Things I’ll Never Say (13 page)

Another train approaches. It pushes air out of the tunnel, causing a breeze to rise in the station. The tight wind swirls and lifts my hair off my neck. The skirt of my sundress molds against my thighs.

“Have a good time there?” The cop rezips my suitcase, fumbling it a bit because he's not really looking there. He's looking up at me. I fidget in my sandals. He's got sexy brown eyes and they are running over me and over me.

“Yeah, sure. It's great down there. Not too hot yet or anything.”

“Not like here?” he says. The train rumbles on past, express, leaving the station calm again. Early-summer hot. Just barely sticky.

“Way better than here.” Because the air moves. On its own, I mean. Without a train to drive it.

The cop stands up. “ID, please.” He holds out his hand while I dig for my wallet, buried in my backpack among the jumble of my iPod, headphones, coins, pens, and an illogical number of paper clips. I plop my license in his palm.

“Sally John.” He reads it aloud, as if I don't know my own name. “That's a pretty . . . uh . . . You're sixteen?” His gaze bounces to my chest. “You look a lot older.”

What am I supposed to say about that? Was he about to tell me I have a pretty name? It's actually about the most boring name known to humanity.

“My mistake.” He blushes again as he hands my ID back. Strange for a dark-skinned guy to blush so visibly. I've never seen that before.

“So I can go?”

He runs his hand down my arm, from shoulder to elbow. Surprisingly smooth hand. “You take care now.” He rejoins his cohort.

I scoot away, dragging my suitcase behind me. If it wasn't for the uniform, you know? Or if I was a little older, like he wanted. Maybe then he would have helped me struggle through the turnstile or up the long flight of stairs to street level. Maybe he would have walked me home to find out if I still live at the same address (which I do and always have).

Or maybe it's all in my head.

Up at street level, West Harlem is how it always is: shaking and shimmying and intense and
home.

First thing I hear: “Hey,
mami
, you need a hand with that bag?” A scrawny guy in a Rasta cap chawing on a thin cigar and toying with a flip phone outside the corner bodega.

“I'm okay.”

“That looks heavy. How far you going?”

“I got it. Thanks.”

He nods and rolls on with his day while I roll on with my suitcase.

A gypsy cab slows and honks, probably thinking I'm going to the airport, not coming from. I wave him off.

It's funny. In Harlem, when you look like me, people notice you. I guess I forgot that. Or maybe it was different before, because I was different before.

The moment I turn up my block, despite the heat and despite the exertion, I start to feel cooler inside.

I haven't been home since the end of August, before school started. Over Christmas, I went straight to Grandma's and spent the whole week there. Dad came out as well, for a day or two. To see me. But holidays just aren't the same anymore, without Mom. Three Christmases now, and each one bleaker than the last.

For spring break I went to Sarah's house in Miami with a couple other girls from school. Same place we just were this past week. It was great, but it's not like I could crash with her for the whole summer. That would be weird.

I invited Sarah to come visit me here later in the summer, so that's something to look forward to. And I'll make sure we talk on the phone every day, like we promised.

My house looks the same. The sidewalk cracks leading down the block feel the same. And the trees and the hydrants and the garbage cans are all in their places, and a brief doughy scent wafts over from the bakery across the street. I have smelled it a hundred thousand times.

And now there's nowhere else to walk, no matter how slowly. I'm here.

Climb the familiar brownstone steps. Thump my leaden suitcase up behind me.

Use my key. Push the door open.

I feel ultra-calm. My heart beats like it's frozen. I actually put my hand on my chest to try and feel it. I mean, I'm standing upright, breathing, so I know it must be in there doing its thing. I just can't feel it.

“Dad? Are you home?”

The foyer, cool and shadowy, lit only by the light through the pebbled windows alongside the door once I latch it behind me.

“Dad?” I raise my voice. It echoes in the stillness.

Mom's laugh used to fill every corner of this place. Plus the smell of her cooking and the clatter of pans, and soft music would always be playing. I peek into the kitchen. The walls are still hung with my crayon drawings, plastered right against the paint with crisscross tape. Nothing looks like it has been touched recently. Probably a pile of take-out containers in the trash under the sink.

