The life im in, p.21
The Life I'm In, page 21
“It wasn’t you.” Her head goes down.
“Caleb. It was him. What he do? Break up with you?”
She shake her head no.
Opening the book, I read out loud even though we said we wouldn’t. In between my sentences, Maleeka whispers, “I thought it was stage three. It’s stage four.”
I hug her like I hug Cricket. “We friends. You my girl. Anything you need—”
She need to cry, I see. To let it out.
“You got a strong mother like I had a strong mother. She gonna be all right.” I say what everybody says, but I know people die from cancer … all the time. In my mind I ask Roxanne to ask God not to take her.
I take Maleeka’s hand. Walk her to the bathroom. I run water in the sink till it’s warm. Then I sit a washcloth in it. Cricket taught me how to go slow, be gentle especially around the eyes. Wiping, patting her face, I ask, “You wanna color?”
She nods.
I got her by the hand again when we walk in my room over to my closet. On my toes, I reach for my mother’s hatbox. It was empty when I got it. But I liked the pretty color—fuchsia. Emptying it out on my bed, I watch crayons roll around, happy. “Take your pick.”
I hid them before I left. ’Cause they’re extra special to me. Left over from when I was little, from her trips to the store with me, some never used.
Side by side, on our stomachs with our legs up, we not saying a word. I draw a heart. Put dark lines all through it. Then make different kinds of boxes that I fill in with my favorite colors. I never go outside the lines. I color faster than usual. Maleeka take her time. Moves in slow motion. Starts with a sun in the sky, Caribbean-blue clouds. Her stick people look like they on stilts. But I know that’s supposed to be her and her mother. They on the sand on the beach, holding hands.
Our crayons move over the page smooth as skates on ice. Our elbows touch. The sun making me squint sometimes when I look up at it. My fingers is happy though. Hers too. They pick up crayons. Move ’em fast and slow, leaving something pretty behind. She slow down, her breathing anyhow. Says I’m lucky to have a sister. “If something happened to my mom—” Maleeka reaching for the light pink one. Then the Pearl Gray. Her next picture is a house with them colors inside on the walls and furniture. “My mom says it’s not as bad as I think it is. But parents lie.”
“Don’t they.” I draw the ribbon. The symbol for breast cancer. It take up the whole page. She help me fill it in. We make it hot pink. After we done, I sign it.
On our backs, watching the moon come out, we talk about our mothers. Not about them being dead or dying. About the kinds of things we done with them when we was little. I run downstairs. Come up fast as I can. Flip through a photo album. She get to see me with my mom and dad. See how much I look like her and him, the clothes I wore, my hairdos back then. Out of nowhere, she take both my hands and squeezes.
“You scared?” I ask.
She shake her head yes.
“I stay scared now. All the time.”
“Momma does too. She try not to show it. But I see.” Her mother won’t talk about her treatments. She comes home. Gets sick. Loses her hair. Bought a wig. Says she’s okay when Maleeka asks if everything is all right. “But now—” Her legs shaking so hard it sounds like a dog’s tail hitting the floor. “Should I quit coming here, Char? Stop my after-school activities?”
“Did your mother ask you to do that?”
“No, but—” It’s the right thing to do, she say after a while.
I know. But I don’t want her to quit coming. Bet she don’t want that either. What I say is way different from that. “She your mother, Maleeka. Do what you gotta.”
SHE AIN’T COME today. It’s only me and Miss Saunders here. I got a B on both my tests, B- on the math part. She wants to go over things I might not have understood well. I don’t know about her and me with nobody else around. We might turn into who we used to be, argue and fight, I say to her.
“Well, let’s give it a try anyhow.”
She go over my tests one line at a time. I chew my lip, wonder when this gonna be over—and if she think I’m still as dumb I used to be. She get up on her feet, puts one of our test problems on the board, asks me to work it out. Standing beside her, I write the answer in neon-pink chalk. Step by step she show me where I made my mistakes, and how not to make ’em again. Later she move on to nouns, verbs, predicates. It take a while, but she help me see how they work and that they don’t all do the same job in a sentence. It’s almost an hour before we finish covering the test. She had to make certain, she said, that I understood the errors I made and that I know way more than I thought I knew. I do see how I can improve. How much I have improved. When I thank her for her help, I ain’t lying. I mean it, for once.
