Long Shot

I follow the path to the river, that swathe of shade and grass overseen by a cypress canvas. Every step brings my grief, carefully stowed away today in a church full of strangers, closer to the surface. Today, the slight breeze whispering through the Spanish moss overseeing the river is a swaying lament for MiMi.

Lo and Sarai sit several feet from the riverbank, and Sarai holds a Louisiana iris. My namesake.

It makes me smile and remember the day with August in the gym when he asked about my name. An ache, separate from my grief, spreads across me. I miss him. I want him, but I have no idea what to do about it.

“They’re gone?” Lo asks, not turning, facing the river.

She’s so like MiMi. Now that I’ve spent time with our great-grandmother, her influence on Lo is clear. I envy that.

“Yeah.” I pull up beside her on the bank. “They’re gone. Your mother—”

“Don’t.” Lo’s voice is iced coffee. Dark. Cold with a bitter edge. “I buried my mother today.”

I nod, not denying it.

“I wish I’d known MiMi longer,” I venture, keeping one eye on Sarai and one eye on the river. It’s not inconceivable that a gator could crawl up on the riverbank or that a snake could slither out of the thick greenery. The bayou is a calculated risk, benefits and dangers constantly on a scale.

“You knew her when you needed to,” Lo says, her voice showing no emotion but her face a ravaged canvas, painted with tears. “So did I.”

I slip my hand into hers, and silently, we squeeze. United again. I can’t imagine I let Caleb come between us. That’s a lie. I let my shame, my embarrassment, and maybe even my jealousy come between us.

“I’m sorry, Lo,” I confess. “I think I was jealous of you.”

“What?” Lo turns startled eyes to me. “When? How could you ever be jealous of me?”

I shrug, my shoulders weighted with self-consciousness and late summer heat. “When you confronted me about letting Caleb control me, I was frustrated. Maybe I regretted my choices.” I pause, assembling my words into the right order. “I resented my life, how small it had become. You were running off to New York to work for a famous fashion designer in an atelier, whatever the hell that is. Meanwhile, I was mashing baby food and wearing yoga pants every day.”

Lo’s husky laugh charms the sun out from behind a cloud, and the last flare of sunlight illuminates the regal bones of her face.

“You? Jealous of me?” She shakes her head, the long braids caressing the curve of her neck. “That’s ironic since I’ve been jealous of you most of my life.”

“What?” I snap my head around to study her fully but don’t release her hand. “No way.”

“Oh, yes way.” She throws me a teasing look, even through damp eyelashes. “Don’t worry. I have since realized the fullness of my own fabulousness.”

I laugh, mouth closed, the humor coming as short nasal puffs of funny air.

“Growing up, I loved you, but I wanted so much that you had,” she says. “I hate what happened to me, but it was good I moved away from you and our mothers.”

I’m curious but also hurt to hear this.

“I can think of a dozen reasons why living here was better than living with them, but why did you need to get away from me?”

“You’ll think it’s silly in that way that girls who never have to think about these things think it’s silly,” she says, her smile self-deprecating, her eyes knowing.

“Tell me anyway.”

“I was dark.” She lifts her braids. “My hair was coarse. I was the odd egg in our little nest, and everyone knew it.”

“What the hell do you mean?” I demand.

“You don’t think about it, but our mothers look exactly alike. Your father was white.” With her free hand, she tosses a few blades of grass into the river. “They were light and you were even lighter, but my dad was black, and I look different.”

It reminds me of August telling me how displaced he felt sometimes. The irony of me feeling like I didn’t belong because I was “too white” and Lo being jealous because she was “too dark” strikes me as funny, and I release a giggle.

“That’s funny to you?” Lo asks, one side of her full mouth tilted.

“It’s just . . . I never felt like I fit in our neighborhood because I looked so different, and the girls always said I was stuck up and thought I was better than them. I really just wanted to fit. I just wanted to look like everyone else.”

“And I just wanted to look like you.” Lo twists her mouth to the side. “When I came here, MiMi sniffed that shit out right away.”

A movement in my peripheral vision catches my eye. “No, Sarai.”

I pull my hand free of Lo’s and walk to the water’s edge, retrieving my little adventurer. I plop down on the grass, careless of the black dress I wore to the funeral, and sit my daughter between my legs. Lo settles in a puddle of black linen beside me, stretching her legs out on the grass.

