“I know, Kiara. I know.”
I lean back into Alé’s chest, fully in the bed now. We lie there until my sobs slow and both joints are gone and we’re in a daze, arms and legs intertwining, forgetting that our skin is meant to be lonely. Every inch of the bed is solace, smooth, and smells like every dream I wish I had the space to have. Smells like Alé, like weed and never having to worry about the eyes. Feels like the warmth, the one that sends my entire body into a frenzy. And maybe the story we remember will be our sleep and maybe it will be her mouth on mine and maybe it will be her leaving, me waking up alone and not quite sure what was real.
* * *
—
When I get the call, the high has mostly faded and I’m still lying in Alé’s bed trying to figure out how the ceiling got so cracked. I’ve decided it’s probably the earthquake, that big one that turned San Francisco into a desert and made everyone take cover inside their nightmares. Bet Alé’s mama and all her aunties watched it shake and fracture their ceiling into a labyrinth of cracks.
Maybe the high is still lingering in there because I don’t register the meaning of the automated warning when I answer the phone, just press the number the robot lady tells me to press. It takes his voice to really shock me awake.
“Kiara.” My brother’s voice sounds like it exists in another dimension. This time, it’s distorted and weak. The same pain from earlier is still in there, masked in fatigue, but over it all, he just sounds afraid. I can imagine his face now, everything pooling in fear like the day we found Mama in the tub. Like Daddy’s funeral or the first time we visited Mama behind bars.
“Where are you, Mars?”
“They got us at county jail, Santa Rita.” He’s sobbing so hard my fingerprint’s probably swimming in his tears.
I want to tell him I’m gonna fix it, tell him I’ll melt down the bars to whatever cell they got him in, and take him away in the getaway car I don’t own.
“I’m sorry.”
He clears his throat. “Maybe they was there ’cause of you, but it was my shit they found. Listen, I don’t want you to worry about me, aight? I need you to make sure you safe and then I need you to do something for me. Can you do that, Ki?”
“Of course.”
“I need you to go find Uncle Ty, okay? He’s gonna know what to do, he been through this and he owes me. Bring him here, I don’t care what you gotta do to get him, aight?”
“I don’t know, Marcus, I already tried—”
“I don’t wanna die in here. Please.”
Even after everything he’s put me through, that’s all it takes for me to want to help him. If he’s ready to ask something of me instead of just taking it, then I will walk to the ends of the earth for him.
“Okay.” Maybe it’s the weed, the bed, Sunday Shoes, guilt. Didn’t plan on ever seeing Uncle Ty again. Still, I say okay and Marcus hangs up and my limbs are attached at the hinges.
Marcus is scared. I could tell from the quake in his voice, the tremor. But, more than that, just him saying Uncle Ty’s name told me all I needed to know about how his insides are rearranging. The metal heat will do that to you. So will a siren. I don’t know how to find Uncle Ty any more than Marcus does, not after Mama didn’t have his number. I called Shauna after Marcus’s voice stopped reverberating through my jaw and she told me to fuck off, said I’m the reason Cole got picked up and she didn’t want no more part in my shit. Her baby’s glass eyes blew up big in my head, looking back at me. My face a sheet of gray.
If Marcus is saying Uncle Ty’s the cure, I don’t have anything left to tell me he ain’t right. Nobody believes in God ’cause they got proof, only ’cause they know there’s not any proof to say they’re wrong.
Alé told me she’d keep Trevor for a couple days while I figure this out and now I’m kissing Trevor’s forehead even as he squirms away from me.
“Aight. I’ll see you in a couple days,” I say, placing a smile just curved enough to be comforting on my face. Trevor nods and Alé reaches out to rest a hand on my cheek, brushing it with her thumb before letting me go.
I walk out the door, lingering in shadows on the long walk back to the Regal-Hi. Same walk Marcus and I took the last day he came with me to Alé’s, when we started separating like my old bracelet beads when the elastic string stretched out. When I arrive at the gate to the Regal-Hi, I don’t let the pool halt me with its blue, even though it tries to pull me in, that scent, that so-fresh-it-almost-seems-real smell. Then I catch a whiff of sulfur behind the chlorine and I remember you can’t trust nothing that saturated.
Marcus and I used to fight about who got to choose the morning cartoon. We’d play war over the remote, scream, cry, plead, whatever we had to do to get control of those buttons. Eventually, one of us would take the remote and whack the other’s head with it out of impulse. Whoever got hit would start bleeding or swelling and Mama would scold whoever done the hitting and give the other one the remote. When I was the perpetrator, I would go sit in a corner and sob. Not ’cause I wanted the remote or even ’cause I felt bad. I just wanted to be able to reverse time and never let that plastic collide with his bone. I just wanted to go back.
That’s sort of what this feels like: the helplessness of it. Like standing on the road that leads to here and noticing a path you didn’t know existed and not being able to take it. Like the road that leads to here was never the only road and time made me forget that until these sobbing moments when I remember, when the fog clears and I’m looking back and there’s a fork on the ground, another way.
I enter my apartment, empty without Trevor, and sit on the edge of the couch, dialing the number Purple Suit gave me and biting off every last bit of white fingernail until each one bleeds. She answers on the second ring.
“They got my brother.”
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Kiara Johnson. Some cops pulled up on my brother and he’s in Santa Rita and I didn’t know who else to ask.”
Purple Suit is silent for a moment. When she speaks next, she sounds tense. “I’m sorry to hear that, Kiara. I actually need to tell you something, if you haven’t already heard.”
“What?”
“Your name was given to the press yesterday. Only your alias, at the moment, but it won’t take long before they have your real name and address. It’s all over the news, especially in the bay, but it made it to the L.A. Times this morning. I’m sorry.”
I think about what 220 threatened, that he’d say my name if I said his, and I didn’t tell anyone anything, but I should’ve known one of them would out me, that I wouldn’t be able to make it through all of this with my anonymity too.
Purple Suit coughs. “I want to help you and your brother, but I don’t have any jurisdiction over arrests, Kiara.”
“That’s not what I’m asking for. I need to contact my uncle, but I don’t got his number and I thought maybe you would know how to find him, investigate or something.”
I can almost feel Purple Suit nodding in her HQ office. “I have access to a driver’s license database, if he’s licensed in California, that would give me his contact information. I’d be willing to look, but I need you to do something for me too.”
“Haven’t I suffered enough ’cause of you? You really asking for more?”
“I’m just trying to help, Kiara.”
I’m weary of people asking me to do shit, but if Purple Suit is going to give me the thing I need most, I don’t really have a choice. “Fine.”
“I have a friend. Her name is Marsha Fields, she’s an attorney, and she can help you out with everything that’s about to happen with the investigation. I want you to call her, okay?” She sounds like she’s trying to talk someone out of jumping from a roof.
“Okay.”
She reads me the number and I write it down on a slip of paper.