She erasing the fake blackboard when I ask, “Do you think I’ll earn my GED one day?”
“I’d like to see you in school full-time. With kids your own age. Going to the prom one day.”
I’m already three years behind other kids at school. Grown up in ways I hope they’ll never be. If I was in class now, what would we talk about, anyhow? How to do it in the alley? What position old men like? I wish I could ask her that. But teachers never understand what kids be going through.
She compliments me on my poetry, then goes in her briefcase. It’s on the chair at the table. Like always, she keep the locks on. Out comes a purple journal tied with a silver see-through ribbon wide as my phone. She want me to continue my writings, she say.
“Just like Maleeka?”
“Writing can be cathartic.”
“Ka—what?”
Miss Saunders ask my permission to go to the stove and start up the kettle. While she doing that, I get the cups and tea out the cabinet beside the sink. At the table, she pour steaming hot water over green tea bags shaped like triangles. JuJu bought them for me. I need to heal inside and out, she be saying.
In her seat, stirring her tea, she real quiet for a while. Me too. I add more sugar. Look out the window past her head. Right then Maleeka calls. Tells me she just couldn’t make it. I ask about next week, she ain’t sure about that either. “My mom needs me.”
Miss Saunders asking what I wanna do. Finish our tea? Discuss how Maleeka’s absence is affecting me? How her mother’s cancer may change things for her? Her eyes shine when she say, “We can talk about anything at all.”
I cross my legs, notice dirt on my left ankle when I bring up Maleeka’s mom. “She was always nice. Why something bad like that had to happen to her?”
Miss Saunders saying what grown-ups always say. “The world can be a terrible place.”
I ask what she know about bad things happening, besides what she see on the news. She stay quiet. I think about Cricket being taken from me, the friends I left behind. And him. “Anthony said it was my fault.”
She don’t know who he is or ask who he is. “What did he think was your fault?”
“Everything.” I pick at the dust in my hair. Smell my stank fingers. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I see.” Her hands is folded on the table like she the student not the teacher. The steam in her tea is gone after a while. I go to the stove to pour more hot water in my cup, then add too much sugar and wish she would leave. Miss Saunders sit her cup and saucer in the sink. Takes the seat beside me. Licks her lips. Clears her throat. Blinks and blinks like there’s something in her eye she wants out. “If I tell you something personal do you think you can keep it to yourself?”
I got so many secrets I’m all full up. I say sure anyhow.
“I was a little younger than you when someone in my family—” She stops, fills her cup again, and puts three teaspoons of brown sugar in, stirring. “I’ve always been a big girl, Charlese. Tall, you know. Overweight.” She pats her stomach. “And of course I was born with this.” She touches the birthmark on her face. I laughed about it, talked about it at school. What I said was mean. Back then, I ain’t think she liked me. I wanted her to know we felt the same way about each other.
She tell me what I heard before. That when she was little, she studied extra hard. Always was first in her class. Did anything she could to stand out for being excellent, so people would focus on something other than how she looked. But they bullied her anyhow. The way I done Maleeka.
“The first person to tell me that I was pretty was twenty years older.” It made her feel pretty and special, she say. The next thing she knew he was treating her to lunch, asking to hold her hand. “It didn’t feel right because it wasn’t right. Adults should protect young people, but some—” She smiles but her eyes say what she won’t. That she still think about what happened. Clearing her throat, she says that what he did to her wasn’t her fault. “I was fifteen. He was—” She got both my hands in hers when she tell me, “It wasn’t your fault either. Anthony knows that. Do you understand?”
I shake my head yes.
