Dark Matter

by Sheree R. Thomas

  In the end, I’m not sure how many copycat babies were born. I read somewhere that some of the mothers honored the Supreme Court’s ban and were persuaded to abort. Of course, they might have been coerced or paid off by one of the extremist groups terrified of a crop of so-called “soulless” children. But none of that would have swayed Denise, anyway. For all I know, little Neecy might have been the very last one born.

  It was three months too late, but I was moved by the understated eloquence of the high court’s decision when it was announced on the News & Justice satellite: Granted, what some might call a “soul” is merely an individual’s biological imprint, every bit as accidental as it is unique. In the course of accident, we are all born once, and we die but once. And no matter how ambiguous the relationship between science and chance, humankind cannot assign itself to the task of re-creating souls.

  I’m not even sure I believe in souls, not really. But I wished I’d had those words for Denise when it still mattered.

  She actually had the whole thing charted out. We were having lunch at a Loop pizzeria the day Denise told me what she wanted to do. She spread out a group of elaborate charts; one was marked HOME, one FATHER, one SCHOOL, all in her too-neat artist’s script. The whole time she showed me, her hands were shaking as if they were trying to fly away from her. I’d never seen anyone shake like that until then, watching Denise’s fingers bounce like rubber with so much excitement and fervor. The shaking scared me more than her plans and charts.

  “Neecy, please wait,” I told her.

  “If I wait, I might change my mind,” Denise said, as if this were a logical argument for going forward rather than just the opposite. She still hadn’t learned that doubt was a signal to stop and think, not to plow ahead with her eyes covered, bracing for a crash.

  But that was just Denise. That’s just the way she is. Maybe that’s who she is.

  Denise’s living room was so pristine when I arrived, it was hard to believe it had witnessed a trauma. I noticed the empty shelves on the music rack and the spaces where two picture frames had been removed from their hooks on the wall; but the wooden floors gleamed, the walls were scrubbed white, and I could smell fresh lilac that might be artificial or real, couldn’t tell which. Denise’s house reminded me of the sitting room of the bed and breakfast I stayed in overnight during my last trip to London, simultaneously welcoming and wholly artificial. A perfect movie set, hurriedly dusted and freshened as soon as visitors were gone.

  Denise looked like a vagrant in her own home. As soon as I got there, I knew why she hadn’t wanted me to see her on the phone; she was half dressed in a torn T-shirt, her hair wasn’t combed, and the skin beneath her eyes looked so discolored that I had to wonder, for a moment, if Sean might have been hitting her. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been in an abusive relationship. But then I stared into the deep mud of my friend’s irises before she shuffled away from me, and I knew better. No, she wasn’t being beaten; she wouldn’t have tolerated that with Neecy in the house. Instead, my friend was probably having a nervous breakdown.

  “Did he say why he left?” I asked gently, stalling. I didn’t see little Neecy anywhere, and I didn’t want to ask about her yet. I wished I didn’t have to see her at all.

  Answering with a grunt rather than spoken words, Denise flung her arm toward the polished rosewood dining room table. There, I saw a single piece of paper laid in the center, a typewritten note. As sterile as everything else. In the shining wood, I could also see my own reflection standing over it.

  “Haven’t you read it?” I asked her.

  “Neecy’s in the back,” Denise said, as if in response.

  “Shhh. Just a second. Let’s at least read what the man said.” My heart had just somersaulted, and then I knew how much I didn’t want to be there at all. I didn’t want to think about that child. I picked a random point midway through the note and began reading aloud in the tone I might have used for a eulogy: “… You squeeze so hard, it chokes me. You’re looking for more than a father for her, more than a home. It isn’t natural, between you and her—”

  “Stop it,” Denise hissed. She sank down to the sofa, tunneling beneath a blanket and pulling it up to her chin.

  I sighed. I could have written that note myself. Poor Sean. I walked to the sofa and sat beside my friend. My hand felt leaden as I rested it on the blanket where I believed Denise’s shoulder must be. “So you two fought about it. You never told me that,”I said.

