After Nothing (7 page)

‘You can come in now.’

‘Your mom be down with that?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll wait till she is.’

‘You’ll be waiting a long time.’

‘What about your dad?’

‘If he was like he used to be, then he’d want to meet you. He would have wanted to meet you the first day I met you.’

Kane opened his door.

‘But Kane,’ I said hurriedly, ‘my dad’s going to be in his pajamas. And my mom, she won’t be nice.’

‘She couldn’t be worse than Wayne was to you.’

‘Yes, she could,’ I replied.

It was the first time in my life that I’d introduced a boy to my parents. They met Kane separately, of course. I woke Dad up, but he got out of bed and shook Kane’s hand. I hadn’t expected he would even remember how to do that. Mom did not shake hands. For a moment, just as we walked into the living room, I got this feeling, like I wanted her to like Kane. But that passed when she couldn’t even bring herself to say two words to him. After I introduced him she just turned back to her TV show, without asking Kane a single thing about himself.

Kane was working that night. He messaged me at two in the morning. The translation of his abbreviated form of text language into English was:

‘Your dad’s cool.’

His second message said, ‘Can’t get over how much you look like your mom.’

Third message: ‘But you is way more than her, baby.’

Message number four: ‘Best thing in the world is that you’re mine.’

Lisa didn’t look like Mom. To look at them you wouldn’t have even known they were related, let alone mother and daughter. Mom and me though, Kane was right about that. Pictures of her when she was young, you could have swapped me for her in a photo and no one would have noticed the difference unless they were looking really closely for it. At sixteen I was taller than her, and my skin was a bit darker, but our faces were crazy similar.

When I was a kid I liked that I looked like Mom and Lisa didn’t. Like, even though Mom didn’t hug me or talk to me the way she did to Lisa, she and I had our faces in common and it connected us. As I got older and smarter though, I realized how little it meant. Once, when Lisa was still alive, I asked Mom if I looked like anyone on her side of the family. She’d just come out of Lisa’s room holding a stainless steel bowl and I was sitting on the floor outside the door. I guess I hoped she’d look at me like I was an idiot, tell me to go look in the mirror, say to me that no one could ever mistake us for being anything but mother and daughter. She didn’t though. She handed me the bowl, told me to clean it out and then went back into Lisa’s room. In the bowl was a mix of bile, blood and a couple of chewed-up bits of apple Lisa had managed to swallow that day.

I washed it out and took it back. Mom was sitting up on the bed and Lisa was resting her head in Mom’s lap. Mom kept stroking Lisa’s forehead. The same tender caress, from Lisa’s eyebrows back toward her hairline. Mom’s dark hand and Lisa’s golden-brown sweating forehead. I guess I was pretty dumb not to realize Lisa wasn’t my full-blood sister. And not just because of her lighter skin. I’ve already said Lisa and Mom looked nothing alike, but she obviously didn’t share any features with my dad either. Her hands, face, feet, legs, everything – it was all her own.

There sure was something real special about her though. Lisa was so special our mom had no need for another daughter. Ever.

Dad wanting me must have been the reason I was born. Must have had to insist upon it. It would have taken a lot to convince my mom to do something she didn’t want to do. Maybe she was hoping for a son, or maybe she
did
want another daughter – until I arrived, and something about me made her change her mind. Even in my earliest memories, the ones where I’m still riding my blue and white tricycle, I can feel that she doesn’t like me. She’s ignoring me as I’m calling out to her. I’m right there beside her, but she’s watching Lisa ride her bike. Lisa’s twelve and I’m three, but even as young as that I know she prefers Lisa.

My sister found out she was HIV-positive in her final year at school. She gave blood at our church blood drive, and then someone rang a few days later from the blood donor place and said she needed to come in and see one of their doctors.

I try to think how things were when the phone rang. Was there noise in the house that the ring had to cut through? Or was everything silent; the house just waiting, light moving swiftly away, everything growing overcast? Darkness creeping in through the cracks of our family façade and taking up residence in what was supposed to be a home.

