Behind You (3 page)

But then something strange happened. I forgot the words. I had been hearing and singing that song my whole life, and there I was, sitting in the heavy, wet snow, not knowing the lyrics to a song that was like the
alphabet
to me. And I looked around, starting to feel a panic build up. The block was empty and getting dark. The snow was coming down hard. And then I remember thinking,
And where the hell is Miah?

SUNDAY MORNING, I HEAR THE SOUND OF THE
TIMES
HITTING the stoop. It's still early and looks like it's going to rain. My girlfriend's still asleep. I look over at her as I'm rising out of bed. Her hair's getting gray and her cheeks are starting to puff a little bit with age. Wonder what she sees when she looks at me. I look at my hands, the way they still shake most days, the way my whole body trembles sometimes until I think relaxing thoughts—oceans and forests and cool, lazy evenings. Still, my heart bangs against my chest. And my eyes, I know when a person looks into them, they see only half a man—not completely focused, not completely there. I touch my girlfriend's back, watch my trembling hand move down over it. She's a beautiful woman—brown skinned, dark eyed, enough meat on her bones not to ever be called skinny. Has a voice like something cool calling your name. The trembling slows, then stops, and I rise, pull my robe on over my pajamas and go downstairs to get the paper.

When I open the door, I look up at Nelia's window. I used to be married to her. And we used to have a son. I feel my hands start to tremble again and think,
That's the past now. Move on.
There's a dull ache in my head. I pull the plastic off the paper and look at the headlines without reading them. So much news. So many things to do in a day. So many people to remember. And birthdays and holidays coming up. Eggs and milk to buy. Miah wore a size eleven shoe. My hands. My head. Lake Erie. Lake Cham plain. The way the water laps against the shore on Mon tauk. Miah's brown hands building a sand castle. His thin seven-year-old body.
Daddy, look!
And the wave coming up that afternoon. The way he laughed as the castle melted into the ocean. Where was that? St. Croix? Mauritius?

Nelia's curtains are pulled—they've been that way for some time now. The papers were piling up on her stoop, but now they're all gone. She lives just across the street and a few houses up. It wasn't supposed to end like this. I wasn't supposed to fall in love with Lois Ann. Some things just happen and you feel them happening but you don't have a whole lot of power over them happening. You have to kind of give yourself over to them. Maybe me and Nelia were moving apart for a long time. It's hard to look back on. The edges of the past get fuzzy when I try. Moments come clear—the first time I heard my newborn son cry. The way his eyes changed to the same color as Nelia's and him with parts of Nelia and parts of me all running together to make some strange and wonderful whole new being. He really was
something
.

I sit down on the stoop and try to read the
Times.
The president wants a war. Some businessmen have been stealing people's retirement funds. A baby found, left beside a grade school. The baby's fine. The schoolkids all want her to be named after them. I read this story and even with all of its ugliness, I can't help smiling. Kids are something. All they can see is the beauty in a moment. I sit there like that awhile—every once in a while looking up at Nelia's window. Feel like I've been making films all my life and none of them can tell the whole story. I'd love to make one—just one—movie that goes from the beginning to the end—tell-all. And not that greasy talk-show tell-all kind of thing, but you know, go to the heart—to the heart's heart—and let the world feel everything deep like that.

Now the curtain in Nelia's living room moves a bit. I want to say,
Open the window, Nelia. Open the doors. Come outside. It's autumn.
This morning is cool and beautiful. The trees are starting to change color.
Look, honey,
I want to say.
Look how the world is moving on.

IT RAINED THE FIRST MORNING ELLIE RANG MY BELL. IN THE city, the rain makes the world gray and then the sun shines down on that gray and everything echoes of silver. Such a beautiful metal, silver is. And downstairs, Ellie stood draped in it, her thick black hair damp, her clothes wet, her long, thin body shivering.

It's Ellie,
she said, looking up at the window. Looking up at me.

