The Dear One

by Woodson, Jacqueline

“Since she stopped drinking, she’s a lot calmer. She still works a lot, though. But I think if I ever got pregnant, she’d take care of me. And Marion and Bernadette too. Bernadette’s over there tutoring Rebecca right now, and Marion bought all these nice clothes for her. She didn’t have hardly anything when she came to stay with us.”

  “What happened to all her stuff?”

  “Ma says they never really had anything.”

  “No clothes?”

  “Her family doesn’t have any money. It’s a whole bunch of them living in four rooms.”

  “God! She probably never had her own room before now.”

  “That’s the worst part. She’s staying in my room. She’s the last person I see before I go to sleep and the first person I see when I wake up!”

  “Horror show!”

  “The guest room is cold, and I threw a fit when Ma suggested Grandma’s room.”

  “Yeah, that’s too sacred, I guess.”

  “She’s such a pain, Caesar. All she talks about is the baby and Danny.”

  “Who’s Danny?”

  “Her boyfriend.”

  “The baby’s daddy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen! Can you imagine, Feni! I think I’d die.”

  “I don’t think I’m ever going to get pregnant.”

  “I can’t even think about kissing a boy, let alone going all the way and doing the wild thing!”

  “Me either. They probably didn’t even know how to do it right.”

  “Well, they knew how to do something right, ’cause she sure is pregnant.”

  We giggled.

  “Afeni, can you imagine? Lying down naked beside somebody?”

  “Kill myself.”

  “Double kill myself. Not in a trillion years. I don’t even think I’ll do it with my husband.”

  “You have to, Caesar. That’s why they marry you.”

  “Well, he’s just going to have to marry me for my brains, because no way, José, am I going to ever take off my clothes in front of somebody. I don’t even let my mom see me naked!”

  “I saw Rebecca with no shirt on,” I whispered, and Caesar’s eyes opened wide.

  “What’d she look like? Did she look like—like us?”

  “Uh-uh. Everything’s so swollen. Her stomach sticks way out and her breasts are gigantic.”

  “That’s because of the milk. They’re getting ready for it to come.”

  “I know that.”

  “Was anything else different?”

  I nodded. “From the neck down she looks like she’s thirty. But then you look at her face and you know she’s only a kid like us.”

  Caesar looked at the calzone, then pushed it back toward me.

  “When she caught me looking,” I continued, “she started screaming, ‘Stop staring at me! You’re always staring!’ ”

  “Well, of course you have to stare!” Caesar agreed.

  “I just know the sooner she’s gone the better.”

  “I wish I could meet her. I never saw a pregnant teenager.”

  “You should come over.”

  “I don’t know, Feni....”

  “Why don’t you come after school sometime? My mother won’t be around. Anyway, she’s really sorry about what happened, Caesar. She really has changed.”

  “Maybe. I think I’ll roll over and die if I don’t meet her.”

  “How about Monday?”

  “Jack and Jill is having a dinner dance.”

  “On a Monday afternoon? That club is so stupid. I’m so glad Ma doesn’t make me go!”

  “Yeah . . . how come you don’t have to go anymore?”

  “Ma says if I come straight home, now that Rebecca’s there, it’ll be okay. What a choice—Rebecca or Jack and Jill.”

  “It’s fun, Feni.”

  “I hate all that stuff.”

  “You’ll like it when you do cotillion. Then we’ll be sixteen. It’ll be different.”

  “I’m not doing cotillion, because I’m not coming out. I think that’s all bull. All you do is wear a stupid gown and get all your friends to look just as dumb.”

  “I like wearing stupid gowns.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Then come Tuesday.”

  “Maybe. We better get back.” Caesar took a last bite of calzone and stood to put her coat on. “You talk to your father lately?”

  “No,” I said, not mentioning the fight Ma and I had had the week before.

  “You’re still mad, aren’t you?”

  “He’s such a jerk! How could you forget how old your own daughter is?”

  “That is pretty jerky. You ever going to go to Colorado for a visit again?”

  “No.”

  “They have some good skiing there.”

  “There’s good skiing here. Anyway, I hate skiing.”

  We headed back toward Roper silently, walking slowly because the sun felt so good on our faces.

  “Does Rebecca go to private or Catholic school?” Caesar asked at the door.

  “She went to a public school. But they kicked her out when she got pregnant.”

  “Public school. My father says the public schools in New York are real bad. There was an article in the Times once about how many kids were shot and stabbed in those schools.”

  “They don’t have money for private school.”

  “I wonder what happened to their money.”

  “They never had any, Caesar. Read my lips. Her family doesn’t have any money!”

  “Wow. Who’s going to pay for her cotillion?”

  “She can have mine!”

  Sixteen

  “WHO’S JANIE FEEDLER?” REBECCA ASKED OUT OF THE blue a week later.

  “What?”

  “Janie Feedler. Who is she?”

  I was sitting on my bed reading. It was Saturday, and Rebecca had spent the morning trying to persuade me to show her around Seton. Me, Ma, Marion, and Bernadette had already shown her the library, the railroad station, and Seton’s one museum, but today I had no plans to leave the house. Not only was it below zero outside, but more snow had fallen during the night. The warmest place in the house, next to the fireplace, was my room.

