Hold Me in Contempt

by Wendy Williams

  “No! I don’t need him!” I snapped at Carol. “I’m just going home.”

  “Yes! That’s fine,” she agreed.

  I picked up my purse, and through tears, I looked around the office as if I’d never be back there again. I remembered King asking me to run away with him. To go away and leave this place.

  I walked out of my office past assistants and other ADAs lined up along the walls with closed mouths and perked ears.

  “I’ll call you later,” Carol said, walking out behind me and trying to make it sound like everything was okay. “Feel better. Just a migraine. You’ll be fine.”

  I walked along the line keeping my eyes ahead.

  I could hardly see Easter, but I knew she was the last person I was passing before I got to the elevator.

  “Feel better,” she said, touching my shoulder. “I really mean that.”

  I pulled away, rushed into the elevator crying. I felt like everyone was chasing me, following me like a mob with pitchforks, threatening to burn me alive. I started sweating and feeling clammy. The elevator was vibrating in and out with the beats of my heart. On the loudspeaker there was Strickland repeating what he’d seen my mother doing. I fell to the back corner and covered my ears. “No!” I said. “She wouldn’t do that!”

  Once the elevator doors opened again, I ran out of my corner, through the lobby, and into the street, where I stopped a cab with my body and an outstretched arm like I knew where I was rushing to. But when I got into the back of a cab, I couldn’t remember where I was going. I couldn’t hear the cabdriver. I just watched his lips moving so fast. He kept saying the same thing again and again, but I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t answer him either. He reached back to me. I was handing him a slip of paper. The world around him started closing in, black all around. And then he was gone. Everything was gone.

  Chapter 13

  I was swimming in the ocean. It was so big and blue and deep all around me. Water as far as I could see. Up above there was more blue in the sky. No sun. Just clouds that looked like the waves. There was no sound. No people. Just me feeling the salt water carry my body in its expanse.

  Up near my breasts, the water was chilly and choppy, but at my feet the undercurrent was warm and so calm. I stopped kicking and pushing myself through the waves and sank down deep to feel more of the warmth. I wanted to stay there. To never leave or find land again.

  Underwater, I looked up at the sky. That was it. I was going away. I closed my eyes, drew the salt water into my lungs, and let myself slip down, down, down.

  “Kim!” I heard through the water. “Kim!”

  I felt an arm belted around my waist.

  “Kim! Don’t give up! You can’t! Wake up, baby! I need you to wake up!”

  I opened my eyes again and the blue water was gone. I was lying on a couch with a sketch of a shark on the wall behind it, flanked by seashells in frames. I could hear the recorded sounds of the ocean through the sound spa port.

  I looked over and saw Dr. Davis standing beside a man with his back to me.

  I couldn’t speak, but I reached out to them.

  “She’s awake!” Dr. Davis said, looking at me and then rushing toward me.

  “Kim!” The man turned around.

  “Kent!” was my first word.

  My brother ran to my side.

  “You okay, Kim?” Kent said, getting on his knees beside me. I could see so much worry in his eyes.

  “I’m fine,” I answered. “I was just dreaming.” I looked at Dr. Davis. “Why am I here? How did I get here?”

  “You gave a cabdriver my number. Told him to bring you here,” Dr. Davis explained.

  “Do you remember anything? What happened to you?” Kent asked.

  “I don’t know. I was at work. I just wanted to get away. I was having a bad day. A really bad day,” I said. “I must’ve fainted.”

  “I think you just had a little panic attack,” Dr. Davis declared, stepping in front of Kent and checking my heartbeat with a cold stethoscope. “You were barely awake when you got here. You were saying something about your mother. And then you passed out. That’s when I called your brother. You had him listed as your emergency contact.”

  “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about.” Dr. Davis placed his fingers on the glands on my neck and then gave me a thumbs-up to let me know I was okay. “I’m glad you thought to call me.” He grinned. “You weren’t answering any of my calls. I was starting to feel a little hurt.” He stood up straight and looked at Kent. “She’ll be fine. I’ll leave the two of you alone. Let me know if you need anything.”

