Tyler can talk, but it takes a while for the words to make their way to his lips, so at first Lawan isn’t worried. Then his hands begin to shake and Lawan realizes it’s a seizure. He jumps in the driver’s seat and shoots straight down Cherry to the big hospital, where his van and his uniform get the guard’s attention and he hits the ER in five minutes flat, by which time Tyler is shivering and his eyes are just white marbles and the hospital staff don’t need any paperwork or cards before they take him and Lawan stands, stunned, beginning to question if he did the right thing, or if he should have held the kid’s tongue down. Wasn’t that the risk? They could choke on it, or bite it or something.
When he calls Tricia he downplays the incident so she won’t kill herself driving over. Once she’s safely in the waiting room, he fleshes out the reality and they sit holding hands, until the doctor comes out and says Tyler seems okay, but Lawan can tell something’s changed. There is a lot of medical talk which Tricia seems to understand. She begins to follow the doctor, then stops. “You coming?”
“No, you go ahead. Your time.”
An understanding passes between them that he won’t be there for her the way she’d hoped, and she accepts it gracefully, but he knows how she feels, and that drives him out to the van, which the guard has moved to a nearby lot.
The guy hands him his keys. “Kid okay?”
“Hope so.” Lawan shrugs, safe inside the assumption that he is just the driver.
He’d planned to spend the evening at Tricia’s. Birthday dinner, birthday sex. Lawan assumes that’s off, but Gloria isn’t expecting him home for hours, so he goes to Lawsandra’s.
She answers the door without her wig, and it takes a few seconds for him to understand the rooster tail was fake. Her real hair looks like tufts of dryer lint.
“How was the concert?”
Lawsandra shrugs. “You didn’t really miss anything. The seats were shitty.”
She brought home KFC and gestures for him to make himself a plate. While they eat, she doesn’t mention his birthday even though Lawan brings up Memorial Day and the change to his schedule in a couple of weeks after school ends for the summer. He can’t think of any other way to get her to consider the date, so he asks if she knows what happened to his sisters.
“Huh?” She’s looking for something in the fridge.
“The twins, Lawnita and Lawkaya. They went to a family named Miller.”
Lawsandra looks at him as if he wasn’t supposed to know this.
“I looked for ’em on Facebook, but that’s a common name.”
“Lawkaya and Lawnita?”
“Miller.”
His phone rings and Karen leaves a message wanting to know if everything is okay. She’s called Gloria several times at home and didn’t get an answer.
Lawan’s not worried. When he left for work, she was at the table with her Chinese farmer book, the newspaper, and a cup of tea. He’d prepped her dinner and she was going to microwave it whenever she got hungry. Still, he puts on his jacket. As he’s moving toward the door Lawsandra says, “They’re your half-sisters.”
“What?”
“Half. Different father. Yours was named Ron and he died in a house fire. Police tried to say it was a crack thing, but it was electrical. The lights and stuff in that place were always weird, and some of the fixtures there, at the ceiling, they had these black marks, like scorches, around them.”
Lawsandra points to the ceiling, at the hundreds of tiny holes their blinding game has left.
“You know where they are?”
“No. They was so little.”
“What difference does that make?”
“They don’t remember. It’s all up here.” She stabs at her temple. “You make your connections and then they stuck, right? Like you, you come back looking for me because you remember. They don’t, and why confuse ’em now?”
On the way home Karen calls again, says Gloria is still not answering. After that, time gets thick. Lawan pushes through. At Gloria’s he finds the bedroom door shut. She must have gotten herself up here on her bottom. There’s no way she could do the stairs on her feet.
Lawan knocks. “I’m home. You okay?”
Nothing. He raps on the door with all four knuckles. “You all right?”
Silence.
He tries the knob and finds it locked.
“Mom?” The word sounds strange. He repeats it, louder. “Mom?”
Razor blades. Pills. Alcohol. The results flash across his mind in vivid pictures. He pounds on the door, “Mom! It’s Lawan. You answer now!”
Then he hears the toilet flush, the faucet, her walker rattling. She opens the door, registers his expression and laughs. “What’s the matter? Did you think I was dead?” Gloria is almost as tall as he is. She gives him a smacking kiss on the cheek.
“Why didn’t you answer the phone? Karen and I were calling.”
“I was trying to nap. My God, why is everyone so worked up? I can be alone for a few hours.”
As Gloria starts to shuffle past him, Lawan blurts, “Why did you ask me?”
“What?”
“Ask me. Why did you ask me to help you, if you got worse?”
She takes a moment to register his meaning and it passes between them, the recognition that asking him to help her die is possible, but asking Karen, Dennis, or Kevin is not.
“That was stupid. I’m sorry.” They are jammed face to face in the narrow hall. Gloria grips his wrist. “I love you, Lawan.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “I get it. I know how it is.”
She squeezes his arm. “I have your birthday present. It’s downstairs.”
“Come on,” he says. “I’ll carry you.”
THE RIVER WARTA
Now that Caroline lived alone for the first time in her life, she began to be irritated by the cleanliness of her house. When she left something somewhere, it stayed there. If she didn’t enter a room for days, it collected nothing but a thin, almost imperceptible layer of dust. Her daughters’ bedrooms grew stiff and gray with disuse. In her own bed, Frederick’s pillow remained plump and smooth, the case free of his coarse, white hair, and Caroline — though she knew it was ridiculous — took this as an affront. It unnerved her that nothing changed in the house unless she changed it.
So when the cat meowed, a ridiculous predatory supplicant outside her window in a golden twilight during Indian summer, Caroline did not broom it away as she would have a year ago. With the Depression on, she’d become used to homeless, hungry visitors. She stood at the window looking down at its twisting, black body, its chartreuse eyes, and whispered, “What’s the matter? Are you lost? This isn’t your house. Go on now, go,” aware that her tone was more inviting than dismissing.
The next day, her youngest girl, Eva — who’d inherited too much of her mother even in her mother’s opinion — came by. “There’s a stray cat around the house. Where’s the broom?”
“Leave it be,” Caroline said. “It’s doing no harm.”
The night before, she’d watched the cat lap at the milk she’d slipped out on a tea saucer, marveling at the strange distance between herself and this woman who stood in front of the window. She who would not tolerate a cat’s filthy tongue on her good tea service, especially now that she could no longer replace what might be broken. But this woman, who was using her dishes, her hands, her eyes, had carried the saucer out and watched with amusement and even pride as the animal satisfied itself.
“Where did it come from?” Eva asked.
“Nowhere,” Caroline said. “I don’t think she has a home.”