The Untelling

by Tayari Jones

  “Dwayne,” I said, “don’t read too much into this.”

  Dwayne struggled to sit up, forcing me to move my head. “It’s not about reading into things. Disrespect is disrespect.”

  The ringing of the phone startled me. I jumped, biting through the soft meat of my jaw.

  “It’s for you,” Rochelle called.

  At first I didn’t catch Keisha’s voice. She spoke quietly and carefully, as though she were reading her words from a cue card.

  “Miss Aria,” she said, “are you busy?”

  “In a way,” I said. “I’m on my way to my mother’s for my nephew’s birthday party.”

  “Who’s with you?”

  “Everybody. Rod, Rochelle, Dwayne.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “Could you come over here? Could you come over here and bring Dwayne with you? It’s important.”

  My impulse was to tell her that we couldn’t make it. Little Link’s party was in less than an hour. My mother didn’t believe in the notion that late could ever be fashionable. I didn’t want to make her angry and possibly ruin the party with one of her creative tantrums.

  “Please, Miss Aria?” Keisha said. This time she was begging. Not in the pouty teenage girl way that she employed to convince me to take her to Taco Bell after school, or to keep me from being mad when she didn’t turn in her homework. In her voice was the pleading that occurs on a soul level. How could I refuse?

  We took Dwayne’s car to Keisha’s apartment. He didn’t talk much on the drive over. I could tell from his flexing jaw muscles that he was still angry about the scene in the kitchen. I knew that his mind was racing, zipping with things that he could have said if he had only thought of them in time. I empathized. I knew exactly what it was like to think of the right thing to say years too late.

  I guided him through the twisting parking lot to reach Keisha’s place. He pulled halfway into a parking space and then backed out, seeing green bottle glass scattered on the pavement. He chose another space and backed in.

  “This is worse than your neighborhood,” he remarked, chirping his car alarm. “At least where you live, people are spread out. Here, they are all on top of each other. Look at all this trash.”

  I shrugged. I’d been here so many times before, the jagged asphalt and soiled mattress jutting from the Dumpster barely registered with me. My mind was on Keisha. The more I thought about her phone call, the less I liked it. It was her, certainly—I recognized her voice—but she didn’t sound like herself. Even the first time I’d come here, when she’d missed so many days of school, she’d seemed like herself. She had been tired, defeated, but she was still the girl I knew.

  At the foil-covered door of the apartment I grabbed Dwayne’s hand before knocking.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

  “Something,” I said just as the door opened.

  I was startled not to find Keisha standing in the doorway. Instead, we were invited in by a small woman who looked to be a little older than Hermione.

  “Come in,” she said. “LaKeisha will be right out.”

  Dwayne and I stepped over the threshold into the living room. Inviting us to sit on the couch, the small woman snapped a dying leaf from a creeping philodendron plant. Dwayne ducked to keep from knocking his head on a hanging flowerpot.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the small woman said. “We don’t get too many tall folks in here.”

  “It’s all right,” Dwayne said. “I’m Dwayne.”

  “Yes,” said the woman. “That’s what I figured. And this is the famous Miss Aria.”

  I gave a little nod and sat on the couch, close to Dwayne. He took my hand, stroking my knuckles with his palm.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” Dwayne said.

  “I’m Mary Montgomery. LaKeisha’s my daughter.”

  I looked closely at Mary and I could, in fact, see the resemblance. I don’t know why I didn’t assume that she was Keisha’s mother as soon as she opened the door. I knew that Keisha lived with her mother, that her mother was the one responsible for all of the foliage. But since I’d never seen her, the woman was only an abstraction for me, like the ever-absent mother in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  Keisha emerged from the back room at last, wearing the same skirt and blouse set that she had worn to ink Rochelle’s invitations a week ago. Her hair was held back from her face with a blue grosgrain ribbon. Dwayne and I were dressed for a barbecue. I shifted, feeling half naked in my tank top and shorts.

  “I don’t know why you got all dressed up,” Mary said.

