Milk-Blood

by Mark Matthews

  “You know anything sweet pea?" The cop asked as if Lilly could understand. “What do you know about your mommy? If you could talk, you would tell us everything. Maybe someday you will.”

  The cop looked up into Zach’s eyes, felt the burn of his gaze, but didn’t back down. “If she could talk, she would tell us everything, because she wants you gone to prison,” he said. “She knows you can’t take care of her.”

  If Zach’s hands were free of the child, he would have taken a swing. A right hook to his cheek would knock him off guard, and then a barrage of punches would follow. But the child in his arms stopped all of this, and he kept his mouth shut and his fist unclenched. His unreleased tension seethed throughout the room, the temperature climbed, his nerves vibrated.

  The moment was interrupted by the smacking of his mom’s tongue. She was listening from the couch, wetting her lips, and about to speak.

  “You men. You two all up in here while your people across the street doing the real work. They talking to that sad homeless man right now, the real menace of this street. He’s no good. He knows things. Go outside, sure enough, you’ll see them. You’ll find everything you need from the man across the street if you just ask him in the right voice. No need to scare a tiny child before she knows she should be scared of you two. Please go, I’m sick and tired.”

  Lilly started to squirm as if she was listening to her Grandma speak. Zach positioned her so that her head was looking over his shoulder, and then he felt a gas bubble come up her chest and vomit came out of her mouth. Warm spit-up was on his back.

  “We’ll try another time ma’am,” one cop responded. “I know we all want what’s best.”

  Zach patted Lilly’s back and watched the cops walk out the door. It was clear he had won this round, but the victory wasn’t complete until they drove off. Instead, they wandered across the street with guns and cuffs blazing on their belts. They were off to join the other two cops who were talking to the crazy homeless man, just like his momma said. Four cops, all waving their flashlights and walking in circles like it was a crime scene, not looking for clues—looking for a crime.

  Zach knew the squatter was too crazy to say much. He’d heard the man blabbing to himself before like he was at church speaking in tongues. The man was frantically checking his pockets, waving his hands in the air, and certainly the cops would tire of this. Zach closed the door and let them be.

  “How did you know what was going on out there, Ma?”

  “Those men,” his mom said, and smacked her lips, “what do they know? Don’t know this street like I do. Like you do. I know what time it is. I know when there’s a woman getting beat on three doors down at the Bloomers, or when Ronnie Harris is back in lock-up. We got that power to know. You got that power. I know what you do. Doesn’t mean I’m no witch like they say. Just means we watch and feel. We know check dates. We know the weather. We know who got tires stolen by how cars set up on the bricks. Don’t need a badge for that. Know how to make money off suburban kids looking for the crack rocks like you do. Know when to duck and take care of business.”

  Mom’s eyes looked around the room like she was talking to spirits and not to her son. Some day she wouldn’t even know my name, Zach thought. He knew this day was coming.

  “They don’t know shit, Ma, you are right about that.”

  And Lilly didn’t know anything either, and wouldn’t say anything if she could talk.

  She’d never know that the same hand that patted her back softly to cough up the milky vomit had held down a pillow over her mother’s face until she died. These hands also burned the body with gas, dug a hole, buried the body with fertilizer, chopped at it with the shovel, and covered it up.

  The police did come back the next day to search the home with another warrant. They sifted through the cereal boxes, through Grandma’s old makeup, through her incontinence supplies. They found one mostly smoked joint. No guns, no bodies, no blood of Latrice on anything, just an expired license plate on Zach’s car. They should have searched the house across the street, about three feet under the ground in the back yard. The homeless riff raff who littered the lawn of the burnt out house were sitting on Lilly’s momma. Zach had returned her to the home he exploded with a firebomb made of vodka. He buried her there.

  *FROM THE AUTHOR - Ten years pass, and now Lilly is old enough for her own chapter. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to switch from the 3rd person to the 1st person point of view for Lilly’s portion of this story. Something inside says it’s the right thing to do, and this story suddenly becomes more personal to her plight.

