Tempest Rising

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  “They’re gone,” Ramona said. She looked away from Mae, preferring to look at the naked mass of the ward leader than watch Mae try to cover her breast, then her thigh, then her breast again. “The girls, they’re gone, they’re gone, gone.”

  “What you mean, gone? What the fuck you let happen to those girls?”

  Bernie snorted and shook himself awake and let out a small scream seeing himself exposed like that. He grabbed the edge of the sheet wrapped around Mae, and they played tug-of-war with the sheet, leaving them both half naked.

  Ramona turned her back on them and talked to the wall. She threw her voice against the wall as if her voice were a sledgehammer and she needed to crack through the wall. “Gone, gone, they’re gone,” she said. “I looked everywhere. They’re gone.”

  There was a small knock on Mae’s door, and Addison edged the door open and stepped lightly into Mae’s bedroom, asking, “Everything okay, aunts?” He looked at Ramona quizzically, facing the wall. “You on punishment, cuz? Looks like all you need is a dunce’s hat.” He laughed and then looked at the bed, at Mae and her ward leader fighting over the larger piece of sheet. “Awl, damn,” he said, covering his eyes and backing out of the bedroom. “Shit.”

  Bernie huffed and puffed and threw up his hands and didn’t even try to cover himself anymore. He jumped off the bed and grabbed his pants from the chair and did cover his front with the pants. He bounded out of the room and slammed the bathroom door shut. Mae propped herself up in the bed to sitting and leaned her back against her headboard, fully covered with the sheet now, looking as if she were waiting to be served breakfast in bed. “Ramona,” she said calmly, “I think you got some explaining to do.”

  “Me?” Ramona’s voice screeched, and she turned back to face Mae, to glare at her, to tell her once and for all that she was a sad excuse for a foster mother and an even more pathetic natural one. But Mae’s expression was so steady, like the face she put on at the card table when it was time to raise or fold, her drooping eye blinking out of sync with her good one, that Ramona swallowed the rest of her words, and only air was left in her mouth, which she huffed at Mae, and then stomped out of Mae’s bedroom. She ran back to the girls’ bedroom to survey it again, maybe get some clues. Wasn’t kidnapping a possibility? Weren’t their parents rich? Maybe she should hunt for a ransom note. She let the thought go as quickly as it had come. Kidnapping wasn’t a possibility. She was sure. Nor did she need to go in that room to find out why they’d left. The whys were running all through that house. Starting with Addison, she thought, and his dick that was where his brain should be, and Mae with her sweet-sounding words that were like cotton candy, no insides to her words at all, just puffs of sugar-coated air. Even herself. She didn’t want to begin to see her own behavior, hear her own words, which had been filled with venom for the girls. Even after she had allowed Victoria to get close to that part of her she’d kept buried and covered with granite, she would still use her words to slap around Bliss and Shern every chance she got. Especially Shern.

  The closed bedroom door stopped her thoughts about Shern. Now she was flooded with the image of the girls curled up in that twin bed. Now she hoped that maybe she just thought the beds were empty, that she’d woke in a fog and gone in there before her eyes were working right. “Please let them be here,” she whispered against logic, praying now that she wouldn’t have to pick up the phone to call the police to report them missing. She opened the door lightly. She would have to call the police. The bed was empty. They were gone.

  She went back into the girls’ room to wait for the police to come. The massive gray cloud had gotten comfortable with this day and was all leaned back in the sky and only allowing a thread of the early-morning pink to push through the window. The pink settled in the bedroom and illuminated what the girls had left behind. The beds appeared freshly made, and Ramona almost choked on the thought that those girls were the type who took the time to make up the bed they’d slept in even as they were preparing to run away. Their trunk was still there; their book bags were piled neatly in the corner; they’d even left shoes behind, lined up in size order and peeking from under the spread. She got down on her knees and searched under the beds for their fur-lined boots. Good, there was a hole under the bed where the boots usually stood; at least their feet may have stayed dry and warm through the night.

