The Untelling (23 page)

“Stand up,” Dwayne said. “I don’t want to see you down on the floor like that.”

I looked to Mary, who didn’t glance toward me. Her eyes were fixed on her daughter. Dwayne moved his jaw around invisible gum. Anticipating something I couldn’t see coming.

“It’s going to be a real good baby,” Keisha said again. “We don’t have nothing in our family. Cancer, sugar, nothing like that.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“She’s just a little girl,” Mary said. “She’s not but seventeen. She’s not ready for a baby. She’s a good kid herself, but she’s not ready.”

Still on her knees like a suitor, Keisha looked up at me, shy but hopeful. “I know you wanted a baby.”

I closed my eyes as the magnitude of this offer rolled over me. It was the sort of thing that made me believe that maybe God did have a plan for me. That my whole life was leading to this moment. Dwayne and I would take this baby, make it our own. We could make our family around this little boy. This big healthy boy that was growing now inside of Keisha, right here at our feet.

“And we would leave town, Mama and me,” Keisha said, looking at Dwayne. “Just listen. Okay, Dwayne? Let me tell you my whole idea. We would leave town so you and Miss Aria could just be a regular family. I know you wouldn’t want me hanging around, confusing things. And I would respect that. I wouldn’t call y’all on the phone, or want to see pictures, or anything. I would be gone, like I never was here.” Her voice caught on the last sentence and she sucked in her cheeks and held her head back, trying to let the water run into her hair instead of down her cheeks. “Okay?”

I slid off the couch and knelt beside her, on my bare knees on the worn carpet. “Don’t cry.” I hugged her, burying my face into her neck, breathing the coconut oil in her hair.

“Aria,” Dwayne said, “can I talk to you outside for a minute?”

I lifted my face to look up at him. “Okay.”

Outside, in front of the foil door, the day was hot. I leaned against a rusted metal railing.

“What’s going on?” he wanted to know.

“You were right in there,” I said. “Keisha wants us to adopt her baby.”

“Aria.” Dwayne covered his eyes and shook his head. “Aria, I’m not a bad person. It’s not like I don’t understand. But this is real life, Aria. This is not a after-school special.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aria, first off, adoption is supposed to be anonymous. You are out of your mind if you don’t think her or her mother is going to show up after a couple of years saying they want their baby back. People don’t just walk away from their kids. Blood always is going to call you back. I don’t care what kind of papers she signs.

“Number two: we are not ready to be parents next month. And besides, we have been trying to have babies of our own.”

“But, Dwayne, did you see her face? We have to help her.”

Dwayne leaned against the metal railing of the porch. “It’s a bad situation,” he said. “But it’s not up to us to fix it.”

For the second time in two weeks I found myself with the urge to hit someone in the face. With my hands in tight fists by my side I turned away from Dwayne, taking deep breaths through my nose. I took a few steps down the walkway, to the stairs, and then back to Dwayne.

“Can you at least say that you will think about it? Do you have to feel like you know everything and can come up with an answer right here, right on the spot? It took a lot for Keisha and her mother to make this decision. The least we can do is to think about it. Take it seriously.”

Dwayne said, “All right. Go in there and tell them that we’re thinking about it. But thinking is just thinking. Don’t get their hopes up.”

I left Dwayne outside while I went in to speak with Keisha and her mother. The two of them sat on the couch, their faces brown and blank against the background of ivy. I told them that Dwayne and I were thinking it over. I told Keisha that I loved her.

Chapter Fourteen

D
wayne and I parked
the car in front of my mother’s house but didn’t get out. We’d made the drive in near silence, each busy with our own thoughts. Sweet Keisha. When I met her on that spring day last year, I thought that my job was to save her. Who would have thought that she would end up saving me? So maybe this was how life felt for other people, people like Rochelle. She had been dealt a bad hand of cards at birth, been abandoned, but the universe corrected its error and sent Mr. and Mrs. Satterwhite to adopt her.

Dwayne finally let up the windows and turned the car off. “All that pain in that girl’s face. When I close my eyes, that’s all I see.”

