Nightcrawling(87)

I couldn’t tell you when I fell asleep or when Alé woke up and removed me from the place right where her lungs would be, but I know the exact moment the jury decided, miles away like it was happening right inside the apartment. It was the clatter. The not-quite-light-enough-to-call-it-morning glass shatter, Alé leaning over the broken pieces of a lamp I never really used. Then the quiet. That’s when they all must have nodded their heads, signed the papers to send to the judge. Maybe they all did it solemnly, without looking each other in the eyes, like they could sidestep guilt.

The call comes an hour later. Alé sat holding me as I heaved and asked her if it was all over. She didn’t say no, just squeezed me until it felt like I had a body again, until my phone rang.

I answer.

Marsha talks fast on the other end of the line, jumbling the words but not saying much, then slows.

“I’m so sorry, Kiara, but there will be no indictment.”

I knew it was coming, I could feel it, but when Marsha says the words it feels like a punch, like the same sharp pain as when the metal man pushed me up against that brick wall the night it all started.

“What about Marcus?” I don’t want to ask, don’t even want to know, but I have to.

Marsha pauses. Silence. “I’ve arranged to get him a fantastic lawyer, one more fit to his case than I am, but I can’t do much more than that. Not without the pressure from the indictment.” She’s quiet again. “I’m sorry.”

I can tell her ice eyes are flooded because then she goes on some tangent about hope and I let her. It’s always best to let them unravel, makes everything seem a little less cracked. I thought I’d be angry at her, want to rage, but I don’t. When she hangs up the phone, almost two hours after the lamp found itself scattered across the apartment, I look up at Alé, who is back with her arm around me on the floor. She didn’t bother cleaning anything up once she saw the salt streaming down my cheeks, and her hands are spotted in blood and glimmers of glass. Neither of us says nothing.



* * *





A calm hits me that I didn’t think would and I rest my head back against the mattress, so I’m facing the ceiling. What did I expect but this? The sky tried to tell me everything comes in extremes, in blinding stretches of shit I can’t escape. Streetwalking all the way up to the clouds. Oakland contains it all: heartbreak and yearning. Reaching for our young back. I lift my head up and turn to Alé, taking her hand, picking out each grain of glass, and lifting it to my cheek so her blood is mine. Iron for ink. Her lips move, murmur, but nothing emerges distinguishable.

She pulls me close to her chest and wraps me so tight I can cocoon in the squeeze. We both know that pretty soon we will have to contend with what it means to have lost it all and still have each other. To have lost a roof and found a home. For now, though, Alé holds me close, I wash her hands, wrap them in Marsha’s black dress, and she begins to clean up the fragments of light.

I’m pulling on one of Marcus’s big shirts when I hear it. I think I’m hallucinating at first, but the sound is so distinct, so visceral that I don’t think my mind could make it up.

I’m walking toward the door, past Alé. “You hear that?”

She shrugs, bent over sweeping the glass up.

I open the door and step out onto the patio strip, lean over the railing, and there he is. I know from the moment I look down because he’s got that same circular birthmark on the top of his head. Trevor is sitting with his feet dipped into the pool, splashing.

The sky is a soft blue and I begin the walk toward the spiral staircase, winding down to the center of my everything, that shit pool that don’t never seem to stop pulling us in. I think about Soraya’s first steps and some part of me that hasn’t had any room to breathe misses her, wants to watch her run, watch her speak, watch her say my name, all three syllables, and learn how to shoot a hoop like Trevor.

I walk down the stairs like I’m descending straight into a fantasy, like I’m about to meet a ghost. When my bare feet hit the pavement and I’m staring at the back of his head, I know it ain’t no dream. He’s wearing his blue-and-yellow backpack, same one I handed Mrs. Randall. Same one I gave him for his birthday so many months ago. I walk closer, until I am standing right above him and, then, with only an oversized T-shirt draped over my body, I sit beside him, slip my own feet into the pool. My legs submerge to mid-calf.

I’m staring straight at him, but he’s still looking right into the pool, like he hasn’t even registered my presence beside him. His eyes are fully open now, face still discolored along the cheekbones, but the parts of him that make his face his are repaired. Perfectly rounded. The bulging eyes. Pouted lips.

“What you doin’ here, Trev?” I touch him lightly with my shoulder, so even if he doesn’t look at me, he’ll be able to feel me.

He keeps his eyes on the pool, on his feet as they come up from underneath its surface and splash back under again. Then, like some timer went off in his head, he whips his head toward me, locks eyes with mine, and flashes me a smile.

“Had to come get my ball.”

I can’t help but beam at that, my whole body spreading into a grin ’cause both of us know it’s so much more than that, but also, maybe in some ways, it’s just that simple. How we grew together in the bounce of a ball, how the beginning of our collapse started with a basketball court and a beating. How we don’t get to return to none of it again, but maybe we can steal this moment. Maybe this excuse is just enough to spin us into a pickup game where we’ll laugh because we can, until the sun disintegrates and nighttime threatens to set us free just to capture us again, back into the things we can’t escape. When I have to send him back onto whatever bus he snuck here on. Don’t even matter, though, because I will send him off with a kiss to the forehead and that ball in hand, that momentum can’t nobody take away.