Now we’re only three blocks from Jackie’s house. No subway to get her there. No getting up three hours before school starts.
Some kids my age are hanging around this arcade I’ve been wanting to check out, but haven’t had the time, and probably won’t ever have. They lean against the games and each other. I look at them and feel like I’m missing something.
Then I think—I got K-Boy and J. L. I mean not like before. But I still got them. It’ll never be like before, but I still got ’em.
I get to our building and go up the elevator.
“We’re home, baby.”
She knows it ’cause all of a sudden she seriously needs a diaper change.
Dad’s left a note on the fridge that I see when I go to make Feather a bottle:
FOOD IN THE FRIDGE. A LETTER FROM YOUR BROTHER.
I feed Feather and read my letter from Paul out loud. She relaxes in my arms, and after a few minutes the formula in her bottle isn’t as important as sleeping is. I take her to our room and try to put her in her crib, but she isn’t that sleepy.
She just looks pissed and dares me to put her down.
So I don’t, and keep reading to her. When I’m done reading I sit holding her by the bedroom window and tell her what I did today. And just about the time her eyes close shut, I tell her about her mom.
then
I USED TO WATCH COMMERCIALS when I was little. I’d run in from the bedroom I shared with my brother Nick every time one came on.
I knew all the words to commercials for floor cleaner and cars, breakfast cereals and soda, fast food places and car batteries. I knew ’em all and used to sing commercials day in and out.
I’m singing a video rental commercial to Nia’s stomach now. Since the baby won’t be talking to me as it’s growing up this has to be enough, even if it is just stupid commercial jingles.
Nia thinks it’s cute, and looks at me like I’m a puppy, then curls up on the couch and goes to sleep. I sing a few more commercials to the baby, then get up to leave.
I’m still dodging her parents. I can’t help it. K-Boy laughs at me about it, but he spends his time trying to feel superior. I got reason.
I touch Nia on the back before I head out the door, leaving her smiling in her sleep. I walk onto the street singing a shampoo commercial.
Nia
WHEN I WAS FIVE I wanted to be a firefighter. All my uniforms would have Nia on them, and I would speed through the city in the lightning trucks. I wanted the ladders to rise high into the sky and have me on them. I wanted my hands to pull people from fires and disasters. I wanted my arms to be the arms that carried out babies and kids, safe. I wanted my feet to be the ones that ran up endless flights of stairs and brought everybody back alive.
But by the time I was ten I wanted to be a balloonist, and just fly up high over everybody, and that’s what it feels like I’m doing now.
I’m flying up high over everybody; way over the city and even myself. I’m flying over Bobby and my parents, and the park with all my friends in it. I guess this is what it must feel like to be dying.
All I want to do is lie here and sleep, even though I see the blood and it shouldn’t be where it is. And it was just a minute ago Bobby was singing a shampoo commercial, but he’s gone now.
But that’s okay because all I want to do is fly.
now
I TELL FEATHER ABOUT HER MOM.
She never liked to wear shoes, but always had to, ’cause you do when you’re surrounded by cement. She liked tacos better than anything, and always ate the extra sauce straight out of the packet.
She cheated at cards and didn’t care who knew. Socks got on her nerves, and she had fifty pairs of sunglasses and seventy hats.
She got in fights at school when she saw somebody being mean to somebody else, even though she could be mean too and very funny.
While she was pregnant with you, fish made her sick, but she ate spicy food all the time.
And all she wanted to do while she was pregnant was swim, but she’d never learned how.
There’s a picture of her right before you were born, with a big smiling face painted on her stomach. She liked to sit on the floor and hide under tables so she could eavesdrop.
You look just like her in baby pictures.
Feather stretches, yawns, then opens her eyes for a second before she snores once and goes back to sleep.
I tell her, I saw your mom today.
K-Boy told her jokes that she probably didn’t hear, and J. L. played her his new CD and danced around her bed till one of the nurses came in and gave him a nasty look.
I told her what I was going to wear to graduation, and how you preferred the night to the day, liked ice cream already, and how Mr. Moose made you smile.
I asked her if she remembered how I put you on her stomach before they took her away from the city and away to the country for something called long-term care. I asked her if she was ever going to wake up, and if she really believed what the doctors said to her parents about brain damage.
I told her about you and how you were mine, not the smiling, happy people’s baby; ’cause now that she was gone I wouldn’t sign the papers.
I got tired after a while and J. L. went looking for food, then K-Boy went to sleep on the chair beside her bed, but I kept telling her about you, Feather.
The nurse came in and turned her over.
Another nurse came in and cleared her breathing tube.
But it didn’t matter what was going on, baby; I kept telling her about you.
Damn right, I kept telling her about you.
then
I TRIED NOT TO RUN, but I did.
I tried not to cry, but when I looked down at my shirt it was soaked; with me wanting to believe it was sweat. By then, though my nose was running and I couldn’t even see the faces of the people, I ran into the street.
And I must have been screaming….
