Chapter 10
Leonie
When we first began dating, Michael and I spent a month of nights parking on the boat jetty out on the bayou, kissing, his face against mine, smooth skin, as the wind came in the open windows, briny and sweet. A month of riding everywhere but near his house in the Kill and getting dropped off at my house an hour before dawn. I jumped off the cliff at the river one of those nights. I ran before I leapt to clear the rocky bank; I dropped into the feathery dark heart of the water and went all the way to the bottom, where the sand was more muddy than grainy and downed trees decomposed, slimy and soft at the core. I didn’t swim up; the fall had stunned my arms and legs, the thunderous slap of the water numbed them. I let the water carry me. It was a slow rise: up, up, up toward milky light. I remember it clearly because I never did it again, scared by that paralyzing ascent. This is what it feels like to wake with my head in Michael’s lap, his fingers still on my scalp, the car rumbling, light slanting sharp through the window. This is what it feels like to rise from a dark deep place. I lift up a little and put my forehead on Michael’s thigh and groan.
“Hey.” I can hear the smile in his voice; the word sounds higher, thinner. I’m too close to his crotch.
“Hey,” I say, and raise up farther. By the time I’m sitting up straight, it feels wrong. Like every bone in my spine, each locking piece, been knocked over and built back up crooked.
“How you feel?”
“What?”
Michael pushes my hair back off my forehead and I close my eyes at the touch. My throat is burning. Michael looks in the rearview and then pulls me over so my head is on his shoulder, his lips at my ear.
“The cops pulled us over, remember? You swallowed that shit from Al because wasn’t no time to dump it. The fucking floor was covered in shit. You should clean your car, Leonie.” He sounds like Mama when he says it.
“I know, Michael. What else?”
“I got you milk and charcoal from a gas station. You threw up.”
I swallow, and the root of my tongue aches.
“My mouth hurts.”
“You threw up a lot.”
The world outside the car is a green, shaky blur, the color of Michael’s eyes, of the trees bursting to life in the spring. The memory that eased me up out the dark, the memory of jumping from that cliff, is a buzzing green, but there is none of that inside of me. Just some water oak limbs, dry and mossy, burned to ash, smoldering. I feel wrong.
“How long to the house?”
“ ’Bout an hour.”
Even the pine trees, with their constant muted green, seem brighter. Through them, I see the sun will set soon.
“Wake me up.”
I lie down in the ashes and sleep.
* * *
When I wake, Michael’s rolled all the windows down. I’ve been dreaming for hours, it feels like, dreaming of being marooned on a deflating raft in the middle of the endless reach of the Gulf of Mexico, far out where the fish are bigger than men. I’m not alone in the raft because Jojo and Michaela and Michael are with me and we are elbow to elbow. But the raft must have a hole in it, because it deflates. We are all sinking, and there are manta rays gliding beneath us and sharks jostling us. I am trying to keep everyone above water, even as I struggle to stay afloat. I sink below the waves and push Jojo upward so he can stay above the waves and breathe, but then Michaela sinks and I push her up, and Michael sinks so I shove him to the air as I sink and struggle, but they won’t stay up: they want to sink like stones. I thrust them up toward the surface, to the fractured sky so they can live, but they keep slipping from my hands. It is so real that I can feel their sodden clothes against my palms. I am failing them. We are all drowning.
“Feel better?” Michael asks.
The sky has turned pink, and everybody looks ragged, even Misty, who has fallen asleep with her face smashed against the window, her hair falling over her forehead and down the line of her nose and cheek: a yellow head scarf.
“I guess,” I say.
And I do, except for the dream. It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it. I turn around to check on Michaela. Her shirt, cold and wet, clings to her small, hot body.
“We could drop the kids off. Go get something to eat before we go home.”
“Home?”
“To your mama and daddy’s,” Michael says.
I knew that’s where we were going, knew there was nowhere else for us to go. Not to the Kill, not to his parents, who’ve never even seen Michaela in the flesh. We could not go where we aren’t welcome. But I guess I had an apartment in my head. Once we’re on our feet we’ll get to it, but I had so envisioned it that when I thought about us going home, I only saw that place. I imagined us settling in one of the bigger towns on the Gulf Coast, in one of those three-story complexes with metal-and-concrete stairs leading from one level to another. We would have big whitewashed, carpeted rooms, space, anonymity, and quiet.
