Gone like yesterday, p.25
Gone Like Yesterday, page 25
“Jesus, Sammie,” Zahra says, but Uncle Trey is silent, pensive. Sammie watches him in the rearview mirror but won’t give him the satisfaction of turning around.
Eventually he says, “Don’t be so naive. People can want two things at once.”
“Like that even means anything.”
“It means—”
“Nothing,” Sammie cuts him off, and immediately, she can feel his steam fill the car.
“It means that I told her no! No, she can’t come here. No, it won’t be good for you. No, I’m not helping her get a visa, and she can’t stay with us. And not a penny, not a penny of help from me.”
“You’re lying,” Sammie says, but she knows it’s the truth, that her uncle, possibly her favorite person in this world, has betrayed her. She takes off her seat belt, feeling trapped by it.
“Your dad is an asshole, and you’re better off without him, and your mom will never leave him. You can’t always ask people to choose.” He must have asked her to. She must not have chosen Sammie, and though the thought hurts like hell, Sammie needs to know for sure.
“Did you?” she asks.
“Did I what?”
“Did you ask her to choose?”
“Never mind that, Sammie.”
“Did you ask her to choose?” Sammie is getting louder now, feeling like she can’t control herself and that there are impulses, beats, moths even, inside of her, waiting to burst out.
“Sammie,” Uncle says.
But just the way he says her name unleashes something inside of her, and she is full-on screaming. “Did you ask her to choose?”
“Fuck,” he says. “Yes, and she didn’t choose you.”
“But tell her the rest, Trey. That her mom won’t stop calling. That she’s always asking about her, about you, Sammie.”
“You knew?” Sammie says incredulously. “She knew?” She turns to Uncle now, faces him square on, and he looks like he’s about to cry. She doesn’t care. He didn’t give a fuck about her feelings when he lied to her, over and over again.
“She knew?” Sammie asks again. “You told her before you told me?!”
“I thought she could help.”
“Bullshit,” Sammie says under her breath, still too afraid to curse at Uncle outright. “You’re such a coward. You can’t even tell her you like her, but you tell her our family’s business? My business? She’s going crazy, did you know that?”
Earlier that morning it occurred to Sammie that Zahra might be too much like her own mother. Why grow close to a woman who can’t figure herself out? Who will one day up and decide that Sammie is nothing but a speck to her, smaller than the moths they have in common.
Sammie can feel Zahra’s head whip around to face her, and Zahra’s eyes aren’t so different from the ones she’s grown accustomed to, the invisible eyes that watch and wait, only Zahra’s are real and right next to her. Still, they don’t stop Sammie from saying, “She thinks she can hear moths, that they sing to her. God, Uncle. You were supposed to be the good one.”
It all happens so fast. Zahra slams on the brakes. Sammie is unbraced, unbelted for the jolt that should’ve sent her flying forward, against the dashboard, maybe even through the windshield, but a soft force like down feathers forces her into her rightful position, against the passenger seat, and she is shock-eyed and sedated by the intensity of it all.
Of course Sammie doesn’t see the moths come out of nowhere like tiny particles of dust revealed in the light. She doesn’t feel the moths fluttering around her like little mothers tending to their sick child. She doesn’t hear the radio station click on, to a song she would only be vaguely familiar with anyway, People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’. And nor does she see the man just yards from the car in a ratty Falcons T-shirt, slowly backing away, one foot behind the other, easy as he goes.
TWENTY-FIVE
Shit, what was that? Did she just hit someone? Something? The car has gone quiet now, the people inside it too. Zahra looks over at Sammie, and she is as still as a statue, eyes wide open, watery. She was leaning over the console, screaming at Trey, but now Sammie is back in her seat. Zahra thanks God for it. She checks the rearview mirror, and Trey is looking around frantically. He seems disoriented. He takes off his seat belt, and Zahra follows his lead, the moths all around her like nosy children.
“What the fuck was that?” he asks.
Shit. Shit. Shit. She doesn’t know. “There was a man. I don’t think I hit him, but then, maybe I did.” Her hands are shaking. She looks at them curiously. They seem disconnected from the rest of her body.
