“Kiara.” Her tears have stopped running, but I haven’t moved, and my name is a question.
Hers is an answer and this is the first time I think that this all might have been worth it, that the only way back to Alé was wading right through the shit pool. She is kissing me. I am kissing her. She’s softer than I ever thought she could be and I’ve never been more relieved to be touched, to have her lace her fingers through my hair. Her on top of me. Her pulling back just to stare into me like the stars found their way beneath my eyelids, and I think this might be my universe-halting love, the one that undoes me and keeps me whole all at once.
Alé comes back down to me slow, traces my stomach with her finger like she always does, except this time she doesn’t pull away. This time, she tells me she is sorry, tells me she came the second she got my message. And even though she’s saying all the right things, it is the look she gives me, the way her eyes pull open so big I know she’s seeing me more than anybody has. That she sees me beyond the shit that got stirred up inside me. Sees me beyond this new body or that old body or any body I have ever existed in because she don’t give a shit about how many layers of shea butter I rub into my skin. Alé just wants to hold me. Alé just wants to be mine.
We are tangled on the floor of this apartment, this living relic of all the lives I’ve lived. This girl who has held me through it all. We are gasping and laughing and crying and I don’t know if I’ve ever told her I love her, but I can’t stop saying it. Because it has never meant this much. It has never filled my mouth like this. Like the only flood I have ever wanted. She is saying it back, again and again, and there has never been a truth like this one.
Alé is feeding me and I am telling her about the women I have known. All Demond’s girls from that party, Camila, Lexi, the two sitting on the wrong side of the aisle torn up. Mama. Me. I am telling her how these streets open us up and remove the part of us most worth keeping: the child left in us. The rounded jaw that can’t even hold a scream no more because they take that too. They take everything.
Alé nods, doesn’t look away, spoons soup into my mouth when I fade into mutters. Kisses my nose. Tells me about how it feels to look at her mama’s face, numb, tells me about the bruises distorting the cold body of the girl who could’ve been Clara, about her fear, about how she wants more than this for me, for us. I tell her I want more for her too, want her to be a doctor or a doula or whatever will soothe the part of her that needs more than a kitchen.
She brought me all kinds of food, healing me the best way she knows, and we’re sitting on the floor still, nothing but flesh, leaning against the edge of the mattress. The soup is hot and I can feel its path from tongue to stomach, feel every sip absorbed. I tell her about Trevor, his bruised eyes, how I had to pull his arms from my neck and set him in the backseat of a car because his mama don’t know how to love him the way he needs to be loved and I am not enough.
Alé stops me there, says, “Just because you ain’t his mama don’t mean you ain’t given him something can’t nobody take away.” And if it didn’t sound like a load of bullshit, I would believe her. The only thing I have as evidence is his swollen face in the backseat of a car, his tremors, and that isn’t proof of nothing sacred.
I couldn’t tell you when I fell asleep or when Alé woke up and removed me from the place right where her lungs would be, but I know the exact moment the jury decided, miles away like it was happening right inside the apartment. It was the clatter. The not-quite-light-enough-to-call-it-morning glass shatter, Alé leaning over the broken pieces of a lamp I never really used. Then the quiet. That’s when they all must have nodded their heads, signed the papers to send to the judge. Maybe they all did it solemnly, without looking each other in the eyes, like they could sidestep guilt.
The call comes an hour later. Alé sat holding me as I heaved and asked her if it was all over. She didn’t say no, just squeezed me until it felt like I had a body again, until my phone rang.
I answer.
Marsha talks fast on the other end of the line, jumbling the words but not saying much, then slows.
“I’m so sorry, Kiara, but there will be no indictment.”
I knew it was coming, I could feel it, but when Marsha says the words it feels like a punch, like the same sharp pain as when the metal man pushed me up against that brick wall the night it all started.
“What about Marcus?” I don’t want to ask, don’t even want to know, but I have to.
Marsha pauses. Silence. “I’ve arranged to get him a fantastic lawyer, one more fit to his case than I am, but I can’t do much more than that. Not without the pressure from the indictment.” She’s quiet again. “I’m sorry.”
I can tell her ice eyes are flooded because then she goes on some tangent about hope and I let her. It’s always best to let them unravel, makes everything seem a little less cracked. I thought I’d be angry at her, want to rage, but I don’t. When she hangs up the phone, almost two hours after the lamp found itself scattered across the apartment, I look up at Alé, who is back with her arm around me on the floor. She didn’t bother cleaning anything up once she saw the salt streaming down my cheeks, and her hands are spotted in blood and glimmers of glass. Neither of us says nothing.
* * *
A calm hits me that I didn’t think would and I rest my head back against the mattress, so I’m facing the ceiling. What did I expect but this? The sky tried to tell me everything comes in extremes, in blinding stretches of shit I can’t escape. Streetwalking all the way up to the clouds. Oakland contains it all: heartbreak and yearning. Reaching for our young back. I lift my head up and turn to Alé, taking her hand, picking out each grain of glass, and lifting it to my cheek so her blood is mine. Iron for ink. Her lips move, murmur, but nothing emerges distinguishable.
She pulls me close to her chest and wraps me so tight I can cocoon in the squeeze. We both know that pretty soon we will have to contend with what it means to have lost it all and still have each other. To have lost a roof and found a home. For now, though, Alé holds me close, I wash her hands, wrap them in Marsha’s black dress, and she begins to clean up the fragments of light.
I’m pulling on one of Marcus’s big shirts when I hear it. I think I’m hallucinating at first, but the sound is so distinct, so visceral that I don’t think my mind could make it up.
I’m walking toward the door, past Alé. “You hear that?”
She shrugs, bent over sweeping the glass up.
I open the door and step out onto the patio strip, lean over the railing, and there he is. I know from the moment I look down because he’s got that same circular birthmark on the top of his head. Trevor is sitting with his feet dipped into the pool, splashing.
The sky is a soft blue and I begin the walk toward the spiral staircase, winding down to the center of my everything, that shit pool that don’t never seem to stop pulling us in. I think about Soraya’s first steps and some part of me that hasn’t had any room to breathe misses her, wants to watch her run, watch her speak, watch her say my name, all three syllables, and learn how to shoot a hoop like Trevor.