Chapter 4
Leonie
The night of Jojo’s birthday, Misty said: If we do this, the trip’s paid for. And then: You and Michael could have enough for a deposit. Y’all could get your own place. You always say the problem is y’all parents. Yours ’cause you live with them; his because they’re assholes. Given was even more still when she said that, like stone. Through Misty’s narrow kitchen window, I could see the tops of the trees turning from a dark velvet gray to orange, from palest orange to a pink the color of the inside of my mouth. How you think I paid for all my trips up to Bishop? From tips? She shook her head and snorted. You better take advantage.
I hear them four words over and over again when we get in the car and I watch Misty put the package in the pocket under the floorboards. You better take advantage. She said them words as though decisions have no consequences, when, of course, it’s been easier for her. The way she said it, take advantage, made me want to slap her. Her freckles, her thin pink lips, her blond hair, the stubborn milkiness of her skin; how easy had it been for her, her whole life, to make the world a friend to her?
Before Michael went to jail, he installed the envelope in the bottom of my car. He elevated the car on a jack and crawled underneath with his welding tools, and he cut what looked to be a perfect square in the floor of the car, then inserted another piece of metal with a hinge, fixed the hinge, and then welded the bottom of the car back together. Two doors, he’d said, and then kissed me twice. One to hold, and the other to let it go. If I need to. He’d been home from the oil rig for six months by then, and we’d had to move back in with Mama and Pop. We’d run through the money he saved, plus his severance. He’d worked on the Deepwater Horizon as a rig welder. After it blew up, he came home with his severance money and nightmares. At the time, I’d talked him into buying a full-size bed for us to share in our new apartment, so no matter how we moved, I said, we’d sleep close, so every time he kicked in his sleep, every time he twitched or mumbled and threw up his arms, drawing back from something, I woke. I’d spent the days after the accident with Jojo in the house watching CNN, watching the oil gush into the ocean, and feeling guilty because that’s not what I wanted to see, guilty because I didn’t give a shit about those fucking pelicans, guilty because I just wanted to see Michael’s face, his shoulders, his fingers, guilty because all I cared about was him. He’d called me not long after the story broke on the news, told me he was safe, but his voice was tiny, corroded by static, unreal. I knew those men—all eleven of them. Lived with them, he said. When he came home, I was happy. He wasn’t. What we supposed to do? he asked, taking two bites of his grits before leaving them to jelly on his plate. We’ll figure it out, I said. When he started getting skinny, I thought it was because of his nightmares. When his cheekbones started standing out on his face like rocks under water, I thought it was because he was stressed out over money. When his spine rose under his skin, a line of knuckles punching up his back, I thought it was because of his grief and the fact he couldn’t find another welding job anywhere in Mississippi or Alabama or Florida or Louisiana or the Gulf of Mexico. But later I found out the truth. Later, I learned he’d figured everything out without me.
“You don’t have to be so nervous,” Misty says.
“I’m not nervous.”
“This ain’t the first time I done this.”
“I know.”
“I’m talking about with Bishop.”
Misty’s sipping on one of the cold drinks she took from her friends’ house. The woman’s name was Carlotta, and her husband, the one who cooked and gave us the bag, was Fred.
“First time I did this was when I was visiting Sonny, my ex.”
“That’s how you know them?”
“Yeah. First time I did it, I was scared to death. Like you. But then after that, each time was easier.”
I glance in the rearview mirror. Michaela’s shoving a blue ball in her mouth and babbling around the ball at her brother, who is trying to coax it away from her, his face very close to hers, his voice low and serious: “No, don’t put that in your mouth, Kayla; it’s nasty and done been on the floor.” Michaela grins and spits the ball in his hand and begins clapping and saying: “Nasty, that’s nasty.” Jojo looks like he’s paying all his attention to Michaela, but I know he’s not. There’s something about the way he leans, about how he says the same thing to Michaela, again, “That floor was nasty,” that makes me realize he’s listening to what we’re saying, even as he’s trying to look like he’s not. Me and Misty already talked about it when I picked her up: we’re not going to refer to it by name, not going to use any words that hint to what’s in the bag, what we’re sneaking north with us: meth, crystal, crank. We’d talk around it, avoid it like a bad customer in the bar who’s too drunk for more, who smells like sweet alcohol fermenting and diesel, yet keeps grabbing my hand when I walk by, saying something fucked up to me like: One more, you sweet Black bitch. And when we have to call it some other name, we’re going to call it the most embarrassing thing we can so Jojo will lose all interest.
