Chapter 16
Two weeks after Cady Lewis climbed into a van and was never seen again, a third grader named Gerry Lean crept up behind Donna
during recess, screamed, “Imma kidnapper!” and grabbed her arm. Donna twitched and suddenly a great dark stain spread across
the front of her Wranglers, down the inside of her left leg. There followed a stunned, dreadful stillness. Kids froze and
stared. A small girl keened with hysterical laughter. Donna later said they were all laughing at her, but that wasn’t true.
Van saw it all. Most of the other kids looked as if they wanted to be sick, or cry, or run and throw their arms around Donna
to shield her from any more embarrassment.
A scream began in Donna’s chest. It rose and rose. It sounded like an eagle in a nature documentary. She whirled, and in the
next instant Gerry Lean was down and she was sinking her teeth into his face, under his left eye. She bit a fat piece of cheek
off and spit it out.
Donovan got to her first and hoisted her off the sobbing Gerry Lean while she fought him and teachers ran toward them and
children shrieked in terror and scattered like ants after someone has delivered a swift kick to the anthill. A cosmetic surgeon
spent six hours working on it, but Gerry Lean’s face never looked right again.
Gerry Lean’s desk was next to Donovan’s in history.
Gerry had always been too big for his age, his head too big for his neck, and he had the staring eyes of a witless poodle.
Even before Donna tore part of his face off, he spent most of history class staring wistfully into the playground rather than paying attention.
Donovan began doing his in-class work for him.
He colored in the part of America that had been snapped up in the Louisiana Purchase; he slipped Gerry’s worksheets off his desk and filled them out as soon as he was done working on his own.
Gerry hardly seemed to notice. Once or twice Mrs. Hamilton spotted Van putting Gerry’s worksheets back on his desk, but she never commented.
Gerry didn’t come back after Christmas break. His parents had decided to make a fresh start in Miami, while the legal suit
played out.
Leticia stayed on after Cady Lewis was taken away to her death. No one blamed her, not even the Lewis family. But she was
different after the abduction, less talkative and more serious. She didn’t let Van and Donna play in the front yard anymore,
which was fine by both of them. For the first couple of months after Cady was taken, Donna wouldn’t go out at all unless someone
made her, and even then she wanted to hold an adult’s hand. Van had always preferred sitting in front of the TV anyway.
Everything Leticia did, as both nanny and housekeeper, was quiet and careful. She even loaded the dishwasher with great care,
as if clinking a dish might wake a sleeping infant. She took to nervously brushing Donna’s hair while they all watched cartoons,
brushing and brushing until it shone like new-minted copper filaments.
One Easter Sunday, when Donna and Van were in fourth grade, Leticia borrowed them for a family brunch at her mémère’s house:
shrimp and eggs, jalapeno cornbread, and sangria at eleven in the morning. Her family had come from all over the panhandle,
and the islands, and New Orleans, even two cousins from East Texas, two of the blackest Black men Van had ever seen, Emmanuel
and Simon. Shafts of warm, golden light hung in the smoke from the barbecue outside Mémère’s big old nineteenth-century house,
half concealed by oaks hung with Spanish moss. Van couldn’t remember a morning that smelled so good, of ocean air and crawfish
and spicy tomato sauces. Emmanuel and Simon had a van just like B.
A. Baracus’s in The A-Team and a soccer ball that they took turns bouncing on their feet and knees, seeing how long they could keep it from touching the ground, while Jimmy Cliff played on the van’s stereo.
Van had five good bounces and Emmanuel and Simon yelled with happiness for him.
Simon smoked big hand-rolled cigarettes that smelled good and that later Van knew were pot.
Donna stood on the grass, twenty feet away, and watched, and said nothing.
When she went home, she told her father she had seen the van again, and that Simon was the man who had been driving it the
day Cady was taken. Donna had recognized the van right away, and a tattoo of a blue anchor on Simon’s inner arm, although
she had not mentioned the anchor in her statement. Van’s mother looked as if she had been punched in the stomach: June McBride
was a thin, wiry woman who had suffered from migraines since the kidnapping and often spent afternoons in her bedroom, in
the dark, with the shades pulled. June and Lenny, Van’s father, stayed up late that night, talking in low, grave voices. Early
the next morning, Lenny called Leticia and asked her not to come to work. Then he called the police. By then, June and Lenny
had pretty well talked themselves into believing Leticia was part of it, had given her cousins the nod when it was safe to
grab the Lewis girl.
In the investigation that followed, it turned out that neither Emmanuel nor Simon could’ve kidnapped Cady Lewis for the simple
reason that they had come to the country illegally only four months before the Easter brunch. They were expelled back to Haiti.
Leticia’s husband, Martin, was arrested for possession of marijuana with intent to sell, although he insisted he was not a
drug dealer, and that the stash was being held for a friend’s bachelor party. He ultimately served five years. Before Leticia
was cleared of any wrongdoing, someone in the neighborhood threw a rock through the windshield of her car. Her pastor asked
her to stop coming to her church.
