The early morning sunlight was bright and already hot. Mina squinted down the street in case he was still on his way up the hill.
“C’mon,” Kanta said and started the car. “He’s not coming.”
They drove toward the sunrise down an empty Highway 40. Mina watched the city pass by, like a silent movie of her life going backwards. She longed for the vision she had originally created of this moment. The one where she felt the release of the angry town as it receded in the distance while she and Octavian argued over whose mix tape they would listen to first.
Kanta cleared her throat and said, “I might as well tell you now, although I’m sure I’m not the only one who imagined this drive a little differently. I’m selling the house in Clayton and moving to New Jersey.”
Mina turned her body to face her mother and said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Hey, watch your mouth. It’s not my fault this mess happened. Last thing I heard, you were out of St. Louis and never looking back, so I decided it made more sense for me to be closer to where you are,” Kanta said. “I took a job at a firm in Hoboken, right across the water. And I got an offer—a good offer—on the house last week. I’m taking you to New York and coming right back here to pack everything up.”
Mina knew any attempt she made to beg her mother to stop the car and turn around would be ignored. She pressed her face against the window. She wanted to open the door and fling her body out onto the highway, let the impact of the speeding asphalt peel back her skin. They passed Forest Park, Busch Stadium, and the elegant Arch. None of it seemed sad to see her go.
TRACK 18
Tonight’s
Da Night
WITHOUT FRANCIS TO THINK about or Mina to see, minutes lasted for days, sunlight seemed to never abate and midnight took forever. For months Octavian found himself face-to-face with Francis’s ghost on every street corner and in every room of his house. Only when he was at Rahsaan’s could Octavian tell himself that Francis had simply disappeared again, that he’d turn up in a few weeks full of promises and apologies like always. But when he was at Rahsaan’s, there was no Mina.
Bones was worried and asked whether Octavian was painting.
Octavian shook his head. “I can’t yet,” he said, and Bones nodded.
“Well it’s been near four months now, and Brendon said you still ain’t hangin’ with your friends.”
Octavian shrugged. “I’m working too much,” he said and tried to smile at Bones.
“You called Mina?”
“Bones, will you get the fuck out of my business?”
“Alright alright. But I need you to tell me if I can help you.”
“I’ll tell you,” Octavian said and when Bones gave him the side eye, Octavian said, “I promise.”
What he didn’t tell Bones was that he didn’t even really sleep. He lay in the bed in his loft and listened to the new Redman album on repeat.
It was on one of those nights, just after Christmas when a soft snow silently dusted the city, that Evan came, banging at the door of the loft like the cops, and screamed, “Tave, I know your ass is in there so open the goddamn door.”
Ivy had told him that a week before, Evan came in late to work for the fifth day in a row so high on coke that Bones fired him on the spot. Since then Evan had been paging Octavian all day every day and Octavian hadn’t called back. Octavian knew he should pretend not to be home, knew nothing good could come from letting him in, but he got up anyway and opened the door.
Evan fell into the room followed by two girls Octavian had never seen before. They sat down at the table— a board on top of record crates—and Evan busted out a mirror and a bag of coke.
“What are you doing, Evan?” Octavian said.
“Cocaine,” Evan answered and the girls laughed.
Evan pointed the rolled-up bill at Octavian and said, “Here. Frankie ain’t around to tell you can’t no more, remember? I think it’s your turn to have a little fun.”
The cocaine in his veins felt like a miracle. In one moment, Octavian became Francis and at the same time, he was released from his brother’s shadow. At first, his heart went wild, screamed, Tave, what the fuck? But then he grew wings, soared over the snow-covered streets of downtown, over the Loop and past his lonely apartment building where his suffering father sat in his chair pretending to read. After that, Octavian’s heartbeat was unrestricted, finally free, and he laughed out loud and screamed into the lights, I feel you, Frankie, I fucking feel you, brother!
