Death has a way of uniting or dividing. Families come together and draw comfort from each other or fight about wills and the things that have kept them apart. It can go either way.
Even with the funeral over and everyone gone home, and MiMi’s small refrigerator stuffed with Tupperware and leftovers, I’m not sure what her death will do to our family. Lo hasn’t seen her mother or spoken to her in years. She avoided Aunt May even at the funeral and shows no sign of breaking the silence. I can’t blame her. What Aunt May did was unacceptable, even more so to me now that I have a child of my own. I could never choose a man over her, much less accept his word as truth when my daughter accused him of wrong. But that’s what Aunt May did, and I’m afraid Lo will never forgive her.
And then there’s my mother.
Her beauty hasn’t faded. She had me so young she’s barely forty. Heads still swivel when she walks past. Her body is a trail of winding curves—breasts and hips and butt and thighs. My father diluted my skin color, but hers is a flawless mixture of darkened honey and caramel, and her hair, slightly coarser than mine, is an unrelieved fall of black to her waist. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
And she could never get over herself enough to find out if she had anything else to offer.
“It’s been a long time since I was back home,” she says, glancing around the tiny kitchen before her eyes settle on me. “You should have told me you were here. If I’d known you were so close, I would have—”
“Told Caleb?” I cut in over whatever lie she was poised to tell. “I know. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“I have no idea what you mean.” She touches her throat. From years of observation, I know it’s her tell. She can look you dead in the eyes, a picture of innocence, while she tries to sell you a goldmine on the bayou, but she can’t keep that hand off her throat.
“What I mean is that I know about the apartment in Buckhead.” I wipe down the counter, cleaning because I can’t think what else to do while navigating this awkward conversation with my mother. “He still paying your way, Mama? Caleb told me he had you well under control.”
“Control?” She snaps a brow up, gentile disdain perfected. “No such thing.”
“Did you know?” I toss the rag, sopping wet, into the sink, giving up on any semblance of cleaning. Considering the NDA, I won’t ask her explicitly, but I can read her. I need to know if she sold me out. “You were so thrilled about all that ‘security’ that came with having his baby, you never considered what it was costing me.”
Her eyes flicker, but not with surprise. Did she know? Or at least suspect? “I really don’t know what you mean,” she says.
But her hand is at her throat.
Tears sting my eyes, but I won’t let them fall. Lo and I won the lottery with MiMi, but our mothers are a pair of snake eyes.
“You ‘bout ready, Sil?” Aunt May asks from the kitchen doorway. She meets my eyes with difficulty. “Great service, Iris. You did MiMi proud.”
“Your daughter planned most of it,” I reply, my voice a quiet accusation with a million how could yous puckering beneath the surface.
She stiffens, tilting her chin, a picture of defiance and grace. She and my mother are almost mirror images of one another separated by just a couple of years. They’ve always been close, covered for one another, chosen one another even over their own children.
“Where is Lo?” she asks. “I . . . we didn’t get to talk.”
“Is that a new development?” I ask, sarcasm thick in the air and in my voice. “I seem to remember her not speaking to you for the last decade.”
Her full lips tighten, the delicately chiseled jaw clenching. She tosses her head, the cloud of dark hair settling around her shoulders.
“Tell her I wanted to try,” she says.
“I will tell her no such thing, because if you really wanted to try, you know she’s down at the river and you’d walk down there until she listened and forgave you.” I release a cynical laugh. “But you don’t want to do that, do you?” I lean back against the counter, my arms folded across my chest. “Or at some point since that night you chose him over her, you would have actually tried.”
“What has gotten into you, Iris?” my mother demands, indignantly. “You never used to be so . . . You weren’t like this before.”
“Right,” I say with cold calm. “I never was, thanks to the two of you. Thank God Lo and I have MiMi’s blood to make up for your failings.”
“Let’s go, Priscilla,” Aunt May snaps. “We don’t have to stay here for this kind of treatment.”
“Now that I understand,” I deadpan. “Not accepting abuse or taking anybody’s shit. Again, lessons I didn’t learn from you.”
“When you are ready to be reasonable,” my mother spits with rare gracelessness, “call me.”
“If you can do me one favor, Mama,” I say to their slim, outraged backs as they head for the door. “The next time Caleb calls, don’t tell him that I’m here.”
She looks over her shoulder, and for once she can’t dissemble the truth in her eyes. Lucky guess.
“If not for me,” I say softly, “then for the sake of your granddaughter, don’t tell him anything.”
Without another word, she nods, and the screen door slams shut behind them.
I slump against the sink, relief and anxiety warring inside me. If all goes according to plan, I have nothing to worry about. If I’ve calculated properly, and I think I have, Caleb cares too much about his father’s opinion, his sponsors’ approval, and his precious NBA career to jeopardize it all chasing me.
But what if I’m wrong? What if one day, the sick obsession that drove him to hatch elaborate schemes and engage in manipulation to keep me is stronger than his desire for all those things?