  Chapter Four: Lilly’s First Day in Sixth Grade

  I felt the acid bubble up my throat. They called it heartburn, and my heart always seemed to be burning. Something hot and fiery was trickling up from my belly and tearing up my insides. Once in a while, it dripped into my lungs and I coughed it up. Then I’d have to find a place to spit and it felt like a hot peach pit. But most times I couldn’t cough hard enough and it would drip back deeper into me.

  I wanted the burning to stop for good. I wanted someone to tell me how not to feel on fire like this. That was all I wanted—for the fire to go out, and for someone to reach in and rip out my defective heart and leave a new one in its place. Fix my stomach and fix my heart. I don’t even care if they leave another big scar.

  I ate both breakfast and lunch at school, and it was full of lots of bread to soak up the molten lava inside. Breakfast was cheerios and a banana. Lunch was a turkey ‘crows aunt’. Home tonight maybe we’d have day old donuts. If not, then Spaghettios which I would eat straight out of the can. I liked them going down cold.

  Sometimes the hurt inside would make me want to cry, but not at school. You can’t cry at school if there was no reason. Especially on your first day of school since they closed down the elementary you were supposed to go to and now you’re in another first day at some strange place. Besides, I was pretty sure if I cried the tears would come out looking red and bloody.

  I sat with my legs pulled into me and my arms wrapped around them, my back pressed up against the brick wall of the school. In front of me, sweaty boys played basketball. They rolled up their blue uniform shirts, pretended that they came untucked by accident, and smashed into each other. On the other side of the blacktop, the rhythmic slaps of jump ropes struck the pavement. Three tetherball sets stood all in a line. Two of them had no balls attached to the ropes, and the other one was being played with by children who were unsure of the rules.

  Swings swayed back and forth, like a clock, tick-tock. The metal chain of one swing had been wrapped around the top cross pole and I wondered whose job it was to go up there and get it down. Maybe nobody. Maybe it just stayed up there until they closed this school too and I got shipped off to a new one.

  The only kids that I knew who went to this school were younger than me. Ciara and Ciana lived four doors down and were drawing with chalk right now. They would let me join them, but if I played with them it would look desperate. When you look like I do, people either pulled you to their side to make you cool, or tried to make themselves cool by beating you down. I waited to see which way they’d treat me. Until then, they were just a group of kids, and I sat and watched.

  I felt a ray of heat on my skin from someone’s gaze, and looked up to see where it was from. Boys were glancing at me and nodding their heads in my direction. Secret words were being spoken. They saw me look and came over to stand before me. I pulled my legs tighter into my chest and they were towering over me.

  “You got some fucked up see through skin,” one boy said. “You black or you blue? What the fuck is you?”

  I looked up at the kid before I responded. Must be in 6th grade—one of the kings of this elementary. And here I was, just another first day—a bunch of first days.

  You got some momma to teach you to talk like that. What is you? I thought to say. But I didn’t say it out loud. I only said it in my brain, on the inside. Where people could see a
nyways. Maybe he would see me thinking it.

  “I got poison in my blood. My hemo-goblin. If I bleed don’t let it touch you or you’ll get cyanosis.”

  I did say that part out loud, and waited for him to get mad. He didn’t get mad. He smiled and then he laughed.

  “You is a freak,” said the middle boy with hair shaved so close you could see where his skull and jawbone connected when he talked.

  He looked sideways at his two friends, one who let his uniform shirt hang out announcing he was on somebody’s side but it wasn’t the teachers, the other with a tooth missing making it impossible for him to try and act older than 11. They were smiling, all three of them, looking down on me like a three-headed monster.

  “Right, you a freak,” one of them said again.

  If I smiled along with them it would make it okay for them to call me names forever. That I thought it was funny he called me a freak. And I couldn’t smile because my stomach hurt, my chest burned, my heart beat faster and the oxygen in my blood was too thin. Daddy slept in this morning, like he forgot it was the first day of school, so I was late and missed my meds. I would take them right away when I got home.

