Shifting Through Neutral

by Bridgett M. Davis

  I uncrossed my fingers.

  Listen, Rae.” Daddy’s eyes were barely open, dark rings underneath like shadows. “I have another daughter,” he said as we glided over speed bumps, now winding our way through the hospital grounds. The car eased along, its shock absorbers performing beautifully over the bumps, but I didn’t understand my father’s words, as if he was speaking Pig Latin and I was too slow to decipher. “She’s a little bit older than you. Not quite two years,” he added. “Your mama knew.”

  “My mama knew what?” I asked, furious that he felt compelled to tell me a secret, now. I wanted him to keep quiet, to preserve his energy, to breathe.

  “About my other daughter,” he said before making a weird sound in his throat. “You met her. You probably don’t remember. I tried at first, you know, to…but Vy wouldn’t have stood for it and I…” His voice petered out, he sighed, touched my hand with his. “Anything happen to me, you get in touch with her mother, okay? I got her number right here.”

  I nodded, stunned as Daddy carefully pulled a little piece of paper out of his wallet, right behind the old picture of me and Josie. I peeked a glance before his wallet eased back into his hip pocket, and there we were, young yet faded, the Polaroid Instamatic crackling at its folds, emulsion growing thin. One day the image, I realized, would disappear. Heat filled my face and burned across my cheeks as Daddy handed me the number and I took it into my unsteady hand.

  I slipped the paper into the visor overhead, gripped the steering wheel with both hands, the way Daddy always did when creeping through a Michigan snowstorm. I remembered her. She knew who I was.

  “And you ought to know this too, ’cause you’re not a child no more.” He looked at me, his face a double-dare. “I loved her mother. It wasn’t some little something that just happened. I loved her. Almost chose to live my life with her too. Got real close a few times. Hell, you young and fool around, fall in love like that, you get all kinda courage. But came a point, I knew I couldn’t go nowhere without you.” He gazed straight ahead. “Ain’t no man-woman love that strong.”

  I looked at him from out the corner of my eye, watched him lick dry lips, swallow—fearing what he’d say next.

  “I did think about taking you with me,” he said quietly, perhaps as an afterthought. “I really dwelled on that one.” His face was shiny, distant. “But I figured that wasn’t right, snatching a young girl away from her none-too-steady mama, running off, causing a bunch of commotion…. And when I was finally about to take you with me, when Vyseemed like she could handle it, well, you know what happened.”

  I did know. I realized I had been secretly yearning for Daddy’s other woman, her soft bosom against my cheek. “I wish you’d taken me away,” I said, wistful.

  “What’s done is done.”

  “Mama left me anyway,” I pointed out.

  “She did what she had to do.”

  “Did she?” I whispered, nine years old again and wounded anew.

  A minute or two passed in silence as I slowly drove up to the hospital’s emergency room entrance, parked near an ambulance, cut off the motor, turned to him. “We’re here, Daddy.”

  He squinted, looking past me, breaking my heart. “I have my days when I wish things,” he said. “Wish maybe if her and that man she married don’t make it, if he don’t treat her right, she’ll come back to me in the end. He’s the one got her, but I’m the one she wanted.” He turned, reached for the door.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  He paused, turned slowly back to me. “Selena.” He said it with such love, I bit my lip.

  “And her daughter…my sister. Her name is Josie.”

  His eyes lit up. “You remember? How ’bout that.” He paused. “She was named after me.”

  “She knows who you are?”

  Daddy shrugged. “She should. I was in her life from the time she was born until she was eight years old. I used to set her on my lap, give her little gifts, read stories to her. I taught her how to write her name, how to count to ten, say her ABCs. She called me Da Da.” He paused. “I told Selena, ‘Children remember. They deserve to know the truth.’ But then her mama said it wasn’t such a good idea, told me to stop coming around, so I did. Except for that once, when you met her. She’s a young woman now, like you. Probably wouldn’t recognize me if her life depended on it.” He closed his eyes, leaned back. Tears slid down his cheeks. As I watched my father cry, I thought about Josie, with her magical string game and scary Barbie dolls and sad radio song.

