“That’s crazy,” I said.
“He’s old school. That was some Slick Rick shit.” He separated himself from his friend’s words of advice.
“Elisha, I want to ask you for something, and I want to give you something.”
“Ask whatever you want,” he said, always confident.
“The truth is, I can’t not love you.” We were walking.
“Can’t not? You do or you don’t?” he asked. His eyebrows were raised and he stopped walking.
“I can’t not. It means, I love you and it is impossible for me not to love you.” His closed lips spread into a bright smile.
“But I’m not a regular girl. I have a lot of things going on all the time. My life is crazy. A lot of the time I’m sad, really sad, and sometimes I’m angry and don’t wanna talk, can’t talk. Sometimes I disappear for a little while. Sometimes I disappear for a long time. None of it has anything to do with you,” I said.
“Don’t you think I know that?” he said, serious-faced.
“I’m twelve. You’re fourteen. Happy Birthday, Elisha! Let’s me and you meet up on my thirteenth birthday, July 26. Then we can start up again from there.”
“Sounds crazy. What’s a man supposed to do until then? Eight long months?” he asked me, looking sincerely hurt. When I didn’t answer, he also saw my seriousness. He hugged me in the ice-cold wind. I liked that feeling too much, him standing taller than me and his arms were strong. He held me tightly so I would feel that he meant it.
I handed him the shopping bag with the homemade carrot cake that I made for him with care. On top of the cake container was my gift-wrapped birthday gift for him.
“Don’t open it until I leave.”
“Then don’t give it to me yet. I’m walking you home,” he said, confident and determined. I knew there was no space for me to argue that he shouldn’t.
“You never danced for me,” he said as we walked.
“You don’t want to see that,” I told him.
“Yes I do!” he said, becoming excited.
“Then you’ll be so in love you’ll probably come and kidnap me and hold me hostage till I’m old enough.”
“Old enough for what?” he said calmly and knowingly.
“Old enough to do what we want to do,” I said.
“You said you love me, so don’t you go loving no one else,” Elisha said with a calm but serious face. He grabbed my hand and held it. My heart thumped.
Walking and wrapped in silence, it was settling into our hearts that we had to separate. Both of us probably wondered if we would love each other more or less or not at all by my thirteenth birthday.
“Don’t open it in the street,” I told him. “Open my gift in your room, alone.”
SCENE 3
On Saturday, July 25, at midnight, I heard a thump on the iron floor door. I froze with fear. Last time a knock came like that, Momma had fallen out and it was hard as hell for me to lift the iron lid with her body lying on the top of it. I ran to the cement stairs and pushed gently on the door. She was definitely not lying on it again. Why wasn’t she coming in? “Momma,” I said, softly lifting the lid. When she didn’t answer or come in, I lifted my head out a little bit more to look.
“It’s July 26,” he said calmly. I couldn’t see him. It was Elisha. I dropped the lid in a swift hurry. The steel slammed. My heart pounded. I ran down the stairs and then I ran back up, then down again. How did he find me?
I was so excited, nervous, surprised, angry, embarrassed, ashamed, attracted, I couldn’t think in complete or orderly thoughts. I stood staring at the iron floor door. He didn’t knock again or say anything else. Then slowly, I walked back up the cement stairs. I pushed it open, stuck only my hand out and waved him in. I ran down the steps and turned off the lights, but I don’t know why I did.
The floor door opened.
“Elisha,” I said softly.
“Turn on the lights,” he said.
“Find me.”
“Say something. Keep talking,” he said.
Siri was so happy for me, she began humming beautifully.
Elisha wasn’t talking at all, but I could hear him breathing.
Strong hands landed on my breasts, which were full now, no longer only swollen nipples. He felt around some, a light touch, his fingertips ending up at my nipples. He squeezed them, then pulled me into his embrace.
My nightgown was thin. Not until my naked body heated up like a tea kettle, did a thought speed through my mind that I should’ve gotten dressed. It disappeared as quick as it came.
