Chapter 7
Leonie
We got to leave the windows down because of the smell. I done used all the napkins I had shoved in the glove compartment to clean up the mess, but Michaela still look like she been smeared with paint, and she done rubbed it all over Jojo, and he won’t let her go so he can clean the throw-up off him, too. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m all right.” But I can tell by the way he keep saying it that it ain’t all true. The part of me that can think around Michael knows what Jojo is saying ain’t true. That he ain’t all right, because he’s so worried about Michaela. Jojo keeps looking over at Misty, who is half leaning out the window, complaining about the smell (“You ain’t never going to be able to get that out,” she said), and I expect him to look mad in the rearview like he did earlier when Misty complained. Instead, there’s something else there, something else in his wide-open eyes and his lips that done shrunk to nothing.
* * *
Michael knocks on the door. All of us are huddled on the porch, smelling like vomit and salt and musk, when Al opens it.
“Hello. I’m surprised they processed you so quickly!” Al says.
He has another cooking spoon in his hand, a hand towel tossed over his shoulder like a scarf. I feel sorry for his housekeeper, if he has one, because I’m pretty sure he never washes any of his pots, just stacks one on the other on his counter. Whenever he’s not at his office, he must be cooking.
“Michaela’s still sick.” Misty shoulders her way past all of us and through the front door.
“Well, that just won’t do,” Al says, and he steps back so the rest of us can file past him. Jojo is last; Michaela won’t let him go, and he won’t put her down.
“Clean towels are in the hall closet,” Al says. “Y’all should wash up. I’ll borrow Misty and we’ll go to the store for medicine.” Misty nods, looks relieved at being able to ride in a vehicle not splashed with vomit. “Bread and ginger ale are in the pantry,” Al says. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that yesterday.” Al studies the carpet, then looks up and passes the towel over his face. “Oh yes, I remember.” He smiles at me and Michael. “I was dazzled by my company and their gifts, no?”
Michael holds out his hand. It is callused from the farm work he did in Parchman: looking after dairy cows and chickens, tending to some vegetable patches. He told me the warden thought it would be a good idea to get the inmates to working the land again, that he thought it was a shame all that good Delta soil was going to waste with all them able-bodied men there, with all them idle hands. But it had put a bug in Michael. He liked it, he told me in his letters. When he finally got home, he wanted us to put in a garden, wherever we ended up at. Even if it was a cluster of pots on a concrete slab. Can’t nothing bother me when I got my hands in the dirt, he said. Like I’m talking to God with my fingers. Al’s hand looks soft, big, and when he shakes Michael’s hand, his flesh is an envelope, swallowing.
“Thank you,” Michael says. “For everything you done for my family and me.”
Al shrugs, looks down at their hands, turns redder than he already is.
“It’s my job,” Al says, “for which I am well compensated. Thank you.”
* * *
After Misty and Al leave, I strip Michaela and make Jojo take off his shirt, and then I throw it all in Al’s washing machine, a fancy upright that takes me five minutes of jabbing buttons and turning dials to figure out how to work. Michaela shrieks the entire time she’s in the bathtub, her eyes rolling to Jojo, and I’m rougher than I should be with her, soaping her little lean belly, her legs, her back. Picking chunks out of her hair. Pushing that rag against her face to wipe the slime and crust and tears from it, pushing harder than I should, because I’m so pissed. Mama carried an orange bracelet always, woven orange yarn with little orange beads on it, and she knotted it and put it in the pocket of her skirt every day, and when me or Given done something stupid, something like Given getting drunk for the first time and showing up with a sick mouth throwing up all over her herbs on the porch, or like when I pulled up some plant she was growing in the garden, mistaking it for a weed, she’d grab that little piece of orange and start praying: Saint Teresa, I’d hear. Our Lady of Candelaria, she’d mutter. And then: Oya. And I don’t know the French, just words here and there, but sometimes she’d say it in English, and I was there often enough to understand: For Oya of the winds, of lightning, of storms. Overturn our minds. Clean the world with your storms, destroy it and make it new with the winds of your skirts. And when I asked her what she meant, she said: Ain’t no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that’s going to flush out the truth.