Trey gets out of the car, but Zahra is less bold. She doesn’t want to see what she’s done. She places her hands on the wheel and grips it tightly. Eventually she sees Trey in front of the car, looking around it, under it. He shakes his head, scratches his beard, comes around to Zahra’s window. Her hands are still shaking when she rolls it down.
“Nothing’s here,” he says.
“But . . .”
“Come see for yourself.”
She steps outside of the car, and the day is chilly, but the sun, peeking over clouds, is bright, blinding. She squints at her surroundings. She didn’t even need the directions to make it here. The stretch of Centennial Olympic Park Drive in front of her. The Ferris wheel in the distance, shrouded in morning fog. To her right, the arched fence and architectural shrubbery of one of the park’s entrances.
She sees a man walking backward, slowly. He is looking at her. His face is unshaven, and his hair is matted, as if he hasn’t brushed it in weeks. But the shirt, the shirt she recognizes. Of course there are Falcons shirts everywhere, but this one is black with a hole in the bottom of the right sleeve from when Gram’s dryer broke and ripped almost every piece of clothing that went in it. Stolen, she thinks. This man stole Derrick’s shirt. She steps closer as he steps away. Closer, away. Closer, away. They dance until Zahra stops and squints her eyes so hard that it begins to give her a headache. The shirt isn’t stolen. The man who looks like an addict, homeless, mentally unstable, maybe all three, is her brother. She runs toward him.
“Derrick, what happened to you?” she screams.
He runs away, around people and strollers and tourists clicking cameras, past the Quilt of Origins, the Quilt of Remembrance, the Quilt of Dreams, but just like when they were kids, he is faster than her. He is smoking her, and she is gasping for air. Running, then stumbling, then crying as she loses sight of him. She turns around and bumps into Trey’s open arms. He pets her like a bird with broken wings.
“It’s OK,” he says. “It’s OK. Everything’s going to be all right. Everything’s going to be all right.” They walk back to the car like this, Zahra devastated, exasperated, hiccupping, and Trey reassuring her that one of the worst possible outcomes is OK. That things are all right, no matter how much they aren’t.
Not far from the car, Zahra spots what Zee was talking about at Fellini’s, a pile of leaflets that Derrick has left behind. She picks them up and has no idea what to think of these unrecognizable faces. She throws the flyers in the back of the car so they scatter like dandelion seeds, like the moth eggs that have latched on to the car’s nylon upholstery. She thinks of Derrick as one of the Black Israelites in Harlem or a brother to the Black woman outside the bus stop who isn’t waiting for the bus at all, just biding her time, arguing with God knows who, saying things like “Not on my time you won’t,” or “Must think I’m a fool, that I don’t know where I come from.” He’s lost. He’s lost it. And now, she’s lost him again.
TWENTY-SIX
Derrick lights a match, throws it in the trash can, and watches the old photos of his family burn; he’s trying to lose memories. The basement is dark and dank but for the light of the fire. It’s got windows but small ones that he has to stand on his tiptoes to see out of. An old coworker, Bina, owns it. “Got in while the getting was still good,” she said. “Vine City’s going nowhere but up,” and it’s not a lie. Derrick doesn’t let the boarded-up houses or the smell of highway pollution fool him. Gentrification is underway. Even the notorious Bluff, anachronized “better leave, you fucking fool,” popularized by the raw criminal and poorly shot Snow on Tha Bluff documentary, and less than a mile from here, will be different in some years, maybe already is now. When Derrick asked Bina for a place to stay for a while, she took his three hundred dollars quick and without questions, only one demand—You’ll have to find someplace to park your car, so he left it.
The fire licks the sides of the can and then dies quickly. He throws more photos in. Some of him and Zahra doing cartwheels on the lawn, and one of him older, in high school, sitting on top of his car and eating a bag of hot pork rinds. He lights up another match.
Gram’s father died in a fire. Folks said he was insatiable, restless, wanting. Sometimes, Derrick wonders if he’s his reincarnate. A fire has to leave something behind, doesn’t it? That’s what he’s hoping for by burning these photos—to replace something, to replace memories. He’s got too many, and it’s easier to deal with the ones that aren’t his.
