by Fiona Zedde
“Thanks, Mrs. Chambers.” The I think hovered loud and clear in the silence. Raven moved toward her bag on the couch. “I’m heading out,” she said. “It was really good to meet you both after all the great things Sara’s told me about you.”
“Don’t run off yet,” Sara’s father said. “Have a bite to eat with us or something.”
But Raven shook her head. “My boyfriend is expecting me any minute. Sorry.”
“Ah. A boyfriend. I wouldn’t have thought.” Sara’s mother unfroze from her position in the kitchen and came toward Raven. “Well, that’s nice to know. It was good meeting you, dear.” She put an arm under Raven’s elbow and walked her, smiling stiffly toward the door. “It’s too bad that you have to go. But it’s good to know that Sara has a friend like you down there at the college. You seem very nice.”
“She is very nice, Mama.” Sara met Raven’s eye. “With or without a boyfriend.”
Her mother’s mouth tightened as she stood in the doorway. An uncomfortable looking Raven gripped the straps of her shoulder bag. Raven’s eyes darted between Sara and her mother. “Still,” her mother went on, “it is nice that she has a boyfriend. That way I don’t have to worry.”
“Worry about what?” Sara asked.
“I really do have to go.” Raven threw the words between Sara and her mother. With an awkward smile, she pulled away from her mother’s light grasp and stepped through the open door. “See you Sunday afternoon, Sara.” Then as an afterthought. “It was good to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Chambers.” Her heels clicked down the driveway as she walked quickly to her car.
Sara’s mother closed the door with a sigh. “Such a nice girl.”
“Mama, you practically ran her out of here.”
“But she’ll be back Sunday, right?”
“Yes. To pick me up for school.”
“Sara’s right, Millie. You almost shoved the girl out the front door.”
“Calm down, both of you. I didn’t do anything to the child. She’ll be back. They always come back, right?” She sat on the couch, put her feet up in Sara’s father’s lap.
Sara watched her parents settling into the rhythms their lives had fallen into without her (or Syrus) in the house. Her mother rubbed at her forehead with a thin hand. Her father grasped her mother’s bare feet and began a gentle massage, keeping a concerned eye on her face.
“You’re tired,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for bed.”
She nodded and lay her head back on the armrest, relaxing more fully into his gentling movements on her feet. Sara felt, suddenly, as if she were intruding.
“It’s late.” She manufactured a wide yawn. “I’m going to my room, okay?”
Her father patted her shoulder when she leaned down to kiss him good night while her mother, with closed eyes, allowed Sara’s dry kiss on her cheek.
“Sleep good,” her mother said.
Sara’s bedroom smelled like the last time she lay in it. The faint scent of baby powder from the talc her mother scattered under the fitted sheet each time it was changed. And from outside the open window, perfume from the overgrown rosebush, thick and cloying. Deep orange blossoms with pale, nearly yellow hearts hid the view of the neighbor’s house and the street. The original intention of planting the roses at the window was to maintain Sara’s privacy; instead, the roses blocked most of the natural light and choked her with too-sweet scent. She knelt on the bed and pulled the window shut.
Under the covers, she couldn’t sleep. Instead, memories from the last time she lay in the bed tumbled behind her closed eyes. Nightmares of falling. Her body in flames as the earth rushed up. The screams that jerked her awake and kicking in tangled sheets.
She turned over, bed squeaking in protest and nightshirt twisting around her hips, to stare out the window. Thick green leaves and sunset petals muted gray by darkness crowded against the glass as if anxious to get in. They rustled, shifting silent shadows, in the fall breeze while beyond them slivers of moonlight fought to peek through.
Tomorrow, Sara thought. She pressed her fingers to the cool glass. Tomorrow.
*
Hours later, the smell of simmering mackerel woke her from an uneasy sleep. Cobwebs from her restless night clouded her mind before she blinked them away. She sat up in the bed. Syrus’s face, leftover from her dream, drifted briefly before her eyes. She shook her head and threw off the covers. After a quick shower and brushed teeth, she made her appearance in the kitchen. At the stove, her mother peeked into a deep pot that drifted steam up toward her face, while her father set their small table. The air felt less tense than it had last night.
