The Sunday that thirteen-year-old Patrina heard the news about Alejandro, she was selling Kool-Aid icee cups from her kitchen door. Her new sign read TWENTY cents a Cup, which was now five cents cheaper than her latest rival’s, Poppa. Patrina always took note of the traitors who walked the alley dropping paper bits of Poppa’s cheap Dixie-cupped icees like breadcrumbs, and Michael was one such traitor. She’d seen him on his way to Poppa’s bouncing a basketball shoulder-high, and now he shoved a spoon of what looked to be a cherry-flavored icee into his mouth.
“Oh, I see how you do. You gonna eat the competition’s icee right in front of me?” Half-joking, Patrina pointed her finger at Michael as she ran toward the end of the white picket fence.
Michael was wearing his usual Orioles cap low over his eyes. He grinned, then glanced down at Patrina’s bare feet, at her unpolished toes and the heels peeling white.
“I was coming by to check on you,” he said. “But I see you’re your usual loud-ass self. Go on inside and put some cocoa butter on them ashy legs, and on your way, get me a pink lemonade.” Michael chuckled and moved up the concrete walk, slowing only to take note of something in Patrina’s mother’s azalea bushes.
Michael, nearly four years older than Patrina and halfway through high school, was thick and muscled by that early June day of 1986. He wore a bleached white tank as if it were skin and a wave cap beneath his hat that masked the full bushiness of the sideburns he’d grown since last summer. Once, he had been part of the St. Phillip’s Catholic School crew who convened in basements, dancing and playing board games. As the leader of the crew, Michael had taught them the Hustle, he’d taught them how to pop wheelies on the Big Hill, how to play dodgeball with particular cruelty, and most memorably, how to French kiss. Everyone had a crush of some sort on Michael and Patrina had been halfway through fifth grade when she begged God to let Michael demonstrate a French kiss on her, but he had always treated her like a little kid, which only worsened after he mysteriously left St. Phillip’s, pulling away from their crew so that they only saw him on occasional weekend afternoons.
But now, suddenly, he was in her backyard.
“Your mother home?” Michael’s left eyebrow arched and Patrina wanted to believe his question suggested an interest in spending private time with her, but she soon remembered the last time he’d been at her home, when her mother told Michael never to return.
It was a month earlier. A group of them had signed up for the Hands Across America charity event that everyone in the country had been buzzing about. Her mother had promised to drive them to their designated spot in the D.C. suburbs. They were all so excited to be a part of a human chain that would extend from the east coast to the west coast, maybe even with the chance to be on television. But Father Gilbert called just as Michael and Alejandro, Patrina’s best friend, gathered on Patrina’s front porch. Father Gilbert needed two altar servers for the eleven o’clock mass. Some of the long-standing servers, older boys whose families had long ago left the city in the second round of white flight from Baltimore, had called out sick, and though Patrina didn’t think this was her problem, her mother, a staunch West Indian Catholic, proud that Patrina was the first girl to serve in the church, stood at the storm door with the phone cord stretching from the kitchen, and told Father Gilbert that Patrina and Alejandro would skip Hands Across America.
“Aww man,” Alejandro whined.
“Your mother’s a bitch,” Michael whispered.
In their neighborhood, no one could call another person’s mother that word without repercussions. Alejandro’s eyes widened, as he uttered an “oooooooh” that was so long and so instigating that Patrina couldn’t possibly let it pass. As her mother said goodbye to Father Gilbert and as Michael readied to leave to search for another ride, Patrina told her mother what Michael had said.
“Yuh betta not let me see yuh blasted face at my house again!” her mother shouted at him. “Yuh have problems wi yu head?! Someting is very very wrong wi yuh!”
The moment she heard her mother’s Trinidadian accent emerge so distinctly and so loudly, Patrina regretted telling on Michael. Even old Ms. Beverly, who often remained in bed twenty-hours a day, peeped through her blinds to see about the commotion. During mass, Alejandro berated her for what she’d done, told her she would never live the betrayal down, but now Patrina had the chance to make it all right with Michael. She’d have to sacrifice her body but it would be worth it.
“You wanna come inside?” She licked her top lip the way the white girls did in the Nair commercials.