  “There’s a lot I didn’t tell you,” Denise said, and I felt her shivering beneath the blanket. “He didn’t understand. Never. I thought he’d come around. I thought—”

  “You could change him?”

  “Shut up,” Denise said, sounding more weary than angry.

  Yes, I felt weary, too. I’d had this conversation with Denise, or similar ones, countless times before. Denise had met Sean through a video personal on the Internet where all she said was, “I want a good husband and father. Let’s make a home.” Sean was a nice enough guy, but I had known their marriage was based more on practical considerations than commitment. They both wanted a family. They both had pieces missing and were tired of failing. Neither of them had learned, after two divorces, that people can’t be applied to wounds like gauze.

  And, of course, then there was little Neecy. What was the poor guy supposed to do?

  “She’s in her room. I already packed her things. Please take her, Paige. Take her.” Denise was whimpering by now.

  I brushed a dead-looking clump of hair from Denise’s face. Denise’s eyes, those unseeing eyes, would be impossible to reach. But I tried anyway, in hopes of saving all of us. “This is crazy. Take her where? What am I going to do with a kid?”

  “You promised.”

  Okay, Mama. I will.

  “What?”

  “You promised. At the church. At the christening. You’re her godmother. If anything happened to me, you said you would.”

  I thought of the beautiful baby girl, a goddess dressed in white, her soft black curls crowned with lace—gurgling, happy, and agreeable despite the tedium of the long ceremony. Holding her child, Denise had been glowing in a way she had not at her wedding, as if she’d just discovered her entire reason for living.

  Tears found my eyes for the first time since I’d arrived. “Denise, what’s this going to mean to her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t… care,” Denise said, her voice shattered until she sounded like a mute struggling to form words. “Look at me. I can’t stand to be near her. I vomit every time I look at her. It’s all ruined. Everything. Oh, God—” She nearly sobbed, but there was only silence from her open mouth. “I can’t. Not again. No more. Take her, Paige.”

  I saw a movement in my peripheral vision, and I glanced toward the hallway in time to see a shadow disappear from the wall. My God, I realized, the kid must have been standing where she could hear every hurtful word. I knew I had to get Neecy out of the house, at least for now. Denise was right. She was not fit, at this moment, to be a mother. Anything was better than leaving Neecy here, even getting her to a hotel. Maybe just for a day or two.

  I couldn’t take care of both of them now. I had to choose the child.

  “Neecy?” The bedroom door was open only a crack, and I pressed my palm against it to nudge it open. “Sweetheart, are you in here?”

  What struck me first was the books. Shelves filled with the colorful spines of children’s books reached the ceiling of the crowded room, so high that even an adult would need a stepladder. Every other space was occupied by so many toys—costumed dolls, clowns, stuffed animals—that I thought of the time my parents took me to F.A.O. Schwarz when I was a kid, the way every square foot was filled with a different kind of magic.

  The bed was piled high with dresses. There must have been dozens of them, many of them formal, old-fashioned tea dresses. They were the kind of dresses mothers hated to wear when they were young, and yet love to adorn their little girls with; mad
e of stiff, uncomfortable fabrics and bright, precious colors. Somewhere beneath that heaping pile of clothes, I saw a suitcase yawning open, struggling uselessly to swallow them all.

  “Neecy?”

  The closet. I heard a sound from the closet, a child’s wet sniffle.

  Neecy, why are you in the closet? Did your daddy beat you again?

  She was there, inside a closet stripped of everything except a few wire hangers swinging lazily from the rack above her head. I couldn’t help it; my face fell slack when I saw her. I felt as if my veins had been drained of blood, flushed with ice water instead.

  Over the years, I’d talked to little Neecy on the telephone at least once a month, whenever I called Denise. I was her godmother, after all. Neecy was old enough now that she usually answered the phone, and she chatted obligingly about school and her piano, acting and computer lessons, before saying, Want to talk to Mommy? And the child always sounded so prim, so full of private-school self-assuredness, free of any traces of Denise’s hushed, halting—the word, really, was fearful—way of speaking. It wasn’t so strange on the phone, with the image so blurry on the face screen. Not at all.

