There You Are

by Morais, Mathea

  Octavian looked down at Keisha. She was soft and brown and looked like Janet Jackson with her baseball cap and tight pink t-shirt. He let her push up on him and he was thinking about what might happen if he bent down to kiss her, when he heard a voice say, “Tave.”

  Octavian turned and Keisha quickly moved out from behind him. “Oh, hey, Frankie,” Keisha said.

  Octavian was about to ask Francis what the fuck he was doing there, when from the corner of his eye, he saw Keisha’s eyes locked on Francis. She bit her bottom lip way deeper than she had when she’d seen Octavian.

  “I’m out,” Octavian said.

  Francis followed Octavian onto the street and yelled, “Tave. Hold up.”

  Octavian stopped. “What are you doing here, Frankie?”

  “Mina called me. Said she’s been trying to reach you. Her car’s broke and she asked me to come get her. Thought I’d come through and grab you first. Good thing I found you, too. Keisha Putnam?” Francis shook his head. “Nah, man, you do not want to do that.”

  “Back in the day, you would have told me I could never get a girl like Keisha,” Octavian said.

  Francis unlocked the passenger side of Deena’s busted up Civic hatchback and opened the door for Octavian before he walked around to the other side and got in. “C’mon,” he said.

  Octavian stood on the sidewalk. “I can’t believe you are out here getting righteous and shit,” he said. “Like you saved me from a crackhouse, or from getting the shit kicked out of me again.”

  “Let me tell you something,” Francis said. “Deena’s cool and all. But if I had a girlfriend like Mina,” he stopped talking. “Can you get in the car?”

  Octavian sat down reluctantly. “If you had a girlfriend like Mina, then what?”

  “I probably wouldn’t ever have needed to get fucked up, that’s what.”

  “You’re full of shit. You can have any girl you want. You’re Francis Munroe.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, brother. Sure, I’ve had some of the prettiest girls in St. Louis—the black ones and the white ones, the mixed ones, too. But I ain’t never had a girl who loved me the way Mina loves you. Don’t fuck it up, Tave.” Francis put his seatbelt on and checked the mirrors.

  Octavian hadn’t seen this version of Francis since right after their mother died. The one that merged carefully onto Forest Park Parkway and drove in the slow lane. Francis didn’t seem to notice anything and turned up the volume on the classic rock station. He didn’t know the words, but he sang along with Bowie anyway about how all they had was five years.

  Octavian felt a cold shiver go down his back even though it was eighty degrees and the AC in Deena’s car sucked. “You listening to music again, Frankie?” he said.

  Francis smiled. “Yeah, man. It’s one of the many gifts of sobriety,” he said. “I can actually listen to songs, even sing along and not start crying cause I miss Mama so much.”

  When the song ended, Octavian said to his own reflection in the window, “Do you remember how, right before she died, she started saying militant shit?”

  Francis was quiet for a moment. Sometimes they had reminisced about what their mother was like when she was alive, but they never talked about what it was like when she was dying.

  “I remember,” Francis said.

  “I just don’t know if Mama would be okay with me and Mina being together because she’s white.”

  They were stopped on Clayton Road where the streetlights shone bright enough that Octavian saw a shadow cross Francis’s face.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Francis said. “Mama said a lot of things right before she died. Who knows how much of that shit was true.”

  “Why? What did she say to you?”

  Francis turned into Mina’s neighborhood and pulled into her driveway. “Shit she shouldn’t have,” he said.

  Mina jumped off the porch and into the back seat of the Civic. “Guess what, you guys?” she said.

  “What?” Francis said as he reversed out of her driveway.

  “I quit smoking.”

  Octavian, who had looked away when she got in the car, turned around. “Say what?” he said.

  “Yup,” she said smiling with her crooked teeth. “That’s why I’ve been paging you. I haven’t had a single cigarette today.”

