Gone like yesterday, p.13
Gone Like Yesterday, page 13
“Shit if I know what that was,” Uncle Trey says.
“Clearly, it wasn’t just fog,” Zahra says, but it seems like she knows more. What isn’t she telling them? What does she know that they don’t?
* * *
—
The house is here now. Zahra was right. She did know the way home. Slow enough, and they made it to the brick ranch, the carport mottled with grease stains; even against the slow start of rain, Sammie can see them. A boy in the yard next door watches them pull up. He stands in the rain like it’s nothing. He doesn’t wave but smiles like he can see Sammie through the fogged-up windows. She looks down at her hands, which were in the middle of texting Leila something that seems altogether inconsequential now.
Everyone in the car is silent, and has been silent for almost the full half hour since the moth debacle. Ahead of them squats the place Zahra calls home, home. The house looks like something Sammie has seen or read about in a book somewhere, one-story and small with ivy growing up one side of it and large front windows opaque with white blinds. Sammie eyes Zahra in the rearview mirror, and she looks at the house like it’s a lover, an ex who’s gotten away, teary-eyed and pouty. Sammie’s scared as hell of going inside that thing, eerie as it is. And something travels with Zahra, something loud, something Sammie worries she’s gotten herself knee-deep in the thick of. She wants to go back to New York, to crush on Noah and hold his pasty-white hand, to hug Mother Ma, her hanging breast the only barrier between them, the Victoria’s Secret perfume she bought Mother Ma for her birthday transferring from her body to Sammie’s own. Sammie unbuckles her seat belt but makes no move to leave the car, looking at the forbidding house and thinking, What in the world is going on in there?
TWELVE
October 2019, Metro Atlanta, Gram’s place, a Friday
The rain is coming down hard now, and to Zahra, it is a sole comfort, thunderstorm tranquility Derrick used to call it, a similar effect to the serenity Gram’s old afghan would bring Zahra on lonely nights, pulling the blanket tight under her toes, forcing her fingers in and out of the well-knit holes. The car ride was long but mostly easy until that swarm of moths—she’s been ruminating on them ever since. It’s evident they’ve got something to say, but damn if she knows what it is. Two options are lumps in her stomach—that this trip is predestined, that she’ll find Derrick here and all will be well with the world. Or just the opposite—they’re warning her, screaming at her to stop, a fruitless plea that there’s no one here to save but herself, and maybe Sammie. Normally, Zahra would offer to help Trey with the bags, but now she’s too anxious to get inside. When Zahra lets herself into the only place that’s ever truly felt like home, she can feel Sammie on her neck, breathing heavily.
The house is just as she remembers it, though whenever she comes home, she expects some significant change. But no. The smell of fresh pound cake. The scratched pine floors, the living room’s wall-to-wall windows, so the space feels big and small all at once. The scalloped curtain valance over the kitchen sink, the double-door turquoise oven, the crumbling brick wall that leads to the basement, which is probably flooding, so Gram will need to wear her rainboots when she goes downstairs to do the laundry. The three bedrooms are in the farthest part of the house, on the opposite side of the carport, smushed and lined up like little Monopoly properties. The rooms will haunt her, she is sure. With Derrick missing, the rooms are tainted. When he was here, they were overburdened.
The house has always been full of sounds, creaking floors and squeaky doors, and the hum of heat or air-conditioning, a house that puts effort into standing, a house that doesn’t take things for granted. Haunted, they used to say. Teasing at first but then with the moths and the spirits and the endless, looping sounds, it became clear that the house really was screaming. There was something there, is here now, so it is hard to distinguish between the real sound of someone entering the house and the phantom people who live within its walls. Gram and Mary are in the kitchen, both in house shoes, but Mary’s are still and Gram’s tap at the linoleum impatiently, and neither of them notice the car pull up or the front door open.
Zahra approaches them from behind, but even so, they look alike, mother and daughter. Two thick heads of hair, kinky and combed out and you can see that their Afros are airy and well moisturized. Gram’s is full gray now.
Zahra is so deep in the constitution of the women who created her that she almost doesn’t notice her dad, smiling like usual. He sits away from the table, enough space to allow him to prop his ankle on his knee. He leans back, arms crossed like he’s posing for a magazine or something.
Gram turns around. “Zahra,” she says. “You’re here.”
Mary turns around now too, but it’s her dad who rushes around the table first, wrapping her in his arms. She feels small, like she’s in elementary school again. To the women, Zahra gives less significant hugs, loose with Gram and even looser with Mary.
“Want a slice of cake?” Gram asks, knowing she does. This is how so many problems have been solved, with a slice of Gram’s pound cake. She and Mary wouldn’t have made it through Zahra’s teenage years without it, one of them would have overpowered the other. Strangulation or suffocation for sure. Now Zahra imagines putting the pound cake out the front door like a mouse trap, Derrick taking the bait and returning home doe-eyed like Shadow in Homeward Bound.
