“If you don’t get up off that floor right now, I’m going to whip you, you hear? You hear me, Kayla?” Michael says. He’s turning red around his eyes and his throat as he waves his arms in the air, and the smoke just follows him like a blanket he’s wrapped around himself. This makes him redder. I don’t want him to hit her with the fork.
“Come on, Kayla. Come on,” I say.
“Goddamnit,” Michael says. “Michaela!”
And then he’s hunching over both of us, and his arm whips out, whips in, and he’s dropped the fork and he’s smacking Kayla hard on the thigh, once and twice, his face as pale and tight as a knot. “What did I say?” He punctuates each word with a slap. Kayla’s mouth is open, but she’s not wailing: all of her seized up silent, eyes wide from the pain. I know this cry. I swing her up and away from Michael’s hand, spin her around and to me. Her back under my rubbing hand, hot. My shushes don’t mean nothing. I know what’s coming. She lets go of the breath in one long thunderous wail.
“You ain’t have to do that,” I tell Michael. He’s backing away, shaking his spanking hand like it’s gone numb.
“I told her,” he says.
“You ain’t,” I say.
“Y’all don’t listen,” Michael says.
Kayla writhes and shrieks, her whole body coiling. I turn my back on Michael, run out the back door. Kayla rubs her face into my shoulder and screams.
“I’m sorry, Kayla,” I say, like I’m the one hit her. Like she can hear over her crying. I walk around the backyard with her, saying it over and over, until the sun sits higher in the sky, bearing down on us, turning the muddy puddles to vapor. Burning the land dry, and burning me and Kayla: her to peanut butter, me to rust.
*
I apologize until she quiets to hiccups, until I know she can hear me. And I’m waiting, waiting for her small arms to fold around my neck, her head to drop to my shoulder, and I’m so intent on waiting for it that I don’t even see the boy staring at us from the shadow of a tall, many-armed pine tree until Kayla’s pinching my arms, saying, “No no, Jojo.” In the bright light of the day the shadow swallows him: cool dark bayou water, the color of mud—tepid and blinding. He moves and he is of a piece with the darkness.
“He’s slopping the pigs. Your pop.”
I blow air hard out my nose, hope it will mean nothing to him. That he will not read it as wanting to talk, that he will not read it as not wanting to talk.
“He don’t see me. How come he don’t see me?”
I shrug. Kayla says: “Eat-eat, Jojo.” All’s quiet in the house, and for a stupid second I wonder why Leonie and Michael ain’t arguing about him hitting Kayla. And then I remember. They don’t care.
“You got to ask him about me,” Richie says. He steps out of the shadow and he is a swimmer surfacing for air, glistening in the light. And in the light, he is just a skinny boy, too narrow in the bones, the fat that should be on him starved off. Somebody that I can feel sorry for until his eyes widen, and I squeeze Kayla so hard she cries out. The face he pulls is pinched with hunger and longing.
I shake my head.
“It’s the only way I can go.” Richie stops, looks up in the sky. “Even if he don’t know me no more, don’t care about me. I need the story to go.” His afro is so long it sprouts from his head like Spanish moss. “The snake-bird says.”
“What?” I say, and regret it.
“It’s different here,” he says. “So much liquid in the air. Salt. And a mud smell. I can tell,” he says, “the other waters is near.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. Kayla says: “Inside, Jojo, inside.”
Richie looks at me like he’s seeing me the way I seen him. Like Pop looks at a hog at slaughtering time, measuring the meat. He nods.
“You get him to tell you the story. When I’m there,” he says.
“No,” I say.
“No?” he says.
“No.”
Kayla is making little mewling sounds, pulling at my ears. “I want eat, Jojo,” she says. “It’s enough we brought you back. Brought you here. What if Pop don’t want to tell that story? What if it’s something he don’t want to say?”
“Don’t matter what he want. It matter what I need.”
I jiggle Kayla. Turn in a circle, my feet sinking in the muddied grass. A cow lows nearby, and I hear: Cool and becoming of green things, it is. All the new grass. I stop my spin when I see his fierce eyes again.
“If I get the story, you going to leave, right? You going to go away?” My voice edging up to a question, high as a girl’s. I clear my throat. Kayla pulls my hair.
“I told you I’m going home,” Richie says. He takes a step before me but parts no grass, squelches no mud, and his face is furrowed: a piece of paper crumpled over on itself, a smudged ball hiding words.
“You ain’t answer.”
“Yes,” he says.
He’s not specific enough. If he had skin and bones, I’d throw something at him. Pick up the corner of a cinder block at my feet and hurl it. Make him say it. But he’s not, and I don’t want to give him cause to change, to stay lurking around the house, around the animals, stealing all the light, reflecting it back wrong: a warped mirror. Casper, the black shaggy neighborhood mutt, lopes around the corner of the house, freezes in a stop, and barks. You smell wrong, I hear. Snake coming through water. The quick bite! Blood! Richie walks backward into the shadows, his hands palms out.
“Fine,” I say.
I let Casper’s bark turn me around. Know the dog is keeping him pinned to the tree, so I can jog up the steps and into the house, even as I feel Richie’s eyes tightening up my shoulders: a line pulled taut between us, razor-sharp.
*
The bacon is sitting on a plate lined with paper towels. I put Kayla on the table and pick the meat apart, peeling away what’s still a little gummy, still a little brown. I hand the meat to her, bit by bit, to eat. She eats so much I’m left with the charred pieces. I can’t even eat them, so I spit it all out and make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Michael and Leonie are in her room, their door closed, conversation a muffled purr. Mam’s room is still dark, her blinds closed. I walk in and open them and put the box fan in the window, turn it to a low hum. The air moves. Kayla marches around Mam’s bed, singing one of her nonsense songs. Mam stirs, her eyes open to slits. I get her water from the faucet and a straw, hold it up to her so she can drink. She holds the water in her mouth longer than she should, puffing out her cheeks in a balloon, works her way up to swallowing, and when it’s down, her face breaks like drinking that water hurt.
“Mam?” I say, pulling a chair up to her bed, propping my chin on my folded fists, waiting for her to put a hand on my head like she always does. Her mouth quivers to a frown, and she doesn’t. I sit up, ask a question, and hope that it covers the pain behind my rib cage, which moves like a puppy turning in circles to settle and sleep. “How you feeling?”
“Not good, baby.” She speaks in a whisper. I can hardly hear her over Kayla’s gibberish song.
“The medicine ain’t working?”
“Guess I’m getting used to it,” she huffs. The pain pulling all the lines of her face down.
“Michael’s back,” I say.
She raises her eyebrows. I realize it’s a nod.
“I know.”