VenCo(32)

A shadow fell on her, blocking out the sun.

“Twenty-five years, that’s when you have to start.”

A woman in a long green dress stood over her, her silver hair catching the breeze so that it looked like dark fire against the sun.

“Excuse me?”

“Go to the Burying Point in twenty-five years, and you will begin,” the woman said.

Meena looked around, but it was clear the woman was talking to her and no one else. “Do I know you?”

“You will,” she replied, with such assurance that Meena started to think she was dealing with someone unhinged. You never could tell around here. Maybe she was a street performer hamming it up, thinking Meena was a tourist.

“Look, my dad is the pastor at First Baptist. I’m not new. I’m not even close to new, so if that—”

“The Burying Point,” the woman interrupted. “That’s when the first one will be found.” She turned and walked quickly away, disappearing into a crowd of camera carriers gathered around the front of the museum.

Meena called after her. “Hey!”

A small child with red hair turned at her voice and stuck out her tongue. Meena returned the gesture.

“Nut job,” she muttered.

By suppertime that night, she’d forgotten about the woman and her strange words.

And just as she planned, when her critically acclaimed run in The Witch Women of Salem Town was over, she got on a bus headed for California. And she didn’t come home to Salem until her father was dying, twenty-four years later.


2015



The funeral was just as Josiah Good would have wanted—a quiet, humble affair devoid of pageantry but full of Jesus. The pews were packed. Every lady wore an Easter-worthy hat over sprayed curls and laid edges. The men wore dark ties and hummed through the sermon. Neither Meena nor her brother, Paul, spoke at the service. Instead, they accepted handshakes and well-wishes and, at the reception, nodded along to stories about the Reverend Good’s abundance and grace, his patience, the ways in which he’d enriched the speakers’ lives. Rejoice, her father’s people said—the Good Lord would have him in His arms by now.

But no one stayed long, maybe not knowing how to reconcile the Meena they remembered—the dutiful teenager or the little girl in pink sundresses—with this tall woman with the shaved head and gold hoop through her septum. No one knew how to carry on a conversation with a woman who ran the Black American Arts Gallery or who had founded the San Francisco chapter of the Lesbian Literary Society. They couldn’t deal with the degree to which she occupied space, the fullness of her presence—to them, being too much of anything was too close to being prideful. And the reverend himself had spoken against pride. So they rocked themselves through the service, fanned themselves at the graveside, handed over casseroles at the house, and quickly left.

After Paul and his wife packed up their kids and headed home, Meena was alone in her father’s house with the cleaned plates and Saran-wrapped leftovers. That was when she knew he was gone, that there was no one left to be disappointed in her. No more disapproving phone calls. No one left to shock with her “life choices.”

She moved through the sparse rooms, with their minimal furnishings and framed religious prints, like a ghost haunting her own past. No room slowed her down. Not one chair tempted repose. The kitchen smelled like dish soap and strangers. She decided that if Paul didn’t want the house, she would put it on the market. She didn’t want to spend another minute here alone, so she walked right out the back door and through the yard. She slipped through the back gate and into the alley, scaring a cat into dropping the rat it had just caught, which made a clumsy escape, shocked by sudden freedom.

The moon was full, and the streetlamps threw small puddles of light she glided through like a seasoned swimmer. Cars passed like strange fish. She walked until the weight of being weightless began to lift, until the space around her returned to familiar shapes and structures. Past the wax museum, she turned in to a crumbling graveyard, not like the orderly one where her father lay on his first night underground. Presumaby, he was already in the arms of God, just like the people told her, and not in a pine coffin in the cheap suit he had insisted was his best. But all Meena could think of was bones—his bones, her own bones, the way their bones were whittled from the same molecular chalk.

The wind picked up, bringing Meena back to herself. She stopped and looked up at the moon, then around her at the burial grounds bathed in its watery light. She reached for her phone, but her smart black shift didn’t have pockets and she’d left her purse at the house—the house she’d left unlocked.

“Oh, for the love of God.”

She needed to head back, grab her stuff, lock the doors, and go back to her hotel. There was no way she was staying in her father’s house. Paul had offered up a couch, but that wasn’t exactly inviting. He had a two-year-old and a new baby, and children were great and all, but also sticky and loud. She’d go back to her room and order room service, then watch something dumb until she fell asleep. And tomorrow she’d wake up when her body wanted her to, not when a toddler decided to put its sticky fingers on her cheeks.

She turned herself around and headed for the entrance, careful not to step on the graves, pulling her heels out when they started to sink into softer ground. Only when something hit her in the side of the face did it occur to her that there could be other dangers here in this old cemetery than a twisted ankle.