Michael scoffed, the sound like a shovel on dry concrete. “Lil girl, you’ll get your feelings hurt if you walk around offering it up like that. Just go on and get me that pink lemonade.”
She was both humiliated and relieved by his rejection and watched as he mindlessly reached into his pocket for a quarter, staring out again at the azaleas. Someone had thrown the tire from her old tree swing into the bushes and ran off with the manila rope. Patrina, thinking little of his far-off expression or the missing rope, hurried into the kitchen. She shoved aside the ground beef, chicken thighs, the pack of broccoli, slamming ice trays, until finally she had to confess.
“I sold the last pink lemonade to Alejandro. You want grape?”
Michael jumped from the rail and snatched open the storm door. “When was he here?”
“Who?”
“Alejandro.”
“I don’t know…yesterday or the day before. Maybe it was yesterday. I also have watermelon. You want watermelon?”
It was, in fact, two days earlier, on Friday, when she and Alejandro had walked home from school on the last day. They’d had a quick meeting with Father Gilbert who wanted to discuss the summer’s mass schedule. Being the newest altar servers, the two of them always had the last pick of Sundays but now with so many of the other boys quitting, Father Gilbert offered them first choice.
“We gotta get our summer plans together,” she’d said excitedly to Alejandro. “We should take only the 12:30 masses, right?”
Alejandro, usually talkative, said nothing until they neared home. “I’m not doing nothing this Sunday” he said. She agreed they’d skip Sunday. Then, Alejandro asked if he could have the last of her pink lemonade icee-cups. “Please?”
“I bet you ain’t even got a quarter.” She laughed and Alejandro emptied his bookbag onto the sidewalk. Two dimes plunged to the concrete, along with test papers he’d clearly hidden from his parents. There were Fs on all of them. He had always been an A/B student.
Patrina didn’t take his money. She never had, never would because Alejandro was her closest friend. At their age, they weren’t safe to admit this for surely he would be called a faggot by the other boys, while her father might sneer and pretend he wasn’t intimating that she was a slut. And their nightly phone calls, which they both pretended was about homework rather than about Family Ties and Miami Vice, would be put to an end.
Now, Michael lowered his voice, nodding toward Alejandro’s house.
“I thought you were just trying to be tough, but you don’t know, do you?” he said.
“Know what?”
In that Northeast Baltimore neighborhood, stories wended their way through back screen doors, through mesh wires not tight enough to withstand the gust of whispers bedded between you didn’t hear this from me and they’ll kill me if they knew I told you. Patrina leaned in, the anticipation making her almost breathless. What did Michael know that she didn’t? Her eight-year friendship with Alejandro had been formed out of their perceived difference. They were the only two children of foreigners in a southern-rooted American neighborhood. Their parents cooked with coconut milk and with beans that were not green and fried things their friends mistook for bananas. They ate spices, the smells of which wafted out of alley-facing metal vents where playmates stood questioning both their palates (that shit can’t taste good) and their hygiene (all that garlic stays in your skin). Living in America, Patrina and Alejandro’s families, though from very different places, seemed more like the same kind of different. When Alejandro’s dad in his wife-beater, took up his machete to trim weeds, Patrina was reminded that her father stored his cutlass in the basement storage closet, taking it out only to hack at green coconuts bought from the Chinese grocer.
Looking at Michael’s brow collapse now, Patrina imagined that Alejandro had gotten into trouble again, that his mother had had to miss work for a last-day-of-school meeting with a roundtable of teachers who couldn’t understand what had gotten into Alejandro as of late. Or that Alejandro’s father, who’d lost a whole hand in Vietnam, had again chased him out into their backyard.
“Alejandro’s father’s at it again, huh?” Patrina said.
“He died, P. He died on Friday night.”
Patrina felt her shoulders falling, felt her bottom lip loosen. Alejandro would be heartbroken. Though he had had a fraught relationship with his dad, the loss would be unbearable, for there’d always been the hope that one day things would be different between them. Thinking of it now, Patrina remembered seeing Alejandro crying in the cloak room, then she’d seen Father Gilbert holding his hand in the vestibule of the church after school. But on their walks home, Alejandro never mentioned that his father was ill and, in fact, he’d denied that he’d been crying, denied that Father Gilbert had ever been clasping his fingers.
