We Are Not Like Them

by Christine Pride

  When we were first dating, I loved that Kevin was so quiet, such a mystery. It was, and it still is, a challenge to try to unlock what he’s thinking or feeling. He’s similar to Riley in that way. They both require effort. I decided I was the only person in the whole world who could get him to open up, and every time he reveals something—the first time he found a body on his beat, the night he spent in the NICU with a baby whose mom was high on oxy—it’s a victory. Sometimes in the middle of breakfast, or a run, or once through the bathroom door while he was taking a shit, I would ask him, “What are you thinking right now?” Usually the answer was, “Er, nothing,” but it became a thing between us.

  I try it now. “What are you thinking?”

  He sighs and bangs his head yet again. “I don’t want to do this, Jen.”

  I look at him, waiting patiently. It usually does the trick.

  “Okay, fine, I’m thinking about the baby. I’m thinking I don’t want to be in jail when you give birth.”

  This is what I get for wanting him to be honest and open up. “Don’t even say that.”

  “You asked.”

  “Here, feel him.” I grab Kevin’s hand, bring it to my stomach, where Little Bird is kicking.

  “You mean her?” Kevin smiles. It’s barely there, but I hold on to the slight twitch of his lips like a kid clutching her favorite stuffy.

  From the very beginning, Kevin has been convinced the baby will be a girl. I know it’s a boy though. The other night I dreamed about him. I pulled him to my breast, his eyes opening and staring up at me. They were greenish-brown like Justin Dwyer’s. I woke up then, swells of nausea overcoming me. I screwed my own eyes shut and prayed my baby’s eyes would be a boring mud brown like mine.

  “We’ll know soon enough.”

  Too soon. I’m so ready for this pregnancy to be over, though I know it’s easier with the baby inside me. I can’t have a kid in the middle of this, when everything is in chaos.

  A wave of fatigue hits me. “I’m going to go lie down for a while. Why don’t you go watch the game with Matt. Try to relax for a bit if you can? And no more Twitter.” I kiss his cheek, my lips catching on sandpaper stubble. He hasn’t shaved since the shooting.

  Despite the rest of the house smelling like a Yankee Candle shop, the scent of pubescent boy still lingers in Kevin’s room. There’s an old aquarium that used to house a snake called Hoagie and, next to that, a box filled with faded yellow CliffsNotes and a stack of CDs. On top is a scuffed plastic case that calls to me, Nirvana’s Nevermind. I put it in the three-disc changer on the ancient stereo and press play, stare at the chubby naked baby on the cover.

  Come as you are, as you were

  As I want you to be

  I can barely remember to brush my teeth in the morning or where I left my keys, and yet each and every word of this song comes rushing back to me like I’m fourteen again.

  The faded glow of the stars still glued to the ceiling are like dozens of eyes watching me as I lie back on the itchy quilt covering the bed. It’s too much: our life is never going to be the same. I have to remind myself of this again and again. The last five years have been so hard—all the miscarriages, the failures to get pregnant, the all-consuming fear I would never be a mother. All the times I lay in bed like this, blinking up at the ceiling, thinking the worst thing that could ever happen to me was not having a baby. It was like driving down a stretch of highway that disappears into nothing. That’s what my life would have been like, no children, no degree, no great career… nothing. On those long dark nights, I used to bargain with the universe: If you just give me this, I will never ask for anything else. And it worked, I got pregnant. The worst was over. But that seems so stupid now. Of course life can get worse. It can always get worse. I was so focused on one thing, there wasn’t room to consider all the other terrible things that could go wrong. Like my husband going to prison for the rest of his life, or the lawsuits that will bankrupt me and my kids and my kids’ kids. And that poor little boy. Every time I let myself wallow, I come back to that poor boy and remember what my husband did. Will I ever be able to look at Kevin and not think about that boy?

  I fumble around the bedside table for the tiny, dusty remote to the boom box so I can play the song again. Instead, I land on my phone, abandoned since this morning. It’s been so long since I had that heart-quickening sensation of waiting for a boy to call or text me, and I experience that same jolt of agitated anticipation now: Has Riley been in touch? But when I look, the only text waiting there is from Lou.

  You hanging in there kiddo?

  Never mind that her message is more fitting for someone home sick with a cold. At least she’s checking in. It’s something.