Evan grabbed him by the shoulders and they jumped into a cab, going where, Octavian didn’t care. The only thing he worried about now was whether or not there was going to be enough cocaine, because he was certain that there could never, ever be enough.
For the next two weeks Octavian missed work, or showed up late and wouldn’t take off his sunglasses. When he tried to sell Fred his rare Linval Thompson record, Fred looked at him and said, “What are you doing, Octavian?”
“What do you mean? I’m trying to sell this record.”
“Cocaine is a helluva drug, isn’t it?” Fred said and pushed the record back across the counter. “I’m going to let you think about this one for a little while.”
After Francis died, Cyrus heard Octavian say he wasn’t going to college, and he saw him come and go amidst words about work, and Cyrus let him. Cyrus sat in his study at home, his office at work, and rode across the waves of grief that woke him with an accusation of failure and then let him bask in a blissful sense of relief. Eventually, when he couldn’t stand either, he immersed himself in work, in his beloved philosophers, who shuffled like old men through his mind. And at first, when Bones walked through the door of his office, and said, “Professor, you alright in there?” Cyrus didn’t know who he was.
“Jimmy?” Cyrus said.
“My apologies for coming here and all,” Bones said. “But we need to talk.”
Cyrus listened to Bones awhile before he began to understand what he was saying. “Are you telling me that Octavian has been doing cocaine?”
Bones balled up his shirt and said, “Doing a lot of it, I’m afraid.”
Cyrus leapt from the chair where he had been sitting for so many hours that it no longer held a sturdy shape and began to pace the room. He stopped to focus on Bones’ face, his blue eyes, his pale, puffy skin.
Cyrus sat back down and said, “I need to get him out of here. His mother loved the ocean. I should take him to the ocean.”
“That’s a great idea,” Bones said. “Get him away from St. Louis. Seems like he’s haunted, like he’s trying like hell to outrun himself.”
Without warning, a sob rose up inside Cyrus and flew out of his mouth. He tried to stop it, but once it was out, it seemed as if an entire lifetime of unshed tears decided now was their time. He turned away from Bones, embarrassed at the power with which the choking cries shook his body.
Bones got up and slowly maneuvered around the stacks of books until he stood next to Cyrus. He put his heavy arm across Cyrus’s narrow, trembling shoulders and said, “C’mon now, Professor. It’s gonna be alright, you’ll see. Ol’ Bones’s got you. You let it out, now. Ain’t no sense in keeping it in no way.”
From somewhere inside his sorrow, Cyrus heard Bones’s soft, soothing voice and his kind words, and at that moment, he saw Octavian and Francis plain as day, sitting in the kitchen, laughing. And it was Octavian who said, “Take it easy now, baby-pa.”
And Francis who said, “Jus’ let Ol’ Bonesy hold you a minute, now, you gonna be jus’ fine.”
From the same place where the sob had come moments before, Cyrus began to laugh. Soon he was coughing on the tears and choking on the tangled-up laughter. Bones, who had no idea why Cyrus was laughing, started laughing too. He laughed so hard he had to sit on the floor next to Cyrus’s chair and when he did, he knocked over a stack of books on the way down, sending them both back into hysterics.
Cyrus to
ok his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his eyes, found a box of tissues and handed it to Bones. When the laughter subsided, Cyrus stood and helped pull Bones off of the floor.
“C’mon, Jimmy,” he said. “Let’s go get my son.”
For a week Cyrus and Octavian sat on the shore of the beach in Trinidad with their feet buried in the heavy, wet sand and let the salt of the air penetrate into the place where they remembered one another.
On the last night of their stay, Octavian put his hand on his father’s shoulder and said, “Thank you, Pop.”
“I’m sorry I got lost in my own sadness,” Cyrus said. “I forgot I still needed to be a father.”
They sat at a bamboo bar lit softly by candles and tiki torches. In front of them were the cold fruity drinks that they had tried to resist at first, but gave into after a few days, as the surroundings seemed to offer them little choice. Octavian twirled the orange paper umbrella between his fingers.
