My eyes went to the other boys, but they weren’t getting involved. One even looked a little fearful.
He pulled me against him, and I immediately pushed him as hard as I could away from me.
‘Don’t touch me!’
I made myself look straight into those bloodshot eyes. They were young eyes to be looking like that, and his long eyelashes seemed to reinforce the fact that he really was just a boy.
What I saw in his expression though was far from innocent. Before, he’d been intimidating, but flirting. Now I could see he’d made up his mind he wanted something, and as far as he was concerned he was going to get it.
‘Leave her alone, man,’ called out one of his friends.
‘Stay your ass outta it,’ replied the kid, and then lunged toward me.
I didn’t see Kane; I just felt him. His arm coming between me and the kid, and then him moving in front of me. Kane hit that kid hard, right in the stomach, below his ribs. The kid bent over double and then fell to the ground. Kane picked him up by the back of his sweater and threw him back among his group of friends like he weighed next to nothing.
I had never seen Kane like that before. The expression on his face wasn’t just hard; it was mean. Mean, and dangerous. Way more dangerous-looking than the crack kid.
‘You know me?’ said Kane to the group of boys, who were all quickly backing away. Kane zeroed in on one particular boy. ‘I said, motherfucker, do you fucking know me?’
‘Yeah, man, we know you,’ said the kid, scared shitless.
‘You know this is my girl?’
The kid nodded.
‘Can’t hear you,’ yelled Kane.
‘Yeah, we know.’
Kane turned his back on the scared kid and went back to the crack kid, who was still gasping for breath on the ground.
Kane hauled him up, and said right in his face, ‘You think it’s alright to fuck with my woman?’
‘I didn’t know who she was,’ he managed to wheeze out.
‘Everyone know who she is: especially who she is to me.’
‘I swear I didn’t know, just heard she was hot is all. I’m sorry, man.’
‘For what?’ said Kane, still right in his face.
‘For disrespecting you.’
‘That all you got?’
‘I don’t know, man. I’m sorry. I really am.’
‘Sorry for touching what’s mine? Sorry for violating her space when she don’t want you anywhere near her? What? What are you fucking sorry for, motherfucker?’
‘Everything, man. All of it. Shouldn’t have gone near her. Please, man, I’m fucking sorry.’
‘You know what I could do to you? Break you, bitch. You don’t walk, you don’t shit. Nothing. You know why? ’Cause you dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not sorry enough.’
I said his name. Kane. He looked at me. His nostrils were flaring, and the veins in his neck were standing out in relief.
‘Stop.’
I don’t know why I said it. Because the kid deserved what he was getting. But he was also young. Young and small. Kane looked like a giant next to him. And also, the kid was dirty. His clothes, his skin. I don’t think I’d ever smelt anyone who stunk as bad as him. It was obvious no one cared for him.
‘He said he’s sorry.’
Kane immediately released his hold on the kid’s sweatshirt.
‘What’s your name, nigga?’
‘Tyrone.’
‘Tyrone what?’
‘Rivers.’
Kane’s expression tightened. ‘You related to Xavier Rivers?’
Fresh fear spiked in Tyrone’s face.
‘Yes or no, motherfucker?’
Tyrone quickly nodded. ‘He my cousin.’
‘So, you tell X what you did, and then me and him will talk.’
‘I don’t want to tell him,’ said Tyrone, close to a whisper.
‘You think I give a shit about what you want?’
‘X already got it in for me,’ said Tyrone, and those bloodshot eyes of his were showing plenty of white. ‘I ain’t allowed any more mistakes.’
Kane hesitated; seemed to look at Tyrone extra close. Then he glanced at me. I didn’t say anything out loud, but it wouldn’t have been hard to read what I was thinking – that kid knew he’d fucked up, and he was scared as hell.