  “I’m a new 6th grader so get used to it,” I said. I gave eye contact with each of them, one at a time, from left to right, waiting for a comeback. Their silence meant maybe I had some power. They didn’t move and seemed ready to leave. I would be alone again.

  “But you want to see something for real?” I asked.

  “What you got?”

  “You can see my veins.”

  I pulled up my shirt a bit to show my skinny belly. The faint lines of blue veins criss-crossed under my skin like a highway map. My hipbones at the edge of my pants turned my sad looking belly button into a mixing bowl.

  One of the boy’s fingertips touched my tummy. I flinched, but it really didn’t feel so bad.

  “My legs when I’m cold show the biggest blue vein. And,” I said, and paused, making them wait for the rest, “you can even see my heart, my beating defective heart, but I ain’t gonna show you that.”

  “I want to see your beating heart.”

  “No.”

  “Come on! Can you really see it? What does it look like?”

  I pressed my forearm down against my shirt. His arm was at the bottom, lifting it up, not real hard, but he wasn’t going to stop. Even though he was a boy, I felt like I was stronger than him, only there were three of them in front of me. You can’t really see it, I was lying, I made that part up, I wanted to tell them. All they might see was a gross looking scar where they cut me. If they could really see my heart, they would see it pumping out fire right now.

  All of this was wrong.

  I finally kicked my foot up really hard, right between his legs. My foot made contact, I felt something squish, and he gasped for air, bent over, and covered up with his arms. His friends were shocked silent. I had shattered something that wasn’t supposed to break.

  What was next? My heart pounded, my lungs burned, and my skin felt frozen but my blood felt hot. I got ready to spring to my feet and run away when someone from the school stepped in.

  “What is going on here? Get up young lady. Get up and come here.”

  It was the lunch lady. Someone I had never seen, but she had that lunch person stance. Her sad, old face was stuck in a permanent grimace.

  Next thing I knew, the lunch lady had a hold of my hand and was pulling me inside the school. She led me through the hallways and my vision got hazy. Her grip was too tight, and kids were stopping and staring and making faces. I didn’t even know what I was in trouble for.

  “Sit here,” the woman said and pointed, and she slipped into the school counselor’s office.

  I sat still and looked down at my shoes. They were so grey. I tapped my big toes together and heard the plastic go tap-tap. Two secretaries eyed me from behind their desks so I looked up and smiled back. If I smiled just right, they would be nice to me. If I looked sweet enough, they would be like kind mothers. I didn’t want them to know I was here because I was in trouble. I didn’t want them to know I was all sick inside, even though I felt dizzy and ready to faint.

  The lunch lady slipped out of the counselor’s office and held the door without saying a word. I walked in just as silent. The counselor was a woman with blond hair and makeup on and long eyelashes. Her fingernails had designs. Her nose was big and pointy but the rest was pretty. I wanted her to smile but she didn’t, but she wasn’t mad either. I couldn’t tell if the temperature in the room was hot or cold but something didn’t feel right.

  The counselor said a bunch of things, but it wasn’t until she said, “Ms. George was just worried about you is all,” that I thought maybe this was no big deal.

  I finally had the chance to tell her what happened. That I was just showing some boys my skin and I got scared. That they didn’t hurt me, and that I was sorry. It seemed like I said enough to be allowed to go. But it wasn’t.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, you are not in trouble. We are worried about you. Ms. George thought she saw bruises, or that you weren’t eating. Or both. Are either of this true?” the woman asked this but then her cell phone buzzed and she looked away. She put up one finger in the air as if to say wait, one second.

  I had one second to figure out how to respond.

