What They Found (14 page)

“It sometimes happens with the first child,” he said.

He was looking at his papers. I guessed he meant that Amiri was the first child and that I probably would have a lot more. People jump to whatever conclusions they want when you’re pregnant and alone.

I looked in the mirror. I was wearing my beige blouse and a green sweater. I thought about changing, but I didn’t have anything nice to change into. My blue top wasn’t no improvement.

I wondered what Billy Carroll was going to say to me. What would he want for his forty dollars? Would he ask me to undress? Some of the guys in my school last year had gone around the neighborhood taking pictures of winos and junkies laid out in the street. Maybe that’s what he wanted to do. Make a picture of me like I was something pitiful.

After Amiri ate I put him back on his bed and gave him the purple bunny my mother had brought over for him. I had hoped she was going to buy him some clothes, or even maybe some disposable diapers, but all she had brought was some plastic toys and that stuffed bunny. I couldn’t be around her for two minutes without hearing how disappointed she was in me. Shoot, I was disappointed in myself just as much. It wasn’t that I was so wonderful or anything before, but at least I went to school and didn’t have any babies. Then Amiri came along.

Amiri’s father was like thirty or something and I didn’t
even like him. He took me to a movie and then came home with me to my mother’s house. She wasn’t there and he started talking about how I “owed him some loving.” I knew I didn’t owe that fool nothing but I did want to know what it was like to have sex. I found out. It was a sweaty man grunting and hurting me and making me feel sorry for going too far. Then it was a sweaty man saying how he had to leave to get to some business downtown. Then it was me sitting by myself, sorry for what I had done and hoping that I hadn’t caught nothing or got pregnant. Then it was Amiri. Whatever I had owed his father there was no loving attached to it.

Billy knocked soft on the door. Almost like he was sneaking up on something. I didn’t want to answer it, but I knew I would. He came in and I could see his eyes look around real quick.

“Sit anywhere you want,” I said. There was one chair at the table and one near the bed.

“Actually, the light coming in your window is a northern light,” he said. “I don’t know if you understand about light, but the light that comes in from the north seems to reveal more things.”

“Oh.” I could see myself in the mirror over the dresser, but I wouldn’t look.

“So, do you want to sit in front of the window?” he asked. He turned the chair near the bed so it faced the
window, about four feet back from the sill and the same distance from the bed.

I got up and sat on the chair.

Billy sat on the edge of my bed, put his hands in his lap, and just looked at me. I had my clothes on, but I felt naked. He asked me something and I didn’t catch it, and then he asked me again.

“Do you mind if I move the bed?” he asked.

I shrugged, and he moved the bed away so he could sit further away from me. Then he put his hands in his lap again and just looked at me.

Then, after a long time, he picked up his drawing pad. I could hear the scratching on the paper. He was drawing me.

I wondered if he was going to draw me and then tell me to take my clothes off. He hadn’t said anything about messing with me yet. He hadn’t said anything about the forty dollars, either. There was no way I was going to feel good. People looking at me like that made me feel bad and he should have known it. Maybe he did but just didn’t care. I tried to roll my eyes over to one side and see myself in the mirror again. All the while he was drawing.

The room was filled with the sound of Billy’s drawing and the even sound of Amiri’s breathing. I knew my son was asleep. There was a clock on the refrigerator, but I couldn’t see it or hear its ticking. My stomach began to cramp and I felt bad.

All Billy was doing was drawing me, like he said he would. And where I was feeling bad before about needing the money, almost bad enough to let him mess with me if he had wanted, now I felt ugly and he was writing down just how ugly I was.

“How about some photographs?” Billy asked.

He took a lot of photographs. He asked me to hold Amiri and he took some with both of us in the picture.

“What do you think of your son?” he asked me.

“I love him to death,” I said. “What do you think?”

“Hold him like you love him,” he said.

He took more photographs and I asked him to take one of just Amiri so I could send it to his grandmother. He said okay, but I could see he was more interested in taking pictures of me holding Amiri.