“If we get pulled over and they find those goddamn tampons, Misty, I’m going to kill you.”
I figure that will make Jojo stop listening. Never mind the fact that the statement doesn’t make any sense. He’s a boy, and periods are one of those things about the human body he most likes to ignore: kidney stones, pimples, boils. Cancer.
“Jojo, I need the atlas.”
I’m right. He jerks when I say this before rooting around for the book and handing it over the seat to me, trying to find my eyes in the rearview mirror. When his brown don’t find my black, Misty takes it from him. He shrinks back into the backseat, still looking at the floor. Michaela calls him, “Jojo,” and he leans toward her again.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“I’m looking,” Misty mumbles.
I look for mile markers. We stopped at Carlotta and Fred’s just north of Hattiesburg, in north Forrest County.
“Mendenhall. We’re in Mendenhall,” Misty says. There’s a stoplight ahead of us, so I slow. She’s not looking at the atlas.
“How you know that?”
Misty points up, and there’s a billboard. Mendenhall, it reads, Home of Mississippi’s Most Beautiful Courthouse.
“I want to see it.”
The light turns green. I step on the gas.
“I don’t.”
“Why not? What if it’s really pretty?”
In the backseat, Jojo is moving his mouth around like he’s chewing something. He looks away from Michaela and up to me, and his eyes dark as mine. I was smaller when I was his age, weedier, more delicate at my joints and bones. He looks like Given, but he never jokes. Sometimes, when Jojo’s playing with Michaela or sitting in Mama’s room rubbing her hands or helping her turn over in the bed, I look at him and see a hungry girl.
“I bet it has big columns and everything. Probably even bigger than Beauvoir,” Misty says.
“No,” I say, and leave it at that.
Michael never used to write me anything about the violence in jail, those things that happened in the dead of night in dark corners and locked rooms: the stabbings and the hangings and the overdoses and the beatings. But I told him he had to tell me. In a letter, I said: If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I imagine the worst. So in the next letter, he told me about somebody getting jumped in the showers, beaten purple and black. In the one after, he told me how his cellmate started messing with one of the female guards, how they snuck around and have sex in the jail, hunching like rodents. Bent on procreating. And in the next letter, he told me about the guards beating an eighteen-year-old boy who had been convicted of kidnapping and strangling a five-year-old girl in a trailer park. They heard him screaming and then nothing, and then got word he bled to death like a pig in his cell. That, I want to say to Misty, is your pretty courthouse. But I don’t say anything. I watch the road roll out before me like a big black ribbon and I think about Michael’s last letter before he told me he was coming home: This ain’t no place for no man. Black or White. Don’t make no difference. This a place for the dead.
* * *
Michaela’s sick. She was quiet for the first hour after we left the house, but then she started coughing, and the tail end of the cough caught in her throat and she gagged. For the past thirty minutes, she’s been crying and fighting with her seat belt, trying to get out. I hand a palmful of napkins to Jojo, and every other time I look in the rearview mirror, I see him bending over her, frowning, wiping at her drooling mouth. The napkins soak in seconds. We were supposed to drive the rest of the way today and stay with Michael and Bishop’s lawyer in the next town over from the jail, but all her crying is making me feel like someone is squeezing my brain, tighter and tighter. I can’t breathe. Then she coughs and gags again, and I look back and the front of her is orange and mauve. She’s thrown up all her puffy Cheetos, digested soggy, all her little careful bites of her ham sandwich. The meat has turned what isn’t yellow pink. Jojo is holding napkins in both hands, frozen. He looks scared. Michaela cries harder.
