Hold Me in Contempt (17 page)

Chapter 7

I
t was late by the time I made it up to Harlem. I found Kent and my father in the backyard in the dark. My father was sitting on the ground beside the rusty metal doors closed over the cellar. He had a drill in his hand. Kent was standing over him holding a flashlight, complaining that my father should let him work the drill and take the flashlight.

“What are you guys doing back here?” I asked.

“Hey, babygirl,” my father said, looking up at me. “Your brother tell you your ma been here?” Both of my parents were first-generation New Yorkers whose parents left the Deep South looking for whatever work would take them off plantations that still meant a death sentence for blacks years after slavery ended. My father's parents were from Mississippi, and while they made a home in Harlem, they moved onto a street that primarily housed people from their hometown, so they still lived and spoke in old ways and passed that down to my father. Kent and I used to joke that in one sentence my father could switch from New York City slick to country-​boy genteel.

“Yes, Daddy. That's why I'm here,” I answered him, getting down on my knees to kiss him on the cheek as I'd been trained to do.

“Guess I shouldn't have asked that. You don't come uptown and see about your pa no way. Too busy I know,” he complained, looking at me through blue eyes that had once been brown, pushed into early cataracts due to his drinking. His sobriety plan had never included his drinking. His standard nightly routine since he'd returned home to us without our mother was stopping at the liquor store on the corner to buy a fifth of whatever was cheapest and fall asleep in bed in his work clothes with his bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag on the nightstand. Some nights he'd sob aloud and call my mother's name. That was when Kent would sneak out and come back with Baggies and vials and cash and candy stashed in his pockets.

“Daddy, don't start with that, please,” I begged. “I can't today. I really can't.”

He shrugged and went back to drilling.

“So, what happened?” I asked. “How do y'all know she's been here?”

“Daddy set a trap,” Kent answered, gliding the light over a sand walkway leading from the gate on the side of the brownstone to the cellar doors.

“Duke and Mrs. Amelia on the corner said they saw her over here a month ago. Then Lil Richard, the one work over in the auto body, said he saw her walking up the driveway a week ago,” my father explained, pulling a screw out of the door.

“A week ago? But no one told me,” I said. “Why didn't anyone tell me?”

“I wanted to tell you,” Kent said, “but Dad said to wait.”

“I didn't want you to get worked up. Get your hopes up about your ma,” my father replied. “You know how you get. Got that job. Need to focus.”

“How I get?”

Kent and my father looked at each other.

“I just figured it'd be better if we knew something before we went and broadcast it, getting folks upset,” he went on. “So I set these traps. Let me know if she's really been around here.”

“The sand was my idea,” Kent divulged, widening his eyes at my father.

“But these could be anyone's footprints.” I pointed to the trail that had two sets of prints—mine and a much smaller pair.

“Ain't nobody coming back here,” my father said. “And, plus, I got me some proof.” He pulled another screw from the door and stood to let Kent pull the door off the hinges. He pointed down the steps.

“What?” I looked into the darkness of the cellar, where seven chipped concrete steps that I'd fallen down too many times as a child led to a storm door that had a trick lock only Kent, our parents, and I knew how to open. “She's been down there?”

My father and Kent looked toward the darkness.

I didn't wait for another word. I descended as if I didn't know the harm that could come with one misstep. Something like an anvil was sitting on top of my heart. And although both Kent and Daddy said my mother wasn't in that basement, there was no stopping my brain from constructing the image of her sitting in the middle of the closet of our stored memories, holding her hands out to me, smiling, asking me all about my bad day.

I undid the lock with three shakes and a turn to the left, and a turn to the right, then I gave the door a kick. I could feel Kent right behind me just as he'd always been when we were younger in these situations involving our mother. Quickly, we were ten again. I looked at him when I put my hand on the light switch.

“It's okay,” he said. “It's fine.”