Billy gave me the money like he said he would. He said he was going to move the bed back but I said, “Let me feel how it’s like over there for a while.”

“Okay,” he said, smiling. “I’ll try to finish the picture sometime this week, maybe by the first part of next week.”

He wrapped all of his stuff up, making sure that I didn’t see any of his drawings.

When Billy left, with his stuff under his arm, I didn’t even know how to feel. I just sat there in the room for a while, trying to think of what had happened. I looked in the mirror again, and saw that I still looked a mess.

I went to the window and started thinking about the forty dollars, what I would buy with it. I wanted to run right down to the store, but I didn’t want Billy to see me just then. When I looked at the clock on the dresser it was past noon. Amiri wasn’t crying but he would be, soon. The boy knows how to eat.

In the supermarket I thought about Billy’s picture and wished I had at least combed my hair. Then I remembered the blue blouse I had worn to my mother’s house two Sundays ago, the one with the lace around the top. I should have worn that.

The cart was half filled when I saw this dude standing across from me. He was looking at me and I tried to ignore him, but then he followed me down the next aisle and stopped when I stopped.

“What you looking at me for?” I asked him. Amiri was on my hip.

“I hope you got the money to pay for that stuff,” he said.

“Get out my face, creep!” That’s what I said.

He was looking at me like I was a thief or something. He got a mean look on his face and crossed his arms. I was hungry and Amiri was starting to whimper and he would be crying soon. I put a pack of diapers in the cart and pushed it to the checkout. What I bought came to twenty-one dollars and three cents. I paid for it, gave the jerk who followed me a look, and started home.

Billy was on my mind all week, mostly because of the money he gave me. Amiri and I had enough to carry us through until there was more money in my welfare account. I don’t daydream about men usually, but I dreamed about him. I’m nothing special and men usually just want to get in between my legs and get on their way. So when he didn’t hit on me it made me feel good. To Billy I was something else he could draw, like the sun coming up or a car or a tree. I liked that, being ordinary. I also wondered what I would say if he did hit on me. Probably yes, but I didn’t think about that too much.

Almost two weeks had passed when Billy knocked on my door one morning. I saw he had the case he carried his stuff in. I was looking a little tacky, but the place wasn’t too tore up so I asked him if he wanted to come in.

“I’ve got the portrait,” he said. “I finished it from the photographs. Can I show it to you?”

“Sure.” I could see he was happy with it. He unzipped his case near the window and I sat down on the chair. Amiri pulled himself up on the side of his crib and made some noises like he was trying to talk.

“Well, there it is,” Billy said, propping the picture on the dresser. “What do you think?”

The boy could really paint. I liked the picture a lot, especially the way he painted Amiri. Because it looked just like him. It was mostly blue mixed with gray except for
the girl and Amiri, who were brown but a nice brown that went with the blue in a way and stood out from it, too.

“It’s real good,” I said, looking closer. “That is just like Amiri. You painted him but it could be a photograph.”

“And your portrait?” he asked.

“That’s not me,” I said. “It kind of favors my face shape, but that’s not me.”

“It’s you,” he said. “It’s the best portrait I’ve ever done. It’s exactly how I see you. I call it
Madonna and Child.
”

I looked again. The girl in the picture did favor me, but she was really pretty. There was something nice about her, like she was good people. And I really liked the way she was holding Amiri. I remembered how Billy had told me to hold Amiri like I loved him. And the way the girl was holding him was just like that.

“I’m going to enter this picture in a group show in Brooklyn that’s opening next week,” Billy said. “But I’d like you to have it for a while. Let me know what you think about it after a few days.”

“Okay,” I said.

Billy asked me to be careful with the picture and I said I would. For some reason I couldn’t wait until he left. When he did I looked at the picture really close. Then I looked at myself in the mirror. It was funny because all my parts were there, my eyes, my mouth, my right ear, and my nose. But there was something else in the picture,
almost like Billy had seen something that I couldn’t see. I tried to fix my face like the me he had painted, but it was still different.

