“Georgetown?” Bird twists her middle finger behind her back and holds onto the pain; something to remind herself that she exists, that she’s not just a slug nestled in the divot between her mother’s slanted eyebrows.
“It’s a wonderful school, and you’ll have the edge of being a legacy. You know how hard the pandemic hit Stanford. They’ve lost dozens of their faculty just from the v-flu.”
Bird struggles to remember what she had said about her plans to Coffee’s mother. Seeing the world. Not going to Stanford. Not staying in the District. Her mouth feels dry, but she can’t coordinate enough to swallow.
“No.” Just that. Hoarse and almost inaudible over the background bustle of the quarantine ward.
Carol Bird blinks. “What?”
Bird tries again to summon up the half-illuminated paths to a future she will be happy in, the possibilities she has only allowed herself to discover in her mother’s absence. Finding herself. Finding Coffee. She thinks, There will be a day when I don’t give you this power. She dreams a flash of the future: Aaron playing guitar for Mo and Nicky and Bird and Coffee and even Carol. It’s “Poison Ivy,” and Mo will laugh till she can’t breathe and Nicky will tug on the edge of his do-rag and her mother will sigh and shake her head. And Aaron, proud and talented enough to make them cry, will look right at Bird and give her a sly grin, because you learn all sorts of things when you grow up. Like when plants aren’t just plants, and mothers aren’t always right or even always good.
“You are just like him, my God,” Carol Bird says, snapping her daughter like a switch from a willow. “And I tried. Lord knows I tried to give you everything I didn’t have. And you’ll throw it back in my face? You’ll stay with your drug dealer and run some sad little shop on U Street when you could have changed the world? Don’t look at me like that — you think I don’t know about that pipe dream? Wake up, Emily! Go to Georgetown, get a good degree, make a good living. You might love your uncle — for heaven’s sake, you know I love Nicky — but you don’t have to go to hell with him too.”
“Not hell,” she says, twisting her finger harder. “It’s only hell when you don’t love.”
“You think I don’t love you?”
It’s a question, and her mother never asks her questions. And Emily Bird has an answer. “There is a man who has drugged me and harassed me and frightened me half to death. You know and you haven’t done a thing. You tell me to do what he says. You won’t tell me why this is happening. You won’t do anything to make him stop. And then, when Nicky could die, you pressure me to go to a school you know I’d hate. You don’t care what I feel. You don’t care what I think. I’m just your displaced ambition. So no, Mom. I think you love the daughter you wish I could be.”
* * *
Bird is not always kind, or fair. But she is honest. At her best, she is brave.
We dream of a future with love. Her mother dreams of a future with success.
But not all choices are ours. Not everyone has agency, and a Black woman — even a rich one — knows that better than most. There’s a king in our play; there’s a god in the wings: King Plague, Lord Death, Her Honor Influenza.
Who will live, O Lord, and who will die?
Nicky’s neighborhood still holds a lingering stink of post-apocalyptic desolation, but Northwest has started to tentatively bloom in these bittersweet final days of the quarantine. The evacuation sirens have kept their silence for nearly two weeks, and though the v-flu finally breeched the wall of the Beltway, healthy Washingtonians walk through Georgetown in tentative twos and threes beneath hastily strung arcades of holiday lights. Most people still wear masks, but a surprising number of the pedestrians Marella and Bird pass don’t bother, daring the plague with smiling, cold-chapped faces.
Bird and Marella don’t wear masks either, though Marella has pushed her scarf over her lips to keep out the cold.
“New Again Vintage said they were opening for a few hours this evening,” Marella says, her voice muffled by the gray-and-black scarf.
Bird, who has never thought much of the DC winter, gives her a dubious look. “We need outfits for a go-go, not prom. Felice shops there.”
“It’s this or the army surplus store, babe. The Salvation Army isn’t open.”
So Bird shrugs and lets Marella lead the way up to the second floor of the quaint whitewashed brick row house. A woman in a floral mask lifts her head up from a book as the bells jangle in the door.
