by Riley LaShea
Melinda’s hands were full with her own work and taking Scott to dialysis, and since I was retiring from teaching to go with Ariel, I would have little to do, so, when it came down to it, Mama had missed her chance to get away from us.
“I ain’t lost a thing in New York,” she said when we told her she was coming with us. “I’ll stay here. I can take care of myself.”
“You cannot stay here alone,” I responded.
“I don’t want to go up there with all those people!” Mama said, but it wasn’t just numbers with Mama. It was the types of people that scared her, so many, so unlike her, as if she was a model human being.
“Maybe she’ll die soon, and won’t have to worry about it long,” I griped to Ariel after a particularly heated argument in which I told Mama she was going if I had to tie her up in the trunk to get her there.
“Don’t say that,” Ariel said softly to me. “You’ll regret it when she’s gone.”
Realizing Ariel was thinking of her own mother and how we’d gotten to Chicago just a little too late when the nursing home called to tell Ariel she should come, I felt the raging guilt I deserved.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right,” Ariel responded. “I mean, tying your mother up in the trunk for the duration of the drive sounds like an ideal way to travel to me, but I’m sure there are several laws against it.”
The sound of the door startles me, and my hand flies to my heart. It’s failing, I can feel it, and it has been for a while, but my reflexes, at least, are still good.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Are you okay?” the young black woman asks me, putting her hand on my shoulder. She’s a big girl with a bouncy personality and dark curls that bounce right along with it.
“I’ll live,” I tell her, and I know that’s what she worries about. One of us tied to life by a thread, the other just damn old, I know the staff is never sure which of us will go first.
“You’re her wife, right?” the woman asks me, and, after nearly three years, I find I still can’t get used to a term denied me for more than sixty.
“Yes,” I say. “I am.”
“How long have you two been a couple?” she asks in a rather intrigued way, and I know it’s because someone so young can’t get her head around ever being as old as Ariel and me.
There was a time I couldn’t have imagined it.
“Seventy years,” I answer.
“Seventy years?” the girl looks positively aghast. “What were you, two, when you met?”
Snorting, I feel Ariel’s ring turn in time with the roll of my eyes.
“Don’t flatter me,” I reply, and the woman laughs along with me. “Are you a nurse?” I ask her, because I have been spending a lot of time at Ariel’s bedside these days and I don’t remember ever seeing her.
“No, Ma’am,” she says. “I just come to visit.”
“You come here to visit my wife?” I send a warning glance her way.
“It’s very professional,” she assures me with a smile.
“What do you do when you visit?” I ask her.
“I just talk to her,” the woman says. “Sometimes I sing.”
“What do you sing?”
“R&B,” she answers. “Popular music.”
Shaking my head, I encourage her not to start, and she laughs again, not a single hard feeling at my dismissal of her repertoire.
“Do you know ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’?” I ask, turning the ring right on Ariel’s hand.
“No, Ma’am, I don’t,” she sounds apologetic.
“If you get a chance, learn it, would you?” I whisper. “It’s Ariel’s favorite song.”
AIDS truly was a suffering disease, but its greatest suffering wasn’t the pain, or even the stealing of one’s life. It was the stealing of one’s dignity.
“It’s not the medicine they need most,” Ariel said one night after a particularly difficult day in which two of her patients had succumbed, more to the loss of hope, I knew she thought, than to their sickness. “It’s the belief they haven’t been abandoned.”
So, when she worked her shifts, I started going to visit her patients, dragging Mama with me, much to her distaste. For weeks, she sat silent in the common room at the hospice, trying not to be touched. Then, one day, just like that, she started talking to the people with whom she was forced to share space.
I wasn’t around to see how it happened, but I imagined one of those handsome, young gay men found something to say that Mama wanted to hear, and she couldn’t help but say something back.
For the first time, I realized Mama could actually be friends with people beyond the social niceties she had always exchanged with other ladies out of obligation.
“Mama,” I walked into the living room of our small Brooklyn apartment one afternoon. It had been a few days since we had gone with Ariel to the hospice, because Mama was tired and she hadn’t been eating well. “Do you want some tea?”
“No tea,” she said, and, along with her shallow breaths, her answer was cause for worry, because tea was the only thing she had consistently taken when I offered it. “Ariel made you happy, didn’t she?” Mama asked me.
“Yes,” I answered, moving closer to her, but Mama’s eyes just stared off at the wall by the window. “She still makes me happy.”
“Could you get the shade?” Mama said. “It’s too bright.” And going over to close it, my hands shook on the cords.
“I had a friend,” she went on in a strange, hypnotic rhythm, “when I was young. I liked her better than any of the boys, wouldn’t have traded her for a one of them. Who knows, maybe I should have been with her. I never even thought such a thing could be.”
“You couldn’t have loved a girl,” I laughed uneasily at her attempt to bond with me. “You loved Daddy too much.”
