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  She was, I began to think, maybe just a bit like me, another black mongrel, her hair and eyes in part from a Filipina mother who, for some reason, had to leave the country. But, really, Aisha was only herself. That chicken pox scar on her nose. Or that tiny dot with a tail at the edge of her pupil, a tadpole near a whirlpool of black.

  —

  “I have to go,” Aisha now told me, looking up at the library’s clock.

  “I’ll walk with you,” I said.

  It was getting close to eleven in the morning, and the margin of shade cast by the buildings had shrunk to almost nothing. In the courtyard of a neighbouring building, someone had set out a turtle-shaped swimming pool for the kids. One little girl carefully dipping her foot into the water that had probably already turned to soup. Before we made our way back to the Waldorf, we stopped off at a convenience store, and Aisha bought a can of Sprite. We shared it while sitting on the curb of the old parking lot near our units. There was a boy thumping a basketball on the sticky asphalt. An empty cop car was parked on the side of the lot. Another cop car was visible a block away. And then still another car drifted slowly past us on the avenue, pulled to a stop a block ahead.

  “Really?” Aisha said. “Three?”

  I shrugged, and she took another sip from the can. Nearby on the shaded concrete curb was a mother gently rocking her baby, and both had their eyes closed. They had probably been up all night. Aisha touched my arm to hand me her Sprite, and I noticed on the lip of the can the pearl of liquid that had touched her mouth. I sipped, and handed the rest back to her. She drained the can and stood to go home, but before she did she gave me a hug goodbye. I felt the slick on her arms as she lifted them over my shoulder, I felt her stomach and for the first time her hips pressed against me. There was a long pause, a moment in which all sorts of things suddenly became possible, but then a siren wailed, and just as suddenly all was lost.

  A cop car pulled up beside a group of young men who had been walking down the sidewalk. The siren was quickly cut, but it triggered every one of us. The baby woke and started crying. The mother’s eyes snapped open, and when she recognized me, she stared as if I were a stray and possibly rabid dog. The fragile peace was broken, nerves flayed once again, but could this really explain what Aisha did next? She looked down and spotted a broken chunk of asphalt that she loosened further with the heel of her sneaker. She picked it up, stepped back for balance, and hurled. It hit a window of the empty police car, making a sharp sound like the breaking of hard candy in your mouth, spider-webbing the glass into a pattern of pale blue without breaking.

  A cold hard panic in my bowels, my head and chest pounding. The cops far down the street didn’t seem to hear or notice, and they just continued questioning the youths. I looked at Aisha, this girl I thought I’d known or at least glimpsed, brushing from her damp face a strand of curly hair, setting her eyes hard at me, daring me to say something.

  How could I? Of all the things that had happened after the shooting, this was by far the craziest.

  THREE

  She’s become a writer, she tells us, the paid kind. After fleeing the Park a decade ago, she dove into a general science degree, before declaring in her second year a major in computer science. She attacked coding languages and algorithms and data structures with a single-mindedness that unsettled everyone around her. “Do you ever relax?” asked a classmate, and the room laughed. “Do you ever relax?” asked her lab supervisor, one evening, when they were alone. She steeled herself, avoided all company, graduated with the second-highest average of her class, but didn’t, unlike most others, immediately land a full-time job. Was she unconsciously cold in interviews? Was that it? She did, eventually, begin working as a programmer in a large and successful IT start-up. She spent two years in a room of mostly young men, bracing herself against the monitor stink, the perspiration, the banter, until she finally went rogue. She’s now a “hired gun,” she explains, a freelance programmer for short-term projects, mostly GIS-related, and never more than a few weeks. In the past three months, she’s worked in both Manila and Austin. Before that, she says, she helped design and implement a cable network solution in the capital of Uganda.

  “Kampala,” says Mother.

  Aisha smiles and lifts her cup of tea to Mother before sipping. We are sitting in the living room washed in morning light, on this third day of Aisha’s visit. Spring is finally beginning to show. Through the living room window, we can see an old woman setting out small flowerpots and planters on her doorstep, a man hanging wet clothes on a balcony clothesline. On the sidewalk, a bunch of kids are playing basketball beside the thawing of grey snow. Aisha takes a bite of her buttered sweetbread, and she speaks again in a lowered tone.

  “A year ago, after a stint in Venezuela, I caught a flight on my own coin to Trinidad. I visited the village where my father was born. Where you were born too, Ruth. I saw the cane fields now wild. I saw the white church of the Spiritual Baptists. You remember it all, don’t you, Ruth? I’ve been thinking a lot about that place since my father died.”

  The wet smack of a basketball outside. Mother nods, takes another sip of her tea, swallows slowly.

  “Tell me about Kampala,” she says.

  —

  For the rest of the morning, Aisha sits with Mother chatting quietly about the many places she has visited, but never returning to the matter of their personal losses. Neither appears at all interested in including me, and sometimes they seem outright secretive. In the early afternoon, I walk in on them whispering together on the couch. I catch a burst of shared laughter, the first time I’ve heard Mother laugh in a while.

