Long Division(82)

“Where’d you get that from?” I asked her.

“People disappear, City,” she said, ignoring my question. “We live, we wonder, we love, we lie, and we disappear. Close the book.”

“Are you for real? That’s it?”

“And sometimes we appear again if we’re loved,” she said. “Accept it. Which answer did you get wrong on the test? I know you know.”

“I don’t even know when I took that test, Mama Lara,” I told her. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful. I’m just so tired.”

“The test ain’t going nowhere,” she said. “When you’re ready to find out what you got wrong, you will. Close the book.”

“Close the book? Then what? Then can Baize come back? Is that Baize’s computer?” I asked her again. “Is she here somewhere?”

“Take it,” she handed me the computer. “You’re so close.”

“I know she’s here. I can feel her. Where is she?” I asked.

“Wait.” I looked up from the computer. “Is Shalaya Crump the governor of Mississippi, or is she like the president or something?” Mama Lara just looked at me. “How old is she now?” I did the math in my head. “Damn near 65? I bet she’s still fine as all outdoors, though. Did she marry that dude, Evan?”

Mama Lara stood there smiling with her hands folded across her chest. Honestly, I didn’t know what it took to be a good president or governor, but I knew Shalaya Crump had it. I knew it from the first day I met her. In her own way, she was as compassionate and thoughtful as a girl could be, but her mind was stronger than yours and no one could ever really break her heart. You could sprain her heart, and her heart would bruise a lot, but it could never ever be broken. Never. I figured that there were probably 27 people like that in the world at one time and they were the only people who should be running for president of anything that mattered.

With all the windows in the museum open, and the lightning bugs outside winking like it was going out of style, I looked at Mama Lara. “So this is it?” I said loud enough so she could hear me.

“No,” Mama Lara said. “This ain’t it. You know how movement works now. You know how love and change work. And you know that sometimes, just sometimes, when folks disappear, they come back, don’t they?”

“I hear you, Mama Lara, but you don’t get it. Right now, all that goofy talk don’t help me. I just need something to hold on to. I need to know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Don’t you see what I’m saying? If you can’t help me get Baize back, can you just stop talking for the rest of the day? You ain’t got no stories to watch on TV? Please just stop talking.”

“Think about what I’m asking you, City,” she said and sat in the desk next to me. “The book is open. Close it and get to work. How else do people disappear?”

I looked down at the desk and thought about everything I’d experienced in the last few days and, I guess, the last 50 years.

“Water,” I told her.

“What else?”

“Um, fire?”

“What else?”

“The wind…and um, words?”

“Who uses words to make folks disappear?”

“People.”

“And who makes people disappear?”

“Um, people make people disappear,” I told her.

“That’s it,” she said. “And everything that makes people disappear can make people what?”

“Reappear?”

“It’s all in your hands now. They’re waiting for you.”

I sat there in the desk looking at my actual hands and thinking about water, fire, wind, words, and people. Both sides of my hands looked so worn, so bloody and smudged and ashy. From typing on a laptop computer, to brushing my hair at the Spell-Off, to tying the hands of a fake Klansman, to reading the first chapter of Long Division, to holding my daughter’s hand, my hands had done things I’d never imagined wanting them to do.

I wanted to walk out of that museum ready to explore, knowing that I’d done new things with my hands and new things with my imagination. Maybe I could find Shalaya Crump and Evan tomorrow, I thought. There was so much I wanted to explore. But before I could go forward, I had to go back under.

Again.

So I grabbed the computer, told Mama Lara thank you, and headed back toward the hole. I loved the slice of the new Mississippi that I’d seen and I respected Shalaya Crump’s decision to stay and fight for us, but I needed Baize back. I didn’t care if it was right to anyone else but my daughter and me.

When I got in the hole, I opened the computer. A revised version of the paragraph I’d written when I first took Baize’s computer back to 1985 was on the screen:

I didn’t have a girlfriend halfway through ninth grade and it wasn’t because the whole high school heard Principal Jankins whispering to his wife, Ms. Dawsin-Jankins, that my hairline was crooked like the top of a Smurf house. I never had a girlfriend because the last time I saw Shalaya Crump, she told me she could love me if I helped her change the future dot-dot-dot in a special way.



I reread it. And I wondered. And I wandered. And I wrote. And I reread that. And I wrote more. And I erased some lies. And I wrote more. And I erased some truth. And I thought about Honors English teachers and librarians. And I forgot about them. And I thought about what people like Shalaya, Baize, Evan, and me needed to read in school to prepare to fight, love, and disappear. And I forgot about that. And I wrote more. And the more I wrote and erased, the more I felt Baize and other characters slowly—word by word, maybe even sense by sense—coming back.