“You call me when that changes. There are consequences to surviving out here, just ’cause you too young to know it yet don’t mean I gotta apologize for the truth. I spent every day for years apologizing, praying up some heaven that might forgive me. I don’t got no breath left for that.”
Mama holds her hands up and I look at them from behind her hair, which is less kinky than both mine and Marcus’s, and the creases in her hands are pale, with a trace of lavender, color that shouldn’t exist in a palm.
Looking at Mama’s hands, I remember a time when Alé was fourteen and I was thirteen and she decided that she was gonna learn how to read palms. She used my hands to practice, trying to distract me from Daddy’s approaching death. She would point to the line running vertically up from my wrist and say, “See how it splits right there? Means you got two caminos de la vida, you know, ways shit might go down.” Then she would look down at the palm-reading book from the library resting in her lap. “And you gotta make a choice someday.”
Mama’s line doesn’t split like mine does. It veers left, toward her thumb, like it got sidetracked on the way up.
“I’m coming home. You hear that?” Mama’s hand waves backward to pat my arm, shake me into getting it. “We gonna go back to normal.”
I brush faster, move the bristles in and out of each individual lock and coil.
“I really just want you to give me Uncle Ty’s number, Mama. Please.”
Mama huffs. “You always wanting. Don’t do nobody no good to want.”
I think about the way Trevor chases a basketball, his feet bouncing on the court. How it always ends. How the ball always comes back down.
“You right, Mama,” I say. Her hair, which is normally jumping up out of her roots, falls limp, matted. “You gonna give me Uncle Ty’s number or not? ’Cause I ain’t gonna sit around here waiting. Wanting don’t do nobody no good, right?”
Mama don’t even seem to register anything I’m saying. “Did I ever tell you about that time yo daddy brought me my favorite flowers?” The swarm of her voice is closing in on me, like poison dripping out her mouth, and she can’t seem to ever look at me and tell me what I need to hear.
I don’t know how she can talk about Daddy and not about the only thing that matters now, how when Daddy died, Soraya was already halfway to full-grown inside her. A late surprise in Mama’s mid-forties. A last remnant of Daddy she ruined.
“Mama,” I say. Her tongue keeps rolling.
“Anyway, they was the nicest flowers. Thinking I’ll get some for the apartment once I get out of this place. Speaking of, I need you to do something for me, baby. Parole officer needs some letters of recommendation for my release. Seems like you could use Mama at home with you, helping out.”
I close my eyes because this had to come at some point and Mama’s mask peels eventually and here we are, her between my knees asking me to fix her up when I’m the one who came here to be held. Here we are, Mama asking me to wring myself dry of everything I got while she sits perfect, full.
I can’t do it no more.
I try again, louder now. “Mama.” She don’t stop talking. This time, I let it thunder. “Mama.” She pauses mid-sentence. “I knew coming here wasn’t a good idea, but you really gonna ask me to get you out of this place when you can’t even say Soraya’s name? You don’t never change.”
Mama swallows, smacks her lips. “That happened a long time ago.”
The smell of Mama’s potion keeps me dizzy, but still talking, all of it swirling together. “Three years last week.”
“No.”
“She was my sister, Mama. I know when she died and it was February 16, 2012. That’s three years from last Monday.”
Mama’s head is shaking. “No.”
“Yes.”
Her head shakes faster, hair flying out the roots.
I nod. “Marcus and I came home from school and the door to the apartment was open. Same apartment Daddy brought them flowers to.” Her head is tilted up toward me and I look right at her, right into the pupil blown up so there ain’t no other color in them. “We walked in and her crib was empty and we thought you wasn’t home, thought you might’ve gone to the store, but then we went to the bathroom and there you was, in the tub, just staring at the ceiling, bleeding. And we was so scared, Mama.”
I’m shaking now, earthquake in the body.
“And we kept asking you where Soraya was, but you wouldn’t answer, so I left the room and started looking for her and I remembered the door was open, so I went outside and downstairs and I didn’t see her at first, but then I heard Marcus scream from the balcony and I looked in the water and there she was. Floating.
“I dove in and scooped her out and held her, but she wouldn’t wake up and her body was cold and she was so small, Mama. She was so small.
“I kept saying, ‘Soraya,’ and Marcus came down and saw her head hang to the side and he started hurling all over the ground and I called 911 and when they showed up, I was holding her still, just looking at her eyes and they was just like glass, didn’t have no spirit and when they came in with their boots, they didn’t even rush her to no hospital. They put that sheet over her and I kept saying her name ’cause they had to know her name but they didn’t pay no mind to it and they asked where you was and Marcus told them in the tub and then they went and got you and they took you ’cause your wrists was bleeding and you told them how you thought you locked the door but you knew the lock was broken and you saw the sheet and you screamed, but you the one who did it. And you didn’t look at us, didn’t say nothing to us, and we was there, alone. Marcus just turned eighteen and they let us stay, but we didn’t know how to do nothing and you was gone, Mama.”
Mama’s body seems to slip down to the floor both gradually and all at once, until she’s suddenly sprawled across the carpet, her hair still dripping.
After that, Uncle Ty paid Mama’s bail and we thought we’d all recover, but she didn’t even come home. She went out partying until she got picked up again and we still went to her trial. We still testified for her, so she would get off on negligence and end up out here in a halfway house after a couple years instead of locked up for the rest of her life.
My teeth are chattering now and I gotta take a minute to slow down the words so she can hear them, really hear them.
I set my feet on the floor, lean down so my face is at her level, right at her ear. “We done kept ourselves alive. Without you. So now I come here asking for one thing—one thing, Mama—and you don’t even give enough of a shit to remember the day you killed her? Bet you wouldn’t give two fucks if I died too, huh? What about Marcus? That why you ain’t helping?”
I curl my lips, every word a deep cut. “So you know what, Mama? You sit there and you say her name. You say, ‘I killed Soraya three years ago from Monday.’ You say that and then you can have your fucking letter and I’ll get on up and go home ’cause Lord knows you ain’t gonna help me. Do you even have Uncle Ty’s number?”
She’s still in the same position, shakes her head once, all that hair and color, rumbling. Mama lifts her head up, stares right at me. Her eyes are gushing and, I swear, her tears come out violet.
“She died three years ago.” Mama’s voice isn’t the same, has shifted into a guttural grind.
I crouch on the floor next to her. “No. ‘I killed Soraya three years ago from Monday.’?”
Mama’s face cracks into shards, watering, eyes big and pooling. “I killed her three—”
“Her name, Mama. Say her name. Your name mean more than anything.” I’ve got tears to match, voice gone from thunder to blade.
She nods, one swift movement of the head, opens her mouth. “I killed Soraya three years ago from Monday.”
At the end of her sentence, Mama lets out a sob straight from her gut and I don’t even flinch. I stand, not bothering to retrieve Mama from the ground, and the moment I shut the door, I hear the muffled sounds of her singing “Pink Cashmere,” then wailing.