The Warmest December Read online

  Hy-Lo would never get better. Never stand up and stretch as if just awakened from a long nap. Never smile at the rosy-cheeked nurse as he signed his release papers or check the nightstand drawer a second time to make sure he was not leaving his Father’s Day watch behind.

  Hy-Lo would leave the hospital almost exactly the way he came in: on his back with his eyes closed. Except this time there would be no heartbeat, not even the faint one that kept him alive now.

  I shivered again and pulled my collar up around my neck, folding my hands beneath my armpits and repressing the urge to stamp my feet for warmth. The sun was setting and the thermostat in the room rose five degrees. But my memories were cold and I was closer to him now. The heat would do me no good. Leaving would be best. Leaving would mean warmth, but I stayed until the streetlights glowed and the rosy-cheeked nurse placed a small soft hand on my shoulder. “Ma’am, eight o’clock,” she said with a smile.

  I looked stupidly at her.

  “Visiting hours are over,” she said with an air that made me think she felt this was something I should know.

  “Oh,” I said, and gathered myself to leave. I moved the chair back to its place beside the wall. I would remember just how close I’d gotten and perhaps tomorrow I would get closer.

  I walked briskly up the street and away from the dark, looming brick walls of the hospital. I walked with my head down, cussing my feet for having carried me there to begin with. I hated Hy-Lo and had for most of my life. The other part of my life was lost deep inside of me in a place where I was not yet able to reach.

  I had hated him so desperately that as a child I prayed for his demise more times than I care to remember. I’d even plotted to poison him by spraying his favorite drinking mug with Raid roach spray. In my mind Hy-Lo was a treacherous two-legged insect that made sudden and unwelcome appearances.

  I hated him so desperately that I cried it into my pillow when I was five and mumbled it beneath my breath at ten. By the time I was thirteen I was screaming it into his face and catching the callused palm of his hand across my cheek for doing so. He was a stone wall and my hostility was nothing more than paper tossed against it. Or so I thought.

  For years I believed, as I had as a child, that his absence would wipe the memories of him clean away. “That would be impossible,” a lover of mine had once suggested, his hand moving across an inch-long battle scar from a belt buckle gone wild. “Hmm,” was my only reply. He never saw me in the nude again.

  I hurried past a woman wrapped in colorful cloth and newspaper. Her hair was thick and matted and hung down to her neck in brown turds of filth and grime. She was bent over a garbage can, both of her hands deep into the waste and filth, rummaging through it as if sorting through her sock drawer.

  Walking past, I turned slightly to look back at her and realized that I was right where I had started, in front of the hospital. The concrete stairs lay before me, the silver specks they held shimmered beneath the streetlamps, reminding me of a summer day in 1970 and the way the sun gleamed through the warm air that glided around me, setting the stage for the hate I would develop at the tender age of five.

  At that age life just was. It wasn’t what it would become: black hours, and days on end when the only thing that mattered was the next drink, and then later, the next meeting. No, life was supposed to be sweet at that age and the only thing you would have to count were the hours before the sun rose again, allowing you to lose yourself in the happy world of Crayola, cartoons, and blue Italian ice.

  In 1970 I was five years old and summertime was a playful woman-child who kept watch over me in the daytime and rocked my mother through her lonely nights. She was the intense heat and long sweltering nights that kept people out late, fanning themselves on the stoop of their five-story walk-up or sometimes forcing them out onto the rusted fire escape, where they would lie, half-naked on a bare mattress, and watch the heavy yellow moon until sleep stole their eyes away.

  That was where my first real memory took place, right there in the midst of summer, beneath a rain of clothes that fell from the fifth floor and landed around the small feet of Glenna and me. We were not yet friends, but would become the best of friends in time.

  Glenna and her mother had moved in just as spring slowly took winter’s place. Our eyes had locked in the halls of our building during our daily comings and goings. Our mothers had traded nods and polite hellos, but no formal introduction had been made.

