The Warmest December

by Bernice L. McFadden

  Glenna didn’t laugh at first, she just rolled her eyes and shook her head. But I laughed, I needed to laugh to push away the evening’s events, and I did until the tears turned to salty diamonds on my cheeks and my teeth chattered from the biting cold.

  Glenna joined in just as a white Caprice Classic pulled up. “You need taxi, ladies?” the man behind the wheel asked.

  “Yeah,” Glenna said and then turned to me. Her eyes moved over my face, she looked at me the same way Delia had—as if I’d suddenly become a stranger.

  “Later, girl, okay?” she said and gave me the peace sign before opening the door and climbing into the backseat. I knew she had so much more she wanted to say, but the icy wind had made it hard to think of anything else but trying to get warm, and now the brown plush of the seats and the sweet stink that floated from the inside of the car rocked her worse than the cold and she put away her words until we would meet up again.

  She let the door hang open for a long moment, maybe to air out the car or lend light to the murky darkness, or maybe just to look at me again and make sure that I was her friend and not the stranger my mother thought I’d become.

  “C’mon, lady,” the driver called out over his shoulder impatiently. We both threw him a look and rolled our eyes in classic B-girl style.

  “Yeah, later, girl,” I said and pushed the door closed.

  There would be time later to tell her what I had learned and who I was becoming.

  If it wasn’t for the wind and the cold, I would have walked off down the block and away from the apartment building. But the cold had numbed my fingers, toes, and the lobes of my ears. It had beat at my breast and pushed at my back like a school bully until I turned away from it and toward the building.

  The wind followed me in and howled its way through the stairwells and hallways. I could feel it pushing at the bottom of the elevator as it climbed toward the eighth floor; even as I stepped into the hallway and started toward the apartment, it taunted and teased me.

  I walked in and almost slammed into Delia.

  “You think I don’t know where you go every day? You lie to me and say you’re making meetings, you lie to me and say you’re visiting with friends or just taking walks. But I know what you’re doing and I want you to stop!”

  Her eyes were wild and flaming.

  “I—” I started to explain, to plead my case.

  “I know you sit beside his bed watching him die a comfortable death, while we live an uncomfortable life. You go every day wasting money on bus fare, money that could buy eggs or bread. Giving your time, your precious, precious time, when you know that if the shoe were on the other foot, he wouldn’t even think of giving you the same. You know it’s true—didn’t you even see it in him with Malcolm?”

  She said it and the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up and I listened hard for the sound of Malcolm’s picture sliding lopsided against the wall, but all I could hear was Delia’s angry voice.

  “You want to forgive him and I’m saying that even though he’s your father, no one deserves forgiveness less than he does.” The words felt like a blade. “Don’t you forgive him, Kenzie, don’t you dare!” Delia screamed. “Don’t you dare forgive him,” she repeated and her words echoed into the empty hallway behind me and danced away with the mocking sound of the wind. She swayed her index finger in my face before turning away and walking toward the couch.

  I closed the door and removed my coat. The apartment stank of Newports as ribbons of cigarette smoke moved eerily around the bare lightbulb sitting in the center of the cracked and peeling ceiling. She must have smoked at least ten cigarettes during the time I was gone. I wanted to open a window, dump the used oil from the frying pan, and scrub away the burnt bits of meat that stuck to its silvery insides. I had a need to empty the ashtrays and then maybe sweep the floor. I didn’t want to talk about forgiveness with a woman who seemed to have forgotten that she’d forgiven her life away and mine right along with it.

  “He don’t deserve it, uh-uh, he don’t deserve it.” Delia shook her head back and forth, speaking more to the stale air around her than to me. Her hands searched across the litter of old magazines, candy wrappers, and the outdated TV Guides that covered the living room table. “I know I had another pack of cigarettes here, damnit,” she muttered to herself, temporarily forgetting about me.

  There seemed to be more gray hairs around her temples, many more than this morning, and the skin beneath her eyes looked darker, the space it colored etched deeper than a few hours ago. Delia had been old for a long time but it was really beginning to show and I felt guilty because I knew I was causing it.

