There There(15)

    “We’re gonna get outta here. Don’t you two worry,” our mom said to us one night from across the cell. But I no longer trusted her. I was unsure of whose side she was on, or if there were even sides anymore. Maybe there were only sides like there were sides on the rocks at the edge of the island.

On one of our last days on the island, me and my mom went up to the lighthouse. She told me she wanted to look at the city. Said she had something to tell me. There were people running around like they did in those last days, like the world was ending, but me and my mom sat there on the grass like nothing at all was happening.

“Opal Viola, baby girl,” my mom said, and moved some hair behind my ear. She’d never, not once, called me baby girl.

“You have to know what’s going on here,” she said. “You’re old enough to know now, and I’m sorry I haven’t told you before. Opal, you have to know that we should never not tell our stories, and that no one is too young to hear. We’re all here because of a lie. They been lying to us since they came. They’re lying to us now!”

The way she said “They’re lying to us now” scared me. Like it had two different meanings and I didn’t know what either one was. I asked my mom what the lie was, but she just stared off toward the sun, her whole face became a squint. I didn’t know what to do except to sit there and wait to see what she would say. A cold wind laid into our faces, made us close our eyes to it. With my eyes closed, I asked my mom what we were gonna do. She told me we could only do what we could do, and that the monster that was the machine that was the government had no intention of slowing itself down for long enough to truly look back to see what happened. To make it right. And so what we could do had everything to do with being able to understand where we came from, what happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our stories. She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories. And then, as if all of it was leading up to what she was gonna say next, my mom paused a long pause, looked off toward the city, and told me that she had cancer. The whole island disappeared then. Everything. I stood up and walked away without knowing where to. I remembered I left Two Shoes over by those rocks all that time before.

    When I got to Two Shoes he was on his side and in bad shape, like something had chewed on him, or like the wind and salt had dimmed him down. I picked him up and looked at his face. I couldn’t see the shine in his eyes anymore. I put him back down like he’d been. Left him like that.



* * *



—

When we got back to the mainland, on a sunny day months after we’d first left for the island, we got on a bus and went back over near where we lived before we moved to the yellow house. Just outside downtown Oakland, on Telegraph. We stayed with our mom’s adopted brother Ronald, who we first met the day we got to his house to live with him. Me and Jacquie didn’t like him one bit. But Mom said he was the real deal. A medicine man. Mom didn’t want to do what the doctors recommended. For a while we went up north all the time, where Ronald would run sweats. It was too hot in there for me, but Jacquie went in with Mom. Me and Jacquie both told her she should do what the doctors said to do too. She told us she couldn’t, that she could only go the way she’d been going. And that was the way she went. Slowly receding into the past like all those sacred and beautiful and forever-lost things. One day she just holed up there on the couch in Ronald’s living room. She got smaller and smaller.



* * *



—

    After Alcatraz, after our mom died, I kept my head down. I focused on school. Our mom had always told us the most important thing we could do was to get educated, and that people won’t listen to you otherwise. We didn’t end up staying at Ronald’s all that long. Things went real bad real fast. But that’s a story for another time. When she was there, and even after she died, for a while he left us to ourselves. Me and Jacquie spent all our time together when we weren’t at school. We went to see Mom’s grave as often as we could. One day on the way home from the cemetery, Jacquie stopped and turned to me.

“What are we doing?” she said.

“Going home,” I said.

“What home?” Jacquie said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What are we gonna do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You usually have some smart-ass answer.”

“Just keep going, I guess—”

    “I’m pregnant,” Jacquie said.

“What?”

“Fucking piece of shit Harvey, remember?”

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can just get rid of it.”

“No. You cannot just get rid of—”

“I know someone, my friend Adriana’s brother knows someone in West Oakland.”

“Jacquie, you can’t—”

“Then what? We raise the baby together, with Ronald? No,” Jacquie said, then started to cry. Like she hadn’t cried at the funeral. She stopped, put her hand on top of a parking meter, and looked away from me. She wiped her arm across her face once, hard, then kept walking. We walked like that for some time, the sun behind us, our shadows slanted, stretched ahead of us.