The Untelling (24 page)

Chapter Fifteen

A
t four o’clock,
after Little Link had blown out the candles on three cupcakes, Mama lowered herself onto the blanket where I had spread myself out, enjoying the warmth of the day on my eyelids, reliving the moment in Keisha’s house when I sank to my knees and hugged the girl. Dwayne hadn’t been a part of that moment. If he had been there and felt what passed from Keisha’s skin to mine, from my body to hers, he would understand that this was what was meant to be. From where he had sat on the couch he could only feel the sadness, but I had been near enough to feel the love.

Beside me, Mama lay on her stomach. She looked good for a woman her age, for one that has seen what she has seen. There were shallow pleats at the corners of her eyes, but that was all.

“Ariadne, do you think your sister is happy?”

“As happy as anybody,” I said.

I rolled on my stomach to watch Hermione bouncing Little Link on her lap and covering his face with lipsticked kisses. He looked like a cartoon sweetheart, his face wallpapered with prints the shape of his mother’s mouth. He didn’t bend his face, but his eyes seemed happy enough.

“Mama, did I laugh when I was a baby? Little Link never smiles at anything.”

“He didn’t get that from our family. You laughed all the time when you were a baby. You laughed so much that I took you to the doctor. Sometimes you can think a baby is laughing and it is really having a seizure.”

“Mama, that is a really morbid thought.” But I liked the idea of myself as an unnaturally happy infant, smiling without obvious provocation.

She touched the tip of her nose. “Honeysuckle. Do you smell it?”

I suppose the fragrance was there all along, but it seemed like she released the perfume in the air with her words. As I breathed fantastic sweetness, she pointed toward the back fence and I saw the vines, twined through the chain-link. They, too, must have been there all along, but it seemed like my mother conjured them with the tips of her fingers.

“Genevieve would have been fifteen this year. Can you picture that?”

I remembered myself at fifteen, overgrown and undercherished. “It’s hard to picture what we would be like if the accident didn’t happen.”

“Your sister thinks I should move on with my life. She thinks I should date. Can you picture that?”

I turned myself to face her strong profile. “You’re not too old.”

“You girls were just children, and children have no choice but to grow. But for me to move on? Move on to what?”

We lay there on the blanket, on our tummies, our chins cushioned by our folded hands. Dwayne and Mr. Phinazee sat facing each other in plastic lawn chairs, their knees almost touching. Lying beside my mother, watching everyone, I thought about my mother and wondered when was the last time anyone had touched her. Maybe this was why she liked working with the blind: there was much unintentional brushing of skin. Occasionally someone might actually touch her face. Angling my face toward my mother, I moved to kiss her forehead, like Hermione kissed Link, but timidity seized me, some strange notion of protocol. Mothers kissed daughters, not the other way around. Instead, I studied her neck, softly speckled with freckles. I placed my hands there, where her neck disappeared into her cotton blouse, just where her pulse throbbed lightly against her skin.

Mama’s hand jerked upward, but she didn’t move my fingers. “Genevieve would have been fifteen this year, did I say that already?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “You did.”

My mother rolled onto her side, so close to me that she spoke these words almost into my mouth. It felt like CPR, the way someone forces your lungs to accept air.

“It could have been avoided. There were no car seats back then. Everybody held their babies on their laps. So when Lincoln swerved off the road, I held her hard to my chest. It was reflex, I didn’t think about it. There was no plan. Children are delicate, you know.”

I remembered my mother running from the car with Genevieve and the impossible angle of her little head.

“That’s not what happened,” I said. “She probably hit the windshield or the dashboard.”

“No,” Mama said. “I would never let my baby hit a windshield. I held her to my heart.”

I reached toward my mother again, resting my fingers in her soft hair. “I always wanted you to hold
me
to your heart.”

“You aren’t hearing me.” She rolled herself over, leaving me to stare at her slender back.

“Yes, I am. Keep talking. Mama, please turn back around.”

She did keep talking, but without turning to face me. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

“Mama,” I said, “I know you didn’t. Please turn around.”

I reached for her shoulder and she let me move her. Mama lay on her back now, staring into the bright sky without shading her eyes. “You’re not hearing me.”

