I paint my recurring dream: the one where I’m in the meadow, where everything’s ripe and it’s like every cell in each blade of grass has come alive. I tell Marcus to paint the flowers: yellow, petals on petals on petals until you cannot separate one from the other.
On top of the grass, inside of the grass, really, I start to paint the girl. I shake my can and hold it to the wall, then think again. I switch the can to my other hand, getting closer to the wall, and trace the outline of the girl who is me and isn’t. This girl is younger and her mouth is open, wide open.
I tell Marcus to paint the girl a yellow dress too. I want her to look like she’s melting into the flowers. My closet is void of anything this kind of vibrant, but my dream tells me that this is the color I will be buried in, mouth gaping. My hands are a mess of green and brown and yellow and now I add blue, moving the can farther from the wall. I’m not tall enough to reach as far up as I need to, but Marcus lifts me from the legs so I am taller than even he is, making sky on an overpass wall.
Behind us, one of the tents unzips. Marcus puts me down at the sound and we turn to two young women climbing out of their shelter. I stand with my hands up, paint as blood.
“What you doin’ out there?” one of them asks, and I realize the cloth draped across her body is a sling and not a scarf. A small child whines softly.
“Ain’t mean no harm. We just painting,” Marcus calls out, putting his stained hands out in front of him. We always showing people our hands like it’s proof we’re human.
The other woman’s eyes squint and I don’t know if that’s directed at us or if the sun’s just too bright. “You finish that and don’t come around here no more, waking the baby up and shit.”
Marcus and I mumble apologies and turn back to the wall. It feels sort of tainted now, us invading a space that isn’t ours.
“C’mon, let’s finish,” Marcus says to me in a half whisper.
He lifts me up again and I fill in the rest so that the wall is a whole sky. Marcus takes my body back to ground and I catch the eyes of the mother sitting in the tent. She’s smiling, faint, but smiling as she zips the tent back up and disappears.
“Yo, Ki, it cool if I add something?” Marcus brings my attention back to the wall. He’s standing, staring at it.
I nod and he grabs a can of black and reaches his arm all the way up to the sky. He draws a single music note. Then moves his hand lower and adds another. And another. Marcus paints a sequence of music all the way down to the girl’s mouth so that there is a treble clef hanging on to her lip. It looks like it’s about to trickle down her throat and the wall is the only thing keeping it in place.
“Yeah?” Marcus turns around, eyebrows raised, his face on pause, and I can’t help but think he looks a little like Daddy.
I nod. “It’s beautiful,” I say, and that is the most honest thing I have told Marcus since Mama left.
Marcus and I stand back together and look at the mural.
I think maybe today is the day I’ve been waiting for. The day when Marcus decides he will straighten his spine and learn how to hold up a little of this life again. The day he’ll put his head in my lap and let me cradle him. He might even hold my hand or ask me why there are bruises tracing my chest. Some days it feels like I’m stuck between mother and child. Some days it feels like I’m nowhere.
I’ve got something to say to him. I promised myself I would and I don’t remember most things Mama taught us, but she always said we stick to our word. Not just Mama. This whole city knows the one thing you don’t do is break a promise. Just like you don’t take the last piece of chicken without asking every person old enough to be your mama if they want it first. Maybe it’s southern manners that traveled. Maybe it’s Oakland etiquette. Maybe it’s just learning from our mistakes.
If Marcus could just be with me, on my side for real and not just in words, I might be able to get out of this mess with all of us intact enough to love right. I open my mouth to speak, but heat finds its way down my throat until the last thing I want to do is make a sound. I swallow.
“Mars.”
“You ain’t called me that in a while.”
My voice comes out soft enough to be called a whisper. “Ain’t been around for me to call you much of anything.”
He sighs, tilts his head away from the mural to look at me. “Neither have you.”
I stare at him, watch those eyes stare back when normally they look away. I turn to the wall. He doesn’t say anything for a while and neither do I.
“Where you been, Ki?”
I’ve been waiting so long for him to ask me. Ask me what I need. Tell me he’s ready to help me.
“Streets.” I respond. The sky in the mural is void of anything but music notes and blue and it seems like there’s no end to the blue, like blue is falling from the sky with the music, coming in closer. “Didn’t know where else to go.”
I see Marcus shake his head from the corner of my eye. “So you thought you’d go around fucking random guys like some whore? Tony told me, but I didn’t wanna believe none of that. Fuck, Kiara.”
“You don’t got no right to judge me. I been out there for you, because you over here living a fucking fantasy. You told me one month for the album and I gave you it. Actually, I gave you almost nine months of fucking around, but it’s been too long, Marcus, and we still in the same place.”
Marcus’s eyes are solid, sharp. “So you thought you’d pimp yoself out?”
“I done what I had to do while you been sitting on your ass. I wouldn’t have to be doing none of it if you helped me and stopped fooling around,” I say.
“You said you were cool with me shooting my shot.” Somehow his voice is only getting higher. “You think I didn’t try? I been trying to keep you safe since before Mama fucked up. Hell, I’m the only one that ever really cared about you. Can you blame me for wanting something for myself?”
“No, I can’t. But we not living in Uncle Ty’s world right now and it don’t do nothing to pretend we are. Pretty soon, neither one of us gonna have a place to sleep and at least I’m trying.”
“That’s why I thought I’d take you out today, you know, make up for it.” His forehead is a twist of lines staring down at me. He really thinks some paint can erase all this. My eyes fuzz and I realize I’m crying: soft, slow, but crying.
“Paint can’t pay our rent, Marcus. I don’t know what you want me to do, say I forgive you? Don’t really matter if I forgive you when we don’t got no food to eat.”
“What you want me to do about that? I already tried with a job. Twice.”
I sigh, trying to wipe the blur out my eyes. “I went to see Mama. She don’t have Uncle Ty’s number, but he always liked you best.” I feel him seize, his body tightening. “Help me, Mars. I don’t give a shit what you gotta do, but I need you to try something. Find Ty or another job or anything. Please.”
“Fuck that.” Marcus kicks the ground with his unlaced sneaker. “You know he’s not helping us do shit.”
“Best plan I got.”
When Marcus turned thirteen, after Daddy came back home, he started skipping school to go hang out with Uncle Ty. This was before Uncle Ty left town, before he got signed to a major record label and bought his Maserati. He was just Daddy’s little brother, the baby of the family, our only connection to something bigger.
Uncle Ty’s the kind of person you wanna get as close to as you can, magnetic really. He don’t even need to speak. It’s almost like you can see the thoughts fly through him, the intensity of every belief, the way his eyes set on something and don’t look away. As kids, we thought Uncle Ty was magic and Mama thought it’d be best we didn’t talk to him much. Stopped coming to Christmas when I turned nine. Marcus cried that whole first Christmas without him, rolled on the floor of our apartment clutching his stomach like the distance bred physical pain. Maybe it did.