“Yeah… okay.…” I don’t know quite what to say, but I don’t pull away, and she doesn’t let go.
“We worked so hard to give you girls everything… to protect you from everything… maybe too hard. I’m not sure. The world doesn’t let black children be children for very long. We wanted you to have as long a childhood as possible. We only meant to protect you girls, never to lose you. Your father and I both grew up long before we should’ve had to. Both of us, in different ways. Do you get what I’m saying?”
She holds her hand to my cheek as though she’s trying to give me her thoughts through her fingertips.
“I think so.”
She pauses for a moment as though she’s going to say more, but instead exhales deeply, like she’s been holding that same breath ever since I was born.
* * *
My mother walks over to the bookshelf and pulls out a photo album. “Your father and I have been putting together your yearbook page. It’s supposed to be a surprise, but I want you to see this one photo.”
She pulls out a photo of the two of us in front of a sleek glass building that looks really familiar. In it, she cradles fat baby me in one arm and holds Jo’s hand with the other. Jo looks up at her, and I drool all over myself toward the camera.
“This was the first building I was the lead architect on. I started it when I got pregnant with you, and I was so scared I wouldn’t be able to finish it. It was already a huge deal that I was the first and only black woman at the firm, and young, and a lot of people thought I didn’t deserve to be there. I thought that once I told them I was pregnant, they’d make me hand the project over to somebody else. And I kept being afraid the entire time. At one point I even wanted to quit, to spare myself the indignity of being taken off the project, which I just knew was coming. But you kept me going—because I wanted to prove something to myself, but also to show you girls that I could. That one day you could. That one day you can. We drove by it that one day; do you remember?”
When I was little, we went on a field trip to a place out in Riverside called Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center. I was very excited, because field trips meant that we got to go on school buses and eat junk food like Lunchables and Fruit Roll-Ups, chased by Hi-C that came in bright boxes, yellow as the buses themselves. Our school required that parents put in a certain number of volunteer hours every year, so my father and mother drew straws, and she either won or lost. When we all started to pile onto the bus, she wanted to sit next to me, but I wanted to sit with my friends. So instead she sat next to Nancy Chang’s mother, who also worked for a living. When we got there, we ran around in the dust and touched dug-up dinosaur bones, and at the gift shop I bought shiny, colored crystals dug from deep in the earth.
On the bus on the way back home, Heather and I were chatting about horses when my mother walked up the aisle and knelt down beside me.
“Look, Ash!” she said, and excitedly pointed out the window at a building, tall, gleaming, and new. “I designed that. That one is one of mine!”
I glanced at it.
“Cool,” I said.
My mother waited for a second for me to say something else, but when I didn’t, she walked back over to Nancy Chang’s mother, and I turned back to Heather, held my Fruit Roll-Up with my mouth, and let it dangle out like a tongue.
I didn’t know it had meant so much to her then. I wish I had.
“I remember,” I say.
She grabs my hand and beams like Christmas.
“You can do anything, Ashley. Be anything… But first, you’re gonna have to pay for Trevor’s car yourself… get a summer job…” She laughs.
“I guess I’ll see if Hot Dog on a Stick is hiring again. I still have my hat around here somewhere. I forgot to give it back.”
“I forgot about your working there… Did I ever tell you my first job was at a diner?”
I shake my head.
“It was the summer Robert Kennedy died. A girl from work invited me to this party at her house. I didn’t like her that much, I thought she was annoying, but there was a boy I liked who was going to be there. We got drunk, and she had a Ouija board and tried to talk to Robert Kennedy from the dead.”
“What did he say?”
“ ‘Hello.’ That’s it. Just hello.” My mother starts to laugh.
Once we played with a Ouija board at Heather’s to try to talk to her bubbe after she died, but we never found out what her bubbe was trying to say because as soon as the pointer moved, we screamed and ran out of the room.
“What happened to the boy you liked?”
“Nothing.” My mother laughs again. “I was too shy… So what happened at prom?”
“Kimberly called me a nigger and pushed me into a pool in front of the whole school.”
“What? Why?”
“Because of a boy.” I pause before I continue. “I messed up. Really bad.”
I hope she doesn’t ask me more. Instead, she grows silent. My mother seems to be coming undone. If normally her curls are perfectly styled and gelled down, today they’re frizzy and frayed. Her foundation has melted with worry. I notice a puckering of the lips I’ve never noticed before; age. It occurs to me that this is the first time in a long time I’ve told her something about myself without telling Lucia first.
“You remember what happened with her and the pool when you were little?”
“Yeah.”
“Your father and I wondered if maybe we’d made a mistake then. Sending you to that school. Raising you where we were raising you. You want things to be better for your kids. I don’t know which better would’ve been best. We always tried to do what we thought was best for you. Everything was always for you.”
She says it like she’s asking my forgiveness. But she’s still a little defensive, kinda.
“Thank you,” I say, and she nods. I start to walk up the stairs, but before I reach the top, I turn around. “You’re not mad at me?”
“You’re more than your mistakes,” my mother says, and I know that in this particular moment, she’s not really talking to me at all.