“Yes, please,” Zahra says. “Thanks, Gram.”
“And your friend?” Gram asks.
“Sammie, would you like a slice of pound cake?”
“Well, I . . .” Sammie seems to be at a loss for words.
“She would, yes,” Zahra answers for her.
The door shuts loudly, and everyone pauses as Trey comes into view. He is wet, soaking actually, and Zahra feels bad for not telling anyone she was bringing home a man, not her man, but a man all the same.
“Another friend?” Gram asks. “Zahra, you didn’t tell us you were bringing company. For a man of that size”—she looks over Trey and seems impressed—“I should’ve baked a second cake.”
“Oh, Gram, I told you,” Zahra lies. She didn’t want to make it a thing, but obviously, it’s going to be a thing.
“Yeah, well, the dementia.”
“What?” Zahra says. “Dementia?”
“It’s a joke, Zahra. Calm down. I’m looking younger than you are these days.”
“We have a lot to talk about,” Mary says. Her voice is disorienting, calmer than usual. She clears her throat. “And it doesn’t matter who’s here to hear it.” There she is. Authoritative. In control. The woman Zahra has grown up loathing.
* * *
—
They are all at the table. Gram, Mary, Dad, Sammie, Trey, and Zahra. It’s a small table, and they are well acquainted with one another, elbows bumping if their arms come above the tabletop to eat their cake or reach for a drink of water. Zahra sits in between Sammie and Gram, across from Trey, and does everything in her power not to look at him. What made her think this was a good idea? Bringing a man home? Home, home! At a time like this. She is more vulnerable than she ever was with Kahlil. More vulnerable than she was with any of her ex-boyfriends. Trey is going to think she’s crazy. When he really gets to know her family, he’s going to think she’s batshit, but if they find Derrick, and he’s one whole piece again, then it will all be worth it. Then anything is worth it. She should’ve come back sooner, she knows. This is her fault.
“I think it’s spirits,” Mary says, and Jesus, it’s like the woman doesn’t know any better. It’s like she thinks everyone’s family goes around blaming family dysfunction, family disappearances on spirits.
“We have to pray he has discernment,” Gram says. “Then he will come back to us.”
“Any idea where he is?” Zahra asks. “I mean, you’ve thought he was overcome with spirits for years now, Mary, so why is he all of a sudden gone? What’s different? Please. Enlighten me.”
“It’s hard to enlighten someone with a closed mind.” Here she goes again. “When you’re in touch with your ancestors, it can be overwhelming, to say the least. And Derrick is someone who listens, in the way that you don’t. So of course he hears people.”
“People or spirits?”
“Both.”
“So how do we find him?”
She shrugs. “Maybe they want him to know something.”
“They?”
“Ancestors, Zahra. You know this.”
Sammie’s eyes light up, confused and incredulous, and Zahra thinks about when she and Derrick were children. Mary emphasized their obligations to their ancestors like a list of chores. Wash the dishes, listen to your calling, shake the rugs, settle the score, mop the floor, learn the stories, water the plants, reclaim the land, take out the trash, reclaim your mind. The obligations weren’t specific; they were obvious.
“What sort of things do they want us— I mean Derrick. What sort of things do they, the ancestors, want Derrick to know?”
“Probably what everyone wants someone to know.” Dad’s voice is jarring, deep. He strokes his salt-and-pepper beard.
“And that is—?” Zahra begins to ask but is interrupted by a persistent buzzing. Her phone. She reaches in her purse, which dangles from the back of her chair. She holds up a finger for the group to hang on, just a second. She pauses when she sees who it is. Sophia. Did she forget to reschedule their session today? Whatever. She’ll call her back. She thinks back to the spirits, to the ancestors, to the people Mary says Derrick listens to, wondering if they’re the same. “What is it that everyone wants someone to know?”
“That they exist,” Dad says, like he’s got all the answers.
“OK, I really don’t understand what we’re getting at here,” Zahra says with discomfort.
Gram shrugs. “It’s not always for us to understand.”
“Most things aren’t,” Trey says, and Sammie looks at him like he’s conspiring against her.
Zahra wants to reach out to Sammie and tell her that this world gets easier, or maybe it doesn’t, maybe it gets harder, but she won’t say that. She can’t decide what to say to Sammie when her phone rings again. Sophia. Slide to answer. She can wait; Zahra silences it.
“What are we going to do?” Mary asks. “What’s our plan?”
“I’m going to all the places that made Derrick who he was, who he still is. If I have to revisit every memory, I’ll do it.”
“He’s not just hanging out on some random corner, Zahra.”
“You don’t know that. You weren’t even there. You barely know him.”
“Zahra . . . ,” Gram starts, but Mary stops her.
“I’ve always been here when you needed me,” Mary says, as if she even knows what that means. Needed. How conveniently oblivious of her. Zahra gears up to tell her everything she’s never said, when Sophia calls again. The persistence of the privileged. It’s impressive.
