Trading Dreams at Midnight

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  She held the flashlight up as if it was a nightstick and she was a traffic cop and had the power to stop a determined man. “Come on, girl, don’t play with me,” he said as he tried to pry the light from her hand and deciding instead to put his effort at pulling the robe from her shoulders. “Fair is fair.”

  “Only if you got a thing for jail bait,” the defiance coating her words, such a contrast to her purring as she’d asked for the receipt. “And the girl upstairs is my sister, not my daughter. And you making me late for school anyhow.” The school part got to him, she could tell as his face caved in on itself, the crease on his forehead throbbing as if it was about to separate. He jerked back then as if he’d taken a knee to his groin, looking at her as she allowed the yellow swath of light against her, the truth of her age sinking in on his face, his face getting more contorted the longer he looked at her.

  “You little—” he said finally. “I ought to—I don’t believe—shit I never touched—”

  Neena tried to imagine him translucent so that she could stare right through him. Her stare had the affect of making him back up, stooping then to pull up his pants, cursing as he did.

  He was still cursing as he stomped up the steps and walked through the kitchen. Tish was at the kitchen table slurping her oatmeal the way a much younger child would since she was supposed to be Neena’s daughter right now. “You need to tell your sister or whoever she is to you that she could get herself hurt playing around with grown-ass men,” he said to Tish.

  Tish dropped her spoon with a loud clang against the bowl. She ran across the kitchen hollering, “Neena, Neena, are you all right?” She took the cellar stairs in two jumps and was sobbing by the time she got to the back of the cellar, not even trying to muffle it though her crying usually garnered a “stop being such a baby” from Neena.

  “See,” Tish said, her words hacked up by her sobs. “See, Neena, we can’t do everything by ourselves, we can’t.”

  Neena didn’t answer, just stood there staring into the cellar’s dull emptiness as Tish moved closer in to where Neena was. She took the flashlight from Neena and placed it on the cement floor. Then she pulled Neena’s robe together and reached around to her back to grab both ends of the belt.

  “Don’t be trying to hug,” Neena said.

  “Girl, nobody trying to hug you,” Tish answered. “I’m just trying to fix your robe all coming all off of you.” Her voice was muffled as she rested her face against Neena’s shoulder while she kept reaching for and then dropping the ends of the belt. The plush velvet warm against her face.

  Neena gave in to the press of Tish’s face and yielded to the hug, telling herself that it wasn’t a hug because then the sense of loss would feel insurmountable. Knowing that Tish felt it too, the loss. They stood there like that and listened to the heater’s steady hum that was keeping pace with their sighs.

  Then the tender air down there was fractured by the sound of footsteps on the porch and Neena felt Tish’s body stiffen. “Maybe the heater man forgot his nasty-looking thing,” Neena said, trying to relax Tish by making her laugh. The declaration having the opposite effect, Tish horrified instead.

  “His thing?” Tish screeched, pulling her head from Neena’s shoulder. “You saw his thing?”

  “What do you think?” Neena said, suddenly ashamed as she looked beyond Tish, though enough of Tish was caught up in the beam from the flashlight on the floor. Tish’s cute mouth loomed around the edges of Neena’s peripheral vision, Tish’s mouth curled to one corner as if she’d just whiffed vomit, or dog shit.

  “You mean he actually pulled his thing out on you, Neena? Daag. What? Were you gonna do it with him?”

  “Do we have heat now? Quit whining,” Neena said as she walked past Tish. “Anyhow, that’s probably just the junk mailman. Come on, we’re gonna be late for school.”

  “But he pulled his thing out on you, Neena.” Tish’s voice shook. “See, now I’m glad I called Nan.”

  Neena was halfway to the stairs, contemplating whether to skip school today altogether and take a long hot bath and rid herself of the feel of the heater man’s fast breaths. She stopped but didn’t turn around, said to the steps, “You better be lying to me, Tish. Tell me you’re lying.”

  Tish’s reply was her silence. And then the confirmation, the doorbell, the three rings the way her grandmother always did. Neena stomped up the stairs, saying shit, damn, fuck. Tish ran behind her. “I’m sorry, Neena, daag, but, I had to do something. We can’t just live here by ourselves until Mommy decides to come back home. I’m sorry, Neena, okay?”

  Neena kicked the cellar door opened. “Be sorry,” she said. “Be sorry and tell her that I disappeared.”

  She went into the shed kitchen then. Folded herself on the cold dark floor and nestled inside the pink robe, the robe buffering somewhat her grandmother’s voice as she moved through the house calling for her. “Stop with the foolishness, Neena,” she said over and over again. “You coming home with me, now. Come on. Come on now and let’s go.”

  Chapter 2

  FREEDA APPEARED IN swatches after that, a phone call here, a sneak in through a window to peep in on the girls there, but no more of her hot pink expanses, her exuberance as she dazzled one man after the next and showered the girls with hugs and attention. Not even that hollowed-out, zombie-like stare that took her over when her down moods hit. That February in 1984 became her last extended stay. Made every February after that a dreaded month for Neena, for Nan too. Sad, like the color pink for both of them was sad.

