Opal is done with the odd side of the street. When she crosses, a car stops for her—the woman inside impatiently waves Opal across like she’s doing all of humanity a favor. Opal wants to lift her arm, lift a single finger as she crosses, but instead she slow jogs across in answer to the woman’s impatience and feigned generosity. Opal hates herself for the jog. For the smile that came to her face before she could stop it, turn it upside down, straighten it out before it was too late.
Opal is full of regrets, but not about things she’s done. That damn island, her mom, Ronald, and then the shuffling, stifling rooms and faces in foster care, in group homes after that. She regrets that they happened. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t cause them to happen. She figures she must deserve it in some way. But she couldn’t figure it out. So she bore those years, their weight, and the years bored a hole through the middle of her, where she tried to keep believing there was some reason to keep her love intact. Opal is stone solid, but there is troubled water that lives in her, that sometimes threatens to flood, to drown her—rise up to her eyes. Sometimes she can’t move. Sometimes it feels impossible to do anything. But that’s okay because she’s become quite good at getting lost in the doing of things. More than one thing at a time preferably. Like delivering mail and listening to an audiobook or music. The trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. Get twice removed. It’s about layers. It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing.
Opal takes out her earphones when she hears a sound up above somewhere. A nasty buzz slicing through the air. She looks up and sees a drone, then looks around to see who might be flying it. When she doesn’t see anyone, she puts her earphones back in. She’s listening to Otis Redding’s “（Sittin’ on） The Dock of the Bay.” It’s her least-favorite Otis Redding song because it gets played too much. She shuffles her music and it lands on Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears.” This song gives her that strange mix of sad and happy. Plus it’s upbeat. That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.
* * *
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Opal was on her route yesterday when her adopted grandson Orvil left her a message telling her he’d pulled three spider legs out of a bump on his leg. He’d scratched it open and out came those spider legs like splinters. Opal covered her mouth as she listened to the message, but she wasn’t surprised, not as much as she would have been had this not happened to her when she was around the same age Orvil is now.
Opal and Jacquie’s mom never let them kill a spider if they found one in the house, or anywhere for that matter. Her mom said spiders carry miles of web in their bodies, miles of story, miles of potential home and trap. She said that’s what we are. Home and trap.
When the spider legs didn’t come up at dinner last night, Opal figured Orvil was afraid to bring it up because of the powwow—even though the two things had nothing to do with each other.
A few weeks back she found a video of Orvil powwow dancing in his room. Opal regularly checks their phones while they sleep. She looks at what pictures and videos they take, their text messages, and their browser histories. None of them have shown signs of especially worrisome depravity yet. But it’s only a matter of time. Opal believes there is a dark curiosity alive in each of us. She believes we all do precisely what we think we can get away with. The way Opal sees it, privacy is for adults. You keep a close eye on your kids, you keep them in line.
In the video, Orvil was powwow dancing like he knew exactly what he was doing, which she couldn’t understand. He was dancing in the regalia she kept in her closet. The regalia was given to her by an old friend.
There were all kinds of programs and events for Native youth growing up in Oakland. Opal first met Lucas at a group home, and then again later at a foster-youth event. For a time, Opal and Lucas were model foster youth, always the first chosen for interviews and photos for flyers. They’d both learned from an elder what goes into making regalia, then helped her make it. Opal helped Lucas prepare for his first powwow as a dancer. Lucas and Opal had been in love. Their love was young and desperate. But it was love. Then one day Lucas got on a bus and moved down to Los Angeles. He’d never even talked about it. He just left. Came back almost two decades later out of nowhere wanting an interview for an Urban Indian documentary he was making and gave her the regalia. Then he died a few weeks later. Called Opal from his sister’s house to tell her his days were numbered. That’s how he put it. He didn’t even tell her why, he just said sorry, and that he wished her the very best.