Hush (2 page)

But I don’t know if that’s true.

When Daddy looks over to where me and my sister, Anna, sit watching TV, he looks surprised, like he’s wondering why we aren’t downstairs in the den. No den here, though. No dining room. No extra bathrooms down the hall and at the top of the stairs. Just five rooms with narrow doorways here. Floors covered with linoleum. Walls all painted the same awful shade of blue.

At night, the sounds outside are unfamiliar. Cars honking and people yelling. Fire trucks and ambulances. Anna in bed across the room from me is too close and strange. Every morning, I wake up expecting to see the mountains outside, then sit on the edge of my bed and force the memories to come. I try to push back what is true—that this place is not that place. That we are gone from Denver. Everything about who we were is gone—our names, our pictures, our old clothes and old lives. All that we have is our souls. If a soul is the way you feel deep inside yourself about a thing, the way you love it, the way it stops your breath, then mine is still in Colorado.

Close your eyes and imagine the floor beneath your feet—cool hardwood maybe. Or softly warm and carpeted. Sit down and lift your feet up off of it and imagine you can never put them down on it again. Ever. See how quickly the feeling of that floor fades? See how much you want to feel it again? How lost you feel with no place solid to put your feet?

It’s okay to put your feet back down on it. Maybe in your lifetime that floor’s not going anywhere.

 

 

 

IMAGINE YOUR BEST FRIEND’S SMILE, HOW YOU remember it from its front-teeth-missing days till this moment. A year after the braces have come off and she’s finally learned how to comb that mass of hair. The boys falling over themselves for her. Her name is Lulu.

Toswiah—we
have
to get the same outfit. On the first day of school, we’ll say we’re cousins.

Imagine Lulu in second grade and third grade and fourth and seventh. The way she shot up past you last year and got beautiful but had her same silly Lulu laugh—even when boys were watching. Lulu in a black turtleneck and jeans—except on the first and last days of school and on our birthday. Then it was something amazing—a long metallic-blue dress made out of silk, shoes with mile-high soles, or a hundred yellow ribbons in her thick black hair and a retro tube top with TONY ORLANDO AND DAWN embroidered across it, halters and miniskirts, a blue leather coat soft as butter falling to her ankles, bright pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. Lulu with her mama’s dark skin and her own beautifully slanted eyes, pressing her bleeding finger against mine, whispering
Now our blood’s all mixed up. We can’t ever leave each other.

Imagine yourself whispering back
I’m not going anywhere. I’d never leave here in a million years!

And Lulu laughing, throwing her head back like a grown-up. And Lulu’s warm head on my shoulder—the day so perfect, we’re speechless.

Lulu. My friend.

My name is Evie. From the jump-rope game. Maybe you’ve heard the little kids singing
Evie Ivie Over. Here comes a teacher with a big fat stick. I wonder what she’s got for arithmetic! One and one? Two! Me and you. Who?

It came to me as I lay in bed one night—in a half-dream—after me and Lulu had spent the afternoon jumping rope and eating ice-cream sandwiches from a jumbo box of them Lulu’s mother had bought, one right after the other until we both swore we’d never eat another one as long as we lived. That night, my father had sat down at the dinner table and told us he was going to testify.
It might mean us leaving here,
he said.
Changing our lives, our names. Everything.
And the ice-cream sandwiches sat heavy in my stomach for a few minutes, then slowly circled around and came back up again
.

My name is Evie now. I am tall and skinny and quiet. I’ve never kissed. Sometimes I think about it, about how it would feel, how it would happen. But maybe it won’t ever happen. Not here. Not now. The boys here call me Neckbone, say that’s all I am—lots of bone and a little bit of meat. They collect in circles on corners and pass bottles of bright, nasty-looking liquids around. When I walk by them, I feel like a third leg grows out of my butt—my walking gets strange and my body feels all wrong.
Hey Neckbone,
one of them always says, making the others laugh. If I was brave, I would look full at them and say
I’d like a little taste of that.
Then I’d take that bottle and put it straight up to my lips, take a long, hard drink of that stuff and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. If I was brave, I’d slide one of my hands past the waistband of my pants and just stand with it there like they do—holding on to whatever.

If I was brave, I could belong somewhere.

My name’s Toswiah,
I’d say.
Toswiah Green. Have you ever heard of me?

But my name is Evie now. And I’ve never been brave.

When we lived in Denver, we skied and snow-boarded. Cameron wasn’t afraid. She’d go up to the expert slope and take off. Sometimes I’d stand all bundled up at the bottom of the mountain watching my sister moving toward me. As she got closer, I’d see that she was smiling. Smiling with the snow flying up around her. The sound of her snowboard swishing toward me always made something inside me jump with love and the beauty of it all. Cameron was the brave one. Popular. Smart.
If you try really hard,
she used to say,
maybe a little of me will rub off on you.
And although I stuck my tongue out at her when she said this, I did try because I wanted to know what it felt like to come down that mountain—grinning and beautiful and free.