“Oh,” she says, giving them a dubious once-over. “Can I help you?”
Bird and Marella glance at each other, their mutual sigh conveyed in hunched shoulders and shuffled feet. As if there wasn’t enough bullshit in their lives already.
“We want some clothes,” Marella says, recovering first because her ballet flats and heavy black coat and good hair look more white-respectable than Bird’s jeans and nappy, half-combed fro. “For a school dance.”
“I’m not sure we have anything you two would …”
Bird takes a step back, twisted with anger and embarrassment and, worst of all, that familiar self-doubt, as if she’s the one who’s done something wrong. She wants to leave and she wants to stay here for an hour and try on every dress in the whole damn store. Marella, though she can’t possibly see Bird’s expression, reaches behind her and squeezes her wrist.
“Listen, lady,” she says, “we go to Devonshire. We just need clothes for a dance and there’s not that many places open, so can we just pretend that you smiled and said hello?”
Bird stares at Marella. The woman jumps up from her seat behind the counter, her skin flushing red above the white of her mask. “Of course, I’m sorry, we just haven’t had many customers. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to think — I mean …”
“Some of your best friends are Black,” Bird mutters, just loud enough for Marella to hear, and they both burst out laughing. The woman smiles uneasily. She tries to help them, to make up for her initial reaction, Bird supposes, but they wave her off. The prices are ridiculous for used clothes, but they stay. Marella, more amply endowed than Bird in every area, tries on a red dress that makes her look like Lena Horne, and a black velvet pantsuit with silver appliqué that makes her look like Catwoman.
“None of them exactly scream go-go,” Bird says.
“It’s a doomsday go-go. It’s gotta be special. Also, I prefer to dress to scare away the horndogs.”
Bird eyes Marella’s fashion-plate curves. “Not possible,” she says.
“Then I’ll just have to bring Sarah,” Marella says, framing her hips with her hands in the mirror. “She can be my lesbian force field.”
“So you two …” Bird trails off. She should know this already, but this is the first time she’s seen Marella in the two days since Nicky was hospitalized. Marella had to drag her out here this evening, since both of them agreed there was no point in missing the dance. His doctors declared Nicky out of danger yesterday, though he has to stay in the hospital for a few more days.
Still, she could have texted or called. She recalls Charlotte with a pang; this time, she has to be a better friend.
Marella gives her a half smile in the mirror and twists so she can look at the back.
“Does my butt look big in this?” she asks, shaking it.
“Oh, no —” says the woman at the counter.
“Yes,” says Bird.
Marella tosses her hair and grins. “I’ll take it,” she tells the woman, and then hands Bird a pile of clothes. “Here, try these on and I’ll tell you about Sarah.”
“Let’s put it like this,” Marella says while Bird pulls on a pair of improbably pink overalls behind the blue velvet curtain in the changing room. “Sarah’s relationship status on Facebook has gone from ‘single’ to ‘it’s complicated.’ ”
“This is hideous,” Bird says, stuffing her hands into the deep pockets.
“Which one? The leaf dress or the rainbow sequin booty skirt?”
“Uh, Pepto-Bismol overalls.”
“I put those in there? Sorry about that. Try the dress.”
“Do you think it’s complicated?” Bird asks, kicking the overalls to a corner.
Marella sighs. “I think she’s beautiful and smart and way too dependent on parental approval and a great kisser and I mostly want to move on except whenever she’s nearby.”
The leaf dress turns out to be a dress of leaf-shaped pieces of cloth in different shades of green and yellow and rust, stitched together in a pattern of questionable modesty. Normally, she avoids wearing any shade that approaches red, but something about this dress looks worth trying.
“So it’s complicated, but you don’t want it to be.”
“Who does?”
“Half the sophomore class?”
Marella snorts. “Well? Come out here and show me.”
Bird adjusts the dress. “I can see my belly button.”
“What are you, a nun? Let me see.”
