Loving Day (25 page)

What I finally hear is, “It’s okay. My father needs alone time.”

I stand there. I don’t open my eyes again. I don’t want to see them. I don’t open my eyes till the last footfall moving past me has grown silent.

I can breathe normally now. I am myself once more. The rage has escaped me. I have returned to normal. The house has returned to normal. Almost normal. When I do open my eyes, the overhead lights are back on. The candles are blown out. The music has been silenced.

Tal is gone.

Roslyn is not. She sits right where she did before. Staring at me. Smiling.

“You didn’t see anything,” I tell her. I know this. I know this even though I’ve seen things.

Roslyn keeps smiling, but doesn’t bother looking at me. Slowly she rises.

“They might believe you, but I can see what you’re doing, that’s what I see,” I say into her silence. Roslyn reaches for her purse at the
couch’s end, brushes something off of it, then puts it on her shoulder. When she doesn’t respond I say, “You’re turning this into a cult.”

“It’s not a cult. It’s a karass. A people linked by a higher purpose,” she says lightly as she walks by me to the door.

“That’s the kind of shit people in a cult say,” I get out, but Roslyn doesn’t look back, my sound just another creak in the room.

SUNITA HABERSHAM IS NOT
taking my calls. Her line rings, I see her face on my phone, and then the only voice I get is the one recorded for the entire world. Tosha won’t talk to me either, but this I barely notice, because Sunita Habersham is not taking my calls or responding to my texts and I feel the loss like one leg is gone and I have to struggle every moment not to fall over. I don’t leave my father’s house. I don’t go out. I don’t go to see her. I know she’s there. I know Tal is with her. Tal contacts me, after The Explosion, with a text that says,
I’m staying with Sun now
. Followed immediately with another text that says,
Cuz UR an asshole
. Tal, I miss, but she’s my teenage daughter and teenagers are supposed go through a period where they hate their parents and so basically this puts us right on schedule. As long as the cult doesn’t steal her, that door will reopen. The door to the life of Tosha Evans, that will reopen as well, we’ve been friends too long to not be now just because of mulattoes. There’s another door I keep thinking about. The one to Sun’s trailer. It’s a little aluminum door, with white metal siding on the outside. If I don’t get that door open again, eventually it will rust shut on me forever.

Everyone else in Mulattopia, they’re cordial. Very tolerant. Polite. The guy who still owns the land to this place? He should be tolerated. No one stands before the house and denounces me. I am never cursed back out. No one will look directly at me as I walk around my own property either, but they don’t make faces or other visible displays of disapproval.

I’m not mad at them, for this genteel shunning. I can feel my own shame, at the way I chose to express myself. My anger, having been given full vent, is largely exhausted. This primal emotion has been replaced with another: loneliness. The major cause of this is Tal and Sun not speaking to me, but I’m surprised to find that this is not the entire cause.

Yes, I believe this has become a cult. But it was a cult in which I was a member. Part of the allure of all of this, even as I’ve struggled against it, has been the seductive feeling of my own group inclusion. I still move through these people, but I feel disconnected from them now. I feel the absence of a kinship I took for granted. The only thing worse than a cult is a cult that won’t have you as a member.

It does get better, slowly. A week later, I do garner a few uncommitted head nods when I make direct eye contact. One of One Drop’s crew even follows with, “You feeling better since The Explosion?” I don’t go out as much, but when I do, when I leave for the store or interact with the parents and others as I teach the remainder of my class, several others make a point to discuss the night with me as well. They use the term
The Explosion
in a way that conveys that the events have been discussed in detail and a title for this historical moment has been formally approved.
The Explosion
. Very dramatic. According to them, The Explosion was perfectly normal. Something many at the camp have gone through. A part of the process. A necessary phase in the creation of a new worldview.

My favorite of these discussions comes at the gate. As I struggle to keep the bike upright in first gear, freshly bought groceries filling my saddlebags, One Drop steps right out in front of me.

“Yo man, I just want to say, it ain’t nothing to be ashamed of. We all been through it, it’s part of the awakening, you know?”

“Thanks, One Drop.” I like saying his name to him. It’s so goddamn ridiculous and the joke seems to hover a yard in front of his face, just out of his reach. He hangs that way before my face now, my front wheel between his legs. The bike stalls; he doesn’t notice. I flip up the visor on my helmet to add to the message that I want to get by him, but he doesn’t read social cues. It’s another language in which he’s illiterate.

