There You Are

by Morais, Mathea

  “Wait a second,” Octavian said, shaking his head against his own thoughts. “When you applied, we agreed that if you got it, we would work something out.”

  A shadow moved across Ramonda’s face. “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before…before, I don’t know. Before I found out that you are this whole other person you neglected to tell me about.” She looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to let it go. Really I did, but I just can’t.”

  “Ramonda,” Octavian said, but she shook her head.

  “Octavian, it has been three months since we got home and you still don’t ever talk about Francis. It’s like he never existed and yet I can see now how he haunts you. Maybe you’re okay with living with a ghost, but I’m not.”

  Octavian felt his insides drop into a reservoir of confusion. He sat down on the edge of the couch. He wished he could find the words to explain something, but he wasn’t even sure what he wanted her to understand. One look at Ramonda and he knew it was pointless. She was going, no matter what he said.

  “When do you leave?” he asked.

  Ramonda sat back into the couch. “Next week. I need to go back to Connecticut first and get my recording equipment from my mother’s.”

  Octavian stood up and walked over to the window. He looked down at the wide, dark-green summer leaves of the giant old oak tree that grew behind their building. He never did tell Ramonda about his heart. In the beginning, it hadn’t mattered because he was sure she’d cured him, and now that it beat wildly in his chest, there was no use in explaining. It would be just another thing he neglected to tell her, another lie. He turned away and walked into the bedroom, leaving the door cracked open in case she changed her mind.

  She didn’t. In the morning, Octavian found her asleep on the couch with her books spread across the floor beneath her. He crouched down close to her face and memorized her chin, her soft eyelashes, the curve of her nose. He slid one of his hands under hers and felt the dry creases of her knuckles, the cool metal of her rings. Finally, he stood up and went into the kitchen where he wrote down the address where she should leave her keys.

  TRACK 3

  Shook Ones

  Part II

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, Mina clutched two-year old Riley and newborn Chloe against her as she sat in front of the television in their apartment in the Bronx, and watched the Twin Towers crumble over and over again. Gone were her remaining romantic notions about being a hustler’s wife. In reality, she was nothing more than the unfortunate neighborhood white woman who pushed her baby’s stroller up and down 245th Street with her snarl-headed toddler in tow. Since Riley’s birth, Mina had begun to pressure Rubio to find what she called a real job, but he refused. For hours at night she sat alone, holding their baby and wondering what would happen if he’d got arrested, or worse.

  A month after the towers went down, Rubio announced that she was right. It was time to call it quits. They were going to move to Boston so he could open a bar with his boy Angel. Mina agreed without question. She’d never been to Boston, but she’d go anywhere if it meant he was going to stop hustling and be legal. Plus, she was tired of New York.

  A week before they were supposed to leave, Rubio came home with a cell phone for Mina and Mina’s friend Marisol, who lived downstairs, taught Mina how to text.

  “You ain’t never checked Rubio’s text messages?” Marisol asked.

  Mina shook her head.

  Marisol rolled her eyes. “You better do that before you up and move out to fucking Boston.”

  While Riley watched Sesame Street, Mina checked Rubio’s phone and learned all there was to know about Katie. A white girl. Irish. From New Jersey. They were madly in love.

  If Mina were Marisol, she’d call up Katie and threaten to scratch her eyeballs out or blow up her car, and if she were Chula, who now lived around the block from Mina, she might actually do it. But Mina could only put the phone back in its spot next to the television and pick up Chloe, who’d begun to fuss. She pulled out her already withered twenty-seven-year-old breast and placed her less-sore nipple into the baby’s mouth. Outside the window, the 4 Train rumbled along elevated tracks through the hazy concrete sky. The idea of spending another day in that sad apartment was worse than the unknown of going to Boston. Mina convinced herself that if Rubio wanted to move, Katie must not be anything serious and she pushed Katie’s name out of her mind.

  In Boston, with Rubio snoring on the couch, boxes still unpacked, Mina couldn’t shake a nagging feeling. She locked herself in the bathroom with Rubio’s phone and found out that when Rubio said he wanted to stop hustling, to move to Boston and open a bar, what he meant was that having a girlfriend and a wife would be simpler if they lived in different states.