“Yeah,” I say.
“So you want to?”
Michaela kicks the back of my seat. Her hair is matted to her head, and she’s chewing on a sucker stick, the cardboard melting and coming away in papery bits to stick on the side of her mouth. I smile at her, wait for her to smile at me, but she doesn’t. She kicks again and bares her teeth around the stick, but it is no smile.
“Michaela, stop kicking Mama’s seat.”
“Ony,” she says, and sucks on the stick and waves both hands in the air. Jojo looks away from the window, down to her kicking feet, and frowns. “Ony!” she screams.
“She’s saying your name,” Michael says.
“Mama,” I tell Michaela.
“Ony,” Michaela says, and for a moment I’m in my drowning dream again, and I feel her hot, wet back buoyed up by my palms, slipping, slipping.
“Yeah,” I tell Michael. “Drop them off.”
Michael turns from one narrow, tree-shrouded road to another, water dripping from the leaves to dot the windshield, and I know we’re in Bois by the map of the limbs. Two people walk in the distance, and as we cruise through the green tunnel, I see a man, short and muscled, who leads a black dog by a chain. And next to him, a skinny little woman with a sable, coily cloud of hair that moves like a kaleidoscope of butterflies. It’s not until we’re right up on them that I see who it is. Skeetah and Eschelle, a brother and sister from the neighborhood. The siblings walk in sync, both of them bouncing. Esch says something, and Skeetah laughs. We pass as dusk darkens the road.
Michaela kicks my seat again, and I turn around and slap her leg so hard my palm stings. Jealousy twins with anger. That girl: so lucky. She has all her brothers.
* * *
The house looks like it sunk. Drooping at the crown. Jojo seems taller than he was when we left as he jiggles the doorknob, as he disappears through the dark door. But soon he’s walking back out to the car, and it’s so dark now that I can’t see his face. Even when he leans into the window of the car and Michael turns on the overhead light, there is still a black film over his face.
“They not here,” he says.
“Mama and Pop?” I ask.
“No.”
“Did they leave a note?”
Jojo shakes his head.
“Get in the car,” Michael says.
“What?” I ask. I’m so tired that it feels like someone has placed a wet towel over my brain, the weight of it suffocating thought.
“We can wait here.” Jojo stands.
“Get in the car,” Michael says.
Jojo’s lips thin, and he climbs into the back of the car. Michaela has her face hidden in his neck again, one finger twirling a lock of Jojo’s hair. Michael reverses into the empty street.
“Where we going?” Jojo says.
“To visit your grandparents.”
My heart is a squirrel caught in a snare. The fine hair on my arms stands up and quivers. I see Michael’s daddy, fat and sweating, his rifle balanced loosely on his lawn mower, the sound of the motor grinding and whining because he’s pushing it as fast as it can go over the lawn, trying to get to my car, to me. I see my hands, black and thin-boned, on the steering wheel. I see Given’s hands, fine as mine, but hard with callused coins from the rub of the bowstring.
“Why now?” I ask.
“I’m home,” Michael says. “You know they never drove up to Parchman.”
“Because they didn’t care,” I say, even as I know it’s not true.
“They do. They just don’t know how to show it.”
“Because of me. And the kids,” I say.
This is an old argument between us. Michael tries something new.
“Plus, Jojo’s thirteen. It’s time.”
“He’s thirteen and they ain’t gave a shit to see him or Michaela,” I say.
Michael ignores me and heads north. The air is cooler up in the Kill, since there are even fewer houses and more dark land sleeping under the deepening sky.
“Maybe they’ll surprise us, Leonie,” Michael says.
My mouth tastes like vomit.
“Sugar baby.”
“No.”
Michael pulls to the side of the road. The crickets turn riot.
“Please,” Michael says. He rubs the nape of my neck. I want to scramble out the window of the car and run, to disappear.
“No.”
“They made me, baby. And we made the kids. They going to look at Jojo and Michaela and see that,” Michael says. I feel my shoulders beginning to creep down, to relax, to settle.
