“Are you still seeing him even after everything?”
“Yes,” Jade said, “but we don’t exactly broadcast it.”
“Obviously, not even to me.”
“You knew about him before.”
“I didn’t know you were still together. Just be careful, baby. Don’t lose yourself, don’t ever lose yourself.”
I inched closer, wondering who they were talking about, and hoped to hear a name. ’Cause after living with her for over a week, I never even saw Jade talk to a guy, let alone hang out.
“Do you love him?” my mom asked her.
“Yes,” Jade said.
“Does he make you happy?”
“Very.”
“Jade…”
“I know what you’re gonna say. But I’m an excellent student, and not just with books and school, with life. I’m not saying that I have all the answers, I don’t, but I do have Grandmom’s recipes.”
I heard them laughing, so I stepped back a little.
“Your father would have been so proud of you, the way you are, the way you turned out.”
“I miss him so much. Sometimes I can’t remember what he even looked like,” Jade said.
“Do you still have the locket I gave you?”
“Yes, here.”
I stepped back more, then went back to my bedroom, wondering about their conversation. It was odd. I didn’t know that my mom was so close to her niece. She must have been really close to Hannah Mae, too. Then I started feeling a little jealous. I didn’t remember us ever having talks like that. She was just always getting on my case about stuff.
A little while later, my mom came to my room and was standing there in the doorway like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t. She just stood there and I realized that my life was so busy with nothing that I hadn’t actually spoken to her in the few days before our argument tonight. She stayed locked up in her room most of the time, taking her pills and being depressed. She didn’t say anything for a while, she just stood there.
I looked up at her as if to say, what? She still didn’t speak. So I looked at her again, hard this time, and seeing her now, I saw that she wasn’t the same woman. Earlier, she was a screaming banshee, all pale and wild, ready to kick my ass. But all that was gone.
The first thing I noticed was that she looked different, all tired and beat down. Her eyes were red and bloodshot. I don’t know how or when, but I know that there was something else different about her. She looked like she had drowned and this shell standing there was all that was left of her.
See, my mom was perfect, nails, hair, makeup, clothes, jewelry, she was always tight and on top of her game. She put on some weight from time to time, but all she did then was take her diet pills and she was right back to perfection within a couple of months.
But looking at her now, you wouldn’t know it. I’m not sure when it happened, when my mom changed into this person standing here now, this person I don’t even recognize. She was hurting, dealing with her own drama and fighting her own demons. I guess maybe I was too busy all this time, locked up in my own drama to notice hers.
I wonder if she’d cried out for help, and if I wasn’t there or just wasn’t listening. I looked at her and started hurting for her. Not for me, for her.
“I love you, Kenisha, I always will, know that.”
“I know, and I love you. Mom, do you still love Dad?”
She paused a moment and stared at me, then finally answered. “No. Does that upset you?”
I shook my head. For some reason, it didn’t. “Did you ever?”
“There was a time, a long time ago.” She half smiled. “A lifetime ago.”
She walked away silently, back downstairs to her bedroom, back to the tiny white pills that helped her sleep. They took her pain away and she let them, although tonight was different, tonight they took everything.
Ambulance.
Police.
Rescue team.
Hospital.
Doctors.
Morgue.
My mom died at 3:32 in the morning.
CHAPTER 14
Back Home Again
“When did I become the ultimate narcissist, selfish, self-centered, self-seeking, addicted to me. When did I start living in my own hermetically sealed, self-important world? When did it all revolve around me?”
—myspace.com
I swear I’m too young to feel this old.
Death, I looked it up on the Internet: shock, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression and acceptance, the seven stages of grief. Where did they get this stuff? I wasn’t feeling none of that. I was just feeling empty inside.
It was the next day or the day after that. I got kind of confused, so I really don’t remember. All I know is that the house was quiet at first, ’cause basically everybody stopped talking to everybody else. We all just walked around like lifeless shadows cast against a wall, all dark and blurred, out of focus, bumping into solids but not really being there. It was obvious that they blamed me. That was okay ’cause I blamed me, too.
I killed my mother and seeing them meant facing my guilt. So I avoided them. It seemed a lot easier ’cause I didn’t feel like dealing with all that. I was the reason she couldn’t sleep, I was the reason she took the pills, I was the reason she got mad that night and I was the reason she died, plain and simple.
So all I wanted now was solitude.
My grandmother’s next-door neighbor and best friend, Mrs. Harrison, came over. She said that we were all still in shock; but all I knew was that I didn’t cry and I wanted to ’cause everybody else seemed to be. So what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I feel anything?
No. I did feel something, I felt cold. It was near ninety degrees out and I was cold. A chill went through me and stopped and I felt like I had fallen into a frozen slime-coated pit with no way out. I couldn’t eat or sleep or anything. So I just stayed in my bedroom, sweater on, bundled up, alone, hoping nobody would figure out that it was me.