  Francis turned the car onto Wydown and Octavian felt the same deep tug in his abdomen that was always there when Mina smiled at him. She was cute like that, all proud of herself in her Dark Side of the Moon tank top, her cut-off shorts and the oxblood Doc Marten’s boots he’d convinced her to buy at Ziezo’s. He was about to reach back and smooth down one of her eyebrows, rough up her crazy red hair that she had been trying so hard to make curly lately, when the back of the car filled with blue-and-white lights.

  Francis’s eyes went wide in the rearview mirror.

  “Fuck,” Octavian said. He turned to face forward and pressed his hands into his knees.

  “Are we getting pulled over?” Mina asked.

  “Don’t say anything,” Octavian said to Mina without looking back. “Don’t say a goddamn thing and don’t turn around. And don’t tell them you’re my girlfriend.”

  Before the first cop even got out of his car, another car pulled up in front of them and another until they were surrounded by the erratic flashing combination of blue and red and white lights. Octavian wiped his hands on his shorts.

  “You alright, Tave?” Mina said.

  He didn’t answer.

  It was silent in the car. Francis sat with his hands on the steering wheel, his license and car keys in his lap. A flashlight shone through the window and into their faces, one at a time. It stopped on Mina in the back seat. “Everyone out,” a voice ordered.

  For a moment, things seemed to be okay. Francis spoke to one police officer and explained that he was sober, that it was his girlfriend’s car. Octavian answered the other in the way his father taught him to—eyes down and with soft words. But he felt the weakness in his knees and in his fingers and he hated himself, hated the weakness. He felt his heart begin to race and he tried to think of a KRS song, but he couldn’t. He knew he was going to have to sit down, either that or he was going to fall down. He wished he could think of a song, wished he could hear Mina’s voice.

  Mina was sequestered away from both of them behind a female officer with acne and thick, rounded shoulders. When Mina moved to try to hear what the cops were saying to Octavian and Francis, the lady cop grabbed ahold of Mina’s wrist.

  “You stay right there,” she said. She looked Mina up and down and popped her gum. “What are you doing with these two anyway?” she said. “That one there has a record, you know. Your father know you’re riding around with him?”

  “I don’t have a father,” Mina said.

  “Well, that about explains things, doesn’t it?” she said.

  Mina was about to answer, but another cop walked over to Octavian and said something she couldn’t hear and in the next moment, Octavian was on the ground.

  “What the fuck?” Francis said and moved to go to Octavian. But in the space of a breath, the cop had Francis turned around with his hands cuffed behind his back, and was shoving him into the back of the car.

  Mina jumped, but the lady cop pushed back. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Two cops were over Octavian now. One had his knee in Octavian’s back, the other was wrapping up his feet and wrists, pushing his face into the concrete.

  “That’s what I thought,” the cop said, loud enough that Mina didn’t have to strain to hear. “Just exactly what I thought when I seen you. I thought, this little nigger looks like he wants to go to jail tonight.”

  They dragged Octavian to his feet and shoved him into the back of the car next to Francis.

  “What you want me to do with this one?” the lady cop yelled, holding Mina’s arm in the air like she was the winner of a prizefight.

  The cop
who had been standing over Octavian looked Mina up and down. “That’s the girl that lives up there on Polo Drive,” he said. “She’s always got black kids up in her house. Take her home and tell her parents they better watch their girl unless they want a bunch of nigger grandkids running around.”

  Kanta opened the front door after many hard slams on the door. The cop began explaining that she was bringing Mina home for violation of curfew, but Kanta pulled her bathrobe around her body and changed her face into that of an attorney. “Violation of whose curfew? I thought I was the mother, I thought I set the curfew.” Kanta looked at Mina. “Who was driving?”

  “Francis,” Mina said. “Octavian was in the front seat. We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

  Kanta looked at the cop and said, “Tell me something, Officer. Do you like being a racist piece of shit?”

  Mina stared at Kanta.

  “Ma’am,” the cop said, “I don’t think there’s any call for that kind of talk.”