  I close the text and scroll to my favorite pregnancy app, the one that tells you the size of your baby from week to week. At thirty weeks, our baby is the size of a large jicama. I look up what a jicama is—this whole fruit-and-veggie thing comforts me. It helps to picture the glob of cells growing inside my belly. I’ve already lost a baby the size of a blueberry, and one the size of a plum. I scroll through the next few as if looking into my future: a butternut squash, a pineapple, a pumpkin, then a baby.

  I drift off dreaming of vegetables.

  It could be minutes or hours later when Kevin comes into the room. His voice, its urgency, wrenches me from a rare deep sleep. “Jen, Jenny.”

  Kevin makes a kind of choking sound like the words are caught in his throat.

  “He died, Jenny. Justin died.”

  Chapter Five RILEY

  Gigi’s eyes flutter behind paper-thin lids. Otherwise, she doesn’t move. I swipe a damp washcloth across her cheek, skin so smooth it should belong to a baby, not to an eighty-nine-year-old woman.

  I’m happy to lose myself for a moment in this simple act of caring for Gigi, especially considering all that she’s done for me over the years, patiently teaching me how to play chess, sewing my Halloween costumes, giving me swimming lessons while keeping her head above the water so she wouldn’t mess up her roller set; painting my toenails Berry on Top, even when Momma told me no because that color was trashy.

  It’s not enough though, this piddly washcloth. I would do anything—walk through fire, give any organ or my last dollar—if it would help. But nothing will. Yesterday the doctors told us she’s too weak to continue on dialysis, which wasn’t really working anyway. Her blood is essentially poisoning her day by day. They hinted to us that she only has weeks, rather than months. We’re all desperately hoping for time: one more Christmas. Just give us one more Christmas. Please, God, one more.

  This early in the morning, it’s blissfully peaceful in the small hospital room. The TV perched in the corner is muted. I look up and catch my face on the screen. Yet another thirty-second promo for my live interview tonight with Tamara Dwyer, set to air at the top of the five-o’clock broadcast. The banner on the bottom of the screen reads: A MOTHER’S ANGUISH. The station’s been teasing the segment hard, and each time I see the ad, my jangly nerves ratchet one level higher because I’m still not even sure it’s going to happen now. I change the channel to CNN. The news about Justin’s death has been making the rounds of the cable networks. #JusticeForJustin began trending this morning on Twitter.

  Beyond Gigi’s soft snores, I can hear laughter from the nurses’ station. Their trivial conversations waft down the hall to fill the rooms of those watching their loved ones waste away. This morning they’re twittering on about a new royal baby.

  Yesterday, I overheard one of the nurses complain about the overflow of flowers in this room, as if that was really something to be irritated about. Granted, the bouquets from Gigi’s church friends are taking over the place, covering every available surface, their sickly sweet scent strong enough to stick to your clothes, but no one has the heart to throw them away. Even if Gigi doesn’t care much for flowers.

  “They should be in a field somewhere, not in a vase,” she’s grumbled more than once.

  I close
the door a few inches to block out the noise. With the blinds drawn, it’s dark in her room, a liminal space. Hospitals are like casinos that way, free of the constraints of climate or time. There is only here and now. I try to embrace the calm, but it’s hard when Justin’s face appears on the screen. The headline reads: UNARMED TEENAGER SHOT BY POLICE IN PHILADELPHIA DIES. I watch the anchor’s lips move, the sad nod she exchanges with her coanchor, a Black man who just landed his own show on the network focused on race and politics. They’re probably trotting out the same grim statistics I’ve been researching: Philadelphia ranks fifth in the nation in Black homicide. Black kids are ten times more likely to die from gun violence than white kids. The police fatally shoot an average of one thousand people per year nationwide. And now another one: Justin, an innocent fourteen-year-old.

  I’d just gotten home from work last night when I heard. Arriving within seconds of each other: a text from Scotty—Kid didn’t make it—and one from my source at the hospital who’d been sending me confidential updates. I slumped on the couch, precariously close to crying, as if Justin were my own brother. Maybe because it could have so easily been my own brother bleeding out on the ground.

  My phone pinged with another text from Scotty not ten minutes after his first:

  I hope the interview is still on. Find out. Make it happen.

  It was obnoxious to intrude on the Dwyers at a time like this, but I needed to know if the interview was still happening, as crass as that was, which meant reaching out to Justin’s uncle, Tamara’s brother. Wes was serving as the family’s de facto media liaison, a role he was thrust into and clearly found overwhelming judging from his anxious tone whenever we spoke about the interview. I was trying to come up with the right words to text to Wes when my phone buzzed yet again. I assumed it was Scotty, but it was Wes’s number that came up, and the first words I saw as I frantically scanned were, I’m sorry. I was already strategizing as I read the entire message.