“How’d he die?” Patrina said this in the same way she’d heard her mother react to the news of any unexpected death. Her mother always wanted to know the how. Then, she would sit with the news for a few longish moments, before emitting what to Patrina felt like canned utterances. If it were cancer, she would always say Damn cancer. And if it was a heart attack At least he went quick. And for accidents, her mother became much more philosophical. Every day is a blessing but it can all be gone in the blink of an eye.
“Killed himself,” Michael said, as he stood between the door and its frame.
“Noooo.”
Patrina had never seen her mother react to news of a suicide. She, herself, had only heard of one person, a young man from the county who’d been mentioned on the 6 o’clock news. He’d been playing with his father’s gun. Had that been a suicide? She didn’t know.
Michael handed Patrina his threadbare Dixie cup and his masticated wooden spoon, gesturing for her to do him the favor and rid him of the burden of carrying it. A fly flew in over Michael’s head and Patrina, worried that her mother would be angry, urged Michael to come inside, but Michael, instead, released the storm door and stood on her back porch. The wham rattled the foil-covered grates on the stove.
“Have you seen him?” Patrina spoke to Michael through the screen in the door but she was thinking of the plans she’d made with Alejandro to take the bus to the skating rink later that night. The rink had a School-is-Closed Sunday night skate special and at lunch on the last day of school, everyone had agreed to meet there. Alejandro would probably not want to come. Who would she couple-skate with if he stayed home?
“We won’t see him until the funeral, I guess,” Michael said.
Geez, Alejandro would have to reconcile this loss with what they’d been taught about suicide being a sin. God will forgive everything but that, Father Gilbert had told them. Patrina wondered if Father Gilbert would perform the rites for Alejandro’s dad, wondered if he would mention what he’d told them in class.
“Do you think God really won’t forgive you for suicide?” Alejandro asked her on their way home from school that day.
“It makes sense.” Patrina had shrugged. “I mean, you can’t go to confession after you do it and you can’t promise God you won’t do it again.”
Alejandro had nodded.
Now, Michael climbed atop the porch rail once more, looking in the direction of Alejandro’s house. Past the Smith’s rose trellis and the Harris’s clothesline, Patrina wondered what Michael could see.
“All that blue.” Michael shook his head. “My mother said that wasn’t a good color for a house.”
A few months earlier, Alejandro’s uncles had painted their traditional, Baltimore, red-brick home, a bright robin’s egg blue. Alejandro had told Patrina that he felt like he lived in a “barrio,” and that the color brought too many eyes. She didn’t have the heart to tell him he was right, that everyone in the neighborhood hated it, that it brought unwanted attention to her foreign family too.
“I know you and him was kinda close,” Michael said now.
Patrina wanted to tell Michael that she hardly knew Alejandro’s dad, but she thought it’d be rude. He’d once taken a bunch of them to Wildwood, New Jersey and sat on a wooden bench while they rode the rides. Sometimes, before Sunday mass, while helping Alejandro to brush back strands of his hair, Father Gilbert would ask Alejandro about his uncles and his father. Alejandro’s face would tighten and Patrina would nudge Alejandro to remind him to behave. They were the only altar servers from seventh grade, and Patrina knew they’d be treated as outsiders if they didn’t make nice. Father Gilbert had tried to bring Alejandro into the clique of boys, taking him to baseball games and watching movies at the rectory, but Alejandro complained that Father Gilbert was too nosey.
“He should mind his business. And what’s his obsession with my dad? He’s always asking people about their fathers.”
“Maybe he’s trying to make everybody’s father come to church more.” Patrina had laughed.
“My dad hates church and he hates that he calls me Alex. He told Father Gilbert I can only serve two masses a month and they had to be with you.”
“With me?”
“He wants to make sure I come straight home after mass, and you always come straight back home.”
Patrina had felt embarrassed by her do-gooder reputation. It was true that she had done nothing extraordinary with her adolescence. No cigarettes, no peeking at Hustler’s, no cherry-popping. Just Atari, and the occasional sneak to watch The Golden Girls, which her mother called smut. She was predictable, boring, childish, so much so that apparently Alejandro’s dad entrusted his only son with her. How humiliating.
“You think I should call him?” Patrina asked Michael now. The fly performed a pirouette before clinging to the door’s mesh. It stared at her.
