At night, as her breasts filled painfully again and again with milk that leaked through and stained her T-shirts, she lay in bed ignoring Melody’s cries and studied trigonometry and chemistry.
As Aubrey slept with the baby on his chest, she read Shakespeare, the Brontës, Auden.
The desire was like nothing she’d ever known. Even as a child, she’d never doubted that she’d one day go to college. CathyMarie stoked something that had always been there, but Melody’s birth—the pain of it, the absolute ferocity with which the baby pushed into the world—now felt like it had changed Iris’s own DNA. But it hadn’t. As her eyes burned in the dim light of the reading lamp, she knew it was her mother and her mother’s mother and on back to something that couldn’t be broken that was driving her. The story of her life had already been written. Baby or no baby.
She had missed the last months of tenth grade and the whole summer after that. She’d missed hanging with friends, smoking weed, and dancing to the DJs spinning in Halsey Park. Before she’d gotten kicked out of Our Lady of St. Martin, she’d found herself falling asleep in the middle of algebra, waking up because the teacher was calling her name.
Had it not been for CathyMarie, she would have ended up in summer school. Fuck Our Lady of St. Martin. Fuck summer school. Her brain was on fire, hungry as hell. The public high school was only two blocks away. She’d go there. She’d blow it out of the water. She’d leave here.
She was already mostly gone.
13
The first time his mother fell, Aubrey knew.
They had spent years walking beaches. The sand dipping and rolling uncertainly along the shore, deep holes that had been dug by dogs and shallower ones that sand and horseshoe crabs had left behind. Her feet had been pale, blue veined, and sure. Her toes painted purple, bright red, and he even remembers once, a glittering gold. No, she was sure-footed, his mother was. When he tripped, she looked at him like something had gone down strange in his brain. Like how could a kid who came out of her stumble like this. Get up, Aubrey. And watch where you’re stepping! But she never had to watch her step. Her feet landed hard and firm and sure in the sand. Again and again and again imprinting it beautifully with tracks Aubrey stepped into, his own small feet sinking into the spaces she’d created.
So when she fell the first time, as they walked along the boardwalk at Coney Island, he knew. Her face landing hard against the splintering planks, swelling quickly as she lifted her head. Her immediate, I’m all right, I’m all right. Don’t make a fuss.
Her hands scraped and bleeding from failing to stop her fall. Pants torn at the knee. A small crowd gathering but his mother trying to rise and scatter them. Her embarrassment clear as pain.
It was the beginning of spring. Had they been walking along the shoreline, the fall would have been a softer one. Or maybe there wouldn’t have been any fall at all.
I’m all right, his mother said. Just walk beside me slowly, Aubrey. Walk me on down to the water.
14
They say you don’t remember early stuff, that you’re just suddenly six and having your first memories. But that’s not true. I can go back to five and four and three. I can go back to thirteen and ten and six. But it’s three that I’m remembering this morning. Three and Iris is nineteen. She’s packing and I’m sitting in my daddy’s lap watching her. The room is hot and thick—like there’s another person in there with us or just something heavy. When I lean back against my daddy’s chest, I can feel his heart beating. Not the slow beat I’d remembered falling asleep to. This was fast and hard. This was a terrifying pounding in his chest that I had to lift my head away from. Iris was humming as she packed. Every so often, she came over and kissed us both on our cheeks. She was happier than I’d ever seen her.
How strange it is to step back into that memory and see them there—my parents younger, my father thinner, my mother happier. The walls around us were painted a deep sagey green and the ceiling was white. That room didn’t exist that way by the time I was ten. It had become the guest room that Iris slept in when she visited—a shell of a room with a full-size bed, a two-drawer dresser, and a small light clipped to the headboard. A room I had to dust every Sunday, with windows I was made to wash at the changing of the seasons. But then it felt full, crowded. My mother’s suitcases and boxes of books, comforter, and pillows crowding it. My father and me sitting on the corner of the bed asking what we could do to help. Me handing her socks and bras and T-shirts. I don’t think I understood what was happening.
