All the hairs on Miriam’s body were raised. She’d known Derek’s father was no good, but she’d never heard most of what August was telling this room. August had a secret side no one in the family had ever been able to penetrate. As a child, she’d always be pounding away at the piano keys, her face unreadable, lost in some reverie that Miriam, even Hazel, couldn’t understand. Or she was hiding up in some tree, listening in to the fireside political debates at the house, her thoughts her own. Yes, August had always been the mysterious one. So, when she got pregnant, far too early, no one had even asked who the father was. Miriam knew her sister would never tell.
“Sometimes, I’d come back from Stanley’s—Stanley’s is a deli by the house—and I’d find the house dark, the lights all turned off. D would be shaking, just shaking. Wouldn’t let me touch him. Wouldn’t say nothing. He’d hide in the cupboards sometimes. The closets. Like some scared, hurt animal. And his father. I don’t think I should even name the nigga. I’d find him sitting at the kitchen table. Drinking black, cold coffee. Asking me, ‘How long ’til dinner?’？”
A strange knocking thud had sounded in the courtroom. Miriam saw Derek was pounding his head against the defense table in slow, methodical thumps. His attorney went to him. He placed a hand on Derek’s back and, stroking it, nodded for August to continue.
But Miriam wasn’t sure she wanted August to. What she’d heard, and Derek’s reaction—it all terrified her. For the first time, and however unwanted, Miriam felt a connection to her nephew. She, too, knew fear. The anticipation of pain. Bruised and beaten on her Camp Lejeune kitchen floor, reaching for the phone to call her sister, Miriam had always reckoned moving back home to Memphis would be safer than staying in North Carolina. Jax was a large man. And trained by the greatest, the most elite branch of the armed services to kill, expertly, with his bare hands. Lying on that floor, in the haze and chaos of being punched in the face, Miriam calculated that Jax might one day kill her. Maybe not intentionally. But just the right blow to her head…She’d had to leave. And where else did she have to go but home? Her mother’s words on the evening before her wedding came to her on that floor: My lovely, beautiful daughters, both of you can always, always come home.
August cleared her throat. “He left one day. Without reason. Went out for a pack of Kools and never came back. The nigga died likely just how he came into this world: killing somebody. And then, I thought we were safe. He was gone. But even after his father left, D would hardly let me touch him.”
My God, Miriam thought. She realized that both she and August had been battling terrors too difficult to face alone. And yet, they had.
Miriam felt shame, like it was Jax swinging at her.
She should have left that son of a bitch sooner. Should have come home the moment, the very first time, he hit her. Miriam could hardly remember when. But it was after the Gulf, after she had forgotten something trifling—an ingredient in that night’s dinner, Joan’s math homework, to post the Jet subscription bill. And he had hit her. Miriam stood holding her burning cheek in open-mouthed shock. He had hit her. Jax. From the record store Jax. She was dumbfounded in her grief. It took time for her to process what had happened. Felt like she had stood at the counter, open-mouthed and silent, for nearly a month, frozen in fear. Why on earth did she stay when Joan was raped and Mya was still inside her? Jax had lifted her off the ground with one hand at the hospital. Lifted her by the neck and squeezed.
Miriam put a hand to her neck and shuddered. Jesus Christ, why didn’t she leave then?
The things women do for the sake of their daughters. The things women don’t. The shame of it all. The shame of her daughter’s rape, the shame of her husband’s violence, her nephew’s psychopathy.
If I ever, ever, ever fail my sister, my daughters, again, Miriam told herself, let demons take me. She made the sign of the cross.
August reached for another tissue. Blew into it. “All of this to say, don’t kill my son. I’m begging you, Judge,” she said, turning to appeal to her directly. “Don’t send my boy to death row. I did the best I could. Motherhood is an anchor. It has devoured me entire. I did the best I could. If love was enough…” August trailed off.
Miriam didn’t know what to think. She had always feared Derek, did not want him anywhere near her daughters—which in turn subtly meant she didn’t want him in the house. But it was his as much as her daughters’。 It was the only home he had ever known. Miriam shifted between pity and loathing, but she steadied herself.
Perhaps it was her faith, but it couldn’t have been solely that, because Jax she could not forgive. Maybe it was blood, having the same line as Hazel coursing through both Derek’s and Miriam’s veins. Perhaps it was her mother’s memory, urging forgiveness from the grave, but for whatever reason, Miriam thought, Pity the boy, Miriam. Pity the poor thing. He ain’t never known a kindness. He ain’t never known. Lord, why?
Miriam heard the ache in her sister’s voice when August said, “Killing my son won’t bring back nobody from the dead. You know this. And y’all going to kill him? That’s the question we came down here for today? How? How, after this, how y’all going to sleep at night?” She turned now to the room at large, her arms outstretched, challenging, beseeching them all.
Her chest was heaving, but her eyes were dry. Hands shaking badly, she reached into a pocket of her black dress and pulled out a pack of Kools and a small, pink lighter. She could barely light the cigarette. Finally, fumbling slightly, she brought the cigarette up to meet her full, peach-colored lips.
The security guard made a motion toward the stand, but the judge held up a palm to halt him. She shook her head in a tender, slight no.
August exhaled a thin stream of smoke. She shook her head back and forth and said, “Men and death. Men and death. How on earth y’all run the world when all y’all have ever done is kill each other?”
“I said, you all right, chile?” Miriam realized she was on her hands and knees next to her now-soiled medical instruments. She hadn’t yet picked up a single one—she was just kneeling there, still. Miriam hadn’t answered her elderly patient’s question.
“My hus—， my ex-hus—” Miriam stumbled. “My girls’ father works in the Pentagon.”
The white woman snorted. Miriam looked up, startled, to see the woman let out a small chuckle.
“Now, is that such a bad thing? Might be a blessing—a dead ex-husband,” the woman said.
Miriam rose. The tray shook slightly in her hands. “Growing up without a father…” She paused, considering. “It’s a lonely life, ma’am.”
CHAPTER 23
Joan
2003
Thunder sounded again, rattling both the house and Wolf. She whined as I petted her, scratched her ears.
Used to the raging weather all that month, my family slept through the storm. No one but me was awake when the rotary phone in the hallway rang. Or maybe they simply couldn’t hear it over the rage of the storm. I yawned and hurled pounds of quilts off me. Wolf whimpered in the blankets, nestled herself farther into them.