“Because I’m not you, how about that?” she said. “Because I don’t just not come. That’s what you do.”
“Mina, I never told you I was going to come. I told you to move on, to let me go.”
“Oh, and that shit is easy, right? To just let somebody go. How is that working out for you? You let Frankie go yet?”
Octavian didn’t answer. It was his turn to look away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That wasn’t cool.”
“No, you’re right. I shouldn’t have shown up here expecting things to be the same. I guess I just didn’t expect them to be so different.”
Mina’s voice locked in her throat. It would be so easy, she thought, to rip out the ponytail that was so tight it made her scalp ache. To sing the lyrics to the Earth Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy” that the DJ put on. But instead, she took another sip of her beer and heard Rubio’s voice as he stepped into her reflection in the mirror while she got ready to go meet Octavian.
“Where you think you’re going?”
She had almost made it out the door, even had her North Face on. She didn’t look at herself or Rubio in the mirror, but at her hands as they pulled her hair back. Hair that never shone in the light the way Chula’s did. Hair that tangled by the end of the night. White-girl hair. She felt her legs tremble a little as she walked around him and grabbed her lighter, her pack of Newports, the ones Frankie used to call genocide cigarettes.
“I’m going to see Chula at work,” she lied. She never lied to Rubio—mostly because she never did anything she had to lie about. But this was Octavian and that meant lying. Because maybe if she was able to do that, the voice inside her head told her, she might be able to do something else.
She looked up. Octavian was pulling on his coat. He had paid for the drinks. “It was good to see you,” he said. His voice shook.
“Wait,” she said and stood up.
Octavian stopped and said, “It was bad for a while, Mina, I mean after you left. I got caught up in some stupid shit and when I came out of it, all I could do was paint. It took me a long time to get through it, but when I did, the first thing I wanted was see you, to be with you, but like you said. I’m too late.” He reached in and wrapped her quickly in his arms.
“Octavian,” she said when he let her go. But he turned his back and walked out the door.
Mina grabbed her coat and chased him to the corner of Houston, where he held his hand up as the cabs sped by. She stood close to him, and that’s when he noticed what was so different about her face. She no longer had those thick and wild eyebrows that he loved to smooth down with his thumb. Instead, they were waxed into thin lines of exclamation.
“I don’t know what I was thinking coming here,” he said as cab after cab passed by. “Actually, I do know what I was thinking. The only real part of myself I’ve got left are my memories from when we were together. I guess I thought you would still feel the same, but you don’t and I don’t blame you. Really, I don’t. It’s my fault. I understand.”
He felt the familiar pounding, the racing of his heart, but this time he knew her voice wouldn’t soothe him, not after the way it had burned in his ears all night.
“Can you help me get a cab?” he said. “You know how it is for the black man in Manhattan.”
She grabbed a hold of his wrist. “Tave,” she said.
“Do me a favor,” he said and pulled his arm away, “and hail me a fucking cab, okay? Don’t make this worse than it is.”
She started to protest, tried to grab his arm again, but he pulled it aside and a cab slowed down and stopped.
“Tave,” she said again. “You think you understand, but you don’t.”
He opened the door and got in. “I don’t want to understand,” he said. “You used to be beautiful. You used to be free. I’d rather remember you the way you were. I don’t need to know who you are now.”
2014
CYRUS THOUGHT IT UNFAIR that his own skin should pucker, dry, and age, while the skin of his wife would always be smooth, the pores open, the moisture captured. That she had left him to raise their sons alone—to bury one and try to heal the other—was not as hard to bear as the fact that she had not stayed with him to endure old age.
Many times during the eternal whirlwind that was single fatherhood, he wished she were there to advise him, to celebrate with him, to console him, but now that he was alone, a glass of port wine in his palm, he wanted nothing more than to look into her tired eyes, to see the ways that the years would have honed her beauty, made her old, wise, and refined. It was as if he felt her absence more now than he did when she first left.
Left. She didn’t leave. She died.
And Francis died and he, too, soon would die, but not before he told Octavian everything. About the fact that Francis was not Cyrus’s biological son, about why he chose to lie about it for so long, about how it got harder and not easier to be without Cordelia.
Cyrus thought of the Yeats poem, the one that started, When you are old and grey and full of sleep. He could not remember the next line and he got up from the table and went to the bookshelf, but instead, Cordelia’s book of Mina Loy poems caught his eye, and he took it off the shelf.
Cyrus opened the book to a page that had been turned down, releasing the intimate smell of whispers of a book that hasn’t been opened for years. He wondered if some forensic scientist would be able to find Cordelia’s fingerprint where she’d pressed the little triangle into the top of the page so that she could revisit that particular poem another time. He closed his eyes and touched his own thumb and forefinger on the fold and hoped for a moment to feel her fingertips between his.
When he opened his eyes and saw the title of the poem on the marked page he laughed a little out loud. Slowly, he walked over to the table and sat down, took a sip of his port, and cleared his throat.
