“Fuck,” Pierre says as we exit the bedroom. “That was shitty.” His breathing is steady but heavy as he bends at the waist, his palms planted firmly against the tops of his thighs.
“Want something to drink before we go back?” It seems like the polite thing to suggest.
He nods, and we head to Audrey’s tiny kitchen, where I hope she still has something to drink from. A short stack of paper cups sits on the counter beside a freestanding roll of paper towels. “I guess tap water is the best I can do.”
“Tap water is still water,” he says, and I fill up a cup, which he quickly drains, his Adam’s apple bobbing along as he chugs.
I step aside so he can refill the cup himself, and open Audrey’s refrigerator. The jar of sweet pickles has disappeared, leaving the single brown egg sitting on the top rack. Audrey loves to cook. I feel unsettled, seeing her kitchen so bare.
A groan emerges from down the hall, guttural and urgent. “Aud,” Gillian croaks, just loud enough for us to hear her. “Audie, I need … Aud…”
We rush back to the bedroom where Gillian is trying unsuccessfully to get out of bed. She gives up, her head draping over the side of the air mattress. “I’m … gonna…”
I dash across the hall to grab the bathroom trash can and slip it under her head just in time. She heaves and vomits, and it smells terrible. I stand back while Pierre holds her braids away from her face. Her light-brown skin has gone almost pale, but he tells her everything will be fine, the same voice he used in the car.
He sits with her while she spits and moans and then dry heaves and falls back onto the mattress. I bring her a cup of water, and Pierre convinces her to take a few sips before she rolls back over.
“Listen, I don’t want you to think Gilly’s a drunk asshole,” Pierre says as he stands. “Sometimes she drinks too much when she gets nervous, and she was nervous about tonight.”
I frown, confused. “About a party?”
“About watching everyone say good-bye to Audrey. She thinks…” He lowers his voice, even with the impossibly loud snores now coming from the air mattress. “She thinks you guys hate her for taking your cousin away.”
I should reassure him that of course we don’t hate her, because Audrey is an adult and she wouldn’t leave if she didn’t want to. But I don’t say any of that. Unfair or not, a part of me does hate Gillian. She is taking away my cousin. Audrey would stay in Chicago if she’d never met Gillian, because Audrey loves Chicago. Even when it’s covered in sheets of ice and piles of black, slushy snow and the windchill registers at negative double digits, Audrey says this is her favorite city.
“Ah.” Pierre raises his eyebrows. “She’s not wrong.”
“Nobody hates Gillian.” Not really. I hesitate, because I’m afraid my voice will become too thick, like it does every time I think about Audrey leaving. “We just really love Audrey is all.”
He nods. Not dismissively, but a nod where he makes eye contact with me, one that says he hears me. He understands.
“Well, we can’t leave her like this.” Pierre sighs as we move to the front of the apartment. “She’ll be really confused if she wakes up and she’s alone. And if something happened to her because of me … I should stick around. I mean, if your cousin’s cool with me being here.”
“She’ll be cool with it, but what will you do?” I look around the empty apartment. There’s no television, not even an idle magazine or book. Everything has already been taken away or boxed up and moved to the edge of the room. My voice echoes against the nothingness, and I think about how depressing it would be to sit in here all alone.
“Quiet isn’t so bad.” He shrugs. “And I’m sure you want to get back to the party…”
Part of me wants to do that—Audrey is leaving in a couple of days. But it wasn’t the sort of party where you have fun. The bocce, drinks, and Motown-themed merriment felt forced, like we were all pretending it was an ordinary Saturday night gathering. And I can’t even hide out with my father, not with Bev around, being awkward and asking the wrong questions.
Considering the way things started out between us, I can’t believe hanging out with Pierre is the better alternative. But I think about the car ride over, how sweet he’s been with his sister. And I can’t ignore the fact that the only moments tonight that I haven’t felt wrapped up in a cloud of anxiety are the ones I’ve spent with him. Maybe arguing isn’t much better, but I’ll take any emotion over crippling sadness. And, well … we’re not arguing now.
“Or I could stay,” I say, shocked at how confident the words sound in my mouth.
Like they belong there.
Like we belong here. Together.
A slow grin spreads across Pierre’s smooth, dark skin. “Or you could stay.”
* * *
I’ve made a mistake.
A few minutes later, and we’re still standing here in the living room, staring at the hardwood floor, the ceiling. Anywhere but each other. What if our silent truce is just that—effective only when it’s silent?
