by Tayari Jones
Tasha was going to say, “I like that top Monica Kaufman has on,” as soon as she finished chewing. But before she could swallow, the pictures of the children appeared on the screen. Nine photos that looked like school pictures were arranged in three rows like a tic-tac-toe game waiting to be played. Tasha stared hard at the TV. She had a mouth full of soft sweet fruit that she tried to swallow, but her throat was constricted and she coughed. Instead of patting her back, Mama said quietly, sternly, “Hush.”
“Mama,” DeShaun said.
“Hush.”
Somebody had murdered all those kids. Two little girls, all the rest boys. What had happened? Tasha had seen a couple of people get murdered on TV. There was the noise of a gun and then the person lying on the floor with a big spot of ketchupy blood on his clothes. She wasn’t sure how the gun killed people. A bullet was involved, yes. But a bullet was a teensy thing that could fit on just one of your fingers.
“All them kids are killed?” DeShaun asked. She was looking at the girl in the upper left-hand corner, who was about her same age. The girl was smiling with her mouth open, as if the photographer had been playing with puppets to make her laugh right before snapping the picture.
“Some of them,” Tasha said, leaning forward to hear better.
DeShaun hooked her fingers between her bottom lip and teeth. She was about to cry; Tasha noted her little sister’s fluttering eyelashes. She pushed the can of peaches toward her sister in an effort to hold off the gusher until the news was over because DeShaun didn’t cry like regular people; she wailed, and nobody would be able to hear the news over that racket. When DeShaun opened her mouth to let out a whopper, the phone rang, choking her sobs in mid-bawl.
“Hello,” Mama said. “Yeah, we’re watching right now.” She made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Of course they’re home.” Noisy exhale. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to them yet. We get the news at six o’clock, same as you.” Mama shifted the phone to her other ear and turned her eyes toward the ceiling. “Fine,” she said. “Here’s Tasha.”
Daddy’s voice was deep, like a hole that went all the way to China. “Hey, baby,” he said. “You watching the news?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Listen”—his voice was serious—“I want you and DeShaun to come right home after school. Hold your sister’s hand and don’t talk to anybody. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” Tasha said. He sounded like he was mad. That wasn’t fair. She knew he wasn’t going to talk to DeShaun like that. Tasha decided that she had a question for him. “Daddy, where are you?”
Mama looked at her sharply across the table. She opened her mouth but then she shut it again, pressing her lips together tightly as a warning. Tasha knew from careful eavesdropping that Daddy was “with his woman” but wanted to know exactly where.
“Not far,” he said gently. “Don’t you worry about that.”
Tasha was about to press him for a little more specificity but DeShaun was trying to wrestle the receiver away.
“Ouch!” Tasha said. “Shaun scratched me.”
“Give her the phone,” Mama said.
“But I’m not through talking to Daddy. I was fixing to ask him—”
Mama pointed her slim index finger at Tasha and shook it wordlessly. Tasha gave the phone to DeShaun, mumbling, “It’s not fair.”
DeShaun held the phone with both hands and yelled into the mouthpiece as if she thought that she had to talk loud enough for him to hear her, wherever he was. “Daddy, can you come back? Somebody is getting the childrens!”
Tasha shook her head. Whenever DeShaun got scared, mad, or even really happy, she started talking like a baby. Her voice got all high, and she messed up even simple words.
Tasha didn’t know exactly what Daddy said to Shaun, but she figured that it was something like he would not be coming home right that instant, because DeShaun knocked the can from the table to the floor. Thick syrup and orange peaches landed on the yellow linoleum and were smashed under Mama’s shoes as she sprang to take the phone from DeShaun, who was begging her daddy to come back and save them. “I’ll call you back,” Mama said into the phone and hung up.