“What you told them?” I ask.
Michael looks at the bugs skipping across the windshield like they are dragonflies and it is hard water.
“I told them it was time,” Michael says. “That if they love me, they got to love them, too, because they a piece of me.” He looks at me then, his green eyes look brown in the fading light, his hair dark: a stranger sitting in the driver’s seat. “Like you,” he says.
I bat his hand off my neck, rub where he touched like it’s a mosquito bite.
“Fine,” I say, and Michael heads north into the Kill.
* * *
“Kayla’s hungry,” Jojo says.
“Chip!” Michaela says. Outside, the world is dark, the fields and trees ink black. I roll up my window, which has been cracked. I woke Misty up when we pulled into her gravel driveway and she grabbed her bag from her feet and struggled out of the car with a sarcastic “Well, it’s been fun, folks.” She’ll hate me for a day or two, but once she washes her clothes and gets the smell of vomit out of her nose, she’ll call. I knew it by the way she leaned into my window after she slammed her door shut, glared at Michael, and said: “Good luck.” When I stretch over the backseat to roll up the window Misty slept against, Jojo’s looking at the floor like he’s lost something.
“They got leftovers down there?”
“No,” he says.
“We’re going to your grandparents’ house,” Michael says.
“Chip,” Michaela says.
“You’ll eat soon, Michaela,” I say. “Pass her here, Jojo.”
Jojo unbuckles her from the seat, and he pushes her forward. Her hair’s knotted in the back, curls worn fuzzy from the rub of her car seat. I smooth the hair up, trying to tame it into a puff on the top of her head, but she shakes and cries for a potato chip again. I dig in my purse. There’s nothing in the bottom but change and one peppermint I took from the bar. I unwrap it and give it to Michaela, and she sucks and quiets. The car smells like mint and her hair, sweet as sugar. Michael slows to cross the railroad tracks, and just as he does, a tusked wild hog, big as two men and covered in black fur, darts from the woods and sprints across the road, as light on his hooves as a child. Michael swerves a little, and I clutch Michaela but I can’t hold her and she flies forward, hitting her head on the dashboard. Michael swerves off the road and stops. Michaela bounces and slides down on my feet, and she is quiet.
“Michaela,” I say. I grab her under her armpits and drag her up, see a purple knot weeping red on her forehead. She’s alive, because her eyes are open and she’s hitching to cry, her breath stuttering in her throat. She wails.
“Kayla!” Jojo says.
“Jojo!” Michaela puts her forearms into my collarbones, pushing away from me, wanting Jojo again. The headlights vanish into the darkness along with the monstrous pig and suddenly I feel boneless, loose as a jellyfish, and I don’t have the strength to fight her.
“Shhhh,” I say, but even as my mouth is trying to comfort her, I hand her over the backseat, and she’s in Jojo’s arms. He’s patting her back as her arms settle around his neck. Michael and I turn to each other and I frown. We face forward, looking at the mist obscuring the windshield.
“Jojo, buckle her in.” I say this without turning to look at him, because I don’t want to see his face, afraid I might see the hard planes of Pop in his expression: judgment. Or worse, the soft quiver of Mama’s pity.
“You sure?” Michael’s shaken: I can tell by the way he grips the steering wheel and then lets go, grips and lets go, as if he’s testing his reflexes, gauging the nimbleness of his fingers. One bug crackles and hits the windshield, drunk in the lights. And then another.
“You want to go,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s go.”
There is no radio, no talk. Just the growl and pull of the car, the gravel ground under the tires, gatherings of frogs singing in hisses and croaks from ponds in woods and some perfect circles dug into yards. Michael’s parents’ house is different at night, and it’s been so many years since I’ve been there in the dark that it is a hazy memory, even as I look at it: long, straight gravel driveway, yellow in the moonlight, leading to the house through the fields; the gravel shimmers, an after-light left by a sparkler through night air. There are two lit windows, one at each end of the house. Michael cuts the lights so the car creeps and crunches down the driveway, the roll of the rocks under the tires sounding little pops. We park next to Big Joseph’s pickup truck and a blue car with a short hood, boxy body and back. A rosary hangs from the rearview mirror. I ease the car door open, and I suddenly need to pee, desperately. I don’t want to be here. Michael holds out his hand, and I want to climb back in the car, slam the door, drive off with the kids, who are still sitting in the backseat. A dog barks in the distance.