Still, one memory stands out—a time when Mary came home looking like she’d just whooped the mess out of the world. In a skirt suit and pumps, Derrick knew his mother was tougher than his father. She’d say things like, Over my dead body, and I’ll be damned a lot. But this one time he remembers like yesterday. Mary came home talking about how a man, a Black man, had burned his own home down. She said he’d planted a lawn chair at the end of the driveway and watched the fire like it was a late-night show. She said it happened in one of those homes that stands alone, ivy-covered, not far from the projects, a place the police don’t seem to care much about, so the house was halfway gone by the time the fire department got there. She said the man wasn’t high or drunk or mental, or at least it didn’t seem that way. Imagine, an ordinary man, just burning his house to crisps as if it’s nothing, as if it’s what he’s got to do to get ready for work the next day. When Mom said it, Derrick was in middle school and had been sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework, eating a nuked slice of pizza.
Derrick hugs himself tight, arms gripping the curve of his back, nails digging in. He picks up an old photo of Zahra, from a family vacation in Savannah, one of the only trips they made that wasn’t to visit family. In the photo Zahra stands next to a street trumpet player, leaning over him, fingers splayed so she might be playing along. She couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven. She’s changed, hasn’t she?
What was she doing in the park today? She looked at him as if she didn’t know him, and what she’d said was even worse, Derrick, what happened to you? As if he’s the one who left. He stayed. He stayed and watched the neighbors come and go, watched the houses sag with weary, swamped-in For Sale signs, weighed down by cardboard boxes packed with worthless shit from the Walmart off Panola and clothes from the Rainbow across the street, shoeboxes stuffed with memories and trash bags heaping with home goods.
Dad’s neighborhood is something of the same dedicated evil. Southland was once an affluent Black neighborhood, up against a golf course, prestigious if not pretentious. But now families can’t sell their homes for even what they bought them for. Freedom isn’t about money, not even about ownership, but people still think they can buy or bully their way out of being Black. In Zahra’s case, she thinks she can run from it. He stayed.
He stayed, and Atlanta is a hot city. Derrick knows this better than anybody, knows that the city can press down on you from all sides and the sun can feel like a light bulb down your back. He thought the fall foliage, the breeze of winter beckoning, could cool him off, but no. He is hotter as the days pass, and he tries to shake the sun in the same way he tried to swallow the moths’ songs, words he’s grown to know all too well, like the Pledge of Allegiance or the first eight bars of “Juicy,” but there is no getting out of this fight. The faces that come to him as easy as looking through a class View-Master, started as a conversation, a simple drop in the everyday mix of pleasantries: Have you ever heard of Warren Samuels? Of course you haven’t, he might say, or Reminds me of Minnie. Let me tell you about Tall Minnie.
Beyond Warren and Minnie, he sees Brittney with the blond wig, and then Shay with her soft round cheeks. He sees Marquise with the scar on his face from flying off a bike and hitting the sidewalk chin first. He sees Princess with keloids and fake diamond studs decorating her ears. He sees the mailman with his patchy salt-and-pepper beard and the autistic person up Gram’s street who always asks to shake his hand. He sees the young freckle-faced bartender at the wings spot off Redan. With everyone in this world, Derrick sees more. Now, he sees Zahra’s face contorted, a face he knows well, pinched thick eyebrows and intense deep-set eyes, but no less than an hour ago, she looked at him in a way that made his skin crawl. No, it was more internal than that. He wanted to claw right out of himself.
But then he might not have the memories of him and Zahra learning Atlanta like the back of their hands, driving everywhere and having nowhere to be, listening to music all day and not feeling any less productive because of it.