“Or maybe I should go knock on the door?” she added.
Michael turned his attention to the tire weighing down the azaleas and to the poplar tree beside it. She imagined he might’ve been thinking of the times they’d all raced to the top limbs. Michael, much bigger, always made it up first, pelting them with sticks and fighting them off with branches as they neared him. Once, when Patrina and Alejandro were seven or eight, Alejandro earned a handsome cut on his cheek during the climb. Michael had been frightened of getting into trouble with Alejandro’s dad. When Alejandro ran home, they watched from the bottom of the alley as he came across his father inside the old Ford he liked to work on, but Alejandro ran straight past the old car and into the house. When he returned outside, his cheek dressed in a Band-Aid, Alejandro’s father promptly exited the car and ripped off the bandage.
“I heard his pops is all torn up.” Michael twirled the hairs in his adolescent moustache and Patrina cocked her head as if trying to hear Michael better, but the fly’s buzzing distracted her. It seemed a plea for her to pry open the door.
“Alejandro’s father’s pops is all torn up? Alejandro’s grandfather? I thought his grandpas were both dead.”
Michael glared at her, his head tilting before he covered his mouth. He jumped off the rail, told her to come onto the porch. The fly wailed, confused, as it tried to squeeze through the opening alongside Patrina. It didn’t manage a clean exit, so it watched her from inside.
“Alejandro, P. Not his dad.” Michael spoke slowly. “Alejandro is dead. Alejandro killed himself on Friday night. Hung himself in the basement.”
Patrina squinted. “You said Alejandro’s dad.”
“No, no, I didn’t. You just thought that.”
“But we’re going skating tonight. He didn’t call to tell me he couldn’t go.”
Patrina looked again to the rubber tire, while Michael assured her that he had the information right. At a time like this, her mother might’ve clutched her chest or even gasped. Should she do that too when what she really felt was the urge to vomit? Michael reached for her, his hands under her arms, holding them aloft as if she were a scarecrow. He had a strange look on his face as if he could feel her heart thumping through her chest, as if he could feel how warm she suddenly grew. Patrina, trying to focus on something, looked down at his left hand. There were faint scars across his wrist. He was a rough-n-tumble boy. Scars from sawing lumber for go-karts and diving across the alley’s concrete surface would be expected. But the scars at both of Michael’s wrists were neat, precise, not the kind he’d earned from climbing a chain link fence. Michael pulled her into him now, hugging her as the fly’s buzzing ceased, replaced by the sound of clinking metal.
“Michael, you must have plenty better places to be.” Patrina’s mother stood with her keys in hand, her figure darkened by the screen’s netting, her perfume catching in the air, an admixture of rose water and Youth Dew. Michael stepped away from Patrina.
“Patrina, where’s de meat I ask you to soak in de sink? What we eatin’ for dinner? And what’s this fly doing in here, Patrina? Michael, gimme a minute, I wanta talk to you.” Her mother spoke quickly, the sentences blurring, as if from one breath. She set her bags down then joined them on the back porch. There wasn’t enough space for the three of them on the landing, so Patrina turned to leave, thinking only of Alejandro. Was he really dead? Was he Pac-Man dead or like old people dead?
Inside, Patrina spotted four cartons of eggs in the grocery bag her mother had set on the kitchen floor. In their neighborhood, death brought a certain efficiency. Baltimore hadn’t yet been ravaged by crack cocaine and the city was still brimming with Black folks who bore big country hearts and big country ways. After news spread of a death, neighbors would brine pork, order flowers, clear parking spaces. And Patrina’s mother always made deviled eggs. Alejandro had been dead for two days and the eggs seemed like confirmation.
“You knew?” Patrina muttered.
The fly buzzed near Patrina’s left ear, as her mother, on the back porch with Michael, squared her shoulders, her expression suggesting that she was not the kind of woman who would question whether she’d done right by her daughter. Patrina lamented that she had spent most of the weekend happily on her Atari, thinking not one minute about Alejandro since he’d left her on Friday.
Well…that wasn’t exactly true.
While playing Pitfall, Patrina had thought about calling Alejandro to play, but she knew he would beat her, and she also knew his dad would say he had chores to finish. Alejandro had always been scared of his dad.
