Page 1 of Of Blood and Smoke

ONE

Della

I do not want to be here.

This mantra repeated in my head as I hopped on the city bus that would take me from one end of the Bronx to the other. How to be a proficient or efficient New Yorker escaped me, and the safety of the subway in this area was questionable. So, I took the bus to avoid gang violence and get some sunlight. I preferred not being underground when and if a situation went crazy.

Every day, I found myself mumbling apologies to the people around me while I battled the crowds trying to fit onto the bus. I could wait for the next one, but it would be just as packed. I wouldn’t have to wait thirty minutes for the next pick up if I just sucked it up and entered the can of human sardines on wheels. Not having a working car was a massive headache, so I had no option but to bump into people or deal with them knocking against me while I took public transportation.

Everything was fine until my dad got sick; my life was pretty ordinary before that.

It all happened at once. My mom left my father in his time of need, my college funds dried up, and my job closed unexpectedly.

Perhaps notcompletelyunexpectedly. My coworkers and I had all sensed something was wrong when everything suddenly went on clearance, but management reassured us it was to bring in new stock and freshen up our inventory of high-end teas and herbal beverages.

A Tea for Thee went from being a happy little shop I loved working in, tucked inside a quaint corner of downtown Boston, to being a source of resentment and despair for me when it was snatched away. I’d lost my family and a job I enjoyed at nearly the same time.

In retrospect, my fellow employees and I should’ve known our salaries were too generous for the small amount of business the place did. None of us ever found out what had really happened. All we knew was we showed up one day and everything was gone. The door was locked, nobody would answer the phone, and we were screwed.

So there I was, on a city bus, tucked between someone eating a can of creamed corn with their fingers and another fighting invisible birds—if the screeching and lurching was any indication of what was going on next to me.

My cell phone beeped with a notification, and I pulled it out of my bag, dodging flying elbows, and quickly tucked it away. It was a text message from my mother, begging me to fly across the country to visit her, to talk to her.

I would do neither—I hadn’t heard from her since my parents split a few years ago. For one thing, I had no desire to speak with her. She’d disappeared from our lives as if we’d never existed.

I’d spent months begging her to talk to me, to come see me, and she completely ignored my pleas. What was done was done; and I was too busy trying to take care of my dad and pay all our bills so we could survive. The tumult she’d send our lives into if I contacted her was unneeded and would upset the delicate balance I was trying to maintain. I’d made the mistake of tryingto rebuild our relationship a couple times before and she’d used it to harass my dad. He never told me exactly what she’d said or done but the stress was enough to send him into the hospital with seizures. My job was to keep the two of us afloat and our life peaceful. There was no room for error when it came to his health.

My parents had been fortunate enough to have a modest home on the outskirts of Bridgeport, Connecticut, before illness and divorce forced them to sell. My dad continued his employment in New Rochelle until his body’s decay shoved him into very early retirement with his seizure disorder. I couldn’t fault his job; they were good to him when they could’ve totally screwed him over. But there wasn’t enough money to keep his decent apartment near his job, or to afford a higher quality of care.

So, I left school in Massachusetts, found work at a restaurant and at a call center, and helped us get a two-bedroom apartment in an area that was no stranger to flashing blue and red lights, or to murder.

At least it was affordable.

Walking through the parking lot, I eyed my car. It sat in our single assigned parking space with a deflated football on the trunk and a row of beer cans on its roof. It needed a new head gasket or something like that, among other things, before it could be driven again.

My dad wouldn’t tell me what had happened to his own car, so we’d been dependent on mine for a little while. I shot my vehicle a dirty look as if that would make it get its act together and engage in self-repair. We’d defied the rules and took up two spaces and then one day, it didn’t matter anymore because dad’s car was gone.

It was probably only a matter of time before my near-vintage Hyundai was towed away. My friend, Brett, kept offering to fix itbut I already owed him enough and the fact hovered, driving me crazy. If I let him fix it, it would just give him more control over me and my life, and I didn’t want to make my situation worse.

I trudged up the eight flights of stairs and started down the hall, listening to the sounds of the world around me. Unidentified thuds came from behind one door, thumps of rib-crushing bass from another. Unit H-15 had the usual loud yelling about someone being “good for nothing,” and a staticky buzz vibrated the air around H-17 before I was able to escape the cacophony and enter some semblance of peace.

The excessive noise in my apartment building grated my nerves. I liked peace and quiet when I was home and it was hard to deal with the racket surrounding me, but I did what I had to do. I’d have thought after college and living in Boston, I’d be used to noise. I wasn’t.

Trying to shut it all out and not think of better times now past; I traipsed down the hallway, laser-focused on getting into the sanctuary of mine and my dad’s apartment.

There was still a stain against our door, shaped like a sloping shoulder, from where Mister Bucket fell when he was stabbed. The brown outline of his back and a floating circle stain showed his final resting position.

He used to wander the dim hallways of our building carrying, obviously, a bucket. The pail was always full of newspaper, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want him dead. It was grotesque, but also kind of cool in a way, a reminder of the brutality of my neighborhood if anyone dared step out of line. It served as a deterrent, I suspected, as no one ever really hung out near our door anymore while loitering.

That kind of scary control was a blessing. I didn’t have to worry about my dad as much if I wasn’t home.

My dad was asleep in his room, frequent napping being a side effect of his seizures. For what still seemed like no reason, he’dhad a major one at work a few years ago in the middle of his day. He continued to have them occasionally and the neurologists couldn’t find the cause. There was no previous family history of the condition and to top it off, he’d had a stroke too.

Nothing had been the same since, and my mother disappeared, having married another man not even a week after dad got sick. She’d never tried to contact me since, for all I’d ever meant to her. At least not until today. I’d never been close to her, so it wasn’t a difficult decision to ignore her. She hadn’t crossed my mind in ages, when she popped up in my notifications uninvited.

I lifted the handwritten note Dad’s part-time caregiver left for me and read the reassurances that he’d bathed and ate and then went to do the same for myself. Fortunately, I’d only had one shift to work today at the call center, and now I had the rest of the day off other than my plans for the evening.

After getting cleaned up, I sat on the couch with the television muted, but on, and ate a bowl of pasta I’d heated up in the microwave. The screen in front of me flickered with images of unsolved crimes while I listened to the muffled noises of the apartment building combined with the low drone of the window-mounted air conditioner.

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