The teachers seemed to question her, too. “Your children are so different, Ms. Figueroa,” they said. Mina had kept her married name only to prove her point. Mina told herself they were referring to the fact that while Riley continued her effortless sprint to the head of her class, Chloe couldn’t read until the second grade. And she pretended not to notice how the other students kept a polite distance from Riley and forgot to invite her to birthday parties while Chloe never wanted for friends.
As Mina walked away from her office, she remembered that she’d left her lunch on the kitchen counter and cursed. She had sworn she would do better at bringing her lunch from home, and that morning she’d even remembered to pack one—leftover chicken and green beans from the night before. Now she walked toward Symphony and turned into Whole Foods, where the temperature-controlled air made her shiver and rub her hands against her pale, bare shoulders.
Mina decided to make herself feel better by looking around the store for sales, hoping to find something cheap to make for dinner. As adolescence had descended on their two-bedroom apartment, Mina struggled less with making sure her girls got to bed on time and more with recognizing them as they walked out of their room in the morning. Forcing them to eat dinner together was one of the ways she’d tried to keep her daughters from slipping through her fingers.
However, many nights it was dinner that showed the weakness of the binding holding them together. Discussions around the table became the premise for arguments that could lead to fights lasting weeks. The night before, Mina tried to make conversation by telling them about an article she’d read on St. Louis that called Delmar Boulevard one of the most racially divisive streets in America. Chloe, who was thirteen, wasn’t listening, but she never listened when Mina talked. But fifteen-year-old Riley pushed at the glasses that always slid down her nose and said, “Wait, isn’t Delmar the street where you took me where there were stores and stuff?”
Mina nodded. “Yeah, Delmar actually runs all the way into downtown St. Louis, but the part we went to is called the Loop. I took you to the record store where I used to work. You remember Rahsaan’s, right?”
They’d only gone to St. Louis once, and that was because Mina’s mother Kanta had insisted on taking them. Riley was ten and Chloe was eight, and while Kanta took Chloe to the Magic House, Mina had taken Riley to Rahsaan’s. Riley got a kick out of Bones, who called her “honey child” and cried when he first saw her. Mina tried to convince Riley to buy something other than an Usher CD, but Bones shut her down, told Riley he loved Usher. Told her, “Girl, you should have seen the type of stuff your mama used to buy from me when she was your age.”
“Those protests that are happening in St. Louis, are they by that record store?” Riley asked.
Mina caught her breath and looked at her daughter. “I didn’t realize you’d been following that story.”
Riley rolled her eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Chloe looked up from her cell phone. She listened when her sister talked. “What protests?”
Riley nudged a green bean back and forth across her plate and said, “You don’t know anything, do you?”
“You think you know everything, don’t you?” Chloe shot back.
“You wouldn’t care anyway, Chloe. This is about black people.”
“News flash, Riley, you’re not black.”
“No, Chloe,” Riley said, holding her brown skinned hand up to the ivory of her sister’s face. “You’re not black.”
“Jesus, Riley. Does Mom look black to you?”
“What about Rubio? You think he’s white, too?” Recently, Riley had been referring to their estranged father by his first name or even just his initials.
Now it was Chloe’s turn to roll her eyes. “Dad isn’t black, Riley, he’s Puerto Rican.”
Riley’s face folded into a furious scowl and her fork slammed on her plate. “Right. Not white. And if you knew anything, you’d know that Puerto Rican people have as much West African blood in them as European…”
Chloe turned from her sister. “Oh my God. Mom, can you tell Riley to stop lecturing me?”
Mina pressed her fingertips into her closed eyes. “How about you both stop? You’re both mixed. You’re white, you’re black, you’re Puerto Rican. You’re lucky—you get to be everything.”
“You would think that.” Riley stood up from the table and gathered her napkin. Her knife fell on the floor and as she bent down to pick it up, Mina saw the enormous tears pooled in the lenses of her glasses.
“Ri,” she said.
Riley shook her head.
“I’d love to talk to you about Michael Brown and about home, I mean, about St. Louis.”
But Riley turned her back. The moment was gone, vanished into the air around the dinner table like the feathered smoke from a blown-out candle.
Mina picked up a bag of rice that was a dollar off and wondered if Chloe was still adamant about being grain free that week. Her phone vibrated in her hand and Bones’s name flashed on her screen.
Mina girl. Closing the store. Having a party. Inviting everyone. Don’t let me down. Please come home.
Mina took the rice and got in the express checkout line. She texted Bones back,
What the hell are you talking about, closing the store?
She started to text Clarissa, the only person besides Bones who she kept in touch with from St. Louis, when her phone buzzed again.
Can’t explain it now, Mina girl, Bones wrote. I’ll call you later. Just plan to come on home. You hear?
Mina girl. Only Bones still called her that, she thought. But once Octavian had, too. Mina seldom let herself think about him. She couldn’t stand the taste of regret that filled her mouth when she did. But she wondered if Bones meant Octavian when he said he was inviting everyone home. The last time she saw Octavian, he had come to New York City to find her, and she’d pushed him away. After that, whenever Bones or Clarissa tried to talk to her about him she told them she didn’t want to know.
