If Aunt Pris looks like Iris’s sister, my mother looks like Aunt Pris’s aunt. Yet, Mama is the younger. Life has been harder on her, or maybe she just never figured out how to shed the years like Aunt Pris did. We look more alike than I realized. I get the tilt of my eyes from her, the shape of my mouth. People used to say I looked like her, and she would tilt her head, studying me like l was a stranger and say, “Really? I don’t see it.”

“How do you think that made me feel, Mama?” I ask the silent woman. “You didn’t want to look like me. You didn’t want to see the resemblance, but there is one.”

A bitter twist masquerades as a grin on my mouth. “I work in fashion now, and I wear beautiful clothes, and sometimes people actually want to take pictures of me and hang them in galleries because they think I’m pretty. You never saw that, though, did you?” I ask her. “Is that why you did it? Is that why you chose him over me? I wasn’t light enough. Pretty enough. Did you always wish you could send me back, and first chance you got, you did?”

Tears flood my throat, floating the inevitable question to my tongue.

“Why did you let him hurt me, Mama?”

I sniff, impatient with my own tears. “Why did you choose him, knowing he was rotten? Knowing he had hurt your baby girl? Why didn’t you ever come for me?”

The question is harsh and raw in the sterility of the hospital room. “Did you never miss me? Did you ever go back to that day and reconsider giving me away?”

The line of futile questions stacks up around me, going nowhere, bouncing off the walls. Aunt Pris will be back soon with whatever jewelry she thinks I can use in a spell to save my mother.

I didn’t come here to save May DuPree.

I came to save myself.

Maybe not “once and for all,” because trauma doesn’t work that way. There may not ever be a “for all” to my healing. It may always be that the smell of pressed hair sets me off. There may always be days here and there when I can’t shake the sadness, the uncertainty that comes from being abandoned and betrayed. I may see trace amounts of this in my life forever, like a bloodstain on the floor that shows pale pink, but is never again spotless.

Oh, the blood of Jesus that washed us white as snow.

The line from one of MiMi’s hymns we used to sing on Sundays when no church would have us rises up to meet my pain. She rises up to meet my pain, like she always did. Head on. Fearlessly. With wisdom. Compassion. Unconditional love. The things she taught me got me this far. She was the first to lay bandages on my wounds. Today, I close them.

“I thought I needed your words, Mama,” I say, my voice hushed. “But my friend says the words that help me more may be the ones I say to you, so here goes.”

I reach in my purse for the journal I used to write the trauma narrative Marsha guided me through. The last page I flip to is where I begin.

“You had your chance,” I read the first line in a strong voice that doesn’t waver. “You had your chance to love me unconditionally, but you chose to change me. You had your chance to protect me as a mother should, but you chose to betray me for the man who split me in two. I was a little girl before Ron raped me, and after that day, I knew things I shouldn’t know. Had questions it wasn’t time for me to ask. He stole my innocence.”

The shock of that pain fills the room like floodwaters, rising all around me and over my head. I hold my breath. I gasp for air. The panic batters me in waves, but I draw air into my lungs by little sips at a time until I can take deep breaths. Like it has so many times before, this pain tries to drown me.

But it can’t. I won’t let it.

“He stole my innocence,” I pick up where I left off, my voice trembling and fainter, but still loud enough for me to hear—for her to hear if she can. “And instead of punishing him, instead of seeking justice for me, you chose him. And I’ve asked why almost every day since. Oh, I may not have said it aloud, but every time I doubted myself, thought I wasn’t pretty enough, light enough, needed to be different, needed to be more, I was asking why you did it. Trying to get to the bottom of what was so wrong with me.”

My spine straightens and I push against the weight of old pain and faded nightmares. I square my shoulders, finding the strength to toss them off like a cloak. “But you know what?” I ask rhetorically, because I already know the answer. “There ain’t a damn thing wrong with me. The problem was with you. The sin was his, and the shame, the guilt, the dirt I carried around for years, that was his, too. That was yours, and I refuse to keep it.”

I shake my head, tears streaming over my cheeks, into the corners of my mouth, collecting at the base of my throat.

“The only good thing you ever did for me was give me away,” I say, stroking my gris-gris ring. “I didn’t come here to see my mother before she died, because my mother is already gone. MiMi was the best mother I could have asked for. Anything good about me finds its way back to her, and anything that’s not, she taught me how to accept or change.”

