“To your mama and daddy’s,” Michael says.
I knew that’s where we were going, knew there was nowhere else for us to go. Not to the Kill, not to his parents, who’ve never even seen Michaela in the flesh. We could not go where we aren’t welcome. But I guess I had an apartment in my head. Once we’re on our feet we’ll get to it, but I had so envisioned it that when I thought about us going home, I only saw that place. I imagined us settling in one of the bigger towns on the Gulf Coast, in one of those three-story complexes with metal-and-concrete stairs leading from one level to another. We would have big whitewashed, carpeted rooms, space, anonymity, and quiet.
“Yeah,” I say.
“So you want to?”
Michaela kicks the back of my seat. Her hair is matted to her head, and she’s chewing on a sucker stick, the cardboard melting and coming away in papery bits to stick on the side of her mouth. I smile at her, wait for her to smile at me, but she doesn’t. She kicks again and bares her teeth around the stick, but it is no smile.
“Michaela, stop kicking Mama’s seat.”
“Ony,” she says, and sucks on the stick and waves both hands in the air. Jojo looks away from the window, down to her kicking feet, and frowns. “Ony!” she screams.
“She’s saying your name,” Michael says.
“Mama,” I tell Michaela.
“Ony,” Michaela says, and for a moment I’m in my drowning dream again, and I feel her hot, wet back buoyed up by my palms, slipping, slipping.
“Yeah,” I tell Michael. “Drop them off.”
Michael turns from one narrow, tree-shrouded road to another, water dripping from the leaves to dot the windshield, and I know we’re in Bois by the map of the limbs. Two people walk in the distance, and as we cruise through the green tunnel, I see a man, short and muscled, who leads a black dog by a chain. And next to him, a skinny little woman with a sable, coily cloud of hair that moves like a kaleidoscope of butterflies. It’s not until we’re right up on them that I see who it is. Skeetah and Eschelle, a brother and sister from the neighborhood. The siblings walk in sync, both of them bouncing. Esch says something, and Skeetah laughs. We pass as dusk darkens the road.
Michaela kicks my seat again, and I turn around and slap her leg so hard my palm stings. Jealousy twins with anger. That girl: so lucky. She has all her brothers.
*
The house looks like it sunk. Drooping at the crown. Jojo seems taller than he was when we left as he jiggles the doorknob, as he disappears through the dark door. But soon he’s walking back out to the car, and it’s so dark now that I can’t see his face. Even when he leans into the window of the car and Michael turns on the overhead light, there is still a black film over his face.
“They not here,” he says.
“Mama and Pop?” I ask.
“No.”
“Did they leave a note?”
Jojo shakes his head.
“Get in the car,” Michael says.
“What?” I ask. I’m so tired that it feels like someone has placed a wet towel over my brain, the weight of it suffocating thought.
“We can wait here.” Jojo stands.
“Get in the car,” Michael says.
Jojo’s lips thin, and he climbs into the back of the car. Michaela has her face hidden in his neck again, one finger twirling a lock of Jojo’s hair. Michael reverses into the empty street.
“Where we going?” Jojo says.
“To visit your grandparents.”
My heart is a squirrel caught in a snare. The fine hair on my arms stands up and quivers. I see Michael’s daddy, fat and sweating, his rifle balanced loosely on his lawn mower, the sound of the motor grinding and whining because he’s pushing it as fast as it can go over the lawn, trying to get to my car, to me. I see my hands, black and thin-boned, on the steering wheel. I see Given’s hands, fine as mine, but hard with callused coins from the rub of the bowstring.
“Why now?” I ask.
“I’m home,” Michael says. “You know they never drove up to Parchman.”
“Because they didn’t care,” I say, even as I know it’s not true.
“They do. They just don’t know how to show it.”
“Because of me. And the kids,” I say.
This is an old argument between us. Michael tries something new.
“Plus, Jojo’s thirteen. It’s time.”
“He’s thirteen and they ain’t gave a shit to see him or Michaela,” I say.
Michael ignores me and heads north. The air is cooler up in the Kill, since there are even fewer houses and more dark land sleeping under the deepening sky.
“Maybe they’ll surprise us, Leonie,” Michael says.
My mouth tastes like vomit.
“Sugar baby.”
“No.”
Michael pulls to the side of the road. The crickets turn riot.
“Please,” Michael says. He rubs the nape of my neck. I want to scramble out the window of the car and run, to disappear.
“No.”
“They made me, baby. And we made the kids. They going to look at Jojo and Michaela and see that,” Michael says. I feel my shoulders beginning to creep down, to relax, to settle.
“What you told them?” I ask.
Michael looks at the bugs skipping across the windshield like they are dragonflies and it is hard water.
“I told them it was time,” Michael says. “That if they love me, they got to love them, too, because they a piece of me.” He looks at me then, his green eyes look brown in the fading light, his hair dark: a stranger sitting in the driver’s seat. “Like you,” he says.
I bat his hand off my neck, rub where he touched like it’s a mosquito bite.
“Fine,” I say, and Michael heads north into the Kill.
*
“Kayla’s hungry,” Jojo says.
“Chip!” Michaela says. Outside, the world is dark, the fields and trees ink black. I roll up my window, which has been cracked. I woke Misty up when we pulled into her gravel driveway and she grabbed her bag from her feet and struggled out of the car with a sarcastic “Well, it’s been fun, folks.” She’ll hate me for a day or two, but once she washes her clothes and gets the smell of vomit out of her nose, she’ll call. I knew it by the way she leaned into my window after she slammed her door shut, glared at Michael, and said: “Good luck.” When I stretch over the backseat to roll up the window Misty slept against, Jojo’s looking at the floor like he’s lost something.
“They got leftovers down there?”
“No,” he says.
“We’re going to your grandparents’ house,” Michael says.
“Chip,” Michaela says.