“Saint Teresa,” I mutter. “Oya,” I say, and rinse Michaela, dumping a cup of water over her head. She wails. I wrap a towel around her that soaks at the bottom, turns heavy with water, before picking her up and lifting her out of the tub. She kicks. I want to hit her. Don’t make me feel this for nothing, I think. Give me some truth. But ain’t no truth coming when I dry her off, ignore the lotion for her flailing, and shoulder past Jojo, who been cleaning off his chest at the sink and mirror and, I know, watching, like a blue jay mother, ready to dart in and peck if I do her wrong. Ready to take the hits for himself if I do lose my temper and start swatting at her bottom, still clammy with water and fever. He’s at that age where skinny boys either stretch and get skinnier and leaner and harder, or where skinny boys get fat and spend their early teen years trying to learn how to move bodies made bulky by hormones. Jojo is a mix of both: fat collects all along his belly, but avoids his chest and arms and face. With a shirt on, he still looks as lean as he did when he was younger. I can tell by the way he washes himself he’s ashamed of it, that he don’t know like I do that in a few years that stomach’s going to melt away, layer by layer, as he gets taller and more muscular, and he’ll emerge, his body an even-limbed machine like Michael’s. Tall like Pop.
“Make sure you get in them rolls,” I say. Jojo flinches like I’ve hit him. Shies closer to the mirror. It feels good to be mean, to speak past the baby I can’t hit and let that anger touch another. The one I’m never good enough for. Never Mama for. Just Leonie, a name wrapped around the same disappointed syllables I’ve heard from Mama, from Pop, even from Given, my whole fucking life. I dump Michaela, the wailing bundle, on the bed and begin toweling her off and she’s still kicking and screaming and moaning and now saying “Jojo,” and I just want to give her one slap, or maybe two, enough to sting her good, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop, Saint Teresa, I won’t be able to stop, help me. I leave her trembling and walk to the door and yell at the bathroom, at Jojo, who stands with his hands tucked in his armpits, his arms like football pads across his chest, and watches us.
“Get her dressed. Put her to sleep for a nap. Don’t leave this room.”
I slam the door.
* * *
When I run out of the hallway and see Michael standing in the milky light, my anger turns so quickly to love I stop, silenced. All I can do is watch him walk the four corners of the room, and then shrug.
“He ain’t got no TV,” Michael says. “He got this big old nice house, but no TV.”
I laugh and it’s like the badass little boy who ruined the TV down the road is in the room with us: the delighted trembling he must have felt at his wickedness rushes like water through me.
“He got something better than that,” I say.
The fireplace is big, the molding blackened at the edges and the paint long since sloughed off like a snake’s skin. There are three ceramic bowls capped with tops on the mantel, vases at least five shades of blue. Like the ocean, Al said the night before. Not like your ocean—I mean seriously, they shouldn’t even call that a gulf since it’s the color of ditch water. I mean real water. I mean Jamaica and Saint Lucia and Indonesia and Cyprus. He smiled away the insult and pointed at the two larger urns at the corners of the mantel. Mater and Pater, he said. And then he slid the small center urn across the sooty wooden plane and cradled it in his arms. And my Baby: my Beloved. When Al pulled out the pack, and said She’s here to party, Misty yelped, excited. I pull out the pack and Michael looks as if he wants to turn and run—and then like I am holding his favorite food, macaroni and cheese, and he wants to eat. Instead, he grabs my hand and pulls me toward him, surrounds me, breathes heavy into the hair at my temple, making it flutter. Five minutes later, we are high.
* * *
It’s the drug but then it’s not the drug. He is all eyes and hands and teeth and tongue. His forehead against mine: his head down. He is praying, too low for me to hear, and then I feel it. “Leonie, Loni, Oni, Oh,” he says, his voice there and then nothing, his fingers there and then nothing and then there again, and my skin itches and tingles and burns and sears. So long since I had this. My chest is hollow and then full; now a ditch dusty dry, now rushing with water after a sudden, heavy spring rain. A flood. There are no words. All around me, then through me, a man praying, and silent, praying and silent, a man who is more than man, a man with a shining shock of hair and clear eyes, a man who is all fire, fire in his mouth, flames his hands, smoldering coals the V of his hips. Fire and water. Drowned clean. Born up. Blessed. Like that, yes. Like that. Yes.
