There You Are

by Morais, Mathea

“I don’t believe in mental-health days,” Mina said. “If I let y’all start taking mental-health days, no one would ever go to school. I don’t take mental-health days.”

  “Yeah, well maybe you should,” Chloe said. She smeared a towel around the mirror so she could look at herself. Her pale skin had reddened in the steaming bathroom and her straight hair started to frizz. Mina hoped that would be enough to get her to leave.

  Mina turned off the water and wrapped herself in the only towel that hung damp in the bathroom. The rest, she was sure, were on the floor of Riley’s bedroom. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Chlo?”

  Her younger girl did the one-shoulder shrug that said she was sad, that said there was something on her mind. Something she needed Mina to know. Mina took a deep breath and wondered how she could move this conversation out of the tiny steam-filled space to somewhere she could bob and weave the darts her child had stored up in the back pocket of her jeans, ready to be thrown.

  “You know she’s terrible to me,” Chloe said.

  “I thought you said this was about school.”

  “Well it’s not,” Chloe said. “It’s about my bitch sister.” Chloe pursed her lips at her reflection, widened her eyes like she did when she took a picture of herself on her phone.

  “Chloe, you’re too pretty to talk like that. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject, Mom,” she said. “We’re talking about Riley.”

  Mina felt the heat of anger crawl up the back of her damp neck and she yanked her sweatshirt over her head with a jerk, pulling out one of her hoop earrings. Mina refastened the earring and wrapped her hair up in the towel.

  “You’re not taking me down this rabbit hole with you, Chloe,” she said. “I love you and your sister, but whatever you are going to accuse her of doing, you’re going to do the exact same thing to her next week. Until both of you are willing to cut this shit out, it will be this way and I, for one, am all set.”

  “You say that, but you always take her side, always.” She choked on her sob and her eyes filled with big, sad tears. She sat down on the toilet seat and covered her face with her hands.

  Mina stood there, looking at the thin back of her young child as it heaved, the agony so heavy the room seemed to sag underneath it.

  “Chloe,” she said.

  “It’s true,” Chloe said. “You love her more than me and I know why. I’ve always known why. I’ve just never said it out loud to you.”

  Mina knew she shouldn’t succumb, but the sound of the pain pulled her down so that she crouched next to the toilet, rested a hand on the arm of her girl.

  Chloe moved out from under her mother’s touch. “Why don’t you just admit it?”

  “Admit what?”

  Chloe looked into Mina’s eyes and said, “Admit that you love her more than me.” She was no longer hunched over, no longer sobbing. Now she was lifted by her anger, her clarity. “You love her because she’s got brown skin like you wish you had. But I look like you, like a white person, and you hate white people, you hate yourself, you hate me.”

  Mina felt the waiting, the expectation that she say something to contradict her daughter, to tell Chloe that she was ridiculous. But there was a hollow place in Mina where her voice had been and she was overcome with an exhaustion that made her joints soften and her bones ache. She pushed by Chloe without saying a word and went into her bedroom where the lock on the door still worked.

  Mina sat down on her bed. She wished her own misunderstanding of herself hadn’t manifested in her daughter thinking she hated her because of the skin they shared. She knew she should talk to Chloe, try to make it better for both of them, but she wasn’t sure if she could. She didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t sure she had the energy to manage the life she had created.

  On the dresser, her phone buzzed and she unwrapped the towel from her hair before she picked it up. Octavian’s name on the screen pulled her heart up from where it had sunk to the bottom of her stomach and brought it right to her throat.

  HEY, the text said, THERE YOU ARE.

