Sometime that winter, Vincent Lowry asked Angie out. He was cute, tall, popular, and uninterested in her before. They dated for weeks and soon enough, she had sex with him. Ella helped her through the experience, even showing her how to get birth control pills from Planned Parenthood without their mother’s knowledge. She felt adventurous, with Ella guiding her through the whole rite of passage. After the first, painful time, she thought she might like sex. When Vincent inevitably moved on, she wasn’t sad. She’d lost her virginity before the end of high school, and that felt like a kind of achievement. And it prompted Ella to tell Angie about her first time, on the night their father died.
When Ella had run out of their father’s barn, upset over his comments about her weight, at first she didn’t see Jeff, the new exercise boy, lounging by another trainer’s stall.
“You certainly seem to be in a hurry,” he said.
She looked up. She had a slight crush on him, liked his muscular frame, his downy mustache. He was nineteen or twenty, and one of the less productive workers at the track. He liked to wait to be told what to do.
“Do I look fat to you?” she’d asked him.
Jeff smiled, as if he’d just won a little prize, and said, “Hardly. You look good to me.”
They fooled around in Thompson Jenkins’s barn, where the horses smelled different from her father’s, medicinal and rank. First, she let him touch her breasts and then let his tongue touch her nipple. The feeling was so electrifying that she let him do it over and over, his mouth moving between breasts. And then they went all the way. She thought, looking back, that maybe she’d actually heard her father’s low, stricken cries.
“El-la, El-la!” she imagined their father called out, with the horses frantically swishing their tails, aware something was wrong. But she didn’t stop. That’s the part that killed her—wondering did she actually hear him calling out to her while she was having sex? Did she ignore him?
She cried as she told the story. Angie cried too as she squeezed Ella’s shaking hand, wanting to still it.
Ella’s recovery process encouraged faith in God. After some research, she decided to join Unity, a “metaphysical Christianity” church on Second Avenue. Angie thought the church itself was so pretty, with its white brick façade, and modern, windowed vestibule. During the service, no one talked of sin or God’s wrath or your debt to Jesus for his sacrifice. They followed the teachings of Eric Butterworth, an affable white man with a kind face who wasn’t scary, punitive, nor very preachy. He called church a “worth-ship” service and said pithy things like “God can only do for you what He can do through you.” Their mother thought it was too new age; it didn’t quote the Bible enough for her taste. Ella said she liked that you didn’t have to use the word God at all, that you could replace it with “love” or “universe” if you wanted. “I think God is sick of hearing His name called, quite frankly,” she said. Angie liked that at the end of each service congregants joined hands and sang, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. Let there be peace on Earth, the peace that was meant to be.” She liked holding Ella’s hand while surrounded by strangers. She felt hopeful.
That year Ella enjoyed going for long drives in the car, liked crossing the border to Windsor, Ontario, just for the change of scenery. Sometimes they had Chinese food, like in the old days with their father. Other times, she and Angie walked along its main street, licking ice cream cones, looking into the shop windows, marveling at how clean and quiet everything was in Canada. She told Angie about life in Nashville, what it was like those two years in the aunties’ boarding house. “Aunt Bea had the biggest bed I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said. “And the biggest heart to go with it. She was forever taking in some down-on-his-luck man, letting him stay in the back room. Folks forever coming and going, coming and going.”
“That must have been exciting,” said Angie.
Ella licked her cone. “Too exciting sometimes. One of those nasty men did some things to me he shouldn’t have.”
Angie hesitated. “Did he…?”
Ella nodded. “Put his fingers where they didn’t belong.”
Angie’s ice cream dripped down her hand. “Anything else?”
Ella shook her head. “I think that was bad enough, don’t you?”