  “She’s a neighbor. Why?”

  “I heard your mother on the telephone with Marion. She said Janie Feedler had asked if I was at your house for charity reasons.”

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s a crotchety something. Never minds her business. What did Ma say?”

  “She said that she told her I was a good friend of yours and then the nosy crotchety—what’s crotchety?”

  “It’s like crabby, rickety, something like that.”

  “Well, anyway, Ms. Feedler asked her if I was in trouble and your mother said, ‘No, Rebecca’s not in any trouble at all.’ ”

  “Ma said that?”

  Rebecca nodded. “That’s wild, isn’t it?”

  “You shouldn’t be listening,” I said.

  “I overheard. Don’t be so crotchety, Feni! What kind of name is Feni anyway?”

  “It’s Swahili,” I said, turning back to my book, amazed at how fast Rebecca could jump from one thing to the next.

  “Swahili for what? You don’t just go giving somebody a name because it’s some sort of African thing. It should have a meaning.” She lay back on her bed and stared up at the ceiling. Every now and then she went over to the window and looked, then fell back on her bed again. I wondered what she was expecting to see different out there.

  After a while I said, “It’s short for Afeni, which means ‘the Dear One.’ ”

  “‘The Dear One’!” Rebecca laughed. “ ‘The Dear One’!”

  “What’s so funny about that?” I asked, slamming the book closed.

  “The Dear One! That’s what’s so funny! You ain’t dear at all!”

  “Maybe not to you. But somebody thought I was! I don’t care what you th
ink!”

  “Who thought you was dear?” she asked, calming down and raising herself up on her elbow.

  “My grandmother named me,” I said, fingering the pages of my book.

  “Is that your grandmother that died?” Rebecca asked, her eyes all questions and interest.

  I nodded. “She got killed in California when I was eight.”

  “How?”

  I recounted the bus-incident story for Rebecca and watched as her face masked over in horror.

  “I miss her,” I whispered, feeling tears well up in the back of my throat.

  Rebecca lay back on her bed and took a deep breath. She rested her hands on her high stomach. “Is she the girl in the frame you put on the night table every single night?”

  I felt for the small silver frame in my back pocket and nodded—then, realizing Rebecca had been snooping through my things, started to say something. But Rebecca spoke before I could.

  “That’s deep. That must be why it’s like you have this gigantic wall built up around you with a sign on the front saying go away.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, picking up my book again. Here I had just told her about my grandmother, when I had never talked about it to anyone before, and now she was talking about some walls somewhere!

  “Come here!” she said excitedly.

  I looked over at her holding her stomach. “Is the baby coming?” I asked, putting down my book and heading toward the door, ready to call Ma if she started screaming.

  “No!” She gasped. “I want you to feel this.”

  “Feel what?” I took small steps toward her bed. She reached out for my hand and pressed it against her stomach. Something jutted out and I tried to snatch my hand away, but Rebecca held it firmly.

  “Something’s moving!”

  “It’s the baby! He’s kicking! He wants to get out of there soon.” Rebecca laughed. “Don’t be scared of it. He ain’t gonna bite you!”

  I relaxed a little and felt the soft skin on her stomach move back and forth beneath my hand.

  “That’s for your grandmother,” Rebecca said. “People die to make space for other people to live. Now that your grandma is gone, somebody else got to come in the world.”

  I frowned, not believing her.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Babies come down from heaven—only, they take the long way—and while they’re on their way down, the other people that been here already are heading on up there.”

  “That’s bull,” I said, getting up and going back over to my bed. Somewhere in the back of my mind, though, I wanted to believe every word of it.

  “So you don’t have to be building up walls and shutting people out, ’cause everything works out okay.”

  “You sure think you know a lot for a fifteen-year-old. If you know so much, how come you got yourself in trouble?”

  “I told you before, this ain’t trouble. Ask that family that’s taking my baby if it’s trouble. And I know a lot because I seen a lot. You can’t be growing up in New York City and not know a lot. Every day, something new happening around there. They got a lot of drugs and killing where I live....”

  “You took drugs before?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “I don’t need that junk. My boyfriend, though, he was smoking a lot, but when me and him got together, he stopped. But I got too much stuff going on to be losing my head with nobody’s drugs. And plus I got love. My boyfriend loves me, and my ma and my sisters and brothers love me. That’s about all I need, you know?”

  “You and your boyfriend gonna get married?”

  Rebecca laughed that grown-up laugh of hers. “You’re full of questions today, aren’t you? When I came here, you was all eyes and silence. I like you better when you’re talking. Nah, though. Me and my boyfriend got bigger plans than marriage.”

  “What kind of plans?”

  “Oh, all kinds,” she said. “Houses and cars and picket-fence plans.”

  “Well, how come he never calls you? I heard you talking to him on the phone that morning. And you gave him our number and everything.”

  She hesitated a moment. “He calls while you at school.”

  I knew she was lying but didn’t say anything.