* * *
“Hey, Daddy.”
In his office, my father sits surrounded by piles of paperwork and several leather-bound reference books. A few overstuffed file folders threaten to slide off the desk, and I quickly grab them before they can leap to their doom.
“I really do have to get more organized one of these days.” He scratches himself right above his eyebrow.
“You really should let Lucia help you before she leaves.”
“I’m afraid if she straightens up, I won’t know where anything is.” He laughs, and his drugstore reading glasses lift up and slide down his face a tad.
I run my hand along the books in his bookshelf, these giant tomes on international accounting and financial trade and global perspectives on economies in transition, blah blah, numbers numbers. Numbers are easier for some people than people, I think. And yet there are always people behind them.
“I’m sorry about Grandma Shirley,” I say. “I wish you had told me before.”
He peers up above his reading glasses before taking them off. “Every day of my life we lived with the awful things that happened to your grandmother, and then the awful stuff in the news. Right in the middle of my childhood, we’re coming home to watch hoses being set on people our own age for wanting to be equal, and the aftermath of people bombing churches and killing little girls. Girls who were even younger than me then…”
His file folders finally fall onto the ground, but he doesn’t rush to fix them.
“When your sister was born, I remember holding her in my arms and thinking I would do anything I could to keep the world from hurting her. Same with you. I wanted to raise you guys without that stuff in your heads. Not that I was ashamed, or that I thought you should be ashamed. We aren’t the ones who should carry that shame. Just not… weighed down by it, I guess.”
He reaches out to hold my hand as he speaks, and I feel lik
e a little kid again. I don’t remember the last time I held on to him like this. He used to say that when I was first born, I was so small he could hold me in one hand.
“I wanted you guys to get to be happy, carefree, even,” he says.
“We were, sometimes. We are…”
Even when we’re sad or scared, somewhere around the corner there’s a bit of joy.
“Hey, you remember me and Jo when we had to evacuate during the wildfires in that gym?”
He starts to laugh.
There were four deer that walked the school grounds back and forth, as though that same ruddy fireman had told even them this place was safe, but they weren’t quite sure how to be there. Outside, the smoke was an orange screen door around the very sun itself. The deer didn’t run through the grounds or cause any damage; instead, they kept to themselves in the farthest corner of the field, away from people, away from the fire, evacuees like us. A bunch of us kids tried to creep closer, but our adults pulled us by our collars, away.
“Leave them be,” they said.
There were enough animals to bother inside the gym itself. Jo and I played with a skittish guinea pig named Rat, who belonged to a sickly girl who lived three blocks away from us. Maybe she wasn’t sickly, just allergic, but my main memory of her is that she coughed and constantly wiped her nose so that there was a thick yellow smear across her pink sleeve. Every once in a while she’d bring out a blue inhaler and puff and suck like it was the source of life itself. Anyway, Jo and I begged and begged for a pet, but my parents said we weren’t responsible enough for one, and it wouldn’t be fair to Lucia to make her clean up after our pet. Rat the hamster had what the sickly girl told us was a show-length coat, which meant that Rat kinda looked like a shih tzu. While the sickly girl watched, we braided Rat’s coat into two soft pigtails that unraveled quickly.
Jo gently lifted a squirming Rat up to the light and declared loudly in front of our parents, “We would take such good care of you.”
I nodded enthusiastically.
Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” wafted in all dreamy-like from a boom box. Us kids ran from pet to pet and climbed up and down the bleachers. Jo and I made friends with several kids we didn’t know who lived nearby and their pet dogs, a few goats, and even a miniature pony named Astrid who pooped green hay bits on the squishy gym floor. We shrieked at the top of our lungs and ran around, excited by the adventure, like it was one big sleepover—entirely forgetting that our houses could be gone, and our toys with them.
At night we slept in rows of green cots, like preschoolers, or soldiers.
The next morning, the fireman stood up on the podium and announced on the loudspeaker, “Fire’s out. You’re okay to go back to your lives, good people.”
And just like that, it was over. We stumbled into the light and went home to see how much of our lives remained.
Mostly, I remember the sounds of all those different people in one room together—taking care of one another, breathing, snoring, being. As though we were one big heart.
“But I don’t want to go home!” Jo whined as she fed one last carrot to Astrid. “We’re having so much fun!”
Daddy laughs at the memory and leans back in his office chair, his hands behind his head. Bleary-eyed from her nap, Jo appears in the doorway and peeks in at us. “What are you two laughing at in here?”
“Yo’ face,” I say.
“Shut up,” she says.
Daddy looks over at the two of us and grins. “Oh, my beautiful daughters!”
* * *
The media and the politicians keep stereotyping everyone who was out during the riots as “savage” or “lawless” or “hooligans” or “thugs,” an “underclass” not representative of the “real America.”