  My brother sat down on the floor at my side and stroked my hair like I was his child. “What happened to you, Kiki Mimi?” he asked.

  “I was at work, and there was . . . ” Though my thoughts were still blurry, I could hear Strickland in my ear like he was standing beside me.

  “There was what? What happened?”

  “Just this guy. We’re working on this case together, and he said some things to me. I was just—it was a bad day.”

  “What’s his name?” Kent asked with his jaw tightening.

  “Name? I’m not telling you that. I’m not crazy.” Even with my head spinning in the waves from Dr. Davis’s ocean soundscape, I still managed to chuckle at Kent’s request. “You’ll go over there and act a fool—and don’t show up at my job. He doesn’t even work at that office.”

  “You know I’ll fuck him up, right?”

  “It was just work stuff. The boys play rough,” I said. Strickland’s language was vile and his approach was just out of line, but it was nothing compared with what I’d seen and heard from men there. On any other day I could’ve taken his insults, fought back, and probably would have won, but in the bottom of the bag of everything else it was like the perfect right hook on the cheek to just knock me out—literally. “I’ve been having a hard time,” I admitted softly to my brother. “A really hard time. And I don’t know what to do. I feel like I need to get away to just leave everything. Start over.”

  “Why don’t you just do it, then?”

  “Leave? You think I should leave?”

  “Why not?”

  “What about you? Daddy?” I asked. “Mommy?”

  “We’ll be fine. Ain’t none of us going nowhere. You know that,” Kent answered. “Kiki, I know I’m supposed to tell you to stand up—right? Give you that ‘Harlem stand up!’ pep talk. But the truth is, you’ve been standing up strong all along. All this time. Standing stronger than all of us. And if you want to sit down for a little while and let us pick up the slack, go on and do it. Maybe you keep thinking that you want to get away because you need a break. Take it. Stay away as long as you like. Like I said, the fam ain’t going nowhere. And you know I always got your back.”

  When I am asked to provide an emergency contact, I usually give the first name that comes to mind—Kenton Kind—and scribble down his cell phone number in a rush as if the question is a nuisance, an unnecessary aspect of whatever form I’m filling out. That’s because I’d never been in a situation where an emergency contact was needed and I couldn’t imagine one.

  With Kenton Kind sitting there stroking my hair with his big heavy hands that could’ve used a little shea butter at the knuckles, I was so grateful for him being my twin, the other side of me, and for being the one whose name I’d put down without even thinking. He was right: He always had my back.

  Dr. Davis wouldn’t let us leave without me signing up for physical therapy for my back and agreeing to make an appointment to be evaluated by a drug abuse counselor for possible dependency on prescription pills. While I initially fought him about his idea that I was abusing painkillers, when I pulled out the Baggie King had given me as evidence of my lack of desire to take the pills, I realized that I was nearly through the stash. I didn’t even remember taking the pills.

  “The best thing we can do right now is ask questions,” he said,
walking Kent and me to the door. “If we get the answers we were expecting, we can move on. If we don’t, we can get some help.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Davis,” I said. “Thank you for not giving up on me. And for harassing me.”

  He laughed and smiled at me. “I knew you’d come around. You’re too smart not to.”

  Kent and I took a cab to my place, and he came upstairs to make sure I got in okay.

  “I’m really fine now. You can go,” I said, walking into my apartment in front of him. “I’m just going to lie down. Probably call the office. I know my assistant is going crazy. She’s probably called every hospital in the city.”

  “Need me to do anything before I go?” Kent sat on the couch as I went into the bedroom to slip out of my shoes. “Maybe I could make you soup.”

  “Soup? It’s spring. What do I need with soup?” I laughed, walking back into the living room with bare feet.

  “I don’t know. Ain’t that what people eat when they sick? Chicken noodle soup?”

