Free Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda Page B

Jonathan lights a cigarette and tries to catch Lil’s eye through the window.
    Lil doesn’t look out. He knows she is icing him on purpose—ignoring his heroism because he refused to write her a place in it. Still Jonathan lingers, hoping someone will prevent him from going to his apartment alone. He wants someone to distract him from his day—from the otherworldly cold of Valerie Marino’s body as he held her in his arms, from the coarse detectives and their questions. Most of all, he wants someone to distract him from his memory of Eden.
    No one appears. He extinguishes his smoke. In his apartment, he opens the windows wide, for once welcoming in the neighborhood noise that will be his only company.

CHAPTER SIX
    C ree dreams of the raft—of the girls bobbing from wave to wave, of them caught in the spotlight moon. Their voices carry, distorted by the rush of the water, until the only sound is their rippling laughter that hits the shore in waves. They are calling to him, their voices drawing him in. He jumps.
    Cree’s bedroom is hot. The dying fan on his bedside table does nothing to relieve the heat. He opens his eyes to the water map on the ceiling, the brown and yellow bubbles tracing the pathways of his upstairs neighbor’s leaky plumbing. The dream tingles his nerves—he feels the free fall, then the plunge, followed by the whiplash force of the current as it tackled him.
    Cree knew the girls were foolish to take on the river in their flimsy piece of rubber, but he admired the bold way they rounded the piers, treating the raft as if it were as sturdy as a tugboat. He followed them after they bobbed out of sight. He scrambled over the rocks, trying to keep pace with the current and arrived within sight of Valentino Pier just in time to see them burst back into view, the raft ready to sail across a spill of moonlight.
    He was standing at the spot where the grass gave way to the jagged rocks and gritty beach. The night was full and humid. The air, too dense to be troubled with a breeze, was burdened with heavy summer stillness. Then the raft hit the moon’s reflection and the girls were lit up in front of the heartbeat monitor skyline. Their voices joined the slap of waves on the rocks and the clang of a piece of metal tangling with the pylons below. Cree dashed to the pier to get a better view.
    Out on the pier he felt a chill ripple across his skin as if an errant wave had broken at his back. He turned. And when he did, the shadow, the ghost, whatever it was, disappeared and the humidity resettled. Cree took a step and stumbled, expecting to find some form of resistance and finding none. He groped in all directions, grabbing nothing. Then he called his father’s name, heard it bounce back off the brick warehouses and tumble into the bay. But his father’s ghost, if he had been there, was gone. When he next glanced back at the water, the girls were out of sight. At first he thought he’d lost them. But soon they reappeared, sliding into the moon’s reflection.
    When Cree walks along the piers at night, he hopes to stumble on some new dimension, something to alleviate the frustration, the sense of being trapped by the only place he’d ever lived. But watching those girls, he understood that it had been a mistake to look for this at the edge of the water. Out on that raft he knew he could feel free of Red Hook yet stay close to it. It seemed that the girls had the entire city, the whole waterfront, even the distant ports of New Jersey at their disposal. They had made the city theirs. Cree couldn’t let them keep the night’s adventure to themselves.
    He’s a natural at jumping the pier, accustomed to the currents and the ways of avoiding them. Marcus had taught Cree to swim young, before he let his son come out on the fishing boat. But that night when Cree hit the water, he felt an unfamiliar resistance, a forceful tidal pull. The water at the surface tugged one way and the water around his feet tugged