Amiri wanted to touch the picture but I didn’t let him. He looked at it and made his baby noises and I knew he recognized us. I held him in front of it the way Billy had painted us. Every time I did I had to kiss Amiri, that’s the way the picture made me feel.

By the end of the second day I couldn’t take my eyes off Billy’s painting. I thought I was going to look all the paint off of it. So when I saw Billy on the street and he said he was coming to pick it up I wasn’t so happy.

“I’ll take you out to the show when it opens,” he said.

I didn’t go. For some reason I was just happy to have seen the picture in my room. Billy said somebody was thinking about buying it but he wasn’t sure about selling it because he liked it so much. I didn’t really care if he sold it because, in a way, I was always going to have that picture somewhere in my head. That and the memory of how Billy looked that day, how serious he was working on his drawings. Sometimes I try to imagine what he was thinking when he was in my little apartment and it makes me feel good. It does.

It’s been months since I had Billy’s painting in my house. Sometimes, when things get bad for me and Amiri, I pick him up and stand in front of the mirror and I can
see just how we looked in Billy’s picture. When I look in the mirror I can see just how much I love Amiri, the same way that Billy saw it. Knowing that Billy, that someone can look inside of you and see something good is worth more than the forty dollars he gave me. It is.

J
ohn Carroll was not in a good mood. He hated to see young black couples having difficulties with the mysteries of love. In his innermost heart he truly believed in the power of love to save the community and uplift the race. The fact that he had been part of bringing trouble to Mavis and Calvin bothered him, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it because Calvin was, after all, a fully grown man. A young man, perhaps, but a man.

It had all started the day that Sister Inez Tubbs was sitting at the table near the window complaining that his curried crab cakes didn’t have enough curry in them. The arthritis in his right ankle was bothering him something terrible, and then Mavis Brown had come busting into his shop with Calvin Williams asking about where he could get a part-time job to buy a gun.

“Boy, what you need a gun for?” John had asked, putting down the rag he was using to wipe off his counter.

“He needs a gun because he’s got to deal with Leon,” Mavis said. “Leon has been running his mouth up and down the avenue talking about
how
I ain’t this and
how
I ain’t that and
how
I was trying to be with him and he didn’t want me.”

“Calvin, a lot of couples break up and leave a trail of bitter feelings,” John Carroll said. “Why don’t you just go over and talk to Leon? I’m sure you can settle it without getting into violence.”

“No, man, it ain’t like that,” Calvin said. “He knows I’m going out with Mavis so if he’s talking trash it means he’s trying to punk me out. He thinks I’m like I used to be—you know, all talk and no action. I’m eighteen now and I got to let the real me out.”

“And who’s the real you?” John Carroll asked.

“I’m hard, man,” Calvin said. “People look at me and think I’m soft because I let things slide. But as far as I’m concerned the slide part is done and the new ride has begun.”

“And he wants to clear up all his loose ends so he can concentrate on his new rap album,” Mavis added.

“Oh, I got you.” John Carroll sat down at the counter. “You going to be a rapper and you getting hard now.”

“I’ve always been hard,” Calvin said.

“Well, why don’t you come around about twelve this afternoon?” John Carroll said. “I need to make a little
trip upstate and I could use somebody to keep me company. You come on with me and I’ll give you some money toward your gun and introduce you to somebody who can tell you where to get it.”

“John Carroll!” Sister Tubbs tightened her mouth up so she looked like a frog with a toothache.

“Inez, you are sixty-five years old,” John Carroll said. “Isn’t that kind of late in life to be growing another nose? I know you can’t have but one nose the way you keep nosing into my business.”

“You’re supposed to be a leader on this block and you helping this boy get a gun!” Sister Tubbs stood up, gave John Carroll a dirty look, and stormed out of the roti shop.

“Be here at twelve-thirty, Calvin,” John Carroll said. “I’m afraid you can’t come, Mavis.”

“It’s man business, baby,” Calvin said.

John Carroll watched as Calvin and Mavis left, then got his son, Billy, on the phone and asked him to come look after the shop.

“I got to go see some old friends upstate,” John said. “You’re not busy, are you?”