  Right now Nan tried to keep her footing here in 2004 as she shooed the slant of pink and yellow light from over her sewing machine where she sat the way she did every morning from four thirty to seven. Her yielding time this was, the space surrounding the rising of the sun when whatever she worked on seemed to bend to her wishes. Her bobbin threads never popped; needles never broke; the most ornery fabrics cooperated and allowed the intertwining of the most elaborate stitches. She pasted her attention to the rumba of the sewing machine, her pleasure and comfort during her yielding time, tried not to offend the special softness of the hour with worries over what she could not control. Couldn’t control that Freeda hadn’t been able to stay put and raise her girls herself. Couldn’t control the way that Freeda’s coming and going had sculpted the girls, the women they’d turned out to be as a result: Neena’s obsession over finding her mother causing her to be a rudderless underachiever with man-hungry ways; Tish just the opposite, treating her mother like she would an infected tooth and excavating her pulp and all, then relying on Nan and church and school to blunt the pain, so Tish prospered as a result. And Nan surely couldn’t control that this was February and her past and present would fuse like every February mimicking the iridescent blue-green fabric she’d used for the two dozen choir robes she’d made last week; the fabric was such that she couldn’t tell whether the green was the base color or the blue. It all depended on how the light hit.

  She accompanied the sound of the sewing machine with her own soft hums. She was attaching a cream-colored satin border to an ocean blue brushed wool that would make a nice swaddling blanket for the baby Tish might or might not have. Tish, the good one, the well-married college graduate with the prestigious on-air news anchor job, was six months into a pregnancy racked with complications. She’d started spotting and cramping the day before and her husband, Malik, had rushed her to the hospital and they’d kept her, though at last report Tish was comfortable, the cramping and spotting having subsided. Nan was hopeful, though not to tempt fate she told herself that the blanket would be her donation to the fund-raising silent auction her church was having. The first Saturday in March, like they’d done since Nan joined there decades ago, the church rolled out a grand flea market that drew crowds numbering in the hundreds. The donations over the years growing in value and sophistication to match the upward march of the congregation: woven pot holders from the Five and Dime Store years ago, a pair of glass candle holders from Ti
ffany’s last year. Nan visualized the blanket she worked on now folded on the display table in finished form. Might go for as much as a couple of hundred dollars, she thought, since the event brought back all the prosperous sons and daughters who’d been raised up in the church. She pictured them as she worked, the many lawyers and educators, a few medical doctors, PhDs, even a sprinkling of judges on the Common Pleas court. Though many had long since moved out of the neighborhood, some even while they were still children because their parents were actually the first generation to get college degrees en masse—Freeda’s generation—most, like Tish, still claimed membership in the church, all willing to pay top dollar for that unique something they could bid on, stroke themselves in the process that in so doing they were giving back. She did such a good job focusing her attention on a positive outcome for the blanket that her ears were blotted to the sound of footsteps walking across her porch. She didn’t even hear the doorbell until the second insistent ring. And even when she did, she told herself that she must be imagining things. Then there it was again. The doorbell.

  She lifted her foot from the pedal of the sewing machine as her breaths caught in the top of her throat. No good news could be coming this early, she thought as she moved through the dining room into the living room and said, Sweet, sweet Jesus, have mercy please don’t let it be her grandson-in-law come to tell in person what he couldn’t say over the phone, that Tish had lost the baby. She was simultaneously weakened and manic-like from the prospect as she peered through the blinds at the front door. She didn’t see anything, just the dew shimmering on the gray bricks of the church across the street, just the ice crystals dotting the tops of her razor-straight hedges, just the snow-speckled newness of her front steps that she’d had resurfaced before the winter set in. She wondered then if this was a scam, someone trying to get her to open the door and then rush her. Her middle-of-the-road neighborhood was not above such an occurrence caught as it was in the war between lushness and decay where the hedges stayed trimmed but there were bars around windows; no drug wars in the immediate vicinity, but there was the sense that any day now the sound of that car backfiring might instead be a gun going off.

  She checked to make sure the dead bolt was intact, then looked through the blinds again. Still nothing. Thought about phoning Charlene across the street to ask if she saw anything on her porch, though Charlene was probably down in her basement pulling her boys’ school-uniform shirts from the clothes dryer. In less than an hour Charlene would be bolting from her house like a bronco, late for work again, yelling for her boys not to miss the bus. Though Nan would see to it that they did not. Had marched across the street many a morning and used Charlene’s emergency key to go inside and yank the boys, fine-looking, eleven-year-old badass twins, out of the house by their shirt collars, daring them to complain. “I’m old-school,” she’d say. “I’ll give you something to complain about hard as your mother works to give you a decent life and you got no better sense than to lollygag. Get on that corner and stand straight and tall and wait for that bus.”

