A Gift for My Sister: A Novel

by Ann Pearlman

  It’s 2:30 a.m. Only 11:30 Eastern time. I call Mom. No answer; she’s probably with her boyfriend, Jim. I leave a message and then call her cell phone, but it goes immediately to voice mail.

  “Call me as soon as you get this. No matter what time.” And then add, “I’m okay, but Troy’s in the hospital.”

  I lie in bed as fear races through my body, my heart throbbing in my neck and ears. I can’t sleep. Maybe my fear will keep him safe.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Changed Man

  Tara

  WE’RE ON THE bus, and I love being on the bus with the crew. It’s so cool—we each have our own section and there are beds that open from the sides, and a table with seats to sit and play cards, work on the computer, or practice. Aaron, Levy, and I have our own little area. Red Dog, Smoke, and T-Bone share a section. This bus is nicer than the one we took to Atlanta and New York. I’ve unpacked, and settled us into our home. There’s a skinny shelf for Levy’s toys, books, and road grader. I put the prism in the window, and rainbows sparkle all around when the sun hits just right. An electrical outlet by the table is available for the keyboard and laptops, and we have a microwave and fridge. Just like a camper. I had a friend once who lived in Coachville and I loved the perfect miniaturized snugness. Everything you needed was there, just smaller, nestled into each other, and stripped down. It contained only the expedient. And then there’s the sense of flexibility—you could move your tiny house anywhere you wanted, on any whim.

  Besides, it’s good practice not to have a lot of stuff.

  We don’t even really need costumes. Or I guess my costume is my streaked hair. We’re allowed to—no, supposed to—look like real people. Not like actresses, who have to be perfect and beautiful all the time.

  Though sexy is good. Sexy is very good. And I have a sequined black body suit and a fuchsia one, which matches the streaks in my hair so the lights bounce. The dudes wear street clothes.

  Anyway, we wake up and stop at McDonald’s. I get sausage biscuits with egg for all three of us and hash browns and coffee for Aaron and me, and milk for Levy. We squeeze ketchup over almost everything. Levy swishes his hash browns in it and licks it off. I add hot sauce to mine.

  We drink orange juice from our fridge and get a coffeepot going.

  There are leftover double chocolate chip cookies that I made before we left Detroit. Don’t know how they made it through the Chicago and Minneapolis concerts.

  “Those cookies aren’t stale?”

  “Just dip ’em in milk,” Smoke says. Smoke is dark-skinned, almost pure black, and unbelievably, he has blue eyes. As soon as I met him, I saw that his eyes were the color of blue-black ink. “Never saw a dude of your complexion with blue eyes,” I said. We were all together rehearsing “Prohibitions of Prison” then.

  Aaron and Red leaned closer. “Hey, how’d you get those?” Aaron asked.

  “Those some kinda lens?” Red guessed.

  Smoke just shook his head and said, “Born with them.”

  “I always assumed they were like mine,” Red goes. “Like black people’s. And I’ve been knowing you all my life.”

  Smoke is a big dude, extra large, and repositions himself slowly like he’s carrying weight that’s more than he can bear. He moves like he considers each step.

  He’s one of those people who says very little but when he does, people listen.

  His slow, disinterested exterior vanishes when he plays his drums. Now he plays a hand drum, a djembe, and his fingers move so quickly they’re a blur. During his solo, his hands play the bass and slap simultaneously, or so quickly that you don’t get the rebound. And when the rhythm is slow, the world hangs in the space between the beats, and that drum of his resonates in my heart. Smoke went to school with Red and Aaron, and grew up around the corner.

  T-Bone is the newest member. Poreless skin and liquid eyes. Tall. A rim around his lips like a Benin bronze sculpture. The girls go crazy for him. He has a great singing voice, and can do slow gospel style, too. Aaron met him at Sissy’s church, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, where they sang for the boy’s choir. T-Bone was working with another crew, tried singing with us, and stayed.

