“Talk di truth,” Miss Maxine is saying to Miss Foster.
“Yes, m’dear.”
“So when she g’wan send fah you?” Miss Maxine turns to Tru.
Tru shrugs.
The women say nothing to this, their silence loud.
“You have a good evening,” Tru finally says to the women, filling the awkward pause.
“M-hmm. You too, dear,” Miss Maxine says.
Tru is relieved that light flickers on inside the house now that the sun has gone down. Mama G shuffles out and opens the veranda grille. She’s still in her housedress.
“What yuh doing talking to dat Maxine?” she asks Tru. “She faas like ah don’t know what. Always in people business.” Mama G sucks her teeth.
“I didn’t tell her anything.”
“Good.”
She ushers Tru inside the house and shuts the door. Mama G’s Jesus music on Love FM serenades Tru. The house smells like rosemary and menthol, the latter from the cream Mama G rubs on her joints for arthritis pain. For the first time Tru realizes how cluttered the house looks with all the Jesus figurines and scriptures framed on the walls.
“Yuh look nice in dat dress,” Mama G says, looking Tru up and down. “Is a pity yuh don’t grow yuh hair out. Di Bible seh dat hair is a woman’s glory.”
“Grandma, how many times ah have to tell you dat I like my hair dis way?” Tru moves away from her grandmother’s hand, which is reaching toward her fade. When Tru decided to cut off all her hair, she did so in mourning. It was the day after she went on Facebook to see if her mother had a profile. There were so many Patricia Reynoldses. Tru spent the whole day on the home computer, clicking on all the profiles, coming up with nothing. The next day she sat in the barber Lester’s chair—the same barber her father goes to on King Street—unmoved by Lester’s brief hesitation. “Yuh sure Chief would agree to dis?” Lester asked, his voice shaking as though he was about to commit a crime. He did it anyway, and Marva nearly fainted when Tru came home, her prized hair—the one thing about her that Marva loved—gone.
“YUH STUBBORN LIKE YUH MOTHER. HAVE A SEAT,” MAMA G SAYS, removing an old phone book and pushing some envelopes off the chair. Tru would’ve said something about the clutter, but she reconsiders, given that Mama G might suggest she help her clean up. She sees the cake her grandmother baked for her sitting on the dining table, hoisted on a plastic container turned upside down inside a bowl of water to prevent ants from crawling into it. It’s the same dining table where her mother used to sit to read those letters. As Tru stands there before the cake, a knob turns in her mind and opens a door to a dark room, forcing her memory’s eye to adjust to an image—her mother looking peaceful, beautiful, caged in the glow of the lamp as she reads a letter, her index finger trailing each line on the ruled paper the way it would a raised bump from a mosquito bite on Tru’s arm. “Mama, what it say?” This single outburst startled her mother. She looked at Tru like she did whenever Tru interrupted her while she was speaking to another grown-up or listening to the news. “What yuh doing up? Guh back to bed!” Tru never knew who sent those letters or why they affected her mother so. By the time Tru lost the snow globe at school when she loaned it to a girl named Trisha whom she wanted to impress, she had gotten used to seeing her mother’s back hunched over the dining table like that. Sometimes her mother would be in bed with the curtains drawn and the sheet over her head. “Is suh Satan strong,” Mama G explained. “Di war between God an’ di Devil is not fah us to undah-stand.” She squeezed Tru’s shoulder then.
“Happy Birthday,” Mama G says when Tru finally sits.
“Thanks, Grandma.”
There are no candles or prompts for Tru to make a wish.
“Grandma? What was wrong wid Mama?”
“What yuh mean?”
“When she used to get sad aftah reading those letters . . .”
Mama G’s face looks stricken, her eyes flashing. “Nuttin’ dat God couldn’t solve, dear. Nuttin’ dat God couldn’t solve.”
“Who was it dat wrote to her?” Tru asks.
“Yuh not g’wan eat a piece?” Mama G says, changing the subject.
“Not yet, Grandma,” Tru says. “I can bring dis home an’ eat aftah dinner.”
“Suit yuhself,” Mama G says.