Did Lisa run to the phone? Maybe she was in her bedroom and she bolted down the stairs to the hallway. She could have thought a friend was phoning her, or even a guy. I know she beat Mom to the phone. If I close my eyes, and search really hard; if I concentrate just the right amount and don’t let the memory slip away, I can find the pitch of Lisa’s voice. I can seek out her tones of confusion and worry and pull them to the surface. I can hear her say, at the beginning of her end, ‘I have to see a doctor.’

I wasn’t there. I don’t know what was really said.

Lisa finished school, but she didn’t go to college and she never got a job. She was always just in her room. Her body was healthy then. It was another year until her gums started bleeding. She didn’t tell anyone. It was the nose bleeds that started soon after that drew attention to the fact something was going on.

It’s hard to know for sure whether she would have got leukemia without being HIV-positive. It’s possible the two were unrelated. I guess it doesn’t matter. First she got HIV, then she got cancer, and that’s what happened.

She didn’t fight to live.

I watched her die from a distance. There was her and Mom on the inside, and me and Dad on the outside. The only time she ever let me in on what she was thinking about it all happened one day out of the blue. I was in her room wrapping her birthday present to Dad. Black socks with stripes around the top and three handkerchiefs with grey edging. I’d been with Mom when she’d bought them. I’d wanted her to get the ones with blue edging, because that was Dad’s favorite color, but Mom had ignored me and bought the grey ones.

I was halfway through wrapping them, scissors and sticky tape and a spool of green ribbon on the carpet beside me.

Lisa was lying still on her bed, on top of the comforter.

‘I only did it once. Just one time.’

I looked over at her and tears were sliding down her face and onto her pillow.

I didn’t say anything. I was ten. I knew about sex. I knew that she’d been infected by a virus you never want to get. And the virus itself: I knew plenty about that because Dad talked about it all the time. He had so many books on it, and folder after folder of internet printouts full of research and treatment options. Dad and me had even gone to some support meetings for families of people with HIV. Mom wouldn’t go, and Lisa never attended any support groups for people living with HIV. The fact was, Lisa wasn’t living with HIV; she was dying with it. The only times she ever left the house were for medical appointments. Even then Mom had to prepare her for the idea of them weeks in advance, and then on the day cajole her, and manipulate her, just to get her out the front door.

I know Lisa’s stays in hospital were torture for Mom. Lisa just shut down if she wasn’t at home. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t read. Mom would have to feed her, and lead her by her hand if they went for a walk. The doctors and nurses used the word ‘traumatized’ a lot. I think ‘hiding’ is a better one.

Lisa would get home from those hospital stays and rather than be all shut down and incapable she’d just be a bit quiet. Then, within half a day, words would come. I’ll tell you something else too, hospital or home, unless she was completely incapacitated with chemo, or just with plain dying, like at the end, Lisa never let anyone take her to the bathroom. Even when she supposedly couldn’t feed herself, she could still take herself to the bathroom.

‘You can live with this,’ my father once said to her. ‘People live with HIV, Lisa. You just decide to.’

But Lisa refused. She hid from life and she hid from the certainty of death. When it was finally time, she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t at peace. The last words she spoke as she drifted in and out of consciousness were, ‘Momma, no.’

When Lisa died, my mom shut everyone out. She stopped going to church, and the few friends she had were cut out of her life. She turned on Dad, and helped push him into his first stroke. Then she neglected him so badly he had another one.

Also, her rejection of me became complete.

After Lisa’s death, she never asked what I was up to, or where I’d been that day. Never even told me off. Once I asked her for help with my homework.

‘Go see your father,’ she said.

That was after his second stroke. My father could no sooner help me with my homework than do a child’s jigsaw puzzle, and my mom knew it.

Even when I started coming home late because I’d been with Kane, she still didn’t ask a single question. Just left my dinner out on the bench, congealing.