So Bird sets back her shoulders and pushes the curtain to the side. Marella jumps to her feet.
“Oh, shit,” she says.
“It’s the red, isn’t it? Not my color.”
“It looks very nice on you,” the woman at the counter says faintly.
Marella nods. “Yes, that. Seriously, look at yourself in the big mirror.”
Though the dress is short and layered with strategic holes and emphasizes all the parts of her body that she has hated for eight years — her big thighs, her small breasts, her absurdly defined biceps, her giraffe neck — it might have been made for her.
No, she thinks, turning slowly in the triple-mirror. Not for her, but for confident, happy, independent, got-her-shit-together adult Bird. The woman in the mirror, so solid and strange in a dress made of autumn, isn’t afraid of her own power. She knows fear, but it doesn’t dominate her. Staring at herself, future and present, Bird feels a moment of dislocation powerful enough to recall her shroom trip. But it’s not that she’s high, it’s that she’s here.
“Oh, shit,” Bird says.
Marella, still in her bootylicious pantsuit, stands beside Bird in the mirror. “Sarah and Coffee will think they’ve gone to heaven.”
Thoughts of him stream through her mind. Coffee, running down Trevor’s driveway. Coffee, watching her dance in Nicky’s kitchen on Thanksgiving. Coffee, kissing her and telling her about love.
“Whatever they think,” Bird says, “they won’t look away.”
* * *
The summons comes five minutes after Bird and Marella leave the store.
“Good news, honey,” her mother says, “it looks like we’ll be able to move back home at the start of next week. Now, I know you’ve been wanting to get a few of your things from your room, and I’ve been catching up with an old friend who just happens to be able to give the permissions for that sort of thing. Come by our hotel so you can get the keys — bring that new boyfriend of yours too.”
This speech, delivered in tones so sticky sweet Bird wants to peel her ear from the receiver, prompts a comment from someone in the room with her mother. Carol Bird laughs, soft and throaty, in response.
“Mom, what the hell?”
Her mother sucks her teeth, just that, but Bird has always been her mother’s daughter, and she understands precisely what it means: Play the game.
“Didn’t you want some shoes for the dance?” her mother says.
Bird glances at Marella and nods. “I do,” she says slowly. She doesn’t know if she should be afraid for her mother or for herself. She doesn’t know what will happen when she takes Coffee to that hotel room with this friend of her mother’s, but she knows she will.
Because her mother will be in some kind of trouble if she doesn’t.
She and Coffee take a taxi to the Mandarin Oriental, on streets that seem strangely crowded after weeks with only buses and government cars. With the quarantine ending, the government has eased most driving restrictions. She doubts this return to normalcy will last another terrorist attack like the one that dropped phosgene gas, but for now she allows herself to hope. She and Coffee have the vaccine, and soon the rest of the world will too. They can have a future — even with his looming trial, even with the hole in her memory.
Coffee is quiet on the ride to the boutique Southwest hotel with views of the Mall and the marina. He rests his head on the fogged window and rubs the soft flesh between her thumb and index finger. He looks tired. She wants to ask him if something is wrong, but she keeps as quiet as he, the only sound in the taxi their breathing and the low drone of the driver’s Christian radio station. She’s worried about what it means for her mother to insist she return to the house, which holds the only clue to Bird’s missing memory. Coffee understood this as soon as she repeated her mother’s invitation; with nothing more than a worried glance and a discreet shake of his left leg, she knew that he knew the danger. His lawyer said his ankle monitor wasn’t transmitting audio, but there are other ways to bug a conversation.
Her mother opens the door when she knocks, and enfolds Bird in an embrace before she can even say hello. Buffeted by the unexpectedly familiar scent of her mother’s perfume and the rigid outline of her bra pressing into her shoulder, Bird goes slack. Nothing about this show of affection is real, but she holds on to every false second. She pretends, as surely as her mother does: She is accepted, she is loved, she is a girl becoming a woman sure of her own worth.