I fold the letter because I’ve memorized the last line. It is the truth that I came into this room knowing, and I’ll leave this room having said my piece.

“I came here not to blame you for giving me to her,” I tell May DuPree, “but to thank you for giving her to me.”

The hospital room door opens, and Aunt Pris rushes in with a jewelry box.

“I just brought the whole thing,” she says, handing it to me. “In case you get a . . . a vibe from one piece instead of another.”

“A vibe?” I ask, lifting one brow.

“I don’t know.” She shrugs elegant shoulders. “Whatever you and MiMi do, just do it. Just save her.”

“I can’t.” I shake my head and pass the box back. “I don’t know how to save anyone.”

“No, you can.” She clutches my hands between hers, desperation making her grip painful. “You have to. MiMi said you were the strongest.”

“What? When?”

“Always,” Aunt Pris says impatiently. “Even when you were a little girl, five, six years old, she said you were the strongest of us all. She said all the power we didn’t want passed on to you.”

“What? I . . .” I falter and process that. “Well, I can’t save a dying woman.”

“You have to,” Aunt Pris says, tears turning her dark eyes even more luminous. “They say she may not have much time.”

And like her words were an invitation, death comes. It’s not some cloaked figure that only I see holding a scythe. Not a dark angel or a creature with horns and a tail. It’s the sudden cold and the goosebumps that spring up on my arms.

MiMi said we miss most of what’s happening in the world because we can’t see it—that we miss the important things relying only on the evidence of our eyes.

Like when death enters the room.

“I can’t save her,” I tell Aunt Pris. “But there’s one thing I can do for her.”

“What?” Fear twists her ever-pretty face. “Anything. What can you do?”

I take Aunt Pris’s hand, grasping it tightly, and look to my mother dying right in front of me.

“You know who I am,” I say, my voice, in spite of the bold words, shaky. “I’m here to make my judgment known.”

“What are you doing?” Aunt Pris tugs on her hand, but I don’t let go. “I don’t want to be part of no spell. What is this?”

“It’s the power of an unbroken line,” I tell her, keeping my voice calm since her fear is evident. “Two women from our lineage have more power than one.”

She stops pulling her hand away. “And we can save her?”

“No, but I think we can help her along the way.”

“No.” Tears spill over her smooth cheeks. “She can’t . . . you have to . . .”

I slowly shake my head, grip her hand more firmly, and turn back to the bed.

“You know who I am,” I say again. “I’m here to make my judgment known. This woman’s soul hangs in the balance.”

I replay all the things I read to Mama, all the things she never said to me, all the questions I’ll never have answers for. Even if she could answer me, it wouldn’t be enough.

I remember all the pain her actions caused me. I live with the legacy of it still.

I honestly don’t know if I have any influence over this woman’s afterlife. She’s practically a stranger to me. So maybe this is just a show for my aunt to ease her coming grief. Maybe in death, I’m giving May DuPree something she never had in life. Or maybe this is a selfish act, and the words I whisper are not for her in the afterlife, but for me in this one.

“I lay a stone on the side of . . .”

I hesitate over the final word like it really will reverberate in eternity, and then I drop it like a stone in water whose ripples are infinite.

“Peace.”

39

Kenan

I really want to reach my destination before the sun goes down. These backroads and swamps are creepy as fuck. Any minute now, I fully expect Google maps to say, “Really, dude?”

If it fails, I also have the directions Iris sent me. She said the last few miles can get tricky.

“Tricky?” I ask aloud, even though I’m the only one in the rental car. “Feels more like Middle Earth than Louisiana.”

The closer I get to MiMi’s house, or I guess it actually belongs to Iris and Lotus now, the more uncertain I feel. It’s not the backwoods, or the alligators, or the trees that seem animated with arms reaching for me as I drive by. I’m uncertain because I don’t know what state I’ll find Lotus in. No one’s heard from her. The last time we spoke, she was heading to New Orleans to visit her mother in the hospital. I was in China, wishing like hell I was back in the States and could go with her. That was a week ago. The team is still in Shanghai, but the game is over. It’s all goodwill stuff and appearances, so I told them I had a family emergency and needed to return early. It’s still pre-season, so things are looser.