The day after the Hands Across America, which had been all over the news for failing to achieve its goal, Father Gilbert, acting as their substitute math teacher, told them that no organization other than a church could get that many people to show up at the same time to hold hands with strangers. “A waste of time,” Father Gilbert had told them. And that’s when Alejandro blew a raspberry. Father Gilbert punished him by locking him in the cloakroom after school. Of course, the principal, Sister Elizabeth had already told Alejandro’s parents that one more reprimand would lead to a suspension, so when Alejandro didn’t come out of detention after an hour, Patrina thought it must have gotten pretty serious. The next day when she asked Alejandro if he’d gotten into real trouble, he told her that Father Gilbert had let him off with a warning.
“But he’s telling your father, right?”
“No.”
“Stop lying!”
“He said it was our secret. He wouldn’t tell my pops so long as I obey him from now on. I can’t get in trouble with my dad no more.”
Patrina reached for a kitchen towel to hunt the fly now. She would wait until later to ask her mother what she knew about Alejandro. Maybe the eggs were for someone else? Then, the phone rang, and by the way her mother scurried inside to answer it, Patrina knew it was something or someone important.
“Oh yes, I was expecting your call. ” Long pause. “Yes. I’m sure.” Longer pause. “Oh, she would appreciate that.”
Her mother held the phone out toward her. “Take it,” she whispered.
“Why didn’t you tell me about—”
“Shhh…” Her mother pushed the receiver into her chest.
“Hullo.” Patrina’s tone was flat, achy. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, not until she knew for sure what was going on with Alejandro. “Yes, Father.”
Michael tapped the metal lower half of the storm door as Father Gilbert was saying something about the importance of appreciating pleasant weather.
“Sorry about everything, P. If you make more pink lemonade, let me know.” Michael waved at her. “Bye, Ms. Castle.”
“Michael, wait, I want to ask you something else!” Patrina’s mother moved quickly through the door and down the walk. Patrina watched as her mother leaned toward Michael, his mouth downturning, his head shaking in a no-no-no-no-no.
Meanwhile, on the phone, Father Gilbert cleared his throat. “By now, I’m sure you’ve heard…I know how much Alex meant to you. He meant so much to so many. But you had a special friendship. His mother would like to know if he told—”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“Many people don’t. It’s a terrible thing.”
It must be true, then. Father Gilbert wouldn’t call unless it was true.
“I should have known.”
Father Gilbert fell silent. Patrina hadn’t expected his silence.
“The funeral will be on Tuesday. I would like you to serve that day. Alex would want that.”
She wanted to say no. If she’d been the dead one, she wouldn’t have wanted Alejandro to stuff himself inside a heavy robe to give people wine and biscuits. She wanted to be in the pew with her parents, not with Father Gilbert who’d be pretending he didn’t believe Alejandro was going straight to hell.
When her mother returned inside, her brow was pleated, like the heavy drapes she’d made Patrina iron every Spring. She cut the meat out of its pack. Frozen ground beef sizzled in the pan, as her mother stared at the phone.
“What did Father Gilbert say?”
“You already know. You practically told him yes before I had a choice.”
“Watch your mouth.” Her mother took the towel from Patrina’s shoulder and threw it into the sink. “Did it sound like he was surprised about Alejandro?”
“Why didn’t you tell me? He was my friend.”
Her mother stabbed the ground beef with a fork. “Did Alejandro ever say anything to you about Father Gilbert?”
“What about Father Gilbert?”
Her mother shook her head, much the same as Michael. “Nothing,” she said. “I just heard Alejandro’s dad didn’t want Father Gilbert to do the service. That’s all. That’s all,” she said again, then she sighed.
The day of the funeral, Patrina’s kitten heel broke off while climbing into her father’s Chevy Malibu. Her mother ran inside, returned with a pair of her own leather flats, a size too small. As Patrina walked the center aisle of the church, ahead of Father Gilbert who held the Bible overhead, her toes felt pinched. This was a good thing, she thought. Focusing on anything but this funeral was a good thing. She needed not to absorb the grief of the mourners, the parents whose eyes seemed to scream there but for the grace of God go I, the emptiness in her classmates’ expressions. She remembered how, until only recently, Alejandro had been shorter than her, how he’d shot up four inches and gained twenty pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. His uniform pants had begun to look so absurd on him. In the early Spring, Michael had invited him to play basketball at the square. He gave Alejandro proper-fitting shorts to wear, and some other St. Phillip’s graduates were there too. Alejandro told Patrina that Father Gilbert drove by them in his church car and Michael gave Father Gilbert the finger and they’d all laughed. Alejandro said that Michael told him that when he left St. Phillip’s, Father Gilbert banned him for life, not just from the school grounds but from the church grounds too.
