Nightcrawling(59)

I walk out the door, lingering in shadows on the long walk back to the Regal-Hi. Same walk Marcus and I took the last day he came with me to Alé’s, when we started separating like my old bracelet beads when the elastic string stretched out. When I arrive at the gate to the Regal-Hi, I don’t let the pool halt me with its blue, even though it tries to pull me in, that scent, that so-fresh-it-almost-seems-real smell. Then I catch a whiff of sulfur behind the chlorine and I remember you can’t trust nothing that saturated.

Marcus and I used to fight about who got to choose the morning cartoon. We’d play war over the remote, scream, cry, plead, whatever we had to do to get control of those buttons. Eventually, one of us would take the remote and whack the other’s head with it out of impulse. Whoever got hit would start bleeding or swelling and Mama would scold whoever done the hitting and give the other one the remote. When I was the perpetrator, I would go sit in a corner and sob. Not ’cause I wanted the remote or even ’cause I felt bad. I just wanted to be able to reverse time and never let that plastic collide with his bone. I just wanted to go back.

That’s sort of what this feels like: the helplessness of it. Like standing on the road that leads to here and noticing a path you didn’t know existed and not being able to take it. Like the road that leads to here was never the only road and time made me forget that until these sobbing moments when I remember, when the fog clears and I’m looking back and there’s a fork on the ground, another way.

I enter my apartment, empty without Trevor, and sit on the edge of the couch, dialing the number Purple Suit gave me and biting off every last bit of white fingernail until each one bleeds. She answers on the second ring.

“They got my brother.”

“Hello? Who is this?”

“Kiara Johnson. Some cops pulled up on my brother and he’s in Santa Rita and I didn’t know who else to ask.”

Purple Suit is silent for a moment. When she speaks next, she sounds tense. “I’m sorry to hear that, Kiara. I actually need to tell you something, if you haven’t already heard.”

“What?”

“Your name was given to the press yesterday. Only your alias, at the moment, but it won’t take long before they have your real name and address. It’s all over the news, especially in the bay, but it made it to the L.A. Times this morning. I’m sorry.”

I think about what 220 threatened, that he’d say my name if I said his, and I didn’t tell anyone anything, but I should’ve known one of them would out me, that I wouldn’t be able to make it through all of this with my anonymity too.

Purple Suit coughs. “I want to help you and your brother, but I don’t have any jurisdiction over arrests, Kiara.”

“That’s not what I’m asking for. I need to contact my uncle, but I don’t got his number and I thought maybe you would know how to find him, investigate or something.”

I can almost feel Purple Suit nodding in her HQ office. “I have access to a driver’s license database, if he’s licensed in California, that would give me his contact information. I’d be willing to look, but I need you to do something for me too.”

“Haven’t I suffered enough ’cause of you? You really asking for more?”

“I’m just trying to help, Kiara.”

I’m weary of people asking me to do shit, but if Purple Suit is going to give me the thing I need most, I don’t really have a choice. “Fine.”

“I have a friend. Her name is Marsha Fields, she’s an attorney, and she can help you out with everything that’s about to happen with the investigation. I want you to call her, okay?” She sounds like she’s trying to talk someone out of jumping from a roof.

“Okay.”

She reads me the number and I write it down on a slip of paper.

“As for your uncle, could you provide his full name and date of birth?”

I’ve rarely called Uncle Ty by anything but his nickname, so I need to pause to even remember what Ty stands for.

“Tyrell Johnson. He was born August 8, 1973.”

I remember Marcus used to make him cards on every birthday, walk them down to the mailbox himself. I wait while Purple Suit types something into a computer, the click of the keyboard floating through the phone.

“I have three results in California.”

Purple Suit gives me each phone number, which I scribble beneath the lawyer’s.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Of course. Don’t forget to call Miss Fields.”

I hang up and look around the room. At the same walls that we’ve lived in since both Marcus and I were born, since our parents found each other and thought they were creating a miracle of a family before we spiraled into a disaster. Into kin more dead and caged than free.

I call each number for Tyrell Johnson, in order. The first one I get voicemail, but I can tell it’s not him from the voice on the answering machine. I dial the next one. Calling these numbers feels like making some kind of fundraising call, knowing the stranger on the other end doesn’t want to buy none of your shit. I’m surprised when I get an answer and it’s his voice, sounding the same as it always did, a lower echo of Daddy’s. Uncle Ty is younger than Daddy, even younger than Mama, and I think he tries to make his voice younger too, how he swings each word into the next.