  “I’m not dressed up,” Keisha said. She gave me a shy smile and sat in the covered chair at her mother’s end of the sofa. I will admit that I felt a little hurt that she didn’t choose the chair that was closer to me. It was awkward being in the apartment with Mary. I felt like the Other Woman. Mary was Keisha’s mother, her blood, so of course Keisha would sit beside her. I shifted a little so that I would be closer to Dwayne. He was my family, in a way.

  “I went to the doctor today,” Keisha began.

  Dwayne’s hand tightened around my fingers.

  “Can we turn on some lights?” Mary wanted to know. “It’s so dark in here. It’s like a haunted house.”

  Keisha got up and went to the doorway and turned a plastic knob. The room filled with a gentle yellow light.

  “See,” Mary said. “That’s better. Go on, baby.”

  “Like I was saying, I went to the doctor today.” She patted her belly and didn’t say anything more.

  “Is everything okay?” I flexed my legs to rise from the sofa, but I stopped myself, wondering if it was appropriate to comfort someone else’s daughter.

  “Everything is fine,” Mary said. “The doctor said that Keisha is having a healthy baby. A big healthy boy. You brought the ultrasound pictures to show them?”

  Keisha looked stricken. “I didn’t bring them, Mama. I should have brought them.”

  “It’s okay,” Dwayne said. “We can see them another time.”

  Mary spoke. “I know you had wanted a little girl. Keisha told me. But a little boy is good to have as your first baby. Sometimes I wish that Keisha had a older brother to look out for her.”

  “Any child at all is a blessing,” I said.

  “I knew you’d feel that way,” Mary said. “From everything Keisha told me about you. She talks about you all the time. Miss Aria says this, Miss Aria says that. Miss Aria got a diamond ring. Miss Aria’s fiancé is so nice. You know, like that. The way young girls can be.” There was a bit of an edge to her voice. Dwayne heard it too; I felt his body stiffen into something hard and even more solid.

  “Miss Aria,” Keisha said, “I know I failed my GED and everything. But I have a good mind. You even said that yourself. It’s nothing wrong with my mind. My little boy, I think he’s going to be smart. And he’s going to be really big and healthy. The doctor told me that.”

  “That’s good,” Dwayne said. “And we don’t mean to be rude. But we have to get over to Aria’s mother’s house in a few.”

  I, too, was wondering about the occasion for this gathering, but I was embarrassed that Dwayne would be so direct. Keisha looked away from us, studying her mother’s profile.

  “Mama,” she said softly, so quiet that Dwayne didn’t hear, but I heard it and so did Mary. She didn’t nod or nudge Keisha, she just turned herself to look into her daughter’s face. Keisha pushed herself up from the flowered chair and stood in front of Dwayne and me. She carefully lowered her pregnant bulk until she was kneeling in front of us.

  “Stand up,” Dwayne said. “I don’t want to see you down on the floor like that.”

  I looked to Mary, who didn’t glance toward me. Her eyes were fixed on her daughter. Dwayne moved his jaw around invisible gum. Anticipating something I couldn’t see coming.

  “It’s going to be a real good baby,” Keisha said again. “We don’t have nothing in our family. Cancer, sugar, nothing like that.”

  “I don’t
understand,” I said.

  “She’s just a little girl,” Mary said. “She’s not but seventeen. She’s not ready for a baby. She’s a good kid herself, but she’s not ready.”

  Still on her knees like a suitor, Keisha looked up at me, shy but hopeful. “I know you wanted a baby.”

  I closed my eyes as the magnitude of this offer rolled over me. It was the sort of thing that made me believe that maybe God did have a plan for me. That my whole life was leading to this moment. Dwayne and I would take this baby, make it our own. We could make our family around this little boy. This big healthy boy that was growing now inside of Keisha, right here at our feet.

