by Sheena Kamal
In bare feet, I cross from their front door to ours. It’s unlocked.
I know I’ll find her in the kitchen, so that’s where I look first. But it’s not her calling me. It’s someone else.
“Where you been, girl?” says Ravi, from behind me.
I turn slowly. I didn’t expect to see him. Columbus said he disappeared. I guess I’d hoped he was gone for good.
He’s staring at me without seeing me at all. There are tears in his eyes, but I can’t tell if they’re from grief or anger. Maybe a bit of both and as soon as I realize that, he takes a step toward me. He’s got the envelope in his hand. The one I left for him, with the insurance papers inside.
“You were supposed to kill my dad, weren’t you, Ravi? In Trinidad, and here, too. You broke in here through the back door and there was supposed to be an accident, right? But he was late and we were coming home. Then he got hit by the car. But you were the one who was supposed to do it.”
It’s like he’s not even hearing me. He’s off in his own world. “Take money from me? Like I ain’t been with you from the start? From when we was little kids?”
It takes me a minute to realize it’s not me he’s seeing, it’s her.
He thinks I’m Ma.
“I almost kill a man for you,” he says, and the tears stream down his face now. “I woulda done it, too. Before you did it yourself.”
There’s a possessiveness about him that’s so much like how my dad used to look at Ma.
An expression on his face that tells me he isn’t ever going to leave her.
That he did it for love, attacking Dad in Trinidad, pretending to break into the house and “surprise” Dad the night everything went wrong. When he found Dad drunk in the parking lot instead, in the moments before our car came smashing through the darkness.
Ravi did it out of love but for Ma there were other reasons, reasons that had nothing to do with him. I think about the bruise on her hip I saw when Dad came up from Trinidad that last time and, you know, I can’t help but think about all the other bruises I’d been seeing on her my whole life.
My ma, she’s had it rough.
Now what I see is the anger cloudy in his eyes and it’s like he can tell what I’m thinking, that I need to get away somehow. He’s as thin as I am, but slower, because when he reaches to grab me, I slip the bird bones of my hands out of his grip and am down the stairs, running. I feel him behind me as I wrench the door open but pull my bones through his hands again and feel a flare of triumph at my little wrists that can do this, that can slip out of these kinds of traps.
There’s a car coming down the lane toward me, headlights bright in my eyes. Is that Ma? I can’t tell.
I don’t know what makes me do this, turn and run the other way, but I do. Right into the woods behind the parking lot. I just want to get away.
And I think, for a moment, that I’m free. So I stop because my head is spinning. I blink, but everything is hazy. The tree bark is cool against my temple.
I forget where I am and instead replay the events of my tourney fights. Didn’t I relive a fight at Dad’s funeral, too? It’s what I do when my mind goes blank. Then I hear Ravi’s voice in my head, him saying things to me as though I’m Ma. As if I’d ever do the things to him that Ma did. It wasn’t enough for Ma to take everything from me, she had to drag Ravi into it, too.
There’s light somewhere behind me and I remember a car pulling into the lot. Someone’s calling my name but I don’t want to be near anyone right now. I just want to stand here in the dark until morning comes. My phone rings, the sound shattering the quiet around me.
It’s Jason. “Hello?” Jason says, his voice sounding groggy. “Trish, are you there? You butt-dialed me.”
“Come get me,” I whisper.
“Where are you? Trish? I’m at my parents’ place. I can get the car from my dad and drive over in no time. Are you at home?” He’s so freaked out he’s tripping all over his words, tripping all over mine as I try to answer. I guess I sound as terrified as I feel.
I’m about to say yes, I’m at home, but a noise stops me. It doesn’t feel like I’m alone anymore. Jason’s speaking again, messing with my concentration so I hang up the phone.
Looking around, I don’t see anybody, but I feel them.
I feel him.
Ravi isn’t behind me, until he is. I didn’t know he could move like that. With all the drugs Ma’s been giving him he shouldn’t be able to move so fast.