  I walked over and sat down beside her. She moved away from me; it was a quick and disgusted movement as if I had something clinging to me that could soil her. Her hands continued searching the table for her cigarettes. I got up and went into the kitchen; she always kept at least one pack in the refrigerator. I opened up the egg-colored door and stared into the bright emptiness.

  Delia was flinging things off the table; her frustration was pushing toward a breaking point. I listened to her mumble and cuss under her breath and knew that most of her rage had nothing to do with her missing cigarettes.

  I flipped up the plastic cover on the inside door that said Butter and there was a new pack of Newports.

  “Here,” I said, handing her the pack. She snatched them from my hand, and like a fiend began tearing the clear plastic wrapper away.

  “Lemme tell you something, Kenzie,” she said breathlessly as she stuck a cigarette between her lips. “There are things you don’t know, things you couldn’t know.” She lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  I did know things, always had, things Delia would drop dead from if she knew I knew. Things she preached against but had, in her private past, succumbed to.

  I knew about the thing that found her near forty, pregnant and unhappily married. Things that found her up on a cold steel table, legs propped up in stirrups while a doctor had his whole hand up in her, probing and jabbing. “Seven weeks,” he said and pulled off the plastic gloves that covered those angry fingers. He didn’t just pull them off; he snapped them off so Delia could feel the disgust he had for her. He hadn’t seen the blue-green marks on her arms and back, he just assumed that she was careless and forgot to take the pill or that she was too lazy to get up and put in her diaphragm. He didn’t know that Hy-Lo had thrown all of those things away, including the douche bag that hung on the back of the bathroom door.

  “Are you sure about this, Mrs. Lowe?” the doctor asked after he saw the tears forming in her eyes.

  Delia moved her head up and down yes—before the question was out of his mouth because she did not want to be sure about it, she just wanted it to be over and done with. She breathed in the anesthesia and her eyes fluttered once, twice, three times before the big blue eyes of the doctor disappeared and she was sucked into a blackness that was so sweet, she would long for it the next time Hy-Lo hit her.

  When Delia woke up she was on her stomach and her arms were by her sides, her hands palms up. She was in a warehouse of women wrapped in white sheets on steel gurneys. They were lined up one after the other, three columns and six rows across. Head to head and toe to toe. Delia thought about the green accounting sheets at work and stifled a laugh. And then she thought about the slave ships and the cargo they carried and she bit her lip so she wouldn’t cry.

  The women filled the white-walled room and they looked like poultry beneath the large silver light fixtures that hung from the ceiling. They were all faced down and distinguishable only by race, girth, and hair color. Lawyer, teacher, clerk—their titles melded to form the only title that mattered: woman.

  All of them had had a life sucked from the womb and so this connected them. Delia could see that at least three of them had done so for the same reasons she had; the purplish blue that stood out like streaks of paint on their arms, calves, and shoulder blades told her so.

  For some
reason this made her feel better, less guilty because she saw that she was not the only one. She formed an alliance with these women in her mind and even smiled at the nurse who came to check on her.

  I knew things.

  “But Mom—” I tried to speak, and her finger was up again, swaying back and forth in my face, chopping my words into nothingness and dismissing them just as easily.

  I closed my mouth. I knew she felt like I had abandoned her, and even though there was only twelve inches of worn tweed fabric between us on the couch, I was miles away from the daughter she’d raised or even the woman she’d seen this morning.

  I wanted to tell her that the change in me started a long time ago, shortly after I stopped drinking, but I didn’t know it for what it was then. It wasn’t until the other day when I found the bottle and the wind found me and taunted me, reminding me that I was a weak woman, that I was just a child of an alcoholic. The wind told me that people would expect me to bend and break.

  I wanted to take Delia’s hand and hold it tightly and tell her that even though everything was against me, I let go of that bottle instead of drinking from it, and when I did, a light broke through the dirt and grime I had been carrying around inside of myself ever since that summer day on the sidewalk when I was five and the clothes rained down around me.

