The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,43
in packs. Dribbling basketballs, snatching caps off each other’s heads and running down the block with them, their laughter incongruous to my ears given the surroundings, but natural enough to them. All of this must seem natural to them.
Eric Ringwald, Holly’s husband, returned from one of his trips to Haiti telling after-dinner stories about the children there. “They have nothing,” he would say, “absolutely nothing—and yet they seem so happy in comparison to us.” He meant it sincerely, and I’ve heard the same thing from many others returning from short-term mission trips: middle-class Americans lamenting their own inauthenticity in comparison to the impoverished and joyous urchins they saw abroad. Maybe I’m channeling my brother’s convictions here, but I can imagine Edwardian travelers returning from their gin-and-tonic-soaked holidays in Calcutta thinking much the same thing. I’ve never heard anyone come back from downtown Baltimore waxing poetic about the authenticity of poverty.
“Don’t let it get to you,” Gregory says. “We’ll be out of here in no time.”
Maybe it should get to me. What kind of person would I be if it didn’t?
One rung above hell is how Gregory described the halfway house, and at first glance he appears to be right. Parking across the street, he unclips his seat belt, lets out a long sigh, and just sits there, working up the nerve to get out. This gives me a chance to look the place over. Mission Up sits at the end of a block of row houses, half of them boarded up and the other half looking like they should be. The tall, narrow facades make me think of a grade-schooler’s smile: you run your eyes left to right and keep hitting gaps where teeth are meant to be.
Once upon a time, thirty years ago at least, Mission Up might actually have been a large boardinghouse, one of those seedy flophouse kind of places you see in old movies, with the creepy attendant behind the counter and the room keys dangling on wall hooks. After that, it must have been boarded up for a long time and only recently pried open and repurposed. Calling it a halfway house gave me the impression of something official. This is anything but.
“It looks more like a squat,” I say.
But looking again, I notice some care has gone into this squat. The sign over the door is hand-painted in pink neon. The lettering is done with flair too, the o in Mission Up rendered as a smiley face. The trim on the ground-floor windows is picked out in the same bright pink. Even though the windows themselves are sheathed in what looks like chicken wire, if you give it a chance, Mission Up exudes a rude cheerfulness.
Gregory turns to me. “It’s not going to be easy getting in. We’ll have to talk our way past the nun.”
“The nun?”
“You’ll see. Just follow my lead.”
Stepping out of the car feels at first like walking on the moon. But the ground under my feet doesn’t give way, and the air is just as breathable as it is in the suburbs. By the time we’re across the street, I’m thinking I can do this. I want to. Beth may hesitate, but Eliza, the girl whose eyes sometimes look back at me in the mirror, would charge ahead.
Gregory knocks on the door. Up close, I can see faded pink detailing on the inset panels, more evidence of life within. After a pause, he knocks again, glancing over his shoulder.
“She’s a bit of a bear.”
The door opens and I see what he means. A wide-eyed black woman about five feet tall and five feet wide looms in the threshold, her bosom and belly conflated into a single roll that pushes on the buttons of her shiny polyester shirt. The collar has a notch of white at the throat, just like the one Deedee’s parish priest wears.
“What you—? Oh,” she says. “The professor come back.”
Not an ounce of hospitality in her voice. In fact, the way she says professor suggests the profoundest doubt that the man standing before her is any such thing. She says it with invisible quotes in the air, implying Gregory is an impostor.
Her eyes cut to me, glancing up and down in frank assessment. On her chest, a gold pectoral cross hangs, hugely out of proportion, its ends whirled with elaborate flourishes. It shines flatly and looks like spray-painted metal. She also wears a dozen or more tiny enamel badges of the sort men used to wear on