“I’m sorry, too,” Octavian said. “About the drugs. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Behind them, the sweet green waves pulled at the shore. Octavian thought that maybe he should stay in Trinidad. Maybe call up Mina, see if she wanted to come down and stay too.
Cyrus looked closely at Octavian and said, “I think that maybe Francis was so much a part of both of us that we didn’t recognize ourselves once he was gone. We didn’t have anything to talk about anymore.”
A half-moon had risen slowly. Around it glowed a peaceful halo and Octavian tried to picture Francis with wings. He bet they’d be giant and groomed to perfection, and that they’d glisten when he turned toward the sun.
“It was the one thing I swore I’d never let happen,” Octavian said.
“Hey now,” Cyrus said slowly. “You couldn’t have stopped Francis. Neither of us could. Shit, it’s not like we didn’t try, but there was no way we ever really did anything but hold him up.”
Octavian started to tell him about his panic attacks, to ask his father to explain why they went away whenever someone he loved died. But instead he said, “All I know is I’m not ready to talk about Francis, or Mama, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be. Not really.”
“Okay,” Cyrus said.
Octavian nodded. “But it’s not because I don’t miss them,” he said. “Because I do. I miss them so much.”
“You’re supposed to, Tave,” Cyrus said. “They’re gone.”
The tension around his father’s eyes had lessened and his skin was sun-bronzed. Octavian thought about his endless kindness, his constant ability to be soft when he needed to be and strong at the same time. Octavian decided that Cyrus probably already had a set of wings of his own, hiding somewhere underneath his starched button-down shirt.
TRACK 19
Before I Let Go
AT FIRST, MINA WROTE Octavian letters. She told him about her classes. How she’d registered for a course called Rap Music and Culture in Contemporary America. She wrote to tell him that every morning she bought a Snapple Iced Tea at the deli, and every afternoon she bought a nickel bag of weed in the park. She told him how she’d seen Biz Markie dancing in the crowd at Giant Step and Eric B. making a call at a payphone around the corner from her dorm. She wrote to tell him that for five dollars she could go to this tiny club up above a store on Bond Street and see Stretch Armstrong spin on Thursday nights. She bought him Ron G mix tapes and asked him if he liked the Wu-Tang album, the Nas album, the new Tribe, the new De La, because that’s all anyone played in New York. Her letters were full of love and sorrow and stories. She wrote to ask if she should come home for Christmas break, for summer.
Octavian never responded to a single one.
Early in 1995, midway through her junior year at Barnard, Mina sat in a diner on the corner of 110th and Broadway with red-plastic seats and a ten-page menu and let the tears silently roll down her cheeks. Her sweet, soft-spoken roommate Ursula held her hand under the table.
“I think I’ve waited enough, don’t you?” she said.
Ursula nodded and took a delicate sip of her Diet Pepsi.
“You know, this whole time I thought he was going to show up one day? That my phone would ring and it would be him?”
Ursula nodded again. “I know what we should do,” she said. “Let’s go to Soul Kitchen.”
Soul Kitchen was no longer the small underground party it was when Mina first moved to New York, which meant that Mina and Ursula were underdressed. But Mina didn’t care because she could still count on Frankie Jackson to play songs that made her want to dance. And as she danced she thought about, if Octavian could see her, he would see how she’d learned how to wind her hips to dancehall reggae and how she still knew the words to his favorite songs. And he would wish he’d came to find her earlier, before she, like Frankie Beverly and Maze, let go.
But it wasn’t Octavian watching, it was Rubio who leaned on the bar and saw loneliness in Mina’s heavy, drunken eyes. And when she left the dance floor, he stood ready with a tall glass of water and a place to sit down.
If Mina had known anything, she’d have known that rubio meant blonde. But she didn’t and he wasn’t. His real name was Fernando. Fernando Figueroa and he had been born with a head of thick, ash-colored hair that earned him the nickname. Even though it was a curling dark-brown by the time he was a month old, a month was all it took.
