Friday, May 23, 2014
Fort Greene, Brooklyn
Lia felt him before she saw him.
She was laughing at Jada's imitation of the gym teacher guarding his burned hot dogs when the back of her neck went warm. Below the courtyard steps, white shirts moved through the sun, Sharpie signatures showing between shoulders. The DJ was back on Biggie. She knew where to look before she turned.
She turned and found him without having to search.
Maine was coming off the court, his gray shirt dark with sweat, the orange KDs bright against the blacktop. Jada still had her phone out from the run. Lia had been laughing a moment ago; now she watched his smile fade as he found her through the people crossing between them. He looked at her the way he used to from the free-throw line, before the shot he always acted like he knew was going in.
She held his eyes. Deion would be picking her up tonight, and she had spent the morning looking forward to it. Now she couldn't remember what Jada had just said.
She looked away first.
It was only when she was looking at the ground that she realized her hand was at her collarbone. Her fingers were already around the small gold A, holding it the way you hold a railing on a moving train.
She let go before Jada could notice.
"You good?" Jada said.
"Yeah."
Jada followed her eyes toward the court, then back to her face, and had the decency not to say anything. Jada had been her best friend since the second grade. She had been there for all of it. She didn't need the play-by-play.
"I gotta go," Lia said. "Abuela's waiting."
She hugged a few people on her way out and kept her eyes ahead as she passed through the gate. Even at the corner, she had to fight the urge to turn around.
*
By the time the 4 carried her past Yankee Stadium, sunlight flashed across the windows and the Bronx opened below the elevated tracks in hot light and bodega awnings.
Her grandmother was already waiting outside the store on Fordham Road with two shopping bags on one arm and her purse clutched against her side like the whole borough was trying to take it.
"There she is."
"Hi, Abuela."
The hug was long and hard and smelled like Jean Naté. Then her grandmother held her at arm's length and studied her face like a detective.
"You ate?"
"Yes."
"You look tired."
"I've been at school since eight."
"That wasn't my question."
Lia laughed, because there was no winning with her and there never had been.
They spent two hours in the store, and her grandmother asked her opinion on everything and then ignored it with total confidence. Napkins for the graduation party. Tablecloths. A dress for Lia's mother, "because your mother won't buy herself anything, you know how she is." A list of cousins who had confirmed, a shorter list of cousins who hadn't, and a long, detailed review of why.
Then, standing by a rack of folding chairs, her grandmother said it the way old people say the hardest things, without slowing down.
"Your father would have been so proud. He would have been the loudest one there."
"I know."
Tylil James would have found a way to make himself heard over the whole graduating class and embarrassed her in front of the school, and she would have pretended to hate it.
Instead there would be a seat. There was always a seat now.
It had been almost three years. Lia had told the story so many times that it came out of her mouth smooth, the way a river stone gets smooth. A home invasion. Someone broke in at night. Her father walked into it. The police said it happened fast, that it was probably a robbery that went wrong, that men like that panic. Nobody was ever arrested.
She had said all of that to teachers, to counselors, to the nosy lady from church, and she would probably say it for the rest of her life. And under the smooth version there had always been a small, hard piece that never wore down: nothing much was ever taken. She had never been able to make that fit.
She didn't say any of that to her grandmother. Her grandmother squeezed her hand, and Lia squeezed back, and for one second she was sixteen again on the church steps after the funeral, too hollowed out to cry. Maine was sitting beside her, not saying anything, not trying to fix it, just holding her hand so tight it hurt. It was the only thing that day that had helped.
She let go of that one fast too.
"Tablecloths," she said. "White or gold?"
By the time they got the bags back to Abuela's, Lia was checking her phone whenever her grandmother turned away. Jada was waiting in Bed-Stuy. Lia packed the dress and jacket into a bag and told Abuela she was going over to get ready with her.
"Don't come back too late."
"I won't. I promise."
Abuela held her eyes until Lia looked down at the zipper. Lia kissed her cheek before she could ask anything about the rest of the night. She left Deion and the lounge out of it.
