Luster: A Novel

by Raven Leilani

  “I didn’t mean that,” I say, mostly to make myself feel better, but also because despite everything, it’s true. I did like him, once. When we were theoretical. When we were at the top of the coaster and the wind was in his hair.

  “It’s fine if you did.” He seems to notice now that his shoe is missing. “I was careless with you.”

  “No, I liked that,” I say, and he smiles.

  “Yeah. What was that about?”

  “I don’t know. Probably something to do with my dad.”

  “Good.” He laughs. “I mean, not good. I don’t know why I said that.”

  “Hey. Have you ever thought about going to a meeting or something?” I say, and he takes off his mask and looks at me.

  “I’d like to be alone if that’s okay,” he says, and I go back out onto the floor and wander around as the night is coming in, all the Saturday attendees wilted and missing pieces of their costumes, toting around swords and crystals and polyethylene toys.

  * * *

  A happy black family comes up to me and asks if they can take a picture with me. A black Leia! the mother says, so excited that I actually try to get the smile into my eyes, though when they scroll through the pictures, I can see from their faces that the pictures have not turned out well. I wander around for a while and end up in Artists’ Alley, a section of the convention I saw on the website and assumed would be composed of signing tables for comic book conglomerates, but which is so much more—sexy, modern portraits that have been reproduced from their original graffiti; sleek, hyperrealist fan art; painters working on the floor, pausing to stow their brushes while they make a sale; homemade zines and tarot cards; graphic novelists struggling with mobile card readers and strongboxes as attendees press their noses to their newly purchased canvas prints. Of course I am envious, but as I am coming to the end, there is a booth with the coolest prints I have ever seen. The artist, a very normal-looking black woman in a wool sweater, looks up from her ice cream and tells me that her graphic novels are loosely based around her quest to find adequate psychotherapy. I open one of the books to a random page and there is a spread of dark, residential road. And I don’t know if it is the texture of the pavement, or the single yellow window suspended above the trees, but there is a feeling in my chest, and for a moment I can’t breathe.

  “This is really beautiful. I’m sorry,” I say, so determined to put this feeling behind me that I leave the convention center entirely and remain outside until Akila, Eric, and Rebecca are ready to go home. On the way to the car, Rebecca mentions that she has had to park a ways uptown, and after we get on the A and take it all the way to Fifty-Ninth, she mentions that there was a minor accident, though when we get to the car, the front is smashed in, and two of the windows are gone. We don’t talk about it. Instead, we pile into the car and begin removing the less comfortable parts of our costumes, and by the time we make it home, there is an increased police presence in the neighborhood and the car is filled with smoke. All night, everyone has a cough.

  When everyone is asleep, I go out to get some air, and I look up the average cost of diapers, but even this is an optimism I can’t afford, as it is unlikely any child of mine would have normal intestinal health.

  * * *

  It is only when I get up to go back inside that I look across the street and see the old woman watching me, standing in her yard with a leash in her hand. Once I am back in my room, I look out of the window and she is still there. I close my curtains and look up the graphic novelist. I find her LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, and I am shocked that she is the same person on all three. Four years at RISD, and then a stint in a posh mental institution before she began her series. On a badly produced podcast about how to handle getting stiffed for freelance work, she says that when she was in the hospital, her assigned therapist kept falling asleep, and when I hear her laugh, the way it is big and ugly like mine, I go to the contact form on her website and send an effusive and apologetic letter. In the morning, Rebecca comes into my room and begins to clean the windows. Before she leaves, she tells me that I should find a way to tell Akila that I’m leaving.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to do this, but when I take my Captain Planet mug from the cupboard and make the coffee, all I can think is, Of course. I sit in the dark and try to figure out a nice way to tell Akila that I am abandoning her, that her father and I don’t really have sex anymore, that her mother has evidently had enough. I know her life has been shaped principally by the sudden departure of people she trusts, and I am not going to buck the trend. I take the train to Dumbo to interview for an internal communications gig I don’t want, and the entire time I am wondering who will do Akila’s hair.