  On that summer day Glenna stood less than five feet away from me, her hair plaited neatly in six long cornrows that began at the top of her forehead and ended in ropes that hung down her back. She had a yellow yo-yo that she held tight in the palm of her hand, allowing it to fall to the end of its string only when my eyes grew tired of watching her and moved to scrutinize something other than her clean white Keds and green jumpsuit.

  We should not have been there, but it was hot in the house and Delia had sent me outside to play beneath the oak tree, where the shade was cooler than beneath the steady whirl of the fan. I was lining up milk crates for a game of train, while Hy-Lo, my father, washed and waxed his car. His transistor radio sat cradled in the driver’s plush green seat, spilling out the Jackson Five’s song about love and the alphabet. Glenna had also been ordered outside.

  In only three short months Glenna’s mother, Pinky, had become the talk of the building. She was infamous for her loud two-person parties. They all began and ended the same. Pinky coming in from the Blue Bar around midnight, stockings torn and wig akimbo; some man, some good woman’s husband, behind her, his hand beneath her dress before she even got the key in the door. She’d put on Marvin Gaye and open her window, filling the courtyard with his sexy lyrics until someone hollered out, “Turn that shit down! Some of us have to get up in the morning!” But she never did.

  Her laughter would come in spurts, sailing above the music, reaching its own crescendo and then falling into a deep groan. Something would happen, perhaps a misplaced word or a denied carnal request, that would ignite an explosion of filthy words and flying fists that snatched Glenna and the rest of the tenants from their sleep.

  But there was no one sleeping on that day, not at three in the afternoon. This man did not stumble in from the Blue Bar in the middle of the night. This man had driven up to the apartment house, rung her bell, and greeted her with a kiss that caused my mother’s face to heat and her eyes to drop. An old friend in town for a night. The night turned into twenty-one sunsets, ten matchstick covers holding simple names and seven digits, lipstick-stained collars, and two women too many ringing Pinky’s phone and boldly asking, “Pablo there?”

  That afternoon he left quickly and on foot, Pinky’s screams at his back violently shoving him forward. His lip was busted and bleeding and his cream silk shirt was ripped at the cuff. I blinked as he moved past me like the wind and around the corner to the Blue Bar. I looked at Glenna but her head was tilted back, her small hand shading her eyes as she looked up at her mother. The curse words came first, a string of indictments in Panamanian Spanish and broken Brooklyn English. Passersby either stopped to stare up at her or lowered their heads and hurried on. My father stopped his waxing, turned off the transistor radio, and leaned against the side of the car. He lit a Camel cigarette and inhaled the coarse smoke. When he exhaled, he laughed and shook his head.

  The clothes came next.

  We stood there, Glenna and I, our hearts beating in quick unison as polyester bell-bottomed pants and knit shirts came down around us. Then the shoes came flying down like grenades, sending us scurrying into the street for safety. We did not look at each other; our eyes remained on the boxer shorts and black silk socks that flew from the window like wingless birds.

  “He ain’t never coming back in here! Never!” Pinky’s affirmation could be heard from Nostrand Avenue all the way down to Bedford Street. It was a refrain every woman in that neighborhood had heard or said more than once.

  The clothes stopped coming and then she was on the stoo
p: Pinky, with her milky brown skin, carrot-colored hair on top and black roots on the bottom. She was wrapped in a red silk robe that barely covered her thick thighs and broad behind, and to make it worse, she had forgotten to knot the belt. Her breast, heavy and bruised, but still beautiful to the men who stopped to stare, played a swinging peek-a-boo with the audience that was gathering on the sidewalk. She did, thankfully, have on underwear; black nylon that barely covered her privates, lending onlookers a glimpse of the wild, black Panamanian hair that grew there.

  Glenna gasped but didn’t move. Pinky was leaping down the stairs like Spider-man, cussing with each step she took.

  “Fucking asshole!”

  Step.

  “Pendejo!”

  Step.

  “Maricón!”

  Step.

  “Bastard!”

