Something She Can Feel

by Grace Octavia

  “Stop it, Jr,” my mother demanded. “That’s enough.”

  I looked at my father on the other end of the table and he was sitting back and staring at Jr.

  “I don’t know, Journey,” Jr went on and pointed his half-eaten cob at my father. “Ask your father about his other son. About how all these years, he’s been lying to us.”

  “What is he talking about, Daddy?”

  “You shut your mouth,” my father said venomously.

  “No, you shut your mouth,” Jr snapped, slamming down the cob. “I don’t have time for this shit anymore. I’m tired of this family’s crap.” He leaned in toward the middle of the table. “Old Jethro here has had his very own secret family right under our noses. Right at the church. Right in the pulpit.”

  “Jr, stop it,” May tried now, but Jr only pulled away from her.

  “It appears,” Jr went on, “that Jack Newsome isn’t a Newsome at all. He’s a Cash. The oldest of the Reverend Doctor Cash’s sons. And the next in line to the throne.” He laughed.

  “Oh, Jr,” my mother said. “Why couldn’t you just shut up?”

  “Jack Newsome? He’s what?” I looked at my father again for a sign of dissension.

  “He’s your brother,” Jr said, and with the last word it sounded as if he’d finally felt some vindication in his exposure.

  “No,” I said, but my father did not move or object.

  “Daddy, say it’s not real,” I implored him, bracing myself.

  I watched a tear form in the corner of his eye.

  “Can’t even say anything to your family, can you?” Jr said. “After all these years of supporting Jack and his mother—taking them on vacations and making sure Jack got into your alma mater—I heard you even went to the parents’ weekend with his mother—of doing the right thing by them and you can’t do the right thing by your own family and just tell us the truth? From your own mouth?”

  My father gnawed at his lip and got up from the table with a kind of sad resolve that let me know he’d never admit anything Jr was saying.

  “That’s right,” Jr spat to his back as he walked away. “Just leave us and go about your business of doing good in the community. Make sure you stop by Jack’s!”

  “Oh, no,” Nana Jessie said, getting up to follow my father.

  “How could you treat your father like that?” my mother cried.

  “No,” Jr said. “How could he treat us like that?”

  I felt ill—like I was about to vomit what little food that was in my stomach onto the table. I couldn’t take it anymore. And then I remembered that this wasn’t even what I’d feared when I sat down at the table.

  “Evil is as evil sees,” May uttered hard-heartedly.

  “What?” Jr asked, and we all looked to her.

  “You heard me,” she said. “You should know about treating people wrong.” She pulled the envelope from beneath the table and I felt my tonsils quiver as she flung it to the center.

  “What’s that?” my mother asked.

  “Now who needs to tell?” May said to Jr. “Who needs to man up to his family now?” Her voice grew to a scream.

  “You don’t have to make me man up to a damn thing,” Jr announced boldly. “I know exactly what it is.”

  “What?” my mother pressed.

  “It’s about my son.”

  “Your son? What? What are you talking about?”

  “I have a son, Mama. His name is Jethro III and he’s going to be coming to live with me,” Jr said proudly.

  “A son with who?” My mother looked at May.

  “He’s not your son, you jackass,” May said.

  “What?” Jr asked.

  “Look at the letter. That boy ain’t no more your son than he’s mine.”

  “What?” I said, reaching for the envelope, which had fallen closer to me at the table. I pulled out the letter and opened the results.

  “What does it say?” Jr asked.

  “You’re not the father.” I read the results and they plainly said that there was less than a five-percent chance that Jr could be the father of Kim’s child.

  “I’m not?” Jr’s expression quickly shrank. I tossed the results to him. “It can’t be true. He looks just like me. He’s mine.”

  “It is true, Jr,” May said. “You lay down with a whore and now you have whore problems.... Let that woman lay up in your father’s house and paid her off all these years ... and for some child that’s not even yours.”

  “You let a woman live where?” my mother asked.