Where we going, Iris? I asked again and again. Where we going?
Where are we going, Melody. It’s where are we going? Mommy’s going to college to get her degree.
At three, I didn’t understand the word college. I didn’t understand degree. That it would take four years. That four years would soon become Forever.
Where. Are. We. Going. Iris?
And then. And then. And then.
Sometimes the body shakes the memory off. I see my mother’s suitcases being carried downstairs, her back disappearing through the door. My daddy’s neck and shoulder rising up toward my face, toward my tears, my screams. My daddy’s sides taking the blows of my kicking feet. His hands holding tight to me. My daddy. Holding on.
15
The winter Slip Rock’s red Mercedes cruised up Cornelia Street, made a left turn on Knickerbocker Avenue, and faded into memory, Aubrey was fifteen years old. It was the first time he had seen a car like that in the real world. As he walked from his apartment with Iris’s words still pressing against his brain, You put a baby inside me, he squinted at the pretty light-skinned brother he’d always kinda known now making good with his fly clothes and sweet ride. Slip Rock stuffed an unlit blunt into his mouth, then lifted his hand to his Kangol and nodded at Aubrey, his hazel eyes slitted against the winter sun.
What up, shorty?
What up, Slip Rock?
* * *
—
Ten years later, Aubrey stood holding Melody’s hand and listening to an OG whose name he couldn’t remember recount the story of Slip Rock’s murder—You know they shot him back of the head like they do when they real mad. That’s how they killed that yella boy. The old man’s bottom dentures were loose in his mouth, moving in small circles as he spoke. Melody stared, her own mouth hanging open. Wide-eyed. The OG blinked down at her, then lowered his voice as he recounted the way the back of Slip’s head was left dripping from the baby swings in Knickerbocker Park, his dookie chain snatched, his eyes blinked opened forever. That’s all she wrote, the man said, folding his bottom lip in to steady his teeth.
Standing there, Aubrey remembered Slip Rock’s nod, the cheeks still rocking baby fat and hardly anything on his face to shave yet. As the OG glanced at Melody again and took a sip from the bottle hidden inside a brown bag, Melody’s eyes followed his hand, the bottle moving to his lips, the wince that followed the sip.
That your girl? Pretty lil thang. God’ll make a butt-ugly boy, but I ain’t never seen him make a ugly girl child. Now when they grown, well, that’s a different story. The man laughed softly. Then took another drink and got quiet.
Forever, son, he repeated, as though he suddenly realized how poetic it sounded. That boy’s eyes was blinked open forever.
Aubrey held tighter to Melody’s hand, remembering how at fifteen, he’d watched Slip drive by, wishing he could get in the game, make some fast money, take himself and Iris and the baby that was coming away from this place forever.
Slip Rock had been spanking a royal-blue Adidas suit and blue Kangol matching it. He was about two years behind the fashion times, but it made sense—since he’d just done a stint at Spofford, where, as everybody knew, time stopped.
The speakers were blasting De La Soul and that was enough to bring all the kids on the block running toward the car. Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Tell me, mirror, what is wrong? But Aubrey stayed where he was, some
distance away from it all. He felt old, standing there. A little bit broken. He’d fisted his hands into the pockets of his pants and could feel the lint at the bottom of them. Even that saddened him. Lint instead of cash. A tired pair of gabardines instead of some breakaways. An old peacoat instead of a quarterfield. You put a baby inside me, he heard again and again. There was a baby growing inside Iris. A baby. It felt like the whole world was turning inside out on him. Crack had killed and taken televisions and watches and homes. As Slip Rock drove through Brooklyn, everyone waving and feeling the jealous burn of his ride knew crack had bought it. Crack had filled his pockets with cash and put the heavy gold chain around his neck. Crack had bought him a gun and let him rent the apartment above his mother’s where there was always a woman or two—fine as the ones on Yo! MTV Raps. Crack had paid for his fresh Caesar haircut and the do-rag and the Murray’s Nu Nile Aubrey figured he used at night to make the waves he sported beneath his Kangol. Aubrey bit at his bottom lip. All he had to do was nod back at Slip and he could get in the game.