I chuck that into the pile of shit I can’t control. There’s a much larger pile of things I can control, starting with what I want to do next. There’s a part of me that wants to remain here, just Sarai and me, hiding from the world, safe from danger. But I know it can’t be forever. Sarai is too bright not to be in preschool soon. Too curious to only have this small patch of the world to explore. Too social not to have friends.
I follow the path to the river, that swathe of shade and grass overseen by a cypress canvas. Every step brings my grief, carefully stowed away today in a church full of strangers, closer to the surface. Today, the slight breeze whispering through the Spanish moss overseeing the river is a swaying lament for MiMi.
Lo and Sarai sit several feet from the riverbank, and Sarai holds a Louisiana iris. My namesake.
It makes me smile and remember the day with August in the gym when he asked about my name. An ache, separate from my grief, spreads across me. I miss him. I want him, but I have no idea what to do about it.
“They’re gone?” Lo asks, not turning, facing the river.
She’s so like MiMi. Now that I’ve spent time with our great-grandmother, her influence on Lo is clear. I envy that.
“Yeah.” I pull up beside her on the bank. “They’re gone. Your mother—”
“Don’t.” Lo’s voice is iced coffee. Dark. Cold with a bitter edge. “I buried my mother today.”
I nod, not denying it.
“I wish I’d known MiMi longer,” I venture, keeping one eye on Sarai and one eye on the river. It’s not inconceivable that a gator could crawl up on the riverbank or that a snake could slither out of the thick greenery. The bayou is a calculated risk, benefits and dangers constantly on a scale.
“You knew her when you needed to,” Lo says, her voice showing no emotion but her face a ravaged canvas, painted with tears. “So did I.”
I slip my hand into hers, and silently, we squeeze. United again. I can’t imagine I let Caleb come between us. That’s a lie. I let my shame, my embarrassment, and maybe even my jealousy come between us.
“I’m sorry, Lo,” I confess. “I think I was jealous of you.”
“What?” Lo turns startled eyes to me. “When? How could you ever be jealous of me?”
I shrug, my shoulders weighted with self-consciousness and late summer heat. “When you confronted me about letting Caleb control me, I was frustrated. Maybe I regretted my choices.” I pause, assembling my words into the right order. “I resented my life, how small it had become. You were running off to New York to work for a famous fashion designer in an atelier, whatever the hell that is. Meanwhile, I was mashing baby food and wearing yoga pants every day.”
Lo’s husky laugh charms the sun out from behind a cloud, and the last flare of sunlight illuminates the regal bones of her face.
“You? Jealous of me?” She shakes her head, the long braids caressing the curve of her neck. “That’s ironic since I’ve been jealous of you most of my life.”
“What?” I snap my head around to study her fully but don’t release her hand. “No way.”
“Oh, yes way.” She throws me a teasing look, even through damp eyelashes. “Don’t worry. I have since realized the fullness of my own fabulousness.”
I laugh, mouth closed, the humor coming as short nasal puffs of funny air.
“Growing up, I loved you, but I wanted so much that you had,” she says. “I hate what happened to me, but it was good I moved away from you and our mothers.”
I’m curious but also hurt to hear this.
“I can think of a dozen reasons why living here was better than living with them, but why did you need to get away from me?”
“You’ll think it’s silly in that way that girls who never have to think about these things think it’s silly,” she says, her smile self-deprecating, her eyes knowing.
“Tell me anyway.”
“I was dark.” She lifts her braids. “My hair was coarse. I was the odd egg in our little nest, and everyone knew it.”
“What the hell do you mean?” I demand.
“You don’t think about it, but our mothers look exactly alike. Your father was white.” With her free hand, she tosses a few blades of grass into the river. “They were light and you were even lighter, but my dad was black, and I look different.”
It reminds me of August telling me how displaced he felt sometimes. The irony of me feeling like I didn’t belong because I was “too white” and Lo being jealous because she was “too dark” strikes me as funny, and I release a giggle.
“That’s funny to you?” Lo asks, one side of her full mouth tilted.
“It’s just . . . I never felt like I fit in our neighborhood because I looked so different, and the girls always said I was stuck up and thought I was better than them. I really just wanted to fit. I just wanted to look like everyone else.”
“And I just wanted to look like you.” Lo twists her mouth to the side. “When I came here, MiMi sniffed that shit out right away.”
A movement in my peripheral vision catches my eye. “No, Sarai.”
I pull my hand free of Lo’s and walk to the water’s edge, retrieving my little adventurer. I plop down on the grass, careless of the black dress I wore to the funeral, and sit my daughter between my legs. Lo settles in a puddle of black linen beside me, stretching her legs out on the grass.
“MiMi knew that even beyond the hurt of what Mama had done, choosing that motherfucker over me,” Lo says with dispassion, “that there was another hurt under it all. Mama choosing him only reinforced that I wasn’t good enough. Maybe she didn’t love me as much as she would have if I’d been . . . different.”
