by Mia Mckenzie
Shit.
“I’ve never done anything bad to anybody,” she says. “As a matter of fact, I did everything I could for everybody else my whole life.”
Which is almost true. She did everything for my father when they were married. Everything for Slade. Everything for her parents when they were aging. Everything for her church. I’m probably the only person she didn’t do everything for, as a matter of fact. Which makes me exactly the wrong person for her to be having this conversation with.
“I thought God was looking out for me,” she says. “I read my Bible and prayed every day and I thought the Lord was listening. But now I don’t know.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this. When I visited her in the hospital after her surgery, she said the same things to me. I didn’t have any answers then, and I still don’t. Back then, she’d seemed angry more than sad. I sat beside her hospital bed as she cried and cried. I felt sympathy for her and the terrible thing that had changed her existence so drastically, but I also felt disconnected. Because how do you comfort someone you resent? How do you show up for someone who didn’t show up for you? I didn’t know. All I did know was that I couldn’t hold my mother’s anger because I had no room for it, with all the space my own anger was taking up.
Now, I sit down beside her on the bed. I think about Vicky, how she held my hand on the bus. I think about how easy the love is between me and her, how unencumbered. There are no regrets between us, and no resentments, because we have no history. History is where shit gets messy.
I don’t take my mother’s hand. I can’t. I don’t even really want to. But I remember what Reverend Seymour said, about bearing witness, and I think maybe I can do that. So, I sit and wait, in case she wants to say anything else. She mostly just shakes her head from side to side and sniffles. I pat her back a couple of times. We exist there for a while, like that.
“Look at me,” she says finally, “acting like the child instead of the mother. I should be taking care of you, not the other way around.”
You have never taken care of me. Not like you should have, anyway.
After a while, I ask, “Do you still want to go to church?”
“If it’s not too late.”
“We have time,” I say. It’s not a metaphor. I’m only talking about church. The rest of it, I still don’t know.
29
On Saturday, I pick up Vicky and Jaz and take them to Malcolm X Park to meet up with a bunch of other kids from activist club at a big protest rally against police brutality. Vicky screams “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!” and “Whose streets? Our streets!” so loudly and with so much guttural rage that I worry her throat is going to bleed. After the rally, we get cheesesteaks. Around one, we drop Jaz off at her house and head back to Vicky’s.
Faye’s in the kitchen, on her phone, when we come in. She does not look happy.
There’s a pizza on the kitchen table. Vicky makes a beeline for it, even though she just snarfed down an entire sandwich and fries.
“Okay,” Faye is saying into the phone. “Thanks for letting me know.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask when she hangs up.
Faye looks at the kid. “Vicky, have you been taking video of the white man down the street?”
OH. SHIT.
“No,” Vicky says, with as straight a face as a person can have with a mouth full of cheese.
Faye peers at her. She’s torn. I can see it in her face. She wants to believe Vicky. She wants the kid to be telling her the truth, to not be lying right to her face. “Okay,” Faye says. “Well, someone said they saw you doing it. Several times. Are they mistaken?”
“Yup,” Vick says without a moment’s hesitation. “It must have been someone else.”
Faye’s mouth twitches at the corners. She looks over at me.
I have a flash of a moment to make a choice here. I can hold Vicky down and pretend to know nothing, ride-or-die style. Or I can give Faye the information she needs to parent Vicky, who we both love and want the best for. It feels like a shitty decision to have to make, but I realize that I’ve brought it on myself. If I had stepped up when I saw Vicky stalking Ethan at the reverend’s cookout, and figured out then and there how to parent the kid, we might not be here now. Still, I cannot bring myself to betray Vicky. So, I try to keep my face as blank as possible, feigning complete ignorance.
It doesn’t work. Faye takes one look at me and knows everything. She moves toward Vicky, holding out her hand. “Vicky, give me your phone.”
Vicky glares at her. “No.”
“It’s my fault,” I say, stepping forward, almost between them. “I wanted to keep an eye on Ethan. To help the reverend. I asked Vicky to do it, too.”
Faye ignores me. “Vicky,” she says. “Give me your phone.”
“No.”
“I explicitly said not to take video of Ethan.”
“No, you didn’t,” Vicky insists. “You said not to take video of the cops.”
“I said not to get involved!”
“I told you, it was my idea,” I say helplessly.
“I’m sure it was not your idea, Skye,” Faye says, finally looking at me. “But the fact that you obviously know about it and went along with it is astounding.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Vicky says. “Nothing bad happened.”
Faye looks at the kid and in her eyes there is a kind of anger I have never seen there. “Vicky, leave your phone on the table and go to your room,” Faye says. “You’re grounded.”
“No!”
“Um, Vick?” I say. “Maybe you should—”
“It’s not fair!”
“It’s not fair?” Faye asks, her voice shaking with anger. “You went behind my back and did something I explicitly told you not to do and you just now stood here and lied about it to my face. But it’s not fair to ground you?” She points a shaking finger at the stairs. “Go to your room right now.”