Then her mother pinches her arm hard enough to leave a bruise as she draws back, and they are themselves again: Bird the elder and younger, bound by ties that might once have been as simple as love.
“Hello, Alonso,” Carol Bird says. “Come inside and meet Donovan, then I’ll leave you guys to it.”
Donovan is a large man with curly red hair and squinting eyes. He wears khaki slacks and a blue blazer. His smile when Coffee and Bird walk into the sitting room ought to be open and friendly, but something in the back of it makes Bird stumble on the carpet. He’s older, less attractive, probably friendlier, but the moment she looks at him, all she can think about is Roosevelt.
“Pleased to meet you, Emily,” he says, extending his hand. “Your mother has told me a lot about you.”
She forces herself to take it. “None of it’s true,” she says.
He laughs and so does her mother; her mother is less convincing. “I met you once when you were much younger,” he says. “You’ve grown into a lovely young woman.”
Behind her, Coffee snorts. Donovan looks up.
“You must be Coffee,” he says. “I’ve heard a lot about you too.”
Coffee jams his hands into the pockets of his jeans and hunches in elaborate indifference. “I’m sure you have.”
Her mother gives her a long look over Donovan’s shoulder; she means it as a warning, but Bird takes it as evidence.
“Lukas Group?” she says, bringing back his startled attention. “Let me guess, Roosevelt’s boss?”
He blinks. “Coworker, let’s say. Clever girl you’ve got here, Carol.”
“Takes after her father,” Carol Bird says, knowing perfectly well which half of her marriage has the brains.
“So I hear you want to get some of your clothes for a dance tomorrow night?”
“A go-go,” Bird says, wondering how her mother even heard about it. It’s the exact sort of excuse her mother would concoct: a reason that a girl shaped like Bird should care about, but actual Bird doesn’t. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe her mother wants her to know about the strangeness of Donovan’s visit, wants her to be on her guard. Maybe this time, Emily and Carol Bird are on the same team.
The possibility dizzies her nearly as much as her mother’s embrace.
“A go-go?” he says.
Carol Bird laughs. “Honestly, Donovan, how long have you lived in this city?”
“Too damn long, I’d say. But Langley keeps me too busy for the local color. Well, Emily, I’ve cleared you to visit, but call your mother if anyone bothers you.”
Her mother
gives her two sets of keys — one for her car, the other for the house. Bird takes them numbly, not understanding half as much as she needs to. They want her to go back to her house — they’re insisting on it. A coincidence? Not a chance.
Because they overheard her basement shroom trip and are just as curious about what it means as she is? Because this final clue is the only way to make them leave her alone?
As she takes the house keys, her mother’s eyes are full of resignation and trust. Whatever she’s done, she’s done it for Bird. She’d accused her mother in the hospital of doing nothing to help her.
And these keys, this strange man, are her answer. An answer so dangerous Carol has decided to trust her daughter for the first time in her life.
Bird holds the keys tight in her left hand and nods slowly. I can do this.
Her mother smiles. For a bright moment, Bird takes it as a gift, more precious than the embrace because this evanescent, anemic gesture is real. But then she realizes her mother’s gaze has wandered past Bird, to the bedroom door that had been closed a moment earlier. Her father braces himself in the doorway, one hand against the jamb. His anger hangs naked in the room, but everyone pretends not to see it.
“There you go, Greg,” Carol says inexplicably.
“Nice seeing you again, Emily,” Donovan says, not taking his eyes from her father in the doorway.
“Dad?” Bird says.
He shakes his head and turns his back to them all. They watch him too, he said. And Roosevelt did warn her about his boss. Bird watches the tableau — father, mother, daughter, and danger, red-haired — as if she has died and floats, disembodied, above the scene of an accident. Offered, at last, her mother’s trust and denied her mother’s love.
Only Coffee’s warm hand has no place in her nightmare; only he can pull her down to her body, out of the crossfire, into the hallway and an embrace that is everything desired and true.
Love is the Drug Page 28
