Mrs. Lorenzo was gentle and kind, and I couldn’t stand watching her coming apart like that or the thought of her widowed so young. I went to a living-room window and looked out and saw the ambulance still at the curb in the crimson twilight.
I had to get out of the apartment. I don’t entirely know why, but I felt that, were I to stay there, I’d start crying, too, and not just for Mrs. Lorenzo or Mr. Lorenzo, but for my father, of all people, because he had that awful emptiness inside himself, and for myself, too, because my father couldn’t ever be a father. Grandma Anita was still alive, and I’d never known anyone who died. Mr. Lorenzo had been a waiter; he often got home late, and he sometimes carried me up to our apartment when I was asleep and my mom returned from work at the club, and now he was dead. I was glad my father moved out, but this was like two deaths close to each other, one the death of a neighbor, the other the death of my father-son dream, which I would have denied having, if you’d asked me, but to which just then I realized I’d still been clinging. I ran out of the apartment and down six flights of stairs to the foyer and outside to the stoop and down more stairs to the sidewalk.
The paramedics were loading the body into the back of the van ambulance. A sheet covered Mr. Lorenzo or maybe he was in a body bag, but I couldn’t see him, only the shape of him. Across the street, a crowd of twenty or thirty had gathered, probably people who lived in the apartment houses over there, and they were watching Mr. Lorenzo being taken away. Some kids were over there, too, my age and younger. They chased around and danced and acted silly, as if the flashing beacons of the ambulance were holiday fireworks. Maybe if the death had occurred on the other side of the street, I’d be watching from here with different kids, acting as foolish. Maybe the difference between horror and holiday was just the width of an ordinary street.
At nine I knew about death, of course, but not as an intimate truth, rather as something that happened out there in the world, in other families, nothing for me to worry about for a long time yet. But now people I knew were going away forever. If two could go in just two weeks, three others could go in just three more—Grandpa, Grandma, and my mother—and I would be like Mrs. Lorenzo, alone and with nowhere that I belonged anymore. It was crazy, a little-kid panic, but it grew out of the undeniable realization that we’re all so fragile.
I thought that I should do something for Mr. Lorenzo, that if I did something for him, God would see and approve and not take anyone from me until I was much older. I guess if I hadn’t been so crazy afraid, I might have gone to church and lit a candle for him and said a few prayers. Instead I thought that I should play the piano for him, one of his favorite songs that he listened to on his stereo.
The community center stayed open until 10:30 on Monday because it was bingo night. As one paramedic closed the rear doors of the ambulance and the other started the engine, I turned away and headed toward the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.
Perhaps in my peripheral vision, I saw him moving, paralleling me. But as long as I live, I will credit luck and the feather pendant in my pocket, because I was in a distraught emotional state that made it unlikely that I would have picked up on clues glimpsed from the corner of my eye. My father must have been among the crowd across the street, because now he paced me. When he realized that I had seen him, he didn’t call out to me or wave, which would have been much less creepy. He only walked faster when I did and broke into a run when I ran.
If I made it to the community center, he might come in after me. No one there knew that my mother had thrown him out or that divorce was imminent. Sylvia didn’t wash her dirty laundry in public. They knew me at the center, and they didn’t know him, and if I caused enough of an uproar, they would surely call my mom.
But then I saw that he was glancing both ways along the street as he ran, checking on the traffic, looking for an opening, ready to dash across all three lanes at the first opportunity. The center was still more than a block away. His legs were longer than mine. I’d never make it there before he caught me. He wouldn’t hurt me. I was his son. Grandpa Teddy said Tilton wouldn’t harm me. Might snatch me and take me away. But wouldn’t harm me. To snatch me, he needed a car, surely a car. You didn’t absolutely need a car in the city; and Tilton hadn’t owned one. Maybe he owned one now, but he would have to drag me to it, and I’d fight all the way, and he wouldn’t want that. So maybe he meant to hurt me, after all.