*
I began to understand home when Riv and I slept next to each other and Riv told me stories in the dark. Once, River told me about the ocean. He said: We got so much water where I’m from. It come down from the north in rivers. Pool in bayous. Rush out to the ocean, and that stretch to the ends of the earth that you can see. It changes colors, he said, like a little lizard. Sometimes stormy blue. Sometimes cool gray. In the early mornings, silver. You could look at that and know there’s a God, he said to me as the other gunmen coughed and tossed. Maybe one day, when you and me get out of here, you could come down and see it, Riv said.
Kayla has her palm curled around Jojo’s neck, and he throws an arm over her back, and I wonder if they dream the same dreams. I wonder if they dream of home: of jungle-tangled trees, bearing the weight of the sky. Of streams leading to rivers leading to the sea. I wonder if the reason I couldn’t leave Parchman before Jojo came was because it was a sort of home to me: terrible and formative as the iron leash that chains dogs, that drives them to bark hysterically and run in circles and burrow to the roots of the grass, to savage smaller animals, to kill the living things they can reach.
Today when Jojo came to Parchman, I woke to the whispering of the white snake, which had dug a nest down into the earth with me so he could speak to me in my ear. So he could curl about my head in the dark and whisper, If you would rise, I can take you across the waters of this world to another. This place binds you. This place blinds you. Keep the scale, even if you cannot fly. Go south, to River, to the face of the waters. He will show you. Go south. He curled around my neck and startled me to climb up and out of the dirt, to rise to the smell of Riv’s blood, thick as the fragrance of spider lilies in flower. When I saw Jojo and Kayla in the parking lot, the snake transformed to a bird on my shoulder before flying away on a wave of wind, speeding south on a lonely migration. As Kayla whines in her sleep and Jojo rubs her back to quiet her, a shadow alights and crosses over them. Up in the sky, the scaly bird drifts, shining a dark light.
I will follow, I say. I hope he can hear me. I say: I’m coming home.
Chapter 10
Leonie
When we first began dating, Michael and I spent a month of nights parking on the boat jetty out on the bayou, kissing, his face against mine, smooth skin, as the wind came in the open windows, briny and sweet. A month of riding everywhere but near his house in the Kill and getting dropped off at my house an hour before dawn. I jumped off the cliff at the river one of those nights. I ran before I leapt to clear the rocky bank; I dropped into the feathery dark heart of the water and went all the way to the bottom, where the sand was more muddy than grainy and downed trees decomposed, slimy and soft at the core. I didn’t swim up; the fall had stunned my arms and legs, the thunderous slap of the water numbed them. I let the water carry me. It was a slow rise: up, up, up toward milky light. I remember it clearly because I never did it again, scared by that paralyzing ascent. This is what it feels like to wake with my head in Michael’s lap, his fingers still on my scalp, the car rumbling, light slanting sharp through the window. This is what it feels like to rise from a dark deep place. I lift up a little and put my forehead on Michael’s thigh and groan.
“Hey.” I can hear the smile in his voice; the word sounds higher, thinner. I’m too close to his crotch.
“Hey,” I say, and raise up farther. By the time I’m sitting up straight, it feels wrong. Like every bone in my spine, each locking piece, been knocked over and built back up crooked.
“How you feel?”
“What?”
Michael pushes my hair back off my forehead and I close my eyes at the touch. My throat is burning. Michael looks in the rearview and then pulls me over so my head is on his shoulder, his lips at my ear.
“The cops pulled us over, remember? You swallowed that shit from Al because wasn’t no time to dump it. The fucking floor was covered in shit. You should clean your car, Leonie.” He sounds like Mama when he says it.
“I know, Michael. What else?”
“I got you milk and charcoal from a gas station. You threw up.”
I swallow, and the root of my tongue aches.
“My mouth hurts.”
“You threw up a lot.”
The world outside the car is a green, shaky blur, the color of Michael’s eyes, of the trees bursting to life in the spring. The memory that eased me up out the dark, the memory of jumping from that cliff, is a buzzing green, but there is none of that inside of me. Just some water oak limbs, dry and mossy, burned to ash, smoldering. I feel wrong.
“How long to the house?”
“?’Bout an hour.”
Even the pine trees, with their constant muted green, seem brighter. Through them, I see the sun will set soon.
“Wake me up.”
I lie down in the ashes and sleep.
*
When I wake, Michael’s rolled all the windows down. I’ve been dreaming for hours, it feels like, dreaming of being marooned on a deflating raft in the middle of the endless reach of the Gulf of Mexico, far out where the fish are bigger than men. I’m not alone in the raft because Jojo and Michaela and Michael are with me and we are elbow to elbow. But the raft must have a hole in it, because it deflates. We are all sinking, and there are manta rays gliding beneath us and sharks jostling us. I am trying to keep everyone above water, even as I struggle to stay afloat. I sink below the waves and push Jojo upward so he can stay above the waves and breathe, but then Michaela sinks and I push her up, and Michael sinks so I shove him to the air as I sink and struggle, but they won’t stay up: they want to sink like stones. I thrust them up toward the surface, to the fractured sky so they can live, but they keep slipping from my hands. It is so real that I can feel their sodden clothes against my palms. I am failing them. We are all drowning.
“Feel better?” Michael asks.
The sky has turned pink, and everybody looks ragged, even Misty, who has fallen asleep with her face smashed against the window, her hair falling over her forehead and down the line of her nose and cheek: a yellow head scarf.
“I guess,” I say.
And I do, except for the dream. It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it. I turn around to check on Michaela. Her shirt, cold and wet, clings to her small, hot body.
“We could drop the kids off. Go get something to eat before we go home.”
“Home?”