  “And anyway, you shouldn’t be listening to other people’s conversations. Even if this is your house.”

  I picked up my book and opened it to the folded-down page, staring at the words without reading them.

  “My boyfriend is going to buy me all kinds of things,” Rebecca was saying. “When I get home, we all gonna party and celebrate.”

  “Just like your friends are going to write you all the time.”

  There was a long silence, and when I looked up, Rebecca was staring out the window again, her back straight, her shoulders shaking. “Why don’t you just leave other people’s business alone? Why you gotta be so mean, anyway?”

  Seventeen

  WE DIDN’T SPEAK FOR A WEEK. MA AND MARION LEFT us alone, prodded Rebecca with questions about the baby and me with questions about school. Our answers were monosyllabic between questions, our meals were silent. One night I turned from the television to catch Ma staring at the two of us, sitting far away from each other. She called me into the den.

  “How was school today?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said, playing with the frames she had above her computer. All the pictures were of me at different stages—crawling, walking, eating, kindergarten graduation.

  “What’s going on out there?” Ma asked, gently pulling my hands into her own.

  “Nothing,” I said, too casually. “You know how people get when they’re pregnant.”

  “Oh?” Ma cocked an eyebrow, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “How’s that?”

  “Crabby about things,” I said.

  “You two going to work it out?”

  I shrugged. “Guess so. She doesn’t get in my way and I won’t get in hers.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll let you handle this yourselves. No need for me to come between friends, is there?”

  “We’re not friends!” I said.

  Ma let go of my hands and pulled one of my braids.

  “I’ll let you two handle it,” she said again.

  I stormed into the living room and sat on the couch—as far away from Rebecca as I could get.

  “I don’t want to watch any stupid pregnancy exercise junk,” I said.

  Saying nothing, Rebecca picked up both remotes, clicked off the VCR, and flipped through the channels. She stopped at a show on public television about dolphins. The man speaking was saying that there was a chance dolphins might be as smart as humans. He stared into the screen as he said this, and his blue eyes bored holes into us. Then a woman came on, promising they’d continue the show after they had collected another thousand dollars and pleading with us to call in and pledge money. I sneaked a look at Rebecca, and although her eyes were glued to the screen, they did not stop there, but moved on past it into a place I couldn’t see.

  “I think maybe the baby is dying,” she said.

  The words echoed off the TV woman’s soft pleading and settled in my stomach. I was not sure whether or not Rebecca was talking to me, but felt I should answer anyway.

  “Why do you think that?”

  When Rebecca finally answered, her voice was soft, clear, and full of sadness.

  “He used to move around so much, and now he doesn’t hardly move at all.”

  “Maybe it’s because you’re exercising and doing schoolwork with Bernadette and everything. Maybe he’s just tired.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “It’s not that,” she said. “He knows.”

  “Knows what?” I asked quietly. In a minute the man and the dolphins would be back on. I didn’t want Rebecca to stop talking. I had missed her.

  “He knows we’re not in Harlem no more and that he’s going to go live with somebody that’s not really his mother.”

  “Don’t worry, Rebecca. It’s going to be o
kay.” I was unsure. I had not thought much about what would happen when the baby came and Rebecca went home again. Nor had I thought about the baby actually being born. That had all seemed like such a long time away. But now, Rebecca had been here more than a month, and the baby would be here in another six weeks. Then Rebecca would stay a little while longer and that would be the end. “Don’t worry, Rebecca,” I said again, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  “The doctor says he’s healthy, but I know that’s not true. I try to eat good, and I talk to him at night. I whisper so I don’t wake you up. And he used to kick a little to let me know he heard every word. But he doesn’t do that no more. He hardly kicks at all now. And yesterday I was bleeding a little. You know what that means?”

  I shook my head, but Rebecca was staring at the screen and didn’t see me. “No.”

  “You not supposed to bleed when you’re pregnant. It means something is real wrong inside.”

  “Maybe he’s just sleeping more.”

  The man and the smart dolphins came back on the screen, and Rebecca watched the dolphins jump through hoops and sing dolphin songs. The man said dolphins laugh like humans and understand stuff. He said dolphins cry.

  Rebecca rubbed her stomach. Her face had gotten chub-bier, and the short curls had grown down over her eyes. She chewed a hangnail as she watched.

  “Monday, Marion’s taking me to Dr. Greenberg again so she can listen to the baby’s heart. She says if I want, she’ll tell me whether it’s a boy or girl. I told her don’t tell me.”

  “You think there’s a teeny-tiny chance it might be a girl?”

  “Nope,” Rebecca said stubbornly. “Danny’s calling me tomorrow.”

  I wondered why she was telling me all of this.

  “He’s going to call around three-thirty. You want to show me around Seton some more after I get off the phone, or are you afraid to be seen with me without your ma and Marion?”

  “I don’t care about being seen with you. I don’t care what people think.”

  “Then you’ll show me? I’ve seen a lot of buildings and I wondered what they were.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “Now we’re friends again, right?” Rebecca turned to me for the first time that evening. She smiled and her dimples cut deeply into her cheeks, making her look a lot younger than fifteen.