Elisha was stroking my face. It felt so fucking good and so foreign and so powerful my pussy began pounding and pounding until it erupted. I was so wet between my legs I was embarrassed, but the good feeling was still racing around my body so strongly it didn’t matter. His fingers were on my two lips and he parted them. I felt his lips over mine, and my mouth opened easily. He slid in his tongue and my legs trembled. It was my first kiss on my thirteenth birthday, underneath the floor where it was hot, in the dark with no windows. He didn’t need to say that he still loved me or missed me or wanted to get up in me. His tongue and his body was saying it all. The sensation of my nightgown silk rubbing on my silky skin made me feel like I was in a complete loss of control. Could I die like this? It felt like something so good that after that there would be no reason to live. All I could hear was our breathing, tongues moving, lips sucking; then, him taking off his shirt and lifting my nightgown over my hips. Suddenly he grabbed my pussy hairs all at once like someone who was snatching a head of lettuce from the earth. Even the pull felt good. I fell to the floor. I didn’t have to tell him nothing, he was right beside me in less than half a second. He was feeling my whole body, my bare skin hot enough to fry an egg.
“Elisha,” I said.
“Sshh,” he said. A finger went in me, and my insides bursted like sparklers, firecrackers, and M80s on the fourth.
“Elisha,” I said softly again.
“Stop frontin’ and give in to me,” he said. I heard his zipper opening and crawled away. I felt like if he found me, I would give him everything I ever had including my mind, body, and money. I’d have his babies and be following him anywhere and do whatever he said. I was so open, my heart and my legs and my mind and my everything! “What the fuck,” I said to myself. “I’m worse than a slave.”
“Okay. Don’t hide from me. I won’t hunt you down,” he said.
“If I touch you some, do we have to go all the way?” I asked him.
“Do you want to touch me?” he asked.
“I do, all over,” I told him. I crawled back over and sat on his lap. I felt his hair and his face, his neck and his shoulders, his chest and his arms. When I reached down and touched his hardness, I got too excited. He started kissing on me. I found myself moaning and singing.
“How can you touch me like that and not go all the way?” he asked me.
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can’t?” he repeated. He made my body shake some more for the fourth time. Then he stopped.
“Turn the light on. I want to see you.” I pulled myself up from the floor searching in the dark for a switch or the long string. My whole body was wet. My hair and gown soaked the cloth hugging my nipples and my hips, my nipples poking through powerfully. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. “I missed you like crazy. Don’t ask me to leave you alone no more.”
Watching Poppa from a distance for my first eight years of my young life taught me that we all have to hustle. Lina taught me that speaking nice and using manners wins friends, connections, and opens doors. Riot showed me to always seize and invest in the right opportunities even when the best opportunities meant using people.
Mr. Sharp once admitted that he had done a bid when he was young. When his time was served, no one would give him a chance or a job. He taught me, “Working a job will get you started but no matter how long you work a job, it will never make you rich.” The people who want stacks ha
ve to think smart, own their own businesses, choose the right products, or sell excellent services, and have the ability to negotiate their way around every obstacle. I definitely listened.
“Santiaga,” he said, “you’re gonna make it big in this world because you are a natural negotiator. Since you’re a beautiful young woman, you got the ‘edge’ over any smart man. Never sell your body. The first time you do, your value decreases immediately and keeps on decreasing until you’re worthless. Don’t let these men play with you. Use your mind to think, your talk to negotiate. Your beauty is just bait. Make them pay, but never let ’em touch it. Those are the secrets of life.”
SCENE 4
Elisha and I were both young businesspeople. We were both used to working, negotiating, saving, investing, selling, and purchasing. That same night, on my thirteenth birthday, we tried to “manage” our love.
“It’s 1:30 in the morning,” I told him.
