Jackie just nodded and smiled, delivered of a lot of Umhmms and I know that’s rights. She thought about what Sybil had said back at the nursery, and she repeated the words to herself. Sybil wasn’t the type to say something she didn’t mean, and what was it Daddy had always encouraged her to ask herself? What would her sister do? Here, she’d said she’d do exactly what Jackie had done. That was cause for a celebration, but for some reason Jackie couldn’t manipulate her heart into matching that tone.
She wasn’t expecting Terry to be home when she walked in. Any other day he would have been, but she felt somewhere inside her today would be different, and because she couldn’t anticipate how long the difference would drag on, how she would respond to it, she was grateful Sybil was beside her. She bathed the baby, really washed between the folds on his neck where milk tended to gather, greased his entire body with Vaseline. He had more hair now, and she’d taken to playing with it at night, giving it the attention she would if he were a daughter, combing her fingers through the curls until he cried. Then she latched him on her breast. People had started to ask how long she would nurse him, but she couldn’t imagine stopping, as if the gulf of emotion that had been building in her over this last year would break forth once she was finished, force itself out of her body in powerful heaves, and she didn’t know what form that would take. When it was midnight and Terry still hadn’t come back, Jackie asked Sybil to stay over, and without asking why, Sybil obliged. Jackie placed the baby in the bed beside her, just like old times, and she caught herself watching the clock throughout the night. 2:49; 4:28; 6:42. Still nothing. She woke up to her alarm sounding, and he hadn’t come back. He wouldn’t.
She dressed the baby as if she were going to work though she knew she’d never make it a full minute there today. Still she just needed to keep her mind busy, her body distracted. She didn’t bother dressing herself, or brushing her teeth or washing her face, just walked to the living room where Sybil was sleeping on the couch, a night scarf still tied at the back of her head.
Sybil sat up in the bed like she slept on sofas every night. “Hey, girl.”
“Hey,” Jackie said back. “I was going to make some coffee. You want something?”
“The same,” Sybil said.
In the kitchen, Jackie realized she hadn’t done the dishes the night before and she didn’t bother to start them now, just poured water into the pot. She knew it was only a matter of time before her clothes were spewed on the sofa, and old food was stacked on TV trays again.
Sybil didn’t ask where Terry was, and for the rest of her life Jackie would be grateful for that, that she didn’t make her spell it out. Sybil only took the baby from her, held him up to her own shoulder, and chanted in a baby voice Jackie couldn’t have imagined coming from a more unlikely source, “Mama’s not feeling well but she’ll be back, she’ll be back, oh yes, she’ll be back.”
Jackie didn’t bother to correct her, to point out that something about this time felt permanent, felt as if she’d been driven down to the bottom of a hole and wasn’t capable of feeling her way out of it because it wasn’t just about missing him this time, or missing out on the family she had banked on. It was about knowing that whatever pain had driven him out had managed to touch her too, and she didn’t have crack to deliver her from it.
She didn’t correct Sybil though; she just poured her coffee, sat down on the sofa and stared ahead at the TV screen. She flipped it on. The Price Is Right had just started; someone was betting on a two-seater sofa, a nice leather one Jackie knew she could dress up with pillows and throws from Macy’s, but the woman on the show was betting too much, $999 when a sofa that size, nice as it was, wouldn’t go for more than $500. Jackie wanted to intercede, cry out, Don’t set your sights too high, girl, it won’t hold, but she just sat in silence. If she was listening, she would have heard the sirens building in the distance, then leveling off, meeting their target, but as it was, her mind was as focused as a tide breaking, ready to crash. On what, she didn’t know.
T.C.
Winter 2011
Going back, when T.C. thought about it, was just like getting out, anticlimactic. His aunt had whittled the sentence down to three years, but he didn’t think about it like that. He just thought about who he needed to be nice to to get an old TV and what CO might let him play ball a half hour longer. The second time was easier in that way. He didn’t have to learn the system. He knew most of the people in there either from his last stint or just from the street. Some he had been close with at home, and they weren’t happy to see him, as much as they were comforted by a familiar face.
He told his mama he didn’t want visitors. Not yet, he said, though the truth was, not ever, and he planned to drag her along until that became clear. That was the thing about people on the outside. They thought it cheered him up to see their faces, but it just reminded him too much of freedom when everybody knew it was better to adjust to the kind of freedom available on the inside. For instance, he didn’t have a roommate this time, and that was something; he could also go out to the yard whenever he pleased.
It was those small victories he wanted to bask in, those small victories that kept him afloat so when his mama came, he stayed in his cell as long as he could. The CO had to ask for him a third time before he stood up, and even then he dragged more than walked to the waiting area.
He didn’t understand it, but she looked better than he’d ever seen her. Made up, thinner, joyful. He wanted to ask if she had come to the right place. She pulled him to her in a tight embrace.
“Hey, my baby,” she exclaimed. “You look good. You look real good. They treatin’ you all right in there? I sent brownies. Did you get ’em? Made ’em from scratch, and MawMaw is going to send a cake, she wanted me to make sure and tell you that.”
“Is everything okay, Ma?” he couldn’t help but ask.
“Oh, everything’s good, real good.”
They sat while she finished answering him.
“I started volunteering as an aide for Miss Patricia. You know she lost her hearing, and I’m helping her through that. She’s got so much grace, this woman, it’s really given me some perspective. What do I have to complain about? I have my health. I have my family. And this.” She waved her hand at T.C. and shrugged. “Well”—she paused—“anyway, have you seen any good shows lately? I know they let you watch television, right?”
T.C. nodded, told her he had been watching Modern Family. “It’s good,” he said, “I laugh at some of the jokes, and that Sofia Vergara, man, if I had a woman like that—” He stopped because he was talking to his mother.
“Well, I’d say Alicia is a good girl, a real good girl,” his mama said. “She brings the baby by every Saturday for me to keep him all by myself while she’s at work. She doesn’t want to cut his hair, but I don’t hold that against her because she doesn’t have to bring him by, I know she doesn’t.”