  “Give me my fucking daughter,” Kanta said grabbing Mina by the arm harder than the cop had. “Tell your superiors they messed with the wrong mother. They’ll be hearing from my office in the morning.”

  Cyrus arrived at the Clayton police station fully dressed even though it was close to midnight. Octavian knew he had made sure to put on a pressed shirt, maybe even taken the time to buff out his shoes before he left. Not to make his sons wait, but so that there was no question what kind of father he was once he looked the policemen in the eyes.

  Octavian and Francis were cuffed to chairs on either side of the room and when Cyrus saw them, he narrowed his gaze at Francis and then looked away. Cyrus held his hat in his hand, as the officer unlocked the handcuffs, and quietly said thank you before he walked out the door.

  Deena had already come to get her car, arriving with tears staining her freckled cheeks. She tried to wait until they let Francis go, but Francis told her to go on. They needed to wait for their father.

  “Pop,” Francis said when they got to Cyrus’s car and he unlocked the door.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Cyrus said.

  Octavian saw the way Cyrus turned away from the pleading look on his brother’s face and he said, “Pop. It wasn’t Frankie’s fault. We were just driving.”

  Cyrus dropped his head for a moment and then looked at both of them. “How many times do I have to tell you, if you are black and male, it’s always your fault?”

  “Yeah, but, Pop,” Octavian said, but Francis stopped him.

  “He’s right, Tave,” he said. “I should know better.” Francis got into the back seat. Cyrus waited for Octavian to get in before he quietly sat down and closed the car door.

  TRACK 15

  Home is Where

  the Hatred Is

  WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTOOD, Francis thought, what no one ever understood, was how much sobriety hurt. Not emotional, make-you-want-to-cry hurt, but actually hurt. Your bones, your muscles, your head. It hurt to take air in and out of your lungs. It hurt your heart to beat. Everyone else, they went on about their day—heart beating, lungs breathing—and they didn’t even notice. But not me, Francis thought. I gotta feel every fucking thing.

  Walking hurt, and eating, and taking a shit. When he was using, he kept it at bay, made it so he never felt it fully. A shot of vodka could hold back the violent sound of the rush of blood through the veins. A hit off a joint could turn the firing of synapses in his brain down to a low simmer. A line of coke, well, that could crank everything up so high, even pain felt good. And a shot in the vein? That was the ultimate quieting, the purity of silence. That’s what heroin washed through him. It made the shivering, the watering eyes, the itch under the fingernails that he could never reach, disappear.

  Sobriety shouted in his ears and woke him in the night to sheets soaked in sweat, t-shirt and boxer shorts drenched, salt in his mouth and eyes. At treatment they told him to give it up to God, to count twelve steps, to amend and pray. But he worried that God would not be able to hear his prayers over the yelling in his head.

  Francis walked, he meditated, he made love, he was celibate. He bought gifts for his father, he listened to his brother’s records and read his mother’s poems. He walked some more, danced, ate only vegetables for days, tried to pray. Sometimes he would look up from his walking and find himself down on Goodfellow, right around the corner from an easy silence and he’d turn quickly, nearly rushing into traffic, to put distance between himself and the relief that was so close at hand.

  And then sometimes, sometimes, there would be moments. Moments when peace broke through the pain like gold bars of sunlight streaming through holes in the clouds. And then Francis wondered if somewhere on the other side of the noise and the pain, there might be a moment when he didn’t feel like he was running for his life. And just the brief possibility of even a little less pain, calmed him long enough to make it another day.

  TRACK 16

  Inner City Blues

  (Makes Me Wanna Holler)

  MINA HAD BEEN DOING their laundry in the cellar, three floors below the loft. Something they determined was desperately necessary after spending days forgiving each other’s mistakes. They were excited about a future away from St. Louis, from St. Louis cops, that would begin in a few weeks when they packed Kanta’s Volvo and left for New York City.