‘I know you little punk ass nigga,’ said Kane to Tyrone. ‘You think you the man ’cause you got some cred for some shit? You think now there ain’t rules that apply to you. You wrong. I’m gonna be watching you, motherfucker. You ever look at what belongs to me again and you done. Now, get the fuck out of here.’
Kane glanced at the rest of Tyrone’s friends, who were still hanging round, watching. ‘This ain’t your place,’ he said to them. ‘Where you’re standing – you in my house. You come back here again, consider yourself fucked up. Ain’t no one gonna recognize you.’
They went. All of them. Quickly. Tyrone even muttered another ‘sorry’ to Kane. He didn’t even glance at me though.
‘Hey,’ said Kane to me. He was looking at me all worried, like I was going to break or something. ‘It’s alright,’ he said, drawing close to me.
‘I’m okay,’ I said stiffly as his arms went around me.
‘Baby, you shaking.’
‘You looked different just now. Different even to how you are in the ring.’
‘He threatened you. I could fucking kill the little fucker.’
‘You think he’s going to be trouble if I see him again and you’re not around?’
‘Nah, he ain’t a problem no more. That little nigga was shaking more than you.’
I buried my face in Kane’s chest and breathed in the familiar reassuring scent of him.
Kane was right about Tyrone not being a problem. I only ever saw him a couple of times in the hallway, and he didn’t look at me.
Then one day Kane told me he was dead. Xavier Rivers got tired of his crackhead cousin stealing from him, his mom and his aunties. He shot Tyrone in an alley not far from school. He left him there, alone, his own flesh and blood, with three bullets in his chest.
‘I heard X reckons he put him down. You know, like an animal.’
‘I can’t believe that, Kane. What sort of asshole does that? What sort of asshole even thinks that? How do you even know him?’
‘Just do.’
‘Well, stay away from him. He’s the fucking animal. Tyrone was just a little kid.’
Kane just grunted, but he wasn’t happy. It wasn’t that he said anything more; he was just real quiet the rest of the evening, and then made Wayne lend him his pickup truck so he could drive me home.
We didn’t talk during that drive. Didn’t even play any music. I looked out the window and watched the streets roll past, thinking about Tyrone. How come he’d been so dirty? How could he only get to fourteen and then have his own cousin shoot him like that? How could life be that fucked up?
Kane found a smile for me when he stopped Wayne’s pickup outside my house.
‘When am I gonna meet your mom and dad?’
‘You can come in now.’
‘Your mom be down with that?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll wait till she is.’
‘You’ll be waiting a long time.’
‘What about your dad?’
‘If he was like he used to be, then he’d want to meet you. He would have wanted to meet you the first day I met you.’
Kane opened his door.
‘But Kane,’ I said hurriedly, ‘my dad’s going to be in his pajamas. And my mom, she won’t be nice.’
‘She couldn’t be worse than Wayne was to you.’
‘Yes, she could,’ I replied.
It was the first time in my life that I’d introduced a boy to my parents. They met Kane separately, of course. I woke Dad up, but he got out of bed and shook Kane’s hand. I hadn’t expected he would even remember how to do that. Mom did not shake hands. For a mom
ent, just as we walked into the living room, I got this feeling, like I wanted her to like Kane. But that passed when she couldn’t even bring herself to say two words to him. After I introduced him she just turned back to her TV show, without asking Kane a single thing about himself.
Kane was working that night. He messaged me at two in the morning. The translation of his abbreviated form of text language into English was:
‘Your dad’s cool.’
His second message said, ‘Can’t get over how much you look like your mom.’
Third message: ‘But you is way more than her, baby.’
Message number four: ‘Best thing in the world is that you’re mine.’
8
Lisa didn’t look like Mom. To look at them you wouldn’t have even known they were related, let alone mother and daughter. Mom and me though, Kane was right about that. Pictures of her when she was young, you could have swapped me for her in a photo and no one would have noticed the difference unless they were looking really closely for it. At sixteen I was taller than her, and my skin was a bit darker, but our faces were crazy similar.