* * *
I pee in Al’s cold white half bathroom, listen for the kids, hear nothing. Walk back into the living room, the windows sparking dust to gold in the air. There is something wrong. Michael smiles at me, rubs his neck where I sucked on him, says, “I think you left a mark.” And Given-not-Given, black-shirted, sits slumped at the other end of the sofa. He waves his arm for me to come sit between them. The buzz loops through me and drops. I sit, and Michael takes my face in his warm, real hands, and his lips meet mine, and I am opening all over again. Losing language, losing words. Losing myself in that feeling, that feeling of being wanted and needed and touched and cradled, all the while marveling that the one doing it is the one that wants, that needs, that touches, that sees. This is a miracle, I think, so I close my eyes and ignore Given-not-Given, who is sitting there with a sad look on his face, mouth in a soft frown, and think of Michael, real Michael, and wonder if we had another baby, if it would look more like him than Michaela. If we had another baby, we could get it right.
I expect him to be gone when I pull my mouth from Michael’s, but Given-not-Given’s not on the sofa anymore, he’s standing by the mantel, looking just as solid as the Michael I’m straddling, but still as those urns. Michael groans and wipes a hand over his face, his neck and chest red, the freckles on him welted as ant bites.
“Sugar baby, what you do to me?” he says.
I don’t know what to say because Given-not-Given is watching me closely, waiting for my reply, so I say nothing and shake my head and root into Michael’s neck with my face, inhaling the smell of him. So alive: so here. Hoping that when I sit up, Given-not-Given will be gone back to wherever he stays when he’s not haunting me, back to whatever weird corner of my brain calls him up when I’m high: the hollow figment. But Given’s still there, and he’s standing outside of the hallway to the kids’ room, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. He rubs his face with his hands.
“I love you,” I tell Michael, and he cups me to him and kisses me again. Given-not-Given frowns and shakes his head. As if I have given the wrong answer. I look at Michael beneath me, and I ignore the phantom, don’t even look toward the kids’ room, so that for the rest of the hour and a half that Misty and Al are gone, Given-not-Given is a light smudge at the corner of my eye, sitting outside the kids’ room, guarding them. But Michael is rubbing my back and scalp, and that is all that matters.
* * *
They sleep as one: Michaela wraps herself around Jojo, her head on his armpit, her arm over his chest, her leg over his stomach. Jojo pulls her in to him: his forearm curled under her head and around her neck, his other arm a bar across them both to lay flat against her back. His hand hard in protection, stiff as siding. But their faces make me feel two ways at once: their faces turned toward each other, sleep-smoothed to an infant’s fatness, so soft and open that I want to leave them asleep so they can feel what they will. I think Given must have held me like that once, that once we breathed mouth to mouth and inhaled the same air. But another part of me wants to shake Jojo and Michaela awake, to lean down and yell so they startle and sit up so I don’t have to see the way they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other’s light.
“Wake up,” I say, and Jojo sits straight up, still hugging Michaela to him. Given-not-Given sat outside their door until Misty and Al came back: it’s strange to see echoes of him in the way Jojo’s shoulders curl inward over Michaela, in his wide-open eyes that scan the room and stop on the one dresser, in how still he suddenly is. “It’s time to go,” I say.
“Home?” he says.
Michael has to sit on the trunk to close it. With three people in the back, we ain’t got room for the bags we rode up here with, so even though Jojo whined about it, I made them put everything in the back, including the sandwiches Al’s sending us down the road with. Jojo’s still pouting, and I’m two minutes away from turning and leaning over the backseat and slapping the expression off his face: the thread line, the moue of his lips, the low eyebrows, all wiped smooth. He sings nursery rhymes to Michaela through the pout: the baby claps her hands and works her fingers like little spiders and looks bored and fascinated in flashes. Every fifth word, she touches Jojo’s nose. Misty’s asleep after complaining for a good hour that the car still smells like throw-up, and Michael’s driving, so I watch the kids when I ain’t watching Michael, when I ain’t noting the way his skin eats up the light from the growing day.