“For real, Holmes. It’s a struggle, this mixed identity thing. I fought it too. Just like you, yo. Even more, bro, even more. Because my blackness, right, it’s my essence? It’s in me. You know what I’m saying?” One Drop tells me as he bangs his chest. So that’s where it is. Because it certainly isn’t outside him. “I didn’t mean nothing, the other night. It’s just, I saw the First Couple, and my mind was kinda blown. I’m just glad you’re down with the cause, bro. You ever want to talk about it, sunflower to sunflower, I’m here, yo.”

Into all this, Spider’s truck returns from its extended scouting mission around two in the afternoon, but I don’t go outside in daylight. I stay here, in the damned house. I go out at dark. I go out when I can walk fast and be largely unseen. I want to go immediately, so I can talk to him before the rest turn me into the villain, and I actually get as far as the door, but I don’t. They’ll all know what I’m up to. It will just make it worse.

It takes Spider ten hours to respond to my text, my simple,
Hey, when you get settled, come up to the house and hang
. And when he does, Spider’s message is just
Come down, man
.

Spider sits on his trailer’s steps, playing his accordion again, managing to keep the song going as he talks.

“What happened while I was gone? Everybody looks like they saw a ghost!”

He’s been waiting all day to say this line, and from the way he laughs it met expectations. He’s gotten better. On the accordion, in just a few weeks’ time. The notes don’t come between labored pauses.

“How was Creole country? Must have been nice to have a paid vacation.” I’m not sure that Roslyn funded his trip until he says, “I know, right? It was sweet! I guess things are going well here, but even
so, I’m definitely headed back. Already got a gig, too. No matter what, we should take a road trip. Just you and me. Dude out. You need a break.”

“I think I already broke.”

“Shut up. You lost your shit. I’ve lost my shit, found it, and lost it again a dozen times. And this whole mixed thing, it’s like racial sacrilege. Especially for the sunflowers.” He leans forward, lowers his voice. “For the Oreos, I think it’s a little easier, because they got a bit of that white entitlement in them, and they think they’re allowed to do whatever they want.” Leaning back, he returns to full voice. “Or that just might be my vestigial prejudice talking.”

I take a seat next to him, and a beer when he hands one over. We drink. Then I drink, and he plays the accordion some more. A sad song. “O, bonsoir Moreau,” he sings to me, and some other lyrics I don’t have the language to understand. I shoot the beer down before he finishes, grab another from his cooler. I am going to get drunk now. Since Tal’s gone.

“You want to find your shit?” Spider asks me, a six-pack in.

—

We are at Sunita Habersham’s trailer. It’s not that late, it’s only just after midnight, but the shades are drawn. Still, you can see the lights are on. It even comes through the doorjamb. Spider decides to go in on his own, have me wait outside, which is fine considering the delicacy of the situation.

He’s in there long enough for me to doubt he’s coming back out. I think, They’ve won him over, he’s gone to the other side, back to the feminine, away from me. But the door opens.

“What?” Tal asks me. Not even
Hello
. Not even,
I missed you
. “Spider says you have an eighteenth birthday present for me. I don’t believe him. I don’t believe you anymore.” Her last sentence, I don’t believe. She can barely say it. I grab Tal into a hug, and she’s not expecting it, almost falls over. I hold her steady and whisper, “I love you and will always love you and you can always trust that,” and don’t let go till she
nods. And then I step back, and continue the previously scheduled performance.

“I have a present for you!”

“I don’t see any presents, Pops.”

“This!” My arms go out, up. I motion, circle, get a little dizzy, stop. “You see all around you. All this is yours! I am signing over Loudin to you. I’m signing the inheritance over to you! To do as you like! As long as that’s selling it and taking the money and going to Whitman College! And giving me the rest to live on!”

Tal looks around, caught for a moment, then says, “Wait, you were going to pay for the college anyway. That’s not really a gift.”

“But now you’re going to pay for it!”

Tal starts to walk away. I look up, at Spider, leaving Sun’s trailer, alone. The door shuts behind him. Spider shrugs. At least I got one of them, his gesture tells me.

“What do you want from me?” I yell after my daughter and it sounds annoyed and I don’t mean that so I try again with “Whatever you want, I’ll give you whatever you want,” which I immediately realize is something that should never be said to a teenager but, there, I’ve already done it. And this gets Tal to stop.

When she looks at me, I know she doesn’t know what she wants. Or she does, but they are not things a mortal can do. She waits it out though, thinks on it. I’m proud of her for that. The genie has granted the wish. She is trying to think of an answer better than “Three more wishes.”

“I want my Sesa tattoo. I’ve earned it.”

“You’re not eighteen yet. I said when you’re eighteen.”

“Dad. My birthday was two days ago.”

