Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(45)

I drive to my mother’s treatment center. She’s made it through detox, and Christmas is my first allowed visiting day. A nurse leads me through a long hall to the backyard. The people inside stare at me. They must know I am my mother’s, I think. We look the same. There’s no mistaking it.

Outside, a fountain spits into the sky. The sun is beating down, and I’m sweating in my chair. I peel off my sweater. Pills of cashmere stick to my forearms like fly tape.

I hear her before I see her—Merry Christmas, baby—behind me. I stand up and turn around as she opens her arms. We hold each other so close her hair is in my mouth. I crumple into her. I miss you, I say. It’s all I can seem to say. The tears come down my face, and, for once, I let it happen.

My mother speaks to me slowly, measured. I can tell she’s medicated so she won’t fever again. We talk about other things: the weather, the news, other patients inside the center. Good, good people. You’d like them. Some of them are around your age. I tell her about Grandma Sitchie’s house, the liver, the Sour Patch Kids. Before I get to ask any more questions, our time is up.

Take care of yourself, baby, she says. She picks up a glass of water from a lawn table and sips it. She holds my hand a moment longer. You doing okay? She is earnest in her question.

Of course, I say. I sit up straighter. I smile.

Make your numbers tomorrow, she says. One of the biggest shopping days of the year.

That trout. I wrestled with the hook to free it; I was in a hurry. Easy, like this, said my mother, and she did it in one motion, a popping sound. The hook had pierced my finger, and I sucked the blood so hard my fingertip went white. I tossed the fish back into the mud of the pond, and the two of us watched it shoot off like a single strand of tinsel in the sun before it disappeared.

What I mean to say is, it lived.



PEOPLE LIKE THEM

I have a famous uncle in prison in northern Florida, a second uncle locked up in the middle of Texas, and a third who will join this club in a year or two. It doesn’t matter why.

Today, I’m visiting the Texas uncle, Uncle Kai, the one with the habits, the one without God, and my Auntie T says, Careful now, you won’t be let in with an underwire bra.

Why not? I ask.

Because a bra could be used as a weapon.

It’s all I have in my suitcase—this bra with the wire in it. I am thirteen and my padded, white, diaper of a bra has a wire running all the way through it. I’m too embarrassed to tell my family this, to show it to them, so I decide to visit prison for the first time braless.

I walk through security with my arms crossed over my chest. I walk like this all the way through a building that smells like microwavable burritos and bleach, until we’re directed outside, to an enormous barren yard, where my uncle sits, smoking a Newport, at a picnic table.

I don’t want him to hug me, because of my chest.

I say, Hello.

He tells me about the latest visitors. How a group of wives shat balloons full of black tar heroin into the toilets. How he was going to get his very own guitar string tattoos, or learn how to give them. How lately, people have been smuggling juices from the kitchen in order to make alcohol.

That sounds nice, I say. Complicated.

This is the last memory I have with my Uncle Kai. Here, he is still mellow, himself. Soon, he’ll be released, take up new chemical drugs, ride a stone horse monument in the middle of Parkland, and beat my mother up on the side of the road. Soon, he will threaten to take out his whole family with explosives and black magic. Us, I mean.

It’s not so bad here, he says.

The blank Texas sky reminds me of a green screen, like I could cut out his body and move him anywhere else, drop him into any other world.

We share a hamburger from a security-monitored vending machine. I break mine into little pieces. The meat is a grayish purple with pockmarks, and he chews like an animal given a treat. We look alike, my uncle and I. Gummy smiles, deep eyes, the ragged edge around our nails where neither one of us can ever stop picking.

At twenty-two years old, I begin teaching inmates in a county jail.

I prepare notebooks with no staples, no paper clips. Rubber golf pencils. I walk through the metal detectors with ease, wired bra and all, drop my belongings into little plastic crates and clear baggies and wait for an officer’s eyes to magnify behind them.

One night, as I’m leaving, a correctional officer corners me in the elevator. He is standing too close to me. His breath on my neck. I hold the papers to my chest.

Why do you teach these losers, he says, when they are so fucking stupid?

They’re not, I tell him. They write brilliant.

I go through their mail sometimes, he says, and laugh at their stupidity.

They’re brilliant, I say.

And anyway, he says, What’s someone like you doing with people like them?



BROTHERS

There are two boys in my life. The older boy, Shawn, is very serious, his eyebrows thick and expressive like a tract of cables running straight to his heart. The younger boy, Blake, likes to perch on top of cushions, or steps, or countertops, with his knees to his chest. He’s always kicking something, needing something, digging at something. Scabbed and ready. I don’t know who these two boys are, not yet, only that we pose in pictures together from time to time, and that, somehow, in some places, I love them.

There are two boys in my apartment. That’s what my mother tells me, anyway, when we have to pack up for the weekends and stay with my Auntie T. When we leave, my father locks up the room with my Breyer horses spread across the carpet, my mother’s lipstick-smacked tissues piled up in a garbage can—a door locked in front of any lingering silhouette of a woman or child. My father plays catch with the boys on the weekends, buffed leather to ball, a square of sun behind the building. I wonder, still, how he explained our locked room. If it supposedly served any purpose.