When Al handed Michael the sandwiches, Al was sweating all over, damp with salt and smelling like raw onions. He’d packed the sandwiches in a small hard plastic bag, a portable cooler with a Chimay logo printed on the side. “We don’t want to take your bag,” Michael said. “I insist,” Al said, his breath shuttering in and out of him fast, his eyes everywhere: the woods, the yard, the house sinking in gentle decline. Al was high again. “For services rendered,” he said, and smiled at me then. His teeth were bad, each one ringed with black like a dirty bathtub, his gums red. He never brushes, I thought. The men shook hands, and Michael curled a loose fist over whatever Al gave him. Michael slid it into his pocket.
“Come here,” Michael says. His blood thuds thickly under my ear, the skin of his arm like tepid water. The road winds through fields and wood, all the way south to the Gulf, and the light that cuts through the windows flutters all around. Where the road meets the Gulf, it skirts the beach for miles. I wish it ran straight over the water, like the pictures of the bridge I’ve seen that links the Florida Keys to the coast, wish it was an endless concrete plank that ran out over the stormy blue water of the world to circle the globe, so I could lie like this forever, feeling the fine hair on his arm, my kids silenced, not even there, his fingers on my arm drawing circles and lines that I decipher, him writing his name on me, claiming me. The world is a tangle of jewels and gold spinning and throwing off sparks. I’m already home.
I’ve never had enough of this. After Michael and I got together in high school, I got pregnant with Jojo in just under a year: I was seventeen. Ever since then we had Jojo and Michaela around us, making those spaces bigger between us. I remember it in flashes, mostly when I’m high, that feeling of it just being me and Michael, together: the way I swam up and surfaced out my grief when I was with him, how everything seemed so much more alive with him. We parked out in a field under the stars, in his pickup truck. We’d sneak and swim in his parents’ aboveground pool, sinking under the water in the blurry blue and kissing. On the beach near a seafood festival, with the lights from the carnival rides flickering in the distance, bad zydeco music sounding over the loudspeakers, he’d twirl me and make me dance with him until we tripped and fell in the sand.
“It ain’t healthy,” Mama said after I brought Michael home the first time, and we sat on the sofa and watched TV. Pop walked through the house and looked past us. After Michael left, Mama began cooking. I sat at the kitchen table and polished my nails, a soft pastel pink, the color of cotton candy, because I thought it looked good on my hand. I hoped the color would make Michael take my fingers in his mouth and say: I gotta get me some of this sweet.
“All you hear, all you see, is him,” Mama said.
“I see plenty else,” I said. I wanted to defend myself, but I knew I was lying, because when I woke up in the morning, I thought of Michael’s laugh, of the way he flipped his cigarettes before he lit them, of the way his mouth tasted when he kissed me. And then I remembered Given. And the guilt I felt when I realized it.
“Every time you say something, you look at him like a little puppy dog. Like you waiting for him to pet you.”
“Mama, I know I ain’t a puppy.”
“You exactly that.”
I blew on the fingers of my right hand and waved them in front of my face, breathed in the hot smells of the kitchen: beans bubbling on the stove, corn bread cooling, the smell of the nail polish, which made my stomach turn, but in a way that I liked. I’d huffed before I got pregnant with Jojo, on my knees in a shed in one of Michael’s friends’ yards, one of the many friends that Michael had whose parents were never home. The world had tilted and spun, and my brain had seemed to break out of my skull and float off. Michael had grabbed my shoulders, anchored me, pulled me back into myself.
“So you don’t like him?” I asked.
Mama breathed out hard and sat across from me at the wooden table. She grabbed my unpolished hand and turned it palm up and tapped it as she spoke.
“I . . . it ain’t his fault what he was born to. Where.” Mama took a deep breath. “Into that family.” She took another hitching breath, and the way her face folded and smoothed, I knew she was thinking of Given. “He just a boy, a boy like any other his age. Smelling his piss for the first time and thinking with his nether-head.” Like your brother, she didn’t say. But I knew the sentence was in her.
“I ain’t doing nothing crazy.”
