The Good House

by Tananarive Due

  “You’re lying. Yours isn’t that high.” For the first time, the boy looked irritated.

  “What, you thought you were the smartest guy around?”

  The boy frowned and went back to his painting. Corey could definitely tell this kid must be a magnet for bullies. He’d met other kids like him who could tear up any test you put in front of them, but who were retarded when it came to getting along with anybody. Corey used to feel that way, too.

  “I bet you listen to a lot of gangsta rap,” the boy said.

  “Sometimes. I like Snoop, Dre, DMX, you know.”

  “Figures. That’s sellout crap for the radio. That’s not about anything.”

  “Ya’ll white boys in the suburbs are the ones spending all that crazy money, trying to piss off your parents. Don’t complain to me. What do you listen to?”

  “Rappers who’ve got something to say. Political rap, consciousness rap. Public Enemy, Sistah Souljah, Mos Def, Arrested Development, Speech, the Roots, Wyclef Jean. Some of it’s old, but my dad turned me on to it.”

  “That’s all cool with me,” Corey said. “I’m down with that stuff. Mos Def’s a poet for real.”

  “You ever heard of a group called the Orishas?” the boy said.

  “I know that word. What are they called again?”

  “The Orishas. They’re Cuban.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of that,” Corey said. He had a Cuban friend in Oakland, Osvaldo, who practicedsantería . Osvaldo’s family went to ceremonies wheresanteros sacrificed goats and chickens for the Orishas in ceremonies that lasted all night sometimes, away from the eyes of the police. Osvaldo had a fire of belief in his eyes that made Corey want to know more aboutsantería, and Osvaldo never ran out of stories. He told Corey how the ceremonies helped bring his family safely from Cuba, or saved his father’s life in Vietnam, or helped bring his aunt back from her deathbed. Osvaldo said he’d seen a man on crutches leap nearly six feet into the air, ridden by anorisha, his face full of bliss. Osvaldo also claimed he’d put a hex on the guy his girlfriend was stepping out with by covering his hand with a special powder and offering the poor guy a handshake.Fucked him up good, Osvaldo had said, and he wasn’t kidding, either. Corey had been careful about shaking Osvaldo’s hand after that. You never knew.

  Corey would give anything just to see real magic happen once. When he was little, he’d ordered a dozen card tricks and magic sets from the back pages of comic books, always hoping the magic would be real. Something disappears. Something comes out of thin air. Something moves across a table. But it never happened. All the magic sets he ordered were full of illusions, sleight of hand, decoys. None of it was real. But there might be real magic out there somewhere, he figured. People in Sacajawea said Gramma Marie had known voodoo—she fixed problems and gave people tea for good luck and helped bring the fish to the river when the fish were missing, people said.That was magic. That was Osvaldo’s kind of magic.

  “Is your CD aboutsantería?” Corey asked the boy, hopeful.

  “No, man. It’s rap music. Orishas is just the name they use. Some of the rhythms might be from ceremonies for gods or whatever, but these are young guys from Cuba who’ve got something to say. It’s in Spanish, though. People who don’t know Spanish are missing out.”

  “I’m taking Spanish,” Corey said, although he was sorry there wasn’t more about magic on the CD. “You’re not the only one who knows some Spanish.”

  The boy’s face lit up. “Oh, then you gotta hear the Orishas. I’ll go get it.” He dropped his brush into the paint can, about to run off. “What’s your name anyway?”

  “Corey.”

  “I’m Sean. Are you sure you’re gonna listen to it?”

  “I guess,” Corey said. “If it’s supposed to be good.”

  “You have to bring me one of yours, a trade. When you’re done, we switch back.”

  “Most of my good shit’s at my dad’s house. But I’ve gotDoggy Style by Snoop.”

  “Yeah, all right.” This time, Sean started running back toward his trailer.

  “Thought you didn’t like gangsta!” Corey called after him.

  “But that one’s classic. I always make an exception for a classic.”