  She hit the sidewalk and snatched up one of my milk crates all in one motion. I took another step backward, anticipating the outcome of that action. Pinky ran over to Pablo’s cream-colored, four-door Cadillac and brought the crate down hard into the front window. It shattered and buckled beneath the impact. Then she ran to the rear window and repeated the deed, with increased force and intensity. The men who watched forgot about the swinging breast and scrunched their faces against the destruction that was unfolding before them. She smashed each side window and then pulled an ice pick from the pocket of her robe and bent over, revealing her tight broad behind to the world, and sliced, stabbed, and jabbed at each of the four tires, until the air whistled out of them and they were dead. Then she crumpled into a heap of female ruin on the pavement.

  The crowd moved on.

  Delia approached, at first with caution and then her steps quickened. Hy-Lo stood up and cleared his throat. Delia shot him a quick unsteady glance but kept moving. I looked at my father and his mouth was hanging open.

  Delia was also wrapped in a robe. Pink and white terry cloth patched in noticeable places hung open in order to accommodate the child that was growing inside her. Her hair was pulled back in a messy bun that had not seen a Saturday wash ’n press appointment in over a month.

  She knelt down beside Glenna’s mother and coaxed her with soft words, until Pinky raised herself up from the pavement and pulled her robe closed around her body. They sidestepped the clothes that littered the ground, making their way up the steps and into apartment number A5.

  Our apartment had seen its own days of wrath. The white kitchen wall was tinged yellow in spots where no amount of scrubbing could completely lift the bloodstains away. That was the night Hy-Lo had come home from work early and found Delia chatting on the phone, the sink piled high with dishes and the food still sitting in cold pots on the stove. There were few words passed between them before he hauled off and slapped her, breaking the vessels in her nose and splattering her blood, thick and red, across the wall.

  But for the moment apartment A5 was quiet and would be a place for Pinky to sit and cry.

  My father laughed at their backs as they walked inside. A loud, long laugh that chilled me and I shivered. He had a can of beer in his hand, his fifth for the day. He tilted it up to his mouth and finished it in one long swallow. He never looked at me, not directly, but he knew I was watching him and that my young eyes were filled with disgust.

  I blinked back that summer and saw that the old woman was staring angrily at me. “Fucking bitch!” she yelled and then gave me the finger before bending over to show me her behind. “Kiss my ass!” she screamed.

  I moved on, feeling more insulted by the long-ago laughter of my father than the revolting invitation from the old woman.

  Chapter Two

  A nurse with dark eyes looked back at me through the glass at the visitors’ check-in. The gold beads that graced the elaborately braided hairstyle she wore would have made her appear regal if not for her heavily shadowed eyes and bright white lipstick. Looking at her hurt my eyes and so I looked down at the metal shelf.

  She’d repeated herself a few times, but each time she spoke into the microphone her words came across in distorted shreds of syllables that made no sense to me and further agitated her.

  “I’m sorry, I—I just can’t—” I started to say again.

  The woman turned her eyes up and cocked her head. She pushed the mike aside and cupped her hands around her painted white lips. “What room?” she yelled. I saw that she had a gold tooth and a missing molar.

  “Oh,” I said, and thought that a foolish smile should follow, but I had no smiles left in me to offer.

  “201,” I said. “D building,” I added. Dead dog building, I wanted to say, but bit my lip instead.

  I pressed my forehead against the glass and watched as she scrawled my destination on a large green sheet of paper. I turned my head a bit hoping that the words she scrawled there said Go home, because I needed some other forces besides myself to help me get out of this thing I had started to do.

  “Thank you,” I said as she shoved the paper through the open space and shook her head.

  “Next!” she yelled.

  I looked down at the paper and my name was written there, as was my destination and time of arrival. I kicked at my ankle with the heel of my boot. If I could not be trusted to remember or control my feet and the places they led me to, then my ankles should suffer for not maintaining some sort of authority. I kicked the other ankle before moving on.

  The elevators in that building frightened me. They smelled of sick people and despair and reminded me of the months before I found Hy-Lo half-dead in the courtyard, his lungs pulling so hard for air that his chest looked as if it would explode.