“If you ain’t already having sex with him, you will be soon. Protect yourself.” She was right, but I didn’t listen. Ten months later, I was pregnant. After Michael got the test and I took it, I brought it to Mama and told her. I told her on a Saturday because Pop worked on Saturdays, and I didn’t want him to be there. It was an awful day. It was early spring, and the rain had been booming all night and all morning: sometimes the thunder was so close, it made my throat judder, closed my windpipe, made it hard for me to breathe. I’d always been scared of lightning, always thought it would hit me one day, burn through the air and touch me with a great blue arc, like a spear streaming straight for me, and me helpless when the sharp head sank in. I’d grown up paranoid, thought the lightning followed me when I was in my car, when it rattled my windows. Mama was hanging plants to dry in the living room on string that Pop had hung on a zigzag back and forth across the room, so the plants listed in the electric air, and Mama half laughing and muttering, the soft backs of her arms flashing white and then not: a kitten showing its belly.
“Here he come. Been singing for weeks.”
“Mama?”
She stepped down from the pine step stool Pop had built her. He’d carved her name into the top of it; the letters looked like wisps of smoke. Philomène. It had been her Mother’s Day present years before, when I was so little the only help I could give was to scratch a little star, four lines crossed at the middle, on the side of her name, and Given had carved a rose that looked like a muddy puddle, now worn smooth by Mama’s feet.
“I was wondering how long it was going to take you to build up the nerve to tell me,” she said, the stool tucked under her arm like she would put it away, but instead of walking to the kitchen, she sat on the sofa and let the step stool hang over her legs across her lap.
“Ma’am?” I asked. Thunder boomed. I felt hot around the neck and armpits, like someone had splashed hot grease across my face and chest. I sat down.
“You’re pregnant,” Mama said. “I saw two weeks ago.”
She reached across the wood in her lap and touched me then, not with the pitiless hand of the lightning, but with her dry, warm hands, soft under the skin she’d worked hard, just a second of a touch on my shoulder, like she had found a piece of lint there and was brushing it off. I surprised myself and curled in to it, leaning forward, put my head on the wood while her hand rubbed circles on my back. I was crying.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The wood hard against my mouth. Unyielding. Wetting with my tears. Mama leaned over me.
“No room for sorries now, baby.” She grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled me up to look at my face. “What you want to do?”
“What you mean?” The closest abortion clinic was in New Orleans. One of the more well-off girls in my school whose daddy was a lawyer had taken her after she’d gotten pregnant, so I knew it was there, and it was expensive. I thought we had no money for that. I was right. Mama gestured at the hanging plants, the listing jungle above our heads bristling in the cool electric air.
“I could give you something.” She let the end of the sentence trail off, disappear. She looked at me like I was a smudged book she was having trouble reading and cleared her throat. “It was one of the first things I learned how to do, in my training. It’s the one tea I never have enough of.” She touched my knee then; she’d found another piece of lint. She leaned back again, and her culottes stretched tight across her knees. Years later, that’s where she’d first start feeling the pain from the cancer: in her knees. Then it moved up to her hips, her waist, her spine, to her skull. It was a snake slithering along her bones. Sometimes I think back to that day, to her sitting on the sofa, giving me those little touches, little touches that didn’t want to turn me one way or the other, even though she wanted Jojo, I think, because her grief for Given was hungry for life. Sometimes I wonder if the cancer was sitting there with us in that moment, too, if it was another egg, a yellow egg knit of sorrow, bearing the shape of bullet holes, wiggling in the marrow of her bones. That day, she was wearing a blouse she’d sewn herself from a print full of pale yellow flowers. Roses, looked like. “You want this baby, Leonie?”
A whip-crack of lightning lit the house, and I jumped as the thunder boomed.
I choked and coughed; Mama patted my back. The humidity made her hair alive around her face, tendrils of it standing up and curling away from her buttery scalp. The lightning cracked again, this time like it was right on top of us, feet away from arcing through the house, and her skin was white as stone and her hair waving, and I thought about the Medusa I’d seen in an old movie when I was younger, monstrous and green-scaled, and I thought: That’s not it at all. She was beautiful as Mama. That’s how she froze those men, with the shock of seeing something so perfect and fierce in the world.
