One of the Good Ones

by Maika Moulite

  “Happi... I don’t know how you could think that. We were all there at her funeral.”

  “Yes, but she was cremated. Mom and Dad didn’t even let us see her one last time. And I didn’t get a chance to mention it yet, but we’ve gotten some really weird comments on the YouTube page.”

  “Yes,” Genny says gently. “But we talked about that. Remember? Kezi would get all kinds of strange people on her channel.”

  “No, these feel personal.”

  I pull out my cell phone and show Genny the comments on Kezi’s page from mr.no.struggle.no.progress and my reply to him asking who he was. And I tell her about prissyhoward asking about the girl I met the day of my audition. The day of the protest. Kezi’s birthday. When we click the link, and the image of Shaqueria pops up, Genny gasps.

  “She really looks like Kezi, right?” I ask Genny, trying to keep the hope that is threatening to overwhelm me from escaping.

  “Let’s call Mom and Dad,” she says in reply. I try not to think about the last time we were all on the phone, but I nod.

  Our mom answers on the first ring, and we can hear our dad speaking in the background. “Is that the girls?”

  “Yes,” Mom says. “You’re on speaker, ladies. How have you been?”

  We give our parents a quick update, and then Genny suggests I recount what I just told her. I do as I’m asked and then wait for them to answer. They must’ve had us on mute, because we don’t hear anything for a long time and then—

  “Happi...” It’s Dad’s deep baritone speaking through the phone.

  He speaks carefully, the dissent in his tone cushioned by his need to let me down gently. He’s stumbling over his words, searching for the right things to say, but the gears are shifting in my mind. There’s something I need to remember... and then it clicks.

  “But what about the user mr.no.struggle.no.progress? That was the name of an account that Ximena mentioned to me and Genni not too long ago.” I explain the cryptic message Kezi received, the one we only learned about because Ximena went against Kezi’s wishes. The line is silent.

  “We know how hard Kezi’s death has been on you,” Dad says softly. “We can understand why you would want her to still be here with us, and even why you would think she might be, after everything you shared. But we have to accept that Kezi is gone.”

  “And I acknowledge that we haven’t always approached this situation with grace,” Mom says. I can imagine her sitting beside Dad on the couch, her hands safely enveloped in his. “But I promise that we—I will do better, be better for you all... Your father and I have been going to therapy. We started shortly after our last phone call.”

  Genny and I glance at each other. This revelation is a shock, but we don’t interrupt.

  “It was hard for me at first, because I didn’t think I needed it. If it wasn’t for your father, I might have never realized how terribly I was handling everything. I had been going nonstop since we learned of Kezi’s death, and whenever I slowed down, I... I started to drink to numb the pain. I’m so sorry for not being there for you the way you needed.”

  I look up at the sky and let the tears run freely down my face. Maybe this was part of the reason I had so desperately latched on to the idea that Kezi might be alive. If she was alive, then things would go back to normal. I could get another chance to be the type of sister she deserved. I could be better toward my whole family.

  “And while I don’t understand everything about Kezi, our therapist is helping me to accept and love her for who she really was and not who I made her out to be. I have a lot of learning to do.”

  The flicker of hope that Kezi is alive goes out gently, like the extinguishing of a candle’s flame. I wanted so badly to have my sister back that I was willing to let the impossible take root in my mind to combat the unimaginable grief my family has gone through.

  I have to accept that Kezi isn’t coming back.

  At last our parents say their goodbyes, and it’s just me and Genny again. We agree that I should restart my therapy sessions to help me cope. If our parents can do it, I can too.

  “I love you, little sis.” Genny hugs me one more time.

  “I love you too, old lady.”