They slept with Mama that night. She had invited them after they followed her around the house all evening, not wanting to be left in a room without her protective adult presence. Sometimes Tasha would feel better if DeShaun was in the room too. But today, when she thought about going to her room with her little sister and listening to the record player, she realized that being in a room with DeShaun was just about the same as being alone. If something scary happened, what would DeShaun do? Probably run to Tasha expecting her to be the one to save the day, since she was the oldest and everything.
Mama stepped on DeShaun twice while trying to fix the curtain rod in the den.
“DeShaun, baby,” Mama had said, “don’t stand up under me like that. I don’t want to hurt you.”
And DeShaun had balled her face up and cried. Mama got on her knees so they would be about the same height and hugged her little daughter, who stopped crying enough to say, “Scared.”
Tasha was frightened too, but she didn’t want to cry about it. As a matter of fact, she wished DeShaun would shut up. They wouldn’t be able to hear it if an intruder knocked in the front door with a sledgehammer. No, they would not be aware of a single thing until the man came to take them away.
“Do you want to sleep in my room tonight?” Mama asked.
DeShaun nodded.
“What about you, Miss Lady?”
“Okay,” Tasha said, relieved. “If you want me to.”
At bedtime, Tasha lay on her father’s side of the bed, awake while DeShaun and her mother dreamed. Tonight was different from the other nights she and her sister had gotten themselves so frightened that they were allowed to sleep in their parents’ big bed. Last June, there had been a ferocious thunderstorm. A power line had been hit and the Snoopy night-light had gone dark.
“Mama!” DeShaun had called.
“Come on in here,” Daddy had said, sounding sleepy but like he was laughing. Tasha had thought she heard Mama giggle.
The girls had crawled into the bed between them and slept breathing in Mama’s gardenia talc and Daddy’s Old Spice underarm deodorant.
Tasha remembered the thunderstorm night. Her parents on each side of the bed provided a barrier between them and—what? Not the thunder; it boomed away, oblivious to their sleeping arrangements. And she hadn’t been scared of thunder. It was only a sound. She had been startled, but not scared. So when had she ever truly been afraid? After watching a movie about a swamp-monster, she had trouble sleeping for weeks. But what exactly had she been afraid of? That a swamp-monster would come into her room? She had opened her eyes at the slightest sound, expecting to be face-to-face with the gooey green beast. But if the monster did in fact come into her bedroom, what would it do that was so scary? In the movie, the swamp-monster had the white girl in his arms and was heading back toward the muck and the white girl was crying Help! Then her boyfriend came and shot the monster with a bow and arrow and kissed the girl. The movie didn’t really show what the monster was going to do with the girl if the boyfriend hadn’t shown up, and Tasha couldn’t imagine.
But this was way worse than a swamp-monster with vague motives. If a child murderer came in the doorway, he would have to kill Mama, then DeShaun, and then Tasha. But if he came in the window, Tasha would be first. And it could happen. Didn’t Monica Kaufman say that one girl was taken through her window? And Tasha knew what had happened to her. She got asphyxiated. What’s that? Tasha had asked. Mama shut her eyes. Smothered, she breathed.
Tasha pressed her face into her pillow to see what it was like to be smothered, to be deprived of something as necessary as air. After a few seconds, her heart moved harder and she felt a desperation in her chest. She held her face there as long as she could and then she lifted her head. Her body acted without her, drawing a long, deep breath as if it were making up for
lost time.
The power of DeShaun’s tears had long been, for Tasha, a source of mystery and envy. As soon as Shaun’s lower lip started trembling and her eyelashes went to blinking, their parents sprang into motion. Tasha’s tears, it seemed, only brought admonitions to be a big girl. But it was DeShaun’s enchanting weeping on the night they found out about the child murders that brought Daddy back home.
It took a few weeks for DeShaun’s magic to kick in. Tasha was fumbling with the lock on the front door—trying to remember if pushing or pulling would keep the bolt from sticking—when the door opened from the inside. Tasha dropped her lunch box and used her free hand to grab her little sister’s wrist. The plastic container opened when it hit the porch and an apple rolled out, badly bruised.