When I was a kid I liked that I looked like Mom and Lisa didn’t. Like, even though Mom didn’t hug me or talk to me the way she did to Lisa, she and I had our faces in common and it connected us. As I got older and smarter though, I realized how little it meant. Once, when Lisa was still alive, I asked Mom if I looked like anyone on her side of the family. She’d just come out of Lisa’s room holding a stainless steel bowl and I was sitting on the floor outside the door. I guess I hoped she’d look at me like I was an idiot, tell me to go look in the mirror, say to me that no one could ever mistake us for being anything but mother and daughter. She didn’t though. She handed me the bowl, told me to clean it out and then went back into Lisa’s room. In the bowl was a mix of bile, blood and a couple of chewed-up bits of apple Lisa had managed to swallow that day.
I washed it out and took it back. Mom was sitting up on the bed and Lisa was resting her head in Mom’s lap. Mom kept stroking Lisa’s forehead. The same tender caress, from Lisa’s eyebrows back toward her hairline. Mom’s dark hand and Lisa’s golden-brown sweating forehead. I guess I was pretty dumb not to realize Lisa wasn’t my full-blood sister. And not just because of her lighter skin. I’ve already said Lisa and Mom looked nothing alike, but she obviously didn’t share any features with my dad either. Her hands, face, feet, legs, everything – it was all her own.
There sure was something real special about her though. Lisa was so special our mom had no need for another daughter. Ever.
Dad wanting me must have been the reason I was born. Must have had to insist upon it. It would have taken a lot to convince my mom to do something she didn’t want to do. Maybe she was hoping for a son, or maybe she did want another daughter – until I arrived, and something about me made her change her mind. Even in my earliest memories, the ones where I’m still riding my blue and white tricycle, I can feel that she doesn’t like me. She’s ignoring me as I’m calling out to her. I’m right there beside her, but she’s watching Lisa ride her bike. Lisa’s twelve and I’m three, but even as young as that I know she prefers Lisa.
My sister found out she was HIV-positive in her final year at school. She gave blood at our church blood drive, and then someone rang a few days later from the blood donor place and said she needed to come in and see one of their doctors.
I try to think how things were when the phone rang. Was there noise in the house that the ring had to cut through? Or was everything silent; the house just waiting, light moving swiftly away, everything growing overcast? Darkness creeping in through the cracks of our family façade and taking up residence in what was supposed to be a home.
Did Lisa run to the phone? Maybe she was in her bedroom and she bolted down the stairs to the hallway. She could have thought a friend was phoning her, or even a guy. I know she beat Mom to the phone. If I close my eyes, and search really hard; if I concentrate just the right amount and don’t let the memory slip away, I can find the pitch of Lisa’s voice. I can seek out her tones of confusion and worry and pull them to the surface. I can hear her say, at the beginning of her end, ‘I have to see a doctor.’
I wasn’t there. I don’t know what was really said.
Lisa finished school, but she didn’t go to college and she never got a job. She was always just in her room. Her body was healthy then. It was another year until her gums started bleeding. She didn’t tell anyone. It was the nose bleeds that started soon after that drew attention to the fact something was going on.
It’s hard to know for sure whether she would have got leukemia without being HIV-positive. It’s possible the two were unrelated. I guess it doesn’t matter. First she got HIV, then she got cancer, and that’s what happened.
She didn’t fight to live.
I watched her die from a distance. There was her and Mom on the inside, and me and Dad on the outside. The only time she ever let me in on what she was thinking about it all happened one day out of the blue. I was in her room wrapping her birthday present to Dad. Black socks with stripes around the top and three handkerchiefs with grey edging. I’d been with Mom when she’d bought them. I’d wanted her to get the ones with blue edging, because that was Dad’s favorite color, but Mom had ignored me and bought the grey ones.
I was halfway through wrapping them, scissors and sticky tape and a spool of green ribbon on the carpet beside me.
Lisa was lying still on her bed, on top of the comforter.
