*
“Jojo,” she says, and pats my cheeks, my nose. Pulls open my eyelids. I jump and wake and fall off the sofa, and Kayla laughs, bright and yellow and shiny as a puppy that just got the knack of running without tripping over her own legs. Happy, like that. My mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking on chalk and licking oyster shells, and my eyes feel grainy. Kayla claps her hands and says, “Eat-eat,” and it’s then I realize that I smell bacon, and I realize I ain’t smelled it ever since Mam got too sick to cook. I sling Kayla on my back and she clings. I think it’s Leonie, and I feel something in me soften for a minute, rethink all the bad I thought about her the night before, and something inside me say: But she do. She do. And then I step into the narrow kitchen, and it ain’t her; it’s Michael. He got a shirt on that look like it’s been washed and dried a size too small, the letters on it faded: it’s one of mine. An old one Mam bought me to wear one Easter. He look all wrong at the counter, the way he reflect too much of the morning light.
“Y’all hungry?” he asks.
“Naw,” I say.
“Yes,” Kayla lisps.
Michael frowns at us.
“Sit down,” he says.
I sit, and Kayla climbs up on my shoulder, straddles my neck, and beats my head like a drum.
Michael takes the pan off the gas, sets it to the side. He lets the fork he was turning the bacon with drip at his side, drip oil on the floor, as he turns to face us.
He crosses his arms, and the oil drips again. The bacon is still sizzling, and I wish he would take it out and drain it so me and Kayla can eat it hot.
“You remember that time we went fishing?”
I shrug, but the memory comes anyway, like someone pouring a bottle of water over my head. Just the boys, he’d told Leonie, and she looked at him like he’d jabbed her in her softest parts. And I thought he’d renege then, say I’m just joking, but he didn’t. It was late, but we went out to the pier anyway and cast lines. He called me son with his fingers, with the way he tied the sinkers and speared the bait. Laughed at me when I wouldn’t spear the worm, when I wouldn’t touch them. Michael waves his fork at me, and he knows I’m lying. He knows I remember.
“We going to have more of that now.”
He told me a story that night. As the fishermen gigged for flounder with their lights and their nets, he said: What you know about your uncle Given? And I told Michael that Mam had showed me his pictures, talked about him, told me he wasn’t here no more, that he was in another world, but hadn’t told me what that meant. I told Michael that because it was true, and because I wanted him to tell me what she meant. I was eight then.
“That’s what me coming home means.”
Michael pokes the bacon. That night on the dock, he didn’t tell me how or why Uncle Given left. Instead, he told me about working out on the rig. How he liked working through the night so when the sun was rising, the ocean and the sky were one thing, and it felt like he was in a perfect egg. How the sharks were birds, like hawks, hunting the water. How they were drawn to the reef that grew up around the rig, how they struck under the pillars, white in the darkness, like a knife under dark skin. How blood followed them, too. How the dolphins would come after the sharks left, and how they would leap from the water if they knew anyone was watching, chattering. How he cried one day after the spill, when he heard about how all of them was dying off.
“For you and your sister,” Michael says, and lifts the piece of bacon he’s been poking at. It’s already maroon and stiff, but he drops it back in the grease anyway.
I actually cried, Michael told the water. He seemed ashamed to say that, but he went on anyway. How the dolphins were dying off, how whole pods of them washed up on the beaches in Florida, in Louisiana, in Alabama and Mississippi: oil-burnt, sick with lesions, hollowed out from the insides. And then Michael said something I’ll never forget: Some scientists for BP said this didn’t have nothing to do with the oil, that sometimes this is what happens to animals: they die for unexpected reasons. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes all at once. And then Michael looked at me and said: And when that scientist said that, I thought about humans. Because humans is animals. And the way he looked at me that night told me he wasn’t just thinking about any humans; he was thinking about me. I wonder if Michael thought that yesterday, when he saw that gun, saw that cop push me down so I bowed to the dirt.
Michael lifts out the bacon and drops it on the paper towel. That night on the pier, it was as if the pull of the moon on the water, the surge of the tide, drew the words from Michael. He said: My family ain’t always did right. Was one of my dumbass cousins that killed your uncle Given. I didn’t think Michael was telling me the whole story. Whenever Leonie or Mam or Pop talked about how Given died, they said: He got shot. But Michael said something different. Some people think it was a hunting accident. He wound up his line and got ready to cast again. One day I’ll tell you the whole story, he said. Now the faint smell of charred bacon wafts through the air, and Michael pulls out another piece, this one curled black and hard.
Kayla claps and pulls at my hair in bunches, the same way she does grass.
“I just want you and Michaela to know that I’m here. I’m here to stay. And I missed y’all.”
Michael pulls out the bacon and puts it on the plate. It’s all black and burnt at the edges. Char and smoke fill the room. He runs to the back door and opens and closes it, trying to wave out the smoke. The grease hisses to silence. I don’t know what he wants me to say.
“We call her Kayla,” I say. I pull Kayla up over my head and set her in my lap. “No no no no,” Kayla says, and starts kicking. My scalp burns. I bounce her on my knees, but that just pisses her off, and she straightens like an ironing board and slides off my legs onto the floor. Her whine escalates until it’s like a police siren. Michael shakes his head.
“That’s enough, young lady. Get up off the goddamn floor,” he says. His door waving ain’t doing much.
Kayla shrieks.
I kneel next to her, bend over, put my mouth next to her ear, and speak loud enough for her to hear me.
“I know you mad. I know you mad. I know you mad, Kayla. But I’m going to take you outside later, okay? Just sit up and eat, okay? I know you mad. Come here. Come here.” I say this to her because sometimes I hear words between her howls, hear her thinking: Why don’t he listen why don’t he listen I feel! I put my hands under her armpits, and she squirms and wails. Michael lets the door slam, walks toward us, and then stops.