  Shern’s lime green velvet bathrobe was folded at the foot of the bed, and Ramona picked it up and felt around in the pockets, for what she didn’t know. The pockets were empty, and she held the robe up to straighten it out and fold it down again. She was struck then by the feel of the robe, the way the soft lush threads were warm under her fingers as they yielded to her press and then surrounded her fingers and held them there. She’d never owned anything where the richness permeated every fiber. Even the way the robe smelled, a light sweetness to it, like lavender with a touch of mint, not like the heavy perfume she wore that she bought on special that sometimes reminded her of how a funeral parlor smelled.

  She imagined Shern and her mother shopping for the robe together. Maybe they’d just had lunch in the Crystal Room at John Wanamaker’s and then taken the escalator down to the fourth floor, where the sales manager of the fine lingerie department waited on them personally, offered them tea and cookies, and then they sat in the dainty parlor chairs and sipped tea from real china as they waited for the robe to be boxed and wrapped. Ramona was sure that they filled the time with warm chatter, Shern’s mother telling Shern things a girl becoming a woman should know.

  Ramona put the robe on and tied the belt around her waist. She lifted the shawl collar up around her chin and breathed in the gentle puffs of lavender and mint rising from the robe like a morning fog. She looked at herself in the mirror in that soft, rich robe. People were always telling her how pretty she was, and some days, right after she’d gotten her hair done and had on a good blouse and her thin gold-tone hoop earrings, she could see that she was pretty. But she’d never felt it. Couldn’t even dream up what pretty would feel like. Except standing in this tight bedroom looking at herself in the mirror in this sweet-smelling robe, the collar pulled up Loretta Young style, she began to sense how pretty must feel, how pretty Shern must have felt every time she put on that robe.

  She tilted her chin and gently pushed her hands into the slit pockets and swayed back and forth in the robe. She could almost hear what Shern must have heard from her mother, hard and soft words about how to live. Courage and dignity wrapped up in her words like spiced apples tucked inside a strip of dough. She imagined that as Shern sat there holding the china cup, she must have felt a rising in her chest that went way beyond just feelings of physical beauty. A line of strength and determination rising up in her like a flag being raised the likes of which had allowed Shern to pack up her sisters and break away from Mae’s.

  Damn, she thought, Shern had gotten out, accomplished in a single month what Ramona hadn’t accomplished in a decade. Now Ramona was sorry she’d called the police. She wanted to shout instead, “You go on, Shern. You take God with you, girl, and you just go on. You got out, Shern. You got out.”

  She wrapped herself tighter in the robe, tried to nestle her head under the collar, took in the air under the robe that was green like the robe, and soft and sweet. She could feel that stirring in her chest again, a stem of something green like a sapling trying to grow around a rock to get some sun. This time the sapling was stronger than usual, more persistent, but there was the granite, the rock, with mean, jagged edges. The rock was taking over her chest again like it always did when she tried to think about it. She gasped, felt like she was choking. She would just have to choke; she had to let herself remember, swathed in the green of the robe as she was. And then it came. She didn’t even have to force the remembrance. The granite exploded into tiny bits of sand; then the remembrance just poured out in front of her and moved along on the gray, cloudy air.

  Even the air in the park was green that day. Blades of grass and tr
ee leaves and shrubbery and stems trumpeted their deepest shades of green because these were the last days of summer and the air swept it all up and dripped color on Ramona and she got a smile in her stomach as she and Mae got closer to the park.

  Ramona was five and on her way home from her first day of afternoon kindergarten. She held tightly to Mae’s hand as they jaywalked to get across the street to the park. “My teacher says only cross on the green,” Ramona blurted as Mae half dragged her across the street before the cars rushed down. “She said a car could hit you and then you would be dead.”

  “Tell your teacher to kiss my ass,” Mae said absentmindedly, and then laughed. “No, don’t tell her I said that, lil darling. She’s right, we should be crossing on the green, we should be crossing at the corner too. But I got things on my mind. Now you asked me to bring you to the park, okay. We’re at the park. Good and empty this time of day, too. Glad I picked you up early so we got this spot in the park all to ourselves. I’m gonna sit right here on this bench and do some heavy thinking while you go play. And stay in my eyesight while you do, you hear me. And please, please don’t scuff up your new school shoes.”