*
By seven, Jada's bedroom in Bed-Stuy looked like a small disaster. Lia's bag sat open beside the bed, the clothes she had worn to Senior Day folded inside it. Two pairs of shoes in the middle of the floor. Makeup across the dresser. Jada's first outfit abandoned on the chair, her second one on her body, and her third under consideration.
"This doesn't look too plain?"
"You asked me that ten minutes ago."
"Because you keep giving me the same answer."
"Because it's the same outfit."
Jada turned sideways in the mirror. "So?"
"You look good, Jada."
"That's all I needed."
Lia was already done: the pinkish-nude dress, and over it the embroidered jean jacket with FEARLESS stitched across the back in gold thread. Her father used to say it. Be fearless, Lia, not careless. There's a difference. She had found the jacket at a thrift store in Williamsburg the summer after, and she'd bought it without trying it on.
Her phone buzzed.
Deion: leaving now
"He's on his way."
"He said eight," Jada said. "It's seven thirty."
"So?"
"So boys don't understand time."
Twenty minutes later, headlights swept across the front curtains. Jada parted them with two fingers. Deion's silver Charger idled at the curb, the windows down, Chris already sprawled across the back seat like he lived there.
"That's them."
Out on the stoop the evening was warm and clear, the sky over Bed-Stuy going lavender at the edges, kids still out on bikes, somebody's grandfather in a lawn chair with a radio playing the ballgame. Deion got out and came around to open her door, all six-foot-seven of him folding back down behind the wheel after she was in.
"Hey."
"Hey."
"You look nice." He glanced at the jacket. "Fearless."
"You read it."
"I can read."
Jada slid into the back next to Chris. "See? He pays attention."
"Where we going?" Chris asked.
"Mama Elena's," Deion said, and pulled off toward the bridge.
*
Mama Elena's was in Harlem, on a corner where the sidewalk was always crowded. Inside it was warm and loud the way a Friday night restaurant was supposed to be: garlic and roasted pork and fresh bread, plates clattering out of the kitchen, an old woman behind the counter who called everybody mi amor and meant it.
They got a booth near the back. Jada and Chris spent half the meal arguing over whose music taste was worse, and both of them were right. Deion kept stealing tostones off Lia's plate after swearing he wasn't hungry.
"You been here before?" Jada asked him.
"A few times."
"With your family?" Lia said.
"Sometimes."
He went back to her tostones, and Lia let the question drop. Deion had taken her places in Harlem where somebody always seemed to know him. She had seen men interrupt conversations to greet him, doors opened with a nod while other people waited. Tonight he had brought them straight to a booth near the back. She watched him reach across her plate again and moved it out of range.
When the plates were cleared, Chris leaned back. "So where we going after this?"
"I know somewhere," Deion said.
*
Nova Lounge didn't look like much from outside. A black door on a side street, a small neon sign with half the N burned out, and a man on a stool who didn't ask for anybody's ID once he saw Deion.
Inside, low red light settled over the tables, and Lia felt the bass through the bottoms of her shoes. Older men sat along one wall with cards, glasses, and cigars nobody was supposed to be smoking indoors anymore; closer to the floor, younger people leaned across tables to hear each other. Heads turned when Deion walked in, then returned to their conversations. Nobody called out or stopped the music.
Just recognition.
An older man at the bar lifted his chin. Deion lifted his back. Lia watched it happen and filed it somewhere, the same way her father had taught her to file things when she was a kid in the back seat of his car: don't stare, just remember.
Jada leaned into her ear. "You see it too?"
"See what?"
"Exactly."
They found a table toward the back. Deion settled into his chair and rested an arm along it, quieter than he had been at dinner. Lia watched him exchange another nod with somebody across the room.
Halfway through the second song, a guy peeled off from a group by the pool table and came over. He was about their age, maybe a year older, brown skin, a fitted cap turned backward, and a thin pale scar running straight through his left eyebrow, splitting it in two.
He and Deion slapped hands and pulled into the kind of hug that's really a shoulder.
"My cousin," Deion said. "Kash. Kash, this is Lia. That's Jada, that's Chris."