“We gotta stop,” I say as I pull over on the shoulder of the road.
“Oh shit,” Misty says, and waves her hand in front of her mouth like she’s shooing away gnats. “That smell is going to make me throw up.”
I want to slap her, even though the smell of the stomach acid, harsh and intense in the small car, makes me feel queasy, too. Want to yell at her: Bitch, how you work around all them drunks and can’t stand a little throw-up? But I don’t. Once we’re on the side of the road, and I’m swiping globs of the vomit away with the napkins I snatched from Jojo, the queasiness turns flips and somersaults in my stomach like a kid on a trampoline. Jojo doesn’t look scared anymore. He puts both hands in the vomit cascading down Michaela’s front and unbuckles her chest harness. She pauses in her frantic straining, her little chest pushed out against the belt again to give a thank-you cry before she starts pulling at the lap buckle, anxious for him to undo that, too, to free her. He’s frowning. He unbuckles the last buckle and pulls her out, and before I even have a moment to admonish him, to say his name sharply, say “Jojo,” Michaela is smashed to his chest and her little arms are around his neck again, the length of her laid along him, shaking, mewling, him breathing: “It’s all right, Kayla, it’s all right, Kayla, Jojo got you, Jojo got you, I got you, shhh.”
“You almost done?” Misty asks, tossing it over her shoulder to the backseat like a piece of gummy burger wax paper.
“I’m tired of this shit,” I say. I don’t know why I say it. Maybe because I’m tired of driving, tired of the road stretching before me endlessly, Michael always at the opposite end of it, no matter how far I go, how far I drive. Maybe because part of me wanted her to leap for me, to smear orange vomit over the front of my shirt as her little tan body sought mine, always sought mine, our hearts separated by the thin cages of our ribs, exhaling and inhaling, our blood in sync. Maybe because I want her to burrow in to me for succor instead of her brother. Maybe because Jojo doesn’t even look at me, all his attention on the body in his arms, the little person he’s trying to soothe, and my attention is everywhere. Even now, my devotion: inconstant.
I mop up the rest of the slimy residue in her seat, throw the napkins on the asphalt, take a few baby wipes, and swipe them across the seat so that it smells like stomach acid and flowery soap.
“It smells better,” Misty says. She’s half leaning out the window of the car, her formerly fluttering hand now cupped over her nose like a mask.
* * *
The drive to the next gas station seems miles, and the sun breaks through the clouds and beams directly overhead.
When we pull into the parking lot of the station, the attendant is sitting on the front porch of the wooden building smoking a cigarette. She almost blends in to the wall she leans against, because her skin is as brown as the stained boards. She opens the door for me and follows me in, and the string of silver bells hung across the door jingles.
“Slow day,” she says as she slides behind the counter. She’s skinny, damn near as thin as Mama, and her buttoned-up work shirt hangs on her like a flat sheet spread to dry on a clothesline.
“Yeah,” I say, and wander toward the drink coolers in the back. I palm two bottles of Powerade and set them on the counter. The woman smiles, and I realize she’s missing her two front teeth, and a scar meanders in a scratchy line across her head. I wonder if she just has bad teeth, or if whoever gave her that forehead scar knocked them out.
Misty’s walking around the parking lot, holding her phone above her head, searching for a signal. All the car doors are open, and Jojo is sitting sideways in the back while Michaela climbs over him, rubbing her face into his neck and whining. He caresses her back, and their hair is molded to their heads. I pour half of a bottle into one of Michaela’s juice bottles and hold out my arms.
“Give her here.”
“Kayla, go,” Jojo says. He isn’t looking at me or the damp day or the empty road, but at Kayla, who begins to cry and grabs at his shirt and holds so tightly, her little knuckles turn white. When I pull her into my lap and sit in the front seat, she plants her chin in her chest and sobs, her eyes closed, her fists tucked under her chin.
“Michaela,” I say. “Come on, baby. You need to drink something.” Jojo is standing above me, his hands shoved into his pockets as he studies Michaela. She doesn’t hear me. She hiccups and wails. “Michaela, baby.”