“I’m not going!” Vicky screams.
Faye takes a few more quick steps toward her, grabs her arm, and steers her toward the stairs. Vicky pulls her arm out of Faye’s grasp and pushes her hard into the wall. Faye looks stunned. Vicky grabs the bookshelf with both hands and knocks it over, sending the books in it, along with the potted plants and framed photos on top of it, crashing to the floor.
“Shit!” I jump back out of the way of flying glass and soil.
“Vicky,” Faye yells, “you need to calm down!”
Fuming, Vicky throws her phone on the floor, and then turns and stomps up the stairs. We hear her go into her room and slam the door so hard that the floors shake.
Silence—the kind that hangs heavy in the air after a fight—fills the house.
Faye stares at the bookshelf, rubbing her shoulder where it hit the wall.
“Are you okay?”
She doesn’t answer. She picks up Vicky’s phone, which, thanks to a bulky case, looks undamaged, and starts toward the mess. I move to follow her but she puts her hand out in a stop gesture.
“You’ve done enough,” she says.
I frown at her. “You seriously don’t want help with all this? There’s dirt and glass everywhere.”
“How long have you known she was taking video of Ethan?”
“I don’t know. Maybe two weeks?”
She shakes her head in disbelief.
“I only saw her doing it once,” I tell her in my defense. “I didn’t know it was a regular thing.”
“Did you tell her to stop?” she asks.
“Yes. Kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“What was I going to do, Faye? Forbid her? She would have just kept doing it anyway. She doesn’t listen to you; why would she listen to me?”
“ ‘She would have done it anyway’ isn’t a reaso
n to ignore it,” Faye says, bristling. “She’s a child. She needs rules. She needs boundaries. You have to say no sometimes, Skye.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.”
“When have you ever said no to her?”
I think about it. “The other day. She wanted cheesesteaks and I was like, ‘Nah, let’s get burgers.’ ”
She just stares at me, like she’s trying to figure out how one becomes such an idiot. Then, she’s like, “Do you really not understand why pointing a camera at a 911-happy white man is a dangerous thing for Vicky to be doing?”
“I do understand.”
“Then why didn’t you put a stop to it?”
I don’t answer because I didn’t want Vicky to be mad at me sounds pathetic.
“I know it’s great being Vicky’s favorite,” Faye says. “Being the only cool grown-up in her life. When Cynthia was alive, I was the cool aunt who let Vicky eat ice cream for dinner and stay up too late. But now I’m the one raising her and that requires saying no sometimes. It’s not fun. It’s not cool. But I have to do it. Because she’s twelve and she makes very bad decisions. Like eating an entire box of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies, getting horrible diarrhea, and sitting on the toilet crying and shitting for an hour.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That happened.”
“Okay. I get it. But it’s not just about being her favorite. It’s more…egg donor specific than that.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning Vicky’s my genetic offspring, right? But I didn’t give birth to her and then give her up for adoption. Or, like, abandon her on the front steps of a nunnery or some shit. I didn’t give her away.”
“Okay.”
“But I also didn’t raise her,” I say. “Which would have resulted in screwing her up in any number of ways, I assure you. So…it’s kind of ideal, as far as parent-child narratives go.”
She peers at me. “I don’t think I’m following you.”
“There’s nothing for me to regret,” I tell her. “And there’s nothing for Vicky to resent. How many family relationships can you say that about?”
She nods slowly, and I know she’s thinking about herself and Cynthia. “Not many.”
“It makes the love between us easy,” I say. “That’s what I don’t want to risk.”
“Easy love is hard to come by,” she says.
Truer words, y’all.
“And I also just want Vicky to know that I’m always on her side. That I have her back. My mother didn’t have mine and it sucked.” I sigh. “And I know I’m not her mother. I know that. But still.”
“How did your mother not have your back?”
I consider not telling her about my childhood traumas. Maybe I don’t want her to know the things that messed me up. But then she comes and stands close to me, looks at me—into me—with eyes full of care and affection, and I want to tell her everything that matters.
“When I was a kid, my dad was really shitty. He liked to lock me in the closet when I didn’t behave. He called me names, told me I was stupid. He knocked me around sometimes. My mother didn’t stop him. She didn’t protect me from him.”
When I feel the sting of tears, I just let them happen.
Faye puts her arms around me. I bury my face in her shoulder. She rubs my back as my tears fall onto her shoulder.
After a couple of minutes, I detach myself from her. “I’m getting snot all over you.”
“I don’t mind.”
I look at the mess on the floor. “I think we should clean this up.”
Together, we lift the bookshelf and stand it upright again. Then Faye starts cleaning up the dirt and broken pot pieces while I start putting books back on shelves.
We hear stomping upstairs, then a thud, then silence again.
“Do you want me to go talk to her?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I’ve found it’s better to just let her settle down on her own.”
I go back to the books. After a minute, I ask, “Do you think settling down is what she needs?”
