Hold Love Strong

by Matthew Aaron Goodman

  “Nigga,” he said, his face inches from mine. “I’m right here with you.”

  I grabbed his wrist and yanked his hand from my chin. “Get off of me,” I said.

  He was stunned. “A,” he breathed.

  “I wish it was you,” I said.

  Donnel looked left and right as if there might be another man I was talking to or someone who might translate the foreign tongue I spoke in. There wasn’t. He wobbled. Then he planted his confused eyes on me and smiled what he had left, that trickling hope that I was making a joke.

  “What you mean?” he said.

  A thousand thoughts raced through my head, a thousand songs, a thousand shouts, a thousand cries. If Donnel aimed to save me then where was the man who was supposed to save him? And if he was trying to be my hero, who had missed the call to be his? And what was I going to do? Shit, what could I do?

  Nothing. The last thing in the world, the very last thing I wanted, was to be nothing, was to know myself as nothing, as powerless. But there I was. It seemed, once again. Just like I was when I searched for my mother and could not find her. Just like I was when she left me for crack and my grandma didn’t let her come back. And just like I had been when my father left.

  I looked at Donnel harder, with more hate than I knew I could muster, and said: “I wish you was dead.”

  Donnel raised his hand as if he was going to hit me with all of his might. Then, he stopped. What I inflicted on Donnel was neither a physical nor a psychological injury. It was worse than a spiritual attack. I know because I saw Donnel’s face speed through a range of expressions and then he was crying. Not aloud or cut off by gasps. And not stymied by swallows. But as if he were melting; that last trickle of hope, that smile leaking from his eyes.

  Simultaneously, I couldn’t believe what I’d done to him and I was embarrassed by it. I sucked my teeth and looked down at the floor.

  “Damn, D,” I said. “Nigga, shit.”

  Then I wanted a knife. Not so I could stab myself until I didn’t see it, or so I could stab, slice, and hack away Donnel. I wanted a knife to kill everything around us. Then we could be something else instead of young men waiting to stand before a judge. But how ridiculous an idea. So, I suddenly wanted a ledge. And I wanted the courage to stand up and jump. I was suspended between rage and sadness, hanging, dangling. So I didn’t just want a knife and a ledge. I wanted a gun. I wanted to end Donnel’s crying quick. I wanted a knife and a gun and a tank. I wanted soldiers. I was vulnerable and violated by everything surrounding me, the sounds and sights of impounded men, men locked in. Because I was locked in. And Donnel was doing the one thing I needed to do, that which I had refused myself since that last moment I saw my mother alive made me feel as if I’d been caught doing something not even God was allowed to do.

  I was jealous. I couldn’t cry. I had convinced myself that crying was nothing. Even more than nothing. Because I was nothing. Empty and numb. And crying wasn’t freeing or healing. Or was it? And it didn’t get a man heard. Or did it? And I was a man. Wasn’t I? That is, had I not been one since I was too young? Because isn’t that what my mother called me? Mister Man, Mister Abraham.

  Hearing Donnel cry, seeing how his lips quivered while his countenance remained unflinching, made me hate myself. Because no matter how much I felt like I hated Donnel I first knew I loved him. And he loved me. That was all we ever did. So I knew I was wrong. But I had too much pride to apologize. I was scared, angry.

  Donnel wiped his face in the crook of his elbow. Then he grabbed me by the chin again and lifted my face so high I felt the skin of my neck burn from the stretch.

  “Don’t never say that,” he said. “You understand? No matter what you think. Don’t never say that to me again.”

  Donnel let go of my chin, and leaned against the wall beside me, his arms folded across his chest as if he was there to protect me. I looked down at the concrete floor. All I could think about was writing a letter. To whom, I didn’t care. Dear Sir, I thought. Madam; Miss; Brother: My Nigga; Kaya, My Love; Excuse Me; Hey God; To Whom It May Concern; Mom; Dear Father: Was this who I was destined to be? Captive, confined? Just like my uncle, just like so many Ever Park men?