“Come on,” Michael says.
“Let’s go,” I tell Jojo. He gets out of the car and stands in the dark. He is as tall as me, maybe a little taller, and I can see him tall as Pop in two or three years. He hoists Michaela up and holds her in front of his chest: her back, his shield. Michaela is touching her forehead, which shows a dark constellation of blood, and asking Jojo questions.
“Mam?” she asks. “Pop? Mam? Pop?”
“No,” Jojo says. “These new people.”
But he doesn’t say who they are, and I want to answer her question, want to be her mother, want to say: Your other grandma or grandpa, your other family, your other Mam and Pop. But I don’t know what to say, how to explain, so I say nothing and let Michael answer her questions. But he offers nothing, either: he walks up the deck steps to the front porch and the door, pulls the screen door open, and knocks: two sure knocks, hard as a horse’s hooves on asphalt. I follow, and Jojo’s dragging feet purr through the gravel in the dark. Michael walks down the steps, a white ghost in the dark; grabs my hand; and pulls me up to stand next to him at the door.
Michael knocks again, and I hear movement in the house. Jojo hears like an animal and takes a step back toward the car.
“Come on, Jojo,” Michael says.
The door opens and there is light so bright I look down at my feet, Michael’s hand hard as metal in mine, gripping so tight I am sure my fingers are purple and white, but I see him, see Big Joseph, wearing overalls and a too-tight T-shirt, his peppered beard, his fleshy arms, all of it too much in the yellow spill. I step back. Michael pulls.
“Daddy,” he says.
“Son,” Big Joseph says. It is only the second time I’ve heard him speak in person, and his voice surprises me with how high it is, so different from the rest of him, which seems so rooted, so close to the earth, so low. The first time was in the courtroom, but he didn’t mean anything to me then, beyond being the uncle of the boy who shot my brother.
“We here,” Michael says. He lifts our clenched hands. Big Joseph lists, an old oak in a bad wind, but does not move, does not step back, does not say: Come in. In the dark behind us, Michaela cries.
“Eat,” she says. “I eat, Jojo!”
There are footsteps. Not as heavy as Big Joseph’s, but a steady, solid thumping, and even though I know it’s his mother, know it’s Maggie, I still flinch when I hear her smoker’s voice: deep and gravelly. She yanks open the door and she looks like a rabbit: her robe like a cream fur, her house slippers like white paws. I’ve seen her twice outside of this house, know that her body underneath is rabbit, too: the thin arms and legs, the round ball of her stomach.
“Cheese, Jojo!” Michaela screams.
“You heard the child, Joseph,” she says. A spasm makes her face twitch, and then it is still. Her hair is a red cap, her eyes unfathomably dark. “Time for supper.”
“We already ate,” Big Joseph wheezes.
Michaela mewls.
“And she ain’t,” Maggie says.
“You know they ain’t welcome in this house.”
“Joseph,” Maggie says, and she frowns at him and pushes his shoulder.
Big Joseph makes a sound in his throat and sways again, but then I realize Maggie is the wind. Big Joseph looks at me like he wants that gun across his lap, but he steps out of the doorway. They’ve talked about this: I can tell by the way Maggie said his name, the way a woman says the name of a man that she has long lived with, long loved. The way she says his name is enough. I know they have spoken about me, about Jojo, about Michaela. Maggie pushes open the screen door. She doesn’t say come in or welcome, just stands there, turned sideways. When I walk past her, she smells like lotion and soap and smoke, but not cigarette smoke: like fallen burnt oak leaves. She has Michael’s face. I startle when I walk past because it’s so strange to see his face on a woman: narrow jaw, strong nose, but the eyes are all wrong, hard as green marbles. In the house, we stand in a cluster, shying away from the furniture: a herd of nervous animals. Big Joseph and Maggie stand side by side, touching but not. She’s taller than the pictures, and he’s shorter.
“You going to introduce us?” Maggie’s looking at Michael when she says it and he nods his head, just barely: a wink of a nod.