  —

  “I’ve been wondering,” Aisha tells me later that night when Mother is asleep. “Could I plan a get-together? Just a gathering, really, with food and music, maybe a few words spoken about the people we’ve lost, Francis especially.”

  She reads my face but continues explaining. “It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It really doesn’t have to be formal in any way. It could be as simple as a dinner. We’d invite a few of the boys from Francis’s life.”

  “Most have moved away,” I say. “Others…It’s been ten years, people just want to move on.”

  “It won’t hurt to ask them. They can always say no. Also, others might want to come. Younger people. Kids dealing with their own stuff today.”

  “I don’t think so, Aisha. My mother doesn’t need a group of strangers in her home.”

  “They wouldn’t be strangers. They’d be people I’ve met. Kids from neighbourhoods like ours. Some international students from the city campuses. Just people trying to make sense of things.”

  “Let them make sense of things somewhere else. I’m sorry, Aisha, I can’t allow this right now. It won’t work.”

  “This would be good for your mother. This would be good for you, too.”

  “Don’t tell me what’s good for us, Aisha.”

  “You know she’s not well, right, Michael? The way she drifts. The way she wanders. Yesterday, when you were at work, we were talking about the old neighbours, and she excused herself to start searching for something she couldn’t describe to me. She ended up wandering outside, still searching. I watched her cross the avenue without even looking. I had to shout for her to turn and wait.”

  “She’s getting older…”

  “It’s got absolutely nothing to do with age. You know that. Your mother’s like this because she’s still mourning. Or else she’s unable to mourn. It’s been ten years and she still can’t accept. She’s stuck.”

  I know that Aisha is talking about “complicated grief.” I’ve heard the term used by doctors, and I’ve read books from the library. There are losses that mire a person in mourning, that prevent them from moving forward by making sense of the past. You become disoriented, assailed by loops of memory, by waking dreams and hallucinations. I don’t need any of this explained to me, but I’m reminded by Aisha’s face that she’s grieving too. I breathe out, nod in a noncom
mittal way.

  “Let me think about it,” I offer. “She’s been doing all right lately. I just don’t want to complicate things for her.”

  —

  The following day, it happens. Aisha and I go for a short early-morning walk, and we return to an empty house. I reassure Aisha, but within ten minutes there’s a shy knock at the door, and when I answer it, it’s a neighbourhood boy, Sivi.

  “Your mother,” he says, “she’s in the valley. She’s not wearing shoes.”

  I avoid looking at Aisha while slipping quickly back into my coat and shoes. We walk down the avenue to the edge of the bridge. We step over the guardrail and spend time rummaging around until we find the entrance to the rabbit path, hidden among young trees and withered brush and cluttered papers and plastic. We push forward and down through the scrub and low branches and slippery matted gunk of leaves. Soon the sounds of traffic have softened until we’re submerged from the city and walking a quiet paved path through the skeletons of trees, their branches bare and dark and wet.

  “I know where she is,” I tell Aisha.

  Just beyond the path, through the underbrush, there’s a clearing beside the creek. The water is higher and faster than usual because of the spring runoff. And here Mother is standing about ten feet away from the edge. There’s no need to approach her right away, no need to rush, and I stay with Aisha at a distance. The sunlight is brittle but bright. The water in the creek is tinged brown and olive, and it makes a nice rushing noise over the smooth grey stones. Tendrils of moss blow under the water. There are some small flowers already beginning to bloom at the water’s edge, very light blue, very small. Mother moves towards them now, lifting her skirt to get through the thistles, and eventually standing right at the creek’s edge. She reaches down to the nearest petals, cupping them tenderly in her hands.

  Here, the pillars of the bridge are covered with graffiti tags and drawings, faces of people like those in the Park, and higher up, in the wedge of shelter just beneath the street level, there’s a stained mattress and evidence of a fire and crushed cans of food and beer. Aisha is quiet. And when I look there are flashes of light upon her arms, sun speckling through the moving trees. Coins of light on her face.

  “She gets into states,” I say, quietly. “It’s not all the time.”

  Mother has noticed us now. She turns and adjusts the collar of her winter coat. The bottom of her skirt is stained damp, and she tries to hide from our sight her bare feet, her toes blackened with mud. She has a small bunch of the blue flowers in her hand, a bright blue, an unnameable pretty colour. Singular.

  TWO DAYS AFTER FRANCIS LEFT HOME, I woke late, my clothes soaked with sweat. I rose dizzily to my feet, squinting hard against the light, and I began to search the kitchen. For some time, Francis had been bringing home milk and juice at least, occasionally fruit, and once in a while chicken or fish. But now that he was gone, the cupboards were empty. The last bit of butter had been forgotten out in the sun, filling its dish with bright yellow for the ants. I checked the fridge: a quarter carton of milk gone bad, the machine powerless against the heat. The only real food was a Tupperware container of rice and peas that looked too old to eat. An empty juice jug, a bottle of pepper sauce. A jar of baby dill pickles. I fished one out with my fingers to crunch.