  An aide approached with a wheelchair. He tried to help Daddy into the chair, but Daddy wouldn’t let him. “I can still walk, damn it,” he snapped, his voice surprisingly strong. The aide nodded, grabbed underneath his armpits, and pulled Daddy up out of the Cutlass. Out of nowhere, a guard appeared at my window.

  “You’re going to have to move that car, Miss,” he said. “Parking lot’s right over there.” He pointed west.

  “Give me a moment,” I told him. “Can’t you see my father is sick!?”

  “Miss, we have special emergency-room parking right over there, but you can’t leave that car here…”

  “I have to wait for him to get out first!” I yelled, thinking this man a moron.

  Daddy leaned into the aide for support. “We got this covered, Brown Eyes. You go park the car. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Okay,” I said, exhausted. The guard, triumphant, disappeared. But I didn’t move, just sat there in the driver’s seat of Daddy’s brand-new navy blue car and watched the back of his beautiful head as he lumbered his way through the automatic doors, away from me and into the bowels of the hospital for vets.

  Passing

  As a driver you have at least two blind spots (which) you cannot get rid of…but you can make them smaller by properly adjusting your mirrors…. If you and an approaching vehiclemove into the center lane simultaneously, a serious crash could occur.

  WHAT EVERY DRIVER MUST KNOW

  That night before they left, I slept with Kimmie. Because it was her last night in Detroit, because I already missed her, I was grateful that I got to snuggle next to her warm body in bed. Daddy didn’t mind. “I’ll be right here when tomorrow comes,” he said. “Go on and be with your sister.”

  We lay side by side in silence. I studied the way Kimmie’s black light made her zodiac poster seem to lift away from the wall, how it added snowflakes to her eyelashes and an X-ray glow to my own hand.

  “Want to play a game?” Kimmie asked, her teeth shining.

  “Sure.”

  “I used to play this with Rhonda when we were your age and she’d have these pajama parties.” She rolled onto her side. “Turn over,” she ordered. “Face the wall.” I did so as she lifted the top of my cotton pajamas. “Now tell me what this word is,” she said as she wrote on my back with her fingertip. “Some letters are really easy, and others are hard to figure out,” she explained. “You have to concentrate.” Her finger moved firmly across my skin as she spelled out the letters N-i-g-h-t.

  I spoke the word into the Day-Glo darkness: “Night!”

  “Oh, I made it too easy,” said Kimmie, lifting her nightgown and turning her back to me. “Now it’s your turn.”

  I hesitated.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking. I don’t want it to be too easy.”

  “Well, hurry up, Rae Rae, before I fall asleep,” she said.

  I wrote G with deliberation, and then two swift Os, a D, a B, and before I could finish the Y, Kimmie whispered, “Good-bye.” She turned over, kissed my forehead. “One more, okay?”

  I nodded, turning my back to her. She wrote H, and then O, an M that tickled, and another letter I couldn’t quite make out. Something about the way she formed it had me stumped. “Spell it again,” I said. She did. “Is that last letter an F or an L?” I tried.

  “No, silly rabbit, it’s an E. H-O-M-E,” she said. “There’s no place like home.” Kimmie clicked off her black l
ight, tossing the room into near darkness except for the streetlights’ soft haze outside her window. “Now let’s try to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

  Game over, we lay on our backs, heads sinking into the pillows, Kimmie with her hands behind her head. Tree shadows crawled with luscious slowness across the ceiling.

  “Where’s your home?” I asked. “Here or Louisiana?”

  “Here,” said Kimmie, with no hesitation.

  “But if you’ve lived in two places, how do you know which one is home? The place you lived the longest?”

  “No, the place where you’re from.” She thought for a moment. “Besides, nearly all of the people I love are here.”

  She brought her arms down to her side. I grabbed Kimmie’s hand atop the tie-dyed sheet.

  “Including Rhonda,” she added.

  “Even though she’s a tattletale?”

  Kimmie laughed. “Yep. Even with her tattletale self. She saved my butt tonight.”