“Yes, ma’am. This—”
“Jojo,” Jojo says. He hoists Michaela. “Kayla.” She looks at Maggie with her beautiful green eyes, and then I realize those are Maggie’s eyes, too, and I squeeze Michael’s hand, and my children seem strangers. Michaela a golden, clinging toddler, the tilt of her head and those clear eyes direct and merciless as an adult’s. And Jojo, tall as Michael, almost tall as Big Joseph, shoulders back, the line of his back a metal fence post. I have never seen him look so much like Pop as he does right now.
“Nice to meet you,” Maggie says, but she does not smile when she says it.
Jojo doesn’t even nod. Just looks at her and shifts Michaela to his other hip. Big Joseph shakes his head.
“I’m your grandmother,” she says.
There is a large wall clock in the kitchen, and the minute hand ticking its way around the face sounds loud in the uncomfortable silence, so loud I begin counting the seconds. My fingers squeeze tighter and tighter around Michael’s as his turn lax as he looks from his mother to his father, frowning. Jojo shrugs, and Michaela sticks her middle two fingers in her mouth and sucks hard. The house smells like lemon cleaner and fried potatoes.
Big Joseph falls into an armchair and wrenches it to the television.
“Figured they’d be rude,” he says.
“Daddy,” Michael says.
“Won’t even say hello to your mother.”
“They’re shy,” Michael says.
“It’s all right,” Maggie says. She bites the words short.
I must be sweating it out. A fire in my chest licks along my breasts. There’s rock in my stomach, at the base of the fire. I squeeze my legs. I don’t know whether I want to throw up or pee.
“Say hello,” I croak.
Jojo looks at me: mutinous. The corner of his mouth, frowning; his eyes almost closed. He bounces Michaela and steps backward toward the door. I don’t know why I said it. Michaela looks at me as if she has not heard; if nobody knew better, they’d think she was deaf.
“Raised by her, what you’d expect, Maggie?”
“Joseph,” Maggie says.
I would throw up everything. All of it out: food and bile and stomach and intestines and esophagus, organs all, bones and muscle, until all that was left was skin. And then maybe that could turn inside out, and I wouldn’t be nothing no more. Not this skin, not this body. Maybe Michael could step on my heart, stop its beating. Then burn everything to cinders.
“Hell, they half of her. Part of that boy Riv, too. All bad blood. Fuck the skin.” His voice is so high by the end of it that I can hardly hear him over the television, over an enthusiastic car salesman whose prices are miraculously dropping. Maggie’s mouth is a seam. Her hands worrying one another, and suddenly I hate her because she can walk and my mama can’t. And then I hate Joseph because he’s called my daddy a boy. I wonder what he knows of my daddy, how he could look at Pop and see every line of Pop’s face, every step Pop takes, every word out of Pop’s mouth, and see anything but a man. Pop’s at least twenty years older than Big Joseph; he was a grown man when Big Joseph was pissing his diapers. So how can Big Joseph see Pop, see how stonelike he is, like Pop’s taken all the hardship of the world into him and let it calcify him inch by inch till he’s like one of them petrified trees, and see anything but a man? Pop would whip his ass. And I can see Big Joseph in my mind’s eye, standing over Given, breathing down on him like he’s so much roadkill, how he would ignore the perfection of him: the long bow-drawing arm, the high forehead over the dead eyes.
“Goddamnit, Daddy!” Michael says.
Quick as he fell into the chair, Big Joseph is up, walking toward us but facing Michael.
“I told you they don’t belong here. Told you never to sleep with no nigger bitch!”
Michael head-butts Big Joseph. The crack of their skulls ricochets through the air, and Big Joseph’s nose is gushing blood, and then him and Michael are on the floor, but Michael isn’t punching him. They’re pushing against each other, each trying to pin the other down, rolling like children. Breathing hard. Sweating. Maybe crying. Michael saying over and over: “Goddamnit, Daddy, goddamnit, Daddy,” and Big Joseph saying nothing but wheezing so hard it sounds like sobbing.