She don’t talk long, but once she’s done, I see that some parts of her story match me and Sister’s story. A grown-up done something to her. He didn’t steal her or beat her, but he did rape her, molest her, change her life forever. Them kind of people always make you think it’s your fault, she say. “It’s how they keep their hand on your shoulder, over your mouth. But if you stay silent, Charlese, they win.”
My legs swing sideways like a door opening wide, but it’s the opposite inside. I feel small, ashamed of what I done. Dirty. I turn my face away from her. “It’s different with me. Not the same thing that happened to you at all. That wasn’t your fault.”
She slide her cup close to mine. Stands up, doesn’t ask permission to go in our cabinets this time. Opening one after the other, she come back carrying a soup cup—wide and fat, a China teacup that never had a match, mugs, and cups with North Carolina, Maryland, Philadelphia, Dominica, and Pittsburgh written across the middle. She put ’em all on the table in a line. “Are these cups one and the same?”
“They the same but not the same.”
“Right. Some hold eight ounces.” She lifts the teacup. “Looks like this holds less.” Some are plastic, she points out, then there’s the mugs, and the ones with names of the places my parents visited before I was born. “They are similar, not the same.”
Standing close to me she ask permission to touch me. Her soft fingers lift my chin. Her eyes and mine see each other for once. It may be that we ain’t have the same exact experiences, she says. “But in many ways, it was similar, which does not make what you went through any less tragic, horrific, or abusive than what happened to me or any other child that has been sexually abused.”
I pick up a cup and sit it in the palm of my hand. “It’s the same, but it’s not.”
“That’s all I’m saying.”
I put my mother’s China teacup back where it was. “And you told … what he done to you?”
“Yes, I did.”
She ain’t stay quiet. And she did something good with her life after a while. JuJu say I can too, but first I have to get out this house. I walk over to the stove. Turn the fire on under the kettle. After I fill our cups, I tell her a little more and a little more after that till she know the kind of work I did, where and who with. I feel dirtier than I look, cleaner at the same time, full, not empty like I been all these months.
IT’S LIKE I got sunshine in my bones. Good ideas coming to me quick as Cheerios falling out the box and onto the floor. JuJu say this is the happiest she seen me since I been home. I took a shower. Washed myself from head to toe. She so proud of me she asked her friend to let me visit with Cricket. She’ll drop her off this morning. Said she could spend the afternoon with me while she take her grandmother to the doctor. It’s a lot to manage old people and babies at the same time, she said.
Lying on my bed, I call Maleeka and she does to me what I’d do to her—ignore the call, hang up. Yesterday I got JuJu to mail her a letter, plus a picture of her and me together. It was taken at McClenton Middle. I cut the twins out. Glued it on white paper, right in the middle. Then I drew a star around us, big enough to fill the rest of the page. All of my favorite crayon colors filled up that space. Made it look like rockets or fireworks was going off. Before I put it in the envelope, I wrote on the back for her to hang in there. Her mother too. She woulda done it for me.
JUJU SAID THAT I might want to take it slow, just go up the block, around the corner, and back. But since my conversation with Miss Saunders, I know I can’t sit still no longer. I woulda went out yesterday, but Miss E had everything all wrong. Her grandma’s appointment was today. So, I waited. I wanted company, Cricket with me, in case I lost my nerve.
At the window, with her on my hip, I look out the blinds, then dig in my pocket for her Binky. It’s in her mouth when I look down at the jeans I got on. You could fit two people in ’em. It’s the same with my shirt. On my way out my bedroom, I untie my night scarf and sit it on the bed; slide a baseball cap on my head. Downstairs, I feel my stomach drop, my throat drying out. But I keep walking, thinking that if Miss Saunders’s life could turn out okay, so could mine.
Cricket’s strapped to my belly, faced out, when I shut the door, jiggle the knob. She coos, kicks, leans her head back—don’t mind me kissing her sweet brown lips. We a team again. Maybe if I get myself together, I can get her back. Be her mother like April woulda wanted.
I look up and down the block, double-check every car I see. In the middle of the street I stop to let a school bus pass. My heart beats double time. So, I breathe in and out the way JuJu and Miss Saunders taught me. But I still feel like running home.