  V

  I sat with my grandma on the Columbus Avenue bus. We headed home. I faced a litany of misdemeanor charges, rioting, disorderly conduct, and things I didn’t even know how to do like endangering the welfare of a child. The court-appointed lawyer said there were so many charges it didn’t matter. Some might get dropped. New ones might come up. I was a minor. I was given a court date and released. The key for me, said my lawyer, was to focus on myself, to focus on the positives. Go to school, he said. Stay out of trouble. Enjoy being with your family. Donnel was an adult. And he faced more charges than me. Assault, battery, criminal anarchy, resisting arrest. He had fought with the police, broke one’s nose in addition to breaking Lorenzo’s. And he was not legally employed. And he was not in school. And my grandma said he looked at the judge with a face like broken bricks, hard and sharp, his eyes accusatorial, as if it were not he who needed mercy but he who dispensed it. The judge took offense and set bail at seventy-five thousand dollars, and Donnel went to jail.

  “He is guilty of something,” my grandma said. “But all that? He ain’t never been in no trouble.”

  She sat straight and stiff, more rigid than the plastic bus seat, and trying to avoid the reality of Donnel’s situation, she told me that her relationship with Mr. Goines was over.

  “Forever,” she said, staring straight ahead, her hands holding her purse in her lap, her face taut. “I ain’t taking no more flowers and things. He’s a fool. That’s all he is.”

  I stared out of the window and did not speak. I was so tired, empty, and hungry my lips and eyelashes were too heavy to bear. We were silent for a few minutes. My mind wandered to Mr. Goines. So that was it, he and my grandma’s love was done?

  “But that judge,” said my grandma. “That judge took it like Donnel was some whole army of men that just up and started acting crazy.”

  It was the last day of summer camp. Each time the bus stopped it filled with the antithesis of us, the carefree relief and release of children in the bright colors of parks and recreation camp T-shirts. High on candy and soda, eyes bloodshot from city pools, lanyards adorning wrists and ankles and hanging from the keys in their pockets, their final arts and crafts projects jammed in backpacks and wrinkled in their hands, some children had first-place ribbons. Others had seconds and thirds. They laughed and disputed and championed frivolous ideas, enlightening one another, professing fates and favorite songs, each voice bursting above and ducking below others.

  “Seventy-five thousand?” my grandma continued. “Who got that kind of money? What are we going to do?”

  Outside on Columbus Avenue, the sidewalk was peppered with people making their way through the rigors of the day, walking over patches of heaved and crumbled concrete, past plastic bags, newspaper pages, broken glass, and tampon applicators. The bus passed the corner store and the decrepit Laundromat, its windows steamed and filled with the rainbows and suns and simple faces children too young for camp carved into the fogged glass. It passed Pastor Ramsey’s church, the Holy Name, its metal gates lowered over its door and windows. It passed the liquor store, still glowing yellow from the new coat of paint it received that summer.

  The bus stopped at a red light and I saw Lindbergh pulling his shopping cart by a rope. The cart was piled high with plastic bags of cans and bottles, a broomstick and a tattered square suitcase. It was heavy and Lindbergh leaned so far forward to pull it, his body hovered above the sidewalk at a forty-five-degree angle, just between falling and standing. Suddenly, he slipped and fell to his knees. But he didn’t let go of the rope. He put one hand down to break his fall and held the rope that was tied to the cart with the other. Then he stayed on his knees and looked down the street like he was seeing something holy, something once promised long ago, something that was still promising.<
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  The light turned green and the bus continued forward. On the horizon, looming at the very end of the avenue, Ever Park’s towers rose upon us floor by floor. Donnel’s money was somewhere inside. Or it was somewhere near. And even if it wasn’t, it was findable. It had to be. Because I was determined to find it. I was going to free him. Not just because I felt guilty for saying what I said to him and I wished to apologize. But for brotherhood. That is, wouldn’t Donnel have done the same for me?