  The next night, after she put the girls to bed, Mina sat down next to Rubio at the folding table they had set up in their new empty kitchen and told him that she knew about Katie.

  Rubio nodded and pushed himself back from the table, but didn’t say anything.

  “Why?” Mina asked.

  Rubio looked at her the way he used to when he sat across the table from her at the Palm and watched her eat the rib eye he convinced her to get.

  “Because she loves me,”“ he said.

  “Do you love her?”

  Rubio shook his head. “I love you,” he said. “Since the moment I laid eyes on you in that club. But you’ve never been in love with me. Not really.”

  Mina started to protest, but Rubio held up his hand to stop her. “Sure, you love where I come from and the stories I have to tell about the real shit I’ve seen—shit that you’ve only heard about in songs. But you’ve never actually been in love with me. Katie, she’s in love with me. Not because I’m Puerto Rican and from the South Bronx, or because she thinks it makes her down to be with someone like me. She’s not like you.”

  “She’s white,” Mina said.

  Rubio shook his head and laughed a little. “Yeah,” he said leaning toward Mina, “but she doesn’t think that being with a black guy, or a Puerto Rican guy, or listening to Mobb Deep, means she’s not white no more.” Rubio sat back again and lit a cigarette.

  Mina stood up and walked over to the sink. He was right. But he was no better than she was. He wasn’t anymore in love with Mina than she was with him. They’d both fallen in love with the ideas of who they thought the other one was, not the real person. With her back still to him, she said, “Maybe we should get a divorce.”

  “Divorce?” he said.

  The air in the room went thin and sharp and Mina turned around. She saw the flare of his nostrils, the clench of his jaw. Quickly, he stood up and hurled his order of carne guisada across the room. He screamed, “You want a fucking divorce?”

  “Rubio,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm.

  “Here I am telling you I love you and you talking about a divorce? How about this, instead of a divorce, I just burn the whole fucking house down with us in it?” Rubio picked up his chair and held it over his head, but before he could swing it, Mina ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She thought he would surely pick the lock, or even break it down, but instead she heard nothing until the front door slammed and he drove away.

  The next morning, Rubio was still gone. Mina knocked on the door of Mama Nora, the Dominican woman who lived in the duplex next door and, in her best halting Spanish, Mina asked her if she could watch Chloe for a few hours. Mama Nora happily agreed.

  Mina drove Riley to her new preschool and explained that Daddy hadn’t meant those things he’d said after Mina thought Riley was asleep, but the sharpness of her three-year-old’s eyes in the rearview mirror told her she didn’t believe her. Mina took Riley into preschool and smiled at the softhearted teachers before she got in her car and cried. Then she swallowed the tears, the guilt, the wounds on her pride, and called Kanta. Mina told her what she was able to say without crying.

  “
And don’t say I told you so,” Mina said. “Because I know you did.”

  Kanta sighed, but she didn’t say “I told you so.” Instead she gave her a list of instructions. The same ones she gave to her clients. Mina went through the motions with little hope. She made phone calls, found the library, wrote a resume, emailed the addresses that the woman with the nasal voice from the Barnard Office of Career Services sent her. Three days later, Rubio appeared in the living room with a bouquet of flowers and new dolls for the girls. Riley promptly threw hers on the floor and broke it and Chloe burst into tears.

  “I’m getting a job,” Mina said that night while Rubio lay in the bedroom watching TV like the word divorce had never been said, like there wasn’t a beef-stew stain on the wall in the kitchen.

  “Who’s going to take care of my kids?”

  “Riley’s going to preschool and Mama Nora said she’d watch Chloe.”

  “Good,” Rubio said. “Maybe she can cook me some real dinner, too.”

  The following weekend he was gone again. This time he left without slamming the door. And so it went for months. Mina took a temp job as the receptionist at a small children’s book publishing company and breathed much easier on the weekends. When he was gone, she took her kids to the playground and got takeout Indian food.