“Enough!” Maggie screams. “That’s enough!” And then she’s running away and I can’t believe she’s going to leave them fighting in the kitchen, but then she’s running back with a broom and beating Michael over the shoulders with it because he’s on top of Big Joseph now, yelling, “Get up. Get up.” And I still feel sick, and cold, and too small for all this, and part of me wants to go grab Jojo’s hand and pull them out this house and leave them fighting. And another part of me wants to open my mouth and laugh, because it’s all so ridiculous, all of it, and I look over at my son and I think for sure he’s smiling, for sure he can see how stupid all of it is, but he ain’t looking at them tussling. He’s looking at me, and I see a flash of something I ain’t never seen before. He’s looking at me like I’m a water moccasin and I just bit him, just sank my teeth into the bone of his ankle, bit it to swelling. Like he would step on my head, crush my skull, stomp me into red mud until I wasn’t nothing but bone and skin and mud oozing in my slits. Like he ain’t no child of mine. Michaela’s climbing her brother, getting higher and higher on him until she’s almost sitting on his shoulder, so I do it. I stalk over and I grab Jojo’s hand even though I half expect him to yank it away, and I pull him toward the door.
“Nice meeting y’all,” I say, and it sounds high-pitched and ridiculous coming out of my mouth, with the men still tussling and Maggie still whacking. Big Joseph’s on top now, choking Michael, and even though I want to go back and help Michael, I don’t. I open the door and pull Jojo and Michaela. I take one look back and see Michael punch his daddy in the throat. Then we’re out the door, and the sky in the Kill is wide and open and cold, awash in stars, and we down the porch steps, standing by the car, shivering, listening to the banging in the house. A crash, and a light goes out.
“Get in,” I say, and Jojo climbs in the backseat with Michaela.
“Shit,” Michaela lisps, and it sounds like thit.
“Don’t say that,” I say. We sit in the car in the dark with the first of the crickets and katydids that come alive in the warmer months and listen to them trill, protesting the frigid air, the unfeeling stars, and we wait.
* * *
It’s minutes. Or it’s hours. Could be days, too, and maybe we slept through the sunrise and sunset, and woke to the night, again and again, and them still rolling and breaking things inside. Daddy and son. Until Michael and his mama come out the door, Michael kicking right through the screen, Maggie rushing out behind him to grab his shoulders. To turn him to her. To yell at him, then talk to him, then murmur. Michael leans down toward his mother in breaths until he’s hunched over her, his head on her shoulder, her rubbing his back like a baby. Her robe turning black where he brushes against it: blood dabbed from his touch. Michael sobbing then. The bugs quiet.
“We should’ve left,” Jojo whispers.
“Shut up,” I say.
“Kayla’s still hungry,” Jojo says.
I should leave. I should leave Michael to his family. Take my daughter home and feed her, fill her stomach, quiet her whimpering. But I don’t. I can’t. Maggie pulls the door open, disappears inside, and I expect Michael to walk toward the car but he doesn’t. He just leans over and crosses his arms and puts them on the porch railing and hunches over, waiting. His mother opens the door again and almost hits him, and then she’s passing him a paper grocery bag and hugging him to her and talking to him again, and with each word, she thumps his back with the flat of her hand. And he’s a baby again, and it looks like she’s trying to burp him. I look down at my lap. Out the driver’s side window. Off into the far line of the woods. There’s the sound of a door slamming shut, and then a creak, and Michael’s opening the car and sliding into the passenger seat. The bugs loud and then dim again. The bag crackles.
“Are you okay?” I ask. I know it’s stupid, but still, this is what I say.
“Let’s go,” Michael says.
The car chokes and cranks to life. I drive slowly down the driveway, swerving around muddy potholes, the bugs scatting our way. When I turn onto the street, the house is all dark. All the windows dim: the siding and beams and glass of the front of it smooth and still as a blank face.