“Yes, I did,” Mama returned. “I did love your father.”
Sinking down on the footstool before her, I watched her look beyond me, wondering what she saw as I took her hand and swallowed at how cold she felt. Like Nan had. Like Daddy had.
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” she still knew that I was there, but I could feel it, the life slipping out of her. In the darkened room, I could even see it, hovering on the air, a whisper of spirit departing for someplace else. Someplace better, I hoped.
I still didn’t know if Ariel believed there was a Heaven, but, every time she watched a young man die, as she had watched them die forty years before, I knew she hoped there was one. Me, I needed there to be one, a place where we would all meet again after we’d learned the lessons of our own world and there was no more fighting over what was right and wrong.
“My biggest regret,” Mama breathed, “is that I tried to push you into being a person I wasn’t even happy being. I was so worried about what made you happy, when I should have just been glad you were.”
“It’s all right, Mama,” I said, feeling her hand grow heavier in mine. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“You know,” she responded, looking to me at last, “I think it will.”
Laying her head back against the chair, Mama closed her eyes, and I didn’t try to wake her. There was no use trying to stop what couldn’t be stopped. Knowing Ariel would be home soon, I just sat there in the silence and let nature take its course.
Scott had died the year before, the early damage to his body too much to sustain a long life, so everything we had became mine and Ariel’s, with one special instruction in Mama’s will, just a suggestion, that when Ariel and I no longer needed it, the money from the estate would go to the boys in the band.
Hearing the lawyer read it, I laughed as he asked if I knew what that meant, remembering the day I found Mama settled on the bed next to the skinny black man named Kevin she had taken to the most at the hospice.
“Shhhh,” she said when I asked if she was ready to go, and Ariel and I had to wait for Mama to finish watching the struggles of gay men unfold on the screen.
“Oh, I hate this movie,” Mam
a declared to Kevin when the credits started to roll, and she found out the main character not only hated himself, but his love remained unrequited too. “Do you feel that way?” she asked Kevin, and, sitting in the room beside Ariel, I felt as if she was asking me.
“Honey, no,” Kevin assured her, and Mama calmed down at that as Ariel helped her out of Kevin’s bed so we could go.
“Good,” Mama said, tucking the covers back around Kevin, before casting a furious glare toward the case the video tape came in. “You should burn that.”
As much as she hated the movie, though, she loved the name, she loved her boys, the only true friends I think Mama ever had.
The light flickers. Three times, then a long spell, and two times more.
Ariel won’t make it to a hundred. I thought she would. She came so close.
She won’t wake up, and have any last words of wisdom for me like Nan or Mama. That’s all right, though. It’s been a long life and I have finally earned wisdom of my own.
Though I still get scared, I find, these days, I have little to fear.
Though I still have questions, I’ve found most of the big questions in life are unanswerable for everyone.
Nan told me someone had to be first. Someone also has to be last. There were all of us, then Mama and Daddy and Scott and Nan and Ariel and me. Then, Mama and Ariel and me, and, now, I can tell, though it has come without fanfare, it is only me.
Closing my eyes, I don’t feel like crying. Perhaps, I’m so old my supply of tears has been exhausted, all used up on a lifetime of highs and lows. Listening, instead, in the absence of Ariel’s heartbeat, I hear a song. It must be Nan’s at last, I think, when I don’t recognize it.
Then, the song changes and it changes again, one melody layering atop another until it’s a near assault of noise and memory.
It’s a terrible racket, I think, at first, before I start to hear the beauty in it. Because Ariel and I didn’t have one haunting song of lost romance. We had many years and a lot of music between us, and that messy rhythm that fills my ears, it is the sound of our lives.
*******
A Few More Notes
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Excerpt from A Special Gift From Gram V
1
The Bodega Owner
Snow floated so softly past the window, it was almost more decoration than weather event, like gazing through the glass of a snow globe.
For the man behind the counter, the holidays had come and gone without the kind of fanfare that filled the streets with stars and angels, Christmas trees and menorahs, but they were imminent for most of his patrons, and he could always feel the change the season brought to the city.
Maybe it was the lights in the trees, or the carolers who paraded out of neighborhood churches and schools, or the empathy one couldn’t help but feel while passing others deeply-burrowed in their coats as they braved the blocks to work, but these mornings even the natives smiled and exchanged greetings.
The bodega owner didn’t see much of the working class during the rush, always up and open for business before most of them rose from their beds in the morning, but his customers carried the spirit of the season in off the streets.
“Good morning” they would say on the way through the door, or “Happy Holidays” as they left, or “Cold one out there” just to make conversation. Startling at the friendliness, the bodega owner would respond as best he could.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t fluent in the language, or that he wanted to feel so far removed. He simply didn’t get a lot of practice engaging. Most of the time, the people who swept in and out of his store barely took note of him. He was like a robotic hand that reached across the counter and accepted their money in exchange for things they needed, just another device by which they made their way through chaotic lives.
