I could see her hand holding the cigarette was shaking. Whenever Mama smokes a cigarette, she always seems like she’s about to drop it. New tears were running down her face. “I don’t know why I said that to Rosa. That wasn’t right. Maybe she didn’t mean nothin’ by it, but she made me so mad, talking about you.”
I sat next to her on the couch and reached for her hand. She wouldn’t squeeze back. “Tell her it didn’t mean nothing. We don’t have to move just because of that. That ain’t nothing.”
“No, Nicky . . . ” Mama whispered. “Telling to hurt somebody is the worst thing a person can do. Even the devil couldn’t do nothing worse.”
I’d seen Mama acting crazy for sure, running around in her underclothes, screaming at anybody who could hear, but I’d never seen her quiet. That scared me more than it would have if she’d been throwing pots and pans on the floor. She sounded different.
I got mad all of a sudden. “Shoot, Mama, forget Rosa. Who does she think she is, trying to say you can’t take care of me? Nobody asked her.”
Mama laughed a little and stared at the floor.
“You are taking care of me, Mama. Better than anybody.”
“Sure am . . . ” Mama said, still not looking up at me. “I got to . . . until May twelfth.”
“Two thousand five,” I said, squeezing her hand again, and Mama just closed her eyes.
Until right then, when I heard myself say it, the date had seemed so far away. I’d always known I would be fifteen that year, but I’d never stopped to think it was only three years away. It wasn’t so far off anymore.
We left Miami Beach, which is too bad because it’s so alive there. There are so many people who sing and dance and laugh and act like every day is the only one left. I wish we could have stayed there. Even in November, it’s already freezing in Chicago, and people are dressing warm, walking fast, waiting for spring to come. In a cold place, there’s no such thing as today, just tomorrow. Will it snow tomorrow? Will it be sunny tomorrow? But Mama said she couldn’t face Rosa, so we jumped on a bus and stopped riding when we got bored. This time, we stopped in Chicago. But there’s never really anywhere to go.
I guess Mama felt so bad about what she said to Rosa because it reminded her of all the times before when she’d lost her temper and said what she doesn’t mean to say. I don’t think she can help it. I was only six when she did it to me, even though I don’t remember what I did that made her so mad in the first place. I was little, but I never forgot what she said: “I’ll be through with your foolishness on May twelfth, 2005, because that’s your day, Nicky. You hear?”
I told a friend once, a kid named Kalil I had just started hanging out with at my school in Atlanta, after he told me about something bad that had happened to his family in the country where they came from. We were just standing on the playground, and we told our worst stories. His story had soldiers; mine was only about Mama and May 12, 2005.
That was the only time anyone ever looked at me the way people always look at Mama. But the thing I like most about kids is that even though they get scared like anybody else, they can forget they’re scared pretty fast. Especially kids like Kalil, who know there’s more to the world than video games and homework. I guess that made us alike. He hardly waited any time at all before he said, “Does that bother you?” Just like that.
I’d never thought about that before. We were both ten then, so fifteen was five years off, half my whole life, and by that time, I’d be in high school, nearly a man. A whole different person. I told him I didn’t think it bothered me. When you grow up around someone like Mama and you hear about it all the time, you know everybody has a turn, and you just try to find something interesting every day to make you glad it hasn’t happened yet.
That’s why I didn’t mind it in Miami Beach when the TV only got two channels—see, I don’t need more than two channels, as long as there’s something I can watch. I’ll watch the evening news and soap operas in English or Spanish or even golf, if Tiger Woods is playing. Hell, I don’t even mind when we don’t have a TV, which we usually don’t. I read comic books and books from the library and take walks and watch people. Kalil said he wouldn’t go to school if he were me, but I don’t mind. There’s always something interesting somewhere, even at school. Like the way my math teacher smiles, when you can see her whole heart in it. I don’t think anyone in my class has noticed that except me.