Back to the foyer. One more time. “Dad?”

“Hi, sweetheart.” His voice floats at me from a distance. “I'm coming.”

I wait for the footsteps on the landing overhead. Dad bounds down the stairs in a suit, sans jacket, tie slightly loosened, iPhone in hand. “There's my girl.”

He throws one arm around my shoulders and draws me in close. My forehead finds a space below his collarbone, and I catch a deep breath of his forever cologne, but my arms barely meet at his spine before he steps out of them.

“Hey, Sal.” He kisses the air near my cheek and then smiles as if he doesn't realize he missed. “Welcome home, love.”

“Hi, Dad.”

His iPhone never left his hand; now his thumb resumes scrolling. “I want to take you out tonight,” he says. “Where do you want to eat?”

“Oh. Um . . .”

He frowns at the screen in his palm. “Totally up to you. I'll make a reservation on Open Table right now.”

I hold the suggestion in my mouth for a while. Until he lowers the phone a nudge and looks at me expectantly.

“How about that fancy place, Chocolat?” I suggest. Their food is pretty good, but they have a chocolate lava cake that's to die for. Totally binge worthy. Usually I eat two. I haven't been eating so much dessert lately, but I guess, for old times' sake.

“Yup. Yup. Okay . . .” He scrolls and clicks. “Perfect. Done. Seven thirty.”

“Okay.”

“That'll give you some time to settle in.”

“Yeah.”

Dad heads back toward the stairs. “Why don't you unpack while I'm finishing up some work,” he says, offering a smile that isn't quite apologetic.

“My suitcase is kind of heavy,” I blurt out. My teeth clamp over my lower lip. I shouldn't. . . . He's already on the second step, but . . .

He glances back. Comes down and grabs it. Groans. “Oh, honey. I hope the cabbie put this in the trunk for you.”

I'm embarrassed to tell him I used up the last of my travel allowance in Miami. I didn't have enough on my debit card to pay for a taxi from JFK. He'll probably give me my summer funds tonight or tomorrow. If I had called him from the airport earlier this afternoon, he probably would have advanced me a bit of it to get home. Since he's home, maybe he would have even come out to meet me at the curb and paid it in cash. I don't know. But it would have been bothering him to ask, and I didn't want to start off the summer like that.

Dad carries the suitcase all the way up to my bedroom on the third floor. By the time I take off my shoes and get up there, he's back down in his office, right across from the master bedroom on the second floor.

“Thanks,” I say as I pass. He's tapping at the keyboard, already caught up in his work again. Maybe he hears me, but I keep on climbing.

The first things I see in my room remind me of the old me.

The worn white tape measure snaking atop the bureau. I read somewhere once that the perfect size for a woman is 36-24-36, but I think that's outdated. People are skinnier than that now. And you're supposed to be short. The best I ever got was 36-30-42. Because I'm tall and this giant butt isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

The neon plastic crates piled in the corner. Empty now, but I used to hide my snack stash in there, beneath tucked mounds of laundry.

The Thighmaster. My nemesis. There is never, ever going to be a space between my thighs.

Popsicle sticks, because I never liked the feeling of sticking my fingers down my throat. In New York, your hands are never really guaranteed to be clean, because of the subway. It all comes back to the subway, somehow. The low, rumbling underground thing that once seemed invisible, but now that you've been away from it for a while, you realize how present it is. How even though you're on the third floor, curled on the edge of your childhood bed, you can still feel it trembling the ground beneath you every seven to nine minutes. How what once was unnoticeable is now ever present and slightly disturbing.

I spread my hands out over the bed quilt, familiar and foreign at the exact same time. The tassels slip between my fingers. I close my eyes and try to remember that I'm someone else now. Someone happy, and 75 percent not-ugly. Someone who wears a two-piece bathing suit. Someone who hasn't even thought about killing herself for something like half a year. Someone who can look in the mirror, most days, and smile.

