Only Child

“Your name,” she said. “Burke, that’s not Italian.”

“I told you I didn’t work for your...for Vonni’s father, Ms. Greene.”

“I remember. I assumed you were a member of some other...organization. But still part of their whole thing.”

“No. No, I’m not.”

“Why would Gio trust you, then? You’re not...‘family,’” she said, her lips twisting with contempt.

“You would have to ask him.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I believe I understand it now. If anyone has to know his shameful secret, better an outsider.”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” I said mildly, trying to steer her back to where I needed her. “But...you see what I mean now? About what Vonni knew about her father?”

“I certainly never told her that her father was in Boston.”

“It was just an example,” I said patiently. “Of the kind of thing you might have told her.”

“What good would it do you if I—?”

“The morning she left, she knew you wouldn’t expect her until at least half past midnight,” I interrupted, still working on not losing her. “If she was looking for her father, she might have gone to wherever you...”

Hazel Greene nodded, as if finally seeing where I was going, if not the sense of it. “She thought her father was dead.”

“Ah.”

“When she was little, she used to ask. Where I was raising her, at first, it was nothing so unusual for a father not to be in the home. But they, the fathers, they were...around, you know? In the neighborhood, someplace. A presence. Even in prison, they were real. I thought of telling her her father had been a soldier, killed in some war, but I could never make the dates work.

“Besides, even when she was a little, little girl, I knew how smart she was going to be. And what a heart she’d have. If I told her that her father had been a soldier, she’d want to see his grave someday. So what I did, I told her that her father was dead, and that I’d explain everything when she was older.”

“She accepted that?”

“Not at first. But then we made a bargain. On her eighth birthday, I’d tell her everything.”

“Why then?”

“I was just buying time when I said it. And Vonni never spoke of it again. Neither did I. But on her eighth birthday, she asked. And that’s when I told her.”

I didn’t say anything, keeping slack in the line so it wouldn’t snap if she made a sudden run.

“She’d just seen West Side Story on television. I thought it was maybe a little mature for Vonni, but she just loved it. So I told her that’s how it had been for her father and me. A forbidden love. It felt good to wrap the lie I was going to tell her in so much truth.

“It was the truth. Gio’s favorite song was some old thing, from the Fifties, maybe? ‘Running Bear.’ I’m sure you never heard it....”

“Johnny Preston,” I said. “With the Big Bopper doing the bass line.”

“Oh! Then you know. The boy and girl, from two different tribes, on opposite sides of the river. ‘But their tribes fought with each other,’” she recited, “‘so their love could never be.’ Gio played that song over and over for me. He said that was us. There even was a river between us. The East River. Do you remember how the song ended?”

“Yes. The young brave dove into the river that separated them, and the maiden jumped in, too. They met in the middle. The current pulled them down. And they drowned.”

“Together.”

“That’s right.”

“Yes. And that’s what crazy Gio wanted to do. He wanted us to die together. Not in some dirty river. He wanted us to go to the top of the World Trade Center...that was years ago, before those crazy people, the terrorists, did that terrible...and jump off, holding hands all the way down. So we could be together.”

“There were other ways you could be—”

“I know. We could have run away. He could have gotten a job. But none of that was real to Gio. He could never imagine leaving his...life. Or getting a regular job. But dying, that was something he could deal with.”

“Not you, though.”

“I had my baby inside me,” she said, as if that explained everything.

I stayed quiet for long enough to understand that it did.

“I always remembered what Gio had wanted to do,” she said quietly. “A couple of years after I...left, I saw a story in the Post. It was about a young man who tried to jump between two high buildings over in the Bronx. It was some kind of gang thing. Not an initiation—the young man was the leader. The story seemed to imply that he was showing the others how to do it.

“So that’s what I told Vonni. How her father died. That young man? In the story? His name was Romeo. Isn’t that just too ridiculous?”

Then she started to cry.

I cruised the neighborhood the way I’d case a bank, starting out way past the perimeter and working my way toward the center. Only a fool goes into the jungle without memorizing enough trail-markers to find his way back out.

When you look for kids—runaways, castoffs, missing-and-presumed—finding a body is always one of the possibilities. But this time I was starting at the other end of the tunnel. That changed the game. If I stepped out of the shadows, had the mother “hire” me, got the names of Vonni’s friends from her, and tried to talk to them, I might as well dial 911 on myself.

In the past, I’d sometimes pretended to be a cop. Never flashed a badge or anything stupid-amateur like that. I’d just plant an impression and let people fall into their own assumption pits. It’s especially easy when people expect a plainclothesman to come around, asking questions.

But I didn’t look the part anymore.

Ten days of drifting with the currents didn’t lead me to a way in. I didn’t know much about small towns, and what I thought I knew wasn’t proving out. The mall was the real city, like I’d suspected, but inside it the population was as fractured as Manhattan’s. Rich and poor walked the same paths but never touched, like human railroad tracks.

Some kids lounged around the food courts, designer shopping bags stuffed with credit-card purchases, gabbing on cell phones until they drove away in their mothers’ Mercedes, or their own Miatas. Other kids worked in the fast-food kiosks, earning less in a month than their better-born counterparts spent in an hour, saving every dime so they could go mobile, too.

That was the common ground. Car culture. You couldn’t get anywhere without one, in every sense of the word.

The parking lot had enough diversity to make a liberal come all over himself. Cute little LOOK AT ME! roadsters stood shoulder-to-toe with hulking monster-truck imitators, Corvettes were docked nose-to-nose with minivans, and thoroughbred sportscars shared space with pro street–quarter-horses. Fundamentalists don’t care what you wear to church—only attendance counts.

The cars got closer to each other than the clans ever did. Inside, a see-and-be-seen parade. Jocks in letterman’s jackets. Whiggers in hip-hop gear. Cholas in tight jeans and bright-colored spike heels. JAPs in pastels. Goth kids in their bloodless black-and-white. Rich boys in stuff that showed they were.

Their jewelry was as varied as their hairstyles, but they all seemed to pack pagers.

Like a prison yard. Everyone crewed and cliqued, no mixing.

I wondered if that was how Giovanni saw it, back when he’d made his choice.