  But being here, seeing her in person, was something else.

  Neecy’s hair was parted into two neat, shiny pigtails that coiled around the back of her neck, her nose had a tiny bulb at the end, and her molasses-brown eyes were set apart just like I remembered them. If the girl had been grinning instead of crying right now, she would look exactly as she’d looked in the photograph someone had taken of us at my sixth birthday party, the one where Mama hired a clown to do magic tricks and pull cards out of thin air, and we’d both believed the magic was real.

  Denise was in the closet. She was six years old again, reborn.

  I’d known what to expect the whole time, but I couldn’t have been prepared for how it would feel to see her again. I hadn’t known how the years would melt from my mind like vapors, how it would fill my stomach with stones to end up staring at my childhood’s biggest heartache eye-to-eye.

  Somehow, I found a voice in my dry, burning throat. “Hey, sweetie. It’s Aunt Paige. From California.”

  “What’s wrong with my mommy?” A brave whisper.

  “She’s just very upset right now, Neecy.” Saying the name, my veins thrilled again.

  “Where’d Daddy go?”

  I knelt so that I could literally stare her in the eye, and I was reminded of how, twenty-five years ago, Neecy’s eyelids always puffed when she cried, narrowing her eyes into slits. China-girl, I used to tease her to try to make her laugh. Here was my China-girl.

  I clasped the child’s tiny, damp hands; the mere act of touching her caused the skin on my arms to harden into gooseflesh. “I’m not sure where your daddy is, sweetie. He’ll come back.”

  Hey, Neecy, don’t cry. He’ll come back.

  Staring into Neecy’s anguish, for the first time, I understood everything.

  I understood what a glistening opportunity had stirred Denise’s soul when she’d realized her salvation had arrived courtesy of science: a legal procedure to extract a nucleus from a single cell, implant it into an egg, and enable her to give new birth to any living person who consented—even to herself. She could take an inventory of everything that had gone wrong, systematically fix it all, and see what would blossom this time. See what might have been.

  And now, gazing into Neecy’s eyes—the same eyes, except younger, not worn to sludge like the Neecy quivering under a blanket in the living room—I understood why Denise was possibly insane by now. She’d probably been insane longer than I wanted to admit.

  “Listen,” I said. “Your mom told me to take you to get some pizza. And then she wants us to go to my hotel for a couple of days, until she feels better.”

  “Will she be okay?” Neecy asked. Her teary eyes were sharp and focused.

  Yes, I realized, it was these tears ripping Denise’s psyche to shreds. This was what Denise could not bear to look at, what was making her physically ill. She was not ready to watch her child, herself, taken apart hurt by hurt. Again.

  Neecy was dressed in a lemon-colored party dress as if it were her birthday, or Easter Sunday. Did Denise dress her like this every day? Did she wake Neecy up in the mornings and smile on herself while she reclaimed that piece, too? Of course. Oh, yes, she did. Suddenly, I swooned. I felt myself sway with a near-religious euphoria, my spirit filling up with something I couldn’t name. I only kept my balance by clinging to the puffed shoulders of the child’s taffeta dress, as if I’d made a clumsy attempt to hug her.

  “Neecy? It’s all right this time,” I heard myself tell her in a breathless whisper. “I promise I’ll watch out for you. Just like I said. It’s all right now, Neecy. Okay? I promise.”

  I clasped my best friend’s hand, rubbing her small knuckles back and forth beneath my chin like a salve. With my hand squeezing her thumb, I could feel the lively, pulsing throbbing of Neecy’s other heart.

  GREEDY CHOKE PUPPY

  Nalo Hopkinson

  (2000)

  I see a Lagahoo last night. In the back of the house, behind the pigeon peas.”

  “Yes, Granny.” Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Jacky leaned back against her grandmother’s knees and closed her eyes in bliss against the gentle tug of Granny’s hands braiding her hair. Jacky still enjoyed this evening ritual, even though she was a big hard-back woman, thirty-two years next month.

  The moon was shining in through the open jalousie windows, bringing the sweet smell of Ladies-of-the-Night flowers with it. The ceiling fan beat its soothing rhythm.