  She swats me on the shoulder, and I get up to join Derek and Ximena. It doesn’t take me long to find them, settled side by side on a large log overlooking the Canyon’s southern rim. I take a seat beside Derek. When the sun continues its descent, the sky bleeds into a rainbow of yellows, oranges, pinks, and reds. The rock is awash with light and mirrors the kaleidoscope of colors in its peaks and valleys. I have never felt so minuscule. I don’t mean this in a bad way either. A sense of peace falls over me as I look around and just take in how big the world is. We are so small, not even a dot to be seen from an airplane, but the lives we lead are big and real and powerful. Everything is silent, as if the world itself has held its breath to behold this moment with us.

  “Wow,” I whisper. I look at Derek, and he is staring intently at the undulating display of nature. Ximena pulls out her phone as if to record but stops. That can wait.

  We sit like this for a long while, as the sun descends and the shadows lengthen, until Ximena gets up and excuses herself. “I’m going to check on Genny.”

  She glances at Derek before walking away, using her flashlight to illuminate the path. Derek and I are alone, and I’m suddenly aware of how close we’re sitting on this old, fallen piece of wood.

  “I’m really glad you came on this trip,” Derek says quietly.

  “Me too,” I reply. “It would’ve been a shame if I missed out on all of this because I was being a little hardheaded.”

  “A little? Nah, you were being a lotta hardheaded,” Derek chuckles.

  I smack his knee, and he grabs my hand playfully in his. His laughter stops as our eyes meet. “At least you came around... It really wouldn’t have been the same without you, Happi. I’ve missed you.”

  I don’t know what to say to this, so I sit, quiet as the earth around us.

  “Don’t freak out, but I got this for you,” he says nervously. I stare at him quizzically, but then he pulls out a silver cuff with a single turquoise teardrop gem in the center of the band. I gasp.

  “Hey, I saw this when we were at the Four Corners! It’s beautiful,” I breathe.

  “Yeah, I noticed how much you liked it, so I decided to get it for you. I hoped it would make you smile,” he says.

  My heart feels...full. “Thank you so much, Derek.”

  “Can I tell you something?” he asks me. He looks down at my hand, still held gently in his own. He laces his fingers through mine, and tingles shoot down my spine.

  “Yes?” I whisper. My heart is beating fast in my chest. Because all I want him to say is—

  “I’ve wanted to kiss you for the longest. But now that I’ve given you this bracelet, I don’t want you to think this is some weird transactional—”

  I laugh in bewilderment as I shake my head. “Jesus, Derek, just do it.”

  He sighs in relief and pulls me closer, his free hand cupping my face lightly as he looks down at me. We close our eyes together, and the space between us disappears. Derek’s lips are butterflies fluttering so gently against my own. I smile and wrap my arms around him. We breathe each other in, and my heart pounds until I’m lightheaded with intoxication. Slowly we pull away. Rest our foreheads against each other and grin.

  “Where’d you learn that, Mr. Williams?”

  “A gentleman never kisses and tells.”

  We stay a little longer and stare out at the Grand Canyon before us. I could fill it with my joy.

  “We should probably get back before Genny comes looking for us,” Derek says. I can tell that he’s not looking forward to leaving our little spot, but his sense of responsibility kicks in even when he doesn’t want it to.

  “You’re right,�
�� I agree.

  Derek helps me up from the log, and as I step away to head back, he pulls me against him. He kisses me again until I’m breathless.

  “Okay. Now, we can go,” he says looking down at me goofily.

  We walk hand in hand as we make our way back to the camp, a little different than how we started out on this journey.

  “Can I tell you something else?” Derek asks.

  “Anything,” I say.

  “I asked Ximena to leave us alone when you stayed behind with Genny so that I could do that.”

  My laughter rings out just as we reach our campsite.

  “Oh, so that’s what was taking y’all so long?” Genny says as Derek and I walk to our campsite, which is bathed evenly in a wash of orange, yellow, purple, and blue as day twilights to night. The Blue Hour. Ximena turns to look at what my sister is talking about and gasps exaggeratedly when she sees me and Derek approaching. We’re holding hands, fingers laced.

  “What’s all this?” Ximena asks casually.

