“Said you were gonna call me last night when you wanted me to come by. Got you the kit,” he says, holding out the metal box.
I nod toward the door to the apartment. “Fell asleep.” I take the box. “Thanks. Trevor ain’t talking yet but I’m guessing he got jumped.”
“Shit.”
I thought seeing Tony here, having him come in to help pull Trev’s limp body up, spoon-feed him would make it all better. But seeing Tony standing here, ready to stitch up anything I say is broken, only makes it worse.
I love him, I really do, but I don’t know him. Don’t know him any better than I know Cole or Camila: they been there, but never close enough for me to know their mamas’ first names or how old they were when they started taking the bus by themselves.
“Can I help?” His face is this hopeful blend of nervous and sad. It can’t be later than nine in the morning and he’s here when he could be finding a life. He’s here, sunshine probably blistering the back of his neck, staring at me, hoping for anything different than what I’ve always given him. He doesn’t deserve fractions and that’s all I got, all I’m willing to give.
“Tony.” I say it slowly enough that I think it might be enough for him to grasp. He looks down at his big feet, back up at me. He wouldn’t cry in front of me, but this is the closest he’s gotten. “You don’t gotta do this no more.” My hands are stained from Trevor’s blood and all I can think is how much I wanna get out of the sun and I bet all Tony can think of is me.
He opens his mouth just enough that sound can come out. “You know I don’t mind.”
And that’s the worst part; that he would do this for decades, do this until funeral day came to my doorstep and left him grieving and visiting the grave of somebody who never gave him nothing but ash. I think in the otherworld that midnight reveals, that place where everybody walks a little different, there is a version of us where I am okay with Tony being everything, holding everything. Not a better world but one where we are content with this, where there is no chase and I let him grieve me after so many years of my back spinning, repeatedly walking away from him and wishing he wouldn’t follow.
I always expected it to end like this: me finally getting the balls to plead with him, talk him into leaving me. “Get outta this. You don’t need me.” Been avoiding that drop on his face since the day Marcus introduced him to me.
Tony will never argue with me. That’s part of the problem, I think. Anytime I call him back, he’s gonna answer, gonna run to me the way I wish Alé would right now, when everything seems to be dissolving. Can’t sit by the pool and let Tony hold me just because I don’t like the breeze, don’t like night without him shadowing me.
He takes my hand, lifts it all the way up to his lips, opens up my palm, and kisses it.
I watch Tony exit the complex, probably back into a swarm of cameras, and I know I gotta decide sooner than later how I’m gonna make my life mine. How I’m gonna get to that moment when Trevor and I make this city ours again, win every bet until we’ve got an empire of our bodies restored. Maybe it all starts in that courtroom in two weeks. Or these streets. Or us dipping our toes in the pool. One way or the other, I know I don’t have much time left to choose, find a way out of this trap.
I can’t stop checking the peephole. I’m not even sure who I’m expecting to see peeking out from the landing, eyes bulging. Maybe the cops, maybe some woman in a suit asking for Trevor, maybe Mama. Definitely Mama. She called me less than an hour after Tony left, from a new phone, saying she was released a couple days ago from Blooming Hope, that the parole officer really liked my letter. I almost forgot I had sent it, all the way back after I visited Mama in February.
When she called, she told me she was staying with an old friend in Deep East, and she gave me the address. I hung up before she could say anything else.
Mama didn’t say she was gonna show up at the Regal-Hi, but I can’t shake the feeling that she’s about to appear at the window, tap-tapping on the door. That I’ll peek outside and see her face reflected in the pool.
The sun already set and Trevor’s sleeping again.
Trevor and I have spent the last three days with the shades pulled because he says his skull feels like it’s got a drum instead of a brain, and Marcus’s football days taught me that a concussion calls for two things: dark and quiet.
Problem is, a nine-year-old boy gets bored pretty quick and don’t like the sound of silence when he’s not sleeping. So, I read him the entirety of the second Harry Potter book and I’ve been humming him the instrumentals to every song I know. When I get tired, I put on one of Daddy’s old CDs and hope Trevor will fall asleep to it. He usually does.