My laughter at the memory breaks the silence in the car, and I wish she were here beside me, curled up in the passenger seat talking about everything or nothing. I’d settle for her silence, her voice, her scent. I’d take anything of her I could get.
It makes me eager to get home—to put this road trip behind me and find a way to see her. I’ll speak with Dr. Packer and figure out when we can talk to Simone, what to say. It’s time to bring Lotus back into my life, into our lives.
I’m not-so-patiently stuck riding behind a slow truck carrying huge pipes when my headlights illuminate a chain anchoring the pipes as it pops loose. The pipe slides off the truck and toward me, headed for my windshield.
“Shit!”
I swerve, avoiding the pipe that lands in the road where my truck was mere seconds ago. Another pipe slips from the truck’s flatbed, bouncing on an unpredictable trajectory. The entire sequence takes seconds, but everything retards to a slow-moving, terrifying crawl. Inside of me, though, accelerant douses everything—my racing, pounding heartbeat, the blood rushing through my veins like river rapids, the quick, shallow breaths chopping up in my chest as my body deploys adrenaline to every vital organ.
The wheel slips through my hands as the truck hurtles toward the guardrail. In my mind, I see Lotus clutching her little saint, her face wreathed in fear and love by the flickering light of candles, eyes fixed on me, never looking away. All I hear is Lotus’s urgent recitation, the psalm falling from her lips with the determined persistence of raindrops pinging a tin roof.
It’s the last thing I hear before the groan and crash and moan of colliding metal take it all away.
45
Lotus
“You ready to hit this J train?” Yari asks.
“In a minute.” I glance up from the dress I’m pinning for JP. “Isn’t this gorgeous?”
“Girl, yes.” Yari walks farther into the fitting room where the models usually try on the clothes. I’m working from a body form, though. “What’s that for?”
“A certain Hollywood actress wants to be wearing this when the Oscar goes to her,” I mumble around the pins in my mouth. “We’ve got plenty of time since she hasn’t even been nominated yet.”
We share a quick laugh. I get up and stretch from the long time on my knees. “Let me grab my stuff.”
My phone rings in my pocket as I’m walking back to my cubicle. Iris’s ringtone.
“Hey, Bo. What’s up?” I ask, motioning to Yari that we can keep walking out. “You calling to complain about how hungry my nephew is again? I’ve told you that formula—”
“Lo,” she breaks in. “No, I, um . . . that’s not why I’m calling.”
The somber note weighing her voice down stops me shy of the elevator. Yari stops, too, eyeing me curiously.
“Oh,” I say. “You sound funny, Bo. What’s up? The kids okay?”
“The kids are fine.” Her voice catches. “It’s, um, it’s Kenan, hon.”
All my bodily functions pause. Or at least, it feels that way. The whole building, the whole city, the whole world seems to stop for a second. I want to stay in this tiny window of time before I know how bad it is, before she tells me something that will demolish my heart and ruin my life.
“What about . . .” I clear my throat, but the fear doesn’t move. An unbudgeable dread gathers and ties knots in my belly. “What about him? He’s okay, right? Iris, he’s okay?”
The silence that follows blares in my ears. I pull the phone away and press it to my chest, closing my eyes and forcing myself to listen again.
“Lotus?” Iris asks. “You there?”
“Yeah. Just tell me”
“He was in a car accident.”
“But he’s okay. He’s alive. I’d know if he weren’t.”
Iris’s skepticism reaches me across the phone—the same skepticism I get from Kenan. She thinks I make it up—that I’ve bought into some of MiMi’s old-lady nonsense. She doesn’t understand. She never really has.
My soul would know. I’d get goosebumps. The damn sky would open up and pour out fire. Somehow, some way, I would know if Kenan Ross had left this Earth.
“He’s alive, yeah. He’s in surgery now,” Iris says. “But it’s serious. You need to come. August is chartering a flight to get you here as quickly as possible.”
“Okay.” My body is all over the place. My heart has splintered into a million shards but my mind is so incredibly focused, as if I’m watching this all from an observation tower. It’s not happening to me. It can’t be happening to him.
Yari calls Billie, who meets us at the airport. I swing by our apartment and grab my stuff. A few items of clothing, my lunch box, salt, candles, St. Expedite. I’m fully prepared to make a fool of myself. I’m braced for skepticism and accusations of lunacy, but I refuse to give a fuck.