  After a year, Mina’s temporary job became permanent. She was skilled at faxing and fielding phone calls and so when she answered the phone one morning and a familiar voice asked to speak with Mina Rose, not Mina Figueroa, the pencil in her hand immediately stopped twirling.

  “This is Mina Rose,” she said.

  “Hey girl. Damn, I’ve been trying to find you forever.”

  “Clarissa, is that you?” Mina said. “How did you find me? Where are you?”

  “Believe it or not, I’m at Rahsaan’s right now,” she said. “I came into town and was visiting Bones. I told him I’m heading out to Boston next week and he said we had to call you.”

  The other line rang and Mina put Clarissa on hold. When she switched back it wasn’t Clarissa’s voice she heard, but Bones’s.

  “Is that my Mina girl?”

  Mina’s eyes filled with tears at the sound of his thick voice and she quickly reached for the box of Kleenex that sat squarely between her pile of Post-It notes and the framed photo of the girls taken in the portrait studio of JC Penney right before they left the Bronx.

  “Hey Bones,” she said and cleared her throat. “How’d you know I was in Boston?”

  “Dang girl, don’t you know who I am? I stay keepin’ tabs on you, even if you don’t want me to. How you been? Don’t tell me you’re no Red Sox fan.”

  What could she say? That she had a cheating husband, an angry toddler, and a baby who spent more time with the old lady next door than she did with her? So she said, ”Don’t worry, Bones. I’ll never be a Red Sox fan.”

  “Well, Ima put your girl back on. She over here trippin because I knew you was in Boston and she didn’t. Ima call you again, okay? You got a real phone number or should I call you at work?”

  Mina gave Bones her cell phone number and wondered if, since Bones knew how to find her, he also knew how to find Octavian.

  “Love you girl,” he said.

  “Love you too, Bones.”

  Clarissa was coming to Boston. Next week, she said. Going to a conference at MIT.

  “Jesus, that sounds really grown-up,” Mina said.

  “You’re the one with two babies. I’d say that’s grown up,” Clarissa said and laughed. “And you better believe Auntie Clarissa is going to spoil the shit out of them.”

  “Will you be here over the weekend?”

  “I can be, why?”

  “Weekends are better.”

  TRACK 4

  Bag Lady

  (Radio Edit)

  CLARISSA’S LARGE FRAME IN Mina’s doorway was more powerful than she remembered. She folded Mina into a hug and when Mina felt the soft flesh of Clarissa’s arms, smelled the deep familiar smell of her Nivea cream, and heard the low echo of her laugh in her chest, Mina didn’t want to be a mother anymore. She didn’t want to make it work with Rubio any more. She simply wanted to let her spine collapse into a pile so that she wouldn’t ever have to stand up again.

  Riley’s voice shook her. “Mom,” she said, “what’s going on?” Mina let go and waited for her structure to implode, but it didn’t.

  Clarissa let out a squeal and Riley’s little body disappeared into that same smothering hug and came out smiling.

  For the next hour, Clarissa sat on the floor listening to Erykah Badu and played with Riley. And when Chloe woke up, Clarissa pulled the baby onto her wide lap and turned pages in a board book and wiped the drool from Chloe’s chin with the back of her sleeve without missing a beat in their memory game. Mina watched her and thought she had been like that once. Down on the floor, immersed in Riley’s imaginary world of cheerleaders and dragons and dolphins who sang. That was before Chloe. No wonder Riley was always so ready to push her little sister out of the way.

  “You want some tea, Riss? Coffee?”

  Without taking her eyes off the game, she said, “Coffee would be awesome. I’m exhausted. I’ve talked more today than I did for a week at that conference. I do not know how you do this every single day.”

  Mina went into the kitchen, where the yellow paint peeled off the walls, and boiled water in a saucepan. She took the coffee sock out of the drawer and the bag of Cafe Bustelo from the cabinet. At one point she thought making her coffee like the old Puerto Rican ladies made her less of a white girl. But now, she couldn’t remember why the coffee sock would have changed that. It was just another one of those things she’d collected for so long—the coffee sock, the lyrics to “My Philosophy,” the memorized Audre Lorde poems, the recipe for arroz con gandules—all of which were now lost somewhere beneath the toys.

