The Lesson

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The Lesson Page 24

by Cadwell Turnbull


  Someone was coming down the stairs. She waited to hear the keys jingle and then brought her attention back to her father.

  “When will you be back over?” she asked. She would try talking to him about it first.

  “In a few days. But I’ll be there for a week. I’ll need to stay with you.”

  Lee bounced in. She threw her bag on the couch and went to the kitchen.

  “Nicole ain’t frustrated with all the time you spending away from her?” Patrice asked.

  “She understands.”

  The fridge opened, and Patrice could hear Lee pouring something into a glass.

  “She should come over with you sometime,” Patrice suggested. “I want to meet her—in person, not over a screen.”

  “She works a lot. But I might convince her to come over on the weekend this time. Keep you posted?”

  “Sure.” Patrice watched Lee come back into the living room. She sat on the couch, sipping water from her glass. She watched Patrice, too, but stayed where she was. Patrice told her father she had to go.

  “Okay,” he said. “Talk soon, love.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled and waved him off. “Love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Patrice hung up. “How long you staying over?” she asked Lee.

  “The weekend,” Lee answered.

  Patrice just smiled.

  “They on me again,” Lee said. “All that mothering is suffocating.”

  “Sounds like them.” Patrice gave another nonintrusive smile. This worked better than pressing. Perhaps that was all of it. Patrice had a feeling, though, that something else had happened.

  Lee finished her cup and went back into the kitchen. Patrice followed.

  “Someone started some shit at school today,” Lee volunteered.

  “Oh?”

  “He was saying things about Derrick.” She stood frozen in front of the fridge, grasping the handle.

  “What happened?” Patrice asked. She wasn’t pressing. Lee wanted to talk about this.

  “I punched him in the face,” she said, punctuating the statement by opening the fridge. She pulled out a gallon of water. “You want some?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Lee almost always told her about these altercations. This was probably because Patrice never condemned her acts of violence.

  “It’s hard,” Lee said, taking a glass from the cupboard.

  Patrice wasn’t sure what, exactly, Lee was referring to, but she said, “I know.”

  “I want vengeance,” Lee said.

  Patrice didn’t have to guess what she meant there. That statement was quite common. She looked at Lee sadly. “No, you don’t. You want your brother and grandmother back.”

  Right at that moment, the glass slipped from Lee’s hand. From Patrice’s perspective, it fell in slow motion to the countertop. Patrice’s body tensed. Lee tried to correct the mistake, but it was too late. The glass shattered, sending bits across the countertop and the floor.

  “Fuck!” Lee said.

  Patrice put her finger to her lips and made a shushing sound. “You gon’ wake him up.”

  “Sorry,” Lee said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Lee was breathing hard, her hands up as if surrendering to some unseen threat. She looked at all the scattered glass and was overwhelmed, not budging from her place. She just stood there, glancing around herself.

  Patrice got the broom from the hall closet. She put on her house slippers and began sweeping the glass into a pile.

  “I miss him, too,” Patrice said as she swept the shards into the dustpan.

  Lee glared at her, still standing in the same position.

  Patrice didn’t say anything at first. This was what it was like, talking to Lee: invisible land mines. Then Patrice decided to push, for both their sakes.

  “We both lost Derrick,” Patrice said, sharpening her voice and readying herself for what would come.

  “You lost an ex-boyfriend. I lost a brother.”

  “We were more than exes. We grew up together.”

  “And then you left!”

  Patrice leaned the broom against the wall, listening for her son’s cry. She was relieved when she didn’t hear it. “I couldn’t stay,” she said. She stumbled through her mind to offer an explanation. She wanted to finally give voice to all the feelings she’d had. Again she failed. “It was too much,” she said.

  Lee was breathing even harder now. “I didn’t have that luxury to run away. And even if I did, I wouldn’t. I’m not a coward.”

  “I came back.”