  I wanted to pull Delia close to me and cradle her in my arms, tell her about Hy-Lo’s childhood, ask her if she’d ever noticed the scars on the bottom of his feet or the fear that shone behind his eyes when he was in Gwenyth’s presence. That fear made him stone-blind to love. Did she know that?

  “You just don’t know,” Delia said again before she exhaled. I moved closer to her.

  “He had a hole near his heart,” I said.

  “What?” Delia asked and turned to look at me. “What hole?”

  “Right here,” I said and placed my hand near my heart.

  Delia gave me a queer look. “Your father has a lot of things wrong with him, Kenzie; I don’t think he has a hole in his heart, though,” she said and gave me a look that made me think she wished he did have one. “He’d certainly be dead by now if he did,” she mumbled beneath her breath, confirming my thoughts.

  “No, not in his heart, next to it, here.” I patted the place on my chest for emphasis. “Like I do.”

  Delia took a deep breath and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “You have a hole near your heart now?” She spoke to me as if speaking to a three-year-old child, slow and patient.

  “The hole where the pain ate through … I tried to fill it with the liquor, tried to make it feel better …”

  “Kenzie, stop—”

  “He did the same thing, only it kept getting bigger …”

  “Kenzie, please stop it—you’re not making any sense—”

  “Bigger and bigger until all he was on the inside was one big hole and that’s what’s killing him now!”

  “Kenzie!”

  We ended on the same high, violent note. We sat there for a moment, breathing heavily, our chests and shoulders heaving.

  “Stop talking crazy, Kenzie. What is all of this about holes? What holes your father had in him came from the gallons and gallons of liquor he drank.” She wiped at her brow and ran her hands quickly across her lap a few times. “I don’t know why you’re making excuses for him all of a sudden. I guess you’ve forgotten all the things he did to us, huh?”

  Delia reached for another cigarette.

  “I guess you’ve forgotten the beatings … the ones we all got?” She lit the cigarette and turned to face me. “It’s because of him we don’t have a house anymore, it’s because of him we have no money, and it’s because of him Malcolm is gone, or have you forgotten!”

  Delia’s body shook with anger and her eyes filled with tears. For a moment she looked as if she would strike me, but she drew on her cigarette instead.

  “I guess you’ve forgotten, Kenzie, huh?” she said as the tears flowed down her cheeks and showered her shirt like a soft spring rain.

  Of course I hadn’t forgotten. How could I forget that day? Even as I sat watching Delia cry I could hear the sound of their bodies slamming against the walls.

  The sound was unmistakable, the bumping and banging. But on that day it was different, harder and meaner. My heart pumped heavily in my chest because I knew Delia was at work and the only other person in the house besides myself and Hy-Lo was Malcolm.

  Malcolm was seventeen years old and towered over Hy-Lo. His shoulders were broad and his neck thick. Since Hy-Lo hated having to look up at Malcolm he often spoke to him across a room or at least made sure there was a foot or two of space between them. It seemed as though the taller Malcolm got, the more Hy-Lo harassed him. He belittled him and degraded him every chance he got.

  “You’re nothing but a stupid idiot,” Hy-Lo said one day when he overheard Malcolm complaining to me about a grade he had received in math. “Dummy,” Hy-Lo cackled as he stood over us with his hands folded across his chest. “Jackass,” he spat and grinned. “Can’t count, huh?”

  “I got a ninety,” Malcolm said between clenched teeth. His hands had balled into fists and his face went red.

  Hy-Lo’s smug expression faltered and then recovered all in one quick wave, then he said, “Yeah, idiot ass—you couldn’t pull a hundred!”

  He laughed and half-walked, half-stumbled out of the kitchen, leaving the stench of vodka trailing behind him. Malcolm’s eyes watered and I saw hate reflecting off his teardrops as they streaked down his cheeks.

  The walls shook again and I remembered moving up the stairs, taking two at a time until I reached the first floor and came face-to-face with the blood that was smeared across the wall. I knew it was blood but something inside of me kept yelling, Ketchup! Ketchup!

