Shifting Through Neutral

by Bridgett M. Davis

  Yet despite the parental influence, I did not have the heart for addiction. I couldn’t muster the staying power. One day, tired of a dry mouth and insomnia, I gave up the pills, graduating to nickel bags of pot. I wanted to love marijuana because Kimmie had loved it. But I still found my highs too exhausting. Rather than relaxing or giggling or getting the munchies, I pondered and worried and regretted. I soon gave up the reefer for good.

  I had one down thought often while high. If Mama had let Kimmie fly to New York that long-ago August and receive a newly legal abortion, she’d never have been on the road that day headed to an auntie in Louisiana.

  My number one teenage mantra: Abortions save lives. Abortions save lives. Abortions save lives.

  I am still nine and dream we are all together, piled into Oldie as the silvery car, suddenly new again, glides through a brightly lit tunnel; Mama sits beside Daddy in the front seat, and in the back Kimmie quietly leans next to the open window. My head in Kimmie’s lap, I can hear the oceanic sounds of her stomach growling. I am wearing the charm bracelet she’s given me, full of lions, tigers, and bells on my thin wrist, and it tinkles as a warm wind gushes through the back window. Kimmie gently places her delicate hand on my head, entwines her fingers in my plaits; I am certain that only because of her hold on my hair do I not fly straight out of the window, like Tinkerbell. Suddenly, I am being shaken, and this shaking whisks me out of the car window, sucking me into the ether, beyond Kimmie’s grasp.

  Daddy was sitting beside me on the sofa bed.

  “You having a bad dream, Brown Eyes?”

  “No, it was a good dream,” I said. “At first.”

  Daddy took my hand. “Sit up for me, okay? I got something to tell you.”

  I propped my pillow against the back of the sofa the way I’d seen Mama do in her bed. Daddy looked awful. He had heavy up-and-down lines in his forehead. And he was sweating. When I looked closer, I saw that his eyes were moist, and I imagined a yummy breakfast of hash and eggs waiting downstairs, as I assumed he’d been chopping onions this morning.

  “I would give anything, anything at all, if I didn’t have to tell you this,” he said. He paused. “There was an accident.”

  “There was an accident?” At that moment he could’ve been reporting something that happened down the block, some tidbit of gossip unrelated to us. Maybe that crazy Elgernon had finally fallen off the roof and really hurt himself this time. Or perhaps Daddy heard something bizarre and remote on the eleven o’clock news the night before, and someone we knew was in danger. My mind was calm, nonchalant even. I was still ignorant of the possibility of personal tragedy. But my body was under no such illusion, as chill bumps popped out of nowhere and raced up my arms.

  “Listen to me now, Rae Rae. They had a car accident driving on the highway.”

  “They who?”

  “Your mama and your sister. And that man.”

  The chill bumps hardened. “Are they okay?”

  Daddy shook his head. “It was a very bad accident. Your mama is in the hospital.”

  Reflexively, my hand pulled out of his and landed across my heart, where all my complicated longing for and resentment toward Mama gathered in a heavy ball of panic at the thought of losing her.

  “Is she going to be all right?”

  He nodded. “It seems so.”

  My hand dropped back to my lap, relieved. “She and Kimmie coming back here?”

  He shook his head slowly. There was more. “Listen to me now. Kimmie didn’t make it, Brown Eyes.”

  “Didn’t make it where?”

  He cupped my hands inside of his. “She didn’t survive,” he said, his voice firm, his eyes piercing.

  “What?” I bolted up, and one of the pillows fell to the floor. I didn’t understand him, couldn’t make out what he meant by that word. “What, Daddy?” Daddy and his big words. Divorce. Survive.

  He grabbed me into his arms and held me tight—way too tightly for Daddy, as only Mama held me like that—and in my ear he said it. “She died, Brown Eyes. Kimmie died before they could save her.”

  I shook my head, chin resting against his shoulder. “But I just saw her. She kissed my cheek, and she said we would see each other as soon as—”

  He stopped me. “Please, Baby. Try to understand what I’m saying.”

  I pushed myself out of his bear hug. “No! No!!” I screamed, right into his ear. “Noooooooo!”