  “Too late!” Lee said. She was panting, her hand clawing at her shirt. “Too late,” she repeated, the words softer and breathier.

  Patrice went over to Lee and wrapped her arms around her. The girl fought her at first, trying to wrest herself free from the embrace, but eventually she gave in to Patrice’s persistence.

  It took Lee some time to settle. Her breaths were fast and jagged. A few times, she tried to speak, but her body would seize up. Half-muted syllables would escape from her lips—stray consonants and vowels devolving into gasps. Patrice felt her own pain in Lee’s attempts to find footing. Tears came to her eyes, too, but she made no sounds.

  Again she felt the weight of the Ynaa on her, as she had when they first arrived, as she always had, even when she ran away. They were somewhere up there, self-satisfied with the destruction they had left. Patrice hated them with all her heart.

  Lee found herself again. Her body stopped shaking, and her breaths grew even again. Patrice’s tears, however, continued to fall, waterfalls on soft stone. Lee pulled away just enough to look at her. She saw her tears. Her own face was slick with grief. She reached out and touched Patrice’s face, wiping away some of the water and salt.

  “You look terrible,” Lee said.

  Patrice smiled. “You, too.”

  “Need me to check on Lil’ Derrick?” Lee asked. Her eyes were red, the lids puffy.

  “No, it’s okay,” Patrice said. Sometimes, the boy would wake up if you even stepped in the room, as if he had radar constantly probing for human bodies. Normal perceptibility, Patrice hoped, and not a sign of something else.

  Quietly they both continued cleaning up the rest of the glass. A few times, Lee would look at Patrice, a subtle smile on her face. A gift of a smile.

  When they were done, Lee went to the couch to watch TV, and Patrice went to her room, careful to speed silently past her son’s room.

  Patrice had moved into Grandma Reed’s old room. At first, she had felt uneasy about sleeping in it, the room belonging to a dead woman, and all. But this was a house of dead people.

  As she lay in bed, Patrice went over the argument. She could understand Lee’s resentment. Lee had to stick around, deal with all the conflict that Derrick’s decisions brought on the family. She had been stuck with most of the caretaking of her grandmother, who was quite frail in those last months. And before that, she had lost her mother and her father. She was now the only living member of her immediate family, orphaned twice over. And then there was her best friend, dead now for how long? Two years? It was a miracle the girl held it together at all.

  What happened in the kitchen could be the beginning of a dark descent or the beginning of healing. Patrice hoped for the latter but figured Lee would most likely remain as she was, the dam breaking only on occasions when she didn’t have the strength to hold it in.

  Patrice could relate only so much.

  Lying in bed, she caught a whiff of Grandma Reed in the air. Sometimes, she could smell her in the room, her familiar human scent lingering in a place that had grown used to a certain person’s presence and now had to make room for another. The woman had lived a long life in this room. It would be a long time before the room forgot her.

  Patrice closed h
er eyes, letting herself exist in that blur of time between sleepiness and sleep. Eventually, she slipped off into dreams.

  • • •

  They had learned about Derrick from Louie’s mother, Debra. If not for her, no one would have known what happened to him. All the other witnesses were dead.

  “The ambassador took him,” Debra had said, the words bitter on her lips.

  Patrice saw Derrick in her dreams often. He was in a room amorphous and white, like the inside of a lightbulb. She could feel the vacuum outside the room; her dream ears popped continually, as if she were in an airplane. Occasionally, her feet would float up from the floor. Derrick lay in some pod. The light from the room made his skin look a sickly grayish-brown. His eyes were always closed. In some dreams, she would just stay there, watching him, until she floated up from the floor and rose so far that all she could see was a distant dot where he should be.

  In another variation of the dream, she could feel someone’s presence in the room with her. As she watched Derrick, tentacles would creep into her vision. They would wrap around her and squeeze, and she would wake up before her body burst.