Faye stops sweeping and looks at me. “What does that mean?”
I’m not totally sure what it means. I think about the way Vicky talks about Charlotte. The way she screamed at the protest rally. I think about myself at twelve, holding back a scream of rage until my throat was sore. “I just think maybe the kid has a lot of anger in there that needs to get out.”
“It got out,” Faye says, gesturing toward the bookshelf and its decimated contents.
“It didn’t, though. It started to. And then you told her to calm down. Like you’ve done before. Like Kenny and Charlotte always do. Like her teachers and principal probably do. So, she did. For now. Until all that anger boils to the surface again. And again. And again.”
I suddenly feel very tired. I take a seat on the floor, against the wall, away from the broken glass and smashed pots. I lean my head back. I say, “I think if we keep trying to push it back down, Vicky’s anger is going to turn into something worse.”
“What?”
“Depression. Disconnection.”
“You’re saying we should just let her explode,” Faye says. “And then what?”
“Then she moves through it,” I say. “Past it.”
Faye looks like she’s thinking about that. After a long moment, she says, “No.”
“No?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know how bad that could get and if I’d be able to handle it,” she says. “And considering you can’t even say no to Vicky about anything more important than cheesesteaks, you’re not really in a position to criticize me for that.”
“I’m not criticizing you. Honestly. I know parenting is hard. I mean, I assume it is. But you’re a great parent.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
She shakes her head again. “Vicky hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you,” I say. “Trust me. If she hated you, I’d know. She hates Kenny. She really hates Charlotte. She’s not shy about expressing hatred for people.”
“She’s never said she hates me?”
“Never.”
“You swear?”
“I swear. Not even once.”
She sits down beside me on the floor, very close, so our shoulders and knees are touching.
“You really think I’m a great parent?”
“You’re a thousand times better than my parents were, in every way,” I tell her. “I think Vicky’s super lucky you fucked her dad to get custody of her.”
She smiles and punches me in the shoulder.
“Really, though,” I say. “Jokes aside. You’re wonderful, Faye.”
She reaches over and takes my hand, interlocks her fingers with mine. Her nails are painted A Oui Bit of Red. She leans her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. We sit there for a couple of minutes in silence. Then she says, “I broke up with Nick.”
She says it almost casually, the way you might tell someone that you don’t like Adele anymore. Actually, I stopped listening to her music when she accepted the Grammy after she admitted Beyoncé deserved it more. But when I look over at her, she’s watching me, and there’s nothing casual in those intense, dark eyes of hers.
I don’t tell her I already know. “What happened?” I ask.
“Nothing really happened,” she says. “But the closer I got to my surgery date, the more my thoughts were consumed with cancer and loss and life and death, the more I just wasn’t sure I wanted to marry Nick. And he wasn’t okay with that.”
To hell with him, is what I want to say. Instead, I ask, “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
&
nbsp; I can feel the change in her energy now, from stressed-out parent to something else entirely. If there have been moments when I wasn’t sure what Faye wanted, this is not one of them. Something has shifted and, as I feel her red-tipped fingers intertwined with mine, there’s no doubt in my mind that she wants something to happen right now.
The thing is: I lied. I don’t want to be Faye’s friend with benefits. I don’t want a situationship. Viva was right: That is some cishet nonsense! But I’m also terrified of the idea of something more. I’m terrified of loving Faye; of counting on her; of wanting to belong with her.
I feel the slightest movement, a shift in the position of her body, and I know she’s going to kiss me any second. I take my hand out of hers and pat her knee, the way your grandma does when you do something cute, and say, “I’m glad we’re friends.”
There’s a flash of surprise on her face, as though, of all the things I could have said right now, she didn’t think it’d be that. She recovers quickly, nodding and smiling and saying, “I’m glad, too.”
* * *
—
Before I leave, I go up to check on Vicky. I knock on her door but she doesn’t answer. “It’s Skye,” I say, hoping that matters.
“Come in.”
She’s sitting on the bed with a book in her lap; one of those fantasy series with teenage witches or demigods.
“You okay, kid?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
I feel like we should probably talk about it. But I can’t force her. And also: I’m a little talked-out right now.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I tell her.
“I don’t have a phone.”
“I’ll call you on Faye’s phone. Or send a carrier pigeon. Whichev.”
She doesn’t look amused in the least.
30
My thirty-ninth birthday falls on a Saturday. When I was young, this fact would have had me psyched. But I haven’t really celebrated my birthday in like ten years. Don’t feel bad for me, okay? It’s not like I put my head under the covers and lament the cruel passing of time; I just don’t make a big deal out of it. I don’t even shower this morning. I just rub a wet washcloth on the important parts and call it done. I don’t have any clean underwear, so I go commando. I’m almost out of clean bras, too, so I put on my emergency bra. Y’all know the kind of bra I’m talking about. It’s white, it’s more than ten years old, and it looks like something your grandmother would have worn under her church clothes. Pretty sure I got it at JCPenney. But whatever.