I tighten my hold on Mama, like grip is somehow a sanctity that will protect me from the tire screeching, the sheer speed of cars when we are most human. If I didn’t think Mama was off her shit before, I know she is now: bringing me up here, onto the freeway like it’s a sidewalk or a detour and not a chasm of speed.
At this time of night, the cars are relatively infrequent, but when they come, they are full throttle, running at least eighty or ninety miles per hour. When the trucks come, I can feel it on my back, the wind beneath my blazer.
I think this is the closest thing to being a live ghost. Disappearing into roadside trash and trees that somehow figure out how to grow in California’s eternal drought. Existing as the most salient and invisible thing on the road, both sinking into the dark and so terribly misplaced.
“Mama, what the fuck are we doing out here?” I’m close to done swallowing her insanities. I don’t know how much longer I’m willing to walk beside her on the freeway with her not even answering a simple question.
Mama takes a breath and holds it. I wait for her to blow out, release a flood into the air, but she doesn’t. I’m starting to think she’s trying to kill herself by way of self-inflicted suffocation when she opens her mouth and lets it out with an explosive howl. A scream that seems to continue past the time she closes her mouth, seems to travel upward, right into a waiting cloud, and spits back at us with a high-pitched echo.
I let go of Mama’s hand when the noise bursts out her lips, jump to the side, and step on a castaway plastic bag with a crackle. I have half a mind to run back down the ramp, right into oncoming cars just to get away from Mama and that sound. She turns her head to look at me, where I have retreated farther into the brush, and gestures for me to come back to her. I stay put, hands up so Mama knows not to come near me.
She relaxes the smile slightly. “It’s alright, baby.” She has to yell to be heard over the car rush and persistent echo. “You need to scream.”
I shake my head. “You done lost your mind.” My voice is a low quake. Maybe she hears me and maybe she doesn’t.
She repeats, “You gotta scream. It’s all gonna get better, but you gotta scream.”
“I’m going home,” I tell her, but I don’t move.
She lifts a hand to her chest, almost like she’s checking for her own heartbeat. This time, she whispers. Could be me reading her lips or could be something my mind made up, but I’m pretty sure Mama says, “Let it out.”
I open my mouth, shut it again. “Why?”
“Nobody learns to walk when they got weights inside they bellies. I want you to walk toward the water, baby. I want you to swim.” Mama lifts her chin up so her head is pointed toward the sound of ocean, sound of the bay somewhere beyond sight. Mama don’t make no sense and, at the same time, she has never said something my gut understands more clearly than that.
My mouth opens slowly, jaw creaks until there is just enough space for the sound to travel out my throat. Still, when I try to scream, nothing comes out.
Mama steps closer to me and I pivot away. She takes another step and she’s within an arm’s length from me, lifts the hand that was on her chest, and places it on mine. Not over my heart, but in the space where my ribs make way for esophagus and blood vessels. I can hear her voice crisp now, same voice that told Soraya to get away from the pool, same hand that scooped her up before she hit the water. Cars race by behind her, leave us in the aftermath of their wind, and Mama’s hand is warm.
“Silence starves us, chile. Feed yoself.” Mama’s Louisiana comes out in a drawl that sounds like music and I try again but don’t no sound come out, and if I am really my parents’ child, how can I not turn my body to musical note?
Mama takes both of her hands and moves them up, toward my face, places them on both cheeks, then slides down to my jaw. Mama hooks her fingers in my mouth and spreads my jaw open like a door with hinges, until I make an oval with my lips, keeping her hands on my cheeks and telling me to scream. The screech comes out in bursts, spasms of sound morphing their way from an eruption of rage to an infant’s cries, moans and whines and all the in-betweens of woman and child.
The sky takes each flurry and sends it right back with just a hint of music lingering in the echo, a belt from some invisible trombone, the lowest note on an organ drawn out. Sound after sound flooding from my body like war-zone fire on a cold day, Mama rubbing the tightness out my jaw, melting the tears back into my skin, until there is no more noise and my chest is heaving, out of breath and raw and Mama is holding me and the cars have not stopped, have not slowed, all of it, all the time racing past us while we are stuck between the sky and asphalt that does not know our names and Mama will walk me to the bus stop and leave me there and we will not speak of what the freeway does to us when it is nighttime and we are ghosts. But Mama taught me how to swim and I can see underwater. I can see.