“Good morning.”
Her father smiled at her greeting, and her mother waved the fork dripping with oil from stirring the mackerel. “Wash up. Food is almost ready.”
“I’m ready too.” Sara held up clean hands.
“Good. You can get the tea,” her father said. “The kettle is already on the stove. Just bring it to the table when it’s hot.”
Just then, the kettle shrieked. Sara lifted it from the bright orange circle of heat on the stove, clicked off the burner, and brought the water to the table, setting it on a warmer in the center. A box of assorted tea bags already sat next to it. Her mother quickly served each of their three plates a portion of breakfast—boiled dumplings, yam, and bananas with a heaping spoonful of mackerel sautéed in onions, tomatoes, and swimming in its own juices. She sat at the table, looking tired even though the day had just begun.
“Did you sleep well, Mama?”
“As well as can be.” Her mother poured hot water over the teabag in her cup, added two spoonfuls of sugar, stirred.
“She doesn’t sleep too well these days, you know,” her father said. Her mother looked at him with a hiss on her lips. “What? You know it’s true. Why hide it from the girl?”
Sara hadn’t slept well either for the first few weeks after her brother’s death. Only after being at Vreeland and away from the house where she’d spent too short of a life with Syrus had she been able to rest. At least most nights. She’d locked everything up and left it here in this house. Her sadness. Her pain. No wonder her mother couldn’t sleep.
“I sleep fine,” her mother said. “Just a little restlessness some nights. Anyway—” She dismissed the subject with a wave of her hand. “Enough about that. How are things for you at school?”
“They’re okay.” Sara slowly chewed a small bite of mackerel.
“Just okay? I remember when you couldn’t wait to get down there.” Her father’s look was determinedly cheerful.
That was before, Sara thought, looking at him. And he knew. “I’m really enjoying my time at Vreeland. It’s actually good to be—to be away from the house.”
“Yes. It would be nice not to be here.” Her mother put down her fork.
Sara put hers down too. “Mama. Daddy. There’s something that I wanted to talk with you about—” Her mother looked sharply at her and Sara lost her words. Under the table, her fingers dug into her thigh through the jeans, nails scraping against the rough denim material. She felt lightheaded.
“There are certain things you shouldn’t say, Sara.” Her mother’s eyes cut at her from across the table.
Her father opened his mouth. “Sweetheart—”
“I’m gay. That’s what I came here to tell you.” The words tumbled from Sara’s mouth in a rush. She felt breathless. Stunned. As if she’d just run a marathon at full speed.
Her mother’s fists slammed into the tabletop. Their plates jumped. “Don’t you ever say that again.”
When would she ever have the need to say those precise words again? The question buzzed through Sara’s mind, an annoying fly newly dropped into the ointment. Fuck. Why did I say it like that? Fuck. Fuck. Sara bit her lip.
Her mother’s hand darted across the table, grabbed hers, and squeezed. Hard. “Do you understand me?” The bones in Sara’s hand groaned in protest. She tried to pull away, but the unexpected strength in her mo
ther’s thin frame held her immobile. “My son is dead and you come into my house to kill my daughter, too—don’t you dare!”
“Millicent!” Her father’s chair fell backward as he jumped to his feet and to her mother on the other side of the table.
Shock slammed into Sara’s chest. “Mama?” The hurt in her hand spread through the rest of her body like a stain.
“That’s enough, Millicent. Let her go.” Her father’s tired face hovered over them, as if he’d expected this moment to come and was helpless to stop it. He touched her mother’s shoulder.
Her mother abruptly released Sara’s hand as if it were unclean. “Go back to your school, Sara. Only come back when you have something different to tell me.”
“Mama, this isn’t—”
“Don’t say anything else.”
“Milly, this is our child. Stop acting as if Sara is a stranger. We’ve always known who she is.”