“Yeah, Mama,” I said. It still twists something in me to think of that: the fact that I hesitated, that I looked at my mama’s face in that light and felt myself wrestle with wanting to be a mother, with wanting to bear a baby into the world, to carry it throughout life. The way we were sitting on that sofa, knees tight, backs curved, heads low, made me think of mirrors and of how I’d wanted to be a different kind of woman, how I’d wanted to move somewhere far away, go west to California, probably, with Michael. He talked about moving west and working as a welder all the time. A baby would make that harder. Mama looked at me and she wasn’t stone no more: her eyes were crumpled and her mouth crooked, and that told me she knew exactly what I was thinking, and I worried that she could read minds, too, that she would see me shying away from who she was. But then I thought of Michael, of how happy he would be, of how I would have a piece of him with me always, and that unease melted like lard in a cast-iron pot. “I do.”
“I wish you would have finished school first,” Mama said. Another piece of lint, this time on my hair at the crown of my head. “But this is now, and we do what we do.” She smiled then: a thin line, no teeth, and I leaned forward and put my head in her lap again, and she ran her hands up and down my spine, over my shoulder blades, pressed in on the base of my neck. All the while shushing like a stream, like she’d taken all the water pouring on the outside world into her, and she was sending it out in a trickle to soothe me. Je suis la fille de l’océan, la fille des ondes, la fille de l’écume, Mama muttered, and I knew. I knew she was calling on Our Lady of Regla. On the Star of the Sea. That she was invoking Yemayá, the goddess of the ocean and salt water, with her shushing and her words, and that she was holding me like the goddess, her arms all the life-giving waters of the world.
* * *
I’m asleep and I don’t know it until Michael is shaking me awake, his fingers digging into my shoulder. My mouth is so dry, my lips are sealed shut.
“The police,” Michael says. The road behind us is empty, but the tension in his hand and the way his eyes widen and roll make me know this is serious. Even though I can’t see them and don’t hear any sirens, they are there.
“You don’t have a license,” I say.
“We have to switch,” he says. “Grab the wheel.”
I grab it and push my feet into the floorboards and raise my rear off the seat so he can put a leg over in the passenger seat and begin sliding over. He takes his foot off the gas, and the car begins to slow. I put my left foot over near the pedal, and I am sitting in his lap in the middle of the car for one awful, hilarious moment.
“Shit shit shit.” He laughs. It’s what he does when he’s frightened. When I went into labor, my water breaking in the snack aisle of a convenience store in St. Germaine, he scooped me up in his arms and carried me to his truck, laughing while cussing. He told me that once, when he was a boy, a cow kicked one of his friends in the middle of the night when they were out cow-tipping with flashlights: his friend, a redhead with pencil arms and a mouthful of rotten teeth from years of not brushing and chewing dip, braced himself as he fell, and his arm snapped like a tree limb. The elbow bent wrong, a piece of bone sticking out of his upper arm, pearly as a jagged oyster shell. Michael said his own laughter scared even him, then: high and breathless as a young girl’s. Michael lifts me off his lap, slides into the passenger seat, and I am behind the wheel when I see the lights behind me coming up fast on this two-lane highway, flashing blue, siren stuttering.
“You got it?” I ask.
“What?”
“The shit. You know, the stuff from Al.”
“Fuck!” Michael fumbles in his pockets.
“What?” Misty wakes up in the backseat, twisting to look back. I begin slowing down. “Oh, shit,” she says when she sees the lights.
I look in the rearview and Jojo is looking straight at me. He’s all Pop: upside-down mouth, hawk nose, steady eyes, the set of his shoulders as Michaela wakes up crying.
“I don’t have time,” Michael says. He’s fumbling for the carpet, about to shove the plastic baggie out of the little door in the floor of the car, but there’s too much in the way with a balled-up shirt I bought for him in a convenience store when we stopped to get gas, with plastic bags of potato chips and Dr Pepper and candy we bought with the money Al gave us. “And it got a fucking hole in it.” The bottom of the plastic baggie is scored and jagged, the white and yellow crystal dry and crumbly at the corners.
I snatch the small white baggie. I shove it in my mouth. I work up some spit, and I swallow.
* * *
The officer is young, young as me, young as Michael. He’s skinny and his hat seems too big for him, and when he leans into the car, I can see where his gel has dried and started flaking up along his hairline. He speaks, and his breath smells like cinnamon mints.
