Come to think of it, Breonna never tried to attract male attention. She was probably on some level afraid of it, because she had been so often deceived and then grievously harmed by it. She was the funny homegirl, the cool-as-hell chick who didn’t mind standing around with the dope boys, shooting the breeze, and who felt safest when surrounded by guys who thought of her as one of them, and hardly saw her as a girl at all.
“She might be over there by the spot,” Ibrahim said.
“Which one?” Manny asked.
Ibrahim told him, and at the next intersection, Manny made a sharp turn, heading back toward their neighborhood, and one of the bungalows their father rented out.
The house was quiet when they got there. No one was outside, though inside Ibrahim had no doubt there would be between a half-dozen to ten dudes, sleeping off the long night and preparing for the day ahead.
These places were in some ways precisely what they were portrayed as in the media—places of crime and despair. There were drugs, of course, and where you had drugs, there were also guns. And sometimes, people who used the drugs, though they were around the house less often than one might think.
The houses were also a sort of clubhouse. Dudes who couldn’t go home, or who didn’t have homes to go to chilled out and watched TV, played videogames or screwed their girl in one of the back rooms. Ambitious little kids who wanted in on the game hung around and waited for someone to give them a few dollars to pick up food from the carryout, or run a small package down the street.
Occasionally, the kitchen was used for the cook-up but mostly not, since Ibrahim’s father owned the house, and that was the flimsy line he drew in the sand. Drugs and guns galore in both the houses he owned and rented out to the dealers, but ‘don’t cook shit!’ was his idea of a dealbreaker.
When Manny and he got out of the car and saw that no one was outside, they shoved open the gate and started hollering for someone to come open the door before they approached it. Everyone inside would be either asleep or jumpy. Manny had just identified himself and hollered again when the wrought iron gate and then the front door swung up open.
The dude who stood there was only vaguely familiar to Ibrahim. He hadn’t been around much, and the faces were beginning to change much more often than they used to. Zac had been complaining lately that the business was getting more dangerous, because they didn’t know anyone anymore. Gone were the days when your homeboy was really your homeboy on a deep level, because your families went way back to when your granny and his granny came from down South together.
That’s why them Jamaican posses be runnin’ the game in New York, Zac opined. They got bonds that go back as far and deep as the ghettos of Kingston. Ain’t nobody can penetrate that.
Now, what they had in Oakland was a lot of new faces.
“Wha’s up?” Manny said, greeting the kid who opened the door. “You seen Breonna?’
“Who?”
“Light-skinned shorty with …”
Losing his patience, Manny hissed his teeth and shoved the kid aside, pushing his way into the house and looking around for someone else who might know.
Finally, they found someone even Ibrahim knew. A young dude they called Shank, for reasons that were self-explanatory, was asleep on the coach. Manny nudged him awake with the toe of his sneaker, and Shank directed them to one of the rear rooms.
Ibrahim and Manny looked at each other, shaking their heads in exasperation. It had been just that easy. Brittany probably wouldn’t have thought to come here because truth be told, she probably didn’t know that much about her niece’s movement and daily life.
The door to the room where Shank directed them was locked. Or it appeared to be, but after jiggling the handle and shoving a little, Ibrahim realized it was just wedged shut, a mattress on the floor shoved in front of it to slow down—but definitely not stop—anyone who had a mind to enter.
Another mattress was set far back in the room, just under the window, and on it, Breonna was curled into a fetal position. Still wearing her pink Timberland boots with jeans shorts and a pink top, she was on her side, her hair spread about behind her, facing the wall.
“Bree,” Ibrahim said.
Manny expelled a deep sigh. “C’mon, girl. Get up. Your auntie lookin’ for you.”
“Bree,” Ibrahim said again.
She didn’t stir, so he went closer and kneeled next to the mattress, putting a hand on her shoulder. As soon as he did, he knew something wasn’t right. Tugging with more force he turned her over.
“Fuck,” Manny breathed.
Breonna’s face was a mass of bruises. Her right eye was swollen shut, there were twin knots above both the right and left brows and her jaw had ballooned to twice its natural size. Dried blood was encrusted at her nostrils, and at the corner of her bruised and split lip.
“Bree!” Ibrahim said again. This time it came out as a gasp.
She didn’t move. She didn’t respond.
Putting his head to her chest, he tried to hear something, anything, but there was nothing, not even the whisper of a weak heartbeat.
But what was worse—what Ibrahim would always remember, even more than her battered-in face—was the sight of her hands.
They had curled in on themselves, clenched into loose fists, as though she had been gritting herself against pain. And her nails. Her short nails, chipped and ripped like she had been in a fight, were painted the identical soft, little-girl pink as her top and shoes.
34
Now
Kaleem and Asha come spilling into the house around three in the afternoon, their faces alight with recent laughter. Kaleem’s arm is around his wife’s waist and Asha’s face is flushed. Maybe they went to a motel or something? And the talk of brunch was all a ploy to get away for a few hours of complete privacy?