  “How you mean, ‘Yes, Granny’? You even know what a Lagahoo is?”

  “Don’t you been frightening me with jumby story from since I small? Is a donkey with gold teeth, wearing a waistcoat with a pocket watch and two pair of tennis shoes on the hooves.”

  “Washekong, you mean. I never teach you to say ‘tennis shoes.’ ”

  Jacky smiled. “Yes, Granny. So, what the Lagahoo was doing in the pigeon peas patch?”

  “Just standing, looking at my window. Then he pull out he watch chain from out he waistcoat pocket, and he look at the time, and he put the watch back, and he bite off some pigeon peas from off one bush, and he walk away.”

  Jacky laughed, shaking so hard that her head pulled free of Granny’s hands. “You mean to tell me that a Lagahoo come all the way to we little house in Diego Martin, just to sample we so-so pigeon peas?” Still chuckling, she settled back against Granny’s knees. Granny tugged at a hank of Jacky’s hair, just a little harder than necessary.

  Jacky could hear the smile in the old woman’s voice. “Don’t get fresh with me. You turn big woman now, Ph.D. student and thing, but is still your old nen-nen who does plait up your hair every evening, oui?”

  “Yes, Granny. You know I does love to make mako ’pon you, to tease you a little.”

  “This ain’t no joke, child. My mammy used to say that a Lagahoo is God horse, and when you see one, somebody go dead. The last time I see one is just before your mother dead.” The two women fell silent. The memory hung in the air between them, of the badly burned body retrieved from the wreckage of the car that had gone off the road. Jacky knew that her grandmother would soon change the subject. She blamed herself for the argument that had sent Jacky’s mother raging from the house in the first place. And whatever Granny didn’t want to think about, she certainly wasn’t going to talk about.

  Granny sighed. “Well, don’t fret, doux-doux. Just be careful when you go out so late at night. I couldn’t stand to lose you, too.”

  She finished off the last braid and gently stroked Jacky’s head. “All right. I finish now. Go and wrap up your head in a scarf, so the plaits will stay nice while you sleeping.”

  “Thank you, Granny. What I would do without you to help me make myself pretty for the gentlemen, eh?”

  Granny smiled, but with a worried look on her face. “You just mind your studies. It have plenty of time to catc
h man.”

  Jacky stood and gave the old woman a kiss on one cool, soft cheek and headed toward her bedroom in search of a scarf. Behind her, she could hear Granny settling back into the faded wicker armchair, muttering distractedly to herself, “Why this Lagahoo come to bother me again, eh?”

  The first time, I ain’t know what was happening to me. I was younger them times there, and sweet for so, you see? Sweet like julie mango, with two ripe tot-tot on the front of my body and two ripe maami-apple behind. I only had was to walk down the street, twitching that maami-apple behind, and all the boys-them on the street corner would watch at me like them was starving, and I was food.

  But I get to find out know how it is when the boys stop making sweet eye at you so much, and start watching after a next younger thing. I get to find out that when you pass you prime, and you ain’t catch no man eye, nothing ain’t left for you but to get old and dry-up like cane leaf in the fire. Is just so I was feeling that night. Like something wither-up. Like something that once used to drink in the feel of the sun on it skin, but now it dead and dry, and the sun only drying it out more. And the feeling make a burning in me belly, and the burning spread out to my skin, till I couldn’t take it no more. I jump up from my little bed just so in the middle of the night, and snatch off my nightie. And when I do so, my skin come with it, and drop off on the floor. Inside my skin I was just one big ball of fire, and Lord, the night air feel nice and cool on the flame! I know then I was a soucouyant, a hag-woman. I know what I had was to do. When your youth start to leave you, you have to steal more from somebody who still have plenty. I fly out the window and start to search, search for a newborn baby.

  “Lagahoo? You know where that word come from, ain’t, Jacky?” asked Carmen Lewis, the librarian in the humanities section of the Library of the University of the West Indies. Carmen leaned back in her chair behind the information desk, legs sprawled under the bulge of her advanced pregnancy.