Donna was unapologetic. The investigation had proved Leticia and Martin were drug dealers. In her opinion, Leticia was probably
high as a kite when Cady was kidnapped. Maybe if she hadn’t been, Cady would still be alive. And if her cousins weren’t kidnappers,
they were illegals, and who knew what else they had done while living among real Americans?
Six months after their family let Leticia go, Donovan saw her outside an ice cream shop, down by the ocean, and ran across the street to throw his arms around her waist in a hug.
She had bent and kissed his forehead and begun to cry.
She was still crying when Donovan’s mother caught up and pulled him free by the wrist.
“Stay away from us,” June said. “Stay away from my children.”
Donna thought she saw the van again, in 1985. Some Mexican landscapers in flannel shirts and work pants were unloading their
equipment from the open back doors of a black Econoline. When she called the police, she did not say it was the van that had
taken Cady Lewis. She said she had seen pot.
They all had their green cards and there was no weed in the van, but one of the men was arrested anyway, because his name—José
Garcia—matched the name of a man who had committed multiple rapes just across the state line, in Georgia. He spent five days
in a Florida jail before he was driven to Macon . . . where he was able to prove he was a different José Garcia entirely.
That was April. The landscapers had contracts for a few houses in the large, gated community where the McBrides had moved
after Lenny took over operation of the family newspapers and TV stations. One afternoon at the end of May, Donovan saw their
landscaping van parked in front of a house down the road, where the street began to curve south. He walked home, went into
the basement, found two cases of cold Coronas, and walked them back. The rear of the van was unlocked. No one saw him put
the cases in the van, gently shut the door, and stroll away. It wasn’t going to make up for five days in a Florida jail, but
Donovan was only fourteen and it was the best he could do.
His father thought Van and his friends had helped themselves to his Coronas. His parents pulled him out of an upcoming trip
to Puerto Rico, part of a cultural exchange organized by his school. When Donna heard Van wasn’t going, she withdrew herself.
“I hope you feel good about ruining this for your sister,” their father told Van.
Donna said, “I never wanted to go. Puerto Rico is the AIDS capital of the world. Fuck that.”
“This is really better for both of us,” Van told him. “Also better for Puerto Rico.”
Sometimes Donna had nightmares and would wake in the grip of a shaking fit, a trembling spell that was almost convulsive in
force. When she had control of herself again, she would let herself unsteadily into Van’s room and ask if she could sleep
on his floor.
He always made her take the bed. He slept on the floor instead, in his sleeping bag.
They held hands. She’d hang an arm over the side of the bed and he’d take it. They would lie awake listening to country music
on the radio, volume turned low.
“Why don’t you hate me?” she asked. “I’m an awful person. Why did I say that about Puerto Rico?”
“I guess ’cause you’re kinda racist,” he said.
She giggled, as if he had made a dirty joke, and squeezed his fingers. “No, I’m not. I don’t even see color.” She was quiet a while and then whispered, “I can’t go to Puerto Rico if you’re not going. I can’t.
I won’t sleep. I’ll be sick all the time. There’s something sick in me, Van. The people who took Cady—they took something
from me too. I’m scared of everything. I know I don’t seem it. But I’m the most scared person you know.”
“You should try smoking pot sometime. It would help with your nerves.”
She laughed, then made a disgusted sound. “Emmy Davis smokes pot, like, all the time. Have you ever noticed how she smells
like burnt cat hair?”
Van knew exactly how Em Davis smelled, and it wasn’t anything like burnt cat hair.
Her natty-white-girl dreads smelled sweetly of coffee, cigarettes, and wildflowers baking in the sun.
Van knew because they had made out, after passing a joint a few times, outside the roller rink last Saturday.
Van loved skating—he was the fucking John Travolta of the roller rink—but he loved his tongue in Em Davis’s mouth even more
“It ought to be legal,” he told Donna. “Weed. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
But Donna didn’t answer. She was only holding his hand with one finger, had dozed off in his bed. Van, on the other hand,
was wide awake. There was a pretty good college station out of Georgia, and at this time of night he could just about pull
it in. They played a kind of music called cowpunk, hillbillies thrashing it out over banjos and fiddle, and he loved it. He
slipped his hand out of Donna’s and tugged a ziplock bag from under his mattress. There were two skinny pre-rolled joints
inside, all he could afford to buy off Em, who was two years older than him and well known around school as the one dealer
who would never sell you crap.
He reached under the mattress again and tugged out a copy of High Times magazine. Em had loaned it to him, said him there was a cool article about evil things the US government was doing with pesticides.
“Yo, old son,” Em had told him. “The feds want to put this shit on all your veg, man, not just pot. This is some shit they talking about here—paraquat will make your dink shrink. You got to inform yourself.”
He lit up, folded the magazine open to the article, and began to read by the light of his alarm-clock radio. Donna lived too
much in her own imagination, and look where it got her: jangled, scared, and angry. One of them had to live in the real world.
One of them had to have the facts. He took a tight, careful hit—a sweet, spicy, lovely, golden hit—and started to inform himself.