  “How?”

  “Kept me from running away again.”

  “But you’re leaving anyway!”

  “Yeah, but I was going somewhere else, Rae Rae. Somewhere new. Till Rhonda convinced me not to.”

  At that moment, Kimmie reminded me of a beloved glittery goldfish in Miss Miller’s second-grade class. I was responsible for feeding it; sometimes I’d watch it throughout recess, my nose pressed to the fish tank glass. When no one was around once, I reached in to grab it. I touched it too, but it slipped out of my grasp, too fast and slippery to be caught.

  “If this is home, why do you have to go back to Louisiana at all?” I asked, pushing the question into the darkness.

  “Because I have to give this baby back to God.”

  “Why can’t you give it back right here?”

  “Because they’re closer to God down South than they are up North.”

  “They are?” I still had my child’s understanding of God, provided in large part by Kimmie, who’d taught me jingly prayers as a toddler. To me he was a Keeper of Souls (“now I lay me down to sleep”) and a Shepherd (“I shall not want”). A biblical nursery rhyme figure. The way Kimmie now spoke of God made him instantly real to me.

  “Yep, they are closer to Him down there,” she said. “I totally forgot that fact till Rhonda reminded me.”

  Out there on the tough edge of the city, far from Metro Beach, Kimmie had tried to get Rhonda to drive her over the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor, Ontario. She had money now. And she’d heard that Canadians had legalized abortions for teenagers, no parental consent needed.

  Rhonda told her that was crazy, to be sitting up in some strange doctor’s office in a foreign country. What would she do if something went wrong? But Kimmie insisted nothing would go wrong, and her proof was that Windsor was an orderly place—no trash on the streets, two murders a year. But Rhonda was leery, convinced that black people from Detroit weren’t welcome in Windsor. When Kimmie said she’d take the Jefferson bus down to the bridge and walk across the border, Rhonda told her she’d look like a fugitive. Pulling over the baby blue Riviera, she turned to Kimmie, motor running, and convinced her oldest friend that just in case something did go wrong, she needed to be near those who cared about her. At least the aunties down in Louisiana could conjure up protection from the saints. Kimmie pondered. She didn’t want to die alone on some doctor’s metal table in a foreign country. She decided to wait.

  As a bon voyage toast, Rhonda pulled out a nickel bag of reefer, and they smoked it with the car windows down, watching the dazzling lights of the Ambassador Bridge beckon against the night sky and nearly forgetting about the Going Away party.

  “I’m coming back soon,” Kimmie said to me, yawning as she eased onto her side. “I’ve been thinking, and I got it all figured out. Instead of New Mexico, I’m going to U of M next year. Rhonda is even thinking about applying there. Forget that dumb idea her father has about working in a factory! We might even be roommates.” She yawned. “You can come visit me, Rae Rae, spend the night whenever you want.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.” Kimmie yawned again. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  I fell asleep that night picturing myself on a college campus with my big sister. I imagined it to be like Cranbrook Institute, where Miss Wheeler once took the class on a school trip—with sprawling expanses of landscaped lawn and castlelike structures made of stone and one primrose path after another, sturdy gates to keep you safely tucked inside.

  But I soon lost my faith in the ability of places to protect, and now years later as I drove toward the Women’s Health Clinic, feeling the fuzzy edges of a lovely narcotic high, I came to this realization: the idea of protection, of a reliable shield against fate, was a mean farce. With that insight, I turned right on Greenfield Road and stepped on the gas.

  When I opened my eyes, Mama was leaning over me in full makeup.

  “Get up,” she whispered. “Come on. Get up.”

  “What time is it?” asked Kimmie, her voice groggy.

  “Cyril will be here any minute,” said Mama. “We all overslept.”

  Kimmie and I both climbed unsteadily out of bed, and Kimmie stumbled to the bathroom. I stood and stretched out my arms, yawning. Mama sat on the bed and watched.

  “Remember when Kimmie arrived, and I promised you things would be different, that we’d be happy?” she said.

