Nightcrawling(58)
She lights the first joint, passes it to me.
“I call this one Chava,” she says.
I take it between my fingers and rest it in my lips, breathe in. It tastes like honey and mint, like consuming a stroll on the water. The smoke comes out in a perfect stream and I cough myself into a high. She’s already lit the other joint and we switch. I breathe this one in and I’m immediately struck with its familiarity: Sunday Shoes. Lavender. Funeral day and clothes with holes we mourn like they are the body.
When the high hits, every guard I’ve kept raised these past months falls and I feel the creases of my neck filling in tears, Alé watching me as I cry in front of her for the first time in years.
“I’m so sorry, Ki,” she whispers.
I try to swallow the urge to fully sob, but it escapes me anyway and I feel like an aching woman, like I’m old and wrinkling and my back hurts and there is no room in life for me to feel anything and yet here I am, overcome. Unraveling. Alé rubbing my back, between my shoulder blades.
“I just wanted a family. I just wanted something to work, something that was mine.”
“I know, Kiara. I know.”
I lean back into Alé’s chest, fully in the bed now. We lie there until my sobs slow and both joints are gone and we’re in a daze, arms and legs intertwining, forgetting that our skin is meant to be lonely. Every inch of the bed is solace, smooth, and smells like every dream I wish I had the space to have. Smells like Alé, like weed and never having to worry about the eyes. Feels like the warmth, the one that sends my entire body into a frenzy. And maybe the story we remember will be our sleep and maybe it will be her mouth on mine and maybe it will be her leaving, me waking up alone and not quite sure what was real.
* * *
—
When I get the call, the high has mostly faded and I’m still lying in Alé’s bed trying to figure out how the ceiling got so cracked. I’ve decided it’s probably the earthquake, that big one that turned San Francisco into a desert and made everyone take cover inside their nightmares. Bet Alé’s mama and all her aunties watched it shake and fracture their ceiling into a labyrinth of cracks.
Maybe the high is still lingering in there because I don’t register the meaning of the automated warning when I answer the phone, just press the number the robot lady tells me to press. It takes his voice to really shock me awake.
“Kiara.” My brother’s voice sounds like it exists in another dimension. This time, it’s distorted and weak. The same pain from earlier is still in there, masked in fatigue, but over it all, he just sounds afraid. I can imagine his face now, everything pooling in fear like the day we found Mama in the tub. Like Daddy’s funeral or the first time we visited Mama behind bars.
“Where are you, Mars?”
“They got us at county jail, Santa Rita.” He’s sobbing so hard my fingerprint’s probably swimming in his tears.
I want to tell him I’m gonna fix it, tell him I’ll melt down the bars to whatever cell they got him in, and take him away in the getaway car I don’t own.
“I’m sorry.”
He clears his throat. “Maybe they was there ’cause of you, but it was my shit they found. Listen, I don’t want you to worry about me, aight? I need you to make sure you safe and then I need you to do something for me. Can you do that, Ki?”
“Of course.”
“I need you to go find Uncle Ty, okay? He’s gonna know what to do, he been through this and he owes me. Bring him here, I don’t care what you gotta do to get him, aight?”
“I don’t know, Marcus, I already tried—”
“I don’t wanna die in here. Please.”
Even after everything he’s put me through, that’s all it takes for me to want to help him. If he’s ready to ask something of me instead of just taking it, then I will walk to the ends of the earth for him.
“Okay.” Maybe it’s the weed, the bed, Sunday Shoes, guilt. Didn’t plan on ever seeing Uncle Ty again. Still, I say okay and Marcus hangs up and my limbs are attached at the hinges.
Marcus is scared. I could tell from the quake in his voice, the tremor. But, more than that, just him saying Uncle Ty’s name told me all I needed to know about how his insides are rearranging. The metal heat will do that to you. So will a siren. I don’t know how to find Uncle Ty any more than Marcus does, not after Mama didn’t have his number. I called Shauna after Marcus’s voice stopped reverberating through my jaw and she told me to fuck off, said I’m the reason Cole got picked up and she didn’t want no more part in my shit. Her baby’s glass eyes blew up big in my head, looking back at me. My face a sheet of gray.
If Marcus is saying Uncle Ty’s the cure, I don’t have anything left to tell me he ain’t right. Nobody believes in God ’cause they got proof, only ’cause they know there’s not any proof to say they’re wrong.
Alé told me she’d keep Trevor for a couple days while I figure this out and now I’m kissing Trevor’s forehead even as he squirms away from me.
“Aight. I’ll see you in a couple days,” I say, placing a smile just curved enough to be comforting on my face. Trevor nods and Alé reaches out to rest a hand on my cheek, brushing it with her thumb before letting me go.