Zahra answers this time, stepping away from the table, plugging a finger into her left ear, even though no one in the kitchen is talking.
“Hey,” she means to say in her usual warm but reticent Zahra voice, but it comes out clipped, irked. “Did we have a session scheduled? I’m in Atlanta. I thought I told you, but it’s completely—”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to bother you. I wouldn’t have called more than once, but my mom thought I should. She said you would want to know how I’m feeling . . . about my essay. And it’s not that I don’t think you care, but I also know you have your own life, and I’m very sorry to disrupt it. Is this a good time?”
No, it’s not a good time. It’s an awful time. “Sure,” Zahra says. “I have ten minutes or so. . . .”
“Oh, well, I guess I just feel like it’s not good enough. I don’t know how to make it better. It feels like my story will never be good enough.”
She called to fish for compliments. Now Zahra is more than a little annoyed with Sophia. They’ve already discussed what she needs to fix. Her essay is trying to say too much. With 650 words, what can be conveyed well is limited. And she has to make sure that it’s applicable to the world around her, because no one gives a shit about thoughts. It’s actions that matter.
“It is. It is,” Zahra breezes over her reassurance. “You’re just trying to say too much. What’s the one thing that really matters? What’s the one thing the tree and its ever presence in your life has taught you? There aren’t a whole lot of trees in New York, you know, so why does this one matter so much? Why does it matter to you, and how will it help you understand the many people you’ll encounter in this world?” Zahra feels weird talking this way, in her college prep voice at home home. Like her high school self is hovering over her, shaking her head, asking, Who the fuck are you? Whose voice is that?
“Who is that?” It’s not the ghost of her sixteen-year-old self but Gram.
Zahra pulls the phone away from her ear, covering the microphone with her free hand. “A kid I work with. You know how I help seniors get into colleges?”
Gram nods thoughtfully. “You can’t tell her it’s not a good time?”
“Yep, doing that now.” But sometimes it is hard to tell Sophia the obvious, to tell her anything she doesn’t want to hear because she’s not used to it. She’s not used to no. She’s not used to hearing that her essay isn’t good enough because she doesn’t know how to self-reflect, and hasn’t felt the need for self-reflection in all of her seventeen years of life. She doesn’t know how to step outside of herself because she’s never had to. And simply, her essay is about a fucking tree. Sophia is a prodigy for almost having pulled it off. Her writing is beautiful, fluid—the language in itself moving. But her essay won’t get any better if she’s unwilling to see the people outside of her bubble. Sophia has been across the country, across the world five times over but has she ever really left the Upper East Side? Zahra bets Sophia will break through eventually. But until then, she shouldn’t expect Zahra to think for her. And sometimes it feels like that is what she wants more than anything else.
“Look, you’ve got a good essay. A really good essay. But is it as good as it could be? Do I think you should push yourself? You mention this tree as a witness of sorts, right? You mention the things it has seen you through, and you mention how its ability to witness is different from your mom’s or dad’s because a tree is static where they are dynamic. That’s great. But what about Pam, your nanny? She’s a Black woman; she’s walked by that same tree too. How is it different for her? How is it different for the man who drops off your mail, for the man who collects your garbage? That is what I mean by the world around you.”
Zahra doesn’t begin to say how self-centered the essay is. The tree as a witness? How egocentric, to believe a living thing as your voyeur and not of its own business, its own volition. She thinks of how much Gram and Mary and Dad and Uncle Richard used to say, Mind your business, a Black proverb, for the people who know that everyone has business to mind, that even the air around you has got a job to do.
When Zahra hangs up, she feels like she’s written the end of the essay for Sophia. And it irks her for Derrick more than anything else. Because the day was supposed to be about him, because the Sophias of the world shouldn’t always get to interrupt. Not when it comes to her family. Not when it comes to her brother. She excuses herself from the think tank at the table; she runs a bath.
* * *
—
She puts one foot in at a time, the water so hot that it draws her breath in, makes her bite down until her body is acclimated to the heat. She sits down tentatively, then slips under the water, so it’s up to her neck, only reaching out of the tub to slide the frosted glass shower door shut. She has no idea how old this house is, but shower doors over a tub are odd, aren’t they? Growing up, they were her normal, having never needed a curtain, but now she sees the many ways in which this house deviates from standard. Still, she feels safe here, shut in like a pet fish.
She leans her head back and closes her eyes, trying not to imagine the world without her big brother, making completely reasonable but highly unlikely excuses for his disappearance. He’s checked himself into some sort of rehab. He’s traveled to a remote village without working Wi-Fi or cell phone reception. He’s gotten so frustrated with their mother that he’s taken a vow of familial silence.
She rubs water on her face and opens her eyes to see moths perched on the showerhead above her. Annoyed, she screams without opening her mouth. The fucking moths are part of the problem, and she knows it. Just wants them to leave her the hell alone already. She tries to relax again, but her body is rigid. Amid the moths hitting their high notes, she resigns to just soaping up instead.