Jada remembered how embarrassing it had been when Kaleem and Asha came to stay just after graduating from college. Ibrahim was home, and Kal had been under firm orders to sleep on the couch. It was stupid, Jada knew, even as she lay down the rule. It was clear from the way Asha looked at her son that the girl was not just in love, but deeply in lust with him as well. There was no way Kaleem would be sleeping anywhere other than with her.
Of course, she has always known her son is handsome. He looks like his father, after all. But seeing him through Asha’s eyes was something else. It reminded her of the headiness of new love, the way she used to almost obsess about Ibrahim—waking up and thinking of him before anything or anyone else, looking at the phone and willing it to ring, or sitting on her hands to prevent them from paging him, just one more time in case he hadn’t gotten the previous one.
It happens, she would tell herself with all the silliness of an eighteen-year-old in love. Sometimes pages don’t go through. Sometimes you have to do it more than once.
Ibrahim was her drug back then. And he made her every bit as high as Asha looks right now.
Kal tosses his keys on the entryway table and looks around.
“Where’s my young ‘un?” he asks.
“Napping,” Jada responds. “He wore me out. He’s an energetic boy.”
Asha laughs. “Isn’t he? I think he’s going to walk early. Lemme just go check …”
She heads toward the back, drawn by that irrepressible maternal instinct that Jada recalled as having woken her up several times a night when Kaleem was a newborn, sending her tiptoeing to the next room just to make sure he was breathing. His silent sleep had been just as nerve-wracking as his wakeful cries.
Baby, Ibrahim would say, voice deepened and rough with sleep. Leave him alone. If he sleeps, we can sleep.
I know, she’d reply. But I just … I have to check.
And Kaleem would be lying there on his back, arms and legs spread and plump lips slightly open, breathing soft, regular, healthy-baby breaths. Oblivious to the hum of panic that permeated her being just about every single moment of every day since she had become a mother. Oblivious to the terrifying depth of h
er love.
Well … in that regard, perhaps little has changed.
“He didn’t come back?” Kaleem asks now, collapsing on the sofa, across from her.
“No. Called though. Said he ran across an old friend.”
Kaleem’s eyes narrow. “Ran across, where?”
Jada shrugs. Her thought exactly.
“I don’t know,” she says. “But I think I’ll head back. I have work Monday, and your father says he may spend the night.”
She had told Ibrahim on the phone that she wouldn’t leave without him, but now that Kaleem and Asha are back, she feels like her job here may be done. They’ll want to get back to their routine and she would be underfoot, an extra person for them to consider and cater to.
Kaleem looks confused, and she can’t stand to see it. Because she has no explanations to give him, and because this experience—of being unable to explain her husband to his son—is far too familiar.
When he was sent to prison, Ibrahim decided that he wanted to have no contact with Kaleem, having gotten in his head the idea that if he stayed too closely in touch, if he let Kaleem visit, he would … infect him somehow with “prison culture.” That Kaleem would begin to see Black men in prison as “normal”.
Ibrahim hadn’t asked her opinion on the matter and when she expressed it, he overruled her. And she let him. On something so crucial, so meaningful, she just … let him. But by then, that had been the pattern of their marriage and it hadn’t occurred to her that she could just insist or refuse to go along with it.
Ibrahim had been not just her husband, he was her shelter, her center, her everything. He was the one who helped her make sense of the adult world, since she had been so young when they married. Of course, he had been young, too, though to her he hadn’t seemed it.
Their wedding had been in her parents’ church, a concession Ibrahim happily made just to get their approval, and have her father agree to walk her down the aisle, despite his misgivings. And Jada knew it was also because he realized it was the final nod to her father’s influence in her life.
After they were married, he would be the one to lead her. Ibrahim had even consented to premarital counseling. Her father was worried about their immaturity, and probably secretly wanted pastor to talk them out of it.
But he hadn’t tried, and in any event would not have been successful if he had. Instead, he talked to them about compromise and hardship, and partnership and about the various forms of love. He told them that there might be times in the future when the glow of romantic love dimmed, and that they would need to remember to lean on the other forms of love that would endure and see them through to a time when romance may return to their marriage once again. He gave them Bible verses to study, and in the final counseling session asked them to think about one that he might read at the ceremony and craft his remarks around.
Jada and Ibrahim chose Ruth 1:16.
“Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.”
The pastor had smiled at their choice.
Even now, the decision to leave Ibrahim, even if just to go back home to prepare for work, feels traitorous.
“Wait,” Kaleem says. “Who’s this old friend?”
“Kaleem, I don’t know,” she says impatiently. “When he comes back, maybe you can ask him.”
“So, you’re leaving right now?” he asks. “You don’t want to wait a little?”
“No.” Jada shakes her head. “I’ve had enough of waiting for your father to come back to me.” Her voice breaks a little. “He knows where I am.”