  In this version of the dream, Patrice spent a long time staring down at Derrick’s corpse. As always, he didn’t open his eyes. She screamed at him, her tears wetting the glass that separated them.

  “He’s sleeping,” said a voice behind her. “Do you want me to wake him up?”

  The voice had a hiss to it, but other than that, she couldn’t tell who it belonged to. She tried to turn around and couldn’t.

  “No,” she answered.

  Something screamed. When she looked at Derrick’s mouth, she could see that it was open wide, the sound flowing out of it.

  “I can wake him up,” the voice said again.

  “They’ll kill him,” she said, her voice swallowed up by the scream.

  The scream changed. At first, it sounded like a cat’s cry, then like a steaming teakettle, but now it sounded like a baby’s wail.

  Patrice clawed her way out of the dream. She launched up from her bed and went to Lil’ Derrick’s room.

  She confirmed that her son had been crying, the wails reaching all the way into her dream. When she picked him up, he quieted immediately from the full-throated screech to a soft babbling. Patrice pressed him gently to her chest and walked around the room.

  The room had been cleared out a long time ago, but sometimes she could still see how it once was. She could remember the shelves of books, that old stupid computer with its heavy breathing. She remembered the bed where they would sometimes lie. She remembered Derrick’s breath, slow and steady, the pulse of his heart.

  Some of his books were still in the closet. The best ones were under her bed. She had read a few, now that he was gone. Through them, she understood some of his wonder at the unknown. She recognized why the arrival of the Ynaa had sent him running to meet them. The stupid boy and his books. She simultaneously loved and hated them: for bringing her closer to him in death, for keeping them apart in life. She could never fill that desire Derrick had taught himself to have, that those books had infected him with. Beyond reason. Beyond good sense. How could he be so stupid? How could she have let him be so stupid?

  Her son had settled in her arms. He lay quiet now, fidgeting only a little, letting out a few fussy murmurs. Patrice heard Lee’s soft footsteps before she appeared at the doorway.

  “Need me to fix him a bottle?” Lee asked.

  Patrice shook her head. “No, he gon’ be fine.”

  Lee lingered at the doorway. “I’m restless,” she said. “Can I stay?”

  Patrice nodded. She watched Lee creep into the room and stand against the far wall, away from the crib, most of her body hidden in shadow.

  Her son made a little noise but soon settled again.

  “Poor Lil’ Derrick,” Lee cooed. “So fussy.”

  Derrick was her son’s middle name. It felt wrong giving it to him, but Patrice decided that a middle name would be sufficient to remember her fallen friend by. It didn’t matter, though; Lee called him Lil’ Derrick from the beginning. Patrice tried to call him by his first name, Jason, after her long-dead grandfather on her father’s side—and, incidentally, the man who had saved her father’s life—but this did nothing to stop “Lil’ Derrick” from catching on. Even her father called him this, despite the many connections the name Jason had for him personally. Patrice had made her bed, though, had invited the comparison. She had her regrets now, but there was no turning back. The damage was done.

  “How’s work?” Lee asked.

  “What?” Patrice shifted Derrick to her other shoulder and bounced him gently a few times.

  “How is work going?” Lee asked again.

  The room was dark, so Patrice couldn’t see Lee’s face. One of her legs caught the moonlight coming in from the window. “You looking for a job?”

  “No. Just curious.”

  “So you into politics now?” Lil’ Derrick was silent and still, breathing softly. Patrice kept him in her arms.

  “Yes,” Lee said with no hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  Patrice smiled at Lee and then wondered whether she could even see the smile from her position in the dark corner. “Work is work,” Patrice answered. “All the interesting political stuff is happening out there, in the streets.”

  “Oh,” Lee said, sounding deflated.

  “Look,” Patrice said, “those white folks ain’t gon’ save us. That’s something we gotta do ourselves.”

  Lee said nothing.