  “It can’t be true,” Jr repeated, looking over the letter again and again. “I was there when he was born.”

  “Well, evidently, you weren’t there when he was conceived,” May said. “And you know what else? I want a divorce.”

  “May, don’t say something you’ll regret,” Jr said passively.

  “All these years, I thought you were leading me and that I needed you for something. That I had to be here because nobody else would want me. But you know, after reading those results, I realized that all these years I’ve been letting a fool lead me around. And only a fool lets another fool lead.”

  May threw her napkin on the table. She got up from her seat and nodded to me.

  “I’m thinking about myself now,” she said. “And I’m not going to be a fool anymore.”

  “May, don’t leave,” my mother said, but this was only to May’s back as she walked away from the table without looking back.

  Jr just sat there with a vacant carelessness in his eyes.

  “See what you did?” my mother cried to him as she got up from her seat, too. “You see?”

  “I didn’t do anything, Mama,” he said flatly. “I was just being my father’s son.” He looked at her. “Maybe you should try looking at him for a change, because he made us how we are ... all of us.” He looked at me and through the corner of my eyes I saw my mother walk slowly from the table.

  “You didn’t have to do this,” I said to Jr. “Not like this.” I started crying and looked around the table to see that we were alone. Everything had changed. Justin had started it by saying he wasn’t who we thought he was ... and now I wasn’t sure who any of us were ... not really.

  In the house, I found my mother sitting in her tea chair in the living room. It was where she always sat when she wanted to think and be alone, to plan, to pray.

  “Your brother,” she said as I sat in the chair beside her, “he took his bag. I should’ve stopped him... . Should’ve said something. He can’t drive like that.”

  “He’ll be fine, Mama,” I said, still parsing out what he’d told us. And it was strange because I wasn’t really that surprised. Yes, I wondered what had led him to make such a big decision, but in a way, I was happy for him. He looked happy. He looked good. But it would be a long time before any of us truly accepted him. “Justin knows how to take care of himself.”

  “He was always a good boy. Never asked for anything. And the one time he does, I let your father just throw him out.” She was holding a napkin in her hand, but she’d stopped crying. Instead of sadness, I saw anger in her eyes now.

  “Was what Jr said about Daddy true?” I asked carefully. She didn’t look at me. “Oh, God. How could he? How could he lie to us like that? All that stuff about what we can and can’t do in this house ... in our lives ... and he was lying all along.”

  “He wasn’t lying.”

  “What?”

  “I knew. What do you think, I’m blind?” My mother looked at me quizzically. “I always knew about him and Iris Newsome. Always. And when Jack was born ... just months before I was due with Jr, I just knew.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you leave him, Mama?”

  “Leave? You don’t just leave. Your father and I had plans,” she said with her voice demanding and grim. “I knew what we could be together. What we could build. And that he loved me. He always loved me more than he loved any of them. Just like Jr, your father’s just the
kind of man who needs an audience. If he doesn’t have a crowd of people following him, he feels empty. One person isn’t enough. That’s just his way. I can’t leave him for that.”

  “But what about the divorce?”

  “Divorce?”

  “Yeah, when I saw you talking to Deacon Gresham when we had lunch,” I said. “He’s a divorce attorney.. . . I thought maybe you were thinking of leaving Daddy.”

  My mother looked off in a way that churned the bile in my stomach again.

  “No, Mama,” I said. “I know that’s not it. Don’t tell me that’s it. Not that ...”

  “Timothy came to me when I had no one to go to.”

  “No, Mama,” I cried. “But you can’t. Not with everything you’ve said to me about marriage and love and accepting who I was and where I’m at ...”

  “Marriage is hard, Journey,” she said. “It’s very hard. And you have to work at it to stay. To keep it together. Nothing is perfect. You need to learn that.”

  “So working at it means you just pretend nothing’s wrong and act like your blind while everyone is just ... doing whatever?”

  “It’s not that simple ... not the way you make it sound.”