  Ramona jumped up and down and pulled her hand from Mae’s. “Okay, Mommie,” she called behind her as she ran down a slope of grass straight to the swing. She hoisted herself up on the wooden seat and grabbed the chain links in her tiny hands. She mashed her feet against the earth for her takeoff into what always felt like heaven to her, flying through the green park air, the air whistling in her ears, the aroma of bread baking in the factory across the street going right to her head, making her head feel lighter, the sight of the tree leaves from up high, the sun dancing under her chin as she threw her head back and laughed out loud. She kicked her legs out, then in, then out, until she got the shrill in her stomach that told her she was going high enough, so she eased back on the motion of her legs to maintain the speed that was laughable and fun.

  But this day she felt a push against her back just as she tried to slow down the swing. It was a heavy push against her small back, and it sent her up and through the air at the height that was scary. “Stop!” she screamed as she hunched her back to make the shrill in her stomach go away. She looked down and saw the baseball bat on the grass, knew it was that Donald Booker who was always bullying people, especially black people, with that bat. Had everyone at Sayre Junior High, where he sometimes showed up for class, terrorized with that bat.

  “Stop it, Donald Booker, right now,” she yelled. “I don’t want to go that high.”

  But Donald Booker didn’t stop. He pulled the swing back as far as he could and then with all of his force catapulted Ramona on the swing through the air. Ramona got a feeling in her stomach like she’d never had, like a scream filled with circles of white light. She almost felt it right now, standing in the bedroom wrapped in Shern’s soft green robe. She had to sit down on the bed, had to lean forward so the feeling would stop, so she could finish remembering.

  “Mommie, Mommie, help me,” she’d screamed. She was coughing and choking and hollering out for Mae.

  “Your momma ain’t nothing but Bernie’s nigger girl,” Donald Booker sang, “Bernie’s girl, Bernie’s girl, your momma ain’t nothing but Bernie’s nigger girl from early in the morning.”

  “Help me, Mommie,” Ramona cried. “Mommie! Mommie! Mommie!”

  “You no-good bastard,” she heard her mother yell frantically from far away. “You leave her alone right now, right now, or I swear I’ll fuck you up.” Mae’s voice got closer as she yelled, and then she was right there almost talking in Ramona’s ear.

  “Mommie, Mommie,” she sobbed, as she felt Mae grab the chain link of the swing arm and hold it still so Ramona could get down. “He was scaring me, Mommie, and making me go too high in the swing.” She fell into Mae’s arms and rested her head against her chest, which smelled like fresh-cut grass.

  “He’s not gonna bother you anymore, lil darling, Mommie’s here,” Mae said as she held Ramona to her and mashed her chin into the top of her head.

  Ramona had forgotten that Mae used to do that, hold her tight like that. She took her hand from the pocket of the soft lime green robe and rubbed it through her hair. She could almost feel Mae’s chin there the way it must have felt all those years ago, moving up and down against Ramona’s head as she told Donald Booker about his bad-assed self.

  “Go on, you juvenile delinquent boy, and get home where you belong before I do to you what your momma should ’ave been doing,” she said, still holding Ramona tightly. “Big as you are and you ain’t got nothing better to do than to pick with babies.”

  Donald Booker poked his thin lips at Mae. He was as tall as Mae, and Ramona was almost afraid for her mother as he stared in Mae’s face like he was grown too. “Awl, shut up, Bernie’s nigger girl,” he huffed.

  “Wh-what did you say to me, you heathenistic son of a bitch?” Mae unwound her arms from Ramona, stooped down lower to whisper in Ramona’s ear, stretched and reached for the baseball bat as she did. “You go start on up the slope, lil darling. I’ll be right there.”

  Ramona clung tighter to Mae; she didn’t want to leave her. Donald Booker’s chest was swelled up like he was ready to do something to Mae, spit in her face or lift his foot to kick at her. But Mae gave Ramona a hard and soft shove. “Go on, lil darling,” she said, “just stand under that wide tree with the big arms; the arms will protect you till I get up there.”