Derrick had friends on top of friends on top of friends, but no one any closer than Zahra. So it hurt like hell when things started happening, things he couldn’t explain, voices she couldn’t hear, faces she didn’t remember, and he couldn’t talk to her about them. Truth was, he started seeing inside of people when he was still young, and at first it felt like a superpower. He would close his eyes and dream something he’d catch on the news the next day. And like a smell or sound might jog your memory, so would his senses create realities that obviously didn’t belong to him. Bobby Womack might conjure up days spent in the US Penitentiary Atlanta, or Nat King Cole might make him remember learning to fly a plane like one of the Tuskegee Airmen. Moths might tell him stories of people whose faces would come to him like a child begging for candy. Eventually, he felt it his responsibility to tell someone else, to tell the stories that wanted to be told.
When he tried to talk to Zahra about all of it, she’d said, “Derrick, worry about yourself.” And “Derrick, you’re scaring me.” And, “Derrick, let’s just forget about the damn moths, why don’t we?” But how could he forget the things, the beings that had eaten at his cool like hungry vultures? They left him wanting and worried. So eventually, he stopped caring about who he was, because the world was so much bigger anyway. He wasn’t but one small piece of the pie, but there were ways to be more. There were ways to be more than one small person.
He didn’t know the faces would become whole people. The day he met that beautiful woman at the creek was the day he realized he might never know what the world wants from him. To tell stories? To be as restless as his great-grandfather? To fall in love? Well, he doesn’t see any point in any of it. But since leaving home, the moths have been quieter than they’ve been in years, and he’s been able to use his voice again, in a way he hasn’t since high school. He’s been taking some alone time to do the work—the storytelling, so why was Zahra choosing to chase after him now? Didn’t she read the note he left?
Lately, something’s shifted in his family, and in people like Warren and Minnie too. One day they’re men, and the next day they’re moths. One day their lives are steerable, and the next day, they’re crashing into phantom people, running after siblings who’ve intentionally strayed, lighting matches in someone else’s basement and feeling the fire outside so the one inside might die off.
* * *
—
He began writing their stories about a year ago. It seems like he knows everything about them except when or how they died. Warren Samuels was the first. He is thirty-seven years old with three kids, all girls, from two baby moms, one of whom he is married to, or would be if Georgia still recognized common-law marriage. Warren calls Regina Hamilton his wife, and Pastor Watkins, who they see every other Sunday and surely on the holidays, recognizes their implicit vows too. Warren is a maintenance worker for Georgia Tech, a job that felt elite when he applied and lied on his paperwork that he’d never been arrested. In fact, he has been arrested three times. Once on mistaken identity, par the course for a Black man in Atlanta, once for two ounces of marijuana, and once for violating parole on that marijuana charge when he unknowingly waived a court hearing. Like anyone really, Warren has a range of signature phrases, things like Be easy; Make that money, don’t let it make you; and As long as the light bill’s paid, he says with his friends, or parables of advice he offers his children like Mess up now and the stink will follow you forever.
* * *
—
Minnie, they call Daija, though it’s not short for her name and she herself is not short either. But she looks just like her mother, Dina, and Minnie, a childhood name that stuck, is five foot nine with a lace front and a nose ring nearly too big for her nostrils. She works retail at a Dots clothing store where women buy bodycon rompers, mesh jumpsuits, matching sweats sets, and no matter how she thinks they look in them, Minnie always nods her head and says, “I’d buy it.” It’s not that the sale matters to her; Minnie doesn’t work off commission but makes $9 an hour. Still, she’s the leading sales rep. She tells people to buy it, and they do. Maybe because she looks damn good in her own jumpsuit, or because her smile lifts the room and the air around her makes you feel like you’re floating. Maybe because she mhmms you to death, so you feel like you’re old girlfriends or for the men who come to buy gifts for their significant others, like they’d stand the chance of jumping ship or switching sails and sidling up to this tall stallion in front of them. Without knowing that Minnie hasn’t dated men in years. She used to until they started tasting tart, a little too salty, a little stale like a bag of chips left open. Minnie is not someone who’s been “turned out.” In fact, you could say she’s been turned in, to her most authentic self, to the woman she was always supposed to be, so when she agrees with whatever you say, mhmm, mhmm, mhmm, really, she’s just unbothered. Maybe considering what she and Sheila will have for dinner, or thinking about what flavor of pie she’ll take her dying grandmother for dessert.