He puts his hands on my shoulders and I can’t slip through this time. I spin, quickly. My hip lifts and torques and my right knee whips into his groin. He screams and falls, taking me with him to the dirt, pinning me there. We’re close to the edge of the ravine, almost too close for me to manoeuvre properly, but I manage to buck him off, push and scrape my body from under him. I’m thanking Imelda now, and the BJJ she introduced us to. My ground game isn’t great, but it’s better than Ravi’s.
Keep running, I think. You’re too fast for him.
His hands close over my ankle and he pulls me back. I kick out—
and this is what it’s like, when all your strength has deserted you and you know the punishment is coming, you know you’re done, all glory lost in this one moment that you weren’t good enough
—but right then I hear a sound, a whoosh of breath, a fierce cry that seems to rise from the earth, a wind whistling through the trees, falling like a hammer from the sky and it’s everywhere at once this sound.
It’s all around me.
It’s Ma.
She’s here with us and her hands are on Ravi. For a moment it looks like she’s hugging him but no, that’s not it. She’s pushing him. Ravi’s hands melt away and I smell her breath, metallic and full of blood, before I realize she’s still screaming, even as she falls down into the ravine, bringing Ravi with her, and now her screams turn from anger to triumph before they die out.
Rain on galvanized roofing. Pansticks on hammered steel. The sound of bones breaking. A skull cracking apart.
thirty-four
Their bodies are twisted, broken. Ravi’s neck is facing a direction it shouldn’t be. His eyes are wide open and blood spews from his mouth. He sputters, chokes.
I’m about to go down to them but I feel a hand on my arm, anchoring me to the spot. “Wait,” says Pammy.
We watch the blood spill from his mouth to the soil, and a kind of stillness overtake him.
Pammy takes her hand away. “It’s safe now.”
I hear her on the phone, calling the police. Her calm is gone, she sounds frantic. She’s sobbing again, the same way she’d been the night my dad died. It feels like that night all over again, except worse. The sound of her voice grows distant as I scramble down the side of the ravine, step carefully around Ravi and go to Ma. I sit beside her and take her dirt-streaked hand into mine. “Ma,” I say, “wake up.”
I close my eyes and put my arms around her. That power of hers is gone, the one that came with the night, the one that turned her into a shrieking thing, fire personified, when Ravi dared put his hands on me.
And now, the night fades away and she’s going, too.
The rising sun burns the outside of my lids until I force them open, see her clearly in the morning light. Her skin dry as paper, hair like coarse brush scattered around her head, a dry halo fit for kindling. The light hits it and for a moment it turns red, like it’s alive. It’s my concussion talking, the bone shard in my brain, maybe, because what I think in this moment is she’s going to burst into flames and go shooting across the sky.
I notice for the first time that her eyes are open. I don’t know how long she’s been watching me. “My baby,” she says, her voice rattling out from deep inside her chest. “I heard you calling me. They say there’s a light in the tunnel, but there’s no light. It was only dark. So dark. And then I heard your voice like it
was when you were a little girl. My baby.”
I don’t even flinch when her hand finds mine, her fingers wrapping around my palm and squeezing with a strength I never thought would be possible, her on the ground like this, broken into pieces.
“Yes,” I say, brushing the dirt from her hair. “Yours. Always yours.”
“Trish? Is it safe now?” I look up at Pammy, who’s watching over us from the top of the ravine. She’s done with the phone-sobbing. Her tears dry and her calm returns. “Can I come down?”
“Yeah.” I echo her from mere moments ago. “It’s safe now.”
Pammy picks her way carefully down the side of the ravine and sits cross-legged next to me. She takes Ma’s other hand in hers and presses a kiss to the back of it.
thirty-five
The hospital is cold, so Jason has lent me his sweater. He showed up at my house after the cops arrived and hasn’t really left me since. He’s here now, sleeping beside me in the waiting room.