  The house shook again and I turned the corner and found Hy-Lo and Malcolm wrapped around each other. Hands around throats, pulling at ears, punching at stomachs and faces. But the worst thing was the breathing, the heavy let-loose of air that sounded to me like snorting bulls. The house shook again as Hy-Lo slammed Malcolm into the front door. The glass window shattered and cut at their skin. There was more blood now, lighter in color than the blood that spilled from their noses and the sides of their mouths. Ketchup! Ketchup! my mind screamed again.

  I was afraid to get between them. It would be as dangerous as trying to break up two mad dogs. I began screaming at the top of my lungs, but they just kept slapping and punching at each other. I stomped my feet and begged and pleaded, but the house kept shaking as their bodies bounced off the walls.

  Malcolm finally got loose, leaving most of his shirt tangled in Hy-Lo’s hands. They stood there bleeding and staring at each other, breathing so hard that they sucked the air in from around me, leaving me breathless.

  I guess I was still screaming because Hy-Lo told me to shut up. He didn’t turn to look at me; the words spilled from the side of his mouth with his blood while his eyes held Malcolm’s face.

  My brother wiped at his nose and his hand came away bloody. He looked down at his fingers and the red that coated them and his chest heaved.

  He turned and walked away. His misery moved past me before his hand even brushed against my wrist. I’m still sorry I didn’t look into his eyes; maybe I would have seen the future there and could have grabbed at his shoulder and begged him to stay.

  The bedroom door of Malcolm’s room moved and Devon Fulton stepped out. His head was bent and his hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his baggy jeans. He moved past Hy-Lo without looking at him. He stepped over the blood drops on the floor as if they were potholes that dotted the streets of our neighborhood.

  I think he was grinning when he walked by me. I saw a glint of white beneath his nose. He was always grinning like an idiot, everything was humorous to Devon, even the hostility between father and son—the blood on the floor and walls.

  I wanted to kick him in the ass as he slithered past me, following Malcolm down to the basement and out the cellar doo
r, but instead I just stared blankly at the blue and green band of his boxer shorts where his oversized jeans slipped from his hips.

  Hy-Lo walked past me and into the bathroom, he slammed the door so hard the jagged pieces of glass that remained in the doorframe shook free and shattered on the floor. The hallway looked like a battle zone and all I could think of was cleaning it up and trying to make it right before Delia got home.

  I was thinking about how I was going to replace the glass. The blood was gone, but she might notice the clean streaks on the mustard-colored walls. The hall smelled like Pine-Sol and that would be odd for a Wednesday but I could make up something. The glass would be the problem.

  I heard the whizzing sound of their bikes as Malcolm and Devon took off down the street. The sound echoed in my left ear, so I knew they were going to the Dip. I licked my lips and wondered where the Yellow Pages were.

  I wasn’t there when it happened, but half of the kids who lived on the block were. The Dip was the place kids would drop their forties, ditch their weed, and scramble like roaches when the cops arrived. The Dip, some long-forgotten mishap by the Department of Roads and Highways. No one wrote letters in that neighborhood, not even when sanitation skipped a week or the light on the corner of Lincoln and Sutter went berserk and shone all three colors at once: Stop. Yield. Go.

  So the Dip remained and the children began to utilize it when the playground became too dangerous to play in unless you owned a bulletproof vest.

  I think I’d found a company to replace the glass by the time Malcolm and Devon arrived at the Dip. Maybe my finger lingered on ABC Glass Replacement and then moved down to ACME Glass by the time they situated their bikes at the top of the Dip. I decided on ABC Glass Replacement and was probably dialing when Malcolm looked down the blacktarred thirty-foot slope. My fingers got tangled and I had to hang up and dial again when Malcolm turned to Devon and said, “See you on the other side.”

  I would have wiped at the dried blood around his mouth and assured him that I would see him. But Devon was his friend and not his sister so he just gave him a pound salute and said, “Awright, dog!”