“I do hear you.”

“Then why don’t you say something?”

“There’s nothing really to say, Mama.”

She seemed to lose control of her hands then. They clenched and unclenched at her sides, with a clatter of bracelets, then flew to her head and tugged at her delicate graying hair. Her eyebrows buckled with her effort. I looked around the yard for Hermione but saw only Dwayne and Mr. Phinazee, huddled deep in conversation. I covered my mother’s hands with mine, prying open her fists, freeing her hair. She struggled still, but my hands were larger, stronger, and younger.

“Is that what it was, Mama? All these years, that’s what it was?”

“You say it like it was nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. But you could have told us.” Her hands still resisted my strength, but I held them still. “You should have told us a long time ago.”

Her hands went slack, as though suddenly disconnected from whatever source powered them. I released them, slowly, carefully, ready to stop her, but she let them lie unmoving on the blanket.

“Hermione knows,” Mama said. “I know that she knows.”

I smoothed her hair where she had ripped at it. “She doesn’t know.”

“Yes, she does. She was there with me. You stayed in the car with Lincoln. But your sister was with me.” Her fingers gave little jumps.

“No, Mama,” I whispered until her hands lay quiet again.

“Ariadne,” Mama said, “if she doesn’t know, then why did she leave us?”

When I didn’t answer, Mama stood up, nearly herself again. She straightened her clothing and walked toward the picnic table. While she stacked plastic cups and paper plates, I rolled myself onto the warm space she had left. With the hands that had touched my mother’s hair I felt my own dancing pulse, parting my lips as I slept, tasting the honeysuckle air.

I opened my eyes to find myself alone on the blanket, the rubber tip of Dwayne’s sneaker just inches from my nose.

“I need to talk to you,” I said, wishing that there were better words to start a conversation as important as this one. Somewhere between dream and memory was the image of my mother and her guilty, dangerous hands. I saw her neck, the veins straining under her loose skin.
See,
she seemed to be telling me with the bunched muscles of her face. Her hands tearing at her hair in desperate sign language.
This is what my secret has done to me.

“I need to talk to you,” I said again to Dwayne, stretching out my hand. “Pull me up.”

Steady on my feet, I rubbed my arms, swollen and blotchy with insect bites. It was after sunset; lightning bugs dotted the air like incandescent snowflakes. The air was still rich with honeysuckle.

“We need some privacy,” Dwayne said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Where can we talk?”

I said, “Let’s talk when we get home.”

“I want to talk now.” Dwayne walked toward the house in long, hard strides.

“No,” I said. “Not here.” I wanted to do this in my own space, in my own house with all its promise and possibility.

Dwayne pushed open the sliding glass door, and the rolling noise seemed too loud. I planted my feet on the soft grass outside, but he tugged me over the threshold. In the living room the television was still on, but no one was watching.

“Where is everybody?”

Dwayne sat on the couch and rubbed his palms against his ashy knees. “Earl’s daughter called, said she had a gift for Link. So Earl took Link over to her house to get it. They’ll be back after a while to get Hermione.”

“Where’s my mother?”

“In the kitchen with your sister. Aria, I need to talk to you right now.”

The urge to run was as strong and undeniable as the impulse to duck when there’s a softball spinning toward your head. I went into the kitchen, where my mother and sister stood at the double sink washing and rinsing serving dishes.

“Hermione?” I said, not knowing quite what I wanted to ask her.

They both turned toward me with stricken faces. I had never noticed the strong resemblance between them, but there they were, mother and daughter. As alike as Keisha and Mary.

“What’s wrong?”

Hermione caught her lip with her teeth.

“No one died,” Mama said. “No one is hurt.”

I nodded, glad to process that information, waiting for the rest. Dwayne’s feet trod on the carpeted hallway behind me with a hissing like water scattered on a griddle. I left the kitchen and took quick steps to my former bedroom and shut myself in, pressing the little button in the handle to lock the door.