“An Old Woman,” he read aloud. The lonely shadows that lived in the corners of the apartment seemed to creep forward to listen, and Cyrus adjusted his glasses and read on. When he finished there was a soft knock on his front door and he wondered if he had read so loud that he disturbed someone. He didn’t get up right away; instead he hoped that whoever it was would hear that he was no longer reading and go on. Even in his apparent loneliness, there was a sweetness to isolation that he preferred over entertaining strangers, especially at an hour when he’d already finished his glass of port. But the knock came again, so he closed the book, stood up and straightened his collar, his cuffs and walked to the door.
Through the fish-eye peephole, Marcia Cohen stood with her arms crossed in front of her, her mouth drawn into a thin, straight line.
“Shit,” Cyrus said to himself, “I know she’s not coming here to complain about me making noise.”
He opened the door, “Good evening, Ms. Cohen.”
She dropped her arms and then folded them again. “Good evening, Mr.—I mean, I’m sorry, Dr.—Munroe.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You can call me Cyrus. We’re neighbors, after all. Would you like to come in?”
She shrugged like her knocking on his door had been his idea and stepped carefully inside. He closed the door behind her and invited her to the table.
“I was having a glass of port,” he said, “and reading a little poetry. Usually, I don’t allow myself more than one glass, but if you’d join me, I think it’d be okay if I have another.”
“Port? What’s that?”
“It’s a dessert wine from Portugal. I haven’t had dessert, but I still enjoy having a glass after dinner.”
Marcia sat down at the table and dropped her hands into her lap. She looked around the room and hesitated. “Okay,” she said.
He poured her a glass and refilled his own before he sat down and said, “Is there something I can do for you?”
“I just wanted to say, you see, well, my son, Adam. He’s, well, you know Bones, right?”
“You mean Jimmy, from Rahsaan�
��s?”
“Is that his real name? I’ve only ever heard Adam call him Bones.”
“Yes, I know him.”
“Right,” she said. “Bones, Jimmy, he thought you might be able to help me. You see, my son, Adam, who you met, well, as you know we haven’t been getting along; and the other morning—I’m surprised you didn’t hear us—we got into a horrible argument and he packed a bag and left.” She said it in one breath and tilted her small head at Cyrus.
Cyrus had heard the whole thing. Their argument had pulled him out of yet another dream where he was searching for his wife by following the smell of her Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, the one in the tall yellow bottle, down a long corridor in Harvard’s Memorial Hall, but he didn’t feel inclined to share this with Marcia Cohen. He invited her to go on.
“Well, I went to see Bones to find out what was going on with Adam. He told me I should talk to you. Somehow Bones knows we’re neighbors, and he said that you raised two of your own sons and that you might have some good advice for me about Adam.”
Cyrus was certain now that his wife was talking to him, but what Cordelia was trying to tell him he wasn’t exactly certain. Still, he was pretty sure it had something to do with making necessary amends while there was time.
Across the table, the timid woman sat glancing furtively about his apartment and Cyrus found it interesting that Bones, who knew both his sons, considered him to be in a position to give advice about raising boys. Maybe that’s because he didn’t know how long Cyrus had told his own lies.
“I can’t tell you what to do, Ms. Cohen,” he said. “I can only tell you where I went wrong.”
“I guess that’s a good place to start,” she said.
Cyrus drank a sip of his port and she did the same.
“I didn’t tell them the truth,” he said.
Marcia Cohen nodded and took another sip of her wine. “I have also told lies,” she said. “You think if I tell Adam the truth about the lies I’ve told, things will be better?”
“It can’t help but change things, can it? And if you feel that anything is better than what it is now, then I guess different is going to be better, right?”
“I guess so,” she said.
“Believe me,” Cyrus said, “it is advice I must take myself.”
Marcia Cohen quickly drained her glass and said, “Can I ask you one more thing?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“That stuff going on over in Ferguson, you know, that’s on the news?” She stopped there and waited.
“What about it?” Cyrus asked.
“Is it true?”
“What part?”
“That the cop shot that boy, even though he didn’t do anything wrong, even though he had his hands up?”
“You mean Michael Brown.”
“Yes, and that now there are riot police spraying tear gas on innocent people?”
Cyrus leaned forward in his chair and cupped his port glass between his two palms. “What makes you think I know the answer to that?”
“Because…I don’t know,” she paused.
“It’s okay for you to say that you think I know the answer to that because I’m black,” Cyrus said.
“It is?”
“You thought it, right?”
She nodded.
“Let me ask you something, Ms. Cohen. What do you think would happen if we actually asked the questions we wanted to ask? What do you think would happen if then we actually listened to the answers?” Cyrus sat back in his chair and said, “Talk about things being different.”
“Do you think you could take me there?” she said. “I mean, to Ferguson?”
“Why?” he said.
“I want to see.”
“It’s not a reality show, Ms. Cohen.”
“If I can’t call you Dr. Munroe, then you have to call me Marcia,” she said. “And I said that wrong. I don’t want to see, I want to help.”