Hey Neckbone,
one of those guys always says.
Show a brother some love.

 

 

 

I CAN NEVER TELL ANYBODY THE REAL TRUTH. But I can write it and say this story you’re about to read is
fiction.
I can give it a beginning, middle and end. A plot. A character named Evie. A sister named Anna.

Call it fiction because fiction’s what it is. Evie and Anna aren’t real people. So you can’t go somewhere and look this up and say
Now I know who this story’s about.

Because if you did, it would kill my father.

2

WE LEFT DENVER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT with some clothes and some family pictures, toothbrushes and combs, all in plastic bags since our suitcases were monogrammed. The morning before we left, two Jehovah’s Witnesses rang our bell. Mama answered the door but unlike the other times Jehovah’s Witnesses came by our house, she didn’t say “No, thank you” and close it again. She bought a
Watchtower,
an
Awake!
and a small brown book called
Reasoning the Scriptures.

But you don’t have a religious bone in your body,
my sister said to her.

What do I have?
Mama asked. Then she shook her head, brushed the hair back from Cameron’s forehead and tried to smile.
You know I don’t mean that.
But she packed the literature into her bag.

This morning, I tried to remember my grandmother’s face. I tried to remember the evening she came by to say she couldn’t come with us, that Denver was the place she’d always known and she couldn’t see herself at seventy-five going to start a new life somewhere.

“Look at these hands,” she said, holding out her hands to show us the way the veins pushed up against her dark skin. “These hands belong to an old lady. At night, my teeth go in a glass and the arthritis feels like it wants to get the best of me. Denver’s the only place I’ve ever lived. And I never planned on not dying here.”

Mama’s eyes started tearing, but Grandma put a finger to her lips. “Hush now,” Grandma said. “Don’t start that. You’ll see me again,” she said. “You will.”

The afternoon before the men came, we kissed my grandmother good-bye as she sat rocking slowly in her blue chair. I’ve never seen my grandmother cry, but that day, her chin quivered just the tiniest bit before she sniffed and said
This isn’t how I want you all to remember me.

I stood a little bit away from all of them—Mama, Daddy and Cameron—remembering how Grandma used to say
This rocker will belong to you one day, Toswiah.
I watched everyone doing what they could not to cry, thinking
That day’s never gonna come.
Even then, though, it wasn’t a hundred percent real to me. As I stood there in the middle of my grandma’s living room with the Denver sun coming in through the thin yellow curtains, I thought
This is all just a game, a stupid game. Tomorrow Daddy will say, “I changed my mind. This is all too much to leave behind.”

But what I know now is this: Look at your grandmother’s face. Remember the lines. Touch her cheekbones. Hold the memory of her in your fingers, in your eyes, in your mind. It might be all you get to keep.

Left behind is that rocker and one Toswiah Green, standing with her arms folded, on a tree-lined street in Colorado. If one of my old classmates shows a group picture around, someone might ask
Who’s that?
And the classmate will answer
That was Toswiah. She just disappeared one day. Weird, huh?

 

 

 

MAMA SAYS THE LIES WE’RE FORCED TO TELL are God’s will. She believes God sent His Witnesses to our door that morning for a reason.
He knew I’d need them,
she says.

Mama’s wrapped her arms around God’s legs,
Anna says.
I guess she figures He’ll drag her to a better place.

These days, Mama prays and prays.
One day the end is going to come,
she says.

I don’t tell her it came a long time ago.

 

 

 

PUT YOUR FEET DOWN ON MY OLD FLOORS IN Denver and keep walking. See the pictures of the four of us—Mama, Daddy, me and Cameron, smiling.
Those are cool names,
you say.
Cameron and Toswiah.
If you want, you can have them. They don’t belong to us anymore. Take the gray-carpeted stairs two at a time, the way me and my sister used to do. See the spot at the top of the stair that’s flattened? Matt Cat used to sleep there because the sun came through the skylight and shined right on him. Listen. Can you hear him purring? Go to the right and you’re in my room. Pretty. Plain. The room smells of pencil shavings. The stack of journals that I’ve kept since I was old enough to write haven’t yet been destroyed. Open the top one to the last page:

The letters and birthday cards, monogrammed towels and the toys we played with when we were little kids. The green sweater with TOSSY knitted into it in yellow letters, the TOSSY T baseball cap I used to wear backward. TGIF—TOSWIAH GREEN IS FABULOUS on a pillowcase—a gift from Lulu for my twelfth birthday. Gone. Gone. Gone. Keep walking. Down the long carpeted hall into Cameron’s girlie, pink room with its frilled white curtains and huge GIRL POWER poster on the ceiling. In the corner of the left window, you’ll find a heart painted bright red with a black Magic-Markered arrow through it and the letters C & J. Joseph—the boy she used to love.

These are the things we left behind.