Read Online Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda - Free Book Online

first time. They took the back stairs. They shed their uniforms, revealing tank tops and shorts. They planned on taking the subway into the city, but they lost their nerve. Instead, they walked deeper into Brooklyn than they ever had been before.
    They crossed from Red Hook into Sunset Park, stomping through the wilds of its industrial waterfront. They found a maze of train and trolley tracks—some stopped dead in the middle of cobblestone causeways, and others dove into the water. They skidded on the mossy overgrowth on an abandoned pier. They passed through an apple orchard. They waded across murky marshland and through shoulder-high weeds. They hurried past empty warehouses and tried to ignore the hollow strike of phantom footfalls.
    It took them two hours to reach Bay Ridge, at Brooklyn’s far corner. The waterfront there was tame and vast. A manicured causeway for pedestrians and bicycles ran parallel to an expressway. The girls skipped over the concrete of the Sixty-Ninth Street Pier and headed up the seawall promenade until they came to the Verrazano Bridge.
    Wind rushed over the open promenade, inciting the water and twisting the girls’ hair into knots. Bicycles and joggers passed them while cars accelerated on the adjacent expressway. The bridge loomed overhead. Its color and ribbed underbelly reminded Val of the giant blue whale that towered over the girls during a class trip to the Museum of Natural History. And standing underneath the bridge, she was filled with the same panic she had felt in the Hall of Ocean Life in the museum—an undeniable awareness of the unknown.
    The Bay Ridge waterfront was the farthest either of the girls had ever been from home unaccompanied. Val insisted they keep going. When June wanted to head back, Val leaped over the promenade’s fence and scrambled onto the rocks at the water’s edge. She tiptoed along the rocks, daring June to follow.
    June sat on the railing, watching Val, calling to her that if she didn’t turn around in two seconds, she was out of there. And then Val slipped, wedging her foot between two rocks where the suction of mud and water would not let her go.
    June picked her way down and calmed her, told her to stop struggling or it would cause her foot to swell and they’d never get her free. She knelt on the slimy rocks and stuck her hands into the crevice without complaining about the filth and mud as she dug to free Val’s foot. She’d worked patiently, shredding her fingers. And then when Val’s foot was free, she fell backward, landing on her wrist and spraining it.
    The doctor charges the paddles once more. The body tenses and falls limp. He replaces the paddles and walks away. One of the nurses writes something on a clipboard. They discuss where to move the dead girl.
    Val approaches the stretcher. The body is turned away from her. All she can see is blood-matted curls.
    She places her fingers on the girl’s forehead, rotating it toward her. The skin is cool and clammy. The head falls toward Val. She understands that this is not June behind the mask of blood. Val returns to her room.
    She sits by the window clutching the figurine of the Virgin. She rocks back and forth in her chair, then leans her head on the glass. The expressway rumbles. Sirens roll in the distance. A woman in an apartment building across from the hospital is sitting on her fire escape. On another fire escape above her two men are lying on a mattress holding hands, watching the sky. On the next roof over three women and a man are sitting in a kiddie pool tossing a beach ball. In the window below them an older man with a telescope is looking at the sky.
    On the river two tugs pull a container ship into dock. A bouquet of fireworks explodes from a small fishing boat lit up with red and orange Christmas lights.
    Val waits for the moon to slide across the water, showing her where June slipped from her grasp.
    The city and river wink and glimmer. Taillights dwindle to beady red points