You good? Slip called out to him. Cuz you know I got you if you ain’t.
Aubrey felt light inside his sneakers. Felt like he could lift off, fly into Slip Rock’s car, and be gone forever.
But he pressed his feet into the ground. Knotted his hands deeper inside his pockets. Yeah, he said. I’m good.
The phone had rung loud just after dawn, and as he put a pillow over his head to block out sound, he could hear his mother stumbling to answer it, then calling to him, holding the phone out. Tell her not to be calling my house this early anymore. I thought somebody had died! The cord not long enough to go beyond the kitchen, so him standing there, his mother too close, the air too hot around him. You put a baby in me, Iris said. His breath slowly leaving him. No air anywhere. His ragged underwear with the elastic shot around the leg holes, sagging like the rest of him. But I thought . . . , he said. I thought you said . . . Inside he was screaming. JesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJesus. Inside he was crying out, watching his life—the rest of tenth, eleventh, twelfth grade, college ball—become a sinkhole beneath his PRO-Keds, become an airless room, his mother too close and all-knowing. Nobody ever calls with good news this early in the morning. And his own self fading.
How did ten years pass so quickly?
Is that where you kissed Iris for the first time? Melody asked him, her hand still in his, the OG gone now, stumbling down the block with the help of several front gates keeping him upright. Melody was wearing a green coat and white boots with the tiniest rise of a heel on them. He didn’t know who had bought her those boots. They were too old for his baby girl. He didn’t like the way they shaped her legs beneath her tights and lifted her feet off the ground just enough to promise something.
Did I tell you that?
You said you kissed her in a park and this is a park. What age is too young to be kissing, Daddy?
Twenty-one. Nah. Twenty-two. Actually, you shouldn’t kiss somebody the way I kissed your mother till after I leave this world.
Daddy!
He squeezed her hand again and smiled. The sun was on them now, warm and bright against the cold. He’d never, ever imagined this—that he’d be bringing his daughter back to the old neighborhood. That so soon the old neighborhood would become heads blown off and stumbling old men. That his mother would be gone. And Iris . . .
You’re never leaving this world, Daddy. Cuz then you’d be leaving me. I’m never leaving you and you’re never leaving me. That’s all she wrote.
Listen to you eavesdropping and repeating grown folks’ conversations.
My friend Sasha, Daddy? She just lives with her mom. You should meet her mom and then me and Sasha could be sisters.
Aubrey laughed.
I know Sasha’s mama.
You know her but not like that!
Now Aubrey threw his head back and laughed out loud, then looked down to see his daughter’s own laughter. He had never imagined a love as deep and endless as this. Melody unlocked her hand from his and wrapped it around his waist. She was getting tall, her knees, even inside her tights, sticking out like tiny knobs from her long legs. He wished she had meat on her bones, but he’d been skinny like this as a boy, and Iris, even as her stomach grew big back then, from behind, you could hardly tell she was pregnant.
Iris.
She had just turned twenty-five and was living on the Upper West Side now in an apartment owned by the parents of some friend from Oberlin. A pied-à-terre they’d abandoned for full-time life in Florida.
What the fuck’s a pied terre, Iris? What the hell are you talking about?
Pied-à-terre. An extra apartment. She gave him that how can you not know this look that burst into shame inside his chest. They thought their kids would use it, but they all have their own places. They don’t want to sell it in case some grandkids need a place to live.
Fuck. White money is no joke.
Nope. It isn’t.
The apartment was on the eleventh floor and the large windows looked out over Central Park. In real life this place would cost hella money, she’d told him. He’d stared out the windows, his hands clasped behind his back. A group of white women ran along the park, their ponytails bouncing out from the backs of baseball caps. He’d stood at the window watching this, wondering again when he’d lost Iris. Wondering again if she’d ever really been his.