  As Daddy picked me up, I gripped myself around his neck, beating my small fists into his back.

  “It’s not true!” I screamed. “Tell me it’s not true! Please, Daddy. Tell me it’s not true.” I grabbed his face in desperate hands, dug fingers into his cheeks and threatened him. “Take it back!” I screamed. “Take it back!”

  “I wish I could,” he said. “But I can’t.”

  While no person I’d ever known had died before, I knew enough to know that death was ugly, its removal swift, and its cause traceable. I knew that that goldfish I loved so in Miss Miller’s second-grade class had to be lifted from the fish tank one day because it was bloated and unmoving. Overfed, said Miss Miller. When Daddy let me have a pet hamster and I placed it too close to the radiator one winter night to keep it warm, we found it the next day, unmoving and bloated. We buried it in the backyard. Daddy rocked me in his arms, and I saw Kimmie curled into a ball, perfectly still and puffy. I cried hard, burning tears that tumbled fast as I choked on my guilt, snot running down my nose, tears flying off my chin until my head pounded and I held it for fear it would pound its way off my neck.

  He touched my forehead. “You’re burning up,” he said. “Come with me.”

  Daddy gathered me in his arms, carried me to the big upstairs bathroom, and drew a bath. He prepared a basin of water and vinegar and placed that beside him on the tile floor. He helped me out of my nightgown and panties and eased me gently into the warm water. Down on his knees, struggling and groaning as his heavy girth got in the way, he took a sponge out of the basin of water and began bathing my body, just as I would bathe his years later. The smell of vinegar was pungent.

  I closed my eyes, feeling the warm water against my skin as I sat there like a Raggedy Ann doll without bones, empty, tired, unable to lift my own limbs. Daddy grabbed an arm, sponged it, grabbed a leg, sponged it. When he let go of a limb, I let it plop back into the water with a splash, exhausted and uncaring.

  “Can you stand, Brown Eyes?”

  I shook my head. Daddy took a huge towel and wrapped it around my shoulders, then lifted me out of the tub, dried me off. “Be right back,” he said.

  I watched the back of him as he left the room, listened as his heavy footsteps moved through the house, causing the floors to creak under the carpet. I thought about Daddy dying, realized for the first time in my brief life that he could leave me sitting here on the toilet lid and not come back—get himself killed somehow from a stray bullet through the window or from strangulation by Nolan, who could be lurking in our basement, his mind set on payback. I realized then how risky love really is.

  Daddy returned with Avon perfumed talcum powder taken from Mama’s abandoned vanity top; he shook a little onto my chest and then slipped the nightgown over my head. Talc covered my feet, like white stardust.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “You sure about that? How about a boiled egg? With the yolk a little runny the way you like it. And some grits?”

  “Can I have lots of salt and pepper?”

  “You can have anything you want.”

  Daddy headed to the kitchen, and I followed behind, watching as he pulled out pots, ran water, turned on the stove. He then stepped into the living room, went over to the stereo console, and opened its glass door, where albums still lay stacked on a rack. These albums Mama never touched; they didn’t get played at either of her parties. He pulled out one with Ray Charles smiling across the cover, all teeth and dark glasses, placed it on the turntable, gently dropping the needle on
to the vinyl. Daddy held his hand out to me. “Come,” he said. I stood, grabbed his hand as he led me to the kitchen. Ray’s earnest voice wailed, “I can’t stop loooovvvvving you!” Morning light spilled through the back-door window, a slender triangle on the burgundy linoleum. Daddy took my small hand into his huge warm one, grabbed me at the waist, directed me to place my feet on top of his and slowly guided me around the kitchen floor. Carefully, he picked up the pace, and soon I was soaring, my cotton nightgown billowing in the back, triangle of sun in my face, grits bubbling on the stove, and by the time Ray sang, “I’ll just live my life in dreams of yesterdayyyyy!” and the gospel choir behind him echoed “of yesterrrrrddayyyyy!” the three-minute eggs were done.

  How’s that head?” Daddy asked after I’d eaten my grits and eggs. We were sitting together at the kitchen table.

  “It still hurts,” I said, because something did.