’Cause bottom line, somebody died and it was a fact that somebody had to be blamed. We argued big-time that night, and she got really pissed at me. Maybe that was the catalyst that spiked it all and started the whole thing. Maybe that was why I couldn’t cry, ’cause I knew it was all my fault.
Like a flash fire in dried kindling, word about my mom got around fast, ’cause all of a sudden all these people started coming over to the house. Things got confusing, but my grandmother’s church ladies, who arrived early every morning and left late every night, came by and basically took over everything.
Every other minute the phone or doorbell would ring and somebody else wanted into my world. They either came or called; my friends, too, but I couldn’t deal with them, either. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I was still trying to make sense out of it all. I knew what the police had said and what the detectives and the doctors and the coroner had said about it being nobody’s fault, but I just wasn’t hearing none of that.
My grandmother sat in the living room mostly. That was where people came to see her. I didn’t know where Jade was. She left yesterday morning and I haven’t seen her since.
So I sat there in my bedroom, cold and waiting in the bottom of my open slime-covered pit. Then there was a knock on the door. “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Diamond.”
“Diamond?”
“Yeah, can I come in?”
“Yeah, sure, come in,” I said, turning from the window. Diamond came in quietly and walked over and stood at the window seat beside me. “How’d you find out?” I asked her.
“You know my grandmother and your grandmother go to the same church.” I nodded, realizing that her grandmother was probably one of the church ladies that always came by. “I told Jalisa, I hope that was okay.” I nodded again. “Can I do anything?” she asked.
“No.” I turned back to the window.
“I know you probably don’t feel like talking and that’s okay, I just wanted to stop by and say
hi and see how you were doing. My mom’s downstairs, she said to say hi, too.” I nodded. “Your grandmother told me to bring these up.” She set a small tray of cookies on the table beside me. “She said that if you want something to drink that you had to go downstairs and get it, but I snuck this up for you.” She pulled a Diet Pepsi out of her hoodie jacket pocket.
“Thanks,” I said, smiling for the first time in a long time. “I’m not really thirsty.”
She put the soda beside the cookies and sat down next to me. She looked out and saw the backyard and the treetop view. “Nice view, you can almost see Virginia from here.”
“Yeah, almost.”
“When’s the funeral?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there. I’m going with my mom and grandmother,” she said, picking up a cookie and breaking it in half, handing one half to me.
“Thanks,” I said, then took a bite of the cookie.
So we sat there nibbling cookies for a while and looking out the window. “I killed my mom,” I heard myself confess to her. I looked up and saw her look at me. I expected her to be shocked or pissed or hurt, but she wasn’t. She was just sitting there looking at me. “I killed my mom,” I repeated.
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “My grandmother said it was her heart.”
“No, we had an argument and she slapped me and I ran off. I couldn’t breathe and…”
“Kenisha, listen to me,” she said, sliding closer, “you and your mom argued all the time. Please, girl, me and my mom argue all the time, too, you know that, that didn’t mean anything. It’s just words. We get pissed, they get pissed, so what? They get it. Just ’cause you two fought doesn’t mean anything. If that was the case, every teenager in the world would be in jail for murder and there’d be nobody left.”
“But it was a real bad argument.”
“Yeah, so,” she said, brushing me off. “Listen, you didn’t kill your mom, and that’s it, hear me?”
“Then why can’t I cry?”
“What?”
“Why can’t I cry for her, everybody else is crying.”
“Maybe it hasn’t hit you yet. Not everybody feels loss or pain at the same time. I remember when my grandfather died a few years ago, it took me a long time to cry and to get my feelings out. I was still in shock ’cause I loved him so much. You know I never knew my dad ’cause he died overseas in the marines, so my grandfather was like everything to me. He even took me out on my first date, remember,” she said.
I nodded and smiled, remembering our Girl Scouts father and daughter date we all went on years ago. My dad took me, Diamond’s grandfather took her and Jalisa’s older brother, Brian, took her ’cause her dad was overseas.
“So, trust me, when the time is right, you’ll cry, okay, okay?” she said again. I nodded. “Good, so guess what,” she said, seeming to want to change the subject and lighten my mood, “your lawn mower guy is downstairs.”
“Who?”
She nodded, chewing the chocolate chip cookie. “You know who, your lawn mower guy is downstairs. He asked me to tell you hi,” she said. I guess I looked skeptical ’cause she smiled. “He did, I swear. I think he seriously likes you.”
“First of all he’s not my lawn mower guy.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, popping the soda cap and taking a short sip, then handing it to me.
“For real,” I said after sipping the soda then handing it back to her. “He’s always around hanging out with my grandmother and walking in and out of here like he pays rent or something.”
“’Cause he likes you,” she repeated, smiling wide, “and you like him, don’t you?”
“Hardly, no,” I said haughtily, rolling my eyes and pushing my nose as high up in the air as possible. “Besides, I don’t even know his name.”
“Please, as if that really makes a difference, so what, unless of course it’s something stupid, like maybe Herman, or Jasper or Percival or Urkel.” She laughed. I looked at her and shook my head, half smiling. Diamond had a way of making people smile. “No, wait, how about Vlad or Frank N. Stein.”
