Home and Away

by Candice Montgomery

  She pulls out a very large blender from someplace overhead where it probably should not have fit. “Kai, be a gentleman. Keep my Tasia entertained until dinner, yes?”

  Kai laughs as he stands and helps me off the counter. She picks up his wrist and slaps the back of his hand with her potholder six times.

  He laughs again and she scolds him about being a “perverted little boy.” And then we make our way down the hall. And then Merrick is yelling.

  “Hey, hey, hey, hey, whoa! Whoa. Where y’all going?”

  Kai holds up his hands, my left still in his right. “I’m just following your mom’s orders.”

  “Follow them in a more public space.”

  And then the blender shuts off and Merrick’s mom marches into the living room, smacks her son with that same potholder. “I have had enough. Enough of you men. From now on—my Tasia and I, we dictate the rhythm of things.”

  “Like hell,” the older gentleman mutters.

  “Go on and show her your room, Kai.”

  “Like fuck!” Merrick says, and this time she hits him but does not spare the pot holder.

  Emily slams the front door, announcing her arrival loud enough to crack the paint, just as Kai and I walk down the hall again, and somehow he’s suckered me into giving him a piggyback ride, and we both almost die on the way there, but we’re laughing too, so it’s pretty much okay.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Kai’s room is like a rainforest made of copper and metal bobs and bells. There’s a mesh grate covering a lot of the far wall, tiny pieces of metalwork hang from the ceiling, and the most incredible art all over the place. Canvases of every size. The theme of most of them seems to be eyes, and even within those eyes there seems to be a theme—dark browns, light browns. The only variation is the hazels, which have tiny specks of green. There’s a concentration of those.

  “Did you paint these?”

  He laughs. “Hell, no. I’m not that talented.”

  I nod. “No, you’re definitely not.” And then I’m in a headlock.

  I’m about to kidney shot him but he lets me go, because I’m sure—I’m sure—he can feel the punch coming, and falls onto his bed. I crawl up next to him and position my legs across his chest. Kai runs his short, blunt nails across my calves and shins, then says, “Eww, you missed a spot,” like he just fell into a patch of my leg hair.

  I immediately try to pull my legs back, but his reflexes are fast and he catches my ankles. “Jesus, I’m jokes, Taze.” I try to pull them back again and he says, “It’s just body hair.”

  I want to snap at him that I know. But I don’t. I feel a little bit chastised for reacting the way I did, about my own body, even. All of it is ridiculous.

  “How come I’ve never been in your room before?”

  He shrugs. “Good question. Probably because you’ve never been here before, to this place where your grandparents live. Couldn’t exactly sneak you in for a quickie, now, could I?”

  A quickie? A quick what, I wonder. Even though I know—my stomach and the chills on my neck all know. “Yeah, but Merrick’s always at the garage apartment and you’re there a lot.”

  Kai nods and drums out a beat on my leg. “Fair. But, I don’t know. Merr is Merr. So it’s not that serious.”

  “I like it in here.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Will you help me make my room like this? At the apartment?”

  He nods and says, “If you teach me to throw a football.”

  “You’re charging me a fee?”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  I like it. “Okay. But there won’t be any pulling you up tight against me the way people learn to shoot pool, I hope you know.”

  He pauses a sec. “Damn. Fine, then I’m not wearing those little spandex shorts I know you’ve been dying to see me in.”

  That earns him a flick to the forehead as I stand and relocate to lie down on his floor. Kai follows and sits perpendicular to my hip. I spy an NYU pamphlet underneath his bed.

  On the tip of my tongue, burning like a box of Red Hots, are about a dozen questions regarding his college preferences and decisions. Whether or not he even has any he feels sure about.

  “Do you know if you have any siblings?” I ask instead.

  “I do,” he says. “I have a brother. Adam.”

  I jackknife and thank myself for spending time on those extra situps. “You do? Older or younger?”