The light illuminated a space that hadn't changed ever. Old cribs and decorations. Cash registers and boxes of hangers from the store my grandparents once owned on St. Nicholas. A box of Kent's old basketball trophies. The dusty Barbie Dreamhouse that had made its way from my bedroom floor to the backyard to the basement. Little islands of stories from everyone's past.

“It's in the corner over there by that old mannequin from your granpap's store,” my father said, coming into the basement behind Kent. “My proof.”

I looked over to the withering white woman with the Kewpie-doll blue eyes and a permanent smile. There was an unraveled blanket and scraps of paper on the floor at her arched feet.

“Been unusually cold these last few weeks,” my father said as I went over to the mess of out-of-place things. “I think she been down here resting.”

I bent down and picked up the blanket. It was a ripple pattern crocheted in an ugly purple and black I always complained about. The anvil sank down.

“That's your old blanket,” Kent said.

I nodded.

“The one from your bed.”

“It's been down here in a box since you left for college. Thing got mildew and whatever else on it,” my father said. “Think I'll wash it. Put it back down here with some canned food. Leave it by the steps where I put her old red sweatshirt she took from down here last spring.”

“The one Mika saw her in on Jamaica Ave.,” I reminded him, knowing he liked it when he could confirm that he'd had some kind of contact with my mother.

He went on, pretending he was unaffected. “Maybe I could put a refrigerator down here for her. Not one of those big ones. A little one,” he said.

“That's a great idea. Because then you could put a note on it telling her to knock on the front door?” Kent joked in a way that I'm sure our father found inappropriate, but it was what any other family who hadn't been through what we'd been through together would ask. Why wouldn't my mother just knock on the front door and come inside for a warm bed and a hot meal?

“She don't want us to see her. You know that, boy,” my father said. “Not the way she is. Not until she's ready.”

I looked down at what I'd thought were scraps of paper but that I could now see were little cut out squares from pictures. I handed the smelly blanket to my father.

“What's this?” I asked.

Kent rushed over to help me pick up the squares.

One by one, I looked at the faces on the squares. Me. Me. Me. All of the faces in the little squares were of me. Me at seven with pigtails. Me at three still holding a bottle. Me at six crying because I didn't want to go to church on Easter Sunday.

“Where'd these come from?” I asked. “How'd they get down here?”

My father walked over and looked at the pictures in my hand. “I thought you'd remember,” he said.

“What?”

“Your ma was supposed to throw those out. You don't remember?”

“No. What happened?”

“You took those pictures out of her photo album and cut them up. Said you had some project for school and needed pictures of yourself from every age,” my father said, laughing. “Think it was right before you went to high school.” His voice dropped. “Right before we left. You really don't remember?”

I shook my head no, and tears rolling down my cheeks sprinkled my face in the pictures.

“Your ma called up to that school to see what the project was supposed to be about, and they told her you was supposed to have pictures of both you and your ma—some Mother's Day art show. And y'all had a big fight about these pictures. She said she didn't have copies, no film. Nothing. No way of replacing them. You got all mad and tried to stomp off with the little cutouts of your face. Said they was pictures of you and you could do what you wanted with them. Your ma ain't like that. She jumped right on you. I guess she was about to give you some licks. But you about fought her back. Pushed her off of you and you called her a—” He paused. “Said you was embarrassed she was your mother. It was the first time you said it to her face, and it really hurt her. I know it. Next day y'all wasn't speaking. You'd dropped out of the art show and your ma was set on throwing those little squares of your face away to teach you a lesson. Guess she kept them.” My father took the square of me crying before Easter Mass and laughed. “I remember this day. Lord, you showed your behind so bad, saying you didn't want to go to church. I made you put on this here dress, and we was about to go out the door. Then your ma stopped and said maybe we shouldn't go if you didn't want to go. And we didn't.”

“We didn't?” I looked at him. “What do you mean? I remember that. We went to church that day. It was Easter. I had on that dress.” I pointed at the picture.