  “Mmm hmm,” I say with a grin. As if she doesn’t know. “Mind your business.”

  39

  KEZI

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 7—

  3 MONTHS, 21 DAYS SINCE THE ARREST

  GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA

  “Dammit, Kezi.”

  It has been one day since Mark received that message on his phone, and these are the first words he has spoken to me. Before that, the last thing I remember him saying was, “You keep giving me no choice,” as he pushed those chemicals into my system and I fell into a pool of black. My world has slowly stopped spinning at its highest velocity.

  Mark runs his fingers through his hair. The oily strands stick up at odd angles, as though he’s been electrocuted. He looks up into the sky. Even wrapped in the deep indigo embrace of night, the Grand Canyon is stunning. The rust-colored cliffs that I remember from pictures and videos are now cloaked in darkness. And although I cannot see them, I know they stretch on for hundreds of miles. But the main attraction right now is not the surrounding peaks and valleys. It’s the stars, their tiny pins of light shining brightly, breaking through the darkest hour of my life.

  “In the beginning, I really thought that the world believing you were dead was going to be enough to effect some change,” he says. “Maybe after a year or so we would be able to reveal ourselves. But that seems so ridiculous now.”

  Mark carries a small lantern with him, its manufactured gleam no match against the pitch black of night. I suspect he was careful to awaken me from my unconscious stupor only after he was sure any nearby campers had crawled blissfully unaware into their tents for the evening. Mark looks at me, and I let my head hang loosely. The noxious cocktail that he pumped me with hours earlier has long since left my body. But he doesn’t need to know that. Even as I try to focus on the hideousness of who he is, my eyes can’t help but take in the more subtle beauty of the canyon around us. The purple petals of lupine wildflowers, the silk strands of spiderwebs stretched between two rocks glistening in the moonlight. And for a place that is famously popular to visitors, it is surprisingly quiet. We might as well be the last people on earth. But I know we’re not. I know Happi, Genny, Ximena, and Derek are here too, following the plan that I left behind. And I’ll do anything to see them and my parents again. Hold on to my sisters and never, ever let go. I want the chance to kiss Ximena, hold her hand, and not look around to see if anyone’s watching. I want to tell her I love her and pray she says it back. I want to live my life as fully as I deserve to.

  “I just wanted to do something nice for you, you know?” Mark says, lifting my chin roughly so that I must look at him. I keep my lids heavy, like I’m fighting to pry them open. “You made all these videos online, teasing, saying how you wanted Black people to be treated with respect, threw out those buzz words. Justice. Freedom. Equality. Equity. But what have you done since then?”

  I say nothing, my breathing even and deep.

  “Complain!” He continues. “I was hoping to keep you alive. Maybe my dad was right about you people all along.”

  “What are you...what are you talking about?” My voice sounds thick even to my ears. I can feel my terror starting to build but I push it down, refusing to let my facade of fogginess fracture in this moment.

  He scoffs. “You must have figured it out after all the time you spent with him.”

  He hums softly, that damn “O, Edmond Bridge” melody.

  “Did he ever get to the next verse of that song?” Mark asks himself thoughtfully.

  “Lynching bridge,

  weighed to the ground.

  Hear them callin’.

  Spirits ring.

  the reckoning sound.

  Hear them caaallin’.”

  His voice is surprisingly sweet, souring an already dreadful song. A shower of icy-hot realization shatters inside me as I realize what he’s talking about. It was more than a morbid song that Ellis sang to me. It was an oral history. Could it be?

  Mark nods as he sees the tension creep into my limbs, the dread invading my body, the din seizing my mind with questions and shouts and overwhelming panic at what I’ve figured out.

  The pieces are still fractured but clear. Mark Collins is a descendent—the descendent—of the monsters that murdered Grandpa Riley’s father. His blood ripped my family apart. When the sun rose again that next morning in 1955 and they had retreated to their respectable places in society, a wife was without her husband, a brother without his brother, and three young children were left fatherless and forced to see the world for what it was. Those realities reverberated for generations, fragments of trauma echoing against each other for an eternity. The truth seems impossibly cruel, but I know it is fact by the sensation deep in every cell of bone marrow in my body. Our ancestors are tied.