  “Cool,” Corey said, smiling. He’d have to go in the house and sneak into his secret stash in his closet to findDoggy Style . Mom censored his music, and he wasn’t supposed to have any CDs with explicit lyrics, which meant he was only allowed to play radio edits and Will Smith on his bedroom stereo. Mostly, he used his Discman and hoped he wouldn’t get caught. It would be good to share his music with someone instead of hiding it all the time. T. would probably think Sean was a trip, Corey thought. T. liked old groups like Arrested Development, too.

  The trade complete, Corey went home.

  In the privacy of his room, he first heard the Orishas’ blend of old-school Cuban ballads and hip-hop, and he dug each cut more than the last. The music was different, but it was good. He recognized it a little, because Osvaldo played Cuban music during the sixth-period yearbook class—they were free to crank up the boom box in that class because they were in a portable classroom and the teacher was cool. Chango was always there in the words of the songs Osvaldo played. Corey recognized his name every time he heard it. Osvaldo said Chango was his personal god.

  The Orishas sang about Chango, too. Their drums were probably playing to Chango, Corey thought. Osvaldo had shown him a dance for Chango, clowning in class one day. Flapping his arms like a chicken, hips quivering. The other kids had laughed, but Corey thought it looked cool as hell, dancing for a god. Osvaldo’s skin was white, but Corey realized when he saw him doing that chicken dance that Osvaldo was more African than he was. Africa was still living in Osvaldo.

  “This music’s all right,” Corey said, nodding to the Orishas’ beat.

  With twenty-four days to live, Corey Hill started to believe the summer might not be so bad.

  That night, Corey dreamed of a door painted bright blue, an endless blue. It was the same dream he’d had every night since his arrival in Sacajawea, always returning as soon as he was asleep, the lone fixture in his dream space. Corey settled into the dream as if he were returning home, bathed in whispers without true voices as he walked toward the door he visited so often.

  Behind the blue door, Corey heard someone calling his name.

  Nine

  Present-day

  MONDAY

  IT HAPPENED WITHOUT FORETHOUGHT.Instead of going left toward the master bedroom where she had planned to take a nap after driving Naomi to the airport, Angela went to the bedroom across the hall from hers, next to the window seat, the room with the closed door. She turned the brass doorknob, pushed the door open, walked in.

  Since the curtains were open, the sun soldiering outside washed the smallish bedroom in light. Bare wooden floorboards reflected the sunlight, bouncing it back up against the white walls. The room looked like a dream-space, and for an instant it seemed to be a living thing because so many of the sights impacted her at once: Janet Jackson flirting in the poster on the wall with a sculpted midriff, Corey’s jeans and bath towel thrown across the back of his chair, his desk covered in CD jewel cases, his wire notebook open beside them, an overflowing black duffel bag stuffed halfway into the open closet door, Corey’s Air Jordans in the middle of the floor—one toppled on its side, the other standing upright, just tossed off. Corey must be standing behind the door, Angela thought, certain of it. She could almost hear him breathing.

  There was a neatly folded note on the pillow mound on the made-up bed. Angela was so calm, she did not feel the maws of panic when she saw the note, even though a part of her nightmarish vision had leaped into reality. There had not been a note in here That Day. She and Tariq and Sheriff Rob Graybold had searched this room for a note—they had opened the desk drawers and flipped through Corey’s notebook full of poems and rap lyrics—and there had been no note explaining why he was dead. This note was new. Angela unfolded the piece of
stationery and read the familiar jittery script, an old woman’s:

  Angie—

  I made the bed, but I didn’t see fit to move anything without your say so.

  If you would like this room cleaned, please let me know.

  Rgds, Laurel Everly

  Bless you, Mrs. Everly, Angela thought. It would be better if the bed hadn’t been made, but this was good, too. An untouched room was the only way to commune with Corey now, where she could spend time in his personal space and take note of the evidences of him.

  She needed to see him again.