  “Mmm … older,” he says. As though he had to think about it. As though, deciding right then, he could make it true.

  “By a lot?”

  “Why? You trying to date him?”

  “Maybe!” I say, and he uses his thumb, index, and middle fingers to squeeze the ticklish pressure points on the sides of my knee.

  I laugh and push his hand away. After reaching behind him for a pen, he runs a smooth line of ink across my shin. I can’t tell what it is yet, but the lines are long and sweeping and swirling, like my moods lately.

  Kai can make all the world’s problems go away with just a minor dose of his creativity. I close my eyes and say a tiny prayer of thanks that I am the one who, I think—I hope—gets to see it most.

  “He lives in New York. Goes to college up there. He’s almost done. Has a girlfriend and they’re super freakin’ in love. It’s pretty cool.”

  “That the reason for the NYU pamphlet?”

  “I guess,” he says. His voice is calm, his words steady. But his face, it gives him away. It’s the sad smile.

  “Did you apply?”

  Kai laughs and this time it’s genuine, touching the highest points on his cheeks. “Yeah. Adam made me.”

  “And you wanna go there? To NYU?”

  He stretches, and I spy the flat plane of his stomach, the small trail of hair leading … “Eyes up here, Tasia.”

  I throw the pamphlet at him.

  Kai catches it, laughing. “Full of questions tonight. To answer you: Yeah. I think I do wanna go there. If I end up going anywhere for college, I’d like it to be NYU.”

  I feel … relief? Relieved to know someone else is checking for him. “Do you see him often? Your brother?”

  “Nah, not really. I snapped some photos of us the last time I did, though. You wanna see?”

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  He gets up off the floor and rifles through his closet.

  While he looks, I make a circuit around the room. On the floor, inside an Earth globe he’s sawed in half, are a bunch of Polaroids. I pull one of the pictures out and the image …

  The image makes me pause.

  The photo is, undoubtedly, of him kissing another dude.

  “Umm, hey,” I say. “Are you bisexual?”

  Kai whips around and looks up at me. He shrugs. “I don’t know. Probably.” And then he’s back in the closet searching again.

  I mean.

  All right.

  Cool.

  Except the redhead boy in the picture with him is …

  “Umm,” I say again. “Is this Cole?”

  “We dated for a little. So, yeah, I guess I am. I’m bisexual. Okay, I found it!”

  He takes the picture of him and Cole out of my hand and is about to throw it into a copper wastebasket, but then he stops, turning back to me. “Unless you want it?”

  I laugh. “Why would I want that?”

  “If there were pictures of you kissing a girl, I would want those.”

  I shove him. “Asshole.”

  “Are there pictures of you—”

  “No!”

  “Just checking,” he says. “Here.” And then I’m staring at a picture of his older brother with a pretty Asian girl. He and his brother look nothing alike.

  His brother is super blond and has solid brown eyes, not broken like Kai’s.

  I hand the picture back to him. “Can I ask you a question?”

  He nods, and starts to weave some thin gold wire around a black chain. I love it when he gets distracted like this.

&nb
sp; “Can you see okay?”

  He looks at me like I just asked him if his dick is crooked.

  “Yes,” he says. “I see fine. It’s just a birth defect.”

  “Would you ever lie to me?”

  “No. I’m telling you—my vision’s fine, Tasia.”

  “Don’t get mad, it’s just a question.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Okay, fine, but you just called me Tasia and you don’t ever call me Tasia, so.”

  He puts the chain down.

  He walks toward me.

  We’re not far apart but it feels like it takes him forever to reach me.

  We’re pressed close together a second later. I don’t know when we got here. Not physically, but just … I don’t know when we both agreed that we were each other’s to touch as we want. I never want to go back.