* * *
Pop is home when I turn in to the gravel drive. He’s sitting on the porch, still as the swing and the potted plants at both sides of the door; he’s cut the light off so he is a darkness in the darkness, and the only reason I know it’s him is by the way he flicks his lighter to life and then releases it, lets it flutter, and then he flicks again. He smoked when I was younger. Packed and rolled the cigarettes himself. But after he caught me around the back of the shed lighting one of his spent cigarettes with only a fingernail’s worth of tobacco in it, he slapped it and the match out of my hand, and I never saw nor smelled the scent of one on him again. The way he looked at me when the cigarette hit the ground. Eyes wide, disappointed: pained. It was the first time I remember Pop looking at me like that. I was eleven and my breasts were budding and my friends at school were already smoking weed and worse, so I wanted to try at least a cigarette, but recalling his face, the way he looked guilty and angry at the same time, made me wish I’d never picked up that bud of rolled tobacco, never stole that match, never lit it, never hid back there for Pop to catch me.
So now whenever Pop is thinking about something but doesn’t want to let anyone know he’s thinking about something, worrying it over, he does this. Light, gutter, light, gutter. Where I was the one hesitant in the Kill, now it’s Michael that stands at my elbow, slumped, curled in on himself: like I got a cur dog on a short, frayed leash. He tries to grab Michaela out of the car, but by the time he gets around to her side, Jojo is out and Michaela is patting his face, saying “Eat-eat,” with every little tap, and they are already walking toward Pop in the darkness. Michael and I grab bags, so by the time we get up the porch steps, Michaela is disentangling herself from Pop’s arms, and Jojo is carrying her into the house. Here, Pop is a dusky smudge, the tattoos on his arms lit up in a flash with the lighter, and then out again. When I was younger, I would sneak and stand next to him when he took a nap on the couch, smell his breath, the way it smelled of tobacco and mint and musk, and I would trace over his tattoos with my pointer finger, without touching him, just follow the illustrations around: a ship; a woman who looked like Mama, clothed in clouds and carrying arrows and a pine branch in her hand; and two cranes: one for me and one for Given. Given’s is alight, poised in flight, feet skimming the marsh grass, while mine is beak down in the mud. When I was five, Pop pointed at mine and told me: This the one I got for you: they a sign of luck when you see them, mean everything is in balance, that it’s raining good and there’s fish and there’s things squirming under the marsh mud, that the bayou grass going to be green soon. They a sign of life. The light gutters, and they are erased in the dark. Pop speaks and I see his teeth.
“Your mama been asking about you.”
“Sir,” Michael says. I feel the words as much as I hear them, hot puff of air that caresses my shoulder.
“Michael,” Pop says. He clears his throat. “I expect it’s good to be home.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your mama—” Pop’s voice breaks off.
“We getting a place,” Michael interrupts. “Soon.”
Pop lights and his face flashes. He is frowning, and then the flame dies.
The night is country dark.
“It’ll keep until tomorrow.” Pop rises. “Leonie, go on and see your mother.”
* * *
Mama is laying in the bed with her face turned to the wall, and her chest is still, the bones from the spoon of her clavicle close and hard under the skin: a rusted cooking grate over a busted barbecue pit. Her arms are all bone, the skin and thin muscle overlaying them sliding to bunch at odd places: too far away from the elbow, too near the center of her throat. She swallows, and I feel relief wash through me, and I realize I was watching to see if she was breathing, to see if she was moving, to see if she was still here. It’s like a quick rain over hot, dry earth.
“Mama?”
Her head moves an inch, and then one more, and then she’s looking at me, her eyes too alive in her face. The pain glistens in her black irises, moves like smoke over the whites. The only thing bright while the rest of her dulls.
“Water?” she asks. It’s a scratchy whisper, hardly there in the din of the night insects trilling through the open window.
I lift the cup and straw Pop left next to the bed for her to drink. I should have been here.
“Michael’s home,” I say.
She tongues the straw out of her mouth and swallows. Lays her head back. Her hands curled on the thin white blanket like an invalid’s.
“It’s time.”
“What?” I say.
Mama clears her throat, but her whisper is no louder: too-long pant hems dragging over dirt.
“It’s time.”
“For what, Mama?”
“For me to go.”
“What you mean?”
I set the cup down on the edge of the nightstand.
“This pain.” She blinks as if to grimace, but doesn’t. “If I lay in this bed for much longer, it’s going to burn the heart out of me.”
“Mama?”
“I done did everything I could. Brewed all the herbs and medicines. Opened myself to the mystère. For Saint Jude, for Marie Laveau, for Loko. But they can’t enter. The body won’t let them,” she says.