  * * *

  The next day, I call Akila out of school, and she does not seem particularly enthusiastic. She says she has a test and asks if anyone has died. I assure her that everyone is safe, and then I pressure her into a day of hooky. We take the bus to Garden State Plaza, and I give her one hundred dollars. She squints at the cash and asks why it is damp, and this is the kind of attitude she has for most of the day. I let her take the lead on which stores we visit, and each time she cuts one cursory circle around the perimeter and darts back out. Though I assumed any Goth-lite accessory would do, she seems to have no distinct taste in clothing, though she lingers on a pair of rain boots at Dick’s Sporting Goods. We go into Macy’s and she plucks a bland, shapeless dress from the rack and tells me that it looks like something I might wear. I try not to let it hurt my feelings, but she does it again at Mango, and then at the Gap. I relent and try one of the dresses on, and it actually doesn’t look too bad. Then I notice a yellow crust on the mirror and feel sick. In the mall bathroom, I throw up for a while, and when I come out, Akila is much more agreeable.

  * * *

  She puts her phone away, and we walk silently through the mall until she decides that she would like to buy some legitimate underwear. At her age, I felt such shame about my breasts that I refused to even acknowledge them. I wore a bathing suit underneath my clothes to flatten them, but because of an extremely nosy group of West Indian elders in my church, whose sole purpose was monitoring the sexual development of young women in the congregation, I didn’t get away with it for long. In the fitting room, my mother attempted to stuff my breasts into a cute, age-appropriate bra, but my body had ceased to be the sort of hard, inchoate thing you might call cute. Instead, it had, at thirteen measly years, become soft and serious, visible to men and in need of copious support. And while Akila has the typical ambivalence about her own body, she is not like this. She invites me into the fitting room, tries on a few bras, and asks me what I think. Good, I say, trying to locate the most sensitive word. I help her adjust the straps, and she shrugs and slips them into her purse. It happens so quickly that by the time we are out of the store, the window in which I could have said something has closed. In the next store, she does it again, and no explicit plan is made, but soon we are moving in tandem, sliding bracelets and sample perfumes into our purses and stowing what we can in our boots. After an hour, we stop at Orange Julius, and we look at each other and laugh.

  “Do you do this often?”

  “Sometimes.” She turns the cup around in her hands. “You’re leaving,” she says matter-of-factly, like she has already spent some time with the news.

  “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” she says, and then we slip into a movie, but it is already halfway through, and I can’t really make sense of it. Everyone in the theater is crying, and when I look at Akila, she is crying, too. On the way to the bus, we argue half-heartedly about what we think the movie meant. For the rest of the ride, we are silent, and when we get to the house, Eric and Rebecca are not home. As Akila is looking for her keys, a patrol car pulls up behind us. As it has become common in the last week for a car or two to make rounds at night, I assume it will proceed around the cul-de-sac, but when two officers exit the car, this assumption reveals itself to be mostly
hope. Evening, one of the officers says, and when I say it back, it sounds so weak that I clear my throat and say it again, though the second time it sounds worse, forceful, and I feel the error in this overcorrection, the officers silent, recalculating.

  I should know better. The effort to appear casual is never a casual act, but in front of the police I don’t know how I can be expected to act like myself. I don’t know how not to assume the posture of defense. I look at the officers, and then at all the lit windows around the cul-de-sac, and in one of the windows, I see the old woman’s face. I ask if there is a problem, and this time I don’t try to correct for the tremor. But when they ask if I live in the house, I hesitate, and Akila crosses her arms and says that she does, her tenor markedly less reverent than mine. One of the officers turns to look at her, and I can feel the impending spiral of this exchange, my fear of the officers’ increasing proximity tempered somewhat by the oddness of our shared incredulity at Akila’s departure from the script. I can’t tell if it is defiance or if she simply doesn’t know the words. I step in front of her and tell her to go around the back. But she won’t, and there is a part of me that sees her ease, her self-possession, and is frustrated for what she hasn’t been told. But when I see how she is resolute, casual in her claim of what is hers, I am envious. When the officers ask me to show ID, I look for my license, but my hands are shaking and my purse is full of stolen perfume. This is my home, Akila says, and I know that the moment between when a black boy is upright and capable of speech and when he is prostrate in his own blood is almost imperceptible, due in great part to the tacit conversation that is happening beyond him, that has happened before him, and that resists his effort to enter it before it concludes. I know that the event horizon is swift because of the gulf between the greeting and the pavement, but in real time, as they press Akila to the ground, every second is long.