“Did you know you were swerving, ma’am?” he asks.
“No, sir, Officer.” The baggie is thick as a wad of cotton balls in my throat. I can hardly breathe.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, sir.” Michael speaks for me. “We been on the road for a few hours. She tired is all.”
“Sir.” The officer shakes his head. “Can you step out of the car, ma’am, with your license and insurance?” I catch another whiff of him: sweat and spice.
“Yes,” I say. The glove compartment is a mess of napkins and ketchup packets and baby wipes. As the officer walks away to talk with a static-garbled voice on his walkie-talkie, Michael leans in, puts a hand on the small ribs of my back.
“You all right?”
“It’s dry.” I cough, and pull out the insurance paper. I snatch up my whole wallet and get out the car and wait for the officer to return, everybody but Michaela frozen in the backseat. Michaela flails and wails. It’s midafternoon, and the trees list back and forth at the side of the road. The newly hatched spring bugs hiss and tick. At the bottom of the shoulder, there is a ditch filled with standing water and a multitude of tadpoles, all wriggling and swimming.
“Why isn’t the baby in her car seat?”
“She been sick,” I say. “My son had to take her out.”
“Who are the man and the other woman in the car?”
My husband, I want to say, as if that would validate us. Even: My fiancé. But it’s hard enough to choke out the truth, and I know with this ball in my throat, I will surely choke on a lie.
“My boyfriend. And my friend I work with.”
“Where y’all going?” the officer asks. He doesn’t have his ticket book in his hand, and I feel the fear, which has been roiling in my belly, rise in my throat and burn hot like acid, push against the baggie on its slow descent down to my stomach.
“Home,” I say. “To the coast.”
“Where y’all coming from?”
“Parchman.”
I know it’s a mistake soon as I say it. I should have said something else, anything else: Greenwood or Itta Bena or Natchez, but Parchman is all that comes.
The handcuffs are on me before the n is silent.
“Sit down.”
I sit. The ball in my throat is wet cotton, growing denser and denser as it descends. The officer walks back to the car, makes Michael get out, puts him in handcuffs, and marches him back to sit next to me.
“Baby?” Michael says. I shake my head no, the air another kind of cotton, humid with spring rain, all of it making me feel as if I am suffocating. Jojo climbs out of the car, Michaela hanging on to him, squeezing him with her legs: she has her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. Misty climbs out the backseat, her hands palms forward and her mouth moving, but I can’t hear anything she’s saying. The officer looks between the two and makes his decision and walks toward Jojo, his third pair of handcuffs out. Michaela wails. The officer gestures for Misty to take Michaela, and Michaela buries her face in Jojo’s neck and kicks when Misty pulls her from Jojo. She’s never liked Misty: I brought her with me to Misty’s one day after a run to the convenience store by the interstate for cigarettes, and when Misty leaned into the car to say hello to Michaela, Michaela turned her face, ignored Misty, and asked a question: “Jojo?”
“Just breathe,” Michael says.
It’s easy to forget how young Jojo is until I see him standing next to the police officer. It’s easy to look at him, his weedy height, the thick spread of his belly, and think he’s grown. But he’s just a baby. And when he starts reaching in his pocket and the officer draws his gun on him, points it at his face, Jojo ain’t nothing but a fat-kneed, bowlegged toddler. I should scream, but I can’t.
“Shit,” Michael breathes.
Jojo raises his arms to a cross. The officer barks at him, the sound raw and carrying in the air, and Jojo shakes his head without pausing and staggers when the officer kicks his legs apart, the gun a little lower now, but still pointing to the middle of his back. I blink and I see the bullet cleaving the soft butter of him. I shake. When I open my eyes again, Jojo’s still whole. Now on his knees, the gun pointing at his head. Michaela thrashes against Misty.
“Sonofabitch!” Misty screams, and drops Michaela, who runs to Jojo, throws herself on his back, and wraps herself, arms and legs, around him. Her little bones: crayons and marbles. A shield. I’m on my knees.
“No,” Michael says. “Don’t, Leonie. Baby, don’t.”