  I nodded, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

  “Well now is our chance,” she said. “You’re coming with us.”

  I stepped backward. “I am?”

  “You sure are.” She smiled. “Excited?”

  I might have said, All this time that I’d been secretly preparing to leave with Daddy and then when I wasn’t, all this time when I braced myself to say good-bye to Kimmie, you’d been planning to take me with you and didn’t say so? How cruel.

  But I wanted to be flying down the interstate in a fast red car, Kimmie and Mama within arm’s reach. After all she was my mother, whom I revered, and I didn’t really know how to say harsh things to her, even if I had formed the thoughts in my mind. I threw my arms around Mama’s neck.

  She gently pried me off of her, held me at arm’s length. I felt her gaze pour over me as she touched my cheek with her palm. “Oh, Rae, wait till you see how much fun it’s going to be,” she said, her voice low. “Everyone down there is so friendly, and there are lots and lots of children to play with. Plenty of places to ride your bike…” Her eye caught something over my shoulder. She rose from the bed, went over to Kimmie’s altar, picked up the picture of herself and Cyril. “Bless my soul,” she whispered. “I didn’t know she had this. Will you look at that?”

  She was hoping, my mother, that this move to Louisiana with Cyril and me and Kimmie would give her a chance to erase the affair with a married man, the out-of-wedlock daughter, the years of slipping to see her lover behind his wife’s back, her own failed marriage of two-way infidelity, the crucial years she missed in her daughters’ lives. She was hoping she could start over and become a woman who really lived, pill-free and energetic. With cocktail parties and nights on the town and the same father for both her girls. But there was one person in her way. Or rather, two.

  “What about Daddy?”

  She put the picture back on Kimmie’s altar, taking time to angle it just so. “He wouldn’t want to come.”

  “But I can’t leave him here.” My excitement was escaping, alongside the air in the room.

  “Don’t worry.” She looked over at me, proud of what she was about to say. “You can come back and visit him anytime you want. I promise.” She gestured toward the door. “See how I let Kimmie go stay with her father when she asked? It’s the same with you. Whenever—”

  “But Daddy needs me!”

  “Shhhh! You’ll wake him up!” she said, finger to her lips. When she spoke again, the tone in her voice had changed. “You want me to be happy, don’t you, Rae?”

  I didn’t answer her. I wante
d to be happy.

  “Well, you want to be with Kimmie, don’t you?”

  Cornered, I nodded.

  “This way, you can. We can be a family. Finally.”

  “But Daddy would be lonely.”

  She came over, squatted, putting our faces inches apart. “Your daddy has a special friend he likes very much,” she said, her eyeliner suddenly scary. “I’m sure he won’t be lonely.”

  “Yes, he will!” I cried, backing away from her. I knew more than she did.

  “Shhhh!” Mama stood. “If you get down there and miss him too much, I’ll send you back here. On an airplane, if you want. How about that? You’ve never flown on an airplane.”

  Kimmie walked into the room. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” said Mama as she smoothed out her clothes. “In fact, everything is better than ever. Rae’s coming with us.”

  Kimmie was as stunned as I was. “She is?” She looked at me. “You are?” She smiled. “Wow. That’s great!”

  It was great for Kimmie, who had grown attached to me again like when I was four. It was all working out—to have her baby sister nearby, to get an auntie in Louisiana to vacuum-suck every trace of Nolan out of her system, to finish school, then head to Ann Arbor a free girl, college-bound with a best friend in tow.

  A car horn blew outside. “That’s him!” said Mama. She moved to Kimmie’s window, pushed the burlap shade to the side and looked down. “That’s him.”

  I sat on Kimmie’s bed. “I’m not going.”

  Mama turned back to me. “Rae, Sweetie, your daddy can’t properly take care of you by himself. You know that, right?”

  “But I know how to take care of him.”

  The car horn blew again. Whonk. Whonk.

  “You’ll finally get to be a kid, have some fun, instead of being his little private nurse.”

  “But I—”

  “Listen, I’m your mother, and you have to do what I say.” She turned to Kimmie. “Help her get ready, will you?”