  VI

  I followed my grandma off the bus. Although Ever was the same as it always was—the same tired red bricks covered with grit and grime, the same scrawls and scribbles, the pleadings and preaching of teenagers with markers and cans of spray paint doing everything to prove they were alive, nicknames and gang names, the same phrases with the same words misspelled, killer with an a, fuck without a c, Rest in Peace written with the peace symbol instead of the word—it felt unknown to me. No longer did I see it as a residence. Rather, it was a vault, a lockbox. Maybe Donnel’s money was beneath our bed. Maybe it was hidden in a sneaker box in the closet. Maybe it was in a safe. If so, I would find the safe and the key. Nothing would stop me.

  In front of my building stood Kaya. She babysat Nakita Webb’s four children, Valentine, Mercedes, Shavon, and infant Asia, sitting on Kaya’s cocked hip as she watched the others play tag. My grandma said hello to Kaya. Then she said that she’d leave us alone to talk and she continued inside. I had talked to Kaya on the phone from the holding cell. I had told her I was fine, that things were all right. But everything was different now. She could see that. She smiled a soft smile composed mostly of sadness. She shifted Asia higher on her hip. Neither of us could find words to say. So when Valentine stopped playing, it was he who spoke first.

  “Abraham?” he said, studying me with round, gentle eyes as if I were an apparition he had never imagined. “What happened to your face?”

  “I got in a fight,” I said.

  “I got a boyfriend,” interrupted Mercedes, eight years old and already full of sass.

  Suddenly, Shavon, who because she just turned three did not know how to question my wounds or brag, latched on to my leg. She looked up the length of my body.

  “Hungry,” she said. “Me hungry.”

  I touched her head, looked at Valentine and Mercedes, then I lifted my eyes to Kaya.

  “Their mom’s working,” she said.

  “She bringing us McDonald’s,” said Mercedes.

  “She’s a pilot,” said Valentine, already a hoper of such a colossal degree that he was also a pathological liar.

  “She ain’t no pilot,” scolded Mercedes, a liar herself. “She builds the planes.”

  “She cleans them,” Kaya whispered because she couldn’t bring herself to announce something that might disappoint the children.

  She looked down the length of Columbus Avenue, sighed, and shifted her eyes to me.

  “You OK?” she asked.

  It took all of my strength to shake my head yes.

  Kaya sighed. “You know, that was the worst thing I ever seen.”

  She stopped herself. Then she forced herself to smile.

  “And you,” she added. She shook her head, took a deep breath, and then she let the words and a small laugh out at the same time. “You the worst damn fighter I ever seen.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Nah, I’m good. I got caught off guard. I didn’t see it coming.”

  “See what?” she said.

  “How I got hit.”

  “It was Eric.”

  “Eric hit me?”

  “No, stupid,” she scolded. “He was pulling on you from behind. He was trying to pull you out of the fight.”

  VII

  I climbed the stairs, rose like smoke. If there was shouting, the sounds of televisions and radios coming from the hallways, I didn’t hear them. If there was laughter or crying, I didn't recognize it as sound. The stench that hovered around Ever, the stench I had not fully been aware of until that day, the day of my return, was multiplied by the stairwell’s confinement. Thus, although I ascended the stairs, it seemed as if I burrowed deeper into the stink, closed in on its awful core.

  I reached my floor, I opened the stairwell door with the flat of my hand and stepped into the hallway’s dimness. As it was in the lobby, because only a few of the fluorescent lights in the hallway worked, humming and flickering through their long dying, the hall was dusk. The apartment doors were black. In front of a few, there were welcome mats. I was home. I took the two steps to my door. There was only silence. The welcome home sign that had greeted my uncle was still taped to the door. I felt choked, as if two invisible hands were clamped around my neck.

  I knocked. The door opened an inch, then two. Then my grandma opened the door all the way. I walked in. Eric sat on the couch, his arms wrapped around his chest, his sketchbook open on his lap. He turned his head and looked at me.

  “D ain’t coming back,” he said in a manner that could have been either a question or statement.

  He swallowed something round and huge the way someone who is drowning seizes and clings to a gulp of air. Then he shook his head no.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry?” I said. “For what?”

  “I got to get stronger.”