Her knuckles bear all the scars: slipped knives, broken dishes, pounds of laundry. I wonder if I pull her hand to my nose and sniff, if I can smell all the offerings she done placed on her altar over the years, done used to heal: strings of peppers, potatoes, yams, cattail, spider lily, Spanish needle, sweet bedstraw, and wild okra. All the green of the earth in her hands. But when I sniff, her palms sandpaper-dry, I smell threshed hay bleached by the winter sun. Dead. She squeezes, and it is pitiful. When I was a little girl, she kneaded my scalp when she washed my hair, scraped it with her fingernails as I sat in the tub with my knees in my chin. I want to cry. I don’t know what she’s saying to me.
“I got one left,” she says.
“What you mean?”
“The last mystère. Maman Brigitte. Let her come into me. Possess me. She the mother of the dead. The judge. If she come, maybe she take me with her.”
“There ain’t another? What about one that heals?” I ask.
“I didn’t teach you enough. You won’t be able to appease them.”
“I could try.” I let the words trail from my mouth and hang in the air like lax fishing line, dangling a hook nothing wants to bite. The night bugs call one to another, courting and threatening and singing, and I can’t understand any of it. Mama looks at me, and for one blink, hope shines, remote and brilliant as a full moon.
“No,” she says. “You don’t know. You ain’t never met the mystère. They look at you, they see a baby.”
I take my hand from hers, and she lays still, her eyes too wet, too large. Eyelids fluttering. She don’t ever blink.
“You can gather for me. I need rocks. From the cemetery. Enough to stack them in a pile. And cotton.”
I want to walk out the room. Walk out the front door. Walk straight to the bayou, to the water, step on it, shimmering glass under my soles, and walk until I disappear over the horizon.
“Cornmeal. And rum.”
“That’s it? You just going to go? Soon as you seek this spirit? Just like that?”
My voice breaks: my face is wet.
“Why can’t Pop do it?” I ask.
“You my baby.” She breathes heavy, and the grate cracks and sinks to rusted stillness. “Like I drew the veil back so you could walk in this life, you’ll help me draw it back so I can walk in the next.”
“Mama, no—”
“Help me prepare.” She sighs wetly then, and I reach out to wipe her face, the skin under the tears warm and wet and alive with salt and water and blood. “I don’t want to be empty breath. Bitter at the marrow of my bones. I don’t want that, Leonie.”
“Mama.”
The cup falls off the table, spreads a puddle of water around my shoes. The katydids clack in applause or disapproval, I don’t know.
“Baby, please,” Mama says.
Her eyes wild and wide. She moans, and what could be the pain moves through her, making her legs shuffle under the covers, then lay still: rough wind through bare winter branches. The morphine is not enough.
“Let me leave with something of myself. Please.”
I nod, and then her scalp is under my hands, hot to the touch, and I’m kneading and scratching like she did me, and her mouth is opening and closing in half pleasure, half pain. Opening and closing with what would be sobs, but she chokes them quiet. Relief again, but this time like a flood over dry plains, rushing from where I touch her head down her gaunt face, her sinewy neck, her flattened, etched chest, the dip of her stomach, the empty pot of her hips, the long, swollen black lines of her legs, to her flat feet. I wait, but nothing about her body changes. I expect her to lie slack, but it doesn’t happen. I only know she’s fallen asleep by her eyelids, the smooth marbles of them, relaxed. I leave her and pull the door behind me. Michael’s in the shower. Pop is still out on the porch, flashing in the darkness. Someone has turned a lamp on in the living room, and Given’s pictures, year after year of half smiles and angled legs like he’s a moment away from jumping up and running, look down on me. A multitude of Givens. And I want him back so bad then, because I want to ask him: What should I do?
Michaela’s on the second sofa in the living room. Michaela breathes openmouthed, huffing crumbs, and a half-eaten cracker falls from her hand to the floor. I don’t even pick it up. In my room, my full bed seems as small and narrow as Mama’s, and like her, I turn to the wall. I can feel her on the other side. She sears me. I couldn’t see before, but now I feel it: her chest packed tight with wood and charcoal, drenched in lighter fluid, empty no longer—the pain the great blaze, immolating all.