“No. It was Easter and your ma asked you what you wanted to do since you didn't want to go to church,” my father said. “Ice cream. You wanted to go to get some ice cream and sit in Riverside Park. And that's what we did. Pretty day. We ain't take no pictures of that though. You remember that, Kent?”

Kent nodded and handed me the pictures he'd collected.

Though there were only ten or twelve squares, the images in my hands felt like hundreds of memories. And I wondered what my mother thought when she saw them. Why she'd looked at them and if she ever thought of what I looked like now. If she cared. My heart started crumbling under the weight of the anvil, and I reached out for Kent to catch me, to keep me from falling to pieces with it.

“It's okay, Kiki Mimi,” he said when I fell into his arms. “It's going to be okay. You know that. Right?”

I sucked in my tears and laid my head on my baby brother's shoulder. I agreed that everything would soon be all right, but none of us really knew that it would be and none of us really knew what “right” meant. The idea was just comfort. Just a word that signified an end coming someday.

In the house, my father explained that he was removing the storm doors because he thought they were probably too heavy for my mother to hold up when she was coming in and out of the basement and he didn't want one to fall on her and knock her down the stairs. He said it so passively, like he was simply making sure to shovel a sidewalk after a snowstorm to ensure his wife didn't fall on her way into the house with groceries or laundry and not to create shelter for a drug-addicted wife he'd maybe seen a handful of times in fifteen years.

Sometimes I wanted to just scream in his ear that she was gone and never coming back to him, not the way she was, but it wouldn't be any use for a man like him. Loving my mother was all he knew. They got together at a time when men married the first girl they loved, made a home for her, gave her babies, came home every night—no matter what they did in the street—and prayed to die first to leave everything he had—even in death—to her. I knew my father felt he'd failed at most of that. And for men like him, even ones who got fucked up using drugs, it made him feel like less of a man. His only chance at redemption was that she was still out there. It would break his heart more to give up on the idea that she'd come back to him.

Daddy picked up his fifth in the brown paper bag and kissed me on the cheek good night.

“Work in the morning,” he said, heading to the staircase.

“Good night, Daddy,” Kent and I said.

“You know, Kiki,” my father said, turning to look at me from the third step, and it was rare because he never said a thing else to us after he'd said good night and mentioned that there was “work in the morning” and also because I'd maybe heard him call me Kiki three times in my life, “I've always been sorry you had to grow up without your ma. You done a good job making yourself what you are, but I just know . . .  ​I know you always been missing and needing her. I'm sorry to you for that.”

Daddy finished his thoughts and started climbing the steps again. Kent and I didn't say anything. He almost never opened up to us like that, and when he did we both knew not to say too much afterward. A thank-you would just embarrass him. He needed the moment to come and go.

“Thought you were going out,” I said to Kent when we heard Daddy's bedroom door close.

Kent had gone into the kitchen and come out with two Heinekens.

“Why you say that?” he asked.

“Because you always do . . .  ​you know, when something happens with Mommy.”

“Can't. Got too much on my mind.” Kent sat down at the table and placed both beers in front of himself.

“Oh, no beer for me?” I asked.

“I don't think you need any beer,” he said. “I've been smelling liquor on you since we were in the backyard. Where were you when I called you?”

“Some bar in Brooklyn,” I confessed. “A place Tamika and her girls took me to.”

“You know you can't be fucking with those hood rats in BK, right? Where'd you go?” He clipped the top off one of the Heinekens.

“Damaged Goods.”

“DG? The fuck you doing in there?” Kent looked at me strangely.

“It's a cool spot.”

“Come on, Kim. You know better. I don't even fuck with Brooklyn niggas, and I know about that spot. What the fuck were y'all there for?”

“Five-dollar apple martinis and fried shrimp. And it wasn't so bad. I went there today to relax a little bit. Take my mind off of some stuff happening at work,” I explained, and there was no way I was going to tell Kent about Paul sending me home. We'd be sitting up debating it for the rest of the night.