“I’m starving,” Pierre says bluntly, blessedly breaking the tension. “I saw a pizza place up the street. Know if it’s any good?”
“It’s good enough.”
That makes him smile. “You want to split a pie? I can do anything but deep-dish.”
My eyes widen. “Wait—seriously?”
Pizza can be a controversial topic in Chicago. When your city is known for a specific type of food, it feels downright traitorous to choose anything else. But the truth is I don’t like deep-dish pizza and I don’t think I ever will.
“I know it makes me a freak around here, but I really hate it.” He makes a face. “There’s too much damn bread.”
“Make that two freaks, then,” I say with a small smile.
He leaves and I check on Gillian. She’s sleeping soundly on her side, but the room still smells awful, so I tiptoe around the air mattress to push the window all the way up. The summer moon is fat, and it shines through the pane brightly enough that I can see the rectangular patches on the wall where Audrey’s pictures used to hang. I’ve spent so much time here that I can envision her bedroom exactly as it looked before she packed everything away, from the Fannie Lou Hamer quote that sat framed on her nightstand (“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired”) to the bookshelves full of Baldwin and hooks and Lorde and Morrison to the nubby stuffed elephant named Freddie who sat on her bed.
A memory lies in every corner of this apartment: the bistro table where I calculated equations and ate leftovers from Aunt Farrah’s, the love seat where I took countless afternoon naps, the space between the coffee table and the armchair, where I sat cross-legged while Audrey put twists in my hair.
All of it is gone now. But maybe that’s the best part—that I won’t be able to come back here after Audrey moves away. Because some days I think I’m doing okay, and then it hits me, in my own house—a nick in the bathroom tile where my mother dropped her flatiron, a birthday card, buried under a pile of old papers, that says “Love you forever, Rah.” I gasp and it is the worst kind of surprise, the permanent reminder that life is only temporary.
Pierre comes back, in possession of a large pizza box and two bags from the convenience store filled with drinks. “I didn’t know what you like, so I just got as much as I could carry.”
There is a blue sports drink and a purple sports drink and three types of soda and a canned energy drink and apple juice and sparkling water. I thank him but quickly turn away to load them in the refrigerator, because I am embarrassed by his thoughtfulness. My father has known me his whole life and he wouldn’t go to this trouble. If he wasn’t sure which drink I wanted—and he wouldn’t be, not without asking—he’d likely bypass the cooler altogether.
Pierre takes the blue drink and I choose the apple juice and we sit in the middle of the empty living room with the pizza box and roll of paper towels. He opens the box to reveal a glorious thin-crust pizza with mushrooms and red peppers on my half, sausage an
d pepperoni on his.
“Are you a vegetarian?” he asks, removing a slice.
“I used to be.” I pull out my own piece and hold it in the air. “My mom never ate meat, but my dad is, like, the biggest carnivore on the planet. Sometimes it’s easier to eat what he makes, since it’s just the two of us.”
“Is your mom…?”
“Dead.”
Pierre swallows a bite and washes it down with a swig of blue water. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say.
And this is the part of the conversation where people wait for me to tell them how she died, also known as the part where I start resenting them. But I don’t get that vibe from Pierre. He’s just here, in the now, not demanding an explanation. It fills me with an unnerving but pleasant sort of comfort.
We’re silent as we plow through our first slices of pizza, and maybe I should be worried about the possibility of grease on my chin, but I’m too hungry for that.
Halfway through the second piece, Pierre says, “I had an older brother.”
I wipe my mouth with a paper towel and look at him, confused, but before I can respond, he goes on. “He got shot on our street and died when I was fifteen.”
“Oh my God.” I don’t mean to say it, but of course I’m surprised—by the way his brother died and that I didn’t already know this, but also because Pierre is in the same club as me. Lots of people lose grandparents by the time they reach high school, but things are different when a parent dies. It’s probably the same with a sibling. Nobody talks about the secret club, but you know when you meet someone else who belongs.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Because I know how it feels, when people are so horrified by the way someone who was close to you died that you end up trying to make them feel better about their reaction. “I didn’t know … Gillian never said anything.”
He finishes his slice, scrunches a paper towel between his fingers, and sits with his legs bent in front of him, arms hanging lazily over his knees. “It didn’t happen in Oak Park. I was born on the South Side. Parents never married, and my dad was around some but not a lot. Mom’s a nurse in the maternity ward at a hospital.”
The South Side? I know less about Gillian than I thