“What?”
Her neck snaps up. “Why you asking me, girl? I ain’t owe you shit.”
I almost forgot how Dee could do that. How she could oscillate so quickly from that giggly mania to this: the sharp.
I step closer to her, crouch down until my head is just slightly above hers and I’m staring down into her eyes, looking into her. She is fierce.
“You owe me everything,” I tell her, saliva flinging out, my lips parted just enough for her to see the edges of my teeth. “Owe me a whole goddamn life.” I spread my arms out and she looks around like she’s really seeing the place for the first time: empty, mattress sitting fully made, blankets folded, no traces of living.
Dee doesn’t look at me, looks at her feet, but something in her shifts. Some bundle of the woman who lay on that mattress mid-birth comes back.
“I wanna see him,” she says.
I shake my head and even if she don’t see me, I know she can feel it. “You don’t get to come back in here and have him whenever you want. What kind of mother leaves her baby alone for weeks? He could be dead if he didn’t have me, you understand?”
Her head rolls back up to look at me with that snarl, which then relaxes into a strange sort of pout.
“I tried.” Dee says it soft, like somebody might say I love you.
“This you trying?”
“I love my baby, but love don’t fix the other shit. It don’t make it all go away. Your mama knew that and I bet your daddy did too. That boy in there? He loves me.” She isn’t blinking. “He loves me just the way I am, but pretty soon he’ll decide that I should’ve been better. You ain’t know what it feels like to have yo baby know you fucked up and not be able to change none of it.”
Dee stands up and I see her fully, even thinner than Trevor. She walks past me and out the door. When we make it outside, she spits down off the railing and I hear it land somewhere below, somewhere beside the pool. She whips back around to look at me.
“I’m leaving, so you can have my boy all to yoself, aight? Just don’t forget that even he ain’t gonna forgive you for everything and you ain’t gonna be able to do nothing to change it.” Dee spits over the railing one more time and then shoves past me into her apartment, slamming the door shut so I’m left in the evening dark, unsure what’s real, what kind of mother can raise a child like Trevor and succeed.
I head back into my apartment and leave Trevor a note saying I’m going out before I even know what I’m doing, signing it with a K because I don’t even know which name is mine anymore. I pull on shoes and the black blazer from funeral day, checking the peephole one last time to make sure nobody’s there. Just streetlights and pool.
This is my first time out of the house since Trevor got beat up. I go out the back gate and walk around the block onto High Street, bypassing the cameras. High Street looks the same and when the only constant feels like change, it’s both comforting and chilling to hear the same whistles from the same old creeps on the same corner as I have since I was twelve. The 80 bus pulls up to the corner and I hop on, put in all the change from my pocket to pay for the bus fare, and sit next to this old woman who’s mumbling something about buying herself a sandwich.
Daddy used to take Marcus and me on random buses just to kill time until Mama got home from work on the weekends. We’d hop on and he’d start talking with the driver, trying to get them to not make him pay for Marcus and me. We were cute enough and Daddy was charming enough that they’d normally say yes and Daddy would sit me on his lap and whisper, “That’s how you get what you want, baby. Anybody who says words don’t mean nothing is lying.” Then he’d start shaking his legs so it would compound the turmoil of the bus and I’d go wobbling in all directions, laughing so hard that Marcus would catch it like a cold.
The best and worst part about the bus is the people. The woman beside me is listing all the things she wants on her sandwich. I’m gonna be on this one for a while, so I settle in and look past the woman and out the window. We pass a bunch of taquerías, none of which could compete with La Casa, then we enter the strip of churches, liquor stores, funeral homes, a couple apartment buildings and houses sprinkled in. International Boulevard is a weave through every kind of East Oakland living. We’re going deeper into East and I’m hoping my memory serves me well enough that I know when to get off.
Spent my whole life waiting to fall into something that would make my body wanna turn into its own instrument just so I could be a part of every song that jump-started a pop and lock, make everybody dance. Like when Daddy joined the Party and hid his biggest joy under his beret, tilted just right. Like when Mama stumbled into Daddy’s smile and knew all she had to do was lock it into her fist. Like Marcus and his microphone. Sometimes, when I paint, I think I feel that, but the painting is never enough, never erases all the other moments I can’t seem to find no peace.