  I’m sorry. I don’t think Tamara’s gonna be able to do the interview. She wants to—she’s just overwhelmed. You understand.

  No, no, no… was all I could think as I fumbled to come up with a response that was polite and thoughtful and not overly desperate. If I could meet Wes face-to-face, I might be able to persuade him of how important this was. I remembered a time in Joplin when I’d convinced grieving parents to go on air hours after their daughter was murdered by her boyfriend. I was all of twenty-four years old, barely older than their daughter, and I felt dirty even as I pleaded my case. But they did it. And that interview led to a Kickstarter that raised $50k for domestic violence charities in the county. As I texted Wes, I reminded myself that as intrusive as it might seem, what I do can make a difference.

  I do understand and I’m so sorry for your loss. The entire team at KYX is thinking of you. Is there a chance we could meet tomorrow morning to talk? Anywhere that works for you?

  After pressing send, I checked my phone every thirty seconds for a response. I told myself that my agitation and eagerness were entirely noble, not self-serving at all. The interview was important for Tamara, and for the community, even if the exclusive would also be huge for my career and might help get me one step closer to the anchor chair.

  When my phone buzzed an hour later, I almost pulled a muscle lunging for it.

  Okay. Can you meet me at the funeral home, Morgan & Sons, on Girard? I have to be there at 11, so maybe right before… 10:30?

  There’s an opening, a window, a crack I could squeeze through. I knew the reason they agreed to the interview in the first place was because of Pastor Price. The first time I spoke with Tamara, her voice was so soft I could barely hear her over the machines beeping and whirring in the background, the ones keeping Justin alive… at least until they didn’t anymore. I could picture her, one hand on her cell phone, the other holding on to her unconscious son.

  “Thanks so much for taking my call. I’m Riley Wilson, a reporter for—”

  “I know who you are. I’ve seen you on TV. And Pastor Price called me about you. He said you’re good people. Local girl?”

  “Yeah, Northeast. Close to where Roger’s Diner used to be.”

  “Oh yeah, I loved that place. Best crab fries.” A lightness crept into Tamara’s voice.

  “I’m the lead reporter on this story, Ms. Dwyer, and—”

  “Call me Tamara.”

  “Okay, Tamara. What’s happening to you and your family is… tragic. And you have my full assurance that I will do it justice. I want you to know that—”

  She interrupted again, gently. “The pastor said I can trust you, so I will, but let me talk to my brother Wes first,” Tamara said.

  Pastor Price obviously didn’t tell her about Jenny. He knows better, of course, like I do. We both want me on this story. Never mind the unease that coated me like a slick film when Tamara said those words. I can trust you.

  I have the same apprehension about not being completely honest with Scotty. I still have it. The resignation letter I’d written to my old boss at work. I don’t know why I keep it—maybe it’s a reminder that sometimes prayers do get answered. I needed out of Birmingham. It was supposed to be my big break—a top-fifty market after years in the minors—but as soon as I arrived in town, I sensed I’d made a mistake. All the Confederate flags—on houses, cars, buildings, the bronze monuments of vainglorious white men and wholesome plantation tours. I took it as a bad omen when I saw a newborn baby in a MAGA onesie. And the giant hand-painted sign in the apartment next to mine that said, IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT HERE, GO HOME. I’d only been in town for forty-eight hours, but it seemed like good advice, if not exactly what the sign painter intended.

  It didn’t get better when I learned I was one of only two Black people in the entire news operation, my counterpart a cameraman who was about to retire after being at the station for forty years since he started out as an “errand boy” for the affiliate’s owner.

  When the news director took me to lunch for our interview—after he took it upon himself to explain what a croque monsieur was—he’d said, “We need someone like you,” I assumed he meant hardworking, talented, resourceful. I later realized that my hire likely had more to do with the fact that the station’s parent company had issued a diversity quota, and I was their check mark. Especially with Harold on his way out.

  So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I overheard him on the phone complaining about me. I’d pushed back, respectfully, about a story, and he’d made a comment about my “attitude” and then called me “uppity.” And there it was, its coded meaning clear as the glass panel in his office, through which he occasionally sneered at me like he was mad I wasn’t more grateful to be graced with a job in “his” newsroom. So I decided to shut my mouth and try to practice patience and gratitude, put in my time and get out once I could build up my clips, but it got worse.