I put the nipple of the sippy cup in her mouth, and she blocks it with her clenched teeth and whips her head to the side. I grip her harder, trying to hold her still, and her little milk muscles give under my fingers, soft as water balloons. We wrestle like this as she stands and sits and bends backward and writhes and says two words, over and over again.
“No. Jojo.”
I’ve had enough.
“Goddamnit, Michaela! Can you get her to drink some of this?” I ask.
Jojo nods, and I’m already handing her over. Without her, my arms feel weightless.
* * *
Michaela drinks a quarter cup, and then she slumps over Jojo’s shoulder, one arm around his neck, rubbing. I wait fifteen minutes, and just as Misty is buckling herself into the driver’s seat so we can get back on the road, Michaela vomits again. It is electric blue, the color of Powerade.
“You might as well take that off,” I tell Misty. She rolls her eyes and unbuckles her seat belt before squatting on a parking block in the shade to smoke a cigarette. “We going to be here for a minute.”
I don’t want Michaela to throw up in the car again, to retch in the backseat while I’m strapped in the front. We’d just have to pull over again so I can clean her up. The heat rises from the asphalt parking lot, along with steam from the rain. Jojo sits sideways, his feet on the ground, Michaela draped over him.
“You want to lay down, Kayla?” he asks. “You might feel better if you lay down.”
He slides his hands under her armpits and tries to ease her off of him and onto the seat, but she sticks to him, sure as a burr: her arms and legs thorny and cleaving. He gives up and rubs her back.
“I’m sorry you feel sick,” Jojo says, and Michaela begins to cry. He rubs her back and she rubs his, and I stand there, watching my children comfort each other. My hands itch, wanting to do something. I could reach out and touch them both, but I don’t. Jojo looks part bewildered, part stoic, part like he might start crying. I need a cigarette. I squat next to Misty on the concrete block and bum a smoke: the menthol shores me up, stacks sandbags up my spine. I can do this. I wait until the nicotine laps at my insides like a placid lake, and then I go back to the car.
“Make her drink more,” I tell Jojo.
Thirty minutes later, she vomits that up. I give her fifteen minutes and I tell Jojo again: “Make her drink.” Even though Michaela is letting out a steady whine now, bewildered at the cup in her brother’s hand, Jojo does what I ask. Twenty minutes later, she vomits again. Michaela is desolate, hanging on Jojo, blinking at me when I stand inside the car door with more electrolytes. “Make her drink,” I say again, but Jojo sits there as if he does not hear me, his shoulders hunched up around his ears like he knows I’m out of patience, like he knows that I want to hit him. “Jojo,” I say. He flinches and ignores me. Michaela rubs her snotty nose and leaking mouth in his shoulder. “Jojo, no,” she says. The attendant steps out onto the porch, her cigarette already lit.
“Y’all all right?” she asks.
“Y’all got something for vomiting? For kids?”
She shakes her head, and her straightened hair flies free at the temples, waving around like insect antennae.
“Nope. Owner won’t stock nothing like that. He say only the basics. But you’d be surprised how many people come through here carsick, needing Pepto-Bismol.”
Weeds are flowering in bushes at the edge of the gas station lot; purple and yellow and white blooms nod at the edge of the pines. I palm the back of Michaela’s neck where she slumps over on Jojo, who is sitting on the trunk of my car, jiggling his knee and watching me and Misty, frowning.
“Hold on,” I say, and walk off the parking lot and along the tree line.