My friends have never seen this side of me. They watch me carefully as I sit in my seat, clutching the little figure in my hand and reciting Psalm thirty-five until my mouth is dry and cottony. I take up the litany in my head, barely blinking or breathing. I frantically assemble everything MiMi ever told me about life, about death and healing. The afterlife. The diaphanous walls that separate time from eternity—how they fall without notice, and the ones we love can so easily slip from this life into the next.
“Help me, MiMi,” I whisper with my head pressed to the cold window as we fly above the clouds. There’s no sign of pink. No cotton candy in the sky. “You said I have your heart. I truly believe that’s all I need. Don’t let me miss the things our eyes can’t see. I need you.”
Salty tears run hot and fast into my mouth, and I pray around them. I open my little lunch box-cum-sewing-kit and pull out all the notes Kenan sent me. There’s one I need. One I cling to.
“Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.”
– Song of Solomon 8:6
“Love is as strong as death,” I mutter, my eyes wide, not seeing the ocean below. “Love is as strong as death. Love is as strong as death.”
I’ve forgotten my friends, and only realize they’re still there when we land. Worry knits their brows and tightens their expressions. They think I’m losing it.
“Come on,” I say without further explanation. “Let’s go.”
The ride to the hospital is a blur. I don’t look out the window or make conversation or pretend I’m not worried. I don’t have time to accommodate people’s concern, their doubt. In the Uber, I press my forehead to the headrest of the passenger seat and close my eyes, blocking out the sounds of the city and erecting an impenetrable wall around my faith, my beliefs, my wild notions of life and death and what’s possible. I’m prepared for anything. I dive so deep inside myself searching for the heart MiMi left me, that it’s as if she’s in the car with me, not my friends. Her heart is my inheritance. My birthright. I take silent, certain possession of it.
“Um, we’re here,” Billie says.
I open my eyes and nod. A light rain falls as the car pulls up to the hospital’s emergency entrance. The three of us get out, bringing our suitcases with us. When we reach the waiting room, August and an older woman I don’t recognize are the first ones I see. Mack Decker, the front office executive whom I’ve met at a few functions with August, sits in the corner with a phone pressed to his ear. Iris rises from the boxy waiting room chair. At the sight of my cousin, the fragile hold on my composure slips and a sob flies free from the cage of my chest.
“Bo,” I cry brokenly.
Iris crosses the room immediately and her arms close around me, the comfort we’ve expected and given each other since we were kids flowing between us like a balm. My tears soak her hair, and I let myself go limp. I share my heart’s heavy burden, drawing strength from her she doesn’t even know she has.
After a few seconds, the pattern MiMi braided into my hair so long ago tingles, eyes in the back of my head deciphering the weight of someone’s scrutiny.
I turn from Iris’s embrace to face Bridget. Her cheeks are wet and splotchy, but resentment still burns in the ice-blue flame of her stare. She doesn’t want me here, but she would have to drag me from this hospital to get rid of me, and were she of a mind to listen, I’d advise her not to try.
Movement behind her distracts me from our stare down. The last time I saw Simone, she was unresponsive and EMTs were shoving a tube down her throat, intubating to save her life. Her face is so pinched with worry, she doesn’t look much better now. She slips one thin hand into her mother’s, I suppose an act of solidarity against me, the sworn enemy. I can’t be angry at her—can’t blame or hate her. She’s the most precious thing in Kenan’s world. I long to hold her. His blood runs in her veins. She has his mouth, his cheekbones, his DNA. She’s the closest thing to the man I love in this room, and if she’d let me, I’d give her a bone-cracking hug and lavish her with kisses.
“Hi, Simone,” I say instead. I’m braced for rejection, but will settle for indifference. Before she can mete out either, a white-coated man holding a clipboard strides into the waiting area. He eyes the small group assembled and speaks, sounding weary.
“Kenan Ross’s next of kin?” he asks, inquiring brows lifted.
“Here,” the older woman I don’t know says, standing and stepping forward. “I’m his mother.”
Another person who shares his blood—a woman Kenan wanted me to meet. I never imagined it would be under these circumstances. Not in my wildest dreams or tortured nightmares.
“And I’m his wife . . . ex-wife,” Bridget amends, pushing the hair back from her face, making the wedding ring she insists on wearing glint under the harsh fluorescent light. “This is his daughter. What can you tell us?”