  “Maybe you need to lie down, Brown Eyes.”

  “Maybe,” I mumbled, fatigue glued to my mouth, hanging off my shoulders. He grabbed my hand and led me to the den. I slid between the sofa bed’s fresh sheets, and Daddy placed a warm, soothing washcloth across my forehead. Next he opened his hand before me, and lying inside his soft palm was a tiny piece of a white pill. “Take this,” he said. “For the pain.”

  “Are you sure it’ll work?” I asked, because nothing was certain anymore and it seemed to me I could live with this pain forever.

  “Have I told you wrong before?”

  He hadn’t. Like the night he used the closed end of a bobby pin to pull the mucus from my stuffed-up nose, he promised I’d be able to breathe. I could. Or the time a hangnail on my finger throbbed with pain, and he promised when I awoke the next morning, the hangnail would be gone. It was. I swallowed the little piece of a pill, feeling closer to Daddy than ever and at the same time feeling like a grown-up, Vy-type female with my talcum-powdered body, my sadness, my naughty nerves, and my own pill to make them behave.

  I took one big gulp from the glass of water Daddy held out to me. My throat was raw. “Whose fault was it?” I asked, believing it was mine, that somehow my presence in that car would have prevented an accident; I didn’t know then who had been driving or even if another car was involved; I only knew I hadn’t been there and I could have been and that if I had, somehow things would have been different. I was well into teenage life before it occurred to me that if I had chosen to join my sister and mother in Louisiana, I most surely would’ve died too.

  Daddy took back the glass, set it down on the little end table. “Bad things just happen,” he said. “We want to blame somebody, but the truth is, sometimes bad things just happen.”

  I lay there, my eyes squeezed shut, envisioning a possible scenario: a highway, Cyril’s car, another one crashing into it head first, turning it into an accordion, Kimmie squished to death on the passenger’s side, no one’s fault. I felt Daddy’s presence folded within my thoughts like autumn leaves pressed upon wax paper.

  “Feeling sleepy yet?”

  “Not yet.” I was afraid of what lay beyond the darkness.

  “Tell you what. You can sleep on my back.”

  “But I thought you said I was getting too heavy for that.”

  “One more time won’t hurt none.”

  He lay down, and I crawled over him into a ball, comfortable against his sturdy flesh. Behind my closed lids, I saw Kimmie and her funny-colored eyes. Kimmie and her warm-towel laughter. Kimmie and her whispered-in-my-ear promise: I’ll be back. Remember, I’ll be back.

  “Daddy?” I asked thickly, the traces of Demerol beginning to work.

  “Yeah?”

  “Will you take me to the show tomorrow?”

  “What do you wanna see?”

  “Ben.”

  “That the picture about the little boy and the rat?”

  “Yes. Michael Jackson sings the theme song.”

  “Now there’s a little fellow who got something special, don’t he? Voice just like velvet.”

  “Can we go to the Mercury Theater and see it tomorrow?”

  “Sure thing, Brown Eyes,” he said. “Sure thing.

  Moments passed in silence. Then, in a smooth falsetto I never knew existed, Daddy sang me a lullaby: “And if that’s not loving me, then all I’ve got to say God didn’t make little green apples and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime. And there’s no such thing as Dr. Seuss or Disneyland and Mother Goose is no nursery rhyme. And when my self is feeling low, I think about her face aglow and ease my mind.”

  Winding its way between the notes of Daddy’s song, sleep came. And I dreamed. Fast, wild dreams pushed against one another. Dreams of back-porch Kool-aid, the put-put of Nolan’s VW, the ace of cups, Belle Isle’s connect-the-dots sky. And in every one of them, Kimmie lived. She lived.

  I myself believe in flying,” a strange woman was saying, her voice loud and husky. “I have never been one for long-distance driving. Now trains are a whole nother story.”

  Daddy’s voice drifted back to me. “Hell, most Negroes can’t afford airplane tickets. Got to get on the highway.”

  “Things are changing. It’s the 1970s, for God’s sake. I flew in here, didn’t I? Got here in two hours, too. Can you believe it? Two hours. Had me a decent meal on the plane too.”

  “Well, Essie, you done always been ahead of your time,” said Daddy.