Tru looks down at the table, wanting to ask her grandmother more questions that have been bothering her—questions her father avoids. Like how come her mother hasn’t written or called? Be a good, obedient girl. What does that even mean now? She’s been trying to be a good girl her whole life, hoping for her mother’s return. The sadness Tru has been feeling lately catches up with her, especially on a day like this one—her birthday—easing its way around the table in the dimming light. Mama G must have sensed this when she catches Tru staring at the cake and guessed it has something to do with her mother. Because she mumbles something about forgiveness and disappears into the room to get ready for tonight’s revival at her church, leaving Tru alone at the table to stare at the elevated cake and the ants lining up around it.
WHEN TRU GETS HOME, SHE TAKES OFF THE DRESS, THROWS IT onto the floor, and makes yet another opening on the skin of her upper right thigh, breaking the surface with the razor she uses to carve a space for herself. A sanctuary. She watches the red bulb rise and rise like a lung inflated with a sudden intake of air.
Later that night Tru wakes up, thirsty for a glass of water, and finds Roy sitting by himself at the dining table. It reminds her of the times she caught her mother doing the same thing in the wee hours of the night, reading those letters she kept locked away in an attaché.
Alone, without his gun and uniform, Roy is just a man slumped at the table. It’s like the world is resting on his shoulders. He’s shaking his head, his hand—the one with the scar—trembling slightly as he reads what’s on the piece of paper he holds. Tru watches him through the beaded curtains. She watches knowing that every line in his dark face has something to do with her, even though he says it isn’t so. As Marva’s belly grows and grows yet again, the shadow persists inside the house like the coming of a storm, a plague, death. She tries to push away these feelings but fails each time she sees her father bent over the table this way, shaking his head. As if he senses her, he lifts his head and straightens his back.
“What yuh doing hiding back dere, Champ?” Roy asks with a strain in his voice.
“Jus’ coming fah some wata,” she replies. “What yuh looking at on dat paper?”
Roy peers down at the paper in his hand and crumples it. “Nothing.”
He gets up to pour himself a glass of the dark liquor he keeps in the cabinet on the top shelf. Tru knows that her father drinks sometimes, but he never does it in front of her. There are just certain things he doesn’t do in her presence.
He throws his head back with the drink, as if simply swallowing it won’t be as effective. Tru watches his face crease. He puts the glass down and stares, turning and turning it. “When ah became a policeman, ah used to t’ink ah could mek a difference,” he says to the empty glass. “Ah used to t’ink ah could catch criminals an’ lock dem up so dat we can live in a real paradise. Now I jus’ want to quit.”
Tru waits on him to explain. She’s never heard her father use the word quit. Something about hearing him utter that word frightens her. Tru looks off into the shadows that creep into the room, refusing to watch her father surrender. As if he knows her thoughts, he says, “Dey denied my promotion again. Dey told me ah haven’t earned it yet. Now, you tell me what else ah need to do. How many more years me haffi wait? How many more quota me haffi fill? I’ve been giving dat police force almost fifteen years of my sweat an’ blood.” He clenches his fist around the crumpled paper in his hand. “Fifteen years. Now dey telling me dey can’t give me di one t’ing me want. What more dem need?”
He looks at Tru now as if she has all the answers. At the sight of his troubled face, her own anxiety surfaces. Suddenly Roy seems more like the child and she, Tru, the par
ent. “Did you ask dem why dey didn’t give it you?” she asks him carefully.
He shakes his head. “What ah got to ask dem for? I already know why dey didn’t give it to me. Dey know I’m not like dem. Yuh t’ink ah want to spend my life tiptoeing an’ biting my tongue jus’ because arresting certain criminals could get me in more trouble than letting dem get weh? I’m committed to upholding the law ovah anyt’ing else. Yuh t’ink because I grew up wid half ah dese clowns who get deported and start calling themselves dons, dat I can’t put dem in prison where dem belong? Dem sadly mistaken. When those bad man see me coming, dem know who is in charge. But half a dese big man connected to di same crooks. Those pompous john-crow Devils living in dem big houses on di hills feeding dem self wid our carcass. See how wealthy they are? Is we back dem feeding off. An’ look at me. Blood money. Dat’s what’s pulsing in di vein of high society.”
He pours himself another drink and swallows again. Perspiration rolls like bright tears down his face. “I coulda been rich long time ago,” he says. His eyes narrow as his thoughts form. “But ah couldn’t bring myself to accept bribe. You know how much policeman ah know who do dat? Everyone know seh di police force is corrupt. Money run t’ings in dis country. Dat’s how nuff policeman get ahead in dis goddamn country. But I was always more committed to working fah di law than fah myself. Maybe me is di fool in all ah dis. People might be laughing when dey see me. Dem might be sayin’ to themselves or to each other: ‘Look! Cuh di fool-fool Beckford! See him deh wid di big dunce hat ’pon him head!’ His wry smile becomes a sudden suck of air. “Maybe is me alone in dis whole wide world who t’ink abiding by di rules g’wan benefit me. Look where it got me. I’m almost a pauper, depending on handouts from America dat will neva come,” Roy says. He looks at Tru. “What kinda man does dat make me?”
33
PATSY WAKES UP SHIVERING IN THE DARK, THINKING ABOUT HIM. She still cannot believe what she saw. Was it a bird with silvered wings, kissed at the tips by the glare of the train lights? It’s hard to relive it. The frightened looks of the hysterical crowd; the squeal of the engines on the tracks that will forever echo in Patsy’s ears; the flash in his eyes just before his departure; the veil that slipped from them, which revealed to Patsy that he was already gone before the leap—a mere gesture of smoke, in comparison to what he had already suffered.
Still, in the hard light of morning she searches for his face, his forgiving eyes, in crowds during her commute to work, struck by the commuters’ apathy as they shuffle like cattle. She scans the deep scowls on each of their faces for him. Sometimes she thinks she hears him say her name in the roar of a train engine, the way he laughed as if her name coated his tongue with sweetness. When she gets off the trains, sometimes she pauses at the sight of a bum on a bench, a rat gnawing at garbage on the side of a trash can, the shadow of a naked tree branch on the sidewalk, each looking at first like Barrington until she blinks.
There was quick cleanup after the incident. There is nothing left, not even a stain of him. Business goes on as usual. It’s how the city works. After big parades, bending figures pick up the garbage, hunched in duty. It has always been a mystery to Patsy, who has never woken up to messy streets after a parade. She decides that New York City Transit workers are like scavengers, sifting, plucking, snatching, and stuffing things inside trash bags—dead things, empty things, lost things.
AT HOME, INSIDE THE CAGE OF HER ROOM, PATSY SITS UNBLINKING on her too-narrow bed, her fingers spread on her kneecaps. Her head is cocked to the side, her mind flying through the window, over the abandoned lot full of weeds, and skidding on the edges of the red-brown buildings darkened by cloud shadows. The reporters had carelessly printed the address in their article as they accosted neighbors in search of an idea of who this man was and if they had suspected that he would do such a thing. To them, he was just a John Doe. But to Patsy, he’s Barrington, who she learned lived in a basement just ten blocks from her place—closer to the cemetery.
When she finds herself at his door, the landlord—a shifty-looking pudgy man with a unibrow and tufts of white hair coming from his ears—doesn’t think it odd. He allows her to see the room, though, closing the door behind him, he asks in a Trinidadian accent, “You is not one ah dem journalist, are you?” When Patsy says no, he gives her a crooked smile.
“Is two-fifty a month,” he says, sniffing and rubbing his broad nose. “You want?”
He never even bothered to throw out Barrington’s things before showing the place. Patsy looks around the room, saddened by the mess—a twin mattress, similar to hers, lying flat in the middle of the room on stained parquet floors, the two ends touching the stripping walls painted baby-blue; a mini-television with antennae hoisted on two crates; and a mound of clothes and shoes piled in one corner looking like a smaller version of the Riverton City Dump in Kingston. The room has a musty smell that could be attributed to many things—either the lack of windows, the pairs of socks lying like limp tongues outside the sneakers, or the clothes themselves, moldy with sweat and body odor inside two trash bags. No one has come to take his things. Not even to burn them. No family. No friends. No girlfriends. What a tragedy to die alone, Patsy thinks. She spies his Jamaican passport. In this country, it’s useless. People like Patsy and Barrington are invisible here. If it were Patsy who had jumped, she probably would’ve been Jane Doe. She knows Barrington’s passport is stamped with a long-expired visiting visa—once thought to be a ticket to freedom. But maybe he’s freer now.
“So, what yuh t’ink? You want it?” the landlord asks Patsy.
“Why yuh didn’t get rid of his t’ings?” Patsy replies.
The man shrugs, rubbing his nose again. “Didn’t have time. Don’t worry. It’ll be all gone before yuh move in.”
Before she answers, his phone goes off, and he puts a chubby finger up to Patsy, indicating for her to wait for him to take the call, and walks out of the room. “Sonofabitch, weh me money?” he shouts at the person on the other end of the line.
Patsy takes this as her cue to leave. She has no business being here. She should have known better. Her heart punches her rib cage as if to punish her. She turns to leave, but the punching grows stronger and stronger, louder and louder inside her ears. A pounding she has not heard in a while, indicating the rush of blood through her veins. Every day, she goes through the motions in a colorless city without feeling. Until now, as her blood surges red-hot through her—wild, like life in the raw. Patsy grabs what she can, stuffing one of Barrington’s striped shirts inside her big leather handbag. It seems as though it offered itself to her hand. She would have taken more if it could all fit. And the fact that the landlord trusts her enough to leave her alone, inside this room with the dead man’s things, only increases her desire to take more. When the landlord returns in the doorway, Patsy thanks him and leaves.
Later, inside her room, she glances up at Barrington’s shirt swaying on the wire hanger from the curtain rod by the window as though a body fills it, its muted sighs and shifting form making the night more bearable. It’s a beautiful shirt—the blue and green stripes vibrant against the off-white color, though it’s a common design. That night Patsy decides to lie with the shirt in the hush of her room. She takes the shirt with the shyness and caution of being with a new lover. There’s something sweetly forbidden about the act. Yet it fills Patsy with something she hasn’t felt since Uncle Curtis put his index finger coated with honey to her lips and kept it there. It was their special game. She thinks of him now, with his lazy eyes and slow smile. He slept in the living room each night after he emptied his bottle of rum. Mama G drove him to drink, Patsy knew, for every time they argued he would leave the house and come back limping, his fingers deftly fumbling with the notch on the stereo, his eyes shiny red, and his eyelids a pair of heavy drapes. At nine years old, Patsy would sit on the cushion next to him inside the living room and wait until he stirred awake. His face would come alive when he saw her, a hint of recognition, warm and gentle.
“What yuh doing up, eh?” With Mama G closed off to the world, excluding him and Patsy, Uncle Curtis’s smile was real, the only thing Patsy believed in. “Yuh too beautiful not to be sleeping,” he’d say. “Ah g’wan start to call you me likkle vampire.” He would stroke her face with his finger. She appreciated her face back then. She even considered it beautiful, because he said so.
“I couldn’t sleep till yuh come back,” she’d tell him, hoping they would dance to his sad songs, she on his toes as they moved around the room together. They were already joined by their own feelings of inadequacy. Patsy lived to hear the words, “Come mek we dance.” And while they danced, he’d say to her under the spell of rum, “Remembah dis one, Gloria? Remembah how we used to love when it come on?”
Patsy would close her eyes to remember a time she knew nothing about but forced her imagination to recall. She imagined him and Mama G in their Sunday best, two-stepping to the old hits from Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, and the Supremes. She became Gloria, driven by her imagination of a woman she hardly knew. She prompted Uncle Curtis to tell her more. Then she’d ask him to show her their dance moves. She loved when he spun her around, her nightgown twirling about her as if the hems were lifted by birds. He would then dip her so low that she felt she had to cling to him for dear life, giggling.
“Do it again,” she’d say.
“We might wake yuh mother.”
“Jus’ one more time.”
Their nightly ritual was secretive, born out of the mischief of disobeying a rule behind God’s back—be it playing ungodly music inside the house, staying up late to dance, or in Uncle Curtis’s case, drinking rum and smoking cigarettes. By the time he offered Patsy a swig of rum when she was ten, she knew how to keep secrets that bound herself and Uncle Curtis inside their own intimate circle. “Yuh like di taste, don’t it?” His voice was always playful and teasing. Patsy rested her head on his chest, her neck suddenly too weak to hold it up. She felt him inhale. Although her eyes were closed, she knew his gaze was on her face, and an image of what she must have looked like to him set in her mind’s eye. There was never reprimand coming from his gaze when she looked up at him, the rum warming her blood, even as he said, “Time fah you to go to bed. Yuh mother might say somet’ing.” It was gentle, patient. Had she been asleep longer on his chest, she knew he would’ve continued to watch her under his lashes; watch her stir into the woman he still loved and mourned. A woman who had left him for a man neither of them had ever seen. Though the thought of Mama G intruded on their peaceful moment, Uncle Curtis’s soft gaze put Patsy at ease. She sensed his restlessness, his desire to move on, and wanted him to stay.
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