by Louise Hawes
“Yeah,” Feena added when Nella continued to look at her expectantly. “She needed a color consultation. She decided to do a punk stripe in her hair.”
“Really?” Nella brightened. “How’s she look?”
Feena shrugged, and Nella grabbed the chance. “Hey, do you think you could come over after school and help me? I’ve had this henna kit for three months, but I’m kind of scared to do it.
Funny, Feena thought, a few weeks ago she would have been glad that someone, even Nella, was still asking her over. Sure, the Pizza Hut meant she’d have to say no. But still…
“You know,” Nella explained when Feena didn’t answer. “A second opinion?”
“I can’t.”
“You never can.” Nella’s tiny features pulled together into a frown. “I guess you like blacks better than your own kind, huh?”
“What?”
“I saw you and that black girl, that Raylene, in the park yesterday.”
“So?” Had she seen Christy, too? Who else had spotted them? Feena could have sworn they’d left the park before school got out. What had gone wrong?
“Why’re you hanging out with her?” Nella seemed genuinely perplexed. “They just want to be white, you know.”
“‘They?’”
“Negroes,” Nella said, resurrecting a word Feena had only read in books. “Black pride and all that stuff? It’s not about that, not really.” Nella’s tiny pale face had pulled itself into a frown. “What it really is, they all want to be white, like us.”
Feena stood up. Did Nella mean what she was saying? Did anyone really believe things like this? “Listen,” she said, “I have to go.” She balled up her sandwich wrapper and empty chips bag, threw them on her tray.
“Course, they can’t be.” Nella gathered her own things, stood up, too. “But that don’t stop them trying.”
Feena wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or yell. Mostly, she thought, it wasn’t worth doing either one. All she wanted now was to get away, to go back to the boat.
But Nella closed in on her. “You just got to set them straight, is all.” She sounded reasonable, patient, someone explaining things to a child. “If you’re too nice, they take advantage.”
Feena whirled on her ex-friend now, her lunch tray between them like a shield. She’d made her choice, she realized; she’d decided to yell. “Well, of course,” she told Nella, her voice rising, the couple across from them untwining themselves to stare. “We better make sure everybody knows where they belong, right?”
Nella looked surprised, thrown off by the question.
“Sure.” Feena answered it herself. “Otherwise, someone like Raylene is going to jump at the chance to be like me and you.”
“What?” Nella backed away, but Feena spoke louder still.
“It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?” She brushed past Nella, heading for the cafeteria. “Somebody with a killer body, the hottest clothes in school, and tons of friends? It figures she’d probably give just about anything to be”—Feena, laughing at last, shook her head—“like us!”
“Hey.” Nella picked up her own tray, followed Feena. “I’m just trying to help, give you the picture, is all.”
And suddenly Feena had the picture. Raylene walking with a swing, like Janie Woods, straight through all the small people and their small talk. Raylene hiding out, even before Christopher, tucked away in the shells of abandoned restaurants and boats. Like some sort of exotic bird, hiding its plumage, ashamed of its flash. She elbowed the door and rushed inside. She didn’t look behind her to see if Nella—small-faced, anxious Nella—was still following. She couldn’t have cared less.
Raylene and Christy were bent over a book when Feena got back to the boat. “End the,” Raylene read, without looking up. “Mama kissing and hugging, picking banjo, blowing trombone, playing piano…” She was turning the pages of Christopher’s favorite book from back to front.
Feena stood, her head cocked, only vaguely recognizing what she heard.
“… dancing, singing a have I.” Seeing her now, Christy slammed the book with his hand, beaming. “Weed,” he told her. “Ween weed.”
“You two are definitely perverted.” Feena shook her head, smiling.
Raylene smiled, too. “Look,” she explained, “if you’d read this book as many times as I have today, you’d be reading it backwards, too.” She closed the book, put it on the table. “How was school?”
“Well, Mommy,” Feena told her, “I was a good girl and studied hard.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Raylene said. “Any hotties put the moves on you?” She was grinning now, conspiratorial.
