by Mia Mckenzie
“I don’t want to talk about it, Faye.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I don’t look at it.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Now?” Vicky asks. “I thought we were gonna hang.”
“I have work stuff,” I tell her, turning and heading for the door.
I hear Faye saying, “Are you sure you’re—”
But I’m already on the porch, then down the steps, then almost running down the block.
* * *
—
My plan is to go back to the bed-and-breakfast and bury myself in work. Really. I swear, I don’t intend to leave the country. But then I cross Larchwood and walk past the beauty supply shop where I stood outside for an hour once when I was thirteen because, on the walk home from school, I suddenly realized I didn’t want to go home, ever. Tasha had been picked up early from school by her grandparents and taken to Wilmington for the weekend, so I didn’t know where to go. I just stood there. After an hour, the Asian store owner threatened to call the cops if I didn’t move along, so I walked down to the next corner and sat in the bus shelter until finally deciding I might as well go home. The bus shelter is still there, too. I really hate this city.
By the time I get to the B and B, I’m reeling again, my mind cluttering with flashes of shitty memories, one after the other, that I can’t push away no matter how loudly I scream internally. When I get to my room, I grab a suitcase without even thinking about it. I’m not even sure what I pack. I grab my passport and call a Lyft to take me to Thirtieth Street Station.
I’m on the train to New York when I open my airline app with shaking hands and pay a ridiculous amount of money to change my flight to Denpasar, which leaves in a week, to tomorrow.
32
Where are you? Can you pick up? Vicky’s not handling it well.
I get this text six minutes after boarding my flight at JFK. It’s eight in the morning, and I’ve been up all night, pacing the airport or slouched in a cramped seat. All I’ve had to eat is coffee.
I turned my phone off last night after changing my ticket. I only turned it on just now to text Toni that I’m on my way to Bali. When I turned it off, it was to forget that anything existed outside JFK. When I turn it back on, the world, my life, flood back in. There are THIRTEEN voicemails. And this text.
I’ve done a pretty good job of not thinking about Vicky or Faye all night. That might be hard to believe, but I have spent years perfecting my ability to not think about people I don’t want to think about. It’s my superpower. Or evidence of my unresolved trauma. Whichev. Point is: When I get this text, when I let my brain kick on, after hours and hours without food or sleep, and remember that Vicky exists, back in Philly, where I’m not, I feel…well, not much, to be totally honest. Numbness, mostly. Emptiness. I tell myself I’ll check in with Vicky when I get to Bali. And I turn off my phone again.
I lean my head back and close my eyes as the sounds of boarding continue around me. I start to doze off a little bit, but then I feel a tap on my shoulder. The other passengers in my row are boarding, so I have to get up from my aisle seat to let them in. They are a grown man and a tween-age boy. Ugh. I hate sitting next to dudes on flights. They fart SO. MUCH.
When they’re finally in their seats, I retake mine. I lean my head back and close my eyes again. I think I fall asleep for I don’t know how long, just a couple of minutes, probably. What wakes me up is the sound of familiar voices.
I open my eyes and squint hazily at the tween sitting next to me. Light plays across his face and I realize it’s from the laptop he’s holding, as are the familiar voices. The familiar cartoon voices. This kid is watching Steven Universe.
It’s an episode I’ve seen six or seven times over the last couple of months, one of Vicky’s favorites. There’s a lot of pizza in it. I stare at the screen as Vicky floods in and I realize I’ve made a huge mistake.
“Sean,” the dad or uncle or whoever says to the kid. “Earbuds, please.”
Sean starts digging around in his backpack for earbuds.
I want to scream. Not internally. EXTERNALLY. But I’m Black, so I don’t, because that kind of shit can get me killed by the airline cops. So instead? I grab the barf bag from my seatback and ralph up the last coffee I ate.
Sean is staring at me, wide-eyed and, I’m pretty sure, hella amused.
“Ma’am?” his father or uncle asks. “Are you okay?”
“I’m actually not,” I say, suddenly standing up, my barf bag swinging wildly. “I need to get off this plane.”
I grab my laptop bag from under the seat and sling it across my shoulder. People are still boarding, jamming the aisle. I step out of my row anyway, reaching for my carry-on in the overhead bin and almost dropping it on the head of an elderly woman who, if we’re being real, doesn’t look like she could survive this level of injury. I manage to catch it, but only by dropping the barf bag. Its coffee-puke contents splash onto my shoulder and against the side of my face. There is a collective UGH from everyone around me. The tween boy looks thrilled to death with the quality of entertainment on this aircraft.
A flight attendant I’ve never seen before is squeezing through the aisle toward me. “Miss, you have to get back in your seat, we’re still boarding.”
“I’m getting off,” I tell her.
“You can’t. You have to sit down.”
I am this close to screaming in her face the African American proverb: I DON’T HAVE TO DO SHIT BUT STAY BLACK AND DIE. Luckily, another flight attendant, a brother named Lamont who I’ve flown with a dozen times, is hurrying from the other end of the aisle toward me, saying, “Skye? Are you okay? Are you sick?”