  I took the stairs, avoiding the faces that moved past me as I made my way up, up, up.

  I walked into the room and the rosy-cheeked nurse stepped out from behind the green curtain. She was close to my father’s age and she smiled brightly at me before she whipped the curtain around the bed, exposing Hy-Lo. He looked the same as he did yesterday. Broken and bent.

  “Hello, dear,” she said as she walked past me, snapping off her plastic gloves as she went. Her name tag said D. GREEN, and her eyes reminded me of someone, but I did not know who.

  “Hi,” I responded as she passed me, but I didn’t move closer to Hy-Lo. I swallowed hard and waited for my feet to make a decision.

  I couldn’t do it. Not again. Maybe it was too soon. Two days in a row was a bit much. After all, who was gaining from this? Not Hy-Lo, he didn’t even know I was there. Not me, all it did was conjure up unhappy memories.

  I gained control and forced my feet to carry me in a wide circle that placed me back at the door, and then I walked out of the room and down the hall toward the stairway.

  The closer I came to the exit sign, the warmer I became. I pulled at my wool scarf and wiped at the perspiration that formed on my brow.

  “Shit,” I said as my hand came to rest on the doorknob of the staircase entrance. I stood there for a long time staring at the red letters that told me this was the way out. Exit. But I couldn’t open the door. Or maybe, looking back, I wouldn’t.

  I tucked the scarf around my neck and started back toward the room. Nurse D. Green looked up at me as I passed the nurse’s station and smiled.

  I pulled the chair to the spot I had left off at. I was parallel to Hy-Lo’s covered feet. The bare wall behind Hy-Lo mocked me, and the lonely nightstand dared me to make his space homey and bright with a slash of purple and bit of green in a vase shaped like an egg or maybe one of those oversized cards with glittering words that said, Get Well Soon, signed by everyone he knew.

  I ignored the challenge because he did not deserve any warm wishes, flowers, or cards. None at all, not after what he’d done to Malcolm, my mother, and me. “Humph,” I grumbled aloud. I straightened my back and my lips began to move. Words escaped. Mere whispers really, not even loud enough for the other patients to hear over the game show contestants’ squeals of joy emanating from the mounted wall television.

  “Remember, Hy-Lo,” I bega
n with a little disgusted laugh. “You were standing over me, breathing down on my head. I didn’t hear you approach but I knew you were there. Not because of the wide-eyed, frightened look that stole Malcolm’s smile away as he sat across the table from me, but because the air grew heavy and it became hard for me to breathe.”

  We always ate alone, my brother and I. Delia was usually ironing clothes for the next day or busy trying to wake my father from his drunken slumber so that he could make it into his night job on time. Family dinners were reserved for special holidays only. I was glad holidays were few and far between.

  My brother dropped his eyes and began to tremble. I held my breath and stared down at my peas.

  Thwat! The first strike came in the form of a rolled-up newspaper. Malcolm jumped and his cup of Kool-Aid fell over into his plate, drowning his food in purple sugar water. My body slumped and my head dipped forward from the blow.

  “Sit up,” Hy-Lo commanded in his low, hard voice.

  My eyes filled with water and I fought to keep the tears from spilling down my face. I pulled my body erect but kept my head down. I wanted to reach up and rub the spot on my head he’d attacked, but that would show weakness, that would mean he’d won this round. I wouldn’t do it.

  “Malcolm?” Hy-Lo temporarily turned his attention to my brother. “Pick that cup up out of your food now.” Malcolm slowly, carefully removed the cup from his plate. He kept his eyes fixed on the peas that floated lazily around his plate.

  “Eat it,” Hy-Lo’s voice came again and I knew he was smiling. Malcolm’s mouth opened and then closed. I saw the first tear escape from the corner of his eye and drop off the side of his cheek to mingle with the purple Kool-Aid in his plate. He picked up his fork and scooped up a small hill of dawn-tinted mashed potatoes. He swallowed twice before he put it in his mouth and then he gagged.