I put my head on his shoulder and close my eyes. When Aunty K finds us, we’re holding hands. Pammy must have called her right after she called 9-1-1 because sometime in the last couple hours she hopped on a plane from New York and all of a sudden she’s at the hospital with us. Maybe it’s not all of a sudden. Maybe we’ve been here for a while and Pammy has been wrapped around me like a shield, sending cops and nurses and nosy busybodies catapulting away like she’s electricity personified. She tried to send Jason away, too, but he refused to go.
“Can I speak to you for a minute, Trisha?” Aunty K asks.
Jason looks at me. “Want me to go, Trish?”
I don’t really want to talk to her, but I know I have to. “No, it’s okay. We’ll go.” I follow Aunty K out of the room. I see Jason staring at us through the glass doors.
She sees him, too. “Pammy says your boyfriend won’t leave. What does he know about what happened?”
“Nothing. Pammy told me what to say to everyone.”
“And the cops?”
“Haven’t talked to them yet.”
She looks relieved. Her hair is loose around her shoulders and there’s a kind of determination about her that reminds me of Ma. “Good. Let’s go over it again.”
“Do we have to?”
“Yes! This is the story.”
She tells it to me, almost word for word what Pammy said. They must have talked about it at some point.
“Are you listening?” Aunty K says, when it becomes clear I’m not.
I force myself to pay attention. This is where the important part comes in. I know this from experience.
* * *
Ravi was an addict. He wandered. Was off his head a lot. Ma must have gone looking for him and saw him at the bottom of the ravine there. Must have slipped on her way down. You came back from your tournament and saw their cars, but not them. Found them like that. When you got down there, Ravi was already dead.
* * *
Me, frowning: “It’s a short story.”
Pammy interrupts. She’s brought some coffee for Aunty K. “Those are the ones that’ll stick. Overdose on meds? Happens a hundred times a day. Besides, he’s been addicted to painkillers since his warehouse accident, everyone could see that. Your Ma suspected it, at least, but she didn’t want to believe something like that about her childhood sweetheart.”
Aunty K nods at her. They’re nodding at each other. Jason is watching us from the waiting room. Columbus is asleep. Ma is still broken.
* * *
“A tragedy,” says the cop, when he finds us. He’s looking at me for signs that I think maybe it’s not. I can feel Aunty K and Pammy behind me, their stillness, their intense focus. Their faces twisted in grief, their eyes saying, yes, yes it’s such a tragedy and everyone here thinks so.
He nods at the bandages on my nose, the bruises on my face. “That happened in your kick-boxing tournament?”
“Yeah, I had three fights. I won a belt.”
“Where’s the belt now?”
I can see it’s a trick question, that he’s trying to trip me up. Thinks maybe that I’m the weak link. So I give him Kru’s number and tell him he can find the belt at the gym tomorrow, probably. He can find the tournament results online, too, if he wants.
“She even spoke to the press,” Jason says. “There are videos online.” He puts a hand on my shoulder. It seems like such a long time ago. It seems like another lifetime. I wonder how he knew about the videos but then realize he must have seen them on the gym’s social media. Everyone knows everything these days. Except for what really goes on behind the scenes.
“I’m going to need a minute with your girlfriend,” the cop says.
Jason doesn’t blink at me being called his girlfriend. He squeezes my hand and walks away. I catch Pammy’s eye, then Aunty K’s.
Where the tears come from, I don’t even know, but now they’re falling from my lashes and the cop softens and in that moment we have him, we really do.
It’s such a good story.
six months later
thirty-six
I think of rain on galvanized roofing.
The sun warms my back as I pass my hands over her hair, fingers combing coconut oil through the strands that have turned solid grey over the past few months. I turn the wheelchair so she can feel some of the heat, too. We’ve moved out of our townhouse and the new ground-floor apartment we’re in gets a lot of light. She closes her eyes to the sensation and falls asleep. Since the accident, being wheeled into the warmth is what she loves the best. I guess when you’re paralyzed from the waist down, you take whatever you get.