“Yes. I need to get off the plane.”
Lamont tells everyone in the aisle to step to one side. He puts a glove on his right hand and picks up my barf bag. With the other hand, he takes my carry-on and leads me back to the front of the plane, and off onto the jet bridge. He dumps my puke into a trash can and rolls my luggage down the jet bridge behind me. At the end of the corridor, we dap, and Lamont hurries back to the flight.
When I emerge back at the gate and hurriedly turn on my phone, it starts ringing immediately. It’s Faye. I pick up.
“What happened?”
“What do you mean?” she asks. “Didn’t you get my messages?”
“My phone was off. What happened?”
“Ethan called the cops again,” she says. “One of them hit Reverend Seymour. She fell and hit her head.”
“She’s…?”
“She’s in intensive care at Penn. Vicky is…not doing well, I think.”
“She’s breaking shit?”
“No. She’s not doing anything. She’s not talking.”
A staticky voice on the PA system announces final boarding for my flight.
“Are you at the airport?” Faye asks.
“Oh. Um. Yeah.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“Bali. Actually.”
She’s silent, and for a second I think she’s hung up. But then she’s like: “You’re leaving the country? Now?”
“I…needed to go,” I say. “But I’ll…come back. If Vicky—”
“No. Don’t come back. I’ll take care of Vicky.”
This time, she definitely hangs up.
* * *
—
It takes me a couple of hours to get back to West Philly, not including the fifteen minutes I spend in the airport bathroom cleaning puke off myself before I hop on the AirTrain. When I finally turn onto Vicky’s block, there are people everywhere. It looks like nearly every neighbor is out, standing in small groups of three or more. Some of them look teary, some angry, some both. There’s a huge, handmade poster in the reverend’s front yard. Get Well, Reverend Seymour. We’re Praying for You.
“Did you hear?” Miss
Vena calls to me as I’m dragging my laptop bag and carry-on past her house.
I tell her yes, I heard, and ask how she’s doing.
She shakes her head, and her lip trembles. “I’ve known LaVonda forty years. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. She didn’t deserve to be treated this way.”
I look down the street at Ethan’s house.
“Nobody’s seen that white fool since it happened,” Miss Vena says. “He took his family and drove off before the ambulance even got here.”
“I’m surprised his house is still intact.”
“Mmm-hmm, me too,” she says. “But I think folks know LaVonda wouldn’t want anything like that to go on, on her behalf. If it was me? I’d want y’all to burn this whole damn city down.”
Same.
Faye answers the door with a look of complete disinterest on her face, like I’m—you guessed it—a random Jehovah’s Witness come to call. And, honestly? It’s a relief. Because I don’t want to talk about it. Any of it. My father. My mother. My leaving. I came back for Vicky. That’s all.
“Hello, Skye,” Faye says, polite and cold. “Vicky’s not here.”
“Where is she? I’ve been calling and texting her.”
“I took her phone to the geek bar this morning. She’s at the library with Jasmine.”
“Oh. Okay,” I say. “Which lib—”
She’s already closing the door.
* * *
—
I consider heading to the library to find Vicky. But there are three libraries nearby and searching them all will take forever. So I walk back to the B and B. I never told Viva I was leaving, so I figure my room and all the shit I left in it are unchanged. I can hang there and then…look for Vicky at Jasmine’s later? Or go back to Faye’s? Or just wait for her to call me? I’m not sure what to do. But then, when I get to the B and B, Vicky herself is sitting on the porch swing, watching her sneakered toes drag along the wood planks as she swings back and forth. When I see her, I feel that familiar vibration under my ribs. I have never seen such a perfect human being. I feel anger rising in my chest. Anger at myself. For almost not being here. For almost letting her down. I don’t deserve to have her cry at my funeral.
“Where have you been?” she asks, jumping up off the swing. “I texted you a bunch.”
“My phone was off. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you, Vicky.”
She frowns. “Why are you being weird?”
“I’m not!”
“You kind of are.”
I place my bags by the front door, sigh heavily and sit down on the swing. “I guess I’m just…out of whack. Because of the reverend.”
“It’s so messed up,” she says, sitting beside me.
“How are you doing?”
“I was real mad at first. I thought I was going to lose it. But then…” She shrugs.
“Then what?”
“What’s the point?” she asks.
“Of getting mad?”
“Yeah,” she says. “It just gets me in trouble all the time. I’m over being in trouble. I just want to be normal again.”
“What’s normal?” I ask her.
“Just, like…not messed up.”
Wow. You and me both, kid. But also: “You are normal, Vicky. Anger is normal.”
She doesn’t respond to that. “There’s a vigil for the reverend tonight,” she says. “To pray for her. Can you come?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to the hospital?”
“No. Are you?”
“Aunt Faye won’t let me. I would if I could. How come you’re not?”
“It’s not really my thing.”
“I thought the reverend is your friend.”
I sigh heavily again, and hold the top of my head in my hands.
“What’s wrong?” Vicky asks.