“Did you know Michael used to be an altar server?”
Patrina had tried to remember if she’d ever seen Michael serving mass.
“He said Father Gilbert asked for too much.”
Patrina rolled her eyes. “Father probably wouldn’t let him listen to The Fat Boys on the boombox in the rectory.”
Alejandro asked her what sin she thought Michael could have committed that Father Gilbert would expel him from church. She said she didn’t know. Then, he told Patrina that Michael had given him a few puffs of reefer.
“Michael said it would make me forget things, but it makes me feel like I could jump from the top of the monkey bars and take off flying.” Alejandro grinned. He told her he wanted more.
“Michael was wrong to give you that.”
Alejandro called her “Granny” and waved her away. It was the first time she felt like she was losing his friendship.
Now, the organist played the selections Alejandro’s mother had requested. The musical notes from the balcony echoed between the shuffling of mourners. She spotted all her classmates and a few of the elder neighbors who attended all the funerals, including Alejandro’s grandmother, who was seated beside Alejandro’s mother, who was the sort of Catholic who hung rosary beads on the rearview mirror of her car, the kind who lit candles and incense when a day went awry. Her short legs, thinly veiled with sheer black pantyhose, were crossed toward the casket. She stared at it as if expecting it to move, while Alejandro’s dad, two seats away, sat anchored by his brothers, the house painters, one of whom would read from the Book of Wisdom, moments later,
The righteous, though they die early, will be at rest.
Alejandro’s uncle wore a double-breasted suit. He pulled at it while he read from the lined paper. The podium seemed small before him. He was a big man, twice the size of Alejandro’s thin, soccer-playing, dad. He adjusted the microphone, which released a stuttered screech, and covered his mouth as if the noise had come from him. Some of the mourners, including Patrina’s mother smiled, while Father Gilbert, seated on the throne-like chair, tucked his hands into the wide pockets of his robe, breathing deeply. Alejandro’s uncle nodded at Alejandro’s dad before he read on.
For old age is not honored for length of time nor measured by number of years…
Patrina searched the pews. People held leather-bound hymnals on benches that were so overfilled that some were forced to sit forward, breathing over the backsides of those ahead of them. And there were a number of people propped against the stone walls. It was cool inside, the thirty-foot ceiling aiding the case, but Patrina knew by the time service ended, they’d all be roasting. “The heat of the mourning,” Father Gilbert liked to call it. She wondered about Alejandro, wondered about the air inside his shiny white casket. Father Gilbert had advised his mother not to display the body so there had been no procession, no ability to ensure that Alejandro was in there, except, of course, by his absence. She liked to believe that she and Alejandro had shared nearly everything except for this death.
But understanding is grey hair for anyone, and a blameless life is ripe old age.
Alejandro’s uncle slowed, his accent so thick that perhaps he felt he needed to attend to each word.
For the fascination of wickedness obscures what is good, and roving desire perverts the innocent mind.
In the back pew, Patrina spotted Michael, the only Black face in that row, the holy water fount just over his left shoulder, his navy-blue suit too tight across his chest. She was surprised she hadn’t seen him earlier, surprised she hadn’t noticed his searing expression. Beside him sat a boy named Randy, an eighth-grade altar server, a freckled-face white boy who wiped sweat from his brow. Next to Randy, a long stretch of scowling boys whom Alejandro had played basketball with at the square, all of them white, all of them former altar servers. None of the boys were seated with a parent, and at the end of their pew remained an empty space, a gap the congregants had, for some reason, refused to close.
Being perfected in a short time, they fulfilled long years…
In the rectory, before the service, Father Gilbert, washing his hands over the marble sink, had warned Patrina that funerals for the young were “terribly emotional.” He told her she should prepare herself for a more vocal grief, prepare herself for the unexpected. And yet, as she stood at the front of the church, the silence that lay in the air between Alejandro’s coffin and the mourners, was far worse than any vocalized grief. This death felt like a silent crushing weight on a chest that felt too insubstantial, too underdeveloped, to bear it.