  The 2000s:

  A MIX TAPE

  YOU DON’T KNOW—BOB ANDY

  MY FRIEND—JIMI HENDRIX

  SHOOK ONES PART II—MOBB DEEP

  BAG LADY (RADIO EDIT)—ERYKAH BADU

  TRACK 1

  You Don’t Know

  CHICAGO WASN’T NEW YORK City, but it wasn’t St. Louis either. In Chicago, no one had ever heard of Francis Munroe. In Chicago, Octavian wasn’t anyone’s little brother. He hadn’t started out intending to lie about Francis. But then he met a girl he liked. Tanya, whose family came from Lebanon. She had dark hair and long eyelashes and always smelled like almond soap. One night Octavian got drunk and told her about Francis, and then immediately had a panic attack so strong that Tanya had to take him to the emergency room. Before releasing him, the doctor told Octavian he probably shouldn’t drink so much, should definitely get some therapy, and offered to prescribe some meds. The next day Tanya called to say that, though she liked Octavian a lot, it was a little more than she could handle right now.

  Octavian made it through one therapy session and then decided to cut back on the whiskey and not to tell anyone about Francis ever again.

  The first person Octavian told he was an only child was a girl named Rachel who he met in a graphic design class he enrolled in at the Art Institute. Rachel came from a wealthy family of Northside Jewish lawyers. She was good at design and had thick brown hair and, Octavian learned after their first date, the largest breasts he’d ever seen. She was smart and paid for everything and so Octavian tolerated her terrible taste in music and the fact that she thought Stouffer’s made good macaroni and cheese. Until the day he realized that they’d been sleeping together for three months and she had never washed her sheets. After that he went home, put on Public Enemy, and stopped answering her phone calls.

  The next girl Octavian lied to was Sheila. She was Cape Verdean, from Rhode Island, and never asked Octavian much about his family. He wasn’t sure whether that was because she sensed his hesitancy or because she didn’t actually care. She eventually left him to go home and marry her ex-boyfriend.

  By the time Ramonda walked into Pan Asia where Octavian was working two years later, the Octavian Munroe who shook her hand had the only-child story down pat. Ramonda had long legs and skin that reminded Octavian of the chestnuts he used to stuff in his pockets as he walked home from school. She wore her copper-colored curls cut short to her head, and her smile was a wide half-moon. When they were introduced, she grasped his hand in her slender fingers and for the rest of the day, her bright eyes danced at him when she caught him unable to look away.

  Octavian didn’t see her breasts on their first date, but he did learn that she, too, was in fact an only child. They fell in love hard and fast, and by the end of the summer, Ramonda had moved into Octavian’s apartment. She was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, getting her PhD in Ethnomusicology, and she added her Bob Andy albums and rare South African pressed recordings of Hugh Masekela, and her John Lomax folk recordings from the 1940s, to Octavian’s collection. She knew how to play the piano and the guitar, and she went to cello class on Thursday nights.

  She inspired Octavian to paint again, to learn to play the trumpet. And it was her idea for him to sign up for an accelerated course to get his teaching certificate. Ramonda filled their home with beautiful things—fichus plants that she whispered to softly, scented candles in the shape of red pears, paintings of women with baskets on their heads from Dominica, where her grandmother still lived.

  Octavian felt like the sorrow he had lived through until he was with her was worth it if she was the reward. The only problem was Francis. Even dead, Francis was still the problem. Octavian knew he had to tell Ramonda about him, knew that every day that passed was another day he was lying to her, but each morning that he rolled over and saw her arm thrown over her head
like she was desperately trying to make a point, he was filled with such unbridled gratitude that she was there and such a stomach-clenching fear that she would go that he couldn’t do it.

  Then, one afternoon in April, Octavian came home and Ramonda said, “Someone named Ivy called. Asked that you call him, said it was urgent.”

  “Ivy?”

  “That’s what he said. Sounded sort of like a white boy.”

  “That’s my boy from St. Louis,” Octavian said. “He is sort of like a white boy. He said it was urgent?”

  “I didn’t know you had white friends in St. Louis,” she said.

  Octavian already held the receiver in his hand and he stopped dialing to look at her. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Ramonda shrugged.

  “You never had any white friends?”

  “Not really,” she said and turned back to the book in her lap. “It’s not a big deal, is it?”