“Nothing. I just fucking feel like fucking screaming my fucking head off.”
“That’s so many F-bombs.”
“I’ve felt like screaming so much lately,” I tell her. I take my hands off my head and look at the kid. “Do you feel like screaming?”
“I always feel like screaming,” she says. “But, like, for real?”
“For real.”
“Right now?”
“On the count of three. One. Two. Three.”
We scream. It’s kind of half-assed: the way you scream when you’re frustrated about slow internet. But it’s something. It feels good. It’s a start.
“That was…okay,” I tell Vicky. “But I think we can do better.”
So, we scream again. This time, I think about Ethan. And the police. I think about Reverend Seymour. I feel myself letting go. My volume rises; my throat opens; my chest vibrates. Vicky looks wide-eyed at me, impressed, I think, and then her own scream kicks up a notch, into a shriek so loud that she covers her own ears. But she keeps screaming. I do, too. We both stop a second for a breath and then we scream some more.
I scream for my twelve-year-old self, locked in a dark closet. For myself at fourteen, in the therapist’s waiting room, holding a scream in my throat. I scream at my mother. At my father. At my adult self, for not having yet figured out a way to get past it all, to not be so messed up, to be normal, to have a life. I scream.
There are people walking down the sidewalk and they stare. Miss Newsome comes out of her house and peers across the street at us. Vicky stands up straight, like a rocket about to blast off, her fists clenched, her eyes closed, her mouth open to the sky. We scream, over and over, louder and louder, until my throat is raw and there are tears streaming down my face, and Vicky’s fists slowly unclench. This is when Viva appears, hurrying up the street with a yoga mat over her shoulder and grocery bags in her arms, yelling, “Chicas! Stop screaming, por el amor de Cristo!”
Shit.
“Sorry, Viva,” I say, hurrying down the steps to help her with the bags.
“Dios mío, Skye. You know I’m running a business here, ¿verdá?” Then she sees my face. “¿Qué pasa?”
We tell her about the reverend.
She softens. “That’s horrible,” she says, sighing and shaking her head. “But come inside, por favor. Before my guests start leaving bad Yelp reviews.”
* * *
—
When I get to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, it occurs to me that they might not let me in to see Reverend Seymour because, according to reputable authorities on the matter, i.e. every TV show I’ve watched over the last thirty-nine years, you have to be a close family member to visit a patient in the ICU. Turns out, TV lied, though, and they don’t ask me how I’m related at all. I just show my ID, sign in, and go up to the intensive care department. At the ICU desk, I have to sign in again. I notice the reverend’s name on at least half of the lines of the clipboard sheet, under “Patient Being Visited.” I stealthily flip back to the previous sheet and it’s the same. She’s had like a dozen visitors already today and it’s only three in the afternoon.
When I get to the reverend’s room, I hear voices, so I slow down and peek in from the hallway. Two men, including the one who was on grill duty at the cookout in the reverend’s backyard, are sitting in chairs by the reverend’s bedside. A woman is standing on the other side of the bed, fussing with the sheets and blankets. Keisha and another teenage girl are sitting on the windowsill, talking quietly to each other.
I expected half of Reverend Seymour’s head to have been shaved, for some kind of emergency surgery, like my mother’s was. But she still has a full head of hair. She’s hooked up to a respirator, which is making a sighing sound that can be heard over the voices in the room. The reverend is asleep or unconscious. I don’t know which.
I sense movement behind me and when I turn around, there’s Nick. Ugh.
“Oh,” he says. “Skye. Hey.”
I don’t hey him back. “Why are you here?”
“Because I care about the reverend,” he says. “I’m also representing her and her family in a case against the police. Along with Brother Nguyen.”
“What’s Brother Nguyen got to do with it?”
“He was there. He tried to protect Reverend Seymour,” Nick says. “Got a cop’s elbow in the face for it. Broke his nose.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
For a second, he looks like he’s going to turn around and go back the way he came. Which: Please do. But then he doesn’t. “Listen,” he says, “I’m glad I ran into you. I’ve been meaning to get in touch.”
Ew. “Why?”
“To say sorry. I shouldn’t have pressured you not to tell Faye.”
“That you were cheating on her?”
“I wasn’t cheat—” He stops, takes a breath. “I still wouldn’t call it ‘cheating.’ But we can agree to disagree on that.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t what?” he asks.
“Agree. To disagree.”
He frowns. “Fine. Either way, I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“I know, Skye,” he says. “That’s literally what I’m saying.”
I peer at him, trying to decide what his angle is. But he actually seems kind of sincere?
I shrug. “I also had my own reasons for not telling her. So.”
“Oh.” He looks interested in that. “Like what?”
I’m not sure what he knows about Faye and me, and I have no intention of giving him any information. So, I just sigh a big sigh and shake my head and say, “Like none of your damn business, nigga.”
He puts his hands up, all mea culpa or whatev.
My phone vibrates. It’s a text from my brother. Two words: He left.
“You going in?” Nick asks me.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why’d you come down here, then?”