  Angela looked behind the door, and Corey’s brown bomber-style leather jacket hung there. She’d given him that jacket for Christmas, and he liked it so much he’d brought it to Sacajawea despite the summer heat. The jacket’s brown leather still smelled new. Gently, Angela took the jacket from its hook and searched for her son’s scent. The leather smell was strongest because the jacket had not belonged to him long, but Corey was there at the neckline. A teenager’s cheap cologne, glycerin and oils from a hair moisturizer he’d started using to make his tight, wiry black locks glisten. At the armpit, the jacket’s black lining smelled of deodorant and a whisper of tart musk.Yes . Corey’d had a strong smell since puberty, with strong body salts, like his father. Smelling him was a shock. Angela’s legs felt weak, but only in a twinge. She wished she could bottle Corey’s smell and keep it.

  What had kept her from coming to see her son? Corey had been here all along.

  She went to his desk next, reading the poems left behind in his notebook. She had tried once before, desperate to find traces of him, but hadn’t been able to finish. This time, she wasn’t as bothered by the sexuality and profanity as she had been right after he died, when she’d wanted so much to find only his childlike affection preserved, not his burgeoning manhood. She’d felt so crushed by the disappointment of whatwasn’t in his words, in her memory Corey’s poems had been pornographic, a source of shame. Now, she read Corey’s writings with appreciative eyes.

  Sweet honey cream,

  wild woman of my dream,

  will you swallow me h-o-l-e?

  Can I be the burrowing mole

  in your field of streams?

  Can you hear my (eager) screams?

  Hold my Lust with your fevered hand.

  Let me taste the Promised Land.

  “You were becoming a writer, weren’t you?” Angela said.

  For an hour, Angela sat at the edge of her son’s bed and read, forgetting about Naomi and Onyx. The creations from Corey’s pen awed her. Corey’s love poems were full of surprisingly astute sexual metaphors, but not all of the poems were sexual. She was amused to see that he’d written a poem about Sean’s horse, Sheba. And his rap rhymes, although they were littered with the requisitefuck andshit seasonings to make them palatable to young tastes, were more than the empty bravado she’d assumed they were. One longer rap, called “Rebelution,” seemed to be a plea to young blacks to look beyond society’s expectations of them. One of her favorite passages from “Rebelution” was:Five-O? You best just go. / You ain’t got shit on me. / This niggah don’t subscribe to slave mentality. / Your prisons don’t define me, / This rebel’s got a mind,G.

  Inevitably, she came to a blank page, and then another. And another. She’d reached the end of Corey’s work. Angela flipped forward into the notebook, finding nothing until she was nearly at the end, with only five or six pages remaining. There, she saw Corey’s handwriting in block letters so large that five words nearly took up the entire page: WE HAVE FUCKED UPBIG.

  The wordBIG was underlined six times. The ink was dark, and the paper was deeply indented, so she knew Corey must have been bearing down hard on the page. The sight of the ominous phrase was such a stark contrast to the other writings that Angela felt her fingertips thrill when she touched the words. The next pages in the notebook were bleak white. She checked them one by one. Empty.

  Secret sex poems. Secret fears. Her son’s secret life.

  Angela massaged a cramp in her neck. Corey might have written those last words close to the date of his death. He’d separated that page from the work he cared about, perhaps choosing it at random in a moment of anxiety. Had he met a girl and gotten her pregnant? Had he killed himself because he’d been afraid to tell her and Tariq about something he’d done?

  “Was it really so hard to talk to me, Corey?” Angela said. “Was I that bad?”

  It wasn’t a suicide note, not exactly, but it was evidence that Corey had been upset about something. That wasn’t a surprise. She knew he’d been upset that day. She’d asked him several times what was wrong, but this was the first clue she’d come across. Why hadn’t this notebook been taken into evidence? How had this been overlooked?

