“Don’t come any closer,” Brit says.
I hold up my palms, a white flag. Very slowly, I take another step. She slashes out once. It’s a penknife, one she carries in her purse. I remember the day she bought it, at a White Power rally. She had held up various models, brandishing onyx, mother-of-pearl. She’d pressed a bedazzled one against my throat in a mock charge. Which is more me? she had teased.
“Hey, baby,” I say gently. “It’s time to come home.”
“I can’t. I’m a mess,” she mutters.
“That’s okay.” I crouch down, moving the way I would if I were approaching a wild dog. I reach for her hand, but my palm slips out of hers.
I look down and see mine is bloody.
“Jesus Christ!” I cry, just as Francis shines his iPhone flashlight down on Brit from behind me, and lets out a cry. She is sitting with her back against Davis’s grave. Her eyes are wide and wild, glassy. Her left arm has been sliced deeply seven or eight times. “I can’t find it,” she says. “I keep trying to get it out.”
“Get what out, sweetheart?” I say, reaching for the blade again.
But she curls it away from me. “Her blood.” As I watch, she picks up the knife and slashes her wrist.
The knife falls out of Brit’s hand, and as her eyes roll back in her head, I lift her in my arms and start running to my truck.
—
IT’S A WHILE before Brit is stable again, and that’s a generous term. We are at Yale–New Haven, a different hospital than the one where she delivered Davis. Her lacerations have been stitched, her wrist has been wrapped; the blood has been washed from her body. She has been admitted to the psych ward, and I have to say, I’m grateful. I can’t unravel the knots in her mind.
I can barely unravel the knots in mine.
I tell Francis to go home, get some rest. Me, I’ll stay overnight in the visitors’ lounge, just to make sure if Brit wakes up and needs me, she will know someone is here for her. But right now, she is unconscious, knocked out with sedatives.
A hospital after midnight is ghostly. Lights are low, and sounds are eerie—the squeak of a nurse’s shoes, the moan of a patient, the beep and exhale of a blood pressure machine. I buy a knit cap from the gift store, one that has been knit for chemo patients, but I don’t care. It covers my tattoo and right now I want to blend in.
I sit in the cafeteria, nursing a cup of coffee, and combing through the tangle of my thoughts. There’s only so many things you can hate. There are only so many people you can beat up, so many nights you can get drunk, so many times you can blame other people for your own bullshit. It’s a drug, and like any drug, it stops working. And then what?
My head actually aches from holding three incompatible truths in it: 1. Black people are inferior. 2. Brit is half black. 3. I love Brit with all my heart.
Shouldn’t numbers one and two make number three impossible? Or is she the exception to the rule? Was Adele one, too?
I think of me and Twinkie dreaming of the food we craved behind bars.
How many exceptions do there have to be before you start to realize that maybe the truths you’ve been told aren’t actually true?
When I finish my coffee, I wander the halls of the hospital. I read a discarded newspaper in the lobby. I watch the flashing ambulance lights through the glass doors of the ER.
I stumble upon the preemie NICU by accident. Believe me, I don’t want to be anywhere near a birthing pavilion; those scars are still tender for me, even if this is a different hospital. But I stand at the window beside another man. “She’s mine,” he says, pointing to a painfully small infant in a pink blanket. “Her name is Cora.”
I panic a little; what creep hangs out in front of a nursery if he’s not related to one of the babies? So I point to a kid in a blue blanket. There’s a bit of a glare through his incubator, but even from here I can see the brown of his skin. “Davis,” I lie.
My son was as white as I am, at least on the outside. He did not look like this newborn. But even if he had, now I realize I would have loved him. The truth is, if that baby were Davis, it wouldn’t matter that his skin is darker than mine.
It would just matter that he is alive.
I bury my shaking hands in my coat, thinking of Francis, and of Brit. Maybe however much you’ve loved someone, that’s how much you can hate. It’s like a pocket turned inside out.
It stands to reason that the opposite should be true, too.