  “I used to think that, too,” I said. “But ... now I think it should be.”

  In that room, the last promise holding my family together withered like an old rose petal orphaned at the bottom of a vase. If this was who we were, then who was I? What was I? What life was I living? Whose life was I living?

  “You told me everything would be okay,” I said and I wasn’t sure if I was talking about her marriage or mine. “You sold this to me. You wanted all of this for me? Knowing what it was like?”

  “So your life hasn’t been good? I haven’t protected you? Helped you make the right choices? You have a good husband. Don’t throw it away because of what’s happening in this house. Don’t be a fool.”

  “No, Mama,” I said, getting up. “My life hasn’t been good.... It’s not working ... and maybe if you and everyone else hadn’t been protecting me all these years, I wouldn’t feel like I’ve been just ... just ... sleepwalking around in my life. Mama, I’m thirty-three years old and I feel like I haven’t ever left home. Like I’m stuck here. And now I see that all of you are. And I’m just like you ... just like you, and Daddy and Jr... . I’m stuck.”

  I just wanted to get home. To get into my house, up the stairs, and into my bed where I could be alone and stop the noise in my head from rumbling. It seemed that just when I thought I had a hold on one thing in my life, had figured things out and how to just be happy, everything else was unrecognizable. My parents. My brothers. My marriage. Even Billie and Clyde. My whole world that just one month ago was quiet and forgivably imperfect was now screaming and ruined. And I knew that the things that had just been said, the things that had been done, couldn’t be changed or taken back now. We’d never be silent again.

  Evan’s car was pulled closer to the front door than usual and the door was wide open. I thought maybe he’d come out and walked around the back for something, but when I entered the house, I saw Evan sitting in the living with colored pieces of paper scattered everywhere around him.

  “Evan?”

  I walked over to him. His shirt was pulled out of his pants and crumpled. His tie was gone. I could tell he’d been crying.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” I walked closer and looked around at the papers. They were glossy pages from a magazine. My heart thumped hard and I felt my throat swell.

  “Where did you go when you went to Atlanta?” Evan’s voice was so low that it was frightening. He looked at me and the redness in his eyes seemed to infiltrate even his irises.

  “What?” I asked, peeking at the pages he was still holding in his hand.

  “Where were you?” he growled.

  “I ... Billie and I—”

  “Don’t lie to me!” Evan jumped up from his seat and pushed me in the center of my stomach until I was up against the wall next to the fireplace. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Journey!”

  “What? What is it?” I cried. “Tell me. Tell me what it is.”

  “You tell me where you were. You look at this and then you tell me where the fuck you were!” He handed me a page and in between two columns was a picture of me and Dame sitting on a furry red couch at the Apache. His arm was around me and at the bottom of the page was the date and a caption: “Dame chills with mystery beauty at concert in Atlanta.”

  I dropped the page and felt the last bit of air I had coming through my throat squeeze out. I crouched over and started coughing.

  “You tell me,” Evan screamed, spittle flying everywhere. “You tell me how my wife is in People magazine with a rapper when she told me”—he came over to me and banged me against the wall again—“she was going to see a play.”

  “I can explain,” I tried. “It was—”

  “I told you not to see him anymore. I told you not to see him anymore and you just went and did it. You did it. Why were you there? What were you doing?”

  “He invited me and I just went.”

  “No! No! Don’t lie to me. Because you could’ve told me that. You could’ve told me.” He let me go and turned his back, knocking over a lamp as he walked away. “Are you sleeping with him?”

  “No... . I wouldn’t do that. You know that.... I just—we were just—”

  “Then what is it?” He turned back to me. “Then why would you lie to me? I know something’s going on. You won’t even let me touch you anymore. Stopped talking about the baby. And I couldn’t figure out why, but I knew something was going on with you.”

  “It was just a crush,” I said. “Just a crush, but it’s over now. I swear. I told him never to contact me again.”

  “He’s a kid. He’s a fucking kid.”