She had only been eighteen, three years older than Riley was now, when she and Octavian had actually been together. And though she’d been through a marriage, the birth of two children and a divorce, the Mina from St. Louis, the Mina in love with Octavian, was somehow more real to her. The Mina she’d become felt like a distant someone, a character on a television show with too many seasons. She never got far in finding an answer to why she felt this way. Maybe because then she would have had to feel it—and with so many chores to finish before bedtime, there was no time left for feeling.
Maybe he’ll be there, she thought. Maybe I should go. Something turned in her stomach, something that had been dormant for twenty years. It jumped up and fluttered about like one of those tiny jewelry-box ballerinas, finally released from its spring.
the ’80s:
A MIX TAPE
DOWN TO ZERO—JOAN ARMATRADING
CACTUS TREE—JONI MITCHELL
SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME—ELLA FITZGERALD
PLANET ROCK—AFRIKA BAMBAATAA
LITTLE RED CORVETTE—PRINCE
STOLEN MOMENTS—OLIVER NELSON
ONCE IN A WHILE—RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK
FOR THE GOOD TIMES—AL GREEN
BEAST OF BURDEN—THE ROLLING STONES
A LOVE BIZARRE—SHEILA E
TENDER LOVE—FORCE M.D.’S
TRACK 1
Down to Zero
CORDELIA MUNROE GREW UP in an oceanside town in North Carolina. Living in St. Louis meant she suffered occasionally from a sadness brought on by a longing for the sea. When this happened, Cyrus took the family on trips to the beach—Maryland, Jamaica, Orlando, Cape Cod. In the spring of 1984, when Octavian was ten and Francis was fourteen, they went to Trinidad. There, Cordelia showed Octavian how to find joy in the delicate peach of a conch shell and taught him and his brother Francis to lie on their backs and watch the night sky for shooting stars. “You have to be willing to wait,” she explained.
“It’s hard, but eventually, you will be rewarded.”
Francis could never wait. He chose to skip stones across the flat darkness of the night ocean instead. The rocks jumping five, six, eight times.
The day before they were to leave, as she was gathering up the green plastic shovel and pail that Octavian had left by the shore, Cordelia collapsed, folded in on herself and fell onto the sand, the waves lapping around her feet. At the hospital the doctor said it was heat stroke, but on the way home, Francis wouldn’t talk to anyone. He didn’t even fight with Octavian over who got to listen to the Walkman while the plane took off.
They had been home a month, long enough for the humid heat of the St. Louis summer to rear its ugly head, when Cyrus sat Octavian on one side and Francis on the other of the kitchen table. He had planned it like a seminar, even jotted down a few notes, and he was able to stick to his script when he looked at Francis’s carved and already angry eyes, but when he looked into Octavian’s bread-dough face, he faltered and only managed to say, “Your mother is dying.”
“That’s impossible,” Octavian said. “Mama’s only thirty four.”
Francis stood up and walked out of the room.
Cordelia was becoming a published, venerated poet by the time she began to die. Her book The White Man Talk earned her nominations on a few prestigious award lists, and invitations to read were coming in from as far away as San Francisco. She taught classes at St. Louis University to inspired young writers, who adored her. And on Tuesday afternoons, she met with prisoners who wept when she read to them, and who composed pieces that made her weep in turn. When she found out she had less than a year to live, she did what she always did. She cracked herself open and wrote about what she discovered inside—her children, her scars, her rotting breasts, her disintegrating mind. And as always, she wrote love poems to Cyrus, her now-iron-haired husband who cried into her back while he thought she slept.
Octavian didn’t how to take care of a dying woman, but he learned. When fifth grade started in the fall, he knew how to make chamomile tea without burning his hand on the kettle. He knew how to lift his mother gently and help her sit up, to take the pillows from behind her and plump them, and carefully help her sit back. After school, instead of going over to friends’ houses to watch Scooby Doo or playing baseball at Heman Park, Octavian went directly home, where Cyrus would pat Octavian gratefully on the shoulder and disappear into his study, locking the door behind him.
Octavian took out his homework from his Spiderman backpack and spread himself on the floor while Cordelia watched The Jeffersons and One Day at a Time. When he was finished, she helped him practice long division, and he read to her from the A Wrinkle in Time series until she fell asleep. Sometimes Cordelia asked him to play her favorite songs. Octavian would get her albums: Roberta Flack, Joan Armatrading, Joan Baez. Then she told him stories that she said she wanted him to remember for her—often the one about the day he was born. “They put you in my arms, and I put my nose in your little plum mouth and breathed in the sweet newness of the world,” she said. Her voice was sleepy, her throat full of gravel.
Sometimes she told him things Octavian thought she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been dying, like the story about the time in college when she smoked pot with a white girl at a party and they kissed in the hallway.
On good days she read to Octavian: Gwendolyn Brooks, Garcia Marquez, Audre Lorde, Faulkner, James Baldwin—The Fire Next Time. Octavian noticed that Cyrus never asked where Francis was, but Cordelia always did. “Where’s Francis?” she’d say. “Where’s your brother?” No matter what, she eventually said, “Go and find him. Bring him home to me.”