  Clarissa sat down at the kitchen table. Mina turned and tried to smile, but she failed so she sat down instead.

  “Shit girl,” Clarissa said reaching over to take Mina’s hand. “Is it that bad?”

  “Worse,” Mina said. The truth tasted like chalk on her tongue.

  “Where’s he at?”

  “With his girlfriend in New Jersey. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “What, are y’all like divorced parents or some shit? You have him for the week, she’s got him on the weekends?”

  Mina nearly spit out her coffee, the laugh came out of her so fast and unannounced. Then the two of them laughed the way they did when they were kids. Laughed so hard their bodies shook and tears streamed from their eyes.

  When they finally stopped, Clarissa said, “Mina, what the fuck are you doing?”

  The lines between Mina’s eyes pulled tight. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? You know you deserve better than this.”

  “Do I? I knew what I was doing, so isn’t this exactly what I deserve?”

  The foreign sound of her mother’s laughter had brought Riley to the door.

  Before Mina could tell her to go on, Clarissa said, “Baby girl, can you go in there and get Candy Land set up? Auntie’ll be right in to play with you.”

  Riley considered her mother carefully before she nodded.

  “Listen, if this is what you want,” Clarissa said, “you got to tell me. Because if it is, I won’t say shit. Some women like this kind of arrangement and if that’s who you are, then…”

  “This isn’t what I want,” Mina said quickly. “I don’t really care about me, but I don’t want my girls to grow up thinking this is what marriage is supposed to be.” Mina wrapped her hands around the coffee mug and looked into the living room where her girls were now fighting over blocks. From the television set Barney gave them directions to clean up, which they ignored.

  “How’d you even wind up with him in the first place?” Clarissa said. “I mean I never pictured you with a guy that treated you
bad, for real.”

  “In the beginning he treated me better than anyone ever has. But then slowly, he started to fuck with me, you know? And I kept thinking that if I just did this or that or changed the way I dressed or looked, things would go back to being the way they used to be. By the time I realized they never would, I was so deep in it, I didn’t know how to get out. And then I got pregnant. I wasn’t going to marry him at first, but then I felt like I should. For the baby and all.”

  Clarissa nodded and Mina took a long, deep breath.

  “And since I didn’t want Riley to grow up an only child the way I did, I had Chloe. Funny thing is, all they do is fight.”

  Mina felt the hot tears in her eyes and Clarissa took her hand again. “This isn’t you, Mina,” she said.

  “I don’t know, Riss,” Mina said. “I have no idea who I am anymore. I forgot how to be the Mina I was a long time ago. Now I’m pretty sure she’s gone.”

  Clarissa reached over and wiped away Mina’s tears with the back of her hand. “She’s not gone, I just saw her. When you laughed so hard like that, it was like we were back at Rahsaan’s laughing at some stupid shit Bones said.”

  “Auntie,” Riley called from the living room. “Do you want to be blue or red?”

  Clarissa stood up and said, “Girl, I’m from the North Side of St. Louis. I definitely cannot be red.” She threw up a crip sign and Mina laughed.

  “See,” Clarissa said. “There you are again.”

  Mina stood up and took their cups to the sink. She turned on the water. Outside the dirty window, the neighbor’s German shepherd, who made it impossible for her children to play in the patch of backyard, paced the chain-link fence. Slowly Mina rinsed the sock clean of coffee grounds and placed it upside down next to the sink to dry.

  2014

  THE WAY FROM BONES’S one-story shoebox house in Dogtown to Rahsaan’s was simple and familiar, like the scent of a loved one. Often on the drive, Bones would let his mind wander, and look up and already be in Rahsaan’s parking lot next to Fred’s truck. But on this morning, Bones made an effort to think about what he passed. It was too early even for the teachers, the janitors, the sleepless secretaries to be on the road. The rounded edges of the hills across the golf course of Forest Park glowed gold with the sunrise, and Skinker Boulevard spread wide in an empty, elegant expanse. Bones took a deep breath.