“You’re really brave, Nicky,” Kalil told me in Atlanta. I don’t feel brave but I do think about it sometimes. I wonder how it’ll go down, if it will hurt when it happens, or if I’ll be crossing the street and a car will come around a corner all of a sudden like with my dead Uncle Joe. Or maybe I’ll see someone getting robbed and I’ll get shot like Auntie Ree when I try to stop the bad guy, and someone will say I was a hero. That would be best. I wonder if it’ll happen even if I stay in bed that day and never leave my room, or if I’ll just get struck by lightning while I’m staring out of my window at the greatest storm I’ve ever seen. I never get sick, so I don’t think it’ll be that. I think it’ll be something else, but I’m not sure what.
Even Mama says she doesn’t know.
This was originally published in Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing, co-edited by the dear, late E. Lynn Harris and Marita Golden to benefit the Hurston/Wright Foundation whose mission is to discover, mentor, and honor black writers. This story speaks to the fear of mortality that underlies much of my work. Nicky’s mature perspective on his own brief life gives me strength.
After all, we are not here nearly long enough . . . and each of us is waiting for our Day.
Like Daughter
I got the call in the middle of the week, when I came wheezing home from my uphill late-afternoon run. I didn’t recognize the voice on my computer’s answer-phone at first, although I thought it sounded like my best friend, Denise. There was no video feed, only the recording, and the words were so improbable they only confused me more: “Sean’s gone. Come up here and get Neecy. Take her. I can’t stand to look at her.”
Her words rolled like scattered marbles in my head.
I had just talked to Denise a week before, when she called from Chicago to tell me her family might be coming to San Francisco to visit me that winter, when Neecy was out of school for Christmas vacation.
We giggled on the phone as if we were planning a sleepover, the way we used to when we were kids. Denise’s daughter, Neecy, is my godchild. I hadn’t seen her since she was two, which was a raging shame and hard for me to believe when I counted back the years in my mind, but it was true. I’d always made excuses, saying I had too much traveling and too many demands as a documentary film producer, where life is always projected two and three years into the future, leaving little space for here and now.
But that wasn’t the reason I hadn’t seen my godchild in four years. We both knew why.
I played the message again, listening for cadences and tones that would remind me of Denise, and it was like standing on the curb watching someone I knew get hit by a car. Something had stripped Denise’s voice bare. So that meant her husband, Sean, must really be gone, I realized. And Denise wanted to send her daughter away.
“I can’t stand to look at her,” the voice on the message was saying again.
I went to my kitchen sink, in the direct path of the biting breeze from my half-open window, and I was shaking. My mind had frozen shut, sealing my thoughts out of reach. I turned on the faucet and listened to the water pummel my aluminum basin, then I captured some of the lukewarm stream in my palms to splash my face. As the water dripped from my chin, I cupped my hands again and drank, and I could taste the traces of salty perspiration I’d rubbed from my skin, tasting myself. My anger and sadness were tugging on my stomach. I stood at that window and cursed as if what I was feeling had a shape and was standing in the room with me.
I think I’d started to believe I might have been wrong about the whole thing. That was another reason I’d kept so
me distance from Denise; I hadn’t wanted to be there to poke holes in what she was trying to do, to cast doubts with the slightest glance. That’s something only a mother or a lifelong friend can do, and I might as well have been both to Denise despite our identical ages. I’d thought maybe if I only left her alone, she could build everything she wanted inside that Victorian brownstone in Lincoln Park. The husband, the child, all of it. Her life could trot on happily ever after, just the way she’d planned.
But that’s a lie, too. I’d always known I was right. I had been dreading that call all along, since the beginning. And once it finally came, I wondered what the hell had taken so long. You know how Denise’s voice really sounded on my answering machine that day? As if she’d wrapped herself up in that recorder and died.