But Jo was out there, and that’s not true of her at all. And if it’s not true of her, then it’s probably not true of at least some of the other people who were out there too. My sister is gentle and kind and thoughtful and opinionated and delicate, and also impulsive and outraged and angry. If anything, Jo was out there because of her values, because she cares too much. I’ve been reading a lot of the books that Jo left behind, all these history and civil rights books, some of her old textbooks from school, trying to understand the world. Trying to understand her. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing, but maybe some of her reasons were the right ones. Because a bunch of dudes beating on one dude who was already on the ground until he’s brain damaged and broken is wrong. Because prosecuting people differently for the same exact crimes because of skin color is wrong. Because some people being able to buy private islands while other people sleep outside on the ground is wrong. Because knowingly destroying poor communities with drugs let in to fund wars against foreign regimes is fundamentally wrong. Because even though you finally enact a Civil Rights Act not even thirty years ago, it doesn’t erase centuries of unequal wealth, unequal access, unequal schooling, unequal living conditions, unequal policing. You can’t tell people to pull up on bootstraps when half of them never had any boots to begin with, never even had the chance to get them. Or when you let people burn whole, thriving black communities to the ground and conveniently forget about it. Because maybe the problem isn’t only with “bad” people; maybe the problem is with the whole system.
Because we’re supposed to be better than that in this country. Whoever we are. Because we can be. Sometimes people do real stupid shit when they feel invisible or powerless. Doesn’t make it right, but maybe at least we can try to understand a little?
It’s like the riots pulled focus from one Los Angeles to the other, but it’s all part of the same photo, if you’re looking. Always has been. The palm trees and the pain, the triumph and the trauma—all of us, one big beating heart. The “real Los Angeles.” The “real America.”
It’s like Uncle Ronnie said: it’s our history, in our blood, in our bones.
“Ain’t no new starts,” he said.
CHAPTER 23
LANA SQUINTS AT me from an eye swollen the color of midnight. I feel a little dizzy when I see it, unsteadied by its violence. Unwittingly, I reach my hand out to touch it, and Lana quickly grabs me by the wrist, hard. She-Ra, the cat, looks up at us expectantly from her perch on the front steps, like we’re on Springer and the tabby is urging us to “Fight! Fight!”
“You told,” Lana says.
“I did.”
“Asshole.”
The cat slithers through the small space in the doorway. Her tail thwaps me as she passes, and I can’t tell whether it’s a deliberate hit. It could’ve been a friendly “hello,” or an “ugh,” or maybe She-Ra doesn’t even care that I’m here at all. Cats are a lot like teenage girls, I think.
“I was afraid for you,” I say.
“It was only a few more months.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. I would’ve moved out. Or away. Something.”
“Can we talk? Please.”
“I don’t want to talk to you, Ashley.”
“Please? I can’t lose any more friends. Please.”
I guess I must sound really pathetic, because Lana cracks the door open wider and looks me up and down.
“Who said we were friends?” she says as she lets me in. She wears a pair of ratty jeans and a men’s V-neck undershirt, with a red handkerchief wrapped around her tousled hair so she looks a bit like Axl Rose. I follow her through Pham and Brad’s house to the backyard. Outside, cardboard boxes strain to hold their Sharpie-designated loads.
“You’re moving?”
“To my dad’s.” Lana explains that the court gave emergency temporary custody to her father.
“Isn’t he down the street?”
“Might as well be another country,” she says.
The trampoline lies in pieces in the grass. It strikes me how delicate it is, a bunch of metal poles and fabric stretched over a circle, like a little world. That’s all it takes to make a person fly.
“My m
other might go to jail,” Lana says. “Maybe she deserves to, but she’s still my mother, you know?”
“My sister might go to jail too.” I bite my tongue to hold back my tears.
“For what?” she says.
The tears well up. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since Jo’s arrest.
“She’s so stupid,” I say as the tears come down. “I hate her.”
“No, you don’t,” Lana says. “Just like I don’t hate my mom. Even though maybe I should.”
She pauses for a moment before she grabs me by the hand. Then she sits down on the ground beneath us.
“Sit,” she says.
We stretch our bodies on the grass like stars. Little-bitty bugs crawl around on our fingertips. A roly-poly makes its way from Lana’s hand to mine. I can feel the tiny green blades along my cheeks.
“You know how if you close your eyes, it feels like you can feel the earth spinning under you?” she says.
“Yeah.”
“It startles you at first. And then you remember we’re so little and the world is so big.”
I’m not sure I 100 percent get what that has to do with Jo, but I also think I get it. We lie there quietly until the cat pounces on Lana and starts to hump her leg.
“Stop it, She-Ra.” She pushes her off.
“Your cat’s a real horndog.” I laugh.
“That was so dumb,” she says, but then she snorts.
“I’m going to help clean up South Central with Julia’s church group later. Wanna come with?”
“Look at you, being civic-minded! Wish I could, but I gotta keep moving.”
A man I assume must be Lana’s father peers over the backyard fence. He’s desert brown, with bright green eyes. His hair is closely cropped to his head in the beginnings of tight curls. If she mostly looks like her mother, her mouth is definitely his, big and warm with teeth like Chiclets. He calls out to her in a language that sounds like a million grains of sand. She stands up and responds to him in English.
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