“Boys?”
Raylene nodded, waiting.
“Well.” Feena, eager to please, remembered the boy outside the cafeteria. “This one guy…”
“Yeah?”
“I think he liked the way I looked.” Feena was uncomfortable now, knew she was making a big deal out of nothing. “I guess it was this skirt.”
Raylene gave her an appraising look. “Good on you,” she said.
“Pretty.” Christy ran to her, buried his head in the folds of the skirt. “Feen pretty.”
Feena was stunned. It was the first time she’d heard the baby use her name. She looked at Raylene.
“We worked on names today.” Raylene picked up a paper plate with the remains of what looked like a Big Mac on it and threw it in a garbage bag by the door. “I figure Toffee’s got to know his family now.”
“Family?” Feena stared. “Family?”
“Sure.” Raylene sat down on the other side of Christy, who had crawled between them. “If he’s going to start over, he needs a new family, doesn’t he?”
“Start over?” Feena was doing it again. Why was she always reduced to repeating what Raylene said?
“Think about it, Feena.” (Another first that Feena registered with only mild surprise. Raylene, too, had never called her by name.) “Why can’t Toffee have a say in what happens? I mean, why can’t he be the first kid with a vote?”
“You mean”—Feena could hardly say it—”keep him?”
Raylene folded her arms and looked levelly at Feena. “If you got a better idea, I’d like to hear it.”
“Well, I… We can’t. It’s against the law.”
“Funny, huh?” The tough voice, the hard words were back. “The law don’t stop people from burning their kids.”
“But—”
“But nothing. I’ve seen it. My aunt runs a daycare center, and I help her sometimes. I see little girls playing with those pea-size families in the dollhouse. Know how they play?”
Feena didn’t answer.
“Last time I was there, this one girl, maybe eight, picks up the mommy doll and talks for her. ‘Oh, Lord,’ she says, ‘Daddy’s trying to come back.’
“So the other girl picks up an old lady doll. ‘Child,’ she says, ‘you better get a restraining order.’
“‘No,’ says the girl with the mother doll, ‘that wouldn’t do no good. The court would just throw it out.’” Raylene stopped, looked at Feena. “The girl talking for the old lady doll was maybe six.”
Feena shook her head. “Six,” she repeated. “I was six when my dad left. My mother told me he’d gotten a divorce and wouldn’t see us anymore, and I thought he was sick.” How little she’d been, how far from understanding. “I thought divorce must be this awful disease and Daddy was going to die.”
“I could talk to my aunt.” Raylene was pressing her case, closing in. “I’ll tell her Toffee is your kid. We can work it out.”
Again, Feena shook her head. She looked at Christy, who was rubbing himself against her like a kitten, studying the last page of his piano book. One day, one sweet day was all she’d wanted to give him. Could they really keep him? Could they give him years?
Raylene was looking at Christy, too. “You and me, we’ve seen stuff. We know too much. We seen waves destroy whole towns on the news, sweep over people’s lives like they
was sand castles. We heard about whole classrooms full of kids putting their heads down for a nap and never waking up. But this child here? He doesn’t know any of that. He’s like a new beginning. A fresh start.
“Think it over, okay?” Raylene stood up and kissed Christy on the top of his head. “I got to go. Just think about it.”
And Feena did. Next day and then the whole weekend, while she and Raylene juggled Christopher back and forth, the most cooperative of hostages, she thought of nothing else. At home, wolfing down meals and then racing out again, ignoring the baffled, hurt look on her mother’s face, she imagined what it would be like to run away with Christy. On Monday at school, in the last row of every class and alone in the cafeteria, Feena dreamed of watching the baby grow up. On Tuesday, in the boat, like a shady nest, with the baby chattering beside her, she pictured the three of them living a whole new life in a whole new town.