I snap. Imagine my teeth on the officer’s neck. I could rip his throat. I don’t need hands. I could kick his skull soft. Jojo slumps forward into the grass, and the cop is shaking his head, reaching under Michaela, who kicks at him, to cuff Jojo with one hand. He motions to Misty, who runs forward and grips Michaela under her armpits, wrestles her like an alligator.
“Jojo!” Michaela screams. “Have Jojo!”
The officer stands in front of me again.
“I need your permission to search the car, ma’am.”
“Take me out of these cuffs.” If he would come close enough, I could head-butt him blind.
“Is that a yes, ma’am?”
I swallow, breathe. Air shallow as a muddy puddle.
“Yes.”
Jojo only has eyes for Michaela. He twists his neck to look at her, speaks to her, his voice another murmuring, like the trees as they sway in the wind. The clouds, like great gray waves, are sliding across the sky. The air already feels wet. Michaela is beating Misty around the neck, and I am sure Misty is cussing, her words indecipherable, but her syllables split the air as cleanly as railroad spikes riven into wood.
“He put up the gun, baby?” Michael asks.
I nod and groan.
The officer is picking his way through the trunk, which is all junk. I see that now, handcuffed, suffocating. Plastic bags filled with faded, misshapen clothes. Al’s bag of sandwiches. A tire iron. Jumper cables. An old cooler littered with empty potato chip bags and cold drink bottles, mold eating at the seams. The baggie down my throat, disappeared to my stomach; my breath coming in a great whoosh, and I can breathe but the high from the meth comes fast. It squeezes me, a great hand, and shakes. It is a different kind of suffocation. I shudder, close my eyes, open them, and Phantom Given is sitting next to Jojo on the ground, reaching out as if he could touch him. Given-not-Given drops his hand. Half of Jojo’s face is in the dirt, but I can still see his frowning mouth, quivering at the corners: it is the face he made when he was a baby, when he was fighting the urge to cry.
“Have Jojo!” Michaela shrieks. The officer straightens from the car and walks over to Misty, who hoists Michaela up in the air to wrangle her. Phantom Given rises, walks to the officer, Michaela, and Misty.
“You all right, babe?” Michael asks.
I shake my head no. Given-not-Given reaches out again, this time to Michaela, and it looks as if she sees him, as if he can actually touch her, because she goes rigid all at once, and then a golden toss of vomit erupts from Michaela’s mouth and coats the officer’s uniformed chest. Misty drops Michaela and bends and gags. Phantom Given claps silently, and the officer freezes.
“Fuck!” he says.
Michaela crawls to Jojo, and the officer yanks at Jojo’s pocket, pulls out a small bag Jojo had, and looks within it before shoving it back in Jojo’s face like it’s a rotten banana peel. He stalks back to stand in front of us again, and he is opening our cuffs, and he shines. The bile glistens, the blue flashes.
“Go home,” he says. There is no cinnamon and cologne anymore. Just stomach acid.
“Thank you, Officer,” Michael says. He grabs my arm and walks me toward the car, and I cannot hide the shudder of pleasure as the meth licks and his fingers grip and the officer undoes Jojo’s cuffs.
“Boy had a damn rock in his pocket,” the officer says. “Go home, and keep that child in the seat as much as you can.”
Phantom Given frowns at me as I slide into the passenger seat. My body lolls. I can’t blink. My eyes snap open, again and again. Given-not-Given shakes his head as the real Michael slams the passenger door.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Misty breathes in the backseat. Jojo straps Michaela’s legs in her seat and hugs her and the whole contraption: the plastic back, the padding. Michaela sobs and grabs handfuls of his hair. I expect him to tell her it’s okay, but he doesn’t. He just rubs his face against her, his eyes closed. My spine is a rope, tugged north, then south. Michael puts the car in gear.
“You need milk,” Michael says. Phantom Given wipes his hand across his mouth, and it is then I realize that streams of spit are coming from my mouth, thick as mucus. Given-not-Given turns away from the car and disappears: I understand. Phantom Given is the heart of a clock, and his leaving makes the rest of it tick tock tick tock, makes the road unfurl, the trees whip, the rain stream, the wipers swish. I bend in half, my mouth in my elbow and knees, and moan. Wish it was Mama’s lap. My jaw clacks and grinds. I swallow. I breathe. All delicious and damned.