“My parents are at a convention in Washington, DC,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, not knowing nothing about a “convention,” but understanding that Elisha was out late cause no one was making him stay home.
“I’m staying with you,” he said. “I’m not moving.”
“You want me to have your baby now?” I asked him.
“Do you want to have my baby?” he asked me.
“The truth?” I said softly. “I want to give you anything you want. No, I want to give you everything I have. I feel like my heart is gonna burst out my chest. But, Elisha, down here where I live, morning never comes. There are no windows and there is no sunshine.”
“I see that,” was all he said. “So what does that mean to you?” he asked calmly. He was caressing me, pressed against my back, both of us naked.
“You know how the sun reminds us of the reality? Down here is different. You and I could just stay down here and love each other until we die. But if there was a window, you would see the sunlight and remember your mother, remember your school, and your friends, remember that you’re a movie director, remember your life.”
“So?” he asked.
“So I’m saying. I want you to do it to me. I want to do it with you, but do we want a baby, now? Maybe we should accomplish something first,” I said. I could feel him smiling, but he was still stroking my skin. We were lying on my bed trying really, really hard to manage.
“Alright, so after I make my first film and it’s big, big, big, you’ll give me some pussy?” he teased, touching me there. “I’ll buy you a house with great big windows and plenty of sunshine. You’ll be my wife and have my babies?” Elisha said it like he was on the set directing the movie scenes exactly how he saw them in his mind, and how he wanted them to go. His strong hand was lying over my pussy bush. My whole body was so ignited it was threatening to overrule my mind and everything my mouth was saying.
“How long before you think our love will disappear?” I asked him.
“Love never disappears,” he said calmly. “It’s impossible. If it disappears it was never love,” he said.
Hot tears boiled and spilled from my eyes like water shooting up from the earth. He was sucking my nipples now and stroking my hips with his hands. I couldn’t stop crying cause Elisha was the sun. I only wanted to revolve around him. I wasn’t used to it though, this incredible feeling.
Elisha’s light was cutting through my extreme darkness, and exposing something that my heart with five holes in it could not bear. Momma, Poppa, and Winter didn’t really love me. They had all disappeared. When shit got fucked up, they didn’t fight back hard enough. They didn’t come get me. They didn’t send no one for me. They didn’t check on me. They didn’t come see about me. Worse than that, they let their loving feelings disappear.
“I know. You had me suffer for eight months.” Elisha said speaking of our separation. “Love didn’t leave me,” he said. “It was walking with me the whole time, just getting stronger and stronger.” We were tonguing again. The heat was even in our mouths. I held his hardness in my hand. He placed his hand over mine and moved it up and down. I kept holding it, massaging it, jerking it until hot sticky fluid spilled all over my fingers.
“We can work it out,” Elisha said. “There’s a whole bunch of ways we can move. Let’s just make moves together.” I was thirteen. He would soon be fifteen. My heart agreed. My tongue agreed. My mind agreed. I fucking agreed.
• • •
So what could be wrong? I was asking myself seven days before my fourteenth birthday. My thoughts had all turned dark. It was like I was being pulled beneath the ground beneath the underground. I was already underground. Could I actually be pulled down any further, any lower? Was there a last floor to the ground, a lowest level, a place where, no matter what, a person couldn’t fall or be pulled or dragged any lower?
Naked, I was seated in the closet, collapsed after dancing, seven days before my fourteenth birthday, one night after seeing Momma, bruised and broken, again.
Elisha was too true and too right. Love does not disappear. Love never leaves. Even when someone you love does not love you, and does not return the love, the love you carry for them is still on. It’s right there. Like Elisha said, it’s walking right beside you night and day, day and night. It never goes away. Elisha’s love has shown me who loves me and who never truly did. Problem was I loved them, my family. Since love never leaves, it was like every day I had five invisible people walking beside me, nonstop.
Somebody has to go, I thought to myself. Siri said, “Not Elisha, he loves us.”
“It’s me. I have to go.”
