“Michaela, leave your brother alone,” Michael says. He’s rubbing Leonie’s hair, bending over to whisper in her ear, and I catch little bits of it. “Just breathe, baby, breathe,” he says.
“Shhh,” I tell Kayla, put my knees to the door, and hunch down over the plate and the charcoal. I hit the charcoal light because I don’t want the gauge to break the plate. Kayla whines and the whine rises. I think she’s going to start screaming candy, candy, but I look back at Kayla and she has her two middle fingers in her mouth, and I know then by the way she’s studying me, her little eyes round as marbles, calm in her seat, rubbing her seat belt clasp with her other hand, that she has it. Like me. That she can understand like I can, but even better, because she know how to do it now. Because she can look at me and know what I’m thinking, know I got it, Kayla, got you a sucker but you got to wait for me to finish doing this and you can get it, I promise, because you been a good girl, and she smiles around her wet fingers, her little teeth perfect and even as uncooked rice, and I know she hears me.
“Mike, you sure about this?” Misty asks.
“It’s what they give you in the hospital,” Michael says.
“I ain’t never heard of nobody using the kind you cook with.”
“Well,” Michael says.
“What if it make her worse?”
“You know what she did?”
“Yes,” Misty says, almost swallows the words, her voice quiet.
“Well, then you know she need something.”
“I know.”
“This what I got,” Michael says, something about his voice set, like concrete firming, like he answered a question: final.
“It’s done,” I say.
“The whole piece?”
I raise the saucer up so he can see it, see the tiny pile of black-gray powder, smelling strong of sulfur. Some kind of bad earth. Like the bayou when the water’s low, when the water runs out after the moon or it ain’t rained and the muddy bottom, where the crawfish burrow, turns black and gummy under the blue sky and stinks. Michael takes the powder. He peels the plastic off the milk top, pops it, and drinks two big gulps. I am so hungry I can smell it on his breath, smell it in the car when he takes the charcoal and dumps it into the milk, puts the top on, and shakes. The milk shades gray. He flicks the top off again, and there is a new smell in the car, the kind of smell that makes the back of my throat get thick, the kind of smell that makes me want to swallow, so I do.
“Jesus Christ, that stinks!” Misty says. She pulls her shirt over the bottom half of her face like a veil.
“It ain’t supposed to smell good, Misty,” Michael says. He hoists Leonie up and her head falls back. I expect her eyes to be closed but they aren’t: they are wide open, and her lashes are fluttering fast as a hummingbird’s wings. A white open shock. “Come on, baby. You got to drink this.”
Leonie twists and turns like she has no bones, her body winding as a worm’s.
“Candy?” Kayla asks.
Michael’s nostrils flare and his lips are spread like he wants to smile, but there is no curve here. His teeth gleam yellow and wet as a dog’s. He won’t know. All his attention is on Leonie, on her winding neck and her hands trying to bat him away.
I unwrap the sucker. It is red and glossy and I hide it in the curve of my hand as I pass it to Kayla. If Michael ask where she got it, I’m going to say I found it on the floor of the car.
“What’s that?” Richie asks.
“Come help me, Misty,” Michael says. The milk drips down his forearm. Leonie is fighting him. “Hold her nose!”
“Shit!” Misty says, and she’s out the backseat and in the front seat and they are both wrestling Leonie back and Michael’s pouring what he can down Leonie’s throat, and she’s swallowing and breathing and choking and there’s gray milk everywhere.
“Hold me!” Kayla says, and she’s climbing into my lap. Her hair is soft on my face, and I can smell the sucker on her breath, sugary and tart, and she turns her head and it’s like having a faceful of cotton candy, rough and sweet.
“It’s a sucker,” I whisper. Richie nods and stretches his hands over his head.
“That’s your mama?” he ask.
“No,” I say, and I don’t explain, even when Michael pull her from the car and they both on they knees in the grass on the side of the station, and she’s vomiting so hard her back curves like an angry cat’s.
*
I am singing nursery rhymes with Kayla while Leonie throws up because I want Kayla to pay attention to me. Don’t want her to see Leonie hunched over and sick, don’t want her to see Michael with that pinched look on his face like he’s going to cry, don’t want her to see Misty running from the station to where they are on the grass with cups of water and her voice high-pitched and her face red. But I sing the nursery songs all wrong; Leonie sang them to me so long ago I remember them only in snatches, light shining on a moment here or there when I was on her lap, both of us singing in the kitchen, steamy with onions and bell pepper and garlic and celery, the smell so delicious I wanted to eat the air. Mam would laugh at my pronunciation, the way I called cows tows, the way I called cats tats. I must have been Kayla’s age, but I could smell Leonie, too, smell her breath, the red cinnamon gum she chewed as she sang past my ear. Even when I grew older and she stopped giving me kisses, every time somebody chewed that gum, I thought of Leonie, of her soft, dry lips on my cheek. Kayla doesn’t care, even if the songs are patched together from my memory, pieces of a puzzle that almost fit: Old MacDonald has a llama, and there’s a cow on the bus, mooing as the wheels go around and around, and the itsy bitsy spider is crawling with a pout. I make up pantomimes for all of it, but Kayla’s favorite is a spider crawling upward, because I cross my thumbs and my fingers splay and segment and move, and there is a spider in the car, inches from Kayla’s face, crawling upward against the rain. Foolishly. When the boy begins speaking, I sing in a whisper, and Kayla sings in a whisper because she thinks it’s fun, and I listen. Then Kayla stops singing and she listens, too, but she waves her arms in the air and whines when I stop, so I sing.
“Is Riv old?” Richie asks.
I nod and warble.
“He was skinnier than you. Taller. Always had a way about him. He stood out. Not just because he was young. But because he was Riv.”
The sun is creeping across the sky. The sun beams past the boy’s face to land on Kayla, to make her eyes shine.
“Got a lot of men in there ain’t so friendly. Then and now. It’s full of wrong men. The kind of men that feel better if they do something bad to you. Like it eases something in them.”
Where the sun should hit the boy’s face and make it glow, it only seems to make it turn a deeper brown.