  I reported a story I thought was heartwarming, about a local Black woman who’d found an abandoned baby and was trying to adopt her. The woman was Black, the baby white. I should have been prepared for the online comments, or avoided them altogether, which I usually have the good sense to do. I know better. But that day I read them, each one worse than the last, as bad as I’d ever gotten.

  A nigger doesn’t know how to raise a white child right.

  That baby would be better off dead.

  And, of course:

  Riley Wilson is an ugly ape who doesn’t deserve to be on our TV.

  Even the same tired insults hurt—hate doesn’t have to be inspired to cut you. I was twelve the first time I was called the N-word. Even though Ryan DiNucci, the seventh-grade boy who left the note in my locker, spelled it wrong, the drawing of the monkey that accompanied it was pretty clear. I crumpled the paper, threw it in the trash, and never told a soul. Just like I didn’t about all those comments. But they still ate away at me, especially on top of everything else that was blowing up last fall, everything with Shaun, and Corey—it all threatened to swallow me up.
I could barely keep it together in front of my colleagues. I don’t know what was worse, the comments themselves or the fact that when I mentioned them, my colleagues dismissed them entirely with breezy eye rolls and oh-so-helpful advice: “Just ignore those assholes.”

  It had been a few years since my last serious bout with depression, long enough for me to believe that maybe it wouldn’t happen again, but I was wrong. That night, I could feel it coming on like the first hint of a tickle in the back of your throat before a cold. The coils inside me wound tighter and tighter, the obsessive thoughts beginning to churn, whispers that could turn into screams. What’s the point? You’re not built for this place. You’re an impostor. You’re never going to be good enough.

  I drank an entire bottle of wine, wrote that resignation letter, and spent the next week working up the nerve to turn it in. Maybe if I could get out of Alabama, away from the cloying civility cloaking casual racism, from all the memories of Corey and a job that was going nowhere, I would be okay. That was the moment I found myself, bare knees on the cold dingy tile, talking to God, praying for a miracle. And wouldn’t you know it, I got one. Scotty called, out of the blue, at the end of that week. He was a fellow Northwestern alum. He had kept in touch ever since we met at a J-school event right after graduation. He’d said he wanted to hire me at KYX, and now he had a spot.

  Life doesn’t give you many miracles or second chances, so I promised myself I’d make the most of this one. It’s not like I’m lying to anyone outright about my friendship with Jenny, and if asked point-blank, I wouldn’t deny it. So the omission feels defensible, even if by degrees. It could all blow up, of course, which is terrifying, but what choice do I have? Besides, I haven’t spoken to Jen since Monty’s last week, and I don’t know when I will again.

  I try to recall the last time I was truly angry at her, how long we’ve ever gone without talking. Once, in high school, she called me a “goody-goody” and didn’t speak to me for a week after I refused to cover for her when she wanted to go to New York and meet up with some guy she’d met online—or those first few months after she married Kevin, when it felt like we might be drifting apart. But somehow, we always come back together, the ups and downs eventually balancing like a seesaw. Maybe it’s because we’ve had the benefit of distance all these years being in different cities—our text exchanges and once-a-year visits haven’t allowed a lot of opportunity for any serious drama beyond her getting annoyed that I don’t call her back fast enough sometimes, or my irritation that she constantly interrupts me. But nothing heated, nothing like her yelling that I hate her husband. Or her asking me for a favor that could compromise my job, and saying, “This isn’t even about race.” Are you kidding me? It’s always about race, Jen. That’s what I’d wanted to scream back at her. She may have the luxury of pretending that it isn’t, but I don’t. Her naivete was stunning. Or was it worse, was she really this oblivious? And how did I not realize this? I once thought I could never know another human as well as I knew Jen, but it’s possible that Jen has changed and I didn’t realize, or I did. Jen is different these days. She used to dream about traveling the world, but when I suggested a trip to India last year she worried it would be too dangerous. She used to collect new friends like scarves, cool interesting people she met at weird music festivals, and now her social life seems to revolve around Kevin’s coworkers’ wives. She used to have a not-insignificant shoplifting habit, and now she’s married to a cop, for heaven’s sake. On good days, I chalk it up to adulthood—this is what it looks like when you settle down, you evolve, your dreams and beliefs and desires are more conservative. On bad days, I blame Kevin: he changed Jen, made her world smaller, made her less open and curious. On very bad days I’ll think, After more than twenty-five years, how well do I really know her anymore? And vice versa?