Chapter 41
“Gentlemen are always discreet.” Mr. Sharp had used this expression more than once in his back-office business conversations.
One day when I was helping Elisha study for his vocabulary exam, I asked him, “What does discreet mean?”
Elisha said, “Calm and cool, like nothing’s happening even though it really is happening.”
“Use it in a sentence.” I pushed Elisha. He had to be able to use all of his vocab study words in a proper sentence anyway.
“Let me see . . .” He was thinking.
“My father flips through the pages of his naked girly magazine, while discreetly pretending to read the newspaper.” We laughed. I understood.
Mr. Sharp’s discreetness was elegant to me. He knew Poppa, Momma, and me. He never mixed or shared or exposed any of our secrets to the others. He never mentioned to me if he had seen Momma recently. If he did see her, he never mentioned what condition she was in. He never let on that he knew she lived in the ground beneath the store floor, one store in a string of stores, which he owned. He never revealed that he was aware that Momma was any different than how she appeared in the pretty photo that he had framed and given to me. He never used words like crackhead, addiction, filthy, regretful, shameful, embarrassing, in reference to Momma. Mr. Sharp never said if it was him who struck a deal with Big Johnnie to allow Momma to live in the underground for free, or if it was Johnnie who had some agreement with Momma himself.
Mr. Sharp only said that, even though he was just his tailor, he loved Poppa like a brother. He never said that he knew Poppa was doing life, and for what reasons he was locked up. Mr. Sharp never said if he had ever visited Poppa at the prison, or if he had written or received Poppa’s letters. Had Poppa known that Sharp gave me a job, paid me well, put out a word of protection on the streets that no one should fuck with the attractive, ambitious little meter maid, personal assistant, errand girl, cigarette hustler? Sharp’s word had kept away all the young hustlers and hotheads in the area who started sweating me as soon as hit thirteen. I don’t know if Poppa knew. Mr. Sharp was so discreet he didn’t say.
Mr. Sharp didn’t ask me for ID, Social Security numbers, working papers, nothing. When I flashed him a sign, he’d drop a question or a topic that he knew I didn’t want to discuss. He never said I was too young to think, work, earn, or be responsible, or asked me what happened or why.
It
must’ve been shocking, a fourteen-years-young naked girl found half dead on his property. He never mentioned how I got to the hospital or why I was registered under the name Ivory Sharp. He never searched for approval, credit, or a financial reimbursement for his time and trouble posing as my biological father in the hospital or anywhere it needed to be done. That’s why Sharp was an elegant discreet gentleman to me. So discreet in fact, he never uttered the phrase attempted suicide to me. In the end he was the bridge that held three Santiagas together.
Chapter 42
When Mr. Sharp called my cell phone, which Elisha had upgraded to a BlackBerry, I knew something was wrong. I was sixteen. It was the first and only call I had received from Sharp on my mobile. From age eleven through fourteen, all of our business had been face-to-face, in his office shop, based on spoken words and agreements. Our bond grew stronger each time one of us did exactly what we said we were going to do, exactly when we said we were gonna do it, and at the standard we expected of each other.
Now, having been away from him for two years, and him being used to receiving a call from me from a phone number or phone card that he couldn’t trace back, and only on Sunday’s, his voicemail to my BlackBerry was clearly an urgent call.
“Mr. Sharp,” I said, returning his call.
“Ivory,” he said.
“Yes?” I said.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Lana . . .” He said Momma’s name. A cold wave moved through my body.
“I’m coming,” I said and hung up.
I took a Lufthansa flight using a passport that identified me as Onatah Rivers. The same one I had been using for the past year. I ate nothing on the flight. I was a dancer with butterflies dancing in my belly. I felt so nervous, I kept having the feeling that I had to pee and poop. I would walk directly to the bathroom, lock myself in, and nothing would come out of me. After four or five times, I stopped falling for the trick my body was playing on me.
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