“Who’s that fooling with my door?” Daddy said, smiling broadly, stretching his arms wide enough for a double embrace.
DeShaun ran into the hug, shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” like TV kids, but Tasha stood back. He folded one arm over DeShaun’s back but left the other free, inviting.
“Ladybug, you’re not glad to see your father?” He stopped smiling.
“You came back for your fishing rod, screwdrivers, and stuff?”
“No,” he said. “I came back for you two.”
“You’re taking us with you?” Tasha said, alarmed.
DeShaun fell limp in her half hug.
“No,” he said, laughing. “I mean I’m back home. For good.”
Tasha consented to the hug then, but she didn’t believe him until she had snuck into her parents’ room and seen his underwear stacked in the top dresser drawer, their striped waistbands facing outward.
They sat at the table that night in their usual positions; the only evidence of the weeks that had passed without him was the little TV, which displayed the pictures of the lost children. Tasha was aware of the words hot line and task force as she shoveled bright yellow corn into her mouth. She looked up at the little screen and took in a photo of the little girl. Her hair was fastened into an unruly ponytail just above her right temple.
“Daddy,” Tasha said, “at school somebody said that they took that one girl out of her house when she was asleep.”
“For real?” DeShaun said.
“That’s what Monica said.”
“That girl that was taken out of her house was different,” Daddy said. “I believe that was her stepdaddy.”
“Like Rex,” Tasha said, interested.
Mama interrupted. “Tasha, don’t even say that. Next thing you know, you’ll be going around telling folks that Rex is going to kill Ayana.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Tasha said, wondering how her mother could look right into her head and see what she was thinking.
“But somebody took her out of her bed?” DeShaun asked again.
“Carried her out of the window,” Tasha added. “And nobody ever saw her again. They still don’t know where she is.”
“Tasha, stop,” Mama said.
Daddy sat DeShaun on his lap and put his hands on either side of her toast-colored face, smoothing back the hair that had escaped her barrettes. “Nobody is going to take you out of this house. Nobody is going to hurt my family as long as I’m around.”
“And anyway,” said Tasha, “we have burglar bars.”
But burglar bars were not enough to convince Mama and Daddy that the house was safe. When the number of faces on the news increased to an even dozen, they told the girls that their routine had to change. After school they were to go to Mrs. Mahmud’s house, next door, like they had when they were little kids, and stay there until Mama got off work at five. Under no circumstances were they to go into the house alone. Tasha was relieved. Although she had once been especially proud of the silver key, she had begun to dread turning it in the door and entering the empty house with DeShaun. After school Tasha, in charge, would turn up the thermostat, get their snack from the counter and put it in their room (although they knew better than to eat in there). Then, the girls would go to the bathroom, each one sitting on the side of the bathtub keeping watch while the other was vulnerable. This completed, they would go to their room, shut the door and put a chair in front of it as an obstacle for child murderers who might be lurking in the house waiting for sisters coming home alone.
When Mrs. Mahmud opened the door for Tasha and DeShaun, the girls looked at each other quizzically. The lime-colored living room had been transformed. Before, Mrs. Mahmud’s house had been full of knickknacks that children were forbidden to touch. The girls had sat on the living-room couch, still as mummies, until their parents came to retrieve them. Now, however, the fragile glass rocking horses had been removed and the carpet covered with a plastic sheath. Children were all over the place engaged in rainy-day activities. A group of four or so seventh-graders were playing Monopoly. Roy from across the street was in the kitchen frosting brownies with an unsteady hand. His brother, David, read quietly in the corner.
“Everybody is over here!” DeShaun said, wriggling out of her coat. She was right. They had spent so many afternoons locked in their room they hadn’t noticed that none of the neighborhood kids played outside anymore.