I spoke out in desperation one night. It was a couple of weeks after Kane had first come over. She was watching television; I was sitting at the dining table prodding limp broccoli with my fork.

‘What did you think of Kane, Mom?’

She looked over at me, and then looked back at the television.

I hated her in that moment. I went straight up to my room, and slammed the door as hard as I could behind me. No sound came back at me. Didn’t I know the house was dead? Well, I was alive, and I was going to make sure my mother knew it.

I played music loudly. I talked on the phone loudly. Once, I cooked dinner before she got to it. But she still made her own.

Maybe I should have cut the television aerial. Instead I hit upon the idea that the best way for me to get something from her was to put together a list of questions about herself, and just make her answer them.

Where did you go to school? I wrote down.

Did you have a favorite teacher?

What was your favorite subject?

What did you do after you left school?

How did you and Dad meet?

What was your first house like?

Was I a good baby?

I got as far as asking her ‘Did you have a favorite teacher?’ before she turned the volume up on the television and pretended I was no longer there.

Kane and I had a fight with colored markers one day. It was stupid, but it was also so much fun. I started it with a blue line of permanent marker down his arm. We were upstairs at his place. Wayne was out at his new girlfriend’s, and Kane was watching a game of football. I was bored and he was concentrating on the game. I had my pencil case out and a whole lot of books because I was behind on all my homework, and I thought I’d get some done while he was watching the game. Problem was, it was a Friday night, and I really wasn’t in the mood for homework. Also, Kane was wearing this white t-shirt and the sleeves were pulling tight over his biceps, and I couldn’t stop looking at them.

I’d never physically initiated sex between us. Obviously I’d told him straight up in the past that I wanted to have sex, but I never made the first move physically. See, the thing was, I didn’t actually like sex that much. I mean, I liked being that close to Kane, and I liked him wanting me that much, and everything around it like the kissing and touching, I liked all of that, but depending on how into it I was, sometimes the sex itself didn’t feel good – or it just straight out hurt.

What I’m getting at was it was a big deal for me to initiate it. Physically. Now, having looked at his biceps a lot, and the flex of his muscles as he changed position on the couch, I began studying the broadness of his shoulders, and how his t-shirt fit firmly across his chest. Apart from when Kane really went to work kissing and touching me, I don’t know that I’d ever really been turned on before. And now just looking at him was doing it for me.

I placed a hand on his forearm and then slid it up to where the sleeve of his t-shirt drew tight around his arm. He didn’t respond.

I went to kiss him but he looked around me, saying, ‘Nat, I’m watching this.’

I sat back on the couch beside him. Hurt flared, and with it the feeling of rejection. And frustration. I uncapped a marker from my pencil case and drew a thick blue line down his arm.

‘What did you do that for?’ said Kane, frowning as he looked from his arm to me. He was expecting words. Instead, I quickly drew a blue line from the top of his cheekbone down to the edge of his jaw.

Kane grabbed my hand, and forced me back on the couch and the marker from my hand. He held it threateningly near my face.

‘Say you’re sorry.’

‘No.’

The marker came closer to my cheek. ‘Baby, you better apologize.’

‘I’m not sorry. You were ignoring me.’

‘So, you want this?’ he said drawing a line down my cheek so lightly that it tickled.

I began squirming and laughing and trying to protest all at the same time, but his body had me completely pinned. I blindly felt around on the floor until I found what I was searching for: another marker. This time, a black one. I swiped at his hand. That led to an all-out marker war.

I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed that hard before or since. It went on and on. Kane kept getting the upper hand, so then I’d call a truce. He’d make me promise to keep it, and I would, only to renege the moment I was free of him and able to grab another marker.

It ended up with him on one side of the couch and me on the other. Kane had decided he’d had enough, and had managed to confiscate all of the weaponry except for the two markers I was holding in each hand. He was trying to negotiate my surrender across the couch, but I just kept laughing and saying no.

So then Kane leapt over the couch, but he must have put too much weight on the back of it, and it toppled over backwards. I was laughing so hard I had tears streaming down my face. Kane was on the floor laughing too, and I collapsed beside him because my stomach muscles were hurting too much to stay upright.

