Nightcrawling(28)

“Got so many knots in there, thought you might wanna help me while we catch up.” Mama leans her head down so her neck is visible. Mama’s neck is five different shades of brown and black and purple and I can’t tell whether it looks like she been beat up or like her body is a whole galaxy.

Spraying her hair, I’m hit with the concoction’s scent of lavender and shea butter. When we were little, Mama would take us into the shower with her and soap us up with soap she said she made, but neither of us never saw her making it. Her soap smelled like a mix of new shoes and forest.

When we got out of the shower, she’d rub her entire body in shea butter that she bought from the West African shop down the street and then she’d sit us in her lap one at a time, her naked, smooth thighs a sweet comfort even in her boniness, and rub us down in it too, so we were soft, shining babies. Sometimes we’d dance to Prince or Mama would let us listen to Daddy’s old CDs and we’d be nothing but skin. We stopped all that after Daddy came home and I think Marcus never let Mama close to him again, blamed her for Daddy’s return and his death, for Uncle Ty, for what she did. I blamed her too, for some of it at least, but I also needed her. She was the only one who knew what it felt like to watch Daddy dissolve from our lives, and I didn’t have an Uncle Ty to take me away. I only had Mama’s hums.

“Now how ’bout you tell Mama what’s going on?” Her voice is so smooth, lulls me back into all the lullabies she used to sing.

I sniff. “They raising our rent so high and I didn’t have no choice, so I been out on the streets and, I don’t know, Mama, I’m just scared.”

Mama reaches back and rubs my knee with her fingers. “And now you want Mama to help you.”

I can hear how hopeful this whole thing makes her, giddy to be needed.

“Thought with Uncle Ty’s number and everything, you might be able to.” My voice is so small now, it gets swallowed by the sound of her breathing. Mama’s hair still looks the same as it always did and, watching each curl soak in potion, I don’t understand how my mama could have done what she did and still kept her hair, kept her voice. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what, baby?”

“Fuck over our whole family.”

Mama doesn’t pause, says, “No point in losing sleep over something none of us can change. Like I said, was survival.”

I pull the brush once through her hair, knowing how it’s gonna hurt. Mama don’t make a sound.

“We been trying to survive every day since then and I ain’t been locked up.”

“You call me when that changes. There are consequences to surviving out here, just ’cause you too young to know it yet don’t mean I gotta apologize for the truth. I spent every day for years apologizing, praying up some heaven that might forgive me. I don’t got no breath left for that.”

Mama holds her hands up and I look at them from behind her hair, which is less kinky than both mine and Marcus’s, and the creases in her hands are pale, with a trace of lavender, color that shouldn’t exist in a palm.

Looking at Mama’s hands, I remember a time when Alé was fourteen and I was thirteen and she decided that she was gonna learn how to read palms. She used my hands to practice, trying to distract me from Daddy’s approaching death. She would point to the line running vertically up from my wrist and say, “See how it splits right there? Means you got two caminos de la vida, you know, ways shit might go down.” Then she would look down at the palm-reading book from the library resting in her lap. “And you gotta make a choice someday.”

Mama’s line doesn’t split like mine does. It veers left, toward her thumb, like it got sidetracked on the way up.

“I’m coming home. You hear that?” Mama’s hand waves backward to pat my arm, shake me into getting it. “We gonna go back to normal.”

I brush faster, move the bristles in and out of each individual lock and coil.

“I really just want you to give me Uncle Ty’s number, Mama. Please.”

Mama huffs. “You always wanting. Don’t do nobody no good to want.”

I think about the way Trevor chases a basketball, his feet bouncing on the court. How it always ends. How the ball always comes back down.

“You right, Mama,” I say. Her hair, which is normally jumping up out of her roots, falls limp, matted. “You gonna give me Uncle Ty’s number or not? ’Cause I ain’t gonna sit around here waiting. Wanting don’t do nobody no good, right?”

Mama don’t even seem to register anything I’m saying. “Did I ever tell you about that time yo daddy brought me my favorite flowers?” The swarm of her voice is closing in on me, like poison dripping out her mouth, and she can’t seem to ever look at me and tell me what I need to hear.

I don’t know how she can talk about Daddy and not about the only thing that matters now, how when Daddy died, Soraya was already halfway to full-grown inside her. A late surprise in Mama’s mid-forties. A last remnant of Daddy she ruined.

“Mama,” I say. Her tongue keeps rolling.

“Anyway, they was the nicest flowers. Thinking I’ll get some for the apartment once I get out of this place. Speaking of, I need you to do something for me, baby. Parole officer needs some letters of recommendation for my release. Seems like you could use Mama at home with you, helping out.”