She saw it all in her mind, the years ahead. First, Christy, home from kindergarten, arms filled with drawings of Aunty Raylene and Aunty Feena for the refrigerator (a refrigerator, Feena was determined, that would never be empty). Next, Christy in grade school, filthy from playground triumphs, graduated from seesaws to kickball. Then finally, in a sort of dim and sentimental fog, she saw Christy in high school, handsome and loving, pursued by girls who all seemed silly and superficial compared with his beloved aunts.
Feena and Raylene checked the papers every day, and every day it seemed more possible, this mythical fresh start. Until Thursday, when Raylene came back from school with the newspaper in her hand. Until she slammed it down on the table, startling Feena and tumbling the precarious “partment” Christy had built with empty milk cartons. “Damn,” Raylene told them. “Just plain damn.”
“What?” Feena picked up the paper Raylene had folded to the third page. She saw it right away. A small article, tucked into the bottom right-hand corner. MOTHER REPORTS MISSING CHILD.
“Fall down boom,” Christy announced, adaptable as ever. “All down boom.” He picked up his cartons and began stacking them on top of each other again.
“You said that right, Toffee.” Raylene sank onto the bench, picked up one of the small cartons, and studied it, avoiding Feena’s worried look. “You sure enough said that right.”
thirteen
They didn’t learn much from the article. Just the age and the name of the pink-armed woman: Delores Pierson, 32. (“Old enough to know better,” Raylene said each time they read over the same short paragraph.) And they learned something else, something Feena grabbed at: of 10 Bide A Bit Village. “I’m going over there,” she announced as soon as she’d spotted the address. “I’m going to go see where Christy lives.”
“Are you crazy?” It was not really a question. Raylene stood up, unintentionally toppling the beginnings of a new apartment. “You want to land us both in jail?”
“I won’t talk to anyone,” Feena promised. “I just want to find out.”
“Find out what?”
“I don’t know.” Feena stared at Christy patiently reassembling his tower. “Where he came from. How bad it is. Stuff like that.”
“Why?” The old, stern look was back. “Those burns don’t tell you all you need to know?”
Feena felt flushed with doubt, disloyalty. She couldn’t stop thinking about the way Christy had looked when they read Mama’s Music, the way he’d grabbed at his favorite page as if he wanted to pull the round woman right off her piano bench.
“I just want to be sure,” she told Raylene. “I want to feel right about what we’re doing.”
“Well, time is what we’ll be doing if you go sniffing around out there.” Raylene looked at Christy, too. “Do you want what’s best for this child?”
Feena nodded.
“What’s best is us. You got to know that. Don’t you?” Raylene pulled her CVS smock out of her book bag and slipped her arms through the sleeves. “I mean, we’ve got a responsibility here.”
Feena nodded, chastened. And then, perhaps because Raylene sounded so much like an adult, or perhaps because she finally noticed the work clothes Raylene was putting on, Feena thought of her mother. Lenore’s patience was wearing thin. If Raylene didn’t come right back to relieve her, there was no telling what would happen. Especially after yesterday.
Even though Feena had been trying to make the little time she spent with Lenore count, and even though she’d been waking up earlier and earlier so she could sneak out of the house without explanations or arguments, her mother had caught her Wednesday morning.
“Is that you?” It was one of those dumb questions people ask when they’re half asleep. “It’s still dark outside.” Lenore’s bathrobe sash had trailed behind her into the kitchen, snakelike. “What are you doing up so early?”
“I … I just wanted to get a head start.” Feena had grabbed her backpack, abandoning the box of crackers she’d hoped to smuggle onto the boat.
“This new friend of yours—” Lenore began.
“I really have to go, Mom.”
But her mother had taken her arm, and Feena had seen the expression she knew all too well. Lately, unless Feena made a special effort, like Saturday night, when they’d stayed up in front of the Sony, watching horror flicks and howling like werewolves, Lenore looked more and more like Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. She wore this worried, disappointed face, and she whined when she talked.
“I’d like to meet her.”
“What?”
“This new friend of yours, the one you’ve spent three out of the last six nights with”—She’d been counting!—“I’d like to meet her.”