  Suicide. The word raked at her, but Angela had always known it was possible. No, it was probable. Would she rather believe that a boy as bright as Corey had found a gun, accidentally put it to his head, and pulled the trigger? A young child might do that, but a teenager? Yes, it happened, Sheriff Rob Graybold had said. Teenagers play Russian roulette all the time. Or, Corey might not have realized the gun was loaded. She’d accepted the accidental death theory only because it was more gentle than the alternative.

  Corey’s last note had nothing to do with her, and Angela felt relief roll across her soul. Who did the “we” in the note refer to, then? And was there a relationship between WE HAVE FUCKED UPBIG and his last words to her,I’m gonna take care of you good? Angela’s heart raced, although the racing had nothing to do with the fear that had kept her away from Gramma Marie’s house and Corey’s room for so long. This was something else. Resolve. Excitement, even. She could solve this. She would find the answer because she was no longer afraid to look for it.

  Angela went to Corey’s closet, where a few of his clothes were hanging up neatly while most of them were piled on the floor, hidden from sight. This time, she didn’t pause to search for his scent. Angela studied the clothes on the floor, which were mostly dirty, stained with grass, mud, and dried perspiration. She checked the pockets of his jeans. She found a movie stub for the R-ratedThe Fast and the Furious, which Tariq must have snuck Corey in to see in Longview, damn him. An Almond Joy wrapper. Loose change. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she figured she would know it when she saw it.

  Angela moved on to the duffel bag, and she found a box of condoms in a zippered compartment. The box had been opened, so she counted the wrapped condoms inside, finding eleven. One was missing, then. That made sense, she remembered: There had been one condom hidden in Corey’s wallet, which he’d had in his back pocket at the time of his death. She’d brought that wallet home with her, and it was probably in her box of Corey’s things, somewhere in her bedroom. She wished she had brought it with her.

  Angela found a dozen CDs in the duffel bag, all of them marked with Explicit Lyrics parental advisories. Little stinker, Angela chuckled. She’d run the same game on Gramma Marie in high school, keeping her Richard Pryor albums hidden from her grandmother’s prying eyes, listening to them late at night, with the volume turned low. She couldn’t help thinking that Richard Pryor was definitely the better end of the artistic deal, but every generation has its heroes, she reminded herself. She’d been looking forward to the day when Corey would no longer be a minor, when she wouldn’t feel responsible for shepherding his values, and she might have said,Okay, Corey, put on some Snoop Dogg and tell me what’s so special about his dope-smoking and pussy-hunting . The day Corey graduated from college, she had planned to share a glass of wine with him, and on that day they could have started becoming friends instead of just two strong-willed individuals with conflicting agendas, the role they had been mired in all his life.

  Tariq had never pushed the parent space with Corey, behaving like a buddy from the day the kid could talk, and she’d always felt forced to take up the slack. Dominique Toussaint had never been stable enough to keep track of where Angela was, who she was with, or what she was doing
, leaving her to make her own decisions, and as a consequence Angela had been drinking Schlitz and smoking pot at twelve, having sex a few months later, when she was thirteen. Gramma Marie had given her boundaries. Corey had never had the chance to grow up and understand why Angela had been so rigid about discipline, so fanatical about not exposing him to predators and seemingly innocuous traps. To Corey, she’d been the Bad Cop to his father’s Good Cop, and it wasn’t fair. She’d never had the chance to be his buddy, too.

  Angela felt some of her newfound strength seep away as new tears fell. She needed to lie down. She went to Corey’s bed and lay atop the bedspread, her knees pulled close to her chest in a fetal position. She waited for sobs, but they never came. A raw sense of regret burned in her chest, flaring hot, but it would cool soon. Grief in smaller, manageable doses.

  She could do this.

  Angela faced the window’s sunshine where she lay, and her eyes rested on the window seat, which Corey had left piled with his good-sized boom box, a stack of clean socks, and copies ofVibe magazine. Staring, Angela felt memory tickling her, and something more nebulous than memory. Something she could not put a name to.