  She wouldn’t call Charlene, nor would she open her door. She just stood there in her vestibule for a minute. A chill raced across her arms even under the flowered duster she wore and suddenly she got a sense of Neena’s presence, Neena the prodigal granddaughter who fourteen years ago when she was nineteen dropped out of college and left here in search of Freeda. Nan had seen neither hide nor hair of Neena in over five years now, though she did receive regular Happy Birthday, Mother’s Day, Easter, and Christmas phone calls, the calls whenever possible coming on a Sunday during Nan’s church-service time. Polite calls that felt like sand. Except for last night when Neena called. Called Tish’s house while Nan was there tidying things for Malik. Nothing polite about the way Neena had clicked the phone off in Nan’s ear. Nan couldn’t fathom why Neena had so much hate in her heart. She moved to the edge of the vestibule and looked out. Then peeped through the blinds again, almost expecting to see Neena standing there. Saw nothing resembling Neena, saw a trench-coated man out there looking in through the blinds as she looked out. Their eyes met for a second and she muttered Get behind me Satan as she unlocked, then opened the door, though she kept the storm door closed and latched.

  He smiled. He had big white teeth, a thick gold watch on his wrist that peeped from beneath the trench coat sleeve as he bent his arm to tip his hat. The tipped hat an old school move, though he looked to be under forty. She couldn’t tell his race. Hair on the straight side she could see from the edges, skin color a blanched yellow. He could be white just back from Florida, she thought; or Arab; Puerto Rican; light-skinned Indian; could be a high yellow black man. Had the thought how both small and large the world had become; was a time for her anyhow when it was just a matter of black and white. Though standing here trying to guess his heritage wasn’t telling her a thing about what he wanted, halfway afraid to ask what he wanted. Even as she did. “What do you want?” she blurted through the storm door.

  He was still smiling and she remembered years ago a man standing on her porch smiling like that, that one had tipped his hat too. That one had come looking for Freeda. Thought history might be doubling back to slap her like an unexpected ocean wave when this one asked for Neena.

  “Excuse me?” she said, as if she’d not heard right.

  “I’m looking for Neena. Might she be here?”

  His voice had the inflection of a network newscaster without even a hint of regionalism so that she couldn’t even pick up an accent, though there was a trace of blackness in his tone, right at the ends of his words when he said Neena’s name. “Can you tell me who you are?”

  “Can you tell me if she’s here?” He put his hand on the storm door handle and turned it. The move scared Nan. She closed the door all the way, then folded her arms across her flowered housecoat in a how-dare-you stance.

  He raised his shoulders and his eyebrows, held his hands out as if to say, I’m harmless. “Please, can you open the door so I can talk to you?” he asked.

  “Nothing to talk about,” she shouted from her side of the door. “Neena doesn’t live here, lives nowhere near here, won’t be here. So don’t come ’round here looking for her.” Her breath made a circle of fog on the glass.

  “But I’m Nathan, from Virginia, don’t you remember.”

  She looked at him through the fog; his face was a blur. “Don’t know you, don’t want to know you,” she said. Then she pulled the cord to the blinds to make him disappear. She stood in the vestibule and held her breath and listened for the pulse of footsteps leaving her porch. Peeped through the blinds when she heard the brush of shoe against concrete going down the steps. She watched his back as he turned and walked out of her line of vision. Now she went to the bay window that gave her an expanded view. He must have parked around the corner because the cars out there now were all familiar to her. Wished that she’d come to the door with a handful of salt to throw behind him, to make sure he wouldn’t return. Asked out loud what had Neena gone and gotten herself mixed up in to have people ringing the doorbell at six o’clock in the morning looking for her. Angry now, and worried. Thinking now about all the people who’d shown up looking for Neena’s mother, Freeda, over the years. Thinking of the one who’d stood out most in her mind.

  Thirty some years ago in the early days of Freeda’s vanishing and reappearing as if that was a normal way to live, a refined-looking man, oak-colored with beautiful straight teeth and a hint of silver running through his hair, had walked up on the porch and smiled and asked for Freeda. His smile was so disarming that Nan hadn’t even snapped at him when she said that Freeda wasn’t in at the moment. Truth was that Freeda hadn’t been home in over a year. She was twenty-two by then and had left a note telling Nan not to worry, which in Nan’s mind amounted to telling a fish not to swim. She’d call every month or so and in a flourish of sentences that didn’t allow a response from Nan say that she was wonderfully okay, don’t worry, please Mother, don’t worry after me.r />
  The man inquiring about Freeda that day had said, “You must be Nan,” and Nan nodded, grateful that he’d first asked if Freeda was at home, because it had now been more than a month since Nan had heard Freeda’s voice and otherwise Nan may have suspected that he was from the city morgue coming to tell her that her child was dead. He handed Nan a long white envelope then. Asked her if she wouldn’t mind making sure that it got into Freeda’s hands. Nan nodded again, easily deciphering by the feel of the envelope that it contained cash money. Nothing else had the soft springy feel of cash money captive in a long white envelope. He turned to leave and she called behind him, “Your name? I need to tell her who this is from.” He smiled again and she thought he might cry instead because his smile had such a sadness attached to it. His eyes were sad too as he said that Freeda would know exactly who it was from.