“We can help her,” I said. “Maybe it was meant to be.”

Dwayne and I opened the side door to go into my mother’s house just as Hermione pressed the red button on the Polaroid camera she’d bought at a garage sale.

“You’re late,” she said, pulling the picture from the camera.

It was such a shame that instant cameras had gone out of fashion. I loved how you took the photo and knew in just a few minutes what your memory was going to look like. Mama didn’t care for them much, said the pictures always came out too small and fuzzy. The prints were never suitable for framing. “Patience,” she’d say, popping out the film cartridge from her camera, a slim 110 model. “If you’re willing to wait, you’ll get a better picture.” And we did wait, and wait. Sometimes we wouldn’t see the photos until the significance of the event had worn off. Snapshots from a wedding or party six months after the fact just didn’t mean as much. Memories are best when they’re fresh.

In a quiet voice Hermione explained that she hadn’t planned to use the camera until later in the afternoon; she had bought only three packages of the expensive film and wanted to save them for the cake and candles phase of the gathering. She brought it out early in an effort to amuse her husband. Mr. Phinazee was depressed because Coco didn’t accept Hermione’s hand-delivered invitation to the birthday party. Hermione had begged her husband not to get his hopes up. If Coco hadn’t made it to Link’s christening or to the hospital when he got his hernia fixed, it was unlikely that she would show up today. But Mr. Phinazee thought that Coco would have mellowed by now. It was one thing for her to disapprove of her father’s marriage, but rejecting Little Link was another matter altogether. How could she hold a grudge against a baby? Hermione whispered all of this as we waited on the milky squares to develop into pictures. “He acts like Little Link is Gandhi, Jesse Jackson, or somebody. If he can get Coco to act right, they will have to give him the Nobel Prize.”

I looked over to my sister’s husband. His plastic chair was situated near the chain-link fence that separated our yard from the neighbors’. He angled his neck to see between the houses, to the street. Mr. Phinazee rubbed his jaw from time to time and yawned.

“It’s pitiful,” Hermione griped. “Doing her daddy like that. I even went to the shop again to ask her to come. I was
begging
her. Well, maybe I didn’t beg all the way, but I was
nice
. Finally I had to just tell her: ‘Your daddy’s not for always.’ And I should know.”

Hermione moved as she talked, sometimes picking up one of the pictures and shaking it like a thermometer, making the image show itself sooner, but I liked to let the faces take their own sweet time. I squinted at the blue-white surface, waiting for the colors.

Since Link was the birthday boy, there were many pictures of him, sitting somber and quiet in his cone-shaped cardboard hat. He fiddled with the elastic band under his chin, looking like a worried, depressed head of state. I wondered if he would have been happier if other children had been invited. My mother had gone overboard, baking and frosting nearly one hundred pink-topped cupcakes for the gathering of only six people. In one photo she is frowning at the tiny cakes, each smeared in buttercream and accented with sugar flowers.

The photo of Dwayne and me was the last to develop. In the eight and a half months we’d been together we hadn’t taken many pictures as a couple. Hermione had caught us unawares as we stepped into the house. Dwayne is about two paces ahead of me, not smiling, his eyes focused somewhere ahead of him. I’m trying to hold his hand. My eyes span the space between us; my reaching hand is a blur.

Hermione sat down beside me on the picnic table. “That’s it for the Polaroid. We’re out of film. Three rolls and I couldn’t even get Earl to look at them.”

“But I wanted me and you to take a picture together.”

“Mama has her camera.”

“But we’ll have to wait a million years to see the prints.”

My sister looked pretty for Link’s birthday. She’d styled her hair in a curly upsweep with loose ringlets hanging from her temples in lazy spirals. She wore a silk tunic, the pale green of seedless grapes, and matching Capri pants. For a fleeting moment I envied Little Link, wishing that Hermione had been my mother, so round and pretty, obviously sane.

She looked over her shoulder to the porch. “Your boyfriend is spiking the punch.”

“Make him stop,” I said. “Mama is going to shit a brick.”