Kane plucked the markers from my hands. I gave them up without a fight. We both stopped laughing and just lay there looking at each other. There was a draft coming in under the front door, and it gave me goosebumps. The carpet we were lying on was worn, and ingrained with the sort of dirt that takes years to accumulate and can never be vacuumed out.

I was happy to lie there though, in that draft and on that dirty carpet. Just to look at him and be with him. I wondered where he had come from. What people, throughout the history of the world, had created him: his strong body, his height, his smile. How part of each and every one of those people had contributed to make the face I was gazing at.

While I was admiring Kane, he must have been admiring me.

‘You’re beautiful, woman.’

‘So are you.’

‘Say what?’

‘I think you are.’

‘A man ain’t like that.’

‘How’s he like?’

‘Tough,’ he said, grinning as he rolled over on top of me.

We did it right there, in the cold draft and on the dirty carpet. I liked it. More than I had ever liked it before then. Kane noticed. He didn’t say anything about it, he just gave me this look afterward as he righted the couch, and it was the sort of look that made my face heat up.

Kane went back to watching what was left of the game. I made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner because that was just about the only option. I ate two. Kane ate five, and drank a quart of milk.

Kane then watched the post-game analysis while I lay with my head in his lap. Partway through the commentary he found an overlooked marker between two of the couch cushions. Uncapping it, he bent his head and drew a graffiti-style heart over the mess of lines he’d left on the side of my face.

I stayed absolutely still. He finished the heart, then wrote on my neck.

When I went and looked in the bathroom mirror, I could only make out part of what he’d written. The last word was too far round the back of my neck for me to be able to see it. I could guess it was his name though, because the other words, written in his perfect script, were ‘I belong to’. And I knew who I belonged to.

Kane turned eighteen the following week, but I couldn’t hide my new tattoo from him for that long. I let him find it himself. It was fall. We were in the gym storage room, and due to the leaves falling onto the roof from the surrounding trees the skylights let in even less light that usual. We were making out on one of the discarded gym mats, and Kane tugged on the scarf I was wearing.

‘Lose this.’

I unraveled the scarf then turned away from him to dump it on the ground behind me.

‘What’s on your neck?’ asked Kane.

He stopped me turning back to him, his hand going to the letters tattooed to the right down the back of my neck.

‘Fuck. Is that my name? Is that for real?’

‘Yes.’

Kane pulled his phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight.

‘I wrote that,’ he said, shining the light on his own perfect script.

‘I got it inked.’ I smiled over my shoulder at him. ‘I left out the “I belong to” bit. It was supposed to be a birthday present, but I think it’s more a present for me.’

‘That’s gonna be there forever.’

‘I can always get it covered,’ I teased.

The light from his phone disappeared, and his lips pressed gently against my neck.

‘You like it?’ I asked, tilting my neck to give him more room.

‘Yeah, I like it.’

That was how we were when something bad happened to Kane.

I thought at the time it was too hard on him. That it wasn’t fair – his life was hard enough. But then, it took fighting from him, and maybe that was good.

If he’d stayed fighting, who knows how far he would have gone. I know Wayne was convinced he’d be a professional fighter. And in the ring even I could tell he had an edge over his opponents. Every hit he landed, every kick he made: they almost always had maximum impact, with minimal cost to him. He always won.

I heard one of the guys at the gym say when he was watching Kane spar with another fighter, ‘That nigga strikes harder, moves faster and fights smarter than anyone I know.’

Fighting was Kane’s strongest connection to Wayne. Kane never said anything much to me about Wayne, but I know he really cared what Wayne thought of him. Wayne never showed him much love: nothing physical like a hug, or even a handshake. Probably the only time they touched was when Wayne was training him. And when it actually came to Kane’s training, Kane carried Wayne. Like, Wayne would tell him to do something, or give him advice, and Kane would have to ‘redirect’ his idea. Or Wayne would lose his place counting Kane’s reps. One time when Kane was supposed to do a quick fifty push-ups, I counted him do seventy-two. Kane would have known when he went past fifty, but he didn’t say anything, just kept going till Wayne called it.