Her mother jerked in her chair, as if from an electric shock. “She needs to be a different Sara before she can come back into this house.”
Bone. Her mama’s face was like bone. Sunken and hard.
“Daddy?” Sara’s neck popped as she swung around to plead with her father.
He held up his hands. “Give her some time. She just needs time to adjust to your news. Don’t—”
“I don’t need time.” Her mother started to put away the food, although none of them had finished eating. She slammed full plate on top of full plate, splashing oil and bits of fish on the front of her dress. Sara sat frozen in her seat, staring, wanting to see some sign of regret on her mother’s tight face. Tears. Eyelashes flickering in distress. Something more than this absence that was worse than—than anything.
Her father tried to pull her aside. He pressed quiet words against her ear. But nothing. Her mother dropped the plates in the sink, ignoring the sound of them shattering. The sounds, a muted echo of one Sara had heard in this kitchen only months before.
The sound unlatched her from the chair’s prison. It propelled Sara to her feet, down the hallway, and into her room with its rose-sick smell. Breath churned at the back of her throat. She shoved clothes into her backpack, sniffling at the annoying wetness dripping onto her hands and shirt. Barely glancing back at the kitchen where her parents argued in a tense quiet, she opened the front door and blinked in the sun’s glare. She ran.
My son is dead. Her mother’s words hurried her feet down the house-bracketed street, onto the sidewalk off the main road. Kill my daughter, too. The bag thumped against her back as she ran. Stones poking through her thin shoes. Sun scorching against her face.
Before her brother left on the first of his many trips, she had gone to a backyard party. An expatriate celebration of Jamaica’s independence with jerk chicken and pork smoking from the spout of the big drum transformed into a homemade grill. Women sat in a circle of plastic and rattan lawn chairs, some with babies leaning into their breasts, sharing their laughter and their stories. Around them were small cousins, children laughing as they ran playing tag in the abbreviated backyard, the smell of meat catching in clothes, masculine laughter, the slam of dominoes. Beres Hammond crooned love songs from the speakers, also homemade, that were set up just outside the screen door. Syrus was inside the house somewhere.
Sara, fourteen, stood with her prettiest cousin, Nyasha, their backs to the chain link fence dividing the neighbor’s house from the two-story wonder that Nyasha’s parents had bought with their combined government workers’ income. Talk of school sputtered from Sara’s lips as she stood next to her cousin, watching the children but feeling intently aware of the slightly older girl at her side. The word “faggot” penetrated her consciousness and stole her attention from where it wanted to be.
The men. The men were talking.
“—and queers should get stoned dead,” an uncle said, slamming down a double deuce and making the domino table jump.
“Yes, man,” another one agreed, dark green mesh marina shifting over his beefy shoulders as he leaned in to match the two. The table jumped again.
“Then burn them up and shoot the stinking carcasses to the moon.”
Prickles of unease stung Sara’s armpits. A woman walked out of the house holding a large plate of festivals, still hot from the frying pan, in her arms. “Stop talking foolishness, Clyde,” she said, reaching back to pull the sliding mesh closed. “Vivian’s boy may be funny that way, but he’s still her child. Don’t talk about stoning anybody especially with the children right here.”
“Mind you business, Clarice. You can’t take a little joke?” He shifted the dominoes in his hands, not looking up. “This is man talk.”
Clarice sucked her teeth and kept on walking toward the white tent where the rest of the food rested, meshed and safe from flies and darting children.
But Sara was paralyzed by fear. Nyasha looked unconcerned, only kept talking about skipping two grades and entering high school in the fall. She didn’t notice. She didn’t care. Sara searched for her mother among the women. She sat near Clarice, smiling at something Clarice said. Something inside her relaxed then. If she was friends with this woman, then surely she didn’t think the same thing her uncles did.
But that something inside her had also held on to that four-year-old incident as validation for withholding the truth about herself. The truth that in the end made her run from her parents.