  The early-afternoon sun had swung around the building and was now flooding thick into the living room. I carefully closed the drapes and drank water mixed with spoons of sugar for taste and it ran out of my skin like I was some spaghetti sieve. I tried watching game shows, but it was too hot. I tried soaking my head in the bathroom sink filled with cold water. I tried adjusting the drapes, and looking through the glass, I noticed the windows of some of the apartments facing us, and I saw what seemed to be a solution. I fetched tinfoil from the kitchen and I taped sheets of it to the windows, slowly smoothing out the metal crinkles with the palm of my hand.

  Glide of my sweat on the foil.

  I was watching cartoons when Mother came back from work. She looked wrecked. She looked into the fridge. She held the pickle bottle up to the unusually weak light, observing the spices swirling in the liquid, her brow raised as though she were making a calculation.

  “Is this it?” she asked.

  “Is this what?”

  “Is this all you plan on eating today?”

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  She looked about the darkened room. Then she saw it, saw what I had done to the windows.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “It’s tinfoil.”

  “I can see it’s tinfoil. What’s it doing there?”

  “I put it up to reflect the sun.”

  Cartoon classical music sounded from the television as Mother stared at me.

  “Is that what I look like to you?” she said, her voice edgy, halting. She gestured again to the window. “Like the sort of woman who puts tinfoil up on she windows? Like the sort of woman who advertises ‘tinfoil’ to everyone passing on the street?”

  “It’s not a bad idea. I mean, other people do it.”

  “And am I other people?” she said, the volume building in her voice. “Do you stand there and look at your mother, your own mother, and think, look! There she is! My mother! Other people!”

  I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t think it’d be a good idea to try. When I looked over at her, she hadn’t moved. She was still holding the pickle jar. More music from the television, the cwazy wabbit fleeing, legs blurring.

  A jar exploded against the wall behind me and sent shards flying all over the place. Then quiet. Something wet was on my upper lip, and I touched it carefully with my tongue, fearing blood. Mother righted herself after the effort of her throw, looked behind me to the wall, to the glazed pattern on the wall, the broken glass on the floor.

  “Are you cut?” she asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You’re touching your face.”

  “It’s just pickle juice.”

  The fridge door was still open, and she slumped against the handle, her chin pressed strangely into her neck. She stayed like that for a moment, and then she breathed out and blinked as if she’d just woken up. She looked deep into the fridge, used her fingernail to scratch at some stain on the vegetable crisper. Shook her head, the sheen of light upon her face.

  “Do you smell that?” she asked. “The dill?”

  —

  In the library that evening, Aisha told me that Goose had been moved out of intensive care. She was doing much better. Word had gone out that she had a rare blood type, and donors had volunteered from around the city. Aisha went silent. She was studying what looked like an algebra textbook. More than studying—staring down the equations. I decided not to mention the asphalt she’d thrown at the window of the cop car. Instead I sat quietly for a good length of time, combing through the newspaper coverage of the shooting.

  There were updates, columns, letters to the editor. A lot of people were angry about the way Goose had suffered. Some called for a crackdown on crime, others for much more. One columnist wrote in that old and ready-made language about “immigrants” and “ethnic neighbourhoods” and “sending people back where they came from,” even though most in the Park knew that the suspects had all been raised in the surrounding city. But what caught my attention in one story was a photo of Anton, identified as both known to police and deceased. It was one of those high school photos that for so many of us always seem to go wrong. The photographer didn’t choose the right background or adjust the light settings, and so the outlines of Anton’s face and hair bled into the navy behind him. His eyes steeled, his mouth screwed tight upon his face.

  What did I know about Anton, this boy whom few would mourn? He lived in the Park, in a sagging low-rise complex on a muddy lot. He shared a two-bedroom unit with his parents, his two brothers, and three sisters, all elbowing for room in a place barely as big as anyone else’s living room. Most times he seemed to live bare and in the open. He never had the
right sort of clothes against the cold and rain. He couldn’t hide the fact that at dinnertime he wouldn’t be going inside, or that he’d never visited a dentist. At all hours, he could be seen hanging out on the bench in the courtyard of my building, calling out jokey violent threats to me whenever I passed by.

  I had no reason whatsoever to like Anton. But once, I saw his world close in hard upon him. A pack of men from outside the neighbourhood hunted him down and caught him in a field not far from the Park where there was just enough darkness for the work to be done. They roughed him up, made him bleed from his nose and mouth, kicked his legs and stomach over and over again with their boots. I caught the last bit of this from a distance, but was probably alone in doing so since there was very little noise. Anton never called out for help. The attackers finished their business by pulling off much of his clothing and leaving him half-naked.

  I approached carefully, and when I got close enough, I heard Anton crying. He had his hands over his eyes, a wheezy sound in his throat, crumpled face, and tears that were hard to distinguish from the muddy filth he’d been left in. When he saw me, he turned his face away, but then he started pretending that he’d been laughing, his sobs turning to chuckles, the laughter becoming almost real. I watched with mixed feelings of concern and annoyance, until I finally asked what the hell was so funny. Anton shook his head, trying to catch his breath and voice from the waves of laughter now shaking him. He couldn’t tell, wouldn’t explain. It was a joke, he said, a dirty joke. Way too dirty for a little bitch like me, he said.