Then Ellie smiled. Her beautiful Ellie smile and a moment, a moment from a long time ago draped itself over me: my Jeremiah and Ellie in that spot where Ellie was standing. Ellie turning toward Jeremiah and offering my son that smile. I felt old watching them through the window. Old but excited—like I was fifteen again too and turning toward some boy—who would it have been?—and smiling.

“Ellie,” I said. “Ellie, it's good to see you.” My voice sounded so foreign to me. An old lady's voice. When had I become old? A birthday had passed, but still . . .

How long had it been since Jeremiah's last day with us—a month, two months, a year. Maybe Ellie knew. Maybe Ellie would tell me.

But once inside, she put her hands in the pockets of her jeans and looked around. The smile gone now. What was she seeing? The gray, dusty inside of what was once a beautiful home. The darkness. One by one, the lightbulbs had burned out. Now I flicked switches and got nothing.

“It's kinda dark in here,” Ellie said. And then the smile was back. There was something different to it, though—embarrassment around the mouth and at the edges of the eyes. “How about we light some candles.”

She followed me into the kitchen, where I pulled dusty white votive candles from a drawer.

“The matches are over the stove.”

Ellie walked over to the stove. To the left of her was the window that looked out over our block. Yellow stained-glass panes across the top of it. A yellow linen curtain hanging from it. Dusty. Still. Ellie pulled it back, the matches in her other hand forgotten.

“He loved the light in this room,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. I watched her thin hand reach up to the yellow panes, her pale skin soften in their light. In the cloudy rain-light coming in from the window, I could see that her fingers were long and the nails were painted a soft pink. I wondered when she had done this. Late at night? In the morning? Was she thinking of Jeremiah as she brushed the color on? Whom did she make herself beautiful for these days?

She kept her hand on the glass, oblivious of me. The kitchen grew terribly silent, a silence I had come to know too well. And now, with Ellie in it with me, the silence didn't seem to belong. But I stood there in it. Watching Ellie's hand touch the glass. I stood there, wearing the same khaki pants I had been wearing for I don't know how many days, the same white T-shirt I don't remember ever pulling over my head. The day after Miah's funeral, I marched to the Fulton Street Barbershop and had them cut off all of my hair. Who needed hair? Who needed anything? But now, I let my hand reach up to my head and felt that the hair had grown in some, long enough now for me to grab a handful of it. As I did this, something strange happened—the sun, which had been watery and elusive all morning, turned sharp and bright, spreading a thin layer of brilliant yellow over everything. I kept my hand in my hair and slowly looked around the kitchen—at the yellow dust covering everything, the cedar chairs draped in yellow light, the battered, beautiful wooden table with yellow swimming across it, the white walls looking as though they'd been dipped in butter . . .

Ellie turned then, and for a moment we just stared at each other. The air had left me. I felt ragged suddenly—hollow. I wanted to scream into the yellow light. Yet—it held me . . . up and together.

“He . . . ,” Ellie said again, looking directly at me. “He really did love this light.”

SEPTEMBER. THE LEAVES ARE STARTING TO COME DOWN. THE sky—the sky seems like it's just
this
much closer to the earth. It's cool today but still warm enough for me not to wear a jacket. This—this is the kind of day a guy can fall in love with. If I could marry a day, it would be a day in September—the kind of day that makes you feel kind of blue and kind of crazy all at once. But you can't marry a day. My mother married a night. My father. Carlton Sr. Black man. And me, born a color somewhere between my blue-eyed white mother and dark-skinned dad. What if the color white was a day? And what if my mother had married a day instead of a night? Then I'd be all white. I wouldn't be walking through this September day, choking up at falling leaves. Would I be alone?