"What's good," Kash said, to all of them, to none of them.
He didn't sit. He stood at the end of the table with his hands in his pockets and talked to Deion about somebody named Thumper and somebody else's car, and the whole time he was talking, his eyes stayed on Lia. Not the way men usually looked at her in a place like this. His gaze stayed flat, returning to her even when Deion answered him. Lia shifted against the back of her chair and waited for him to look away.
Then he smiled, and the smile didn't change anything about his eyes, and he knocked twice on the table and went back to the pool table.
"He's cool," Deion said. "He just be like that."
Lia nodded. Don't stare. Just remember.
The music changed. Chris dragged Jada onto the floor without asking, and Jada pretended to be offended for about four seconds. Deion stood and held his hand out.
"You wanna dance?"
She looked at him. Then she smiled and took his hand, and for one song, then two, then three, she let the bass carry everything else out of her head: the courtyard, the seat at graduation, the scar across a stranger's eyebrow.
*
It was after midnight when they came back out into the warm night, the music following them through the door before it swung shut and cut off.
Deion dropped Chris first, on a block in Harlem with all the stoops full. Jada climbed out after him and leaned back in through Lia's window.
"I'm staying with Chris."
"Your mother?"
"She thinks I'm with you."
Lia stared at her. "You used me as the alibi?"
"Technically I was with you." Jada kissed her cheek. "Text me when you get home. Love you."
Then it was just the two of them, city lights sliding across the windshield and the radio low. Deion drove with one hand on the wheel as they headed north toward the Bronx. Lia checked her phone and turned it facedown in her lap. Abuela's last words came back to her, along with how easily she had made the promise.
He pulled up outside Abuela's and put the car in park. The dashboard clock read 1:00. Saturday already. Lia looked up at the dark windows.
"You had fun?"
"Yeah," she said, and she had.
"You doing anything tomorrow?"
"I don't think so."
"We should do something."
"Like what?"
"I'll figure it out."
"That's a terrible plan."
"You'll still go."
She laughed and leaned across the console to kiss his cheek. He turned his face and caught her mouth instead, and she let him. It wasn't awkward. It was too easy, if anything. There was more heat in it than tenderness, and Deion leaned into it harder than she expected, his hand settling at her side, pulling her in.
She pulled back first.
He stopped. "You good?"
"Yeah." She reached for the door. "Goodnight, Deion."
"Goodnight."
She glanced back once from the stoop. He was still watching her, his face lit green by the dashboard, the engine idling. She gave him a small wave, and went inside, and listened to the car pull away before she let out the breath.
*
The house was quiet. Lia eased the door closed behind her and kept her keys in her fist so they wouldn't clatter into the bowl. Abuela's door was shut. Her mother was still on shift at Kings County until two.
She and Mami had lived here since the home invasion. At first, Lia had kept her clothes in bags, ready for somebody to say they were going back. Now she knew where to step on the stairs without making them creak. She went up slowly, carrying her shoes, and slipped into her room.
Lia showered, changed, and sat in front of her mirror with her hair wet, dividing it into sections and working each one into a two-strand twist. Her hands kept moving while her thoughts went back through the night: Kash watching her across the table, Deion's hand at her side, the moment she had pulled away. Then Maine was there again, coming off the court. She caught herself staring into the mirror with an unfinished twist between her fingers.
She reached behind her neck for the necklace clasp. It took three tries. Her fingers didn't want to do it. The chain slid free and pooled in her palm, the small gold A lying on top of it, warm from her skin. He had given it to her on her sixteenth birthday, in a box he had wrapped himself, badly, with too much tape. A few months later her father was gone, and she had worn it every day since. Through the funeral. Through junior year. Through prom, and everything after prom. Tonight, with the clasp between her fingers, she could no longer pretend she wore it out of habit.
She wasn't going to throw it away. She just couldn't keep wearing it.
She knelt by the dresser and slid her fingers under the loose panel at the bottom, the one only she knew about. Her father had built it into the dresser during the stay with Abuela after the flood, so she'd have a place to hide candy from her mother. He used to call it the vault.
