The Weight of Blood (21)

“When Reverend Washington died of alcohol poisoning, Thomas tried to take over the family business, but tithes and congregation membership were nearly nonexistent. They were forced to move their worship to the living room and became a church of two. His mother, completely dependent on her son, left no space for him to find a wife of his own.

“According to medical records, Reba was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer at eighty-one and had less than six months to live. Since she refused to be put in a home, Thomas hired a live-in nurse while he worked at the local grocery to pay the rising medical costs. After her sparsely attended funeral, the town assumed that Thomas, so distraught by his mother’s death, became a recluse in his family’s crumbling home on the West Side border.

“Ten months later, Thomas walked into Dr. Paul Foreman’s pediatric office with a six-week-old baby girl named Madison Abigail, and little explanation. Dr. Foreman wouldn’t examine the girl again for another twelve years. The mother’s name was left blank on most records, and after the town burned, no one could locate a single copy of Maddy’s original birth certificate.

“There is no available information on Reba’s family history, but many believed she was from the New England area and met her southern husband at seminary school.”

May 8, 2014

The Good Old Days had a smell that Maddy could never find the right word for. A combination of dank musk and decay, mixed with the lingering presence of lives that each item in the store had once touched. Filled to the ceiling with relics and coveted collectibles, the shop had little room for anyone to walk through, leaving the space dark and looming, like the inside of a wasp hive. Dust peppered the air at the slightest movement, and Maddy sneezed often. Papa worked in a tiny back office, returning phone calls from interested buyers and posting items on eBay, a necessary evil that just kept them afloat since no one from Springville ever shopped in their store. The previous week, he had made $1,500 selling a 1956 Coke wall clock.

The Good Old Days sat diagonal from Sal’s Pizzeria, and on the days Maddy worked the register, she watched kids pour in and out of the restaurant for hours on end. Kids from school. Hanging out, laughing, joking, kissing . . .

Being normal.

Papa condemned the place. “A cesspool. And those girls, refusing to protect their modesty. Have they no decency?”

One of Maddy’s favorite movies, Roman Holiday, starred Audrey Hepburn as a princess who sneaks away from her security detail just to have one day off in Rome, where she meets a reporter who offers to show her around. She goes where she wants, eats what she wants, dances, drives a Vespa, even cuts her hair short. And she does it all without her father breathing down her neck. Maddy would give anything to escape, anything to have one normal day.

Watching her classmates live the life she wished for through a foggy glass door—so close she could hear the laughter and smell the baking dough—felt torturous. Just once, she’d like to put on blue jeans and sneakers, walk across the street into Sal’s, and order a slice with a large Coke. She’d imagined the exact scenario so many times that she’d often felt a heated rush surging, pushing her aching hand forward to grab the doorknob and pull. But she always stopped herself. The kids would never accept her, especially now that they knew the truth. She was doomed to live in purgatory behind the counter until she was old and gray. She had taken the SATs (in secret, of course) but college wasn’t in her future. Papa would never let her go, even if he did have the money.

Maybe now . . . I can apply for minority scholarships.

The thought made her tense. Was she really a minority? She’d never considered it. Never thought of anything other than being white. What would her mother have called her, if she was still alive? Would she have made her hide like Papa had? Would she have agreed with his tactics? She probably wouldn’t have had a choice, just like her, but at least they would’ve had each other in the fray.

Maddy looked into the gold oval mirror that hung by the register, selling for thirty-five dollars, her reflection dulled by speckles of rust.

I am Black, she thought, trying out the unnatural words, seeing how they fit, testing their durability against doubt. Would anyone believe her? Didn’t matter. She would never need to say it. Papa acted like the incident at school hadn’t happened, and so would she.

I’m white, she thought, but the lie sat crooked on her skin.

Maddy shook the thought away and tried to busy herself with work. She had just finished writing a shipping label for the 1950s classic pay phone being sent to Philadelphia when she noticed that the address Papa had given her differed from what was in the email. It was missing an apartment number.

He’ll blame me, she thought, feeling the rising panic, and scrambled to find something to correct it with. She stretched across the counter for a pen just out of her reach . . .

And the pen wiggled and rolled toward her fingertips.

Maddy gasped, reeling back into her stool, clutching her extended hand as if it had been burned. The pen sat in the middle of the red countertop, unmoving. There were no open windows, no drafts. Yet it had moved. She’d seen it with her own eyes.

She spun around, expecting to find Papa. But he was still on the phone, not to be disturbed.

Maddy tried steadying her breathing, her heart beating too fast for her small frame, the pen still where she’d left it. Or where it had left itself.

The pen had moved on its own. No strings. No magic tricks. It had moved toward her at the very moment she wanted it.