~~~
Jada is at first a little nervous getting in the car on her own and backing out of the driveway. It isn’t the drive itself that makes her nervous, of course, it is the act of leaving Ibrahim behind. Having him leave her is more familiar.
When he went to prison, led from the courtroom, arms shackled behind his back, to serve his sentence, she had been stoic. They only exchanged a brief few seconds before he was ushered out. His shoulders were still square and erect. He still walked like a king. He was unbowed.
She on the other hand, as calm as she may have appeared, was screaming inside, tearing her hair from her scalp and shrieking in distress. She did not know how she would even begin to organize a life that was not centered on him.
That night, after the folks from the church left, and Kaleem, strangely mute had fallen asleep, she sat at the kitchen table, her mind flooded with questions.
Where was Ibrahim now?
Was he being hurt?
Was he scared?
Was he thinking of her?
Was he thinking of their son?
It was like being shot back in time more than a dozen years to the start of their relationship when he stayed on her mind when they were apart. That first night Ibrahim was in prison, she realized with mounting panic that they had not spent a night apart since they were married. Just as she thought she might drive herself mad with that thought and a dozen unanswerable questions, someone knocked on the door.
People had been stopping in throughout the day, telling her they were sorry, as though Ibrahim had died. Men going to prison was not uncommon in their community, but his case was different. He had been defending a woman who herself might have been killed if he hadn’t intervened. He was a hero, people said. And yet, the justice system didn’t see it that way.
Jada was still dressed in her court outfit when she opened the door. But she had slipped off her uncomfortable pumps and didn’t bother to put them back on to welcome the uninvited guest. She was too tired of maintaining social graces.
She remembered hoping it was her mother, or father. But they had been ashamed, or at least her father had been, of where Ibrahim ended up, and treated it as an inevitability, even though he knew the special circumstances. It would take weeks before they came over to comfort her, and by then, Jada had begun feeling the emotional estrangement from them that would never again be fully repaired.
So, that night it was not her parents who stood at the door.
It took her a moment to recognize him. He looked like a ghost. He looked like Immanuel, the closer of her husband’s two brothers, both in age and in relationship. But Immanuel had been several years dead by then.
It was Isaac. The eldest of the Carter brothers.
He said nothing.
Jada stepped aside and let him in.
He would come to her many more times after that.
35
Then
Jada stood at the front door, open-mouthed.
“Ibrahim,” she said. “What’s …?”
“Can I come in?”
Nodding, Jada looked up and down the block before quickly pulling him inside. There was no one in sight, but that didn’t guarantee that Mrs. Leary, the old lady a couple houses down wasn’t watching them right now from between her curtains as Jada let him in. And what Mrs. Leary saw, she talked about if given the chance.
“I went to your school,” he said. “You weren’t there at lunch.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Dental appointment. And I figured I’d take the rest of the day off and study for finals.”
Ibrahim stood with his back to her, looking around the living room as if it wasn’t familiar to him already.
“Your mother here?” he asked.
“No. She’s gone to get her hair done. Trimmed, colored.”
“Oh,” he said. He still didn’t turn to look at her again.
It was past noon, but she knew it was early for him since he was working tonight. Sometimes he got up early to run but hadn’t done it as much lately because of the extra hours he was taking on.
“I’m so damn tired,” he said, as if he’d read her mind.
He turned to look at her and J
ada noticed for the first time the drawn, almost distraught expression in his eyes. His eyelids were red-rimmed, and slightly puffy, likely from lack of sleep.
“Ibrahim. Are you …?”
“How long’s she gonna be gone?” he asked. “Your mother.”
“Another three, maybe four hours. She has a lot of hair …” She lifted her own heavy braids as if to demonstrate. “And then she’ll stop at the grocery store maybe. Why?”
“You mind if we just lie down a little bit?”
Jada hesitated, but only because Ibrahim was usually so careful about putting them in situations like that. Where they might start kissing and touching, and not be able to stop.
“Just for a little bit,” he said again. “I just …”
“No. Yeah. Of course.”
She took his hand and led him back to her bedroom. The moment they crossed the threshold she almost groaned in embarrassment. Her room was a mess.
Reaching for a pile of clothes at the foot of her bed, she tossed them onto her armchair and pulled back the comforter, and the covers. Ibrahim looked around, turning in a slow three-sixty to take everything in. Then he looked at her and a small smile teased the corners of his lips, not an amused smile, but an almost rueful one.
He was in a strange mood, and she didn’t know how to decipher it.
“Ibrahim.”
Before she could ask him what was wrong, he was sitting on the edge of her bed, toeing off his sneakers. Once done with that, he reached for the hem of his light-blue t-shirt and peeled it over his head. Jada realized that since he wasn’t even looking at her, it was probably just something he habitually did before getting into bed.
He wasn’t trying to get a response out of her, though there was one nevertheless. Jada swallowed hard and tried to look away. Ibrahim’s body was smooth and firm, with ridges and bumps at his abdomen.
Courtship: A 'Snowflake' Novel Page 27