  Here we are today. Still linked.

  It must end.

  I force myself to calm down, to remember that I am supposed to be in a stupor. Even though I finally understand what I must have known all along but was too trapped and distracted and dazed to realize.

  “What exactly...what was your father saying about what his dad taught him? Did he...?” I ask. A man who knows the truth of my great-grandfather’s demise, a man who descended from the monsters responsible for Joseph’s destruction stands before me now.

  “Did he lynch anybody? No,” Mark says. Laughs bitterly. “But my grandpa...well, that hanging bridge by the saloon was my grandpa’s favorite spot. You don’t know how many times my own dad described the gore he witnessed as a little boy. Those poor people. One time there was a pregnant mother and her son...another was a man all alone on his way to the gas station that had closed hours ago...ah, yes, you get it now, don’t you?”

  My stomach clenches in terror. Disgust. I have to keep him talking. But he cuts me off before I can say a word, lost in his hand-me-down memories—

  “They took pictures, Kezi,” Mark whispers. “They put all these destroyed bodies, torn-up faces, on postcards and—and passed them around like trading cards. But my dad said the horror of those pictures was nothing compared to the real thing. They weren’t scratch and sniff—you couldn’t smell the copper from all the blood, or hear the crunching of bones breaking.”

  I inch away from him reflexively. I can’t take this much longer. He grabs my wrist. Does not let go.

  “The first lynching he went to stayed with him the longest. He was just eight years old. So young,” Mark says. He bows his head before catching my eye. “He was obsessed with it, really. Made my grandfather tell him the guy’s name over and over, because he was still wiping the sleep from his eyes and hadn’t caught it when my grandpa and his friends started questioning the man about being in town after the sun went down.”

  Grandpa Riley was around that age, too, when his father was murdered.

  Mark lets go of my wrist, and I am still. The
eye of a hurricane.

  I’ve been dealin’ with your kind since I was a little boy.

  “You know how these things just poison our bloodlines, like we haven’t learned after all this time. That experience wrecked my father. He pretended to be okay, and everyone believed him, because no one but me was around to hear him scream ‘Joseph Palmer’ every night in his sleep after my mother died. They didn’t see his folder of clippings—anything he could find about Joseph Palmer and his family. An obituary. A short mention in an African American newspaper about a revival in a congregation led by a Riley Palmer. A new church breaking ground out in Los Angeles by Naomi Smith née Palmer. I took my dad’s work a bit further, if you will, moved to LA for nursing school and stayed in town to work. I felt...restless. I needed to be near your family. The Palmers. Our ties are unbreakable.”

  He pauses.

  “And then I found a YouTube page by a generationkeZi.”

  My daddy taught me just what to do with you—

  “Maybe we could have built a family one day,” he says. He is far away. I need him even farther. “That would’ve been the ultimate reconciliation of our pasts... If we changed your face a little, so you weren’t recognizable.”

  He turns to touch my cheek lightly. His thumb slides down to my jaw. I grind my teeth to prevent myself from biting off his finger. “But now you’ve made my choice for me.”

  There’s no mistaking what he means. He finally got to where he was going, to the end of me. He shakes his head slowly, his gaze already far away from the destruction he is waging right here.

  “I can’t trust you. You’re always going to try to escape,” he says. Disappointed. Heartbroken. “That’ll get me in trouble, and the world won’t understand what I did for you people. I can’t let that happen... And I also hate that it’s come to this. So, I thought I’d do this last thing for you and bring you here. To take in the splendor of the stars right above the Grand Canyon. I remember when you announced your road trip stops...you were so excited to visit, even though it was a detour from Route 66. It must be a comfort to know that your family is nearby in these last moments, right?”