Past the fire trucks that now surrounded the building, I pushed forth into the traffic of Walnut Street, pumping my skateboard toward something I couldn’t imagine. I had heard that there was a foam? That you could buy, that could kill sperm? But that was all I knew. No one else had heard of it though, at 7-Eleven or Wawa. I didn’t calm down until an hour later, when I decided that if she did get pregnant, I would call up Trojan and get them to pay for the abortion. My groan, though, was silent. I did feel the release. I was unburdened.
In the days after, she began calling me. And we talked. And it was okay at first, even though we had nothing to talk about. But she kept calling, several times a night. I would come back to Germantown, walk into my father’s latest renovation, and the phone would already be ringing and it would be her. After fifteen minutes of forced pleasantries, to get her off the line I told her I needed to get settled in, but if I didn’t call her back by dinnertime she would call again. My father, annoyed, would get rid of her this time for me. If I didn’t call her before I went to sleep, she would call late at night and I would pay the price for this piercing of my father’s solitude. She wanted something, something besides sex. It scared me, how badly she desired this unknown thing from me. I was too young to realize it was just friendship. It ended as childishly as it started: she wanted to get together on a Saturday; I said I was staying home. An hour later, two of her girlfriends saw me on a bus heading downtown to Love Park with my skateboard. A crying call from her that night let me be single again by Sunday. The phone rang when I came in the door from school until Wednesday, but when I didn’t answer it eventually I was rewarded with it going silent.
Sunday night, a week later, she called to tell me she was late. I didn’t know the meaning of the euphemism. The calls started back up again from there, surging past their original frequency. Her narrative started with the conflict that she might be pregnant, and every phone call was to discuss the possible repercussions. After two weeks she told me that she had taken a pregnancy test and it was positive. This revelation brought me a mortal fear I had never conceived of and bought her several extra minutes on the phone. Now that the pregnancy was real, she told me she needed an abortion, that she needed $340.
Petrified that my father would find out, I offered to pay half, stopped eating lunches, and started pocketing the twenty dollars a week my dad gave me for food. Then she told me there was a complication, that she needed a special abortion. That the cost would triple. That her mother demanded I pay half before she authorized the procedure. I told her I would send it. I stopped eating regularly altogether. I lost weight. I did even worse in school. The stress cured my sexual desire, but I still couldn’t sleep at night.
I could hear the phone ring even when it didn’t. I would be upstairs in my room at night, and there would be a call and my dad would pick up, and I would stand at the door listening to the pause after his “Hello” knowing that my ruin was upon me. That he was being informed of my sins, of the fact that my life was wasted. Eventually he would begin to talk and the call would be revealed as something totally unrelated but I knew my demise had only been delayed.
She phoned three months in, wanted to know where the money was. She called less often now and when she called she was just mad and didn’t try to keep me on the line like she used to. I had scrounged together 380 bucks doing some messenger work for Sirleaf Day, kept the cash in a shoe box that once held yellow and blue Air Jordans. But I had started to doubt, by this time. I had asked around at her school, had received the word that while the rumor was that she was pregnant, nobody noticed her actually getting bigger. Chubbier, baggier clothes, but not belly bigger. I decided I would offer her a check. If she told me I could make it out to her mother, I would send her the cash I saved. If she refused, told me to make the check out to her, then I would send her nothing.
When we finally talked, she said, “No, make the check out to me. That’s what my mother wants.” I said okay, and hung up. It really was okay. No mother wants the check made out to you. I didn’t send it. I didn’t spend it either. I was too chickenshit scared to. Her next call three weeks later began, “Where the fuck is the money?” It was the last sentence she said to me. In response I said, “I didn’t send it. And I’m not going to send it either.” And then there was nothing but silence.
So much silence. I could hear the radio on in the background, Hot Hits 98! WCAU FM. I knew she was still on the line. It was open audio territory, meant for me to step in and defend myself, to uphold my position. But I stayed mute. I was not going to say anything else. I was not going to call her a liar. I was going to let the silence hold, because I knew that if I could endure it, this silence, this final call, then she would disappear. Because I disappeared. Right there, I was holding the phone, but in my head, I was gone.
In the silence, I first understood you could do this fully, that you could just vanish. Or rather: I could do this. I could do this my whole life, and would, because the only thing it took was not being a good person. Now I knew: I wasn’t a good person. I wasn’t going to grow up to be strong. I was going to be a weak man who could do something horrible, unspeakable, shameful, and just vanish. Disappearing, like when my mom was in the hospital after her stroke and I stopped visiting because it hurt less not being there, seeing her there, unable to do more than witness. So I vanished. And then Mom was gone and I never had to go back anymore. After three minutes, three of the longest minutes of my life, three minutes of hearing ads for Krass Bros. menswear and Robbins Eighth and Walnut at her end of the phone, of hearing her breathing, hours in feeling but minutes counted on the red digital numbers of my father’s alarm clock, she finally hung up. Cindy was gone. It was over. The conflict was erased, and now I had the money, and the only price was my delusion that I was worth loving. I spent the money on the next Air Jordans. All white and lizard skinned. And pizza, I think. And forties of Red Bull.
—
“You knew my daughter,” Irv Karp says to me, eighteen years later. He’s Jewish and I can hear in his question the Torah’s sense of “to know.”
“I barely knew her. I don’t know her,” I tell him, and I look frantically around the diner we’re in, at the people in the other booths and tables, searching for Cindy’s face staring at me. Preparing for the hate on that face. The anger from the last phone call undiminished.
That’s how I’ll recognize Cindy today: the accusation in her expression.
“You’re right, you didn’t really know her. And you never will. She’s dead.” He takes a sip of his coffee, then lets me carry the weight of the statement. I fumble my condolences but he still takes them. Outside, standing on the sidewalk, the girl smokes a cigarette. “She’s dead. Seven years now. Stop apologizing, that part wasn’t your fault.
“She had her demons. She fought them for a while. Sometimes she beat them. Mostly though, she followed them to hell. And seven years she’s been gone. She was my angel, but I’m under no illusions that she was an angel to the world. A man’s daughter is his heart. Just with feet, walking out in the world. A guy I went to grad school with, he said that. He turned out to be a gay, didn’t matter: for him and his little girl it was the same way. You’ll find that out now. This one, she takes after you anyway.”
“You don’t know me.”
“But I know me. I know my wife, may she rest. And I knew my daughter better than she did herself. And this one, she’s not like my people. It was clear when she was little; it’s clearer now. You get a seed, doesn’t matter what kind of soil or light or water it gets, it’s going to grow into what it is,” Mr. Karp tells me. I want to know what this old white man means by “my people,” but it’s the way he says the word seed that hits me. She’s looking through the window at us. At me. She holds one arm around her waist, the other leans its elbow on her hand as she bends the cigarette to her mouth, the way my mother used to do when she was thinking.