“What?” The word comes out like a little slung dart. Even though I know it must be the dregs of the meth I swallowed, I still feel sober as a lead weight, and here Given is, burnished and tall, in the living room. His mouth is moving like he’s repeating something that someone else is saying, and if he could speak, it would be a mumble. Whatever he’s hearing, whatever he’s mimicking, makes him run to the open doorway of the room, to pause on the threshold of the kitchen, to bow his head and grip the frame. Last time I saw him here, he was living. The blood beating through him like drums. He and Pop had just argued over something, over the Nova or his middling grades or the fact that besides the bow and arrow, he didn’t seem to have any passion for anything besides playing football. You need direction, son, Pop had said to him. Given had been sitting on the couch, and he watched Pop walk out the back door, slumped down, and winked and whispered at me: And you need to take the stick out your ass, Pop.
Given-not-Given’s shoulder blades bunch together like fists under his shirt. He shakes his head at me once. Then again at whatever he hears.
“I’m going crazy,” I tell myself. “I’m going fucking crazy.”
I walk past Given to look out the screen door. Pop and Jojo are hunched down in the backyard, in the dirt by the pigpen, talking. I can’t hear anything from this far away, but Given can, and whatever he hears makes his head shake faster and faster, his fist punch noiselessly, once and again, in the molding. It leaves no mark. I expect to feel the brush of his T-shirt against my arm when I walk past, but feel nothing but misty cool. Given’s mouth moves, and I can make out what he’s saying without words. Pop, he mouths. Oh, Pop. I squint. It looks like Jojo is rubbing Pop’s back. Hugging Pop, and I realize I ain’t never seen Pop on the ground before if he wasn’t pushing a seed into it or wrestling some animal or pulling up weeds.
A dog bark rips through the creaking kitchen, and Given starts and turns to me, mouths one word, hands open and beckoning me like he could pull an answer from me. Who? he mouths. Who is that? He runs to the screen door. Casper barks again, a sound that shies up to a panicked yip. Pop seems to be sinking, Jojo holding him up. I don’t know this world. Given holds his arms up in front of him like he could block something. I wonder if this vision of my brother is an aftershock of yesterday’s high, a shaky meth tremor that comes once, if the massive hit I swallowed has unsewn my body and mind, unseamed me. Given is still there. As the dog’s bark rises, Given bleeds. I don’t see wounds, but he bleeds anyway, from his neck, from his chest. Where he was shot. He braces himself on the wood frame of the closed screen door, his arms and legs straining. Something is pulling him outside. Pop and Jojo are curled in two, and the dog is still barking, but I don’t see nothing, don’t see anything until I blink, and like a dark flash at the corner of my eye I see a churning black cloud come to earth in the yard, but then I blink again and it’s gone. Given slumps and runs his hands up and down the doorsill; he did this when he was alive, wore the wood of the sills in the house smooth with his rubbing. He freezes and looks at me, and I wish he was alive, was flesh, because I’d kick him. Kick him for not being able to speak. Kick him for seeing whatever it is he sees or hears out in the yard and not sharing that with me. Kick him for being here, now, for taking up space in the waking, sober world, right before me. For knocking the world sideways—birds flying into glass windows, dogs barking until they piss themselves in fear, cows collapsing to their rumps in fields and never rising—still winking and smiling, every dimple and tooth declaring the joke. For dying. Always for that. Given shakes his head again, but this time, slowly—but still, his face blurs. I reach out and step toward him, to push him, maybe, to see if I can feel his brown arms, the calluses on his hands like patches of concrete, but Michaela’s cry pierces the air, and he’s gone.
*
Michaela’s standing on the sofa, walking from one end of it to another, yelling. Sleep-matted hair, sleep-swollen face. Her little legs clumsy with waking, she trips and falls face-first and mouths the cushion.
“The boy, the black bird,” she sobs.
I kneel next to the sofa, pat her hot little back.
“What boy, Michaela?”
“The black bird. The Black boy.”
She stands, runs to the arm of the sofa farthest from me, straddles, and slides off.
“He flies!”
She wakes up like that all the time, trailing the blankets of her dreams behind her. She’s still sleepy. I catch her under one armpit, swing her up, put her head down on my shoulder.
“Go back to sleep,” I say.
When Michaela kicks, her toes are little shovels digging into my belly, trying to break the dirt of the softest part of me. It used to be my walk rocked her to sleep. She dreamed in my womb with sightless blue eyes. Now she flails, smashes my mouth with her hand, and will not let me hold her.
“He want Mam!” she screams, and at that my arms go dead, and Michaela slides down my front, noodle-limp. She lands running, straight to Mama’s door, and knocks at it with her little fists. Each little thud married to a breathy whine. Her eyes rolling like a panicked colt’s.
“Michaela.” I kneel. “Ain’t no man trying to take Mama nowhere.” Her little knobby knees brush the wood as she hangs from the doorknob, trying to turn with her weight. What I say is mangled truth: no man wants to take Mama, but what she’s tasked me to do will usher her away. I move to Michaela on my knees, floorboards grinding my bones, and I wonder at the fear spilling through my chest, scalding-hot grits. I wonder at my short, round toddler with her toes grazing the door, at the future and what it will demand of me. Of her. Michaela’s fingers lose their grip on the knob, and I turn it, open it, point at Mama with an upturned palm. “See?”
I am not prepared to see.
Mama hangs half off the bed, half on, her toes on the floor, her legs bound up in sheets, twisted around her, stretched tensile and thin as rope here, wide and voluminous there: Mama caught like a prized sailfish. The one who sails through the air, silver and white, still with the silky feel of the salt water on her: the one who shivers in the sun and fights. It is colder than a spring morning warrants in the room, cold as a November morning, and yet Mama sweats and moans and kicks. Michaela hops into the room, sniffs the air, takes hesitant steps, and reaches to the ceiling. She breathes one little word, again and again.
“Bird,” she says.
The room smells like Mama has been turned inside out. Like piss and shit and blood. Like intestines, a heartbeat away from rot. Her eyes are wild. Her arms are pinned in the sheets. Mama struggles to shrug them off.
“Mama?” I say, and my voice seems high and small as Michaela’s. “Let me help.”
“Too late,” Mama says. “Too late, Leonie.”
I have to grab her arm hard to free it. My fingers leave shallow ditches in a row in her flesh, my handprint visible on her with every touch. Mama moans. I try to touch lighter, to hurt less, but I can’t.
“What you mean?” I say.
Mama is bleeding under the skin. Everywhere my hands touch, there is blood. Trenches in the sand filling with seawater. Underneath: doom.
Mama looks beyond me, to the corner where Michaela has seated herself, still except for the song she is singing as she squints and then glares at Mama. Mama’s eyes skitter to my face, up to the ceiling, down at her ruined body. Away, away.
“I heard him,” she whispers. “Thought it was a . . .” She pants. “Cat.”
“Who, Mama?”
“Ain’t never seen them. Sometimes heard them.”
“What?”
“Like somebody talking three doors down. In another room.”
I free one hand, balled to a fist.
“Said he’d come for me.”
All these petals of blood.
“Ain’t lè mistè.” No spirit. No God. No mystery.