  * * *

  As it happens, everyone involved is denied some kind of dignity, the officers’ brute force sincere and absurd, the exertion rendering them small, and Akila, surprised and clumsy and afraid, so conspicuously a child that I run over without thinking and try to get them off, the whites of her eyes bright in the porch light before an officer lifts me into his arms and presses me down into the grass and says Stop resisting, which my ears receive as Greek but also as déjà vu, because not even in what is feasibly my last moment can I be free from the internet and the digital hall of mirrors in which orders are issued unironically to dying women and men. When I stop resisting, it is because I can no longer hear Akila’s voice. For a moment, I only hear geese, and somewhere, an ice cream truck. But then Rebecca is calling out from the end of the driveway, and when I turn my head, her truck is parked sideways in the middle of the street, smoking, and she is running in her scrubs and Docs, waving her arms and saying words I can’t make out. The officers’ retreat is almost coordinated. Rebecca hurries over to Akila, and as she gets to her feet, the officers straighten their clothes.

  “We wanted to touch base with the owner of the house. Per the incident earlier this week.”

  “The dog.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Akila gets up and goes around the back, and when I try to go with her, she pushes me away. “Do you know Ms. Moynihan?”

  “Not well, no.”

  “Do you have any firearms inside the house?”

  “Of course not,” Rebecca says, and our eyes meet briefly before I go around the back.

  * * *

  Inside, Akila has shut herself in her room. I knock on the door, and when she answers, her lip is bleeding. When I draw her attention to it, she is surprised. I can’t feel it, she says, covering it with her hand, and when I get the first aid kit and tend to the cut, she says it again in a small, disembodied voice.

  “I shouldn’t have talked back,” she finally says. “I feel—” She pauses, collects herself. “I feel really stupid.”

  “No, there’s nothing we could have done. It was always going to go that way.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she says, her voice low, tight. I remember when my parents tried to tell me this, the only time in their miserable marriage they were ever united. It must be strange for every black kid, when their principal authority figures break the news that authorities lie. Ironically, I didn’t believe them. I had to find it out for myself.

  “You’re not going to feel better about this,” I say. “You’re going to feel angry, for a long time, and that’s your right.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” We sit in silence for a while, and then we resume our video game—a collaborative multiplayer where we have to prepare burgers for a ravenous fast-food crowd. But we are out of sync. She can’t get the pickles down in time and I keep dropping the mayonnaise. As the level reloads, the screen goes dark and reflects our faces back to us, and though we continue to play, our reflections, our stricken expressions, remain in the room. During a level interlude, I turn and put my arm around her and she accepts my embrace, briefly, before we turn back to the game.

  * * *

  It is the first night we all have dinner together. Eric and Rebecca watch Akila as she eats, and she takes a few bites and asks if she can go back to her room. Eric tries to follow her, and Rebecca simply places a hand on his arm. Later, I try to paint. When I can’t, I sit in front of the mirror and do a quick graphite study of my face, and for the first time in my life, there I am. Or, at least, something about it is recognizable, but the timing is bad. Because among the dumb, insufficient platitudes I might offer to Akila or myself is the truth. And the truth is that when the officer had his arm pressed into my neck, there was a part of me that felt like, all right. Like, fine. Because there will always be a part of me that is ready to die.

  * * *

  Later, Rebecca lingers in my doorway until I motion for her to come in. After two months of her pointed intrusions, this propriety feels absurd. She closes the door and glances at the two garbage bags where I have packed all my things. She sits on the floor and removes her shoes, leans back against the door.

  “You’re okay.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and when I look over at her, her eyes are bright and still.