Six months into her sister’s sobriety, Angie made a point of saying to Ella, “You’re so brave, to go through this.” The counselor at the last family session had privately told Nanette they’d reached a fragile, pivotal point in Ella’s recovery; the family should be alert to signs of relapse. The idea that they’d have to start all over terrified Angie. She wanted Ella on the other side of this and so she tried hard to be her cheerleader, to rah-rah her into recovery success. “You’ve always been brave,” Angie noted. “Look how you came to Detroit all by yourself on the train. Aunt Bea said you weren’t even scared.”
Ella puffed on her ever-present cigarette. “I was scared when I got on that train, so I don’t know what the hell Aunt Bea was talking about.” She fell silent. “That’s what recovery feels like,” she finally said. “Like I’m moving toward somewhere better, but I gotta get through this long, scary ride before I can get there.”
With Denise visiting from Atlanta, one of the last things the family did together was watch the Motown 25 TV special. Of course, the highlight was Michael Jackson performing “Billie Jean,” doing his moonwalk. No one had expected his debonair style. “I was worried he wasn’t gonna make that transition from child singer to adult entertainer,” said Nanette. “Looks like he made it all right!” The girls loved it all—Marvin Gaye’s riveting performance (which would be his last), The Temptations battling it out with The Four Tops and The Supremes gathering on the stage together one more time.
The night before she left for Nigeria, Ella lay prone on the sofa, arm across her forehead, glasses perched low on her small nose. Nearby, Angie slouched in the matching leather chair. She imagined this was how her sister had looked in rehab during a therapy session, or maybe afterward in her shared room.
Ella got up from the sofa, headed to the den’s stereo, popped in a cassette tape. In rehab, with Angie’s help she’d put together a mixtape of favorite songs. The cassette case had her ID number scrawled across it on a piece of masking tape. Al Jarreau’s jazzy voice floated out over them. I hardly had a bellyful, he sang. Never knew a new bicycle. The year of recovery had subdued Ella, taken away that reckless air that once had Angie both frightened and excited. Now Angie felt protective of Ella, as though she were a recently released prisoner needing to be brought up to speed on the ways life had changed on the outside.
In May Angie, Denise, and their mother had thrown a little party for Ella to celebrate her one-year anniversary. Her oldest friend Evelyn had been there, along with a smattering of friends from back in the day, people who’d faded from her life while she was lost to heroin. A middle-aged man named Joe, a new friend from rehab, also came. Nigel was there. Nigel! He’d been clean for three years to her one. Their mother made it clear she didn’t like seeing him, felt Nigel was the one who brought drugs into Ella’s life. But they’d gotten back together after the party, and somewhere in the span of a couple weeks, made the snap decision to go back to Nigeria. Their mother was now resigned to it, said she felt better about Ella not taking such a big trip alone. Angie knew her mother was praying that Nigel would look out for her.
Two days before Ella was to leave, she and Angie went shopping to buy new clothes for her trip. Initially, Ella didn’t want to go to that store. “All those fat-girl dresses and old-lady stretch pants? I don’t think so.” But Angie knew better, had saved a little newspaper clipping about the store’s takeover by the same company that owned Victoria’s Secret and The Limited, how LB’s clothes were now trendy. She’d hung the article on her bulletin board, alongside a treasure map of images and quotes and photos conjuring Ella’s recovery. “They’re really fashion forward n
ow,” she told her big sister. “Trust me.” Ella walked through the store with eyes wide and mouth agape. She hadn’t shopped here in six years, since her last trip to Nigeria. Together they chose flattering, peasant-style loose tops, cotton wrap dresses, and comfy but stylish jeans.
Now, Ella’s bags all packed, house quiet, Angie watched her sister closely. As she lifted a cigarette to her lips and sucked hard, loose flesh hung from her arms, remnants of her weight loss and gain over the years. Angie stared at the stump where her sister’s ring finger used to be. But we got by, sang Al Jarreau. Lord knows we got by. Ella looked so tired, so worn out that Angie found herself grateful for this trip, grateful for a break from having to see her sister in this “transitional” phase, as the drug counselor called it. She couldn’t wait for Ella to leave so she could return transformed—rejuvenated and youthful and sensuous again, all the things a trip to the motherland had done for her before.