Octavian could stand the wincing noises his mother made when she rolled over in her sleep, and the way she left her sentences suspended in the air when her morphine pill kicked in. He could even stand the sharp smell of her yellow-brown urine in the toilet that she forgot to flush. But he hated having to go and look for Francis.
Before Cordelia got sick there were only two places Francis would be. Sitting in his room listening to records and looking at baseball cards with his best friend Michael Ivy, or over at Brendon Gaines’ house playing Atari. But after she got sick, Francis was in neither of those places.
If Octavian hadn’t been so worried about his mother, he might have let himself worry about what was happening to Francis. He still told his mother that Francis was at the library. But really, Francis was over in Eastgate, a neighborhood on the other side of Delmar where Cordelia had forbidden them to go.
The St. Louis suburb of University City where they lived was divided down the middle by Delmar Boulevard. On the south side sat Washington University and the gated communities with grand homes and elegant apartment buildings where professors like Octavian’s parents lived. On the north side, middle-income housing quickly gave way to low-income neighborhoods lined with identical one-story houses that reminded Octavian of sideways Cracker Jack boxes. Eastgate was a place where angry voices tumbled out of apartment windows, where the streetlights never worked and dogs, on unreliable chains, barked from behind broken fences when Octavian walked by.
Sometimes Francis was in the park that ran down the middle of Enright Avenue with his new friends, Chris Dumar and Dante Nickerson, and sometimes Francis was there alone, hidden except for the orange glow at the end of his cigarette. Those nights it was easy to get him to come home. But most of the time he was over at Chris’s big cousin’s house over on Clemens, and then getting him home was more complicated.
Chris’s cousin, known as City Ass Cedric, was much older than Francis and his friends. Cedric was big, big like a football player, with square shoulders and no neck. He had green eyes, a gold tooth and skin the color of cold butter. He was always the one to open the door when Octavian knocked.
Usually, by the time he got there, Octavian had psyched himself up to be mad. What was Francis thinking, being over there in Eastgate, getting high and drunk with City Ass Cedric while their mother was dying? Octavian would promise himself he was going to threaten to tell their father when they got home, but then Cedric would open the door a crack and Octavian would look through the cover of weed smoke, beyond where Cedric stood guard, and see a handgun on the table or a pipe in an ashtray and feel afraid. He’d swallow and look up at Cedric. “Francis needs to come home,” he’d say. “My mama’s sick, you know?”
“Aight, lil man, aight, chill,” Cedric always said. “Frankie’ll be right out.”
Sometimes Francis did come right away, but most of the time Octavian sat on the hard, heavy steps of the hallway and waited. He ran his index finger up and down the grooves of dirty grout between the broken tiles on the hallway floor and listened to the sounds of the neighbor’s television that echoed through the building.
One night, he fell asleep waiting, his body curled onto the landing. Francis woke him, shaking him by the shoulder. The hallway was quiet, and Francis had creases on his face like he’d been asleep.
“C’mon,” Francis said. Octavian got up and followed him as he pushed open the heavy front door of the building and let it slam back on Octavian.
“What the hell, Francis?” Octavian said.
Francis, who was already many steps ahead of him, turned back, palmed Octavian’s face, and mushed him to the ground. Then he turned and walked away.
It was the first cold night of fall, and Octavian sat on the frigid sidewalk. Around him, Eastgate was nearly silent and Octavian realized it must be extra late. Like late enough that they both might get in trouble.
Octavian’s mind filled with static. This was not the Francis Octavian knew. Octavian’s brother Francis wasn’t always nice, but he was always his friend. The one who always split his candy bar in half, who showed Octavian how to throw a strike and how to organize his baseball cards. Francis took Octavian with him to the comic book store and the record store and, if Francis had money, he always bought something for Octavian. It wasn’t that he couldn’t be cruel
. Francis never missed a chance to tease Octavian about how he wasn’t nearly as cool or cute as Francis was, but Francis would never let anything bad happen to him.
Octavian sat on the sidewalk and waited for Francis to come back the way he always did when he’d been too mean. But Francis didn’t turn around. He just kept walking away. Octavian scampered to his feet and began to run toward the yellow-and-white stripes of Francis’s Polo rugby. He had almost caught up when the lights on Delmar changed, and Octavian heard his mother’s warning voice to wait for the walk sign before he crossed the wide boulevard. He was grateful to be only three blocks from home.
He turned the corner onto their street and saw the blue, the red, the white lights of the police car before he saw Francis. A cop had him. Francis’s long, thin arms were pressed behind his back and his face was smashed up against the window of the car. “What the hell are you doing over here, boy?” the cop said.
Octavian stood transfixed on the corner. He was only twenty feet away but enough in the shadows that neither Francis nor the cop saw him. The lights of the cop car burned his eyes and his breath was taut in his throat.
“I live right there,” Francis said. “6616 Washington.”
“I just got a call from an extremely worried woman,” the cop said. “She said there’s been some suspicious characters in this neighborhood, especially late at night. I’m thinking she musta been talking about you.”
There You Are Page 4