On Saturdays, Melody stayed with Iris. Once in a while, when things were going well between the two of them, Melody would stay over an extra night, but most Sunday mornings, his daughter was blowing up his phone by seven in the morning, asking him when he was coming to get her.
Aubrey stared at the park bench and tried not to remember Iris with her legs draped over his, her tongue searching his mouth. He had always been too scared to ask her how she learned to kiss the way she did. He’d never asked her who was the first. Some things, he didn’t think he wanted to know.
There was a mural to Slip Rock grinning out over the park—light-skinned and wide-nosed, his grin flashing gold-capped front teeth. Beneath it, in sprawling graffiti, the artist had sprayed Sun Rose: April 18, 1975 / Sun Setted: February 8, 1994.
Slip Rock. Gone.
Aubrey looked down at his daughter. Her grandmother had styled her hair into tiny box braids that curled at the edges and stopped just below her shoulders. She was staring out over the park, squinting.
That man’s teeth shook.
Aubrey smiled. A deep orange light was filtering in through the branches, and something about the way it moved over the swings—too gently, too much like a caress—made something catch in the back of his throat.
* * *
—
It’s poor around here, Melody said. It’s not poor where we live.
Aubrey remembered the apartment he’d shared with his mother, how the linoleum peeled back over itself, revealing splintered floorboards and the black spots roaches left behind. What were those spots? Crap? Blood? He didn’t know. His mother’s hands had been calloused, but he never knew why. It had something to do with the system. The years she refused to talk about moving from home to home. It was the same reason that she refused to scrub their floors when he was young, and the one time he offered to do it—after Iris had come over, her eyes showing him the dirt he hadn’t seen before—she told him her child would never scrub a floor. The fierceness in her voice, coupled with the sadness, scared him. But the first time he shook Sabe’s and Po’Boy’s hands, he was surprised. He had thought all grown-ups had rough and calloused hands. And now his own hand inside his daughter’s felt the way his mother’s had. Years in a mailroom, sorting and packing and opening. Years of crushing boxes and making binders and pulling staples before shredding documents. All of it had left him with a trace of asthma from the dust, and calloused hands. He wanted Melody to never have hands like his mother’s. And maybe that was what being not poor was. They w
ere not poor. Well, Melody wasn’t. In a minute, he could be left with nothing. Iris had proved that to him. She had walked out that door and disappeared into a world he would never know. Left him in this one.
I can take a bus there to see you. Bring the baby, he’d said again and again.
But there was always a reason—exams, too cold, be home soon anyway. Always something that she offered up at arm’s length—some stay away from this part of my life thing. Some you belong in Brooklyn.
You know what, Daddy?
What you got for me, Melody?
This place feels like from a long time ago. It feels like it’s in the past tense.
Yup, Aubrey said.
Sun setted.
16
She was still beside her the next morning. It had never lasted into daylight this way. Mostly it was hurried and fraught—their want for each other so desperate, shirts had been left on, underwear ripped, legs cramped from standing. But for the first time, they had gotten naked, climbed under the covers of the tiny twin bed, and pressed into each other against the chill that was still in the Ohio air. Iris lifted up and stared down at Jam. Her locks were spread over the pillow and across her eyes. She traced her fingers over Jam’s breasts, down her belly, and into the thick patch of black hair. Jam shivered but didn’t wake up. Iris leaned closer and inhaled her hair. The locks smelled like vinegar and heat. But there was lavender too. She pressed her nose into them, wondering if the smell of Jam’s hair would stay with her forever. Maybe this was love—wanting someone with all the senses. She leaned back against her own pillow and closed her eyes.
When she woke up again, Jam’s mouth was on her breast, moving toward her nipple. Iris jolted upright. During their night of lovemaking, she’d been able to keep the girl’s mouth away from her breasts, moving it instead back up to her own lips or down between her legs. Jam had smirked into the semidarkness but complied. But now, they were both looking down at her breasts in the bright daylight, milk seeping out over her belly. Iris tried to cover them with her hands, but Jam pulled them away, staring. When she looked into her eyes there were so many questions rising there.
Red at the Bone Page 8