For their souls were pleasing to the Lord, therefore he took them quickly from the midst of wickedness.
After the reading, Father Gilbert said kind words about “Alex,” words that didn’t match Alejandro at all. Pious and quiet and obedient and wanting. Words absent the affection Patrina had seen Father Gilbert exhibit for Alejandro. Was Father Gilbert angry with him? She’d hoped Father Gilbert might mention the things she told him about Alejandro–the comical way he trotted down steps, three at a time gripping the handrail with both hands, or the way he loosed his body when he danced or rode his bike with his arms outstretched, or perhaps even the way he tented his fingers when he begged for Patrina’s icee-cups–but Father Gilbert said none of that.
As Father Gilbert waited for the congregants to wish each other peace and as Patrina held up the heavy gold-trimmed Bible for Father Gilbert to read from, she turned quickly to glance again at the back pew. For some reason, the boy Randy was now standing. He turned to Michael, who stood too, and suddenly the row of boys were all standing, glaring up at the altar, gripping each other’s hands, the last of them holding something aloft that Patrina couldn’t quite make out. As she wondered what was happening, she lost focus on the mass. Father Gilbert, noticing, stepped on her pinched toe to revive her attention. Wincing in pain, Patrina dropped the Bible.
“Lord Jesus!” she heard her mother gasp.
The deafening clatter startled the entire church. She reached down to retrieve the Bible, but it was too heavy to lift without a full squat. Father Gilbert bent down beside her, trying to wrench it from her grip, but Patrina held firm, insisting on righting the wrong, searching for the pages he had flagged earlier in the rectory. Matthew was it? But it was Isaiah that opened before her, the words underlined. Had Father Gilbert underlined the words for this service or another? Of whom were you worried and fearful, when you lied, and did not remember Me nor give Me a thought?
She pointed to the page as if to ask him if she’d found the correct passage. Father Gilbert covered the mic with his hand. “Stupid girl,” he whispered.
Patrina flushed with shame, then suddenly, she felt herself growing angry.
“His name is Alejandro. Say Alejandro.” She whispered this only to realize that Father Gilbert’s mic, clipped to his robe, was no longer covered by his hand. The congregants heard her as clearly as if she’d whispered Alejandro’s name in each of their ears.
Father Gilbert snatched the Bible as the crowd stirred. The mourners were now focusing on the back of the church where the boys had begun to move toward the center aisle. The few non-Catholics, unfamiliar with the rituals, stood to mimic them, while Patrina’s bangs blew across her forehead, for Father Gilbert was urgently flipping the Bible’s pages.
“We ask for patience and forbearance,” Father Gilbert said.
Alejandro’s mother, nestled against the corner of the pew, emitted something that sounded like a deep growl, an utterance so primal that Patrina felt tears flooding her eyes.
“Oh no no no no no, ” she cried.
Decades later when detectives from the Northeast precinct joined other law enforcement officials to question the congregants of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, they would find a note in a detective’s file—lined notebook paper—detailing a phone call made by a little girl from Baltimore city in the summer of 1986.
The girl had questions about a priest..
Northeast Baltimore??? Afro-American girl??? Priest???
Someone at the precinct had written question marks in the margins of the note. A note that would have been entered into evidence except no one ever followed up with the girl, no one ever followed up with the woman the little girl grew to be.
It was only after the Vatican shuddered under accusations of its criminality and cover-ups, that the folks who’d been in church the day of Alejandro’s funeral, finally wondered aloud what those boys had meant to do that day. Moving into the middle aisle of the church like that? Threading a manila rope between their fingers like that? Disturbing that “little Spanish boy’s” funeral like that? They remembered Alejandro’s parents had packed up their blue house within months, they remembered how the row of boys who’d shouted at the priest had been asked not to return to St. Phillip’s , they remembered that the island people’s daughter had been expelled from school for turning off the priest’s microphone during the service, but no one remembered the name of the priest, the priest who’d been transferred to what he referred to at his last 12:30pm mass, as “a more obedient congregation.”