  “Sometimes, I hoped something bad might happen to you.” She laughs. “Isn’t that monstrous?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I say, and as the room darkens, her face slackens and becomes novel, almost inanimate. I draw it quickly before all the light is gone, and once it is night, we sit in silence until I am asleep. When I wake up, she is stretched out on the floor. But something is wrong. I go to the bathroom and when I turn on the lights, I am covered in blood. My first impulse is to wash my hands, but as I’m doing it, I see myself in the mirror and stop. There isn’t enough toilet paper, and when I reach for the showerhead, I feel the beginning of a terrible abdominal cramp. I wake up Rebecca, but none of the words that come make any sense. I am both grateful and horrified to find that she wakes up promptly to a fully alert state, like a grim little computer, and after she clocks the bloodied pajamas in my arms, she gets me clean sweatpants and ushers me downstairs and into the truck with a box of sanitary pads. The seats, I say, which is the first coherent thing I’ve said since waking up, and she pulls out onto the road and gives a dry, mirthless laugh. Dawn is breaking and the road and sky are in and out as we drive, the dark behind my eyes softer and warmer than the car and the AC that Rebecca has directed right onto my face, but in the dark, I don’t have to feel it, and I don’t have think about it, what is happening inside of me.

  * * *

  As she is helping me through the parking lot, I can hear the day becoming whole. Traffic and avian chatter and wind in the trees. We enter urgent care, Rebecca lowers me into a smooth, green chair, and I remember that I don’t have health insurance. I close my eyes again, and when I open them, she is doing paperwork, writing my birthday in her sloppy, right-handed script. I don’t ask her how she knows. I know I have been vetted and carefully observed,
and I know Rebecca does not like to be surprised. But when she fills out the details of my medical history, sends the paperwork back with her credit card, almost as if it is nothing, I feel held.

  * * *

  The bleeding hasn’t stopped. When a nurse comes for me, I’m embarrassed to get up. There is a spot on the chair, and as they are taking me away, I look back and Rebecca is trying to clean it up. It happens quickly. A paper gown and an intake bracelet that is too tight. A Wyeth painting mounted above a box of purple gloves. The sweatpants, inside out and heavy with blood. Cold jelly and the murmur of the sonogram. I can’t help feeling that the painting is inappropriate. It depicts a woman crawling through tall, brown grass. The woman was Wyeth’s neighbor, and she was suffering from a neurodegenerative disease that impacted her ability to walk. This painting is hanging in the room where a doctor tells me that the baby is dead and the tissue will need to be cleared.

  * * *

  They give me a pill to soften my cervix and then a light sedative. The nurse calls it a twilight sleep. As she walks me through what will happen during the uterine aspiration, I can’t shake the feeling that she once served me at an IHOP in Flatbush, and while it’s possible a lot has changed for her since then, I feel sort of uneasy as she explains the procedure and palms the speculum. When she asks me what I do, I tell her that I don’t do anything. But as they are turning on the machine, it feels important that I be earnest, and I grab her arm and tell her that actually, I am an artist. It is an embarrassing declaration, even as the room is going dark, but when I wake up and they provide me with a diaper, the declaration feels no different from a theoretical child, a thing I’ve cultivated mostly in my mind, cautiously, desperately. A sunlit dream where I do better, where there is no father and my daughter and I move upstate and sometimes I yell at her while helping her with her homework, but ultimately we are pals, and she is someone I can talk to, ill-tempered and serious and leaving bowls of cold cereal around the house, off to kindergarten with noisy, ornate hair, because like black mothers everywhere, I will be required to overdo it with the barrettes. And maybe it is not all great and in my single motherhood my bandwidth is shot with work and child-rearing and trying to get laid. Maybe I bring too many men into her life and she wishes she knew who her dad was, and I tell her that I don’t know, the months in Jersey like a brief, sunlit seizure. Maybe she is too much like me, too much like my mother, teetering silently on some horrific precipice in her teenage years until she comes out the other side as the woman I couldn’t be, a woman with good credit and hope and who is terrifying in her conviction to be whatever it is she wants to be.