Mama always told me that if I look carefully enough, I can find what I need in the world. Starting when I was seven, Mama would lead me out in the woods around the house for walks, and she’d point out plants before digging them up or stripping their leaves and telling me how they could heal or hurt. The wind moved high in the trees, but nearly everything was silent below, except for me and Mama, who said: That right there is cow parsnip. You can use the young leaves like celery when you cook, but the roots is more useful. You can make a decoction for cold and flu. And if you make them into a poultice, you can ease and heal bruises, arthritis, and boils. She dug around the roots of the plant with a small shovel she carried on our walks, and then pulled the whole plant up by its leaves and doubled it up before putting it in the bag she carried across her chest. She searched the ground until she found another plant, and said: This pigweed. Ain’t good for any medicine, really, but you can cook with it, use it like you use spinach. Got a lot of vitamins in it, so it’s good for you. Your daddy like it sautéed with his rice, and he say his mama used to make bread with the ground-up seeds. I ain’t never tried that, though. On our way back to the house with the day’s haul, she quizzed me. As I grew older, it was easier for me to remember, to answer her quickly as we picked our way around tree roots. Wormseed, I would say. Good for getting rid of worms if you use it like seasoning in food. But it was hard for me to remember everything. Every day, Mama would point out a plant that had parts that could help women, specifically, seeing as how it was mostly women that searched her out, needing her skills and knowledge. She’d say: Remember you can use the leaves to make a tea that helps with cramps. And it could bring on a period, too. I’d look away and roll my eyes to the pines, wishing I were in front of the TV, not out trudging through the woods with my mama talking about periods. But now, as I walk through the clearing and peer into the woods, looking for milkweed, I wish I’d listened more carefully. I wish I could remember more than the fact that it has pinkish-purple flowers. And even though milkweed grows wild on parcels of land like this and flowers in the spring, I don’t see its white-beaded, downy leaves anywhere.
When Mama first realized that something was seriously wrong with her body, that it had betrayed her and turned cancerous, she began by treating it herself with herbs. I’d come home on those spring mornings to find her bed empty. She’d be out in the woods, picking and slowly dragging bushels of young pokeweed shoots behind her. Every time, she said: I’m telling you, it’s going to cure it. I’d take the bundles from her, put my arm around her waist, and help her up the steps and into the house, where I’d set her in a chair in the kitchen. I was always buzzing from the night before, so while I chopped and cleaned and boiled and made pitcher after pitcher of tea for her to drink, the high would trill through my veins like a discordant song. But it didn’t cure it. Her body broke down over the years until she took to her bed, permanently, and I forgot so much of what she taught me. I let her ideas drain from me so that the truth could pool instead. Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.
* * *
If the world were a right place, a place for the living, a place where men like Michael didn’t end up in jail, I’d be able to find wild strawberries. That’s what Mama would look for if she couldn’t find milkweed. I could boil the leaves at Michael’s lawyer’s house, where we’re staying before we go pick Michael up in the morning. Put a little sugar in it, a little food coloring like Mama used to do whenever I had an upset stomach as a child, and tell her it’s juice.
But the world ain’t that place. Ain’t no wild strawberries at the side of the road. It ain’t boggy enough up here. But this world might be a place that gives a little luck to the small, sometimes shows a little mercy, because after I walk awhile down the side of the road out of sight of the gas station, after I leave Misty gesturing out the window with her arm, yelling, “Fucking come on,” I find wild blackberries. Mama always told me they could be used for upset stomach, but only for adults. But if there was nothing else, she said I could make a tea and give it to kids. Not a lot, I remember her saying. From the leaves. Or was it from the vine? Or the roots? The heat beats down so hard I can’t remember. I miss the late-spring chill.
This is the kind of world it is. The kind of world that gives you a blackberry plant, a doughy memory, and a child that can’t keep nothing down. I kneel by the side of the road, grab the thorny stems as close to the earth as I can get them, and pull, and the vine pricks my hand, tears at the skin, draws blood in tiny points that smear. My palms burn. This the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout. Even though the words were harsh, I saw hope in her face when she said them. She thought that if she taught me as much herbal healing as she could, if she gave me a map to the world as she knew it, a world plotted orderly by divine order, spirit in everything, I could navigate it. But I resented her when I was young, resented her for the lessons and the misplaced hope. And later, for still believing in good in a world that cursed her with cancer, that twisted her limp as an old dry rag and left her to disintegrate.
I kneel and lean back on my haunches. The day pulses like a flush vein. Wipe my eyes, smear dirt across my face, and make myself blind.