  Ramona started up the slope, reluctantly. She could hear Mae telling Donald Booker that he needed a lesson taught to him. By the time she got to the top of the hill and was standing under the tree she couldn’t hear anything they were saying, as if the woods around the bottom of the park were gobbling up their sounds. She could see Donald Booker’s mouth moving, his face getting redder and closer and closer to her mother’s face, his shoulders going back and forth like he was putting up his dukes. Then his hand stretched way back and came forward right toward Mae’s face. Ramona started running back down the slope, hollering, “You better not hit my mother, you better leave my mother alone.” She saw his hand stopped in midair by the bat, sent flying way over his shoulder. Then she saw his head go back too, just like his hand had. She was close enough to hear the crack of the bat against his head, and now she could hear Mae too. “Threaten me, will you, or any part of me, I’ll teach your no-good ass a lesson you’ll never forget. Get up, you grown, you gonna jump at me, get on up, and finish what you started.”

  But Donald Booker didn’t get up. Even when Mae leaned down over him, and shook him, and slapped at his face, he didn’t get up. With Mae stooping over him as she was, all Ramona could see were his dirty canvas sneakers. Then Mae stood, and Ramona could see his head, how odd his head looked. Not just that it was swollen, but the way it was arched, as if he were getting ready to do a backward flip, as if his head and neck didn’t belong to the same body.

  Ramona pulled her hands from the pocket of the soft green robe. She knitted and unknitted her fingers in quick movements that made her knuckles click, much the same way Mae clicked her knuckles that afternoon. Her drooping eye was just about shut tight, and her voice shook as she spoke. “Ramona,” she said, “this don’t look good, not good at all.” She picked up the handle of the bat and wiped it in the pleats of her belted sundress and let it fall down the hem of her dress into the grass. “Him being a white boy and all, Lord, no. This is serious, very, very serious.”

  She reached for Ramona’s hand. “You and me gonna walk out of the park, and this never happened, you hear me.” Her voice shook less the more she talked.

  “Huh?” Ramona asked.

  “Don’t talk, just listen,” she said as she looked all around them. “We wasn’t at the park today. We took the long way home from your school because I had the taste for some fish from the fish store on Market Street. But we didn’t go into the fish store because once we got there I didn’t like the smell of the fish sitting on ice in the barrel outside, so we came on home.
Now that’s all we did this afternoon. The rest never happened.”

  “What never happened, Mommie?”

  “Ramona, are you messing with me or what? Now, this is important. I’m trying to get you to understand that this afternoon never happened. We wasn’t at the park today, Ramona. You don’t see Donald Booker back there laying in the grass.”

  Ramona was trying to understand what Mae was saying. She turned around to look back at Donald Booker. She gasped. “He’s not laying in the grass, Mommie. Look, he’s getting up. Now he’s walking like a drunk man further in the woods. He has his bat too, Mommie. Look.”

  “I’m not looking back there. And don’t you either.” She yanked Ramona’s hand. “Might turn into a pillar of salt looking back there. Ain’t no way that boy got up.”

  “Yes, he did, he got up, Mommie, honest he did. Just look and see for yourself.” Ramona felt Mae’s hand clap hard against her mouth in a way that Mae had never slapped her before. It was such a forceful slap that it seemed as if night fell all at once and she could no longer see the green or smell the bread, and now she was cold too.

  “Shut up! We weren’t here. We went for fish. We took the long way home. We’ll never speak about this again as long as we live. And there ain’t no way that boy got up. Just ain’t no way. Now say it. Say what we did today.”

  “We went for fish.” Ramona pushed the words through her mouth, which was already beginning to swell. “You changed your mind. We took the long way home.” She sobbed the rest of it out. She was dizzy and confused as she felt her lips puff up. She waited for Mae to tell her not to cry, to call her lil darling. But Mae never did, not the whole walk home. It was a long, silent walk as Ramona kept licking her lips, nursing them, trying to get rid of the puffy, burning feeling, grabbing for her mother’s hands. Mae would hold her hand for a second or two and then drop it, suddenly, as if she’d just remembered something she’d forgotten.