Lakewood(53)

Tanya put her feet up on the coffee table; her toenails were painted antique gold. Her hair was flat-ironed. A small hoop earring in one ear, two diamonds in the other. She was wearing a light-gray tank top and her hot-pink lace bra kept announcing itself. Lena set her wineglass down on the floor. It felt important to take all of Tanya in, make her a real person again. I missed you and who I was around you too, Lena thought.

“I’m not sure,” Tanya said.

“Why not try?”

“Well, what about you?”

“He’s in California and I’m. . . .” I’m in a government-sponsored research study that I have to keep secret. Lena cleared her throat. “I’m in Lakewood.”

“Let’s play a game.” Stacy plopped onto the floor next to the couch. He took a sip out of Lena’s wineglass. “If you could make a movie about anything, what would it be?”

“I would make one, a good one, about Marian Anderson,” Tanya said. “My dad can’t stop talking about her.”

“I would do one based on the life of Janet Jackson,” Stacy said. “Rhythm Nation era.”

Kelly said he was making a movie right now for an exhibition. It involved paint, and light, and this really cool DJ he had met. He put his legs over the side of Lena’s grandma’s chair. His socks were tie-dyed, green-yellow-blue. Kelly said he was really into textures right now. Like crushed ice. Cement.

“Stop, you’re making me hate you,” Stacy said, clawing at his brother’s feet.

“Don’t. Touch. My. Feet.” Kelly rearranged himself in the chair, tucked his feet away.

“I think I would make a movie about . . .” Lena picked up her wine, drank it in one long gulp “research studies in America. Like, I would make a movie about Tuskegee, or I read about this one in the 1950s that was about mind control. People love mind control.”

The front door swung open. Her mom was back from her date.

“That sounds like a Chadwick Boseman movie. They make him take LSD and he has a psychotic break. Something about civil rights. He wears a suit.”

“I would watch anything with Chadwick.” Lena held her wineglass out to Stacy. He poured more.

“It could take place in Russia now. Have you been following the news?” Tanya said. “It’s wild.”

“What are y’all talking about?” Deziree kicked off her shoes. Her lipstick looked smudged.

“Research studies,” Kelly said.

“Oh.” Deziree frowned.

“Movies,” Stacy said. “Your daughter wants to make a movie about a research study.”

“I would make one.” Deziree put a hand on her hip. “That’s just a nice comedy. No gross stuff. A comedy with manners. No pee or poop or vomit or butt stuff. Just funny black people.”

Her eyes were on Lena’s face, but Lena couldn’t tell what her mother was thinking. Lena raised her eyebrows to ask if she was okay. Her mother tilted her head to the left. That meant don’t worry. But there was thoughtful concern on her face. Maybe Miguel had done or said something.

“Let me get you a glass of water.” Deziree looked around. “Let me get you all a glass of water.”

They ate more, put on a movie. Deziree excused herself, saying she had to work at the church early tomorrow.

“We’ll keep it down.”

Lena woke up halfway through the movie. Went to her room to get blankets, pillows. Her bag was on the floor, the contents spilled. Someone had gone through it, looking for something.

“I’m being paranoid,” she whispered. No one here would go through her bag. The house was too small and loud for someone to have broken in without them hearing. Lena shook her head. Took all the bedding out to her friends. Covered Tanya’s feet where she slept on the couch, gave Stacy a pillow, paused by Kelly. Looked at him in the white light from the television, his face gentle with sleep. Kelly’s eyelashes were long, his lips looked—were—soft. She put a blanket on him. He took her hand, laced his fingers between hers. Lena exhaled. She relaxed, tried to focus only on his warm hand, how much bigger it was.

On the edge of everything was the terror Lena felt when she fell. She remembered the sounds her mouth made, the way her body refused to do anything she said. The girl walking into the bedroom, the way it still hurt to breathe because her body was bruised from the fall. The three seconds, bullet out of gun, bullet into mother, the spray, the sound of pens on paper. Wasn’t it ridiculous, she felt, how something that had only started in May was crumbling and rearranging so much of who she was, how she was. How could almost three months be so big in proportion to 21 years? Kelly’s breath became slower. Lena let go of his hand, went to her room to sleep.

Her friends left early the next morning. Alone in the house, Lena went back to her grandmother’s shoeboxes. She found a photo, yellowed and square, of her grandmother as a teenager. Miss Toni was holding a book in one hand, a small handful of wildflowers in the other. Long grass obscured her knees. A tree in the background looked familiar. Her grandmother was smiling big enough that you could see the gap between her front teeth. She rarely did that. Lena’s eyes kept cutting to the tree, the grass, the wildflowers. It was a guess, but Lena was almost certain her grandmother was in the meadow near Long Lake.

It wasn’t impossible. Her grandmother had grown up only 30 miles away. It was probably nothing. A trip to the country to see a lake, a meadow crowned in purple clovers and the August wildflowers worth having a picnic in. Maybe she had known—or maybe they were distantly related to—someone in the area. And it was probably nothing: Lakewood was probably just a small mid-Michigan town then. A lot of churches, a lot of donuts, bad winters. Lena’s hands shook as she set the photograph down.