It was mid-fall when Kane started saying things to me about fighting: unexpected things. Things like, ‘That guy I fought last night: we’ve been competing for years. That’s the third concussion I’ve given him.’

‘He shouldn’t fight you then.’

‘I shouldn’t fight him.’

‘It was a money fight.’

‘Ain’t no excuse.’

I came to realize just how much Kane worried over the hurt he caused other fighters in the ring. But when I said something to him about it he blew me off. Said the only thing he cared about was winning his fights.

Wayne might have been training Kane to be a fighter since kindergarten, but Kane hadn’t been born that way. He loved drawing, and he was incredible at math. He even liked English. If he’d gone to school full-time he probably would have been in the running for valedictorian. What I’m saying was there was a whole lot more talent in him than just his fighting skills. Which was good, given what happened next.

Kane injured someone in a fight.

I was at the fight. Because Wayne had made a new rule that I wasn’t allowed near Kane on fight nights, I asked Melissa to come with me. We sat up in the stands and got seriously hit on, but we were both pretty good at knocking guys back. I remember I got called a fine piece, and soon after a ‘cold bitch’, about the same time the guy’s friend said to Melissa, ‘You is nasty. Damn I like nasty.’

Melissa replied, ‘You is toothless; go get yourself some teeth before you be smiling at me like that.’

The thing about Melissa was she could always get away with saying things like that without causing offence. I guess because she said it with a smile. If I’d said it I would have been called more than a cold bitch. But Toothless just laughed with his friends, his smile not dampened one bit by his two missing front teeth.

‘You is alright, girl,’ he said, and winked at her.

There was a bit more banter after that, but as soon as the first fight started they left us alone.

Kane’s was the fourth fight. His opponent was Danesh Burrows, and Kane knew him. He’d told me the day before that he’d beat him. He did, in the first round. Didn’t even take three minutes for what was going to happen to happen.

Kane was just faster. He blocked punches and caught the other guy’s kicks before making contact every time with his own strikes and kicks. He had the psychological edge too. Even from where I was sitting I could feel the aggression and determination exuding from Kane.

Two minutes into the fight the sound of Kane’s gloves hitting Danesh’s skin came at speed. One of the hits was a liver shot. Danesh went down.

Cheers erupted around us.

‘Fuck me, Anderson’s giving that boy a beat-down,’ said Toothless behind me.

Danesh slowly got up off his knees and came at Kane with his gloves up. Danesh got one punch in and then Kane hooked him with his right. Danesh’s head snapped back. He staggered, but stayed standing. Kane finished him with a head kick.

Danesh was knocked out while he was still upright, and when he went down he went down hard.

Everyone got up on their feet and roared, the noise a mix of jubilation and disappointment, a sort of bloodthirsty baying. Melissa was on her feet beside me, but neither of us were clapping and cheering. She kept saying ‘oh no.’ I was watching Kane. He wasn’t looking out at the crowd; he was looking down at the other fighter, and the referee kneeling beside him.

‘That nigga is out,’ said one of Toothless’s friends with glee.

‘Move,’ was Toothless’s response, his urging directed at the inert form in the ring. ‘Come on brother, get up.’

Danesh didn’t move, and there was a rush of movement into the ring.

Wayne also entered, trying to get Kane back to his corner, but Kane, his chest heaving, and sweat pouring off him, stayed where he was, his gloves hanging limp at his sides.

The ringside doctor started working on the motionless fighter and everything got really quiet: no music playing or announcers calling the next fight, no cheers or yells, just people talking in lowered voices, if at all.

Wayne finally managed to get Kane back in his corner as two paramedics entered the ring with a stretcher. Danesh was carefully moved onto it, a brace around his neck and an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose.

Kane was announced the winner.