What caught Mina’s attention, other than Rubio’s strong hands as he pulled out her chair and counted bills out from a thick roll of money to pay for her drinks, was when Rubio told her he grew up in Patterson Projects in the South Bronx.
“As in, Patterson and Millbrook Projects, Cassanova all over, ya couldn’t stop it?” she sang.
Rubio laughed. “Yo,” he said, “you’re from where?”
Every night, Rubio arrived promptly at seven at Mina’s dorm to take her out to eat. Whatever she wanted, he told her. Voraciously she ate. Steak at The Palm, Indian food on 100th and Broadway, Ethiopian food on Amsterdam, falafel downtown at Mamoun’s. Quickly, she filled out her jeans as he let her choose whatever she wanted and never let her pay. His attention filled her fuller than any of the plates of food she consumed. She talked to him about her classes, about her professors, and Rubio nodded and sometimes looked interested and sometimes looked away. That was when Mina would ask him to tell her again about the Bronx and about the block parties and break dance battles, the time he met MC Lyte in the elevator of his building, and Rubio would always smile and tell her again.
One Saturday afternoon, when they were sitting at an outside table at Sidewalk Cafe eating French fries, Mina asked Rubio where he worked.
He scoffed. “Work? I don’t work.”
“So how do you have all this money?” she said.
Rubio lit a cigarette. “Where do you think I get it?”
Mina felt a tingling in her jaw, like she’d said something wrong. “I thought you had a really good job.”
“I guess you could call it a good job,” Rubio said. “But it’s definitely not no nine-to-five.”
Mina looked away. She could feel Rubio studying her. “You don’t sell drugs do you?” she said.
Rubio shrugged and exhaled. “Sometimes,” he said.
Mina could now taste the old grease that the fries had been cooked in and put down the one she held in her hand. “That’s not cool.”
Across the table all the muscles in Rubio’s face tightened and he flicked the cigarette into the street. “I thought you were this down-ass white girl,” he said. “I thought you listened to hip hop and all that.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Well, all that shit you’ve been listening to, they’re not just songs to me. Remember, I’m from the Bronx. I’m not no fake-ass cat from Missouri.”
Mina ignored the voice inside her head that yelled at her to leave. To get up and walk as fast as she could to an uptown train. “Are you telling me that you’re a drug dealer?”
“No, no,�
�� he said. “Sometimes I sell some weed, but mostly I just hustle shit with my boy Orlando.”
The voice in Mina’s head was yelling so loud that Mina couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You’re gonna stop fucking with me now, aren’t you?” His face was etched with worry. “I knew this was too good to be true.” He sat back in his chair and began to nervously straighten the silverware. “Listen, if it’s the drugs that you don’t like, I’ll stop. For real. It’s just weed, and only sometimes.”
Mina reached across the table and took his hand. “No,” she said. “No, it’s cool. I understand.”
After that, Rubio began to show up earlier in the day, saying he couldn’t wait until dinnertime, even if it was simply to meet Mina outside one class and walk her to the next. When Ursula raised her eyebrows after Mina turned her down again to go get dim sum, Mina pretended not to notice and paged Rubio instead. He always called her right back. She didn’t even have to put in 911.
One night over raviolis in Brooklyn, Rubio asked Mina what she was.
“What do you mean?” Mina asked. “I’m white.”
“Yeah, but, from where?”
Mina didn’t know. “In St. Louis, you’re either white or you’re black,” she said.
“Well, you’re from somewhere,” Rubio said.
The next day, Mina called Kanta.
“You’re Jewish,” she said.
“And?”
“And celestial. Why do you want to know?”
“This guy I met, he asked me.”
“I hope he’s not Jewish,” Kanta said.
“No, he’s Puerto Rican.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Kanta said. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire you go.”
The next day, Rubio and Mina walked west along the park on 59th Street towards Columbus Circle and Rubio nodded when she told him what Kanta said.
“That’s why you like sauerkraut on your hot dogs,” he said.
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