“It’s over there,” Spider yells and keeps hopping forward, short enough to avoid all the low-hanging branches that I have to push through.
“What’s over where?” I can see the fence through the brush. We’re at the back of the camp.
“The VIP entrance,” Spider tells me, then lifts up one end of a flap created by a cut in the mesh fence. I pull up the other end, make sure the kids don’t get snagged on the edges while crawling inside. I count them off. We still have eleven, and I’m pretty sure they’re the same kids we left with. The mixie pixies, they love this. They think it’s a joke. They think it’s an adventure. They laugh. I don’t laugh.
“Come on, it’s fun!” Spider insists. He actually is having fun. Kimet is the last one through, and he’s out of earshot walking with the others back to the classroom when I say, “No, this is bullshit. So this place really could get evicted at any minute?”
“Roslyn’s got good lawyers, though. Like, the best ones. They get a judge to get an injunction, it’s a whole thing. Usually takes about four hours, tops.”
“Usually? What do you mean, ‘usually’?”
“Like a dozen times. Once a month since last year. First it was the neighbors fussing, but Roslyn finally won them over. Last couple times it’s been that guy from the Umoja School. He keeps calling the cops, I’m pretty sure. You know the type. Black folks like him are used to having the power to say who’s black and who’s not. It really pisses them off that some people just opt out.”
“It pisses him off now because his son is here. Kimet.”
“Oh. That makes even more sense. Oh well. It’s cool, though. The whole place is on wheels. If it hits the fan, we just roll.” Spider giggles at the vision. I see it too, and the only response I make is the clenching of my jaw.
I look around at the buildings. I look around again at all the wheels. Even the fence is attached at its base to mere concrete blocks. I can see the grass beneath our feet and imagine this whole space empty again, with just those blades remaining. For a second, I am standing on a vacant lot. Gone are all the black-and-white harlequins.
For her crucial final precollege year, the launchpad to a life of more promise and less struggle, the sole paternal gift I’m not too damn late to offer, I have enrolled my daughter in a school that can literally disappear overnight.
—
I’m Googling “prestigious GED programs” on my phone before I even get home. I’m searching for “Philadelphia Magnet Schools Late Enrollment.” I start thinking, if Mélange collapses maybe I can get Tal to stay with me and do over her senior year. Private school, even — I might be able to cash in on the house by then, possibly even sell it. I start hating myself for not plastering and painting before, not doing all I know how to do to repair this hermitage every moment of the day and faking what I don’t. We’ve already compiled the list of prospective colleges, schools with decent dance programs in California, Rhode Island, and Washington State, the latter being my favorite as it’s the farthest away. It seems an impossible goal, remote yet imminent when I think about how I have to pay for it.
Irv’s car is in my driveway. I get the gate open, get back into my car then pull up slowly behind it like it might decide to suddenly lurch back and smash me. My headlights flash into its cab as I head up the hill. It’s empty inside. The lights inside the house are dark, upstairs and down. There’s someone lying on the porch. Not Irv. Not Tal, either. I can see Tal in the kitchen, through the window.
The fear comes back but I don’t listen to it. I decide the fear itself is nothing of merit, a few little chemicals in my brain, dripping the wrong way. I walk right over and if I must I will walk right through.
“Tal’s home,” Sunita Habersham tells me, pulling herself up off her back and onto her elbows. “She looks exhausted, needs the quiet. She came by Mélange looking for you, but it was locked up. She gave me a ride here in her grandfather’s car. I said I’d wait out here for you.”
Sunita Habersham in the dimness of the one yellow lightbulb. Life can have a sepia tone.
“And why’d you want to see me?” I ask, because the time to ask her is now, before it gets weighted.
“It’s Wednesday. I brought the new batch of comic books. My whole pull list.”
“You came to show me your comic books. You don’t talk to me for weeks, and now, comic books.”
“I had to think, okay? And I decided I wanted to see more of you.”
“You seemed finished when you left before.” My aim was to be jovial. The actual sounds that I emit are nothing like that. No humor can be found there, by either one of us.
“I guess I wasn’t finished with you yet.” She shrugs, as if her own self was a mere acquaintance. “If that’s not okay, I can go. I need a ride, though. You can still borrow my comics. Except for this…one.” She flips through the comics, pulls out an issue of Locke & Key. “Haven’t read this one.”
I roll my eyes, but take her hand. Sun lets me. Soft, sweating palm. I pull toward the door.
“Not in the house.”
“What? You just want to sit on the porch?”
“Tal’s in there,” Sun tells me. “It’s too weird.” The only thing I find weird is that statement.
We go, back to my dad’s little Volkswagen Beetle. We don’t read comics at first, optioning to begin our meeting with fondling instead. It’s almost roomy, with the seats pushed all the way down.
As we progress toward fornication, I look at my father’s house when the angle permits it, waiting to stop if a curtain moves. One never does. Even as our sounds starts building.
“Don’t yell ‘Shazam!’ this time.”
“Right, this time you yell a catchphrase when you come.”
“Which one?”
“Surprise me!” We stop talking.
I don’t come. And I don’t want her too either. I go as slowly as I can. Because when she comes, Sunita Habersham will leave me again. So I don’t let her. I break rhythm, keep pausing. I look out on the vacant lot of the lawn, the grass long and unkempt and dead from the winter’s first frost. It’s so bare. I focus on anything but the pleasure. But eventually the car windows are steamed and I can’t see out anymore.
Afterwards, we do read comics, with the windows cracked. She only stays until the glass has gone transparent once more, and then, per her request, I drive her home.
—
The times Sun visits me following this one, she still won’t go in the house. So in my driveway we meet. She shows up every Wednesday evening, for new comic-book release day. Sometimes she even comes Thursdays as well, if we haven’t read all the issues, sitting in the car postcoital the day before. Sun never mentions the “boyfriend” again. I don’t ask about her “boyfriend.” I ask her to come in the house, I ask her to have dinner with me and my daughter, but I stop doing that eventually since she keeps saying “No.”
14
THE WOMAN WHO breaks into my house breaks into my dream. She sits at the end of the mattress, facing away, but I know it’s her. I know the bones popping through the back of that wet paper flesh could only be hers. And she’s crying. I hear her crying, want to tell her to stop. But if I do she’ll turn around and look at me, and I’ll remember her face and I don’t want that memory.
I put all my energy into lifting one arm, nothing. I put all my energy into kicking one leg, get the same. She leans backward to look at me, like she will fall once more into the bed, and then we will all be doomed. Doesn’t turn around, just leans back. Arches her spine, throws her head far enough that I see her nose and know her eyes will be next. I try to close mine, my eyelids do work, but I can’t close my ears. I hear the whimpers. I hear the sniffs of mucus loosened by tears. I hear the whine.