  “And we would leave town, Mama and me,” Keisha said, looking at Dwayne. “Just listen. Okay, Dwayne? Let me tell you my whole idea. We would leave town so you and Miss Aria could just be a regular family. I know you wouldn’t want me hanging around, confusing things. And I would respect that. I wouldn’t call y’all on the phone, or want to see pictures, or anything. I would be gone, like I never was here.” Her voice caught on the last sentence and she sucked in her cheeks and held her head back, trying to let the water run into her hair instead of down her cheeks. “Okay?”

  I slid off the couch and knelt beside her, on my bare knees on the worn carpet. “Don’t cry.” I hugged her, burying my face into her neck, breathing the coconut oil in her hair.

  “Aria,” Dwayne said, “can I talk to you outside for a minute?”

  I lifted my face to look up at him. “Okay.”

  Outside, in front of the foil door, the day was hot. I leaned against a rusted metal railing.

  “What’s going on?” he wanted to know.

  “You were right in there,” I said. “Keisha wants us to adopt her baby.”

  “Aria.” Dwayne covered his eyes and shook his head. “Aria, I’m not a bad person. It’s not like I don’t understand. But this is real life, Aria. This is not a after-school special.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Aria, first off, adoption is supposed to be anonymous. You are out of your mind if you don’t think her or her mother is going to show up after a couple of years saying they want their baby back. People don’t just walk away from their kids. Blood always is going to call you back. I don’t care what kind of papers she signs.

  “Number two: we are not ready to be parents next month. And besides, we have been trying to have babies of our own.”

  “But, Dwayne, did you see her face? We have to help her.”

  Dwayne leaned against the metal railing of the porch. “It’s a bad situation,” he said. “But it’s not up to us to fix it.”

  For the second time in two weeks I found myself with the urge to hit someone in the face. With my hands in tight fists by my side I turned away from Dwayne, taking deep breaths through my nose. I took a few steps down the walkway, to the stairs, and then back to Dwayne.

  “Can you at least say that you will think about it? Do you have to feel like you know everything and can come up with an answer right here, right on the spot? It took a lot for Keisha and her mother to make this decision. The least we can do is to think about it. Take it seriously.”

  Dwayne said, “All right. Go in there and tell them that we’re thinking about it. But thinking is just thinking. Don’t get their hopes up.”

  I left Dwayne outside while I went in to speak with Keisha and her mother. The two of them sat on the couch, their faces brown and blank against the background of ivy. I told them that Dwayne and I were thinking it over. I told Keisha that I loved her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dwayne and I parked the car in front of my mother’s house but didn’t get out. We’d made the drive in near silence, each busy with our own thoughts. Sweet Keisha. When I met her on that spring day last year, I thought that my job was to save her. Who would have thought that she would end up saving me? So maybe this was how life felt for other people, people like Rochelle. She had been dealt a bad hand of cards at birth, been abandoned, but the universe corrected its error and sent Mr. and Mrs. Satterwhite to adopt her.

  Dwayne finally let up the windows and turned the car off. “All that pain in that girl’s face. When I close my eyes, that’s all I see.”

  “We can help her,” I said. “Maybe it was meant to be.”

  Dwayne and I opened the side door to go into my mother’s house just as Hermione pressed the red button on the Polaroid camera she’d bought at a garage sale.

  “You’re late,” she said, pulling the picture from the camera.

  It was such a shame that instant cameras had gone out of fashion. I loved how you took the photo and knew in just a few minutes what your memory was going to look like. Mama didn’t care for them much, said the pictures always came out too small and fuzzy. The prints were never suitable for framing. “Patience,” she’d say, popping out the film cartridge from her camera, a slim 110 model. “If you’re willing to wait, you’ll get a better picture.” And we did wait, and wait. Sometimes we wouldn’t see the photos until the significance of the event had worn off. Snapshots from a wedding or party six months after the fact just didn’t mean as much. Memories are best when they’re fresh.

