Luster(53)

It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to do this, but when I take my Captain Planet mug from the cupboard and make the coffee, all I can think is, Of course. I sit in the dark and try to figure out a nice way to tell Akila that I am abandoning her, that her father and I don’t really have sex anymore, that her mother has evidently had enough. I know her life has been shaped principally by the sudden departure of people she trusts, and I am not going to buck the trend. I take the train to Dumbo to interview for an internal communications gig I don’t want, and the entire time I am wondering who will do Akila’s hair.



* * *



The next day, I call Akila out of school, and she does not seem particularly enthusiastic. She says she has a test and asks if anyone has died. I assure her that everyone is safe, and then I pressure her into a day of hooky. We take the bus to Garden State Plaza, and I give her one hundred dollars. She squints at the cash and asks why it is damp, and this is the kind of attitude she has for most of the day. I let her take the lead on which stores we visit, and each time she cuts one cursory circle around the perimeter and darts back out. Though I assumed any Goth-lite accessory would do, she seems to have no distinct taste in clothing, though she lingers on a pair of rain boots at Dick’s Sporting Goods. We go into Macy’s and she plucks a bland, shapeless dress from the rack and tells me that it looks like something I might wear. I try not to let it hurt my feelings, but she does it again at Mango, and then at the Gap. I relent and try one of the dresses on, and it actually doesn’t look too bad. Then I notice a yellow crust on the mirror and feel sick. In the mall bathroom, I throw up for a while, and when I come out, Akila is much more agreeable.



* * *



She puts her phone away, and we walk silently through the mall until she decides that she would like to buy some legitimate underwear. At her age, I felt such shame about my breasts that I refused to even acknowledge them. I wore a bathing suit underneath my clothes to flatten them, but because of an extremely nosy group of West Indian elders in my church, whose sole purpose was monitoring the sexual development of young women in the congregation, I didn’t get away with it for long. In the fitting room, my mother attempted to stuff my breasts into a cute, age-appropriate bra, but my body had ceased to be the sort of hard, inchoate thing you might call cute. Instead, it had, at thirteen measly years, become soft and serious, visible to men and in need of copious support. And while Akila has the typical ambivalence about her own body, she is not like this. She invites me into the fitting room, tries on a few bras, and asks me what I think. Good, I say, trying to locate the most sensitive word. I help her adjust the straps, and she shrugs and slips them into her purse. It happens so quickly that by the time we are out of the store, the window in which I could have said something has closed. In the next store, she does it again, and no explicit plan is made, but soon we are moving in tandem, sliding bracelets and sample perfumes into our purses and stowing what we can in our boots. After an hour, we stop at Orange Julius, and we look at each other and laugh.

“Do you do this often?”

“Sometimes.” She turns the cup around in her hands. “You’re leaving,” she says matter-of-factly, like she has already spent some time with the news.

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she says, and then we slip into a movie, but it is already halfway through, and I can’t really make sense of it. Everyone in the theater is crying, and when I look at Akila, she is crying, too. On the way to the bus, we argue half-heartedly about what we think the movie meant. For the rest of the ride, we are silent, and when we get to the house, Eric and Rebecca are not home. As Akila is looking for her keys, a patrol car pulls up behind us. As it has become common in the last week for a car or two to make rounds at night, I assume it will proceed around the cul-de-sac, but when two officers exit the car, this assumption reveals itself to be mostly hope. Evening, one of the officers says, and when I say it back, it sounds so weak that I clear my throat and say it again, though the second time it sounds worse, forceful, and I feel the error in this overcorrection, the officers silent, recalculating.

I should know better. The effort to appear casual is never a casual act, but in front of the police I don’t know how I can be expected to act like myself. I don’t know how not to assume the posture of defense. I look at the officers, and then at all the lit windows around the cul-de-sac, and in one of the windows, I see the old woman’s face. I ask if there is a problem, and this time I don’t try to correct for the tremor. But when they ask if I live in the house, I hesitate, and Akila crosses her arms and says that she does, her tenor markedly less reverent than mine. One of the officers turns to look at her, and I can feel the impending spiral of this exchange, my fear of the officers’ increasing proximity tempered somewhat by the oddness of our shared incredulity at Akila’s departure from the script. I can’t tell if it is defiance or if she simply doesn’t know the words. I step in front of her and tell her to go around the back. But she won’t, and there is a part of me that sees her ease, her self-possession, and is frustrated for what she hasn’t been told. But when I see how she is resolute, casual in her claim of what is hers, I am envious. When the officers ask me to show ID, I look for my license, but my hands are shaking and my purse is full of stolen perfume. This is my home, Akila says, and I know that the moment between when a black boy is upright and capable of speech and when he is prostrate in his own blood is almost imperceptible, due in great part to the tacit conversation that is happening beyond him, that has happened before him, and that resists his effort to enter it before it concludes. I know that the event horizon is swift because of the gulf between the greeting and the pavement, but in real time, as they press Akila to the ground, every second is long.