  I knew I wasn’t supposed to say certain things. I was not supposed to say that when the heat shuts off we use the stove to keep the house warm until my doctor writes a note to the electric company that I will die if they don’t turn the power back on. I wasn’t supposed to say that I stay alone sometimes when I get home from school and that my dad gets mad and fights but he doesn’t hit me, he just hits walls. I would not talk about my dad and the friends he has over, or that I drink my Grandma’s chocolate Ensure shakes if I get hungry and there’s no food. I wouldn’t even admit to my friends that the first of the month is my favorite because that’s when the new food stamp money comes.

  I moved my eyes about the room looking for help. There were posters on the wall with sayings and pictures trying to convince kids not to be bad. On the counselor’s desk was a picture of her in a white wedding dress. A man was kneeling down in front of her, about to slip a ring on her finger. I knew they were just acting, but both of them were smiling and seemed so happy. This woman would be a mommy soon. Maybe then she’d leave and not care about kids at this school. Or maybe she was the stick-around type, even if the man in the picture stopped being happy and left.

  The counselor’s voice shifted in tone and the phone call ended with a plan for “training the staff on autism” and “putting it on the agenda” and now her attention was back on me.

  “I don’t have bruises, I have a heart problem,” I said as soon as I saw the counselor’s eyes.

  “You have some medical problems?”

  “Sigh-o-netic Heart Defect” I said. When I said it wrong like this in front of doctors, they would correct me, but here it wouldn’t matter. The counselor was no doctor and wouldn’t know the difference, but would feel sad for me right away.

  “But there is food in your house, right now, if I came over?”

  “Women like you don’t come on my street.”

  “Why not?”

  “They just don’t. Don’t make me say. They don’t.”

  “Well, I do.”

  I realized I hadn’t answered the question about food yet. I would answer if she pushed and say, Yes, there was some. I wanted to practice not answering things to people. If you answered things right away, they expect you to always answer.

  The phone rang again and the counselor answered and held up one finger in the air same way as before. “No, he’s suspended. Maybe expelled. No, we can’t have an IED because he is not coming back. Yes, they are pressing charges. Yes, they did have to do surgery. They won’t try him as an adult but he’s at home. Protective service will find a place. Alternative school. I can’t help you out here. Not again. Not now.”

>   The counselor hung up fast on this one.

  “Lilly, what I mean to say is—we’re concerned. What do you eat? Did you eat today?”

  “Yes. I had breakfast and lunch but I didn’t eat much because I was nervous. I forgot to take my medicine.”

  I said too much and my heart knew it. My breath picked up, and each exhale had particles of my bubbly stomach inside. My mouth watered with a burning liquid.

  “Your parents do make sure they give you your medicine I hope?”

  I wanted to say yes, but that wasn’t always true. Last time when I couldn’t breathe and my heart fluttered, I went to the hospital for two nights. The social worker had talked to my dad about medicine refills. He lied, and I think she knew it, so she set us up with mail order refills. Now I take the Digoxin pills that come in the mail. Dad hardly sees them, but I don’t mind, because this way he can worry about Grandma’s pills. All three of us take pills that fill up our cabinets.

  The counselor waited. I didn’t say a word.

  I wanted to go home. I wanted to be on my couch with my nose smushed against the cushion, smelling cigarettes and my Grandma’s breathing treatment and maybe even Dad with a sack full of White Castles. I didn’t answer the counselor but looked at a big poster on the wall about bullying, and pretended to be real interested. I read it to myself and mouthed the words. Don’t be a bystander. Say something. Stopping Bullies starts with you.

  “I will be lunching with you tomorrow, and all next week,” the counselor said, finally rescuing me. “Come to my office at lunchtime. Okay? You and me. Now go, shoo… and I do go down your street, or we send someone. That’s what we do, when we have to.”

  She gave me the motion with her hand to leave and picked up her phone. I got up with a smile that I hoped she saw and moved to the door.

  My stomach cooled, my blood thickened, and I breathed easy the rest of the day. My teacher, Mr. Edwards, gave me a green folder and a calendar for my mom to sign each day to prove she saw my assignments. He didn’t know I don’t have a mom, but my dad can sign it just the same.