Someone dies and you hold on to everything you can. I think it's easier if you know they're gonna die—somebody old who you loved—like a grandmother or a sweet old uncle. You watch them die, you expect their death, and while death is coming, you're getting stories from them and touching their skin one last time and smiling and telling them how much you love them. But when someone gets killed—the way my homeboy Miah got killed—shot down by cops in a case of mistaken identity—sounds clichéd even to say it. Wish it was a cliché. Wish it was a dream that I could wake up from, shake out of my head and say,
Now where did that come from.
No. No dream. When someone gets killed, when that someone is this guy you've spent just about every day with since you were this high—well, then you don't see it coming. And all you have to hold on to is what you remember—and the day. The light of it. The weather. You in it. The way everything about it smells and feels and looks. Then you go to bed at night feeling like you lived it, really lived it. Like you walked through the world that day—whole. When somebody dies real quick and unexpectedly like Miah did, you spend every single day, after the news hits you, trying to live. And maybe sometimes you're living with some big secrets over your head or some big regrets in your heart. But the good part is you're walking and breathing and waving hello. And as the days go by and turn into weeks and months and years, you realize how much each day you get through matters.

I take a deep breath and keep walking. Still day. Windless day. Day with so much color to it, my head starts to ache. But then the color softens. It feels as though the whole sky is trying to wrap itself around me. I stop, lean against a mailbox and take small breaths. And it feels like the air is trying to breathe with me.
Calm Carlton,
the air feels like it's saying.
Why you gotta be so high-strung anyway.
But it's not the air—it's Miah. I hear his voice, feel him grinning. Then I'm grinning too. Headache gone quickly as it came.
Why you gotta be so high-strung.

“Miss you, man,” I whisper.

A little boy passing by me stops.

“You talking to me?”

He's brown like Miah. Clean-cut. Neater than any little boy should be.

I shake my head and he shrugs and keeps on moving.

And the wind starts blowing, soft and high as a song.

At the corner of South Oxford and Fulton, a car swerves to miss hitting a small dog. I hear the dog's owner scream and watch her curse the driver out. Then he's cursing back and the cars behind him are honking and the day doesn't seem as beautiful as it did a minute ago.

I keep walking. When I get to Vanderbilt and Fulton, I stop and think about grabbing a cup of coffee. At a red light, some scrub leans out of the passenger side of a beatdown Honda and says
Hey, Girl-boy
. He winks at me. I hear the other guys in the car laugh.

“You weren't calling me that last night,” I say. And wink back at him. The guys in the back start howling and the scrub gets so mad, he makes a move to get out of the car, but the light changes and his friend speeds off.

I keep walking. Girl-boy. Fag. Batty-boy. The list goes on. I've heard it all before. I remember me and Miah were walking this one time and some guy he knew from somewhere pulled him to the side and whispered, loud enough for me to hear, “What you hanging with the sissies for, Miah-man?”

Miah had his ball in his hand—the way he usually did. He chucked it to me and grinned.

“Take some inventory, man,” Miah said to the guy. “Everything in the world's just a little bit deeper than you seeing it.”

The guy walked off without saying anything else. I know he didn't have a clue to what Miah was talking about, but maybe he walked on thinking about it some. I don't know.

Did me and Miah ever talk about this? About
it.
About who I really am—you know, way down deep beneath the me that's part white, part black, a ballplayer, a singer, a pretty-boy?

Nah. We didn't. We left that stuff alone. We talked about ball and our folks and more ball. And when Miah started falling in love with Ellie, we talked about that—about what it meant to be a black guy who was loving a white girl. And once we got on that subject, it was like—well, it was like that's all there was, because he and I could spend hours just talking about people's reactions and his own fears and what it felt like to just be with Ellie. He loved that girl. I'd sit talking with him and then I'd come home to my parents sitting on the couch, watching TV—sometimes my dad would have his arm around my mom's shoulders. And I'd think,
Man, I can't even hardly imagine it, but these two old people were, like, our age one time and they got some of those same funky stares and comments Miah and Ellie got.

So with all that going on, where was there a place to say,
You know, Miah, I don't think I'm the kind of guy that likes girls.

But now that Miah's gone, I find myself having all kinds of conversations with him. Telling him when I first started feeling this way, how lonely I've been all these years, how all the stuff I don't say and don't do goes into ballplaying and that's probably why I'm on the starting five and one of the best ballplayers in the history of Brooklyn Technical High School. Stupid name for a school that's supposed to be one of the best in all of New York City. Decent ball team, though, and some smart kids running through it.