  Red Dog is Aaron’s brother from another mother. By that I mean they grew up together, know each other backward and forward. Absolute loyalty and love. It’s like if I wanted Aaron, Red came with the package. And Red had to accept me in the mix. Not an easy thing to do. Because a white girl in a rap crew is way weird. Controversial, you might say. They have to deal with me. Deal with me dealing with all the girls drooling over the crew. “You’re just, like, notches on their belts,” I tell the crew. As if they’d mind.

  “I’ll take that notch,” Red laughs, like I meant to say something nasty.

  “Or you’re potential support for some baby and an easy way to make a living.”

  Aaron shoots me a look to quit being such a mom. Later he says, “They grown ass men. In order for this to work, you can’t tell them what to do.”

  I know he’s right, but I guess it’s whatever teeny part of me that’s like Sky. I do think of the consequences, the worst-case scenarios, even though half the time I disregard them because they don’t seem worth passing up what I want to do. I guess that’s what the crew thinks, too.

  Now, Aaron can kind of be bossy sometimes. Controlling. Sometimes he’s a boss for me, my protector. Like, when we started happening, Special Intent just said, “Tara’s with us. She’s the music. And she’s my angel. Ain’t none of this happenin’ without her. She’s our key. You got a beef, let’s hear it or leave.”

  They looked at him and then at me. He’s the only one who would ever think of me as an angel.

  “Key. That’s a great name for her,” Smoke said. And that’s how I got my name, Key, or Li’l Key.

  “She knows what’s up. She’ll deal,” Aaron said. That meant I was supposed to be cool with the bitches and the pot. No one in the crew does any hard drugs. Not that I know of, anyway. No cocaine, either powder or rock, no heroin, no X, no crystal. They smoke some weed, but not around my baby. That was clear from the get-go.

  And then Special said, “Another thing. We’re not gonna be takin’ everybody on this tour. Just us. This is professional. Besides, if we spend all our profit on keeping people in motel rooms, we won’t be able to do what’s right by us or them.”

  But sometimes Special says something and there’s a look in his eye, a set of his mouth, and I know he’s unmoveable. Like telling me to butt out of the crew’s business. Like, once I asked him, back when we were first living together, “Where’re you going? When’ll you be back?”

  He stepped back and narrowed his eyes slightly. “I just got outta jail. I’m not signing up for no bars.” His voice was measured. “I’ll be back when I get back. You want me, call.” He slid on his shoes.

  I was dashed with cold, but planted my feet solid and tilted my chin, reaching for my spunk. “Dude, I’m not controlling you. Chill.” I nodded and lowered my voice. “I’m just wanting to make my own plans.”

  His eyes softened.

  And then I pursed my lips and pitched him a sly grin and said, as cocky as I could, “And I, like, want you in them.”

  Aaron laughed then. “You got my number, T.”

  But I haven’t asked him where he was going again.

  He said, “You know I wouldn’t do anything to screw us up, right?” I guess that was his way to promise me fidelity. I guess he was feeling my distance.

  We were in our apartment, Levy sleeping in his crib, both of us watching his fingers twitch slightly and his eyes slide under his lids dreaming. We stood there in awe of what we had done, making another human being. Still seems like a miracle to me, even when Levy is crying or screaming.

  I guess I put myself in the middle of a storm of my own worst dread even messing with a good-looking rap star, knowing there were countless girls wanting to spread their legs for him. So I protect myself. In truth, I’d protect myself regardless. That�
��s the only thing I learned from my dad.

  So I say to him, “I’m my father’s daughter. Two can play that game. And I don’t want to play. I’ll just be gone.” Now, that’s true. I’m always ready to bolt.

  He asked me to marry him when we were in Atlanta, right after the concert, while the crowd was still stomping and screaming and he was charged with their excitement and his own success. “Marry me,” he said in his bossy way.

  I knew the women we’d have to wade through who would be jamming their hands in his pockets and sliding them down the back of his pants just to get to our bus. “After the tour is over.” I tested him. Testing myself, too.

  “Good idea. We’ll get married in our new house.”

  Anyway, in our bus we’re a family moving around the USA together.

  I finish up my coffee and gaze out the window at the flat earth we’re riding through, so horizontal the land is like the sky except different colors.