  My arms hang at my sides and he brings them up and around his neck, maneuvers me like a doll, and then suddenly his hands meet the back of my thighs and I’m hoisted up and against him, and then he is catching my surprised gasp in his mouth, with his tongue and his teeth and I whisper hard and fast and so desperately I want to split myself in two, begging him for “the wall, the wall, the wall, Kai.” And he obliges because I am pressed hard up against the empty wall and he’s pushing up against me and my dress leaves me totally exposed, and when did we stop kissing because I’m breathing in the scent of his neck—a soft scent I can’t even begin to describe or put a finger on—and each hit, each push of his jean-clad hips, only adds another pulsing, radiating circle of pleasure to my entire body.

  I’m starting to sweat and so is he and I don’t even know who I am, because I lick a drop of perspiration right off his neck and he groans.

  He’s chanting, it’s an incantation, it’s profanity, and it’s my name and somehow they’re one and the same. We’re both so close, I can feel it happening for him and—

  “Descendre à dîner, s’il vous plaît!”

  Shit.

  “Dammit,” Kai says. “Dinner. She says dinner is ready.”

  No.

  And Kai laughs. I’ve said it out loud. Jesus.

  Before I go down the hall, Kai grabs my hand, pulls me close again, kisses me soft and gentle and sweet and tender, like sunflower petals.

  “Are you gonna write about our first kiss in your diary?”

  I shove him away from me, mutter, “Ass,” and then follow his retreat, pulling him back to me. I want to be the one to kiss him this time. It’s like I’m trying to crawl inside him, trying to fuse us together. I nip his lip and then drag my lips across his cheek to his ear, whisper, “Thank you.”

  I’m in the living room first and Kai comes five minutes later and I want to kill him because I know people can tell there’s some reason for his delay. He sits in his chair, directly across from me, legs sprawled and stretching into my space, as though we’d been in his room discussing politics this whole time.

  I hate him and I like him. So much. Not even the universe could contain this thing we’ve got going.

  The world’s most awkward Meeting Your Long Lost Granddaughter dinner happens in Mémé and Pépé’s dining room.

  “What is this?” I say. Merrick passes me a Pyrex dish full of chunky something. That’s just what I’m calling it even though I assume they’re mashed potatoes—“Chunky-Something.”

  They laugh like I just told a joke. Kai knows better.

  “That’s mac and cheese,” Emily says.

  Oh.

  “And this is …?”

  “Tasia, honey. That’s green bean casserole. Stop kidding around and eat your dinner.”

  There’s a lot of food on this table. Some of it—mostly the traditionally French food—looks okay but most of it looks like all the color has been zapped out of it.

  Kai laughs and Merrick glares at him and Pépé scoffs and Mémé tries to tell me about her bridge club in French but gets so frustrated about mixing up a few words that she switches back to English for like sixty-seven percent of the conversation.

  The final straw is when Emily asks me what sort of highlight and bronzer I use.

  “Melanin,” I answer pointedly.

  It isn’t the worst family get-together I’ve been to, but it is the one where I feel the most like an intruder. It’s the family get-together that helps me realize I don’t do family get-togethers for the food. I do it for the community, the culture. I do them because, usually, the people involved are the most accepting of who I am, on every level. I attend them with open eyes and an exposed heart because at least twice a year, the Newarks and the Quirks come together and Poppa camps out in the Barcalounger and doesn’t move for the entire day. I do it because usually those occasions mean Mamma will make three sweet potato pies—two for the party, one for the days to follow when we’re all craving it again. I do it because after everyone’s eaten and settled in the largest possible open room, I always get to nap in Daddy’s study while he takes a few sneaky work calls that Mamma usually does not permit. I do it because the food is what I was raised on. The company is who I was raised with.

  This whole thing with Merrick and the box, I wonder how much I might have cheated myself with impatience. This need to move and unravel the mystery.

  Someone clears their throat across the table from me.

  It’s him. The crotchety, voiceless man at the table. Apparently, he’s my grandfather.

  Pépé.

  He still doesn’t say anything to me and whenever there is A Need to say something to me, he’ll go absolutely out of his way not to do it.

