“And stop eavesdropping,” I say. I blow air out my nose, mad. There are no bounds to Candace’s wormy snooping. But now she has two things I want. I sit up and scoot over to make room for her. “Gimme cherry.”
We prop up on our thin pillows, licking the bland white paddles and dipping them into the packets of colored sugar. I try to keep an inch between us. Candace isn’t loyal. She talks shit about me with the white girls from the high school cabins. But at night, she’s like the love vine in Kai’s margins. She twines and weaves and clings until I’m flat strangled. I have to keep peeling her off, or she’ll grow right up my nose.
She regards me over her candy paddle, her mouth corners turned up to a sly and waiting angle. Her mouth is full of sugar and ideas.
“How?” I say at last.
“I’ll whisper it,” Candace says. She knows how to milk a quid pro quo.
My mouth sets, but I hold myself still as she closes that last inch between us, pressing in close. I can smell faux grape on her breath.
“Write him a long, long boring letter, like about what you saw on TV, and talk on a lot about how you’re working on a poem for a school project. Then you put the poem in, but you recopy it.”
“Mmm,” I say, noncommittal, leaning away.
She leans with me, propping her head on my shoulder so that her pointy chin digs at me. “If it’s in your writing, and if you burn up the original, they can’t trace it to your mom at all.”
Dammit, it’s a good idea. Candace is such a mouth breather, I forget how crafty she can be. I owe her now, so I don’t kick her back to her bed when the candy is gone. I turn my back and she presses herself against it. She is out cold in two minutes, limp and still as a corpse.
She never sleeps like this in her bed. She cries and kicks her feet, saying, No no no, and I don’t like it. Listening to her moan and beg makes me feel queasy in my stomach. I wonder if I cry out in my sleep, as pitiful as Candace. I have my own bad nights, when I dream that 911 call.
What is your emergency, the dream-operator asks, and I see cop cars already zooming past the Dandy Mart, hundreds of them, zigging fast like a long line of black roaches. I don’t have one! I don’t have one! I yell, already too late. I see red light, like firelight, rising from behind the kudzu. I hear my mother screaming, and that always wakes me up. I could never, even in my dreams, un-tell the story that I told that operator.
Now Candace is so hard asleep that her head is sweating like a baby’s. I can feel it dampening my T-shirt. I stay awake much longer, crammed against the wall in a bed that is gritty with spilled sugar.
By morning, I have decided. I go to Mrs. Mack, and I squeeze out some tears. I am Kai’s child, and I know to start with true parts: “He always called me Bossy Pony, and he helped me with my math.” The true parts are a foundation that let the lie stand tall and strong: “I know he’s not really my dad, but he’s the only daddy I’ve ever known.” And then on top of this structure, I set the thing I’m angling for: “If only I could write him. I want to know that he’s okay.”
Mrs. Mack gets his address for me, even gives me stamps. It’s easy.
I follow Candace’s plan exactly, mailing Dwayne a long, dull letter that includes the poem, masquerading as a school project. I can’t send the drawing. I lack the talent to reproduce it, and the original is way too traceable to Kai. I won’t risk a TPR. Dwayne will know the poem is from her, anyway. She tells stories from the Ramayana all the time, and the poem reads like hers.
Destroying both the originals would be safest, but my mother wrote the poem, and she drew her own familiar, absent face on Sita. I hide them in the very bottom of my footlocker and change the combination on the lock. Again. Not that it keeps Candace out. It’s a mystery, how she keeps breaking in.
I solved it two decades later, when I got out Kai’s Ramayana for Julian. I’d pulled the footlocker down from the top shelf of my closet, then realized I couldn’t remember the combination. Hell, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d opened it. I tried my birthday, the day that Jimi Hendrix died, and a host of my old zip codes. I got so frustrated that I rattled the lock, then let it go with a spiteful, sideways jerk.