Sitting on the low twin bed where I slept for most of my childhood, I crossed my arms over myself, looking for a way to escape. But were there a hidden hatch, a trapdoor, an unbarred window, I think I would have discovered it years ago. There on the bed I closed my eyes hard, covered my ears to shut out his knocking. “I can’t hear you.”

The door opened, of course it did. I opened my eyes a crack, half hoping to see Coco, hoping that she would sing to me. But Dwayne filled the threshold.

“Calm down. I just want to talk to you.” He closed the door and pressed the privacy tab. “I talked to Earl this afternoon.”

He sat on Hermione’s old bed, facing me. He spoke and I could easily picture the scene. Mr. Phinazee, well-meaning Earl, old enough to think that he knew what was best for everyone else. Mr. Phinazee had sat Dwayne down in a man-to-man way. Probably he had intended to pour vodka but discovered that Hermione and I had drunk everything in the liquor cabinet years ago, filling the bottles with tap water. So he and Dwayne had sat down with cups of spiked punch between them, and Earl had told him not to worry about money.

Dwayne said, “Aria, I thought he was talking about the wedding. That he would pay since your pops had passed and everything. So I am nodding my head, saying, ‘Yes, sir. I really appreciate it,’ and everything like that.”

I could see Earl, old and interfering, assuming everyone knew everything, explaining that he and Hermione would stay out of our business when it came to the matter of the child. To think of the egg as a gift. It was only the egg that Hermione would be contributing; the child, the baby itself, would be ours.

“Then he goes on about how lucky we are to be living in this day and age. When there is technology. He’s going on and on, talking about his wife that died and the daughter that don’t half speak to him. He’s talking about your sister and about Link and even about your dad, but I can’t get over what he just told me.”

Dwayne was on his feet now, pacing across the small room. His sneakers were dirty, leaving faint tracks on the already stained beige carpet. From the top of the chest of drawers, he picked up the glass ring-holder, shaped like a finger. He jiggled his hand as though weighing it, like he was considering throwing it, but he replaced it on the dresser top.

“I was going to tell you. I was going to tell you as soon as we got home.”

“So what’s going on, Aria?”

“It’s like Mr. Phinazee told you.”

Dwayne stood in front of the mirrored closet door and met my eyes in reflection. “No,” he said. “It can’t be like he said, because you
were
pregnant at first. I gave you my aunt’s ring because you were having a baby. You were sick in the morning. I heard you in the bathroom being sick.”

“The doctor said it was just a coincidence.”

He took two steps toward the door, three steps the other way, then again. His feet were too heavy for this room. The ceramic figures on the tops of the dresser and chest rattled with his walking. “You are telling me that you came down with the
flu
and decided that you were
pregnant
? Didn’t you take a
test
? Didn’t you at least
pee in a cup
before you started telling people?”

In the mirror I stared into his face, which wasn’t quite angry. His mouth hung open in something like disbelief, but his eyes were narrowed like he couldn’t bear to watch what would come next. I also looked at myself, sitting on my childhood bed, my face and hair appearing girlish and vulnerable.

Dwayne sighed, still pacing. “I gave up my boy behind this.” His voice was quiet, but I knew Hermione and Mama could hear him. This house had never been able to conceal private conversations. “I signed the papers, had them notarized.” Dwayne closed his eyes and let air out of his mouth. He uncurled his fist like a flower past its prime, unfurling until the petals fall to the ground. “So what am I supposed to do?”

I moved my lips to speak, but there was no air.

“I feel so stupid,” he said, sitting down hard on Hermione’s bed. “That thing with Keisha, that was a setup, wasn’t it? The whole thing. You and her on the floor hugging and crying. No wonder it all seemed so fake. Like TV instead of real life.”

“No,” I said, crossing the floor to sit beside him. “I had no idea what she called us over there for.”

“Let me tell you something, Aria. Let me tell you something about me. I want a family. A regular family. Even when I had Trey, we weren’t a family. I want a kid that can call me Daddy. When I call Trey on the phone, you know what he says? He says, ‘What’s up, Dwayne?’ I want a kid that can call me Daddy.”

“It would be the same,” I said. “We would raise this baby in our house, with us.” I reached for his hand; he let me hold it, but didn’t squeeze mine back.