  Mina had walked by four times before she realized that what she thought was a pile of cellar detritus of rags, wood, and tools was actually a body of bones, hands, and feet, a face with eyes gone wide, skin already cold and hard. She dropped the basket of clothes and ran. The undershirts and towels spread across the dirty floor like a trail of luminescence through a dark pond. A trail that led toward the shell that had once held Francis.

  She ran. Through tunnel vision she went up the concrete steps to the loft where Marvin Gaye hollered through the speakers and Octavian stood high on a ladder before an immense canvas. Mina held him there for a breath. There was cerulean paint in his hair. He held a small paintbrush between his fingertips. He sang, threw up both his hands.

  Mina walked to the record player through what felt like an ocean of mercury, and lifted the needle. The paintbrush fell from Octavian’s hand. Maybe he saw it on her face, maybe he felt it, had felt it for days, or maybe it was just what he always said.

  “Is it Frankie?”

  After that, the edges dropped off. Down in the cellar Octavian cradled his brother’s body in his lap, wiped his tears away with blue painted hands. Cyrus came and unwrapped Octavian from Francis, and covered his terrified eyes with one of Octavian’s clean Rahsaan’s t-shirts from the floor. Octavian shadow boxed the emptiness around him, pushed away Mina’s trembling outstretched hands, and disappeared.

  Mina lost track. There were sirens and the static of police radios delivering distant voices. Cyrus cried silently. His head in his hands. Ivy appeared and he clutched at fistfuls of Brendon’s shirt, and sobbed. Clarissa was there, too. She wrapped her arms around Mina’s shoulders and did not let go as she walked her up the cellar stairs, as they sat in the back of Evan’s car and drove home. And then there was Kanta, laying Mina down and pulling up the sheet, pulling down the shades.

  In the forced darkness of the room, Mina prayed for sleep, but when it came she dreamt of Octavian sitting on the cellar floor, holding Francis’s crumpled body—and her unable to climb down the stairs.

  TRACK 17

  Lilac Wine

  OCTAVIAN MET MINA’S EYES only once to tell her that he would not be going to New York with her. It was five days before they were meant to leave and three weeks after they’d put Francis in the ground and still Octavian couldn’t see Mina, without remembering the way she looked when she took the needle off the Marvin Gaye record and said, “Frankie’s dead. He’s downstairs in the cellar, and I think he’s dead.”

  They sat in her car, parked behind Rahsaan’s where Mina had waited, chain smoking, until he got off work.

  “Then I’ll
stay here with you,” she said.

  “No, you need to go,” Octavian said.

  “Tave, you need to go too,” she said. “I understand if you don’t want to be with me anymore, or if you don’t want to come to New York, but you shouldn’t stay here. He’s gone now. You don’t have to stay.”

  Octavian gritted his teeth against the advice that everyone wanted to give him and said, “I’m not leaving. So just stop.”

  Octavian had gone back to focusing on details—the smell of the old leather in the Volvo, the deep indigo sound of Nina Simone’s voice coming through the speakers, the grateful quiet of his heart that now decided to rest. Mina stared at his profile and he felt the questions she wanted to ask. But he did not have the energy to make words that could explain. Francis was gone. Mina needed to go too.

  Quietly, she leaned over and kissed his cheek and he let her wind her fingers in his for a moment before he carefully moved his hand away.

  “I love you, Tave,” she said. “I’ve loved you since we were little. I’ll never not love you. I’ll wait.”

  “I don’t want you to wait,” he said. “You’ve got to let me go.”

  She attempted to say no, but there were tears in the way and so she just shook her head.

  Octavian tried to look at her, but he still couldn’t, not even now when he knew it would be a long time before he saw her again. He opened the car door and, from in the back of his gray mind, he knew he should do something kind, say something to acknowledge the ending, and so he clumsily touched her shoulder and said, “Be safe, Mina.” He rushed from the car, appreciative for every step he put between them.

  On the morning that she left, Mina prayed that Octavian would be on the porch with his duffel bag, but when she opened the door, there were only the empty bricks, the torn jute of the welcome mat.