“Let me hang up your coat,” Mrs. Mahmud said, picking DeShaun’s green plaid jacket up from the floor. Tasha was reluctant to remove hers. It was a pretty pink one with genuine rabbit fur around the hood and sleeves. Daddy had brought it home one day hanging from a little hook above the window of the passenger seat of his car. Tasha had thought that it was dry cleaning but the package was opaque. And something about the way he handled it made it clear that this was more than just his gray suit. He’d held the garment with its hanger hooked over his index finger, gone into his bedroom and shut the door.
Tasha had stood in front of the shut door and listened. Mama was in the kitchen banging pots and pans, making all sorts of distracting noise. But Tasha knew how to concentrate on what she was listening for. There was the sound of rustling plastic. He was unwrapping the thing. She wished that the door had a big keyhole like doors in stories. But real-life doors locked with a little round button in the center of doorknobs, and kids’ rooms had no locks at all.
“Tash,” Daddy called from inside the room.
How did he know she was out there? She had pretty much accepted that Mama had eyes in the back of her head and even X-ray vision sometimes. But not Daddy.
“Tasha!” he said louder, and she realized that he was just calling her in the regular way. She scampered back to her room to answer.
“Sir?”
“Come here for a minute.”
“Okay, let me put my spelling words up.”
The door was still closed when she reached her parents’ room. Should she knock on it or barge right in like she usually did? She tapped lightly on the door frame and went inside.
“Ta-dah!” Daddy said, with a grand swoop of his arm, motioning toward the bed.
Tasha eyed the rose-colored satin incredulously. She whispered, “Did Mama see this yet?”
Daddy winked and shook his head.
“What about DeShaun?”
“Nope.”
She giggled deliciously, sliding into the coat as Daddy held it. She turned on her toes in a complete circle before the full-length mirror twice before Daddy said, “Don’t get dizzy and fall.”
Monica Fisher was going to pass out with jealousy. This coat was not only trimmed in genuine rabbit fur, as the label verified, but it came with a matching muff to keep her pretty little hands warm.
Tasha had to let that fabulous coat rot in her closet for a month and a half as she waited for the weather to cool off. She was afraid that she would have to wait until Christmas and who knew how many girls would have new coats by then? But October brought a little nip to the morning air. Tasha wore the heavy coat although DeShaun only had on a windbreaker.
Mrs. Mahmud said, “Let me hang up that gorgeous coat in the hall closet by itself so that nothing happens to it.”
Tasha wiggled out
of the coat and headed to the living room and sat outside of a group of three kids playing Monopoly. They had all gotten to Mrs. Mahmud’s at least an hour before since their school was in walking distance. She thought about asking them to start the game over so that she could play, but she didn’t really know them all that well. Besides, she wasn’t a big fan of Monopoly. She didn’t want to play a board game. She wanted things to be like they were before, when she was in charge of her own house for two wonderful afternoon hours. This felt like being demoted to kindergarten.
Tasha quickly got tired of watching the Monopoly game. She wished she had brought something to read. She wandered into the kitchen where Mrs. Mahmud was on the telephone, laughing. When she saw Tasha, she shooed her away with a wide hand decorated with nail polish. Mrs. Mahmud was the kind of grown person that Tasha didn’t really like, the kind that thought that kids weren’t supposed to talk unless someone talked to them first. Her Great-Aunt Reatha was like that. She even went so far as to say, out loud, that “children should be seen and not heard,” like they weren’t really people at all.
Mama and Daddy were even getting to be like that now. Tasha didn’t like it, but she kept quiet at dinner now. It hurt her feelings not to be allowed to contribute to the conversations, but it did have benefits. It seemed that when she was not heard, she was not seen either.
That night at dinner, she sucked saltine crackers until they were mushy and quietly swallowed them. Mama and Daddy were talking and she didn’t want to disrupt their illusion of privacy. They spoke more freely when she and DeShaun were not part of the discussion, so she let them have their space.
“It’s got to be somebody white,” Daddy said, shoving his peas around his plate with a slice of light bread.
“Might be,” Mama said.
“Might nothing. Think about it. You ain’t never heard of nobody black going around killing people for no reason. That’s white people’s shit.”