For a moment, underground, some guy thought I was pretty. Yeah, he was old and creepy and I threatened to spray him, but I bet some girls never, ever get told they're pretty. And then there was the handsome cop. He thought I was pretty, too. I know he was checking me out, from the corner of his eye while he pretended to go through my suitcase. Maybe I even leaned forward a little, so my boobs would sway in their sundress cups. That's one good thing about not being too skinny.

Lying here now, I cup my boobs from underneath. They fill my hands, and then some. I let my thumbs skim over my nipples until they pop up out of the skin. Someday, maybe some guy will want to touch me. My hands slide down over the dainty linen sundress. My belly — God, it feels kind of big right now, actually, even though breakfast on the plane was pretty pathetic and I never got around to lunch. With the heels of my hands I try to push it down, smooth it out. But I end up cupping it like a globe. Last year at this time, my stomach felt more like a bowl. What the hell happened?

It's so weird being back here. I used to imagine that the roller marks in the ceiling paint were invisible rainbows, with color hidden behind them. Now it just looks so freaking white.

Dad knocks on my door.

“Yeah?” I sit up as he pokes his head in. Swing my legs down over the side of the bed and smile at him. Maybe he actually wants to hang out now. Maybe he's missed me that much.

“I —” Dad does a funny little double take. Just a twitch of his face, really, and his voice stalls. He opens the door wider, almost wide enough to come in.

“What? You can come in.”

“Uh, well.” He shakes his head. “Eight thirty instead of seven thirty, okay? I need to take a call before we go.”

“Sure. Whatever.” I wrap a bedspread tassel around my finger real tight. It doesn't matter. We'll go to dinner, but he won't really be there anyway.

“You're the best.”

I give him the grin I know he loves. “Of course I am.”

Dad grins back and starts to close the door. But he doesn't close it. He lingers in the open wedge, holding the knob.

“What?” I ask. He's looking at me in a soft, strange way.

“Sorry.” He shakes his head again. “It's just —”

“What?”

“God,” he breathes. “You look like your mother.”

I'm going to say something now. Something that'll make him step inside. He'll put a hand on my cheek, or sit along the side of the bed and stroke my hair and tell me he loves me.

But he tucks away at the exact wrong moment. The door clicks shut, finishing the wall between us. Leaving me with stinging eyes and words to swallow and a heaviness about my entire being.

Six stories below, the subway rumbles through.

My fingertip throbs from lack of blood.

I free it. Go stand in front of the mirror above my desk. If I stand far back, I can see myself down to the knees. Not bad. I turn and study myself. Not bad at all.

Close up, though, it's different.

It's not true, what he said. I don't look very much at all like my mother. A little in the face, I guess, but only a very, very little. Mom was always shapely but quite thin. Especially thin in the time when I most knew her. In the end.

I don't know what Dad thought he saw just now, but it wasn't me. Not the real me, anyway.

My makeup pouch is easy enough to find, tucked in the suitcase, outside pocket. With light brushstrokes I darken my eyelids, my lips, my cheeks. I know how to do it, although most of the time I don't bother at school. I mean, who's going to see me except my friends? But when Dad takes me to dinner, I want to look just right.

At some point I learned how to put on blush in such a way that it makes my cheeks look slimmer. To convert their fullness into something more concave. Too bad I can't do that to my stomach.

The food is really good up at school. Easy to eat and easy to keep down. Everything turned over when I got there. I don't even know what it was that changed, but the minute I got there, I felt lighter.

My phone starts blinking. Sarah's sent me a sad-faced selfie.
Miss U already.

I snap a shot of my own frowning face, then thumb quickly:
Me too.

Boarding school was my idea in the first place. I had to do something, you know? To get out of the circle I was caught in like a swirling drain. Popsicle sticks and Thighmasters. Weighing and measuring every day. I didn't even bring any of that stuff with me to school, which is weird, now that I think about it. As if I already knew I wouldn't need it.

But I'm back now. And the Popsicle sticks are here, so wide and so easy that they came in a box labeled “tongue depressors.” And I don't know my measurements anymore, but I'm too afraid to take them. I rub my belly dome. (Do they make a Bellymaster?)