“Sure.” Feena had made a mental note to pretend it was a different friend next time, though she didn’t know which was more believable, making a best friend so fast or making so many! “I’ll bring her over sometime.”
Lenore retrieved the end of her sash, wrapped it around her waist. Without her makeup, she looked a little younger and a lot sadder. “I know this house isn’t exactly the Taj Mahal,” she’d said. “But I could find a cover for the couch. Get some of that peach swirl you like.” She paused, hopeful. “For shakes?”
How long would it be before Our Lady of Sorrow turned into an angry detective prying? Spying? And how long could Feena go on lying to someone who, after all, cared about her more than anyone else on earth?
And now, here was Raylene, shouldering into her smock. It was always after five o’clock when she came back from work. “My mom’s acting strange,” Feena told her. “When do you get off?”
Raylene fixed Feena with a look that made her squirm. “When I get off,” she said.
“It’s just, she’s getting kind of crazy with my never coming home.”
“How about that?” Raylene’s perfectly arched eyebrows arched higher. “Now, my mom, she’s handling it real fine. She’s only cried twice.”
“Sorry.” It seemed Feena was always saying that lately, or feeling it. “She wants to meet you. She told me today, she wants to invite you over.”
Raylene laughed. “Well, now all we got to do is find someone to take care of Toffee while the three of us have tea.”
Then, unpredictable as always, she relented. “I’ll ask can I leave early.” She kissed Christy, who, apparently under the impression he was going with her, had stood up and taken her hand. “And I’ll look for a hat, maybe some baby shades for Toffee. We spent three hours in that sun yesterday.”
“Three hours? And you didn’t burn?” Feena looked at Raylene’s gorgeous darkness, then turned away, embarrassed. “Well, I guess you don’t, you can’t—I mean…”
Astoundingly, Raylene was grinning, broad but warm. “Hey, have you ever had a black friend before?”
“Not exactly.” Friend, Raylene had said. Not acquaintance. Or classmate. Friend. Feena smiled, too. “No,” she said.
Raylene untwined her hand from Christy’s and pushed open the cabin door. A broad stripe of light cut across the tiny room. “You’re going to take some work, girl
.” She shook her head, still smiling. “You’re going to take some serious work.” And then she was gone, the cabin in shadow when the door swung shut.
The address in the paper turned out to be a turquoise doublewide in the Bide A Bit trailer court. The next day, while Raylene was watching Christy and it was her turn to go to school, Feena played hooky. She lacked Raylene’s confidence about what they’d done, dreamed each night now of walking through a tunnel with glossy moss-slicked sides, of the walls collapsing in on her as she hurried toward a distant light.
The rumpled news clipping stuffed in her pocket had changed everything. It meant Christy’s mother wanted him back. Feena needed to see for herself where they lived. Needed to know she was a rescuer. Not a kidnapper.
Bide A Bit looked like an endless parking lot. Mobile homes were lined up along gravel walkways, row after row, unrelieved by trees or hedges. Aside from two long-suffering, withered saw palmettos, one on each side of the entrance, Feena saw no hint of green. The sun beat off pebbles, off tarmac, off the steaming metal roofs of the trailers. Bide A Bit was right, Feena thought, searching the parched, shadeless rows. Bide A Bit and Get Out Quick!
There was a laundromat two trailers down from number ten, the address in the article. Feena sat out front on a bench, as if she were waiting for the spin cycle to end. She’d brought a book, and opened it now in her lap. Casual. Easy.
But she didn’t read; she studied the vivid blue trailer instead. The paint was peeling off its aluminum sides, and a tin awning over the front windows had come unfastened on one end, letting in more sun than it kept out. Feena couldn’t stop watching the place, as if each sordid detail, each crack and rust spot, confirmed the rightness of what she’d done. Christy shouldn’t live in a place like this. Vindicated, self-righteous, she noted the lidless garbage can heaped to the brim, the torn candy wrappers and the bottles strewn across the narrow strip of asphalt that led to the door. Anybody could see that.