“What are you looking forward to the most?” Angie asked her, disrupting the fragile silence.
Ella took a final drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out in a paper plate of half-eaten Boston cream pie. “Getting back some of what I lost.”
Angie realized she’d been wondering all these years if Ella actually ever did.
Lying across her bed, still wiped out from her brief high, Angie tried to hold onto the anger she’d felt earlier, but she couldn’t conjure any outrage. Rather, she felt rejected—inconsequential in the life her mother was moving toward, some shiny, fresh, southern start. She rose, went to her altar, pulled open the vanity’s bottom drawer, and lifted out a bundle of letters, each written on soft blue par avion paper, each folded into its own envelope. There were seven in all and as she plopped back onto her bed and crossed her legs, she spread out the letters in front of her. She arranged them in chronological order of their postmarks, from July to December. Read together they created a rich narrative of adventure, allowing Angie to fantasize that only good things had happened to her sister in Nigeria: a successful newspaper career filled with cool people and exotic Nigerian locales. The last letter arrived after Ella’s death and for a long time Angie couldn’t bare to open it, fearful of what she might learn or worse, what it would fail to reveal. When finally she did open the letter, she pored over it for clues, read and re-read the last two lines:
Come visit during Spring Break . . . we can just take off together, see the North and maybe a few other countries on the continent. That is, if I’m still here.
Love you,
Ella
Based on the return addresses, she could track Ella’s travels in the Nigerian capital: Lagos Island, Ikeja, Surulere. Alluring names that Angie had memorized, names she’d let spill over her tongue many times over the past four years. Since her encounter with Solo, she’d felt a force beyond her control pushing her toward Nigeria and now with her mother’s own plans, it was the only thing to do. Now was her chance. She kissed each letter, and hoped for the same transformation that Ella had once gone through. She wanted this trip to be a hajj of some sort, yearned to return more certain of who she was, of what she could do in the world. Figure out what type of black person to be.
And to understand Ella more, maybe solve the mystery of her death. That is, if I’m still here.
The trip scared her. It was a daunting proposition. Africa was so far away, with unsafe water, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and yes, dangerous roads. What did she hope to find anyway? She was no detective, had no stomach for investigating. Besides, which Ella was she chasing after? The twenty-one-year-old version who went to Lagos at the height of her powers, or the one who went six years later, newly sober and chastened? The latter one was an apparition, never returned. And yet, the younger version didn’t exist either, evaporated in a mist of drug-addled highs.
One thing felt certain: Detroit had changed. The passionate radicals of the seventies—themselves fueled by the city’s 1967 uprising—where were they? Gone. Or addicted to crack. And those who shot up were at risk of getting the new deadly disease, the one targeting gays and needle-using addicts. Mayor Coleman Young was mired in scandals reported with glee by an antagonistic press, and now the city had Devil’s Night to cope with. She and her mother sat up half the night on Halloween Eve, guarding the house against rampaging arsonists. She had to admit, it was probably best for her mother to move away. Safer. But Detroit was home, where all the memories of her big sister were rooted. She didn’t want to follow her mother to Atlanta, a place where Ella had never been. Wouldn’t that completely erase her sister’s life, the physical proof of her existence? That felt wrong.
But Angie didn’t want to be left behind either. And so, Nigeria.