—

Tal’s arm is swabbed and prepped and Spider seems very professional about it, and I don’t want to be here. I want to end the day, admit defeat, call it a night. I want to end the month. I want to end the life. I can’t end my life because Tal needs me and that hurts, the lack of
chance at the alleviation of pain, but she needs me. And I need to be a good father. I will never be a good father, though, so I just want to be a better father. The kind of father who buys a calendar and puts important dates on it. At least that kind of father.

“I’m so sorry,” I say one more time, then again with another “so” in it. I’m building a mountain of apologies. Tal isn’t answering me, she’s not talking to me at all, but I’m going to climb the mountain of regret and reach her someday, so it has to be tall.

Spider lays a stencil on her skin, presses it down, and I know that soon he will take a needle and pour ink into her bleeding flesh. There’s giggling from Tal as she’s branded with the preliminary etching. I don’t find it funny, because soon it will be permanent. To Spider she talks, even smiles, when he holds up her temporary design, the swirl outline with the Star of David on the inside.

“I was hoping you’d at least throw a little Gaelic twist in there, for your old man.” I try to play along.

“Do you want that, sweetie?” Spider asks Tal directly.

“No,” Tal says, so I know she can hear me.

After the design is pressed on wet paper to her skin, Tal looks at it in the mirror like it’s a good thing it will soon be made to last the rest of her life. Spider has the needles. Spider has the true ink. Permanence comes with pain, as always.

“Okay, now here’s the big question,” Spider says to her. He’s holding up what looks like an airbrush gun in one hand, and a ruler-sized wooden rod in the other. “Do you want to do this modern style, or do you want me to go the traditional hand-tattoo route?”

“Spider, you are not needling my daughter with a stick.”

“It looks primitive but actually hurts a little less. A little.”

“Honey, listen to me. This thing, it’s forever. Are you sure you really want this on your body forever? Are these people that important to you? This Mélange thing, I know you love it, but it’s only going to be a couple months in a long life. You’re off to college, then you have your whole—”

“Poke me with the stain stick,” Tal tells Spider.

“Is that okay, dad?” Spider asks me, and takes my shrug.

Tal flinches at the initial piercing. I go to her before I even think of doing it. Kneeling on the floor, I pat Tal’s head, transitioning from my hand to a towel when I feel the sweat beading on her brow.

“Pops? You have no idea how bad this stings,” Tal says finally. I don’t know. I am the last untattooed man on earth. I am He Who Has No Ink. Everyone else has made their decision, has chosen their totems. The lack of paint on my skin at this age—where it seems like even babies are written upon in the maternity ward—has made me the last of my own clan. We, the undecided.

“You could go next, dude. It’s been a long year. Join us! It’s not a Mélange thing; it’s a mixed thing. You’ve earned it.”

“Yeah, no thanks. My plan is to finish this life unscarred.”

I can’t actually see what’s happening. Or I can’t actually bring myself to see. I look at Tal’s face. I force myself to stop flinching when she does. There’s her pain. And here I am, finally. I missed her flu shots, her first fall from a bicycle, even her ear piercings, but for this I am present. Tal’s first tattoo. The moment she is forever marked. The moment even her body loses its pretense to being a blank state. We have stories. Now you can just see one of her chapters.

It’s taking too long. “Can I do something for you, honey?” I ask Tal. “What can I do for you right now. For the pain?”

“Bring me vodka.”

“No.”

“Then bring me Sun,” Tal tells me, adding a yelp when I seem reluctant to carry out the order.

—

I knock so lightly on Sun’s door. I’m so polite. Just cute little taps, evenly spread out, I’m very controlled and considerate.

“Sunita? Please. Open up. I need to talk to you.”

When that doesn’t work, I hit a little harder, and a little more so every few beats. “Sun. Please. It’s not for me. It’s for Tal.” My voice is low, but it doesn’t need to be. There’s no one else outside to hear me.
I have no idea where everyone is, but they aren’t walking the grass alleys of Halfie Heights. There must be a party. A party to which I wasn’t invited. Two parties, most likely, one for the Oreos, one for the sunflowers. You would think the sunflowers’ party would be rocking more bass, but Little Halfrica is silent.

When I sit down on the stoop, I say it again. “It’s for Tal.” Because it all is for Tal. These steps, they’re metal and narrow and hurt my ass but I don’t care because it’s for Tal. Also, it’s pathetic. I want Sun to see me being pathetic. I want her to see my regret. I want—

The light goes on beside the trailer. Just appears, no sound. Bright light. I look to Sun’s windows. Curtains still drawn. Space behind them now dark inside. It was the outdoor motion detector. I haven’t moved.