The room is chaos in its most raw form: bodies on bodies. Bodies beside each other on couches, in chairs. Bodies embracing. Bodies sipping coffee. Bodies sobbing and clinging and smiling. I don’t see Mama, but I hear her. “Oh please, Miranda.” Mama’s voice is booming, but her laugh is chill, almost robotic.
I move toward it, through the clutter of people whose limbs cement in my vision, but never their faces. Their lips blur with their noses and they are just bodies. Bodies on bodies. And Mama.
Mama sits on a green couch in the back corner, her bare feet resting on a coffee table, head tilted upward in a laugh that doesn’t even seem to produce sound at this point, just a jaw opening and shaking slightly. I watch her: this woman whose skin I crawled out of.
Her body has blown up, so now Mama is soft where she used to be all collarbone. The woman seated next to her, Miranda, is a dwarf of Mama with gray jumbo box braids and lips that curl straight down into a pout. She is huddled on the couch, resting her head on its edge when she sees me. Mama’s face erupts outward from her mouth, quivering around her tongue. Then her eyebrows twitch. Then Mama lets out a single shriek that sounds more like a gurgle and stands.
“Kiara,” she shouts across the room. The sound gets lost somewhere in the muddle of the room’s noise. I walk toward Mama until we are close enough to touch and then she pulls me into her arms and squeezes. For such a familiar voice, her arms could not feel like less of a home, the way the flesh cushions me. I don’t remember Mama ever feeling this safe, like a barrier to the sound.
When the embrace ends, Mama drags me back to the couch and plops me into the green of it, right in between her and Miranda, who seems to sink into the cushions. Mama keeps hold of my hands and fiddles with my fingers, moving the tips of hers along the base of each of my nails. I can’t help but look at her, just fixate my eyes on that face I’ve been trying to remember for so many years. Something is strange about it, like her skin has a purple tint beneath the surface, like she is glowing.
Mama don’t even pause to really look at me. She’s got things to say, always got things to say. “So happy to see my baby’s face all grown up. How old you now, nineteen? Twenty? So grown. You know I looked just like you at that age, pretty and shit. Time really do fly, child, just like your grandma used to say. Where my Marcus? You tell him like I said you gotta tell him?”
I don’t know how she keeps on talking, how she’s got enough breath for that.
I blink a couple times and try to remember all the things she asked. “I’m seventeen, eighteen in a couple months. And yeah I told him, but I don’t got control of him, so I don’t think he’s coming. Listen, I came down here ’cause I need Uncle Ty’s number and I know you wanted Marcus too, but I’m what you got. Okay?” I’m still staring at her, at her cheeks, at the purple underneath.
Mama’s smile doesn’t waver and she goes on like I didn’t say nothing at all. “I’m getting outta here soon. I’m comin’ home, just a couple more months—year at the most—and I’ll be cleared.”
Mama home. The thought never even crossed my mind, her back in our apartment.
Miranda speaks for the first time. “Yeah, Chey got real lucky her parole officer likes her ass.”
“That’s nice, Mama. I really gotta get Uncle Ty’s number though—”
“You know yo uncle always had a thing for me? Yo daddy didn’t wanna see it, but that man sure did want me.”
I shake my head, fuzzy from what could be heat or noise or the way Mama’s voice seeps into every canal of my body. “No, you not listening, Mama, I—”
“Nah, don’t you tell me I’m not listening, chile. All I ever done is listen to you. You ain’t got no ground to stand on, baby. We talked about this when I first went in there—Mama made a mistake. When I was just trying to support you, feed that mouth. Don’t mean I ain’t still yo mama.” Mama takes her thumb and pats my bottom lip.
I open my mouth again to talk, but Mama has stood, pulling me up with her and through the maze. As Mama leads me out of the room, my feet buzz in their shoes and I realize I might just be a little scared of my mother. As a child, I was never scared of Mama. She was a sacred figure and even when she was about to give us a spanking, I knew she’d rub our red skin after.
We head out into a hallway, up a stairwell, and into a room that must be hers because there are Prince posters lining the walls, and if there is one thing that could never change about my mama it would be her love for Prince. She used to break out into his songs on our Sunday morning walks to church and even though she’d go off on runs and belts that made them unrecognizable, I didn’t want Mama to stop, wanted to worship her voice.