Must have looked crazy and desperate, but it was better for me to run all the way to the hospital from my mom’s ’cause the note on the door said meet her there, something had happened to Nia.
The whacked part was I didn’t start trying to make a deal with God till I was almost running through the doors. And when I see my mom’s face I know I got to catch up.
So I start begging.
I say how it’s supposed to work out ’cause we thought about it. We made a mistake but we aren’t stupid. We were going to do the right thing.
Then I guess I start babbling about how Nia looks when she sleeps and how she smiles and eats and laughs, but I have to stop ’cause even though I don’t think about God or go to church, maybe this isn’t the way you make deals with him.
Maybe he doesn’t listen if you scare everybody in the emergency room and hold on to your mom that tight while you’re screaming and crying more than you ever have in your whole damned life.
Maybe if you’d said out loud how much you felt in the beginning you wouldn’t have to look at her parents’ faces when they walk out the automatic double doors.
And my mom’s whispering in my ear, past the screaming, “Hold on, Bobby, hold on,” like she did when I had poison ivy all over my body when I was nine and she held my hand while I cried on cool white sheets.
Hold on, Bobby. Hold on.
I want to tell Mr. Wilkins to hold on to his wife harder ’cause right in front of the doctors, nurses, me, and my parents she’s starting to disappear.
In a minute, it’s too late.
She’s gone.
Just like that. No noise. Not a word.
She walks over to the window and looks out it like she’s a tourist. She’s seeing everything for the first time and she doesn’t even know us.
She’s holding Nia’s favorite stuffed animal, and all I can think is she grabbed it to make Nia feel better, but when I look at her again, I change my mind.
It’s for her.
We all sit at a round table, but none of us are knights.
My p
arents make soft sounds at Nia’s parents and ask the doctor questions.
Nia’s father nods his head at everybody and cries when the doctor closes his folder, pats him on the back, and leaves. Mrs. Wilkins holds hands with her husband, but I don’t know how she keeps a grip, ’cause she’s been invisible since the emergency room.
I can’t ever be a knight or brave, so I ask nothing about brain death or eclampsia or why the girl who had a thousand pair of sunglasses and my baby inside her won’t ever walk, talk, or smile again. And I have to say irreversible vegetative coma five times, like a tongue twister, to believe it.
And I feel like a three-year-old when I walk out the room between my parents while they hold my hands. Mr. Wilkins starts crying, then falls to his knees, and it’s only then that Nia’s mom comes back from the invisible place and rocks him in her arms.
I carry around a picture of me, Nia, K-Boy, and J. L. at the beach. A minute before the picture was taken by J. L.’s sister we were all out in the water, splashing around, having fun.
I had to fold the picture in half so it would fit in my wallet. I like the way Nia’s laughing and the rest of us look pissed.
Nia’s laughing ’cause just as the picture is snapped she tells us she’s given all our clothes to some kids who said they needed them for Halloween.
It was July, but we believed her.
J. L.’s sister has the next picture of us running back to the water. It doesn’t show our faces, only our backs while we chase her out into the white water.
I guess I think of it when I turn around in the waiting room and see the backs of both my buddies talking to my dad. But I know they won’t be laughing like we did, or yelling “Get her” like we did.
But they’re here, and she won’t ever be running away from any of us again. In a few minutes, though, they’re beside me and in the white light of the waiting room. I miss Nia for the first time, but feel her more than I ever did.
It wasn’t fast or blurred. Didn’t knock me out or make me fall against the wall.
She came to me slowly.
Somebody covered in hospital clothes head to foot pushed the incubator toward me down the longest hall I’ve ever been in.
My mom and dad talked over my shoulders, and Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins cried over by the nurses’ station.
She came to me so slowly I felt like I was in a dream. Four steps away, three, then two …
Then she was all dark hair, hands in fists, Nia’s nose and mouth. She came to me so slow, and it was just like somebody brushed the air with a feather.
I just came from the nursery.
Feather doesn’t like being wrapped up in her blanket. She fights against the binding. I like that she does that. I like that the only thing that makes her not fight is me holding her in the rocking chair in the hospital family room.
It’s been an hour since I did it.
The social worker tried about five minutes of reasoning. She kept tapping her pencil against her desk. I think she was saying the things she thought she should say.
“I know this is an emotional time for you, Bobby. I can’t think what you must be going through. Nia’s condition—have the doctors said anything else?”
I look at the smiling families on the wall.
“They keep saying ‘persistent vegetative.’ I hate when they say it, but there it is.”
“Bobby, the baby …”
“Feather. Her name is Feather.”
“We have to think in the end what’s best for her. Are you ready for this? Do you know what raising a baby entails?”
I look at the adoption papers stacked in front of me, then fold them in half before I tear them.
“No, I don’t know anything about raising a kid. I’m sixteen and none of those people on the wall look like the kind of family me and Feather’s gonna be. But I’m doing it.”
The social worker’s forehead wrinkles up. “You don’t have to do it. This baby is wanted. There’s a family that wants her. They’re set up to take her and love her—”
“But I love her, and even though I’m not set up for her, she’s mine. And I’m hers.”
