When No One Is Watching(90)
A hand comes to rest on my shoulder and I feel Theo’s solid weight behind me.
I lean back into it, and we watch that shit burn down.
Epilogue
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I WAKE UP IN AN UNFAMILIAR BED—the pullout in Candace’s guest room. Arms are around me, in a bear hug, but I’m not afraid.
Theo.
He smells like Ivory soap and smoke, but not the iron of blood anymore.
The scent of coffee drifts in through the double doors that lead to the kitchen, then there’s a hiss and pop of oil and the smell of bacon follows.
When I open my eyes, Miss Ruth is sitting on the arm of the couch, looking down at me and Theo.
“You move fast,” she says, with brows raised and shoulders back in judgment.
I sit up, my entire body sore and my head spinning. My throat hurts from the smoke of the fire we watched and from crying it raw.
“Didn’t you say you never liked Marcus? Let me live, Miss Ruth.”
She leans in closer to me. “Is it pink? Down there? I’ve never seen—”
“Ruth, leave the children alone,” Gracie calls out. “Come help with breakfast.”
When I glance down, Theo is staring up at me, his expression unreadable. Everything that has passed over the last few days barrels into me.
“Good morning,” I croak.
He crooks his finger at me, face still blank.
I lean down close to him and he says, “In the future, if anyone asks, you can tell them it’s taupe.”
I don’t know how it’s possible, but I start to laugh. The laughter shifts to tears so fast that I don’t even realize it, and Theo pulls me against him. Holds me together.
The radio cuts on in the kitchen, which I guess is their way of giving us privacy. After a minute, I pull back, surprised to see that his eyes are red-rimmed and watery, too.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” he says, and I kiss him once softly on the lips even though we both know there’s no guarantee of that.
“Fresh asses!” Miss Ruth calls out, and we get up, freshen up, and join them.
And back to the biggest story of the day, and maybe the year: The proposed site for the VerenTech campus has gone up in flames overnight, just weeks before construction was to start. It is believed that a transformer fire spread quickly, trapping several VerenTech employees in the inferno.
Although the new site was opposed by community activists, no foul play is suspected. The project has been canceled as the company faces major restructuring challenges. Stocks plummeted—
Fitzroy cuts off the radio as we pull two seats to the table. Jamel and Ashley Jones are here, too, looking haggard but able to move on their own. They had apparently been taken shortly before Theo and I had found them.
They nod at us, and we nod back.
Candace and Gracie bring platters to the table, not letting anyone help them, and we all dig in.
Jamel clears his throat. “Um. So y’all know I do community activist work. And I’m in some groups. It might be too soon to bring this up, but . . .”
“What is it, baby?” Candace prods, but her gaze is sharp.
“Last month, this cat in one of the anti-VerenTech organizing forums started acting real weird. A dude out in Detroit. He was saying that—that people was disappearing, and the neighborhood was gentrifying fast. He kept trying to show us all this evidence, these articles, but they just seemed like regular news, right? We all thought he was maybe going through some things. He left the group, but he sent me an invitation for a new one that he’d made. I had joined just to keep an eye out for him, but hadn’t checked in in a while . . .”
“Show them,” Ashley says gently.
He pulls out his phone and as it passes from person to person, their expressions drop.
When it gets to me, I hold it between me and Theo as we read.
It’s a thread on a private forum, with dozens of responses. The top post is a longer version of the story Jamel told, with links; the way the page is set up we can only see the first few lines of each response in the thread, but that’s enough.
Belquise Ramos (Queens, NYC): In my neighborhood, they just straight up rolled through with a tank. Arrested a man who had been going to community meetings and asking why the houses of deported citizens were getting flipped and sold for ridiculously high prices.
Sandy Smith (Jasper, AL): Oh thank god I found all of you, I was starting to go crazy. I’m white, but my town is poor. A distribution plant opened up that was supposed to bring us jobs and improve things, but I swear, everyone is disappearing, and more and more land goes to the factories.
Andrew Chen (Los Angeles, CA): Health inspectors showed up at my parents’ restaurant and shut it down so they had to sell, and now it’s a Panera. They’d been refusing a lot of buyout offers right before that. Lots of my childhood friends who grew up around Chinatown say the same thing—it’s like someone is picking us off and just taking what they want.
Gloria Pierce (New Jersey): It was slower here and less scary and maybe it’s not part of . . . this, but maybe it is. Things changed, people moved, but they suddenly upped the taxes. Overnight, all the original inhabitants of my neighborhood went from living the American dream of owning property that had appreciated in value to having to sell because only millionaires can afford these kind of taxes. Where are we supposed to go?