The sound of splashing wakes me up at noon. It’s foreign to me here, the water thrash noises both recognizable and out of place. Something’s always waking me up in the height of my happy, right when my dream begins to dance. During last night’s sleep, which really didn’t start till four a.m., I dreamed up this meadow with flowers that exist in colors I’ve never seen in person. I could hear this melodic soundtrack, this Van Morrison kind of blues, and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until I lay down in the flowers and realized it was coming straight from the sky. And then I was laughing because the sky was singing to me. God walked out the clouds like music. I was naked. I am always naked. And then there was a splash, bright midday through the shades, this empty apartment.
I stumble up from the mattress, swinging open the door and hanging my torso off the railing, so my body splits in two at the stomach: legs and breasts. Crust crumbles out my eyelids as I stare down into the pool, the scene materializing like a television turning from static to moving image. Trevor’s head bobs up and down, in and out of the water. He’s tall enough now to stand in the shallow end, but continues to dip his head under, moving it around; circles of boy turned fish.
“What you doing in there, boy? There’s shit in that water,” I call down to him. Though the brown of it has disappeared, probably through the filter, I swear I can still smell the feces lingering in the air. As far as I’m concerned, Dee’s man’s dog shit and the pool are interchangeable.
Trevor’s head comes up, bends back to look at me. He has a birthmark on the top of his head, a dark spot in the shape of a spilling circle and I can see it as clearly now as I could the day he came out his mama. The whole apartment building went into labor with Dee when her moans found their way through the vents and out the windows. We all sweated with her, paced around and counted the minutes between each choke of her body. Mama was looking at the clock in our apartment, waiting for a couple hours until she turned to me and said, “It’s time. Come on, chile,” and just like that we were out the door and knocking on Dee’s apartment, in a flock of women all joining the stampede of this birth, my eight-year-old shoulders shaking. Every woman in the Regal-Hi crammed into Dee’s studio apartment, where she was splayed on the floor, gaping like the pocket of sky before the rain starts to pound, ready to bust open and release itself.
Dee kept saying, “Give it to me, please, just to get me through, Ronda.”
She repeated this like a mantra between contractions, referring to the rock and pipe on the kitchen counter, ready for her. She said she had quit her habit after she found out about the pregnancy, but by quit she meant she used only on occasion, only when the morning sickness or the back cramping got real bad. Ronda, her childhood friend, refused to give Dee the crack, and a group of women stood in a line between the counter and Dee’s body, guarding the child from its mother.
Mama pushed her way through the crowd, her arms long and spread out, me trailing behind her toward the center of the room, toward Dee’s pounding.
“We got a little longer till he’s out, alright, baby? It’ll be over in about one hour. One more hour, one more hour.” Mama repeated this, dropping to the floor by Dee and humming until the whole room was one rumble of my mama’s lungs, intoxicating and heavenly, and I couldn’t help but want to climb back into her body, feel those vibrations like my own breath.
Dee wailed and squeezed and trembled until my mama’s hums drowned it all out and then the tribe of us saw the hair, saw the tiny round that crawled from her body, turning her inside out. The squeals began and the humming turned to chants and we all watched that child swim out his mama, head poking out more blood than hair, and my mama took him into her arms and laid him on Dee’s breast and this was the sweetest, most whole thing to ever take place in our building, and the rain poured and poured and poured until Dee began to beg again and her birthmarked baby squirmed and Ronda gave up, passed Dee the pipe, and she faded into sky like she didn’t hear her own baby crying. And Trevor cried and she smiled and we all hummed again.
* * *
—
Trevor splashes down below, looking up at me.
“Lost my ball,” he calls.
“What you talkin’ about? Why you not at school?”
“Mama not here and I woke up late and then I was gonna go but I dropped my keychain in the pool and if I don’t got it, then the boys don’t win the game and I lose my money.”
I ask him, “What money?” but he simply dips back down into the water until the only thing distinctly him is that circular mark on his head, roaming. His pile of clothes is now wet from the splashing and when he emerges, small metal basketball keychain in hand, his boxers are slipping off him. I see the outline of his ribs like they been carved out of him and the rest of my day fades like a dream.
I walk toward the stairwell down to the pool and Trevor starts climbing up, pile of clothes a lump in his arms. We meet at the halfway point of the stairwell, Trevor a head shorter than me at age nine, with arms and legs that seem to stretch farther than he can control, but his face is still childlike.
“Go on and put some new clothes on,” I tell him, beginning to guide him up the stairs.
“We goin’ somewhere?” Trevor’s teeth flash, always eager for the escape.
I grab the keychain out of his hand and look at it, taking in the way it shines like somebody been scrubbing it clean and tucking it into bed every night. “You wanna play ball so bad, let’s go on and do it.”
At that, little boy limbs fly straight up the stairs and into the apartment, just like they always have. His legs are longer and he knows more about what kind of life he has than he did when he was three and racing around the building, knocking on everyone’s door, but he is still the same buoyant little man.
Dee tried to be his mother for the first few years of Trevor’s life, at least enough that she was home half the time and she bought formula and bothered to make sure somebody was watching him when she went off to go get high in some other apartment. She used to leave Trevor with one of the women, sometimes Mama, any of the aunties who inherited all the Regal-Hi’s children once theirs grew up. Then, between Daddy’s death and Mama’s arrest, all the aunties left. It was like something had come over the building and they all scattered, women disintegrating into nothing. Some chose to go and some got evicted, some passed away and some remarried, but all the women who had helped raise Marcus and me were gone by the time Trevor turned seven and then it was just us, motherless.
Trevor started to come around more often after that and then I was walking him to the bus, finding him some extra Doritos for after school. I was determined not to let nobody toss him away. So when the rent notice got posted, when Polka Dot came up to me and showed me what my body was worth, I thought maybe this was a ticket out for the both of us. Maybe this was how we got free.
I head back into my apartment and Marcus is awake, rubbing his eyes on the couch.
“Mornin’,” he says.
I sit down next to him, thinking about how it felt to be in the second man’s car last night, about Tony’s back as he walked away. It was different when I was alone, the fear escalating and the grit so profound that when I got home last night I showered longer than I ever have before, didn’t even worry about the water bill. I don’t know if I can do it again, but I also don’t know how to keep us alive if I don’t.
“Marcus, I gotta ask you something.”
He looks at me, rests his cheek in his hand, waits.
“I know I said I’d give you a month to work on the album, but I need you to get a job.”
Marcus starts to nod slowly, looking at the carpet and then back up at me.