When I walk out of the office I think I see “Just Frank” standing at the end of the hall. And then I know I’m being a man, not just some kid who’s upset and wants it his way.
I’m being a man.
Before all the papers turned into shreds, I talked to Nia’s parents.
I talked; they listened.
They talked; I listened.
They cried.
I almost cried.
And when Mrs. Wilkens started telling me how much the baby looked like Nia and she’s all they’ll ever have of their daughter, I did start to cry But I wiped my eyes real fast on the back of my sleeve ’cause I’m going to be this baby’s daddy now.
I don’t know any of the parent rules, but crying like a baby when you just decided to keep a baby probably shouldn’t happen.
“We’ll support you keeping the baby, Bobby,” was all they said in the end. But when they looked at the baby through the nursery glass, it was like they were saying good-bye.
Soon Feather is home with me sleeping on my stomach.
Three days ago everything was different. She wasn’t here and she was never going to be with me.
Now she’s three days and nine hours old, won’t sleep through the night, and my mom—her grandmother—only smiles at her when I’m not looking. But it’s all okay ’cause I know now better than I ever did that I’m supposed to do this. I’m supposed to be her daddy and stay up all night if I have to. I’m supposed to suck it up and do all the right things if I can, even if I screw it up and have to do it over.
It’s all right for now, ’cause for the first time I get to watch the coming of the soft morning light.
now
BABY, DO YOU WANT TO hear more about Heaven? Do you want to know more about the fields, and grass, and cows? Do you want to wonder what it would be like to have a deer wake you up by eating on a tree outside your window?
Do you want to know more about somewhere else that’s not here?
“What you thinking about, Bobby?”
I jump ’cause I think it’s the first time my dad has ever asked me this question. And, because it’s the first time, I think I should come up with something good.
What to say?
I got a little time to think. Feather went down for a nap a minute ago and won’t wake up till her formula digests and she needs some more. For once I don’t have anything to do and the sun is shining down Seventh Ave.
What to say?
Do I say I’m glad I’m back in Brooklyn and wanted more than anything for Feather to see more trees? Do I tell him I’m glad I’m back with him ’cause he puts the covers over me at night and kisses Feather all the time before he leaves the room?
Or do I tell him that I’m thinking I need something else ’cause of everything that’s happened? Everything.
Do I tell him how my whole body hurt when I went to see Nia in the nursing home the other day? Do I describe how skinny she is and how soft her lips were when I kissed her good-bye?
Maybe I’ll just tell him how I don’t think I’ll make it if I stay here. In this place. In this state.
Maybe I’ll just tell him how I feel like I’m a baby with a baby most of the time. Just playing daddy until somebody comes over and says, “Hell, kid, time’s up. No more of this daddy thing for you, and anyway you’ve been busted.”
Maybe I’ll tell him how all of a sudden the city just feels like it’s too big and I’ve been having dreams that I leave Feather on the subway and can’t get back inside the train fast enough to get her, and she disappears forever.
Maybe I should tell him all that and then he’ll make me something good to eat and we’ll turn on one of the sports channels and watch baseball all into the night.
Instead I say, “Paul says he loves Ohio and it’s a good place to raise kids.”
Dad goes over to the window and squints
into the sun.
“Your brother might be right, Bobby, he just might be right.”
And then me and Dad turn on the sports channel and talk about how we should have checked the Mets out more.
heaven
I WON’T TALK about the good-byes.
I won’t talk about how for a month I went to every place in the city that I loved so much, so many times that K-Boy and J. L. thought I was whacked.
I won’t say how much I’m going to miss everybody and how if it wasn’t for Pennsylvania I’d be one hour from Brooklyn instead of eight and I’d have the best of all of it.
I won’t say.
I won’t talk about how, I woke up one night to my mom rocking Feather and telling her to mind me and take care of me.
I will talk about how, when I finally visited Paul in Heaven, Ohio, the town was out of some old postcard and Feather smiled at everybody when we walked down the main street.
I will talk about how the grass smelled and how the horses looked running in the fields outside of town. And how I decided the little apartment by the car repair shop with its big front window and bikers hanging around all day had to be ours.
I will talk about how I didn’t know if it would all work out as me and Feather pulled out of New York on the bus, and waved to everybody we’d left behind.
I can talk about how it felt to be holding my baby in my arms on the long ride, getting off the bus when we had to and sleeping the rest of the time.
I can tell you how it feels sitting in the window with Feather pointing out the creek that rolls past our backyard. I can tell you how it is to feel as brand new as my daughter even though I don’t know what comes next in this place called Heaven.
about the author
ANGELA JOHNSON received her first major literary prize in 1991 when her second book When I Am Old with You was named a Coretta Scott King Honor book. Since that time, Angela won two Coretta Scott King Awards, for the novels Heaven and Toning the Sweep, and a second Coretta Scott King Honor for The Other Side: Shorter Poems. Her most recent novel for Simon & Schuster is Looking for Red. She lives in Kent, Ohio.
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