“We just won’t tell her,” Hermione said. “People deserve to have some fun. Maybe Earl will cheer the hell up. It’s ninety-something degrees out here.”

I scanned the yard for Dwayne. He sat on the grass beside the baby pool, speaking to Link, who sat in the waist-high water, staring at his own tiny hands. I waved at them, but neither seemed to notice.

“I wish you had made more of an effort to get here on time,” Hermione said. “Mama thought you were blowing her off.”

“Something important happened.”

Hermione gave a quick shrug. “It wasn’t pretty here for the first half hour or so. Earl was mooning over Coco, and Mama was fretting over you and Dwayne. It’s a good thing that you finally showed up. Mama was raring herself up for a big one when I saw you and Dwayne sitting in the car out front. Since then, it’s been all smiles. But who knows how long it will last?”

“I didn’t plan to be late.”

“All I am saying is that you should try to think about Mama’s feelings. She’s been through a lot.”

“What about us?” I blurted. “We’ve been through more than Mama.”

Hermione stretched her lips into one of those smiles that don’t show teeth. “Mama thinks she’s cornered the market on misery.”

“But what do
you
think, Hermione? Don’t you think it was worse for us? I mean, she had her whole life before everything happened. We were
kids
.”

“Aria, what’s the point of even thinking about things like that?”

“Come on, Hermione, please tell me what you think.”

My sister took a potato chip from a plastic bowl, broke it into pieces, and spoke to the crumbs. “Before I had Link, I would agree with you. But now that I have a child, I think that Mama was hurt more. Because of Genevieve.”

“But Link is the only child you have. Mama still had us.”

Hermione licked the tip of her finger and touched her finger to the crumbled chips. Tapping the pieces onto her wet tongue, she said, “Don’t get so upset, Aria. I don’t know why you even spend your time thinking about these things. It’s not really the point.”

“What is the point, then?”

“The point is your life right now. I think about you all the time, Aria. I’ve been thinking about Dwayne too. You are just going to have to tell him.”

“I’m going to tell him tonight,” I told her.

“I’m serious about the egg,” Hermione said. “You say the word and we can harvest the next day.”

“That costs money,” I said.

“Earl will pay. He’d do anything for you, Aria.”

I wasn’t comfortable having this conversation outside like this where our words could carry on the wind. Dwayne was over at the barbecue now, painting sauce onto the chicken. Mr. Phinazee laughed. I’d forgotten how men were together. After the accident we hardly ever had men at our house, and never more than one at a time. I’d forgotten how they play together like young horses, drink, and laugh. How they seem to make each other happy.

“I want a big wedding,” I said to Hermione. “I want to invite three hundred people. An outdoor reception.”

“Oh God,” Hermione said. “Earl and I stood up before the judge and that was that.”

“Three hundred guests isn’t that many people. Rochelle is having twice that.”

“You don’t even know three hundred people. Who would Mama invite? A bunch of blind people? You’d be a fool to spend a thousand bucks on a dress to wear in front of a bunch of blind people.” She laughed a little. When she choked on her potato chip, I refused to clap her on the back.

Link toddled over to us with his arms outstretched. “Hey, birthday boy,” Hermione said. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

Link didn’t speak, he just waddled closer with his arms open. Hermione picked him up and plopped the wet baby across her thick thighs. “Have you been swimming?”

He nodded the way some children do, bobbing his entire upper body.

Suddenly shy, Link hid his face in the front of Hermione’s tunic, making a dark wet spot.

“Let’s dry you off,” Hermione said.

She moved toward the sliding glass door with Link riding her hip. I marveled at how easily she carried him, how snugly he fit there, clamped to her side with his wiry legs.