  Merrick’s mom talks nonstop about me. Which is weird, because I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or to everyone else.

  “Tasia and her mother plant trees in the local forests, where most have been burned or cut down—did you know?” she says.

  And I mean, I knew, but how does she?

  I glance at Merrick and work so hard not to laugh hysterically. The look on his face says he didn’t know either.

  “Henri, darling, do you want to ask our Tasia about her football? She’s played since she was a girl.”

  “No,” he says. And shoves a bite of rice into his mouth.

  Which is fine, because I don’t particularly want to tell his cranky-ass about my football anyway.

  Emily says, “Well, that’s rude, Dad.”

  “It’s fine,” I say.

  Merrick places a hand on top of mine. “It’s not, T.”

  Merrick’s mom continues. There’s no way she’s oblivious to this tension. I can’t shovel chickpeas in my mouth fast enough. “She’s been awarded all kinds of medals and awards, even met the mayor of Los Angeles last year after receiving one. Isn’t that wonderful, Henri? She’s so talented.”

  He harrumphs. And that’s it. Nothing more. Just a grump and another shaky bite of rice.

  “Dad, what’s your problem?” Merrick says.

  “No problem,” he says. More rice.

  Kai cough-speaks, “Bullshit.”

  And Merrick’s mom swears at Kai in French. I know it’s a swear because Kai taught me them.

  “Dad,” Merrick says. “I brought Tasia here so that we could have a nice family dinner. Maybe you should at least attempt to make a minimal amount of effort.”

  “I think we’ve had plenty of fine family dinners without—”

  Merrick slams a fist down. Silverware clanks against the table, against plates, water glasses shake, Emily yelps.

  “Goddammit, Dad.”

  “Okay,” Merrick’s mom says. “Okay, enough.” She takes control very quickly, like she’s been giving commands for years, telling Kai and me to take the food dishes into the kitchen. She instructs Emily to follow and plate up some things for Merrick and me to go.

  Once in the kitchen, Emily high-fives me and says, “Good job, girl. Not much gets under Dad’s skin.”

  “Except pushy Americans,” Kai adds helpfully.

  “Except them,” Emily says. “And you’re not that.”
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  “Why doesn’t he like me?” I ask. I use tongs to place the baked chicken and rice and chickpeas into Tupperware.

  They both shrug and we’re all three quiet for a second to hear whatever it is they’re talking about in the dining room.

  Merrick’s saying, “—my kid. That girl’s my blood. My first and probably my only. I can’t believe you’re acting like this.”

  “We don’t know she’s yours.”

  “Yes, we do!”

  “How!”

  “Because I had her DNA tested!”

  “Oh, hell,” Kai says as he pulls me against him. “We’re getting out of here. If I can get us into Fat Freddy’s downtown, you want to go?”

  “Merrick drove,” I say into his chest.

  “We’ll take the subway. You never drive to those things anyway. Parking’s too pricy to valet in the city.”

  I nod even though I’ve never worried about the cost of valet.

  “Wanna come, Em?”

  She chugs the wine still in her glass then drags the full bottle of red off the counter before leaving the kitchen. We take that as her answer.

  In the other room, Merrick’s still going and I am a little bit proud to be this mistake that he has literally second-guessed at every turn, apparently.

  Merrick continues, “Dad. What is this about? You didn’t bat an eyelash about Kai.”

  “He didn’t give me a choice.”

  Merrick laughs. “So what’s this about? Because she’s proof of my bad judgment? Because she’s female?” He pauses. “Tell me it’s not because she’s Black.”

  Silence. Well, shit. That’s kind of new. I mean, it’s not, but it is. He is supposed to love me, as his granddaughter or something. It’s strange and confusing, all at once, to know that he only sees my race. My skin. And that he sees it as inferior, as lacking. As unworthy of his love or familial connection.

  Sometimes I think I would wash it off if I could.

  “Don’t be an idiot. This isn’t about the girl at all. I am not a racist.”