I chuckled. “You are so silly,” I said.
After that, talking got easier, then joking and laughter followed. After a while I was back. I climbed out of the slime-covered pit and I was back. Then somebody knocked on my door again. “Come in,” I said, hearing my voice sound a lot better.
Jalisa came in, followed by Chili.
“Hey, how you doing, girl?” Jalisa said, walking over to me and Diamond. But before I could answer, Chili started acting up.
“What’s that bitch doing here?”
“Chili…” Jalisa started.
“No, what’s up with the skank being all up in here. I thought we were through with her.”
“This is not the time for your drama,” Jalisa said.
Diamond reached over and took my hand and squeezed it. “I gotta go anyway. My grandmother’s probably downstairs making everybody crazy and my mom’s probably ready to go. You take care. Call me if you need me.”
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
“That’s right, step your ass out of here, skank,” Chili hissed.
“Chili, you need to stop, you know you can be such a jerk sometimes, what is your problem?” Jalisa asked as she hurried to follow Diamond out.
“What, who me? I ain’t do nothing.” She grabbed a cookie and started eating it. “Y’all always up in my face with that, blaming me for something. You need to talk about her, she the one all up in here knowing can’t nobody stand her ass.” When the door closed, Chili looked at me and smiled. “Hey, girl, so what’s up, and who is that fine-ass brotha downstairs, his dimples are hot and he’s got those light-colored eyes, damn, his babies with me would be gorgeous.”
Chili always sized up a guy by what she thought their children would look like. “You know, he was seriously checking my shit out. I think I might just break a piece off of his fine ass.” As per Chili, every guy on the planet between the ages of ten and fifty wanted to get with her.
Okay, so then I looked at her like she had lost her mind, and she wasn’t even paying attention. She was so far in Chili-world that she had no idea that her stuff was messed up. When did the world start revolving around Chili Rodriguez? So then I wondered if I was blind to everything around me just like her.
“No, you didn’t just come in here with that,” I said.
“What?”
“Acting all stupid like that,” I added.
“What are you talking about?”
“This is my house and my room, don’t be throwing people out of here.”
“I thought you didn’t like her.”
“We started talking again, we’re cool.”
“No accounting for taste,” she said, sucking her teeth.
“Whatever,” I said, but at that point, Chili had gone way past getting on my nerves.
“Don’t think I’m supposed to like her now, ’cause I don’t.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“Good, so when you moving back to Virginia?”
“I don’t know.”
“What, I thought that this was what you wanted; everything can be like it was before now, right?”
“No, my mom’s dead, everything can’t be like it was before.”
“I know she’s dead, but what I mean is that you can move back into the house with your dad like you wanted to before.”
“I don’t know, maybe, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know, what’s wrong with you? Hello, look around, Kenisha, this place is whacked. I don’t know how you even live here. It’s all dark and ugly and old. No disrespect to you grandmother and all, but damn, this place is hideous. The only good thing is that brotha downstairs.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Trash everything and act like every man on this planet wants your tired, no-English-speaking ass.”
“’Cause th
ey do,” she said arrogantly, striking a pose.
“No, they don’t, they just want what you can do for them.”
“So, at least I do it,” she snapped.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked her.
“Nothing, forget it.”
“Oh, I see you been talking to LaVon. Well, he’s right. I’m not giving it up to him and nobody else until I feel like it.”
“That’s your problem, Kenisha, it’s all about you.”
“Look who’s talking, thinking you so hot that every guy on the planet wants you.”
“That’s right, they all do.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Your man do.”
“Did, past tense, that was from that grammar class you skipped last semester.”
“Do, he still do want me,” she said awkwardly.
I didn’t know why I wasn’t shocked. “Well, then, you can have him,” I said, then we just stopped and started staring and gritting on each other.
“You are a trip,” Jalisa said as soon as she came back in. “Can’t you act like you have sense sometimes?”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with me, what’s wrong with y’all, all hugged up with Diamond and all like she somebody. That skank tried to step up on my shit and take my boyfriend. Look, y’all acting all stupid and I’m tired of all this drama. I’m going, if you want to get a ride back to Virginia, come on, ’cause I’m leaving now.” The words came out fast and confusing.
“What did you say?” Jalisa asked.
“Don’t start that shit with me, Jalisa, you heard me.”
“I’m staying,” Jalisa said, smiling.
Chili slammed out and we looked at each other and burst out laughing. “That girl needs to have ‘drama queen’ tattooed to her ass as a federal warning label,” I said.
“She’s a trip,” Jalisa agreed, “and her whole future-trophy-wife-drama thing is seriously getting tired, real fast.”
“Tell me about it. Is Diamond okay, I mean, after Chili and all?”
“Yeah, she’s fine. I’m gonna meet her at Freeman later. But I’m glad the two of you are okay now.”
I nodded. “Yeah, me, too.”
“You think Diamond and Chili will ever get back?”
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