  “I tried not to ...” I said, sitting down on the couch. “I tried to let it go, but he’s just—”

  “Just what?” Evan picked up some of the pages from the floor and threw them at me. “He can take you to parties and have you in magazines? Is that what you mean? He can take you out of this boring old house and away from your boring husband?” He came over to me. “What do you want? What do you want, Journey?” He bent down on his knee in front of me. “Because I swear to God I’ve been trying to give you what you want all my damn life and I can’t seem to do it right. I give you everything.” His head dropped and tears fell, salting the carpet between us. “My life. My whole fucking life and it’s never enough.”

  “It is enough, Evan.” I tried to touch him, but he pulled away.

  “No, it’s not.” Evan looked back up at me and I saw in his eyes that he was broken. Broken inside. Past the tears, his eyes were shallow and empty like something had died. And then, just then, everything I was doing and how it must’ve affected him became so real. This wasn’t sneaking around. This was pain. And if I never wanted to hurt anyone, to make anyone feel pain, it was Evan.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whimpered, wiping his tears. “I’m so so sorry.”

  “Do you love him?” he asked, stopping my hand on his cheek. And while my first instinct was to say no, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I hadn’t even been sure if anything I was feeling for Dame was real until that moment, but then, it just was. And I couldn’t lie about it.

  I dropped my hand slowly and looked cautiously into Evan’s eyes.

  “Tell me,” he blurted out, his voice cracking as tears poured down his cheeks again.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Evan fell back and began to weep.

  “I’m sorry.”

  And I couldn’t take it back. Seeing Evan, my best friend, my love for my whole life, crying on the floor for what had just been lost, I wanted so badly to take it back, but I couldn’t. I was screaming inside and I couldn’t stop it.

  I stood up and tried my best to wipe my tears, but I was shaking so hard that I couldn’t hold my hand to my face.

  “Where are you going?” Evan called
when I reached the hallway. And I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I had to leave. I had to go somewhere quiet.

  “Don’t leave me,” he said. And I turned to see him up and coming toward me.

  “I’m not leaving you. I just ... I need to go,” I cried, picking up my purse.

  “You can’t leave me, Journey. We can work it out. We can try to make this work.” He was stuttering and heaving.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I can’t pretend anymore. We can’t pretend anymore.”

  “No ... no ... no,” he protested, grabbing the purse from my hand.

  “Evan, we can’t go back. We can’t just go back and pretend anymore. I need to go and be alone, so I can figure this out.”

  “You’re my wife,” Evan blared.

  “I’m in love with another man,” I said and the words stabbed me so hard in the gut that they went through me. Through me and then through Evan.

  He stepped back from me and dropped the purse.

  “He can’t love you like I can,” he said. “There’s no one in this world who’s gonna love you like I can.”

  “But I have to find out. I have to go out in the world and find that out for myself.”

  The Listener

  June 23, 2008

  Sunset in the Sky

  “Where were you going?” the white man seated behind me on the plane asked sympathetically. His name was Pete. He was an architect from Philadelphia who’d gone to Ghana to finalize a new contract for his company. Kweku and I gave up on locking him out of our conversation when we could actually hear him groaning in disagreement at my decision to go see Dame at the Apache. Then, we just stood up and leaned over the seats like teenagers on an overseas end-of-the-year school trip—chatting, laughing, and, me, sometimes crying.

  The sky was growing calm with the setting of the sun. It wasn’t gray yet. Just dull with streaks of pink and disappearing white clouds beneath us. The flight attendants announced that we’d soon be approaching our layover in Amsterdam.

  “I didn’t know where I was going—not for a long, long time,” I said. “Once I got out of that house and was in my car, all of the big talk had folded up inside of me and I was just driving. At first, I was on my way to see Dame in Atlanta, but then I realized how nuts that sounded. He wasn’t expecting me; I’d just turned my back on him to be with Evan and I’d deleted every number I’d had for him from my phone. I was going nowhere.”