Maleeka live ten blocks from here. No big deal at all. Bet after I show up, she’ll want to color or get her nails painted. I got everything in my backpack, plus a dozen glazed donuts. Swallowing spit, I hurry up, but don’t get far. A block away my feet feel heavy as buckets. Inside, I’m turning sad. That’s why I stop in front a daycare center. Me and Cricket get as close to the wall as the paint. “Go ahead.” I take her by the hand. “It’s okay.” She touch the green circle. Her little fingers slide over the yellow triangle and red apples. I name all the colors for her. Look back over my shoulder. Point out the seals and walruses, polar bear and penguins, and then look over my other shoulder again. I help Cricket trace a few numbers: three, five, ten, eight. “My mother was good at math. Maybe you are too.” I face the street ’cause I ain’t comfortable with my back to people behind us. I smack my forehead for letting Anthony get all up in my head.
I PUSH HER higher. Watch her feet kick. Listen to her giggle. When I can, I walk two swings over and do like she doing—swinging with my head back, laughing at the sky. Not for long though, ’cause she don’t like sitting still. Jumping up again, I run and push her, tickle and kiss her. Tell her how much I miss being with her.
A hour is gone by the time I carry her over to the bench to give her a bottle of juice and Cheerios. Cricket couldn’t eat nothing like that when we was together. She was too young. Now she got rolls behind her knees, a double chin. “You remember our place?” She don’t, I know, but I wish she could. Shutting my eyes, I go back to the Starfleet Motel. We’re on the floor playing with her blocks, reading Goodnight Moon. “Cricket.” I open my eyes while I bounce her on my knees. “If it happens to you, tell somebody.”
I pack her up and walk as fast as I can. Using a pencil, I scratch take her to the park off my list. If I wasn’t doing that, I woulda seen them girls coming this way. Today ain’t my best day clothes-wise, so I turn around and walk the other way.
“Char? That you?”
I look back. She catches up. Her eyes got question marks in ’em.
“Hey. What’s up, India?” I say.
She with a girl who don’t look up from her phone at first.
India and me was never close friends. But we would walk to elementary school together and go to the park sometimes. She ask how I been. After I say fine, her lips curl up, like she smelling something foul. Don’t know why. I took a bath.
I’m walking when she ask about Cricket. I lie. And tell her she mine. She lies. And says she look exactly like me. Then she reaches over and pinches Cricket’s chubby cheek. Right then, I let my guard down and ask how she been doing, what she been up to?
“You ran away, right?”
“What?”
She look at her friend, then Cricket, then me. “I heard you in that life.”
“Huh?”
“You got a pimp, right?”
I start backing up.
“Ain’t nobody surprised, Charlese Jones.”
I turn around and run.
“Hope you came back rich!”
I TURN ON the TV in the living room, open a bottle of gin, and sit down with my feet up. The more I drink, the more I think about him. With the bottle in my hand, I go upstairs. Taking a swig, I stare at my parents’ door. I drink out the bottle, wasting gin on my shirt and my arm. Laughing, I go in their room.
His pictures are everywhere. So are hers. Their bed still the same way they left it—with the spread on and the sheets tucked under. On my way to his closet, I try to remember Anthony’s number. It popped up on JuJu’s cell when I first got home. She cussed him out and changed her number the next day. Then three times since then. He quit calling after she said she would give the FBI his number.
The door to my father’s closet always opened extra easy. He only had three suits, but he owned a lot of shirts, all white. I bury my nose in ’em one at a time. Then, sitting on the bed, I drink until my throat and belly burn. In the hall, I take out my new cell, and dial his number. He don’t answer right off, on purpose I know it. So, I call again, begging this time. That’s when he pick up. “Daddy—”
“Apologize.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“I told you, nobody wants you. Loves you. Just me.”
He orders my bus ticket without me asking. He gonna meet me at the Greyhound station tomorrow night. But I gotta leave now so I can make the last bus. “If you mention anything to anybody, I’ll—”