  Octavian shook his head and finished dialing the number. Ivy’s mother was dead, that much Octavian got through his inconsolable weeping. Other than that, he could only make out Ivy’s repeated request that he come home for the funeral. “I know you don’t like to come home, but I can’t do it without you, Tave,” he said. “If your brother were here, I wouldn’t ask, but you know, he’s gone too.”

  Octavian hung up the phone and said to Ramonda, “I have to go home.”

  “Home?”

  “I mean to St. Louis.”

  “You told me you were never going back there.”

  “Ivy’s mom died. He wants me to come to her funeral.”

  Ramonda closed her book and got up from the couch. She walked into the kitchen. “Some guy named Ivy you’ve never talked about needs you to come to his mother’s funeral?”

  Octavian followed her. “I’m sure I talked about Ivy to you before. He’s one of my best friends, he was definitely my…”

  Ramonda pulled a box of guava juice out of the fridge. “Your what?”

  The words my brother’s best friend stuck in Octavian’s mouth like a clot of blood. He would have to tell her. He knew this. But not now. He would tell her when he came back.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said, taking a glass from the cupboard.

  “You don’t have to do that, baby,” Octavian said.

  She put a loving hand on Octavian’s arm. “If it’s that important, I want to.”

  TRACK 2

  My Friend

  AS SOON AS OCTAVIAN walked Ramonda into Rahsaan’s, he wished he had brought her there sooner. Not only did her eyes light up as she began to search through the vinyl, but Brendon—who still helped out Bones on the weekends—took one look at her and nearly fell on the floor. Both he and Bones made fools of themselves following Ramonda around, dashing off to seek out rare recordings she was looking for, smiling up in her face when she clapped after Bones found a mint condition Smart Nkansah & His Super Sweet Talks album she’d never heard of.

  Octavian managed to pull them both aside and asked them not to bring up Francis, giving them the excuse he’d given Cyrus the night before about her having bad experiences with friends and drugs and said, as matter-of-factly as possible, that it was simply something they didn’t discuss.

  Bones gave Octavian a look, but Brendon said, “Whatever, man. Do what you have to do to hold on to that one. She is F-I-N-E.”

  Before the funeral, Octavian tried to run the same lines on Ivy, but Ivy’s lens of devastation was so thick he couldn’t even see his way through more than a few words of conversation before disintegrating again, so Octavian gave up.

  They stayed for two nights and on the last night, Octavian and Ramonda lay in the same bed where Octavian and Mina had once lain with Francis and made jokes about Michael Jackson. They listened to Jimi Hendrix and Octavian’s heart filled with sadness. He longed for Francis in a way he hadn’t since before he died. He wanted him there, with them right then, teasing Octavian about how in love he was.

  “I’m hungry,” Ramonda said and rolled over on her side so her long body was closer to his. “You all, excuse me, y’all got anything good to eat in this town or what? And don’t tell me about that damn Imo’s Pizza. I had some of that last night at Ivy’s house after the funeral and it was nasty.”

  “You’re crazy,” Octavian said. “Imo’s is the shit.”

  “The shit is right,” she said. “And I don’t mean that in a nice way.”

  “How about toasted raviolis?” Octavian said. “I bet you’ve never had those before.”

  Ramonda scrunched up her nose and said, “That does sound kinda good. Do we have to drive somewhere far to get them?”

  “Nope,” Octavian said and sat up. “We can walk right to Blueberry Hill. And I can beat you at darts while we’re there.”

  They walked hand in hand down toward Delmar, and Octavian felt St. Louis tugging hard at his heart. Made him wonder if maybe they couldn’t come back more often. He pushed open the heavy door of Blueberry Hill and there sat Bones, Brendon, and Ivy in their favorite straight-backed booth right in the front. When they saw him they yelled his name in unison.

  Ramonda smiled her half-moon smile and said, “Damn, babe, you’re like Norm from Cheers.”

  Quickly, they shifted around to make room and Brendon stood up to offer his seat to Ramonda. A voice from behind Octavian said, “You got room in there for me too, big B?”

  Octavian turned and saw a heavy-eyed Evan—who, for a moment, didn’t recognize Octavian. But then he said, “Oh shit, Tave, is that you?”