At the Chinese take-out place down the street, she called Raven from the sticky payphone. “Raven.” Her hands gripped the black receiver. “Can you pick me up before Sunday?”
The answering machine in Bryan’s room dutifully took the rest of her message, before Sara, spotting a bus lumbering down the road toward her, hung up the phone and got on it, jerking her way down the aisle, past other passengers staring dully ahead, past intimate smells of incontinence, leaking mother’s milk, and into an empty seat in the back.
On the bus, she ended up at the library. Through the automatic doors releasing the blast of cool air and the musty comfort of old books against her face. That was where Raven found her nearly six hours later. Curled in her favorite corner, the well-thumbed pages of No Telephone to Heaven flat under her dry and unseeing eyes.
Three
Stephen/2004
The other woman looked nothing like Stephen imagined. He had anticipated another Rille, all charm and captivating looks, drawing people in by their basic need to be near such brilliant light. He imagined the two women drawing men into their intimate sphere, breaking them down into nerves, gasps, and orgasm then turning away afterward, with lips and eyes only for each other. This Sara, the real one, was a revelation. She stood underneath the amber lights at the restaurant’s front door, pants-suited with her long dreadlocks twisted in a bun. She wasn’t smiling.
He got out of Rille’s Mercedes and handed the key fob with her name stitched in the brown leather to the waiting valet. He felt a burst of something—pride? possession?—every time he saw that key chain, pleased that she actually used it. Grinning, Stephen helped Rille from the passenger seat.
In a pretty summer dress, high waisted with spaghetti straps and billowing skirts like a 1950s TV siren, Rille stood in sharp contrast to the woman who waited. Sara looked like she’d just left work, had only left the requisite leather briefcase in the car but still was every inch the lawyer in a cool green suit that skimmed her figure enough to let him know that she had one. There was no makeup on her smooth face. No jewelry winked from her fingers or throat.
“It’s good to finally meet you,” he said, holding out his hand.
She looked at it, considering, glanced sideways at Rille, before taking it. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said, then gestured toward the restaurant. “Shall we go in?”
The question was rhetorical because she immediately stepped away and reached for the heavy looking industrial door that took them into the recesses of the restaurant. Fire-lit yet draped with intimate shadows, the place looked nothing like the warehouse it on
ce was. With high ceilings, lushly colored murals on the walls, towering fireplaces in each corner of the room, Red and White was one of trendiest places to eat in Atlanta. On a Wednesday night, it was far from crowded and, Rille had said, the perfect place for her two lovers to meet.
They were quickly seated at a quiet table near one of the fireplaces. The table, a semi-circle with padded seats and a view of the cool darkness outside, allowed Rille to sit between them and gently squeeze both their hands before settling against the cushions with a look of the cat who’d gotten all the cream. And the mouse too. After drinks were ordered and the whole idea of eating dispensed with altogether, Rille put her hands on the table.
“Well,” she said, smiling from one to the other.
Sara raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Close up, she was beautiful. Supple, unlined skin, brows carefully shaped over eyes that missed nothing and a firm mouth that could not mask the vulnerability underneath her lawyer’s disguise. Stephen immediately felt sorry for her.
“I’m not here to take your place,” he said, beginning to relax for the first time all evening.
She looked at him. “You can’t take my place.”
Just then, the waiter came by with her martini, Stephen’s beer, and Rille’s glass of red wine. Sara took her drink with a tight smile, then sipped it once before setting it on the table.
“Look, Rille wants you here, and because of that, I won’t make a fuss. And that’s why you’re here. No other reason. I don’t want someone else in my bed, especially not a man, but because I love Rille, you’re here. Because she loves you, you’ve made it here with us.”
Stephen wanted to ask her what she wanted. In her coolly controlled face, he could see hints of himself, someone hopelessly carried along on the tide of someone else’s desires, while her own was diluted to the point of being nonexistent.
“If you say you don’t want me here, I’ll go,” he said.
“It’s not that simple.” Her lashes flickered, but she did not look away.