“You’re so gentle with her. Such a good daughter,” Pammy says from the doorway. She’s staring at me in that new way of hers. Trying to see what I know, what I’ll say, if I’ll stick to the story, if she needs to call Aunty K.
She doesn’t need to worry. The story is as much mine as it is hers, Ma’s and Aunty K’s.
The story is ours.
She doesn’t shift from the doorway, seems content to call to me from just inside the room. “Christopher tells me you’re focused on school now. You don’t even go to the gym anymore.”
“I don’t have time with university and everything.” It’s only part of the truth. The fight in me is gone. It died the night I stood with Pammy up on the lip of the ravine and watched Ravi fall asleep for the last time. I’ve tried to go back to training, but it doesn’t feel the same. Nothing will ever feel the same again. “Aunty K is coming for Christmas this year. Will you be around?”
“Of course.” She smiles at me. “We have to be there for each other, especially in times like this.”
When Pammy leaves, I separate Ma’s hair into two sections and braid both, leaving a little tail hanging over each shoulder.
She wakes, putting a hand over mine. You can see how much she’s aged in the new lines on her face, carving deep furrows at the corners of her mouth and eyes. You can hear it in her voice when she asks, panicked, “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere, Ma. I’m right here.”
“Tell me about Junior,” she says. She’s been doing this a lot. Ever since she woke up from the accident, she’s been encouraging me to reach out to Junior. I think it’s because she’s scared that if she dies, I’ll be alone. I tell her all about him working at the garage. About him postponing uni for another year so that he can make some more money right now. She nods and tells me that sometimes you have to do that.
But she’s made sure that I don’t, and that my tuition is paid up.
“Sometimes I close my eyes and I see you win that fight. You know the one where you got a belt?”
I pitch my voice low, to match hers. No abrupt movements. No sharp noises. There’s only infinite gentleness for her now. “Yeah, I remember. But it was a tie. A split decision.”
“No, you won, baby. I saw it with
my own eyes.” I don’t know if she did. I don’t know if she was ever there, or if we’d both imagined her in Florida. She finally notices the fresh braids and nudges one of them with her chin. “Your father loved the smell of coconut in my hair,” she says, her lids falling closed again.
“Ma,” I say. “Why did Ravi have Dad’s phone?”
“Mmmm…” Ma sighs. She’s almost in that dream-state, the one she enters into most afternoons, and into the evening. Maybe that’s why her accent comes back strong. “Your father dropped it that night, when they fight. Ravi picked it up after. He wasn’t supposed to. He should have just left it on the ground.”
It was the last thing I didn’t know. But, you know, I’m not sure what difference answers make. With Ravi and Dad dead. Ma like this, a black widow who can’t even move her legs.
She falls silent. I think she’s asleep when she hits me with this: “I know you didn’t mean to kill him. You were driving, it was dark.”
“There was rain,” I remind her.
“Yes,” she nods. “The rain. But you hadn’t seen him. You didn’t mean to.”
My hand on the wheel of the car and, suddenly, her hand on mine.
Outside, two shadows, one seeming to freeze the moment before it disappears into the woods, the other stepping away from the car.
Away or toward?
Does it matter?
A slight bend of pressure on the wheel.
Her or me?
Doesn’t matter.
I wait until I’m sure she’s asleep again before I press a kiss to her head and rub some warmth into her shoulders and pull some of her heat into my hands. My ma, she’s had it so rough. Now I hope she gets to be a little bit easy. “Yes, I really did.”
I put some money in her purse, not because she needs it, but because she likes to know there’s a little extra in there just in case. Then I leave before the weak fall sun sets behind the trees. Leave before she gives herself to the night, sheds the skin of her broken body, a body she broke for me, hers, and becomes fire.