Crisp squeezes through the tear in the chain-link fence and the Yankees cap he took from home pops off. He jams it back on and tugs the bill low over his sunglasses—a meager disguise that has gotten him this far. Hatted, hidden, sans his signature fro, he slipped past the surveillance cop returning from his pee break, continued unseen along Brighton Beach Avenue, and made it back into the subway. Then he rode the train south to north and north to south, thinking, until he forced himself to decide.
He promised JJ he’d come back so he’s doing it: coming back.
His mind bends around the darkness, the moonlight, the water’s surface undulating in expanding circles as if reacting to a sudden movement with no obvious source. He glances back through the chain link and sees a couple in the distance, walking along Van Brunt, but they don’t appear to have noticed him.
Inside the musty building, the fibrous history returns but he won’t breathe it in this time…and he won’t think about Officer Russo or Robert Moses or the NRA or anyone who raises up his or her hand to squash down others who look weaker. You look weak and then they make you weak, that’s how it works…his mind bouncing light off that idea as it crystallizes…
Stop.
He holds his breath and takes the stairs. Steps into JJ’s squat. Slung with shadows, its emptiness hits him hard.
“JJ?” His voice bounces from wall to ceiling to floor and back to him. “Are you here?”
“Crisp.” In one quick movement Glynnie is on her feet and there he is, looking almost like someone else in that cap and with those dark glasses. She feels like hugging him but something, a stiffness, tells her that he wouldn’t welcome it so she holds back. “What happened to your hair?”
Surprised to see her standing there, the Beats slung around her neck, he asks, “Have you been here the whole time?” But then he notices the white T-shirt she wasn’t wearing yesterday glowing in a shaft of light slanting in from the window.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she says. “I’m so sorry about last night.”
He resists the drama in her tone that yesterday felt compelling but now grates. “It’s a little late for that. Where’s JJ?”
She doesn’t want to tell him, but she has to. She takes a breath. “This morning, when I was home, the cops were there.”
Cops. “Is that why they’re looking for me?” A whiplash of anger fades when he realizes that that’s also probably how the cops knew to pick up Dante on Governors Island, why Crisp was able to get off the island without the gun dealer intercepting him. Glynnie, in her priceless way, hurting and helping all at once. “What did you tell them?”
“Not much. But Crisp, they know about JJ.”
“We promised to help him—not give him away.”
“I did not tell them.” Firmly. Because she needs him to know that.
“Then how did they find out?” But before she can even try to answer, the realization hits him. As soon as their parents started to worry, as soon as they called the cops, the surveillance state would have kicked into action; all those hidden camera eyes you never really think about would have opened at once. The three of them walking around Red Hook last night, around IKEA, in and out of the projects.
“I waited at his school but he wasn’t there,” Glynnie says. “And I sat here all afternoon but he didn’t come back. Look.” She gestures toward the small bookcase, at the fixed-in-time image of a once-happy family. “That’s the phone I bought him. I did it. I kept my promise.” She needs Crisp to know this too.
He wants to trust her, he does, but how can he? He watches her face crumple and it’s as if she’s a different girl, or at least could be someday, and the feeling slips past his defenses and into his mind. He lets out a breath. She takes a step closer and he doesn’t move away.
“I screwed everything up,” she says.
You kind of did. But, even now, he can’t say that to her face.
“Listen,” she says, “this might sound crazy, but I have an idea about JJ. About where he might be.” There are so many places a placeless person can go, but she’s had so much time to think about it and it won’t stop flickering through her mind: a vision of JJ not just hiding, but resting. Crisp, with his excellent bullshit detector, will let her know if it’s a decent idea. “Last night…” she begins, picturing JJ serene on that bed at IKEA, looking as though he remembered what it felt like to be home.
* * *
Without the buzz of fast friendship and strong weed, IKEA’s charms of last night are gone. Instead, Crisp feels a vulnerability he can’t shake as, the cap’s bill pulled low to hide his face, he follows arrows through the labyrinth of displays. Living room after living room. Kitchen after kitchen. He pauses to rip a paper measuring tape off an inch-thick sheaf and continues until he reaches the bedrooms.
At the threshold of the orange and mahogany display, he glances around to make sure no one’s watching him. His breathing grows shallow as he enters the life-size diorama, pulls out the desk chair and glances underneath, pretends to inspect the dresser, runs his hand along the smoothed-out duvet—no sign now that JJ ever lay down here last night. Recalling how delicious it felt, this afternoon, to lie on his own bed after just two nights away, Crisp is filled with sadness at the thought of JJ’s year without a bed. He falls to his knees onto the fake bearskin and pretends to measure the clearance between floor and bed frame.
Ten inches.
His eyes roam the empty under-bed space where he hoped to find the boy. Instead, he takes in a clear view of moving pant hems, calves, ankles, sneakers, sandals, boots walking both ways over the showroom’s floor arrows. He wonders why he thought this was a good idea; no one could hide under here—you’d be spotted too easily. He backs out and, kneeling, telescopes his disappointment onto the measuring tape, as if he’s just a random shopper and whatever he hoped to stash under this bed would never fit.
“Crisp.”
The faintest whisper. His own wishful thinking, he decides.
But then he hears it again, and freezes.
He ducks back under the bed and it’s still a void.
The whisper repeats: “Crisp.”
He turns to the dark edge where floor meets wall, beneath the top of the headboard, and sees him. Or it: a long boy-like shape pressed into a deep shadow.
JJ whispers, “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” Crisp whispers back. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting. Soon as it closes, I can come out.”
Crisp reaches a hand across the floor into the shadow. “Come out now.”
“Can’t. Dante had me—he was looking for you but I didn’t know where you lived so he grabbed me. I told him I don’t have your address. He didn’t believe me.”
“When?”
“On my way to school. Took me to his baby mama’s place, and me and Rodrigo, we waited.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. But Dante got picked up. Rodrigo, he saw it on his phone, some video. Then he took off. So I took off. Saw someone in my window at my crib so…”
So he came back here. “Have you been here all day?”
“Most of it.”
“JJ, please.”
JJ backs deeper into his shadow.
Crisp stretches, manages to touch the boy’s pant leg, pulls against his resistance. He wonders if it would help or hurt for JJ to know that the cops are looking for him and decides that for right now less fear could mean more courage. “Last night, when I said I’d help you, didn’t you believe me?”
A pause, and JJ admits, “Yeah, I did.”
“I came to find you, didn’t I?”
Another pause. Another “Yeah.”
“I was just at your place, looking for you. Glynnie’s been waiting all afternoon. She got you that phone she promised.”
“Really?”
“Come out.”
JJ hesitates, then rolls away from the wall. His eyes appear bright in the under-bed dark. A whole highway of tear tracks glisten down his cheeks. He squirms closer and the cracked lips and snot dried under his nose finish the job of breaking Crisp’s heart.
“What time is it?” JJ asks.
“Not sure, but it isn’t nine yet or they’d be closing.”
“It’s night already?”
“We’re getting out of here.” Crisp pulls him all the way out from under the bed. “Act as natural as you can, don’t run but keep moving. Can you be cool?”
“I’m as cool as they come,” says the tear-streaked boy, attempting a smile, shifting to his feet, standing for the first time, Crisp would guess, in hours. “Hey, why’d you cut your hair?”
“Tell you later.” Crisp removes the Yankees cap and snugs it low over JJ’s eyes. “Keep the visor down. Don’t look at anyone. If we get separated, plan A is to meet me downstairs in the parking garage. Plan B is to go to the IKEA dock, jump on whatever comes first. We’ll reconnect on the other side.”
“Why would we get separated?”
“I’ll explain that later too.”