  Smoke plays with Levy, trying to teach him how to draw.

  Aaron has grabbed some paper and is writing. I know he can’t hear anything except the words in his head. His writing looks like a map from outer space, because he arrows in new ideas in oblongs. I read his words upside down.

  I don’t know why, but there’s something compelling about watching him create. I don’t have access to his mind, and oh, how I want it. I guess I obtain a window into his soul by observing his thoughts drip out of his fingertips. If only I knew what was in his mind, I’d know exactly how safe I am.

  Occasionally I long for the classical stuff I played for so many years. And today is one of those times. The Iowa landscape looks like the day after the very first one, the day before God started decorating the world. So I stand up, get my keyboard, and plug it in.

  Fauré’s Requiem feels perfect for Aaron’s lyrics. The notes vibrate from my keyboard and pulse our bus, and I hum the voices, the melody, that accompany them.

  And then Special Intent adds his final lines,

  In this game

  With death callin’ my name.

  As though old Fauré has inspired him. He reads his song and says, “Hey. Let’s do this. See what you think.” Smoke, Red, and T-Bone gather around us, Levy under Smoke’s arm.

  I stop playing to listen.

  “No. You keep doing that, whatever it is.”

  “Fauré’s Requiem. It’s, like, about Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.”

  “Perfect,” Special says, “Amazing.”

  And he starts the hook, and I tease in the music, humming the voice melody softly. And Special raps the chorus and we end together on the last line, the one with death calling his name, and I do the Ahhhhmmmmen, like it’s the end of the world or the fresh beginning. Who knows, who ever knows, what way it’s going to go.

  And the crew, man, they’re quiet, glancing at each other and shaking their heads. “That’s tight. Too cool, dude,” T-Bone says.

  “Gettin’ away from straight-up rap,” Red says.

  “We don’t have to fit in somebody else’s box. We make our own,” Aaron says.

  “Sure, with a baby-mama and the baby in tow.” T-Bone wanted to know if he could bring his baby-mamas (he’s got two of them) when he heard Levy and I were on the tour.

  Aaron said, “Yep, when they can play or do something significant. When they can do a keyboard better than Tara. Or rap as well as one of us.” That shut T-Bone up, but I know it’s salt under his skin.

  Smoke says, in his slow and lazy voice, “Mixing cultures together gives some staggering product.”

  Special looks up at me and smiles. “We keep getting better and better.”

  “Let’s put some Africa in there.” Africa is the name of Smoke’s djembe. And we go at it again.

  We work on it through the plain, through what’s left of the cornfield. Under a heaven that is pale blue, almost white, but absent clouds, the green stretches out to meet it like a sea . . . and we’re the only ones on the road, me and my crew, my family, as we work on this song about our Detroit.

  And then in between the line about vacant lots, my cell phone rings.

  “Mom?” I walk to the front of the bus so the crew can keep working.

  “Tara, where are you?” When she says my name first in a sentence like that, I’m alarmed. Her voice is trembly and yet hurried.

  “Iowa, I think. On the way to Denver.”

  “You okay?” It’s not a question as much as a demand for me to relieve her.

  “Yes. Why? What’s up?”

  There’s silence. I think the call is dropped. “Mom?”

  “Tara. I have some news.”

  I know she means bad news. I sit down a few seats behind Thumble, our driver,

  “Okay. I’m ready.”

  “It’s Troy. He’s in the hospital.”

  “What happened?” I immediately think a car accident.

  “He has some kind of infection.”

  “What?”

  “One of those antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. A flesh-eating bacteria. Looks like it’s in his lungs and bloodstream.”

  I didn’t think they were real. Something made up for science fiction movies, or to scare people into staying away from each other. “Sky and Rachel? Are they okay?”

  “Yes. But Troy’s fighting for his life.”

  “Sky . . .” She’s been through so much. “It’s not fair.”

  I hear Mom breathing. She’s not pacing, I can tell that, too.