“Paige, promise me you’ll look out for Neecy, hear?” Mama used to tell me. I couldn’t have known then what a burden that would be, having to watch over someone. But I took my role seriously. Mama said Neecy needed me, so I was going to be her guardian. Just a tiny little bit, I couldn’t completely be a kid after that. Mama never said exactly why my new best friend at Mae Jemison Elementary School needed guarding, but she didn’t have to. I had my own eyes. Even when Neecy didn’t say anything, I noticed the bruises on her forearms and calves, and even on Neecy’s mother’s neck once, which was the real shocker. I recognized the sweet, sharp smell on Neecy’s mother’s breath when I walked to Neecy’s house after school. Her mother smiled at me so sweetly, just like that white lady Mrs. Brady on reruns of The Brady Bunch my mother made me watch, because she used to watch it when she was my age and she thought it was more appropriate than the “trash” on the children’s channels when I was a kid. That smile wasn’t a real smile; it was a smile to hide behind.
I knew things Mama didn’t know, in fact. When Neecy and I were nine, we already had secrets that made us feel much older; and not in the way that most kids want to feel older, but in the uninvited way that only made us want to sit by ourselves in the playground watching the other children play, since we were no longer quite in touch with our spirit of running and jumping. The biggest secret, the worst, was about Neecy’s Uncle Lonnie, who was twenty-two, and what he had forced Neecy to do with him all summer during the times her parents weren’t home. Neecy finally had to see a doctor because the itching got so bad. She’d been bleeding from itching between her legs, she’d confided to me. This secret filled me with such horror that I later developed a dread of my own period because I associated the blood with Neecy’s itching. Even though the doctor asked Neecy all sorts of questions about how she could have such a condition, which had a name Neecy never uttered out loud, Neecy’s mother never asked at all.
So, yes, I understood why Neecy needed looking after. No one else was doing it.
What I didn’t understand, as a child, was how Neecy could say she hated her father for hitting her and her mother, but then she’d be so sad during the months when he left, always wondering when he would decide to come home. And how Neecy could be so much smarter than I was—the best reader, speller, and multiplier in the entire fourth grade—and still manage to get so many F’s because she just wouldn’t sit still and do her homework. And the thing that puzzled me most of all was why, as cute as Neecy was, she seemed to be ashamed to show her face to anyone unless she was going to bed with a boy, which was the only time she ever seemed to think she was beautiful. She had to go to the doctor to get abortion pills three times before she graduated from high school.
Maybe it was the secret-sharing, the telling, that kept our friendship so solid, so fervent. Besides, despite everything, there were times I thought Neecy was the only girl my age who had any sense, who enjoyed reciting poems and acting out scenes as much as I did. Neecy never did join the drama club like I did, claiming she was too shy, but we spent hours writing and performing plays of our own behind my closed bedroom door, exercises we treated with so much imagination and studiousness that no one would ever guess we were our only audience.
“I wish I had a house like yours,” Neecy used to say, trying on my clothes while she stood admiring herself in my closet mirror, my twin.
By fall, the clothes would be hers, because in the summer Mama always packed my clothes for Neecy in a bundle. For my other little girl, she’d say. And beforehand Neecy would constantly warn me, “Don’t you mess up that dress,” or “Be careful before you rip that!” because she already felt proprietary.
“Oh, my house isn’t so special,” I used to tell Neecy. But that was the biggest lie of all.
In the years afterward, as Neecy dragged a parade of crises to my doorstep, like a cat with writhing rodents in her teeth—men, money, jobs; everything was a problem for Neecy—I often asked myself what forces had separated us so young, dictating that I had grown up in my house and Neecy had grown up in the other. She’d lived right across the street from my family, but our lives may as well have been separated by the Red Sea.
Was it only an accident that my own father never hit me, never stayed away from home for even a night, and almost never came from work without hugging me and telling me I was his Smart Little Baby-Doll?
And that Mama never would have tolerated any other kind of man? Was it pure accident that I’d had no Uncle Lonnie to make me itch until I bled with a disease the doctor had said little girls shouldn’t have?