The panel came free. Inside was everything she'd kept: the movie stubs from the Saturdays at the Court Street theater with her father, a folded Valentine's Day note in handwriting she knew better than her own, a friendship bracelet she didn't look at, and, curled in the corner, a single white loop of nylon net, still stiff, still smelling faintly of a gym.
She laid the pendant down beside it.
The chain slipped toward the corner. When she reached to keep it from tangling around the net, her nail caught a raised edge beneath the lip of the compartment. She moved the keepsakes aside and leaned closer. A little mechanism sat against the side wall, no bigger than a fingernail, painted the same color as the wood. From above, the lip hid it.
She pressed it.
Click.
The back wall of the vault shifted upward a half inch with a dry wooden sigh.
*
Lia sat back on her heels for a long time without touching it.
Then she pulled the panel all the way open.
Behind it, in a space she would have sworn was solid wood, was a black leather journal with worn corners. Under it, a faded photograph, an old business card, a thick manila envelope, and a small silver flash drive.
She took the photograph out first.
Four young men in front of a brick wall, maybe twenty, maybe younger, squinting into the sun and grinning like the future belonged to them. Her father was on the left, skinny, in a Navy sweatshirt, one arm thrown around the shoulders of the young man next to him.
It took her a second to recognize Uncle Nasir without the gray, without the suit, without the campaign smile from every poster in Fort Greene. Then Melo, broad and laughing, a head taller than the rest of them. And on the end a man she didn't know by face, only by name, a name she had heard her parents say once or twice at the kitchen table in lowered voices.
On the back, in her father's handwriting: Me. Naz. Melo. Victor.
The business card lay facedown beneath the photograph, its edges soft from wear. She lifted it by a corner and set it on the carpet without turning it over. One thing at a time. That was another one of his.
The envelope was thick with photocopies, property records, numbers, and names that meant nothing to her, and on top of all of it a single folded sheet with one line written in his hand.
311 DeKalb Avenue.
She turned the sheet over. Nothing on the back. She spread the other pages beside it, looking for the same address.
She set the flash drive beside her knee and spread the papers across the carpet. Every few minutes she returned to the photograph, searching the four faces again, then tried another page from the envelope. When the front door finally opened downstairs, she looked at the clock and realized how long she had been sitting there.
Keys landed in the bowl downstairs. After a pause, Lia heard her mother coming up the stairs. She swept the photograph, the business card, and the envelope under her bed and shoved the drive into her pocket just as the door opened halfway.
Carmen Rosario James was still in her scrubs, her hair falling out of its clip, her hospital badge flipped backward on its lanyard. She looked at her daughter on the floor, at the open panel, at the journal still in her hands.
"¿Todavía despierta, mija? It's almost three."
"Bendición, Mami."
"Que Dios te bendiga." Her mother's eyes went to the journal and stayed there. Something moved across her face, and then she put it away the way she put everything away. "What are you doing?"
"Going through some of Papi's stuff."
For a moment her mother didn't say anything at all. Then she nodded slowly. Lia waited for another question, but none came.
"Don't stay up all night."
"I won't."
Her mother started to close the door, then stopped and looked back at her, and her face went soft.
"You look like him when you're thinking too hard."
"I know."
The door shut. Lia waited until the footsteps faded down the hall and the bedroom door clicked at the other end of the house.
Then she opened the journal.
Pages and pages of his handwriting, firm and clean and deliberate, and dates running back years. Near the end, one entry caught her eye as the pages fell past: April 12, 2010. Follow the paperwork. Paperwork tells you who planned it. After that the entries got shorter. Then there were blank pages, a lot of them, because he had run out of time.
She closed it and opened it again to the very first page, which she had skipped.
He had written only one line there, in the middle of the page, pressing hard enough that the pen had dug into the paper.
If you found this… it means I was right.
Lia read it twice. Down the hall, her mother's room was quiet. She looked at the second compartment behind her keepsakes, then at the line dug into the page.
He had expected someone to find this.
* * *