I followed Hermione into the bedroom that my sister and I had shared in the years before her famous elopement. Mama kept the space just as I left it when I moved eight miles away to a dormitory at Spelman. She’s not the kind of mother to preserve our artifacts as a shrine to our childhoods. It was more like she had no use for this room once we were gone, no reason to alter or visit it. The posters I had loved as a teenager—Michael Jackson dressed in a yellow cashmere sweater and Prince wearing an impossible purple blazer surrounded by a haze of smoke—still hung on the wall, secured by pushpins shaped like daisies. Our narrow twin beds still pressed against opposite walls and were covered with the same green plaid spreads worn thin in places. While Hermione dried Link with a heavy towel, I lifted an ancient lipstick from what had been my side of the dresser. The pink plastic case caused me to smile a little, remembering how expensive and elegant Fashion Fair makeup had seemed to me then. How sophisticated I had been to buy makeup from a department store counter, rather than stealing from the drugstore. I twisted the tube and found it empty. I must have used a brush to dig out every expensive purple bit. The bottom of the case bore a round sticker, “chocolate raspberry.” I held it to my nose and remembered the strong perfume of Fashion Fair, a scent so overpowering that it flavored your food and your kisses.

“It’s weird to be in here,” I said. The air in the room was cooler than the rest of the house.

Hermione laid Link on the bed that had been hers and pulled off his wet trunks. The baby looked horrified and covered his private parts with his small hands. “Are you shy?” Hermione said. “Nobody is looking at you.” She leaned down and kissed his hernia scar with a smack.

“The scene of the crime,” Hermione said, rummaging in the diaper bag, which also matched her clothes. “This whole house is a crime scene, really.”

Hermione slipped a pair of pull-ups onto Link, snapping the elastic around his waist. “Now you don’t have to be so shy.”

“I think I want to adopt a baby,” I said to my sister.

Hermione continued to dress Link, smoothing lotion on his skinny legs, tickling his potbelly. There was only the rustle of clothing and Hermione’s coos and clucks.

“Then I won’t even need the egg.”

“You can have the egg, Aria.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. And I told her about Keisha. “It’s going to be a real good baby,” I assured her.

“What did Dwayne say?”

“He wasn’t all that enthusiastic. But he might change his mind once I tell him about my medical problems. See, right now he’s looking at it out of context. When I tell him, he’ll see how it all fits together, how it is more fate than anything.”

“He’s not going to go for it,” my sister said. “This baby is due in a month? It’s too soon.”

“But it’s a special situation,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Hermoine said. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s men. I know how they are.” She swung Link back to his place on her hip and moved toward the door. He crossed his arms around her neck, holding on like he was drowning.

For a moment I wanted to rise from my bed and snatch Little Link, to untangle him from her and hold him on my own lap. My sister could be terribly smug, secure in what she had. She was the kind of person who could make a way out of no way. She had found a way out of this house, out of this room, by latching on to Mr. Phinazee, our father’s best friend. An old man even when we were little, five years older than our father. Hermione thought herself to be very smart, and I supposed she was. Who could have known that old Mr. Phinazee had the ruby slippers all along?

But maybe it was my turn to be at the right place at the right time.

“Do you have any idea,” I said to my sister, “what a big deal it is for someone to offer you a baby? It means that she trusts us, that she thinks we will be good parents.”

“Goodness, Aria,” Hermione said. “You said this kid’s seventeen and doesn’t even have a GED? Of course she’s going to think that you and Dwayne would be a better option for the kid. I mean, think about it.”

I didn’t have a response to this remark. Of course Hermione was right, on some level. Everything she said about Keisha was true, but this bare outline didn’t capture the heart of the matter. I was still trying to think of something to say, some way to explain, as Hermione and Link moved toward the door. My nephew gave me a backward wave, with his palm facing his own face.

“When you tell Dwayne,” Hermione said, “tell him about the egg. At least that way he can have his own child. Trust me.”

I stayed in my bedroom a long time, watching Dwayne through the window. No one seemed to notice that he kept his distance from me this afternoon, cavorting with my mother and even horsing around with Mr. Phinazee, but saying nothing to me. I suppose it was because Keisha’s offer was between us. Until we talked about that, there was really nothing else to say. Through the metal burglar bars I saw Dwayne swing Link around by his arms, my nephew’s bony shoulder blades like undeveloped wings.