She shakes her head once and keeps us moving down until we are encompassed in black, the only sound coming from the occasional whoosh of a car on the freeway in front of us. Mama pulls us to the right and I stop in my tracks. “This ain’t a road, Mama.”
She tugs a little harder and keeps me moving. “Trust me.” And I don’t, could never, but I want to, so bad, more than anything, so my feet move heel to toe, heel to toe. The ramp is an illusion of emptiness, a stream of black that looks like it only leads to more black until, suddenly, it doesn’t and we’re in the rush of cars, barely over the line that separates freeway from debris.
I tighten my hold on Mama, like grip is somehow a sanctity that will protect me from the tire screeching, the sheer speed of cars when we are most human. If I didn’t think Mama was off her shit before, I know she is now: bringing me up here, onto the freeway like it’s a sidewalk or a detour and not a chasm of speed.
At this time of night, the cars are relatively infrequent, but when they come, they are full throttle, running at least eighty or ninety miles per hour. When the trucks come, I can feel it on my back, the wind beneath my blazer.
I think this is the closest thing to being a live ghost. Disappearing into roadside trash and trees that somehow figure out how to grow in California’s eternal drought. Existing as the most salient and invisible thing on the road, both sinking into the dark and so terribly misplaced.
“Mama, what the fuck are we doing out here?” I’m close to done swallowing her insanities. I don’t know how much longer I’m willing to walk beside her on the freeway with her not even answering a simple question.
Mama takes a breath and holds it. I wait for her to blow out, release a flood into the air, but she doesn’t. I’m starting to think she’s trying to kill herself by way of self-inflicted suffocation when she opens her mouth and lets it out with an explosive howl. A scream that seems to continue past the time she closes her mouth, seems to travel upward, right into a waiting cloud, and spits back at us with a high-pitched echo.
I let go of Mama’s hand when the noise bursts out her lips, jump to the side, and step on a castaway plastic bag with a crackle. I have half a mind to run back down the ramp, right into oncoming cars just to get away from Mama and that sound. She turns her head to look at me, where I have retreated farther into the brush, and gestures for me to come back to her. I stay put, hands up so Mama knows not to come near me.
She relaxes the smile slightly. “It’s alright, baby.” She has to yell to be heard over the car rush and persistent echo. “You need to scream.”
I shake my head. “You done lost your mind.” My voice is a low quake. Maybe she hears me and maybe she doesn’t.
She repeats, “You gotta scream. It’s all gonna get better, but you gotta scream.”
“I’m going home,” I tell her, but I don’t move.
She lifts a hand to her chest, almost like she’s checking for her own heartbeat. This time, she whispers. Could be me reading her lips or could be something my mind made up, but I’m pretty sure Mama says, “Let it out.”
I open my mouth, shut it again. “Why?”
“Nobody learns to walk when they got weights inside they bellies. I want you to walk toward the water, baby. I want you to swim.” Mama lifts her chin up so her head is pointed toward the sound of ocean, sound of the bay somewhere beyond sight. Mama don’t make no sense and, at the same time, she has never said something my gut understands more clearly than that.
My mouth opens slowly, jaw creaks until there is just enough space for the sound to travel out my throat. Still, when I try to scream, nothing comes out.
Mama steps closer to me and I pivot away. She takes another step and she’s within an arm’s length from me, lifts the hand that was on her chest, and places it on mine. Not over my heart, but in the space where my ribs make way for esophagus and blood vessels. I can hear her voice crisp now, same voice that told Soraya to get away from the pool, same hand that scooped her up before she hit the water. Cars race by behind her, leave us in the aftermath of their wind, and Mama’s hand is warm.
“Silence starves us, chile. Feed yoself.” Mama’s Louisiana comes out in a drawl that sounds like music and I try again but don’t no sound come out, and if I am really my parents’ child, how can I not turn my body to musical note?
Mama takes both of her hands and moves them up, toward my face, places them on both cheeks, then slides down to my jaw. Mama hooks her fingers in my mouth and spreads my jaw open like a door with hinges, until I make an oval with my lips, keeping her hands on my cheeks and telling me to scream. The screech comes out in bursts, spasms of sound morphing their way from an eruption of rage to an infant’s cries, moans and whines and all the in-betweens of woman and child.
The sky takes each flurry and sends it right back with just a hint of music lingering in the echo, a belt from some invisible trombone, the lowest note on an organ drawn out. Sound after sound flooding from my body like war-zone fire on a cold day, Mama rubbing the tightness out my jaw, melting the tears back into my skin, until there is no more noise and my chest is heaving, out of breath and raw and Mama is holding me and the cars have not stopped, have not slowed, all of it, all the time racing past us while we are stuck between the sky and asphalt that does not know our names and Mama will walk me to the bus stop and leave me there and we will not speak of what the freeway does to us when it is nighttime and we are ghosts. But Mama taught me how to swim and I can see underwater. I can see.
I don’t remember what time it was when I got home, I only remember the moment I woke up. The pounding on the door. The fists. Vernon’s eyes through the peephole. The woman standing behind him. Her clipboard. The way her lips turned inward.
Trevor’s healing body is still cocooned in sleep and I retreat to the back of the apartment, to the mattress, like distance from the hole they already saw me peek through will erase us. Maybe I should have seen it coming. All the warnings were there and I still thought we could escape them, make it out of this together. I still thought I had a choice.
“Open the door, Kiara. We will call the police.” Vernon’s familiar growl.
Trevor’s stirring from his sleep and I want to will him back into it, so he won’t have to be conscious for whatever comes next; for when they pull us apart, pry his fingers from around my neck like an infant. The pounds keep coming. Trevor’s swollen eyes blinking open as much as they can, brown peeking through to stare up at me, frantically looking around for some kind of shield against the rupture. Trevor’s face crinkles and his lips part, trying to ask me what’s going on, but the cuts in his mouth sting him into silence.
I lean over and touch his head. I shaved it so I could patch up his wounds and now it’s grown out enough that I can feel it instead of just the bare scalp. I whisper to him, “Trevor, baby, some people are here and they might be taking you someplace else for a while, okay? Don’t you worry, though. I’m gonna open the door, you just rest there.” I steady my pitch so my voice won’t crack like it’s threatening to: reveal all the wounds that make me up, all the fear I’m harboring in my gums.
I inch toward the door again and I’m scared of it, scared of what comes from this, what Mama opened up. Maybe she called Vern or the government or whoever owns the woman-in-the-suit’s ass. Somebody always owning the woman, knocking on the door so all she has to do is stand there.
My hand on the knob, twisting, pulling, no longer any barrier between me and them. Vernon standing there with a snarl. The woman, waiting.
“Can I help you?” I ask.