The holidays, they had a way of restoring the soul of the city that the rest of the year depleted little by little. Because, as filled with life and wonder as New York could be, it could also be cold and distant and difficult to endure, like a host who welcomed the lost and hungry and dreamers out of obligation, but refused them hospitality.
Reaching for the last of his coffee, the bodega owner discovered with a grimace it had gone cold and put the plastic mug aside as the boy who’d been walking the aisles for several minutes wandered up to the counter at last. Twelve or thirteen maybe, his mop of blonde curls sat unruly on his head, and his uninhibited smile turned the bodega owner’s lips grudgingly upward in response.
“Is this it?” he asked the boy.
“Yes, Sir,” the boy responded. “That’s all.”
Reaching for the first of the items, the bodega owner bobbed his head in general approval. He didn’t get a lot of ‘Sirs’ from young people, but it never would go out of style.
A minute later, the hodgepodge of items totaled just over seven dollars, and the bodega owner watched the boy count the total from coat pockets hanging heavy with loose change. Less annoyed by the slow-going than he might normally be, he collected the change from the boy’s hand when he at last finished, popping the cash drawer open and dropping the coins into their separate compartments.
“Oh!” the boy suddenly exclaimed, and the bodega owner paused to watch him pull grubby dollars from the pocket of his jeans. Thumbing them apart, there were only two, but the found money put a huge grin on the boy’s face. Sliding along the counter, his bright blue eyes scanned the key chains that hung on the wall at the bodega owner’s back. “How much is that?” he asked, pointing to the end of one row.
“Which one?” the bodega owner questioned, pressing the cash drawer closed, but not bothering to latch it, as he moved to the back wall.
“The bingo one,” the boy replied. “My grandma really likes bingo.”
Having suspected some of the items in the boy’s pile were meant to be gifts, the bodega owner withheld a genuine smile as he scanned the contents of the wall, finding the keychain the boy must have meant, the one with the bingo balls popping across it. Sliding the novelty gift from the wall peg, the $5.99 price tag twirled on its metal ring, until, gripping it firmly between his thumb and index finger, the bodega owner pinched it off.
“It’s two dollars,” he said, glancing back and watching the blonde boy’s eyes go wide as they cut down the counter.
At his whistle, a boy about the same age, with jet black hair and nearly as dark of eyes, glanced up from where he was lying across the counter, clearing the last of the bills from the cash register.
“Hey!” the bodega owner shouted, and the black-haired boy slid from the countertop, making a shaky landing on his feet before following the blonde boy at a run.
Clearing the length of the counter in three strides, the bodega owner rounded its far end and chased the boys through the front door. Though he looked the wrong way first when he reached the street, the boys still weren’t far when he spotted them. Pivoting around, he saw his business neighbor rush out the door of his own shop and knew the man would keep an eye on things as he went after the thieves.
Footsteps light and steady, cold burning his lungs, the bodega owner watched bills fly from the black-haired boy’s hands, and glared into the blonde boy’s eyes when he glanced back. His deceptively innocent face registering surprised, it was as if he didn’t expect the bodega owner to still be behind them.
They probably though
t they could outrun him. They might have thought, at his age, he wouldn’t even give chase. Despite their head start, though, the bodega owner could tell from several feet back the boys’ breathing was too shallow, weak chest breaths that would deprive their muscles of oxygen, and their strides were too short, pavement-pounders that would wear out their legs.
As the boys rounded the corner of a building into the alley ahead, they all knew he was on the verge of catching up, and the bodega owner expected his robbers to be hiding somewhere when he closed in on them. Turning the corner into the alley, he was met with a face full of dirty money instead and the laughter of the two delinquents as they rushed off.
“You little bastards,” the bodega owner yelled at their backs as they ran the length of the alley and disappeared into the pedestrian traffic on the next street.
He wanted to go after them, teach them a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget, but the money had to be his priority. He was sure they had gotten away with some of it, shoved what they could into their pockets, but there were still enough twenties and tens soaking up the gray slush at the bodega owner’s feet to make it worth the effort to retrieve them.
The wind lifting some of the bills into the air, he rushed to collect them, gathering all he could find, feeling the stack notably light and all the good tidings of the season slip away. Cursing the little demons all the way back to his bodega, he hoped they got theirs before the day was done.
Excerpt from Black Forest: Kingdoms Fall
Chapter One
The Maiden Awakens
Water ran warm in the halls of the palace, a perk of servitude that, in months of cool winds, made even the freest of peasants long for captivity. Those who lived within the walls were not sheltered at their wishes, though, but at those of the king, who had them plucked from the stalls and barns and sanctuaries of the village as they appealed to him.