She awoke to a dry mouth and the smell of coffee wafting toward her alongside the upbeat lyrics of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” That meant Denise was listening to the Sunday oldies show on WJLB. Angie lay there in bed as a few more Motown songs played. Sixties music held no allure for her. But Denise was different; she loved those tunes. Angie could hear her sister’s voice talking over the music, imagined Denise telling their mother a juicy story involving someone else’s business; she could see her acting it out, making their mother laugh. Everyone always said Nanette and her daughter Denise were alike, and in obvious ways they were. Both were born under the zodiac sign of Taurus, both loved good gossip, both were practical minded. And they were equipped with the same moral compass. But Angie felt she’d gotten to know their mother these past few years in a way Denise couldn’t appreciate, saw her chastened by grief, by a huge loss that had softened her positions, quieted her, made her more pensive. More interesting. Denise wasn’t privy to this subtlety because she lived five hundred miles away. Angie and her mother had formed a bond in the absence of the other daughters. She’d gotten her mother to try new things like independent films and health food and natural hair. But when Denise was around, that side of her mother evaporated and she reverted back to Denise’s mirror image. She went to see corny comedies with black actors, ate fried foods, and got her usual press-and-curl. Denise and their mother became a unit again, and Angie couldn’t find a place to enter. In their presence, Angie seldom even tried to add to the conversation. The mere thought of being the third wheel made her want to lie in bed all day, hide out. But she couldn’t. She had to get up, go to work. Today the store was hosting its plus-size fashion show for teens. There’d be a lot to do.
She could hear their conversation long before she got to the kitchen. Denise’s voice was loud, traveled. “What I don’t understand is why she has to be protected from knowing the truth?”
“I want to tell her in my own way and time, OK?” said their mother.
“Tell me what?” said Angie as she entered the kitchen.
“Nothing,” said Nanette.
“Obviously, since you two were talking about me, it must be something.”
“Why do you always think somebody’s talking about you?” asked Denise.
“Because you are. And behind my back, yet again.”
“Whatever I say, I can say to your face,” Denise noted.
“So say it.”
“Apparently it’s not for me to say.”
“That never stopped you before from blabbing your mouth.”
“At least I know what’s going on.”
“Hey! Stop it, OK?” said their mother.
They moved, the three of them, in a clipped silence for several seconds as Angie headed to the refrigerator, grabbed the orange juice, and poured herself a glass.
“Want some coffee?” Denise asked brightly as Angie sat down. She was like that. Arguments didn’t linger with Denise. She had her say—could bite your head off with her sharp tongue—and was instantly ready to move on. To her that was what sisters did.
“No, I don’t want coffee,” snapped Angie, still annoyed. “I gotta get to work early. Busy day.”
“Do you have to work late?” asked their mothe
r.
“Not really. I should be home by five.”
“I’ll fry some catfish.”
Angie shrugged nonchalantly, even though they all knew she loved her mother’s catfish.
Work was nonstop all morning. The workers set up a runway and folding chairs through the middle aisles, pushing clothing racks to the side. Angie and her manager Lana and two other sales girls gathered all the models’ clothing into the line of dressing rooms. Angie was assigned three teens, charged with helping them dress quickly to head onto the runway. The show, which started at noon, moved along smoothly at first, with the girls giggling nervously backstage before walking jauntily down the catwalk in their coordinated outfits. Angie was fascinated by how the white girls had each given themselves the Madonna look—bleached, platinum-blond hair cut into a curly crop, heavy, black brows, and bright red lipstick. In contrast, the two black girls had Lisa Bonet-style flowing tresses, thanks to their curly perms.
Toward the end of the show, the girl wearing the leggings and oversized T-shirt stepped down the runway too confidently in her stilettos and tripped. To a chorus of gasps, she fell face-first, quickly got up, and ran off the runway. Lana pushed the next girl out and the show continued. The fallen girl’s mother rose from the audience, found her daughter crying in the dressing room, grabbed her hand, and swiftly left. The whole incident made Angie think of Ella and those diet pills, the teenage rejection of her own body. Angie was annoyed with herself: Why hadn’t she stood her ground with Lana over the jelly shoes?
Afterward, as the workers broke down the runway and folded chairs, Lana said, “I think we recovered well, don’t you?” She rattled on, not waiting for a response, eyes brimming with tears. “And you know, I feel good about the whole thing, I mean, you know, despite that unfortunate moment. But she was great, she got right up and I think it went well, don’t you?”
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