Transcendent Kingdom(70)

I didn’t even wait for Katherine to pull over all the way. I just jumped out.

“Where did you go?” I shouted, running to her and folding her in my arms. She was as stiff as a board. “Where were you?” I took her shoulders in my hands and shook her forcefully, trying to make her look at me, but she wouldn’t.

Katherine drove us back to my apartment. She said a few words to my mother, but other than that the ride was silent. When we got to my place, she asked my mother to wait outside the car. She took my hand in hers. “I can stay if you want,” she said, but I shook my head.

She paused, leaned in closer to me, and said, “Gifty, I’ll be back first thing in the morning, and I will help you figure this all out, okay? I promise. You call me anytime today. Really, anytime.”

“Thanks,” I said. I got out of the car and led my mother back to my apartment.

Inside, she looked small and bewildered, innocent. I had been so frightened and angry that I’d forgotten to feel sorry for her, but, now, I pitied her. I pulled her into the bathroom and started running a bath. I pulled her shirt off, checking her wrists. I undid the drawstring on her pajama bottoms, and they slipped down themselves, a silk puddle on the bathroom floor.

    “Did you take anything?” I asked, ready to pry her mouth open, but mercifully, she shook her head, quick as a blink. When the bathtub was full, I had her step in. I poured water over her head and watched her eyes close then open, in shock, in pleasure.

“Mama, I beg you,” I said in Twi, but I didn’t know enough Twi to finish the sentence. I wasn’t sure how I would have finished it, anyway: I beg you to stop. I beg you to wake up. I beg you to live.

I washed and combed her hair. I soaped down her body, moving the sponge along every fold of skin. When I got to her hands, she grabbed one of mine. She pulled it to her heart and held it there. “Ebeyeyie,” she said. It will be all right. She used to say it to Nana when she washed him. It was true then, until it wasn’t.

“Look at me,” she said, taking my chin in her hands, jerking my head toward her. “Don’t be afraid. God is with me; do you hear me? God is with me wherever I go.”



* * *



—

I finally got her into bed. I sat outside her door for an hour, listening to the sound of her snoring. I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I knew I should stay there, keep vigil, but then I started to feel like there wasn’t enough air in my apartment for the two of us, so I sneaked out, something I’d never done when I was a teen in my mother’s house. I got on the 101 and headed north toward San Francisco, driving with the windows down, gulping the air, the wind whipping my face and leaving my lips chapped. I kept licking them.

“That makes it worse,” my mother always said.

She was right, but that had never stopped me.

I didn’t know where I was going, only that I didn’t want to be around mice or humans. I didn’t really even want to be around myself, and if I could have figured out a way around that, discovered the switch that could turn my own thoughts and feelings and harsh admonishments off, I would have chosen that instead.

    Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

I was waiting for that voice, waiting for the way, driving up and down the narrow streets of a city I had never much liked. I could almost hear my car, huffing through its exhaustion as it climbed those ample hills, and exhaling, relieved, as it flew down them. I found myself in neighborhoods with houses like miniature castles, the lawns vast and vibrant, shimmering green, and I found myself in alleyways where strung-out men and women sat on stoops and convulsed on sidewalks, and I felt saddened by it all.

When we were children, unaccompanied and unsupervised, Nana and I used to sneak into the gated pool a few blocks away from our house at night. Our swimsuits were too tight, several years old. They hadn’t kept up with our growth. Nana and I were all too happy to take our dips under the cover of darkness. For years we begged our parents to let us join the pool, but for years they had made up excuses for why we couldn’t. Nana figured out that he was tall enough, his arms long enough, to reach up and over the gate, and unlatch it for me. As our mother worked the night shift, we waded in that pool.

“Do you think God knows we’re here?” I asked. Neither of us really knew how to swim, and while we were trespassers, we weren’t stupid. We knew our mother would kill us if we died. We stayed in the shallows.

“Of course God knows we’re here. He knows everything. He knows where every person is at every second of every day.”

“So God would probably be mad at us for sneaking into the pool, right? We’re sinning.”

    I already knew the answer to this and Nana knew that I knew. At that time, the two of us had never missed a Sunday at church. Even when I was contagious with pink eye, my mother had fitted me with a pair of sunglasses and marched me into the sanctuary to receive my healing. Nana didn’t answer me at first. I assumed he was ignoring me and I was accustomed to being ignored, at school, where I asked too many questions, and at home, where I did the same thing.

“It’s not so bad,” Nana finally said.

“What?”

“I mean, this is a nice sin, isn’t it?”