  Octavian took in Evan—his ragged shirt, his aging skin. “Hey man,” he said and smiled.

  Evan grabbed Octavian by the back of the neck and hugged him, pounding his fists gently into Octavian’s back.

  They sat. Evan acknowledged Ramonda with a nod and Octavian felt her stiffen next to him.

  “Ay yo, Ivy man,” Evan slurred, “I know your mom’s died and all, but how bout we celebrate this motherfucker Tave finally gracing us with his presence?”

  Ivy, who was lucid now that his mother was in the ground and he had enough beers in him, raised his bottle and said, “To Tave.”

  Octavian looked at Ramonda. She was smiling again and she raised her glass of water and lemon to him and winked.

  Bones went to the jukebox and soon the restaurant was filled with the funky sound of KC and the Sunshine band singing “I Get Lifted.” Octavian thought about Mina and wondered if Bones remembered how much she loved that song. Drinks and toasted raviolis, fried mushrooms and hot wings arrived, and within moments Evan and Ivy began reminiscing about old times. Octavian shot Bones a look, but he shrugged. No one had briefed Evan or Ivy that the topic of Francis was off limits, and it didn’t take long for it to circle back around.

  “Yo, Tave, remember that night when your brother put fifty bucks worth of quarters in the juke box and we were up in here, jukebox DJ’ing all night?” Evan said.

  “Hell yeah,” Ivy laughed. “What about that time Tave had to go rescue him from where he was hiding in the closet of that older woman he was kickin’ it with, after her husband came home?”

  “I remember that,” Brendon said. “Tave had to knock on the door talking about how he was raising money for the football team or some shit. Meanwhile I was back there trying to help Frankie’s uncoordinated ass climb out a window.”

  Octavian didn’t look at Ramonda. He knew he should have gotten up, should have said goodnight and walked home with Ramonda’s hand in his. Then he could have laid his broken soul bare. But in that hard-backed booth, with Chuck Berry looking down from where he stood outlined in neon on the wall, Octavian felt Frankie’s smile arch over him and he wanted to sit in its warmth for a few minutes more. He ordered another drink, and let Ramonda’s fried ravioli lay cold and untouched in the plastic basket with the red-and-white plaid paper.

  For the entire train ride back to Chicago, Octavian talked. He told her everything about Francis, about looking for hi
m in Eastgate, about Prince, about how Francis died. Ramonda stared out the smudged window at the dirty backs of Illinois towns and said nothing. When they got home, she locked herself in the bathroom, turned on the shower and wept. An hour later, she came out. Octavian reached for her, but she gently pressed his arms away and tried to meet his eyes.

  “I hope you know,” she said, “that I would never lie like that to you.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She lifted her wet eyes and Octavian felt something inside him crumble. “I wish I could have met him.”

  Neither of them mentioned it again and Octavian went back to thinking he was the luckiest man alive. That was until he came home from work one night at the end of summer to find her on the couch, her lovely head in her hands. Octavian thought of death right away. Her grandmother in Dominica maybe, her uncle in Detroit. Cyrus.

  “No,” she said. “No one has died.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I got the Fulbright,” she said.

  “The scholarship? That’s great, baby. Why do you look like the world has come to an end?”

  She shifted her legs underneath her and dropped her hands. “Because it means we have to say goodbye and I wasn’t ready for that to happen. Not yet.” She stared down at her lap.

  Octavian felt his heart race as it had been doing more since they got back from St. Louis. “I don’t understand.”

  Ramonda gave him an exasperated look. “Octavian, I am going to Zimbabwe for two years.”

  “So,” he said. “I can wait for two years. I’ll visit you. Shit, I’ll even go with you.”

  Without looking up, she said, “I don’t want you to come with me and I don’t want you to wait.”

  The words were loud in their now dark space and Octavian barely heard what she said next.

  “Tave, you know how I am. I need to devote myself to my work, entirely. I need to become a resident. I can’t do that with my American boyfriend in tow.”