Nightcrawling(73)
“Can I help?” His face is this hopeful blend of nervous and sad. It can’t be later than nine in the morning and he’s here when he could be finding a life. He’s here, sunshine probably blistering the back of his neck, staring at me, hoping for anything different than what I’ve always given him. He doesn’t deserve fractions and that’s all I got, all I’m willing to give.
“Tony.” I say it slowly enough that I think it might be enough for him to grasp. He looks down at his big feet, back up at me. He wouldn’t cry in front of me, but this is the closest he’s gotten. “You don’t gotta do this no more.” My hands are stained from Trevor’s blood and all I can think is how much I wanna get out of the sun and I bet all Tony can think of is me.
He opens his mouth just enough that sound can come out. “You know I don’t mind.”
And that’s the worst part; that he would do this for decades, do this until funeral day came to my doorstep and left him grieving and visiting the grave of somebody who never gave him nothing but ash. I think in the otherworld that midnight reveals, that place where everybody walks a little different, there is a version of us where I am okay with Tony being everything, holding everything. Not a better world but one where we are content with this, where there is no chase and I let him grieve me after so many years of my back spinning, repeatedly walking away from him and wishing he wouldn’t follow.
I always expected it to end like this: me finally getting the balls to plead with him, talk him into leaving me. “Get outta this. You don’t need me.” Been avoiding that drop on his face since the day Marcus introduced him to me.
Tony will never argue with me. That’s part of the problem, I think. Anytime I call him back, he’s gonna answer, gonna run to me the way I wish Alé would right now, when everything seems to be dissolving. Can’t sit by the pool and let Tony hold me just because I don’t like the breeze, don’t like night without him shadowing me.
He takes my hand, lifts it all the way up to his lips, opens up my palm, and kisses it.
I watch Tony exit the complex, probably back into a swarm of cameras, and I know I gotta decide sooner than later how I’m gonna make my life mine. How I’m gonna get to that moment when Trevor and I make this city ours again, win every bet until we’ve got an empire of our bodies restored. Maybe it all starts in that courtroom in two weeks. Or these streets. Or us dipping our toes in the pool. One way or the other, I know I don’t have much time left to choose, find a way out of this trap.
I can’t stop checking the peephole. I’m not even sure who I’m expecting to see peeking out from the landing, eyes bulging. Maybe the cops, maybe some woman in a suit asking for Trevor, maybe Mama. Definitely Mama. She called me less than an hour after Tony left, from a new phone, saying she was released a couple days ago from Blooming Hope, that the parole officer really liked my letter. I almost forgot I had sent it, all the way back after I visited Mama in February.
When she called, she told me she was staying with an old friend in Deep East, and she gave me the address. I hung up before she could say anything else.
Mama didn’t say she was gonna show up at the Regal-Hi, but I can’t shake the feeling that she’s about to appear at the window, tap-tapping on the door. That I’ll peek outside and see her face reflected in the pool.
The sun already set and Trevor’s sleeping again.
Trevor and I have spent the last three days with the shades pulled because he says his skull feels like it’s got a drum instead of a brain, and Marcus’s football days taught me that a concussion calls for two things: dark and quiet.
Problem is, a nine-year-old boy gets bored pretty quick and don’t like the sound of silence when he’s not sleeping. So, I read him the entirety of the second Harry Potter book and I’ve been humming him the instrumentals to every song I know. When I get tired, I put on one of Daddy’s old CDs and hope Trevor will fall asleep to it. He usually does.
I’m hoping he’s fully recovered in the next week or so because we’ve got some twelve-year-olds to give a beatdown. He started making full sentences again on Sunday, two days after the incident, and explained what happened. Apparently, Trevor decided to sneak out while I was with Marsha and headed to the courts to bet the seventh grade’s best basketball player that he could beat him in a one-on-one. Boy said yes and a whole group of them gathered at the courts for the show.
When it began to look like Trevor was gonna win, the other boy got a little antsy, so he shoved Trevor and traveled with the ball all in one swoop. Trevor called foul and boy got upset, got his friends in on it. Trevor says it was all an excuse to end the game before he lost, but the boys were bigger and had numbers on their side and when it’s a quiet spring day and everyone gets bored, kids love a good fight. Wasn’t really a fight, though, because Trevor was on the floor getting kicked around without even throwing one punch. They left Trevor on the ground when some older boys came over and said they best get home. The older boys helped Trevor up, took him back to the apartment.
The whole time Trevor was reciting the story, my eyes filled with flashes of bright light, like what Daddy used to describe as cataracts, except these ones were painful and searing, full of rage. I told him that we were gonna find these boys, don’t care if I’m six years older, we gonna beat they asses the moment the grand jury is over and he’s all healed.