  In a quiet voice Hermione explained that she hadn’t planned to use the camera until later in the afternoon; she had bought only three packages of the expensive film and wanted to save them for the cake and candles phase of the gathering. She brought it out early in an effort to amuse her husband. Mr. Phinazee was depressed because Coco didn’t accept Hermione’s hand-delivered invitation to the birthday party. Hermione had begged her husband not to get his hopes up. If Coco hadn’t made it to Link’s christening or to the hospital when he got his hernia fixed, it was unlikely that she would show up today. But Mr. Phinazee thought that Coco would have mellowed by now. It was one thing for her to disapprove of her father’s marriage, but rejecting Little Link was another matter altogether. How could she hold a grudge against a baby? Hermione whispered all of this as we waited on the milky squares to develop into pictures. “He acts like Little Link is Gandhi, Jesse Jackson, or somebody. If he can get Coco to act right, they will have to give him the Nobel Prize.”

  I looked over to my sister’s husband. His plastic chair was situated near the chain-link fence that separated our yard from the neighbors’. He angled his neck to see between the houses, to the street. Mr. Phinazee rubbed his jaw from time to time and yawned.

  “It’s pitiful,” Hermione griped. “Doing her daddy like that. I even went to the shop again to ask her to come. I was begging her. Well, maybe I didn’t beg all the way, but I was nice. Finally I had to just tell her: ‘Your daddy’s not for always.’ And I should know.”

  Hermione moved as she talked, sometimes picking up one of the pictures and shaking it like a thermometer, making the image show itself sooner, but I liked to let the faces take their own sweet time. I squinted at the blue-white surface, waiting for the colors.

  Since Link was the birthday boy, there were many pictures of him, sitting somber and quiet in his cone-shaped cardboard hat. He fiddled with the elastic band under his chin, looking like a worried, depressed head of state. I wondered if he would have been happier if other children had been invited. My mother had gone overboard, baking and frosting nearly one hundred pink-topped cupcakes for the gathering of only six people. In one photo she is frowning at the tiny cakes, each smeared in buttercream and accented with sugar flowers.

  The photo of Dwayne and me was the last to develop. In the eight and a half months we’d been together we hadn’t taken many pictures as a couple. Hermione had caught us unawares as we stepped into the house. Dwayne is about two paces ahead of me, not smiling, his eyes focused somewhere ahead of him. I’m trying to hold his hand. My eyes span the space between us; my reaching hand is a blur.

  Hermione sat down beside me on the picnic table. “That’s it for the Polaroid. We’re out of film. Three rolls and I couldn’t even get Earl to look at them.”

  “But I wanted me and you to take
a picture together.”

  “Mama has her camera.”

  “But we’ll have to wait a million years to see the prints.”

  My sister looked pretty for Link’s birthday. She’d styled her hair in a curly upsweep with loose ringlets hanging from her temples in lazy spirals. She wore a silk tunic, the pale green of seedless grapes, and matching Capri pants. For a fleeting moment I envied Little Link, wishing that Hermione had been my mother, so round and pretty, obviously sane.

  She looked over her shoulder to the porch. “Your boyfriend is spiking the punch.”

  “Make him stop,” I said. “Mama is going to shit a brick.”

  “We just won’t tell her,” Hermione said. “People deserve to have some fun. Maybe Earl will cheer the hell up. It’s ninety-something degrees out here.”

  I scanned the yard for Dwayne. He sat on the grass beside the baby pool, speaking to Link, who sat in the waist-high water, staring at his own tiny hands. I waved at them, but neither seemed to notice.

  “I wish you had made more of an effort to get here on time,” Hermione said. “Mama thought you were blowing her off.”

  “Something important happened.”

  Hermione gave a quick shrug. “It wasn’t pretty here for the first half hour or so. Earl was mooning over Coco, and Mama was fretting over you and Dwayne. It’s a good thing that you finally showed up. Mama was raring herself up for a big one when I saw you and Dwayne sitting in the car out front. Since then, it’s been all smiles. But who knows how long it will last?”

  “I didn’t plan to be late.”

  “All I am saying is that you should try to think about Mama’s feelings. She’s been through a lot.”

  “What about us?” I blurted. “We’ve been through more than Mama.”