  “That’s for a cold, crazy.” I sat beside Kent and leaned my head on his shoulder. “You know, you have your flaws, but you’re really the best brother in the entire universe.”

  “The universe? Really?” Kent leaned his head on top of mine. “That’s mad competition. I beat the fucking aliens, too?”

  “Yup. Yup.”

  He pointed at the table. “Where’s your Jameson?” he asked. “That’s where you normally keep it.”

  “No more Jameson,” I answered, shaking my head. “I told you I was stopping. You didn’t believe me?”

  “Saying you’re stopping and actually stopping—” he trailed off, “. . . you know.”

  “Yeah. How’s your thing going?”

  “Great. I lead the meeting next week. Want to come—”

  “I’m good,” I answered, giggling. “I think I had an earful last time.”

  “All right. Don’t say I didn’t invite you though.”

  We sat there a little longer. I felt so safe leaning on him that I fell asleep listening to him breathing.

  When I woke up, the sun was down. Kent was sitting there looking straight ahead into the dim living room.

  “I fell asleep,” I said. “I think I was really tired.”

  Kent wasn’t saying anything. He was just looking ahead.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  “She probably ain’t gonna get better, Kim,” he said firmly.

  I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about.

  “I been sitting here thinking about what I could say to make you feel better. Something about what I think is really bothering you,” he said. “I think you worrying about Mommy. You always been. And I think I need to tell you she gonna be all right. But I don’t think she will.”

  “Me neither,” I agreed with tears in my eyes.

  “I ain’t never want to say this to you, but we might need to prepare for the worst.” Kent put his hand on my knee. “Our mother might die out there in those streets. She might not ever come home. You understand that?”

  “Yes.” I closed my eyes and let the tears fall. I watched my mother’s red hoodie disappear into the darkness beneath my eyelids.

  I had a long cry on Kent’s shoulder. One of those good cries that builds into sniffling and bated breath. I didn’t say anything though. I just sobbed over everything I couldn’t forget about my mother, everything I couldn’t remember, everything I’d probably never know.

  Kent comforted me through my wailing. He draped his arm around my shoulder and nodded along with what I was thinking but not saying. It was as if once again my thoughts were ours. He knew what each sob was for.

  “So, where am I going to be visiting you? Bali? Dubai? Australia?” Kent said, trailing me to the door after my swollen eyes couldn’t produce another tear and I convinced him that it was safe to leave me alone to go to sleep. I wasn’t tired at all after my nap, and it was still pretty early, but my brain was exhausted and I really wanted some alone time to dig through the day and prepare myself for tomorrow. Dr. Davis advised me to get a mental health evaluation as soon as possible. He wanted me to talk with a professional about why I’d had a panic attack that led to me passing out.

  “Atch-scray on Australia-ay,” I said, speaking the pig Latin Kent and I’d used to pass messages to each other in front of our parents as teens.

  “Oh, you just went old school!” Kent said, chuckling, as I started unlocking the locks on the door. “But why scratch Australia? You know all y’all bougie black females going to Australia right about now.”

  “I’m saying, you’re trying to ship your sister off already? Let’s wait and see how things go before you start planning stamps in your passport.”

  “You know what I figured out when I was in Brazil?”

  “What?”

  “You only here once. Maybe there’s a heaven. We don’t know. But you only here once. And you should probably do some shit while you here,” Kent said introspectively.

  I unlocked the last lock and turned to take in his depth. And for a few seconds every word of what he’d said sounded like it had come from the lips of Nietzsche himself. But then, after looking my brother over, his Timbs and fitted cap, his slang and swag, I burst out laughing.

  “What? Why you laughing at me?” he asked, laughing too. “Niggas can’t get deep?”

  “So, is that how you ended up proposing to Latin Lydia—​because we’re ‘only here once’?” I asked.

  “Shorty was bad, yo! For real!” Kent explained, regressing from Nietzsche to Tupac. “Could’ve been wifey—”

  “Right! If she wasn’t a prostitute!”