Cyrus was tired. Tired and ready for Ms. Marcia Cohen to go home. Still, if this woman wanted to help, she should help, and Cyrus was grateful for a reason to get up from the table. He took a piece of paper and a pen from the shelf by the phone and wrote down Evelyn Morris’s name and the address of the church.
“This is a woman who is doing good things in Ferguson,” he said and handed Marcia the piece of paper. “If you want to help, start with her. She’ll be happy to put you where you’re best needed.”
Marcia Cohen looked into her glass as if wishing it were full again. Then she blinked her eyes at Cyrus and said, “But can’t you take me there? Introduce me and everything?”
Cyrus shook his head. “I’m afraid I’ll be too busy getting ready for my son’s visit.”
“Then I can’t go,” she said.
“I thought you wanted to help.”
“I did. I do. But I can’t go over there alone, you know that.”
“I don’t know that, Ms. Cohen. If you want to help, this is where you can go to help. There are many other…volunteers there. You’d be surprised. What do you need me for?”
“To…I don’t know. Protect me?”
Cyrus laughed. “Ms. Cohen,” he said, “I am nearly eighty years old. What exactly do you think I am going to be able to protect you from?”
Her smile was tight. “I don’t know,” she said.
Cyrus took her glass from the table and walked into the kitchen. He stood for a moment in front of the sink and asked himself why in the world he was holding back. Why did he let her feelings matter more than his? He walked back into the room and over to the front door, which he opened.
“If you think I can protect you from blackness with my blackness, Ms. Cohen,” he said, “you’re wrong. It is old men like me who need protecting from people like you. I think it is time for you to go on home now.”
Marcia Cohen stood up, “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I don’t know what I said.”
“I know,” said Cyrus opening the door wider. “And therein lies the bigger issue.”
At the door, she offered him her limp hand, but he didn’t shake it. “Good luck with your boy,” he said.
She walked out and Cyrus closed the door behind her. The scrap of paper with Evelyn’s address sat on the table. Marcia Cohen had left it behind. Out loud he said to the room, “I understand, Cordi, I understand. From now on, I will revel in my loneliness. I will rejoice in the silence of being an old man whose wife is long gone, whose children are dead and far away. And I will tell the boy. I will tell Octavian the truth.”
Cyrus changed his clothes and got into bed. As he turned off the light on his bedside table he thought that maybe if Octavian did come home for the closing of Rahsaan’s, before that, before the party, they could sit down, have a drink and he could tell him. When he asked himself why he’d never told Octavian this story, even now that he was grown, Cyrus knew it was because he didn’t want to remind his son, to remind himself, what the cancer did to Cordelia. How it stole away during the night everything that they loved. How it made it so that the anger that grew in her eyes was the final thing to go.
The mournful light from the alleyway reflected the ebony polish of his Harvard chair, the sharpened pencils in the first clay cup Octavian made in grade school, the silver frames on his desk with photographs of his family at Hampton Beach, on the Screaming Eagle at Six Flags, Octavian graduating from high school, his smile sad and unsure.
THAT THERE WAS ONLY one bathroom in Mina’s apartment was more of a metaphor for single motherhood than anything. A second bathroom would have been a luxury and by definition, there was nothing luxurious about being a single mother. For a year after their father left, Chloe and Riley would not let Mina out of their sight—including when she went to the bathroom. And so they sat wide eyed as she removed and inserted a tampon and then tried to close the lid before they were able to peer over and see the bowl full of blood. The night she got food poisoning, when the girls were bare
ly five and three, they sat in the bathtub and watched in horror as Mina retched into the toilet.
Mina craved privacy like a fix. A moment of quiet and release without being watched, without hearing the rustle of footsteps outside the door, the quiet rap, the call: “Mom, are you in there?”
“Of course I’m in here, don’t you see that the door is closed?”
“I have to pee.”
She was convinced that like Pavlov’s dogs they heard the door close, the water turn on, and immediately rose from where they were sitting and decided there was something in the bathroom they needed urgently. The nail polish remover, a Q-Tip, to use the toilet right away. At one point, there was a lock on the door. But when she was seven years old, Riley went through a phase of violent tantrums and locked herself in and destroyed every breakable item, poured the shampoos down the drain, and emerged with fingers cut and bloody and Vaseline in her hair. Mina removed the lock.
The coming of female adolescence gave the bathroom yet another meaning. It became the place where they could hold her captive and tell her about the problems they were having, and most importantly, the ways in which she had failed them. That day it was Chloe who needed her attention as Mina tried to find a way to shave her legs and bikini line.
“I’m not going to school tomorrow,” Chloe said. “In fact, I’m not going back to that school ever.”
Mina didn’t want to lower herself to the level of a thirteen-year-old girl, but it was hard. Chloe’s side-eye glances away from the phone to her naked aging body didn’t help.
Mina let her eyes roll toward the ceiling before she said, “Chloe, you know the rules. You go to school unless you’re sick.”
“I need a mental-health day.”
Mina gave up on her bikini line. It didn’t matter anyway. No one saw her vagina anymore except her teenage daughters. She considered letting it grow like Kanta—that would scare them away from her body. Then they’d give her privacy.
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