Correal stepped aside as the outreach group and social workers approached the girls. Farah bent awkwardly to take off five-inch black heels, then stood barefoot, barely five feet tall. She looked like a girl playing dress-up. The sliver of sarcasm that aroused and terrified him had disappeared.
Chickie was shaking. She turned to one of the social workers who had led them out the back door. “I’m so sorry. Tell Mama I’m sorry.”
Chickie’s mother was dead. She’d been dead for months now, as Justin had informed her when he’d started working here. Chickie made that knowledge available to herself only sometimes. For the most part, her mother existed as a being with whom she couldn’t communicate, who couldn’t hear her. She was there now, walking beside them. Chickie was still caught up in the heroin high and needed this woman to give her mother the message.
But the woman misunderstood. “I’ll help you find her. Come with me.”
Chickie and her dead mother followed the woman to the car, through the loud noises of the men being arrested and shouted at, feet moving quickly, police, and sirens.
For Chickie and Farah, the sounds were muted. The things still alive within them were kept hidden — almost completely covered.
In the backseat of the car, the girls lay their hands next to each other, not touching.
Miles’s Blues
by Wanjiku Wa Ngugi
Montrose
It happened one night in Montrose, in the Fielding Café on Fairview Street. There, love found Jennifer — in the form of Miles, named after Davis himself.
Fielding Café was actually a bar that featured new psychedelic rock and blues bands. Jennifer burst through its doors because Lola’s, her usual dive bar, was closed for renovation. Struck by the youthful clientele, she sat on the barstool nearest the band, the only one left. She could have joined the table with an empty seat, but she had never been the social type. With a tequila firmly in hand, she studied her surroundings. In front of her was a small stage with black curtains and a framed pencil drawing of Obama plastered above. That’s what this place was like: amateurish drawings and pictures and paintings. Artists clamoring for walls on which to express themselves. Take, for instance, the silhouette of the woman standing over a grave in a dark forest; or the man standing in front of a burned-down house with the rainbow flag blowing in the wind; or the children standing in front of an old police truck with fists raised high; or the woman, her blond hair cascading in the air, her arms outstretched in front of her. Pent-up emotions splattered on the wall.
As the band did their sound check, Jennifer paid for another drink. The bartender handed her the whiskey sour, and she spotted, above the bar, a picture of Lance Armstrong holding a little girl. Probably his daughter. She remembered sitting on her father’s shoulders during season games. She had often wished, even as a child, that she was someone else. Or that her father would one day show up at her school to watch her perform poetry at the talent shows, even though she never won. Or that her mother would, like her friend’s mother, take her to the park for a picnic. Or that the popular boy in school would spend his time with her instead of making fun of her looks. Wasted youth, she thought. It was one of the reasons she had gone into teaching — to be close to the youth she had missed.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the drums. And that’s when she saw Miles. She held onto her chair and took a sip of her drink, captivated by his long arms and the way they hit the drums as if they had done him wrong. She could tell he was letting go of something. She watched his face as he hit the red drums, how, in those precise moments, something revealed itself.
This love came as a surprise, like most things in Jennifer’s life. Their relationship developed fast that first night. Right there on the corner of Fairview and Grant, in the early hours of the morning, Miles reawakened in her a longing as covetous as the one she first felt at age five, in her family’s two-bedroom bungalow on Crocker Street. This bungalow was a couple of miles from Dunlavy Park, long before it was named for Eyran Chew. Before the bulldozers entered Montrose, eliminating bungalows and cottages with wide porches in order to conform to standards Jennifer’s family and the other residents had no say about, and displacing them.
Her father was a short man with a penchant for politics and cigarettes; he spent most of his free time exchanging opinions at West Alabama Ice House. So much so that, when he came home, he demanded silence to organize his thoughts for the next day. It had been like this since Jennifer was born, so she’d learned from an early age to temper her tantrums so they only emerged when he wasn’t home. One day her father staggered home a couple of hours earlier than usual and caught them by surprise. No one was in their expected positions. Most times, Jennifer’s mother would be preparing his food and Jennifer would be in her bed, practicing her nursery rhymes. This was good because when her father came home, her eardrums were acclimated to her voice and not his. His was always a few notches louder than necessary, so it bounced off the walls, creating a raucous sound.
On this day, however, Jennifer and her six-month-old baby brother sat on their mother’s lap. It was a small house, so his breath that reeked of ethanol and yeast filled all the rooms as he pounced around the space her mother occupied, pointing out her insufficiency. When he pushed her chair backward, Jennifer’s mother had to make a choice. She chose to hold onto the baby because, as she later explained to Jennifer, his skull was not yet fully formed.
Fortunately, except for the bruises in her heart and the shock on her body, Jennifer escaped unhurt. But from then on, she preferred to sit in her room. In that room, she developed the longing, only she did not know what it was she longed for. She carried this yearning everywhere she went. She only ventured outdoors to try to figure it out.
Once, as a child, she walked two miles in her sleep. Then, as a teenager, she walked ten miles away from Montrose in the daytime. Then she traveled twenty-six miles to attend Clear Lake College. Over time, she had come upon three truths about herself. One was that she had developed a distrust for adults. The second was that she harbored undying love for a youth that had passed her by. The third was a realization that the yearning was a part of her.
So she returned and set up house down the street from the Montrose Remembrance Garden on Converse Street, an homage to the neighborhood’s violent past. She often sat outside her one-bedroom apartment surrounded by antique stores, redbrick luxury apartments, and townhomes and watched pub crawlers prowl through. She knew how lucky she was to have secured a place she could afford on her meager teacher’s salary. The longing, however, remained buried inside her, under the membranes of her skin, until the night she saw Miles play his drums.
After the first set, he asked if she wanted a drink, and she declined. He asked if she wanted to buy him one, and she declined. She wanted to walk away, but he kept talking, saying things about her face and her hair and her body. His shirt clung to his torso and his boyish smile lingered. A wisp of hair fell on his forehead, and she had the urge to push it back. He hung onto her every word. When she indicated she wanted to go home, he would not accept it and asked her to stay for their second set.
She asked why they played so late into the night and he asked why not, tilting his head back and laughing. He said it wasn’t like he had a curfew or anything. She laughed uneasily. He told her he liked it when she laughed. He touched her hand as he ordered another shot, and the touch stirred something inside her. His hands were soft, and when his eyes danced on hers, she knew he saw only her. She decided to wait until the band was done.