  “True! True!” Kent said as I pulled the door open. He started walking out but stopped to hug me and ask if I was sure I’d be okay.

  “I’m fine,” I repeated. “And thanks for coming to my rescue.”

  “Anytime, Kiki Mimi. You know that.”

  I pulled the door all the way open to let my oversized twin out and stepped into the threshold behind him.

  Our laughter turned to gasps as we saw King standing there outside the door.

  I let out an involuntary “King!” but Kent’s fast reaction to the unexpected person beside my front door led him to draw back his fist to swing. I quickly jumped between Kent and King, ready to try to stop my brother’s blows.

  “Wait! No!” I cried to Kent. “Don’t!”

  “Fuck is you?” Kent asked King.

  “Fuck is you?” King spat back, stepping in toward him.

  “I’m the nigga that’s about to split that wig,” Kent said.

  King just laughed at this as I fought to keep them apart.

  “Oh, you want to see? You want to know what’s up?” Kent started patting his lower pelvis where he kept his gun.

  “No!” I cried. “No! He’s my friend.” I looked at King over my shoulder. “This is my brother!”

  “You know this fool?” Kent asked me.

  “Yes. He’s here to see me.”

  Kent kept his hand on his jeans but backed up from me. “Fuck is he standing out here by the door like a stalker if he’s your friend?”

  “I invited him,” I said, though I hadn’t. “I told him to come here.”

  I pulled Kent reluctantly down the hallway toward the elevator, tussling with his pushing and cussing the entire way. I was nervous but not surprised. If I’d thought about the two of them meeting, I’d realize it would have to go something like that.

  “It’s fine! Everything is fine! He’s my friend!” I repeated to soothe Kent when we were at the elevator and actually couldn’t see King anymore, but Kent was still bucking up like he was ready to fight.

  “I don’t like that shit! You know that!”

  “Just calm down!” I insisted the way my mother would when Kent would get on some boy who’d shown up on our doorstep just to talk to me.

  “That’s the cracker from your job? The one who was up in your face today? He ain’t look like no fucking law
yer. He look like a dope dealer.”

  “No he isn’t and no he doesn’t,” I argued. “Look, just go home. I’ll call you later.”

  “I don’t like that ofay—tell him I said that shit, too. I ain’t feeling it. You saw how he was about to come at me?” Kent asked.

  “You threatened to shoot him in the head, and you grabbed for your gun. What did you expect him to do?”

  He ignored my logic, of course, backing into the elevator. “Tell him we ain’t finished yet. I’ll catch that ass on the flip side. He better be glad you was here. For real.”

  “Sure. I will.” I blew Kent a kiss as the door closed on the rest of his rant.

  I rushed back to my apartment. The door was closed, but I knew he was inside. I turned the knob and let it swing open.

  King was standing by the window. He was wearing the same blue jeans from his place and a thin white polo.

  He turned from the glowing city outside and looked at me. His blue eyes were like lasers through my skin. They could see any emotion I was even thinking of trying to hide to keep my distance from him. There was something like a buzzing or alarm in my ear. It wrecked all of my defenses and swept away the dirt of the day.

  We ran to each other like there was a football field between us. Embraced and kissed and felt each other’s faces like it had been forever.

  I hugged him again, and my desperate hold proved that support can come in different ways from different people. With my brother, my sorrows came out by leaning on his shoulder. With King, I collapsed into his arms, resting my heart against his, and the tears all poured out. He held on to me.

  “I’m here, Queen,” he said, and I realized for the first time that unlike Ronald and Paul, he’d never once called me “baby.” I was always Queen. He held me closer and kept repeating in my ear, “I’m here. I’m here.”

  I suddenly pushed away, remembering Strickland’s threats, Paul’s work with the feds. “You have to go! You have to leave now!” I shouted fearfully.

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Strickland—he was at my office today. He knows about us. Frantz told him—he’s undercover.”

  “I know about Frantz,” he said pensively.