On her wrist.
“He lè mò.” The dead.
Her forearm.
“Young. Full of piss and vinegar.”
Rotting flowers.
“Vengeful as a beat dog.”
Fruitfulness gone to seed.
“Pulling all the weight of history behind him.”
Her breath whines.
“Like a cotton sack full of lead.”
She’s right.
“But still a boy.”
I’m too late.
“Hungry for love.”
The cancer done broke her.
“Says he want me to be his mama.”
Broke her clean through.
“I always thought—”
Mama claws at my arm as I free her other hand.
“It would be your brother.”
I stop.
“The first dead I see . . .”
I can’t breathe.
“Would be him.”
Given is in the corner of the room, stretched along the seam where the walls join. He looms over Michaela, rigid and fierce as Pop, and for the first time, I am afraid. In life, there was a joke in every line of him, humor that ran along the bones of him, that everyone read in the hang of his shoulders, the shake of his head, his smile. There is none now. The weight of time he never bore in life holds him rigid now, cloaks him somber, whittles him sharp as Pop. He shakes his head, and speaks.
“Not.”
Michaela’s little song sinks.
“Your.”
Mama begins to fight me.
“Mother.”
Mama looks beyond me, up to the cracked ceiling, pocked with thousands of little stalactites like the roof of a cave. Pop spent hours dipping a broom in paint and then stabbing the ceiling with the bristles, making circles and loops and swirls, shaping the paint into stars and comets. Mama opens and closes her mouth but makes no sound. I follow her gaze but don’t see nothing but the ceiling, that sorry drywall, turning gray from humidity. But Michaela, who whispers her song and waggles her fingers like she does when she sings “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” does.
“Not.” And Given, who speaks, the planes of his face converging and turning sharp as knives, does.
“Your.”
And Mama does. She rolls her eyes to the corner of the room where Given looms. She bares her teeth in something like a smile, something like a rictus.
“Mother,” Given finishes.
Mama slaps me. Where her hand hit burns. She cuffs me with an open palm on the other side, and my ear throbs with blood. Her right fingers grab my cheek, dig into my eyebrow ridge, and she’s holding my face straight, whispering against whatever is above us, at my back, whatever awful thing that’s come for her. I hear a whisper above me.
“Come with me, Mama,” he says. “Come on.”
“No,” she says.
Her fingers pull my eyelids up, up, painfully.
“Not my boy,” she says.
Feel like she’s peeling the skin.
“Given,” she breathes.
I yank my head away.
“Baby. Please.”
It’s the word baby that makes me jump off the bed. Because I hear her say it now and I’m her baby again, soft-gummed and wet-eyed and fat, and she is whole and sweet-milked. Her hands fall away from me like husks from corncobs, land just as brittle and dry on the bed before she whips them up, faces them out palms up.
“No, boy. No,” Given says.
I sweep the cemetery rocks from the floor where they’ve fallen, dumping them on the altar to join the rest of it I’ve already gathered. From the bathroom: cotton balls. From the cupboard: cornmeal. From my trip to the liquor store yesterday: rum.
“Say it,” Mama says. She’s let her hands fall. “The litany,” she says again, and her breath rattles in her throat. She doesn’t turn her head to the side, to look at the wall beyond me where Given stands, thrashing against some invisible thing that holds him there. Her mouth opens: a silent wail. Michaela is crying in a way I’ve never seen her cry before: mouth working, but no sound. There’s no time. This moment done ate it all up: the past, the future. Do I say the words? I blink, and up on the ceiling there is a boy, a boy with the face of a toddler. I blink again, sand scouring my eye, and there is nothing.
“Mama,” I choke, and it’s as weak and wanting as a baby’s. “Mommy.” My crying and Mama’s entreaties and Michaela’s wailing and Given’s shouting fill the room like a flood, and it must have been as loud outside as it is in here, because Jojo runs in to stand at my elbow and Pop’s at the door.
“You got what you came for. Now get,” Jojo says.
At first I think he’s talking to me, but then he’s looking through me and up, and I know who he’s talking to. There’s strength in his voice, so much that I’m speaking even as I’m crying and pulling Mama up to my heart.
“For Maman Brigitte, Mother of all the Gede. Mistress of the cemetery and mother of all the dead.” I breathe hard and it is a ragged sob.
“No, Leonie,” says Jojo. “You don’t know.” He glares up at the ceiling.
“Leonie,” Mama chokes.
“Grande Brigitte, Judge. This altar of stones is for you. Accept our offerings,” I say. Mama’s eyes are steady rolling, steady rolling to the ceiling, where the boy with the smooth face hovered, needy and balled up like a baby.
“Shut up, Leonie. Please,” Jojo says. “You don’t see.”
Mama’s eyes steady rolling to the wall where Given has stopped thrashing. They turn to me, beseeching. “Enter,” I say.
“Go,” Jojo says. He looks up at where the boy flashed. “Ain’t no more stories for you here. Nobody owe you nothing here.” He raises a hand to Given, and it is as if Jojo has unlocked and opened a gate, because Given pushes through whatever held him.
“You heard my nephew,” Given says. “Go, Richie.”
I don’t see anything, but something must have happened, because Given walks unbothered toward the bed. Pop has slid down the wall, all the upright parts of him crumbling as he looks at Mama, makes himself look at Mama, for once. He’s been orbiting her like a moon, sleeping on the sofa with his back to the door, searching the yard and woods for pens and bins and machines to fix so he can repair in the face of what he cannot.
Mama’s breath is a jagged wind, coming slower and slower. Her eyes lowered to slits. Her body: ruined and still. Jojo steps out of Given’s way. He scoops Michaela, who’s crying, “Uncle.” Jojo swallows and looks right at Given. Jojo sees him. He recognizes him. He nods, and Given is Given again, only for a breath, because he smiles and there’s the joke again in his dimple.
“Nephew,” Given says.
Mama’s breath slows to a choke. She looks at me, her face twisted.