‘I only did it once. Just one time.’
I looked over at her and tears were sliding down her face and onto her pillow.
I didn’t say anything. I was ten. I knew about sex. I knew that she’d been infected by a virus you never want to get. And the virus itself: I knew plenty about that because Dad talked about it all the time. He had so many books on it, and folder after folder of internet printouts full of research and treatment options. Dad and me had even gone to some support meetings for families of people with HIV. Mom wouldn’t go, and Lisa never attended any support groups for people living with HIV. The fact was, Lisa wasn’t living with HIV; she was dying with it. The only times she ever left the house were for medical appointments. Even then Mom had to prepare her for the idea of them weeks in advance, and then on the day cajole her, and manipulate her, just to get her out the front door.
I know Lisa’s stays in hospital were torture for Mom. Lisa just shut down if she wasn’t at home. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t read. Mom would have to feed her, and lead her by her hand if they went for a walk. The doctors and nurses used the word ‘traumatized’ a lot. I think ‘hiding’ is a better one.
Lisa would get home from those hospital stays and rather than be all shut down and incapable she’d just be a bit quiet. Then, within half a day, words would come. I’ll tell you something else too, hospital or home, unless she was completely incapacitated with chemo, or just with plain dying, like at the end, Lisa never let anyone take her to the bathroom. Even when she supposedly couldn’t feed herself, she could still take herself to the bathroom.
‘You can live with this,’ my father once said to her. ‘People live with HIV, Lisa. You just decide to.’
But Lisa refused. She hid from life and she hid from the certainty of death. When it was finally time, she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t at peace. The last words she spoke as she drifted in and out of consciousness were, ‘Momma, no.’
When Lisa died, my mom shut everyone out. She stopped going to church, and the few friends she had were cut out of her life. She turned on Dad, and helped push him into his first stroke. Then she neglected him so badly he had another one.
Also, her rejection of me became complete.
After Lisa’s death, she never asked what I was up to, or where I’d been that day. Never even told me off. Once I asked her for help with my homework.
‘Go see your father,’ she said.
That was after his second stroke. My father could no sooner help me with
my homework than do a child’s jigsaw puzzle, and my mom knew it.
Even when I started coming home late because I’d been with Kane, she still didn’t ask a single question. Just left my dinner out on the bench, congealing.
I spoke out in desperation one night. It was a couple of weeks after Kane had first come over. She was watching television; I was sitting at the dining table prodding limp broccoli with my fork.
‘What did you think of Kane, Mom?’
She looked over at me, and then looked back at the television.
I hated her in that moment. I went straight up to my room, and slammed the door as hard as I could behind me. No sound came back at me. Didn’t I know the house was dead? Well, I was alive, and I was going to make sure my mother knew it.
I played music loudly. I talked on the phone loudly. Once, I cooked dinner before she got to it. But she still made her own.
Maybe I should have cut the television aerial. Instead I hit upon the idea that the best way for me to get something from her was to put together a list of questions about herself, and just make her answer them.
Where did you go to school? I wrote down.
Did you have a favorite teacher?
What was your favorite subject?
What did you do after you left school?
How did you and Dad meet?
What was your first house like?
Was I a good baby?
I got as far as asking her ‘Did you have a favorite teacher?’ before she turned the volume up on the television and pretended I was no longer there.
9
Kane and I had a fight with colored markers one day. It was stupid, but it was also so much fun. I started it with a blue line of permanent marker down his arm. We were upstairs at his place. Wayne was out at his new girlfriend’s, and Kane was watching a game of football. I was bored and he was concentrating on the game. I had my pencil case out and a whole lot of books because I was behind on all my homework, and I thought I’d get some done while he was watching the game. Problem was, it was a Friday night, and I really wasn’t in the mood for homework. Also, Kane was wearing this white t-shirt and the sleeves were pulling tight over his biceps, and I couldn’t stop looking at them.
After Nothing Page 6