  “And with elections coming up …” Patrice said, trying to fill the silence, but she had nothing really to add. Elections were still a year and a half away. Who knew what sorts of people would come out of the woodwork to grab at a slice of power.

  Since the Massacre of Men, the US government had sent in all these appointed officials to keep the island afloat. Most of the senators had been men. The governor and the lieutenant governor had been men. All but one local male senator had died—he was off island during the massacre. The appointed officials were a short-term fix to a long-term problem.

  Patrice worked in the office of Dorothy Simmons, a former congresswoman and a military veteran, brought out of retirement to stand in as a senator. She was white. Many of the appointees were white statesiders who had never set foot in the Virgin Islands before the Ynaa decided to kill half the population of St. Thomas. But Dorothy was nice enough, considering. Patrice worked as a glorified secretary, but the woman had never made her feel small, and that was more than she could ask for.

  “You should run,” Lee said.

  “What?” She said it louder than she had intended, and it woke Lil’ Derrick from his sleep. He cried out, and she had to rock him back and forth again to settle him. When he was quiet, she repeated the question softly.

  “You should run. With elections coming up, we need people with some sense running.”

  Did Patrice consider herself someone with sense? Surely she had more sense than half the asshats who had occupied government positions before the massacre, but that wasn’t saying much. She had imagined someone older, with more years in politics. And someone local. But few fell inside that Venn diagram after the severe culling at the hands of the Ynaa.

  “You don’t think you would be good for it?” Lee asked. “You getting a degree in political science.”

  “Don’t have it yet. Going to school part time means I won’t have a degree for another year at least.” Patrice listened to her son’s easy breathing. His eyes were closed again. A gentle island breeze whipped the trees outside, their shadowed limbs dancing on the wind.

  “Don’t matter,” Lee said. “Most of them dead politicians had no political science degree. I’ve been thinking about this. I think you’d do a good job.”

  And here Patrice had thought this conversation was spontaneous. Now
she knew it for the ambush it was. “I’m too young.”

  “Derrick wanted to run for senate,” Lee said. “Eventually.”

  It would have been too abrupt a shift if anyone else had said it. But Patrice understood where it came from, what it meant.

  “He thought he could help humans and Ynaa reach a better peace,” Lee said. “Now that they gone, we are the only ones left to fix things.”

  Lee moved out of the corner. The light from outside wrapped around her frame. She was so tall. Patrice remembered that little girl she knew from so long ago. Not a little girl anymore.

  “Think about it,” Lee said.

  “I will,” Patrice said, and looked down to find intelligent eyes looking back up at her. Her son smiled and waited for her to answer with one of her own. Satisfied, he closed his eyes again, and any signs of wakefulness melted off his face.

  “Your kid creeps me out,” Lee said. “The way he stares at me sometimes—”

  “Your birthday is coming up, right?” Patrice noted that her mother’s birthday was coming up, too, in another month.

  Lee didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “Next week. Why?”

  “We should go out. Have some fun.”

  “And who gon’ watch Lil’ Derrick?” Lee asked with interest.

  “Our mothers.”

  “Okay,” Lee said, laughing. “You better get me a nice present, too, since you in such a giving mood.”

  “Oh, I will,” Patrice said, smiling. “The greatest gift in the universe.”

  “I’m holding you to that.” Lee yawned and stretched, then gave Patrice a lazy salute—her way of saying good night. Patrice nodded back. Lee walked away, her footsteps retreating to the living room. The television flicked on, the volume set to a whisper. A sitcom laugh track came through faintly. Lee had trouble sleeping sometimes. The TV helped.

  Patrice carried her son back to the crib. She laid him down and gave him a light kiss on the forehead. He felt it, his tiny nose wrinkling and smoothing out again. Patrice looked down at her son. “Don’t wake up until morning,” she whispered, staring at that small face, those tiny limbs. He would likely sleep through the night, now that she had commanded it. Soon, he would be talking and walking, screaming down the house, going off on his little adventures.

 

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