  Suddenly, my Aunt Rhonda ran across the room. Her face was torn leather. She raised her arms high. Then she dropped them with a thump around my shoulders.

  “Oh Abraham,” she cried into me. “Oh Abraham, why?”

  My uncle stood alone at the window, his muscular arms folded across his chest. He turned and looked at me bracing my aunt, bearing all her weight. He studied the sight. Was this how it was when he left? Were we wounded by his absence just as much? He closed his eyes and held them closed. He was a man privy to the aftermath of his own absence, how, no matter how he prayed that it didn’t, it had victimized us, his family, at least as much as it victimized him. He turned and looked back out of the window. He looked left, down the length of Columbus Avenue, as if he would wait right there and never move, not until he saw Donnel walking his clip-clop stride home.

  I opened and closed every door in my head, searching for a portal, some avenue of chance that led to a different reality. Where could Donnel’s money be? The failure of not being harder on Donnel; for not demanding that he want more for himself; for allowing him to assume the familial responsibilities that his nature predetermined him to assume; for resting silent and still in his arms when he held me the moment I was born into this world, then letting him carry me, bathe me, whisper to and defend and soothe me: for all of this and more, I reasoned his imprisonment was my fault. If only I had not dribbled the ball off of my foot. If only I had refused to be knocked down. How could I love someone so much and say I wished he was dead?

  I couldn’t take the television. I couldn’t take not knowing right then and there where the money was. I couldn’t take my family. I couldn’t take myself. So I left. I didn’t bother to excuse myself. I didn’t say where I was going or when I would be back. No one called out. No one tried to stop me. I turned around. I opened the door. I ran out and slammed the door closed behind me. Then I ran down the stairs, skipping the last three steps of each flight with a leap to the landing. I sprinted across the lobby. I slammed my hand against the steel door. I ran past Kaya and Nakita Webb’s children and I had no plans of stopping. I was going to run until I reached the edge of the world or the air I split wore me away, rubbed my skin, bones, and organs to ash and left my soul to the whim of the subsequent wind. But then I heard my name and my legs refused to churn and go.

  “Abraham!” Kaya shouted. “Abraham!”

  I slowed to a jog, then walked a few more feet with my hands on my hips. Slowly, the urge to blame Kaya for everything, starting way back when we were children, devoured me. Because she wasn’t family. Because we didn’t share blood. I had so much hurt I needed a target. I stopped walking and turned around.

  Kaya walked toward me,
her face twisted as if she had read my mind and her heart was broken.

  “I ain’t going,” was all I could compose, surprising myself with the declaration.

  I was talking about school. Somehow, she knew it. She absorbed everything I hurled at her with those three words. But she would not stand for it.

  “You got no choice,” she said, her voice forceful yet no louder than a whisper.

  I looked down. I looked left and right. I searched for a reason, for some sight that provided me the proper words to respond with. In a week, we would begin our senior year. I could be the first Singleton in history to graduate from high school. But I was afraid. I was suffering, buckling. I closed my eyes. Where was that money?

  “Abraham,” Kaya said. “Promise me. On the count of three. Swear to me.”

  BAR 9

  If We Must Die

  I

  Donnel wouldn’t tell me where the money was. He wouldn’t write about it in a letter. He wouldn’t talk about it on the phone.

  “That’s for Atlanta,” he said. “That ain’t got nothing to do with this. I worked too hard to blow it.”

  Still I searched for it. It wasn’t beneath the bed, in the closet, or behind the refrigerator in the kitchen. It wasn’t beneath the sink in the bathroom. It wasn’t hidden in any sneakers or shoes. Where does one put so much money? No, that was not the question whose answer I was seeking. It was more. It was where does one hide freedom? I asked every inanimate object we lived with. The showerhead, the floor, the toilet. Where was it? I thought. I whispered. I shouted. But it was as if everywhere I looked, from the black night to the first morning sky, had sworn to secrecy.

  “So what you want is bigger than being locked up?” I asked Donnel when we talked on the phone.

  “That’s it,” he said. “That’s exactly how it is.”