  I was just five when I first met Troy. Sky had everything: Mom’s favor, Troy’s attention. Good grades. Straight blond hair and a golden tan. Her spectacular gray eyes stopped everyone in their tracks. I never take them for granted. And by the time she met Troy, she was playing with eye shadow and each color—green, brown, or mauve—brought out entirely different tones.

  My eyes are just plain brown, hazel maybe.

  And she had the coolest two friends, Marissa and Jennifer. Marissa was a cheerleader with brown ringlets and Jennifer was the high school tennis star. The three of them hung out together, so they were never lonely, and did all the things I wasn’t allowed to do: wear makeup, shave their legs, go out on dates, go downtown by themselves, go dancing. I snuck around outside Sky’s bedroom door listening to them, until she caught me and complained to Mom. For a while after that, they had sleepovers at Marissa’s house.

  I heard her tell Mom she hated me after she caught me eavesdropping on her sleepover. Mom said it’s just the way of sisters. Sibling rivalry, it’s called. I puzzled over that. I tried out saying I hate you to her, but my words fell limp, without any enthusiasm. I wanted to be like her, with a life that was effortless and flawless.

  Though I guess that’s not true now. Guess that’s not true since the miscarriages. Though when she learned that Rachel escaped the genetic curse, everything went back to the smooth predictability Sky always manages. Until Mia died, that is.

  I hear Mom clicking her tongue with anxiety.

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “When are you getting to L.A.?”

  “Three more days. A day to get to Denver . . . we’re going nonstop, and then the concert, and then a day to get to L.A.”

  “I’m taking a flight out tomorrow to be with Sky and help out with Rachel.”

  I stand up, hunt up my backpack, fish around it for a pen. “What’s his number?”

  I write it down.

  “Mom. He’s young. And healthy. He’ll be okay.”

  “Please don’t give me that ‘young and healthy’ nonsense.” I know Mom’s thinking about Sky’s dad and his death from pancreatic cancer at thirty-four.

  “It can’t happen. It just can’t happen. Sky can’t have a father and a husband die before they’re forty. The odds, the math is against it.”

  I start crying.

  Mom doesn’t say anything.

  “Troy’s like my brother.”

  “I wanted you to know what’s going on and that I’ll be leaving for Los Angeles today.
”

  I guess she won’t be coming to my concert. “Maybe by Friday, he’ll be better.”

  “I want to come to your concert. We’ll just have to see . . .”

  Troy is more important. I know that. I know that. But Sky always takes precedence over me. My pregnancy with Levy was dwarfed by her miscarriages. It’s always about her. And because she’s so damn good, she gets the sympathy; and because I’ve never been the good kid, but the weird, rebellious one, I get pushed aside. Mom would say I isolated myself, but I felt pushed out.

  I don’t mean to whine. I’m happy with how things are now. All those sad, lonely times strengthened me to do what I’m doing now. But sometimes, I miss being as important to Mom. I thought at my concert, for that one night, just one night, all my family would be there to see me. But one way or another, I don’t get that.

  I consider flying to L.A. as soon as we hit Denver, but I can’t leave the crew or skip the concert. I have contract obligations. “I’ll come to see him as soon as we get to town.” I know Mom considers that putting myself above family, but she doesn’t understand what Aaron and I are carrying.

  I try to explain. “We have to do this concert because we’re responsible for the entire crew. They can’t do it without us, and we have legal obligations.”

  “Well. I have to finish packing. I’ll call you when I get there.”

  “Maybe there’s something we can do to help.”

  She’s quiet.

  “I love you.” But she hung up. Or the call was dropped. I don’t know which.

  I stay near the front of the bus, the gang still fiddling with the transition between hook and verse. They laugh, and I feel their excitement and cheer.

  I moved out as soon as I told Mom I was pregnant. I saw the expression on her face, that worried, what-should-I-do-now expression that threatened to fizzle away my joy. I knew what she thought, how crazy and self-destructive my relationship with an ex-juvie convict, black dude must be. She said our dream was “immature nonsense.” That’s what she said. So when Aaron said he had a car I could use to go back and forth to high school for the two weeks before I graduated, I packed up my keyboard and some clothes and was gone.