“MiMi knew that even beyond the hurt of what Mama had done, choosing that motherfucker over me,” Lo says with dispassion, “that there was another hurt under it all. Mama choosing him only reinforced that I wasn’t good enough. Maybe she didn’t love me as much as she would have if I’d been . . . different.”

Memories of Aunt May complaining about Lo’s hair come to mind. She’d say she didn’t know what to do “with hair like this.” When Lo learned to press her own hair, Aunt May and my mother would complain about the “smell of burning hair” in the house. A hundred little thoughts come to me like pinpricks, piercing my ignorant bliss.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I hope I never made you feel that way, Lo.”

“No, not you.” She reaches for my hand again and smiles. “You were my hopscotch, Bo. I knew you didn’t feel that way.”

“Did MiMi do one of her cleansing ceremonies to fix you, too?” I only half-laugh because I’m still not sure what that was or what it did, but I know I’m changed somehow.

“It wasn’t that simple,” Lo says. “It never is. No, she told me about a boy she loved when she was young. When he came to the house, her mother said he failed the paper-bag test.”

“What is a paper-bag test?”

“You have to remember it was New Orleans, years ago,” Lo offers. “Our family was filled with quadroons and octoroons and a whole bunch of words for almost white. So when she came home with a brown brother, her mother broke out the paper bag. They would hold a paper bag against your skin, and if you were darker than the paper bag, you didn’t pass the test.”

“That’s awful. Oh my God.”

“Yeah, and MiMi regretted letting him go. He ended up marrying a friend of hers. He treated her like a queen, and they lived a happy life not a block from where he asked MiMi to marry him.” Lo blinks at tears, her lips tightening. “She told me that she missed out on him because of a stupid paper bag,” Lo says. “And anyone who misses out on me would be as foolish as she had been and that they would live to regret it.”

I glance down at my daughter, with her skin lighter than mine and her eyes of blue–violet, and I swear to myself that no one will ever make her feel out of place or question her identity. It may not be a promise I can completely keep, but I’ll try.

“Anyway, enough reminiscing.” Lo looks at me, clear-eyed and probing. “It’s the future we need to discuss.”

I watch the sun dipping into the long, watery line of horizon, like a cookie diving into milk. “It’s getting dark.” I stand, brushing my dress off and bending to pick up Sarai.

“Listen to me.” Lo grabs my wrist, looking up from her plot on the riverbank. “You can’t stay here, Bo.”

I swallow a quick retort, a defense. Even though these were my very own thoughts before I came to the river, I resist the idea of leaving. “What if it’s not . . .” I gulp sudden trepidation, “. . . safe to leave? What if Caleb comes after us?”

“You’ve done all you can to keep him from doing that.” Lo squeezes my wrist gently until I meet her eyes. “The leash is tight around his neck, but it’s also tight around yours. Think about all you gave up. Get it back.”

Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.

MiMi’s incantation circles my thoughts.

“The dreams you had. Your ambitions,” Lo continues, in unknowing chorus with MiMi’s voice in my head. “Reclaim them.”

“But Sarai needs—”

“Sarai needs to see what we never saw,” Lo says dryly. “Let her see her mother pursuing her dreams. Let her see you standing on your own two feet.”

“I will need the money,” I murmur. The little bit of cash Andrew smuggled to me when I left will run low eventually, even though our expenses have been next to nothing out here.

“You need more than money. Girl, you need a life.” Lo stands, too, taking Sarai from me.

“Do you remember any of your Louisiana geography?” Lo asks.

“Um, that would be a no.” I laugh. “I mean, the basics, yeah.”

“Did you ever learn about deltaic switching?”

“No idea,” I tell her, frowning and searching my memory.

“I don’t remember all the details, but the long and short of it is that the Mississippi River searches for a shorter route to the sea. It makes these deposits of silt and sand over time to get there faster.” Lo shrugs. “Think of it like geographical evolution. Well, the bayou was one of the points of deltaic switching, and over time, about every thousand years or so, it literally changes its course.”

“Wow.” I’m not sure what else to say. “What does that mean, though?”

“It means that this very spot where we’re standing right now was powerful enough to be a part of that—to help set the new course for the freaking Mississippi River.” She starts walking back up the shaded path to the house, but looks over her shoulder, locking our eyes.     PrevNextTip: You can use left and right keyboard keys to browse between pages.

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