Memories of Aunt May complaining about Lo’s hair come to mind. She’d say she didn’t know what to do “with hair like this.” When Lo learned to press her own hair, Aunt May and my mother would complain about the “smell of burning hair” in the house. A hundred little thoughts come to me like pinpricks, piercing my ignorant bliss.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I hope I never made you feel that way, Lo.”
“No, not you.” She reaches for my hand again and smiles. “You were my hopscotch, Bo. I knew you didn’t feel that way.”
“Did MiMi do one of her cleansing ceremonies to fix you, too?” I only half-laugh because I’m still not sure what that was or what it did, but I know I’m changed somehow.
“It wasn’t that simple,” Lo says. “It never is. No, she told me about a boy she loved when she was young. When he came to the house, her mother said he failed the paper-bag test.”
“What is a paper-bag test?”
“You have to remember it was New Orleans, years ago,” Lo offers. “Our family was filled with quadroons and octoroons and a whole bunch of words for almost white. So when she came home with a brown brother, her mother broke out the paper bag. They would hold a paper bag against your skin, and if you were darker than the paper bag, you didn’t pass the test.”
“That’s awful. Oh my God.”
“Yeah, and MiMi regretted letting him go. He ended up marrying a friend of hers. He treated her like a queen, and they lived a happy life not a block from where he asked MiMi to marry him.” Lo blinks at tears, her lips tightening. “She told me that she missed out on him because of a stupid paper bag,” Lo says. “And anyone who misses out on me would be as foolish as she had been and that they would live to regret it.”
I glance down at my daughter, with her skin lighter than mine and her eyes of blue–violet, and I swear to myself that no one will ever make her feel out of place or question her identity. It may not be a promise I can completely keep, but I’ll try.
“Anyway, enough reminiscing.” Lo looks at me, clear-eyed and probing. “It’s the future we need to discuss.”
I watch the sun dipping into the long, watery line of horizon, like a cookie diving into milk. “It’s getting dark.” I stand, brushing my dress off and bending to pick up Sarai.
“Listen to me.” Lo grabs my wrist, looking up from her plot on the riverbank. “You can’t stay here, Bo.”
I swallow a quick retort, a defense. Even though these were my very own thoughts before I came to the river, I resist the idea of leaving. “What if it’s not . . .” I gulp sudden trepidation, “. . . safe to leave? What if Caleb comes after us?”
“You’ve done all you can to keep him from doing that.” Lo squeezes my wrist gently until I meet her eyes. “The leash is tight around his neck, but it’s also tight around yours. Think about all you gave up. Get it back.”
Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.
MiMi’s incantation circles my thoughts.
“The dreams you had. Your ambitions,” Lo continues, in unknowing chorus with MiMi’s voice in my head. “Reclaim them.”
“But Sarai needs—”
“Sarai needs to see what we never saw,” Lo says dryly. “Let her see her mother pursuing her dreams. Let her see you standing on your own two feet.”
“I will need the money,” I murmur. The little bit of cash Andrew smuggled to me when I left will run low eventually, even though our expenses have been next to nothing out here.
“You need more than money. Girl, you need a life.” Lo stands, too, taking Sarai from me.
“Do you remember any of your Louisiana geography?” Lo asks.
“Um, that would be a no.” I laugh. “I mean, the basics, yeah.”
“Did you ever learn about deltaic switching?”
“No idea,” I tell her, frowning and searching my memory.
“I don’t remember all the details, but the long and short of it is that the Mississippi River searches for a shorter route to the sea. It makes these deposits of silt and sand over time to get there faster.” Lo shrugs. “Think of it like geographical evolution. Well, the bayou was one of the points of deltaic switching, and over time, about every thousand years or so, it literally changes its course.”
“Wow.” I’m not sure what else to say. “What does that mean, though?”
“It means that this very spot where we’re standing right now was powerful enough to be a part of that—to help set the new course for the freaking Mississippi River.” She starts walking back up the shaded path to the house, but looks over her shoulder, locking our eyes.
“Take a few minutes and think about that,” she says. “Don’t let Caleb define the rest of your life. Change your course.”
I take more than a few minutes after she walks away. I stand there until the sun disappears, and the night spreads the sky with black velvet and studs it with stars. I know I should go in. I’m never this close to the river when it’s dark, but tonight, there’s no fear of gators or snakes or whatever the swamp could use against me. Tonight, the crickets whisper Lo’s words back to me.
Change your course.
And in the lapping water, I hear MiMi’s voice, too.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
I draw a deep, bracing breath, strength in my lungs and pulsing through my blood. I breathe out my fears, releasing my reservations and all that could hold me back. And then I feel it. The power that changed a river’s course floods my veins, and I rise inside, so high I assume a new form, a new shape. A new course.
I rush down the path back to the house, stumbling occasionally in the dark. And it’ll be that way sometimes, running this course, stumbling. All that I’ve been through, all that is to come, none of it is easy. There is no quick fix, but tonight, I feel powerful enough to forge ahead.
Before I lose the nerve, I dig around in my purse until I find it. A small white card, bent, stained, and nearly forgotten, that may lead to big plans. May lead to my future. To my new course.
With shaking fingers, I dial.