“Girl, you’re so lucky,” Neecy told me once when I was in college and she’d already been working for three years as a clerk at the U Save Drugstore. She’d sworn she wasn’t interested in college, but at that instant her tone had been so rueful, so envy-soaked, that we could have been children again, writing fantastic scripts for ourselves about encounters with TV stars and space aliens behind my closed bedroom door, both of us trying to forget what was waiting for Neecy at home. “In my next life, I’m coming back you for sure.”
If only Neecy had been my real-life sister, not just a pretend one, I always thought. If only things had been different for her from the time she was born.
I called Denise a half hour after I got her message. She sounded a little better, but not much. Whether it was because she’d gathered some composure or swallowed a shot or two of liquor, this time her voice was the one I’ve always known: hanging low, always threatening to melt into a defeated laugh. She kept her face screen black, refusing to let me see her. “It’s all a mess. This place looks like it was robbed,” she said. “He took everything. His suits. His music. His favorite books, you know, those Russian writers, Dostoyevsky and Nabokov, or whatever-the-fuck? Only reason I know he was ever here is because of the hairs in the bathroom sink. He shaved first. He stood in there looking at his sorry face in the mirror after he’d loaded it all up, and he . . . ” For the first time, her voice cracked. “He left . . . me. And her. He left.”
I couldn’t say anything against Sean. What did she expect? The poor man had tried, but from the time they met, it had all been as arranged as a royal Chinese marriage. How could anyone live in that house and breathe under the weight of Denise’s expectations? Since I couldn’t invent any condolences, I didn’t say anything.
“You need to take Neecy.” Denise filled the silence.
Hearing her say it so coldly, my words roiled beneath my tongue, constricting my throat. I could barely sound civil. “The first time you told me about doing this . . . I said to think about what it would mean. That it couldn’t be undone. Didn’t I, Neecy?”
“Don’t call me Neecy.” Her words were icy, bitter. “Don’t you know better?”
“What happens now? She’s your daughter, and she’s only six. Think of—”
“Just come get her. If not, I don’t . . . I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Then she hung up on me, leaving my melodramatic imagination to wonder what she’d meant by that remark, if she was just feeling desperate or if she was holding a butcher knife or a gun in her hand when she said it. Maybe that was why she’d blacked herself out, I thought.
I was crying like a six-yea
r-old myself while my cab sped toward the airport. I saw the driver’s wondering eyes gaze at me occasionally in his rearview mirror, and I couldn’t tell if he was sympathetic or just annoyed. I booked myself on an eight-forty flight with a seat in first class on one of the S-grade planes that could get me there in forty minutes. Airbuses, I call them. At least in first class I’d have time for a glass or two of wine. I convinced the woman at the ticket counter to give me the coach price because, for the first time in all my years of flying, I lied and said I was going to a funeral. My sister’s, I told her, tears still smarting on my face.
If you could even call that a lie.
Three more months, just ninety days, and it never would have happened. If Denise had waited only a few months, if she’d thought it through the way I begged her when she first laid out the details of her plan, the procedure would not have been legal. The Supreme Court’s decision came down before little Neecy was even born, after only a couple hundred volunteers paid the astronomical fee to take part in the copycat babies program. To this day, I still have no idea where Denise got the money. She never told me, and I got tired of asking.
But she got it somehow, somewhere, along with two hundred thirty others. There were a few outright nutcases, of course, lobbying to try to use DNA samples to bring back Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King; I never thought that would prove anything except that those men were only human and could be as unremarkable as the rest of us. But mostly the applicants were just families with something left undone, I suppose. Even though I never agreed with Denise’s reasons, at least I had some idea of what she hoped to accomplish. The others, I wasn’t sure. Was it pure vanity? Novelty? Nostalgia? I still don’t understand.
In the end, I’m not sure how many copycat babies were born. I read somewhere that some of the mothers honored the Supreme Court’s ban and were persuaded to abort. Of course, they might have been coerced or paid off by one of the extremist groups terrified of a crop of so-called “soulless” children. But none of that would have swayed Denise, anyway. For all I know, little Neecy might have been the very last one born.
Ghost Summer, Stories Page 17