  I climbed out of the sofa bed, went toward the voices with hopeful steps. If people were talking about airplanes, then Kimmie couldn’t possibly be dead.

  When I entered the dining room, Daddy was there with a strange woman, sitting at the dining room table, which never got used. They stopped talking when they saw me. She looked at me with a long, sad face and Daddy’s nose. I hated her for that because I wanted to believe everything was okay, and now I knew for sure it wasn’t.

  “How you feeling, Darlin’?” she said in a funny drawl.

  “Fine, thank you.” The trick was to be very polite, act like nothing was wrong. And then maybe it wouldn’t be.

  “Brown Eyes, this here is my big sister, your aunt Essie,” said Daddy. “She flew in from down South to be with us a while,” he explained. I went to sit on his lap.

  “Pleased to meet you, Brown Eyes.” She smiled.

  “Hi” is all I said. Better to keep it simple.

  “So, I’ll bet you’re hungry?”

  I shook my head. I noticed she had a light mustache.

  “Just a little bit? I got some catfish and a little collard greens and cornbread. How’s that sound to you?”

  “I don’t want anything,” I said, leaning my body against Daddy’s. I wished she would just go home, leave us alone, this surprise sister of my father who had his pug nose and her own salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Well you must’ve slept up an appetite,” she continued. “You got to eat something. It’s way past lunchtime. Suppertime, pert near.”

  “I’m not hungry!”

  Silence.

  “Okay, Darlin’. I’ll keep a plate on the stove, just for you. It’s a deal?”

  I was starving. Sadness pressed down on me in thick layers; I buried my head in Daddy’s chest, closed my eyes and kept very quiet, focusing on Daddy’s heartbeat. Boo boom, boo boom, boo boom.

  After a long while, Aunt Essie asked, “She sleep?”

  I felt his body shift slightly as he nodded. I didn’t move.

  “What time is Vy expected in?” she asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. As soon as the hospital discharges her, I guess.”

  “Is he coming with her?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “He’s gonna surely be here for the service? That was his child!”

  “Who you asking, Essie?”

  “Well, we’ll all know in a little while. What about the arrangements?”

  “Soon as possible, I imagine. I hope it’ll be something simple.”

  “That’s best,” she said. “I for one don’t go for those long, drawn-o
ut services. Too much on the family. Just too much.” She took a deep breath. “Never thought I’d be saying this, but my heart goes out to Vy. Lord knows she ain’t done right by you, JD, but I don’t never want to see a woman look down on her own child. Ain’t nothing worse. Completely against the natural order of things.”

  “Ain’t no such thing as a natural order in this world,” said Daddy. “It’s as random as all get-out.”

  “Not when God’s in the picture.”

  “Hmph,” said Daddy. “Guess he was busy in the wee hours of this particular morning.”

  “Can’t question the Lord’s plan, JD. It’s not for human understanding. All you can do is pray. Pray for a young life lost.”

  “I’d like to know how prayer is gonna help me explain to this child what happened to her big sister. She loved her something awful, kept right at her heels. Sat by her door for days on end when Kimmie broke up with this no-count nigger she was seeing. Just sat there on the floor, waiting.”

  Aunt Essie sighed. “God will give you the words.”

  “Back off, Essie. You know me, and I haven’t changed in that area. So back off.”

  “Well, if you can’t trust in the Lord, then lean on your horse sense. She’s a child, JD. Children bounce back. The one we got to watch is her mama. Lord only knows how Vy’s gonna fare now. She ain’t never been too stable in the head to begin with, as we all well know.”

  “Just be nice to her when she gets here.”

  “Now, what I look like?” she said, her voice rising an octave. “That woman will be carrying tragedy on her back. Imagine being in a car accident and you live, your daughter don’t. I’m sure she wishes it had been her who went through that windshield. That’s what any mother would wish. And besides,” Aunt Essie paused for effect. “This here is her house, not mine. She got every right to run things her way when she gets back.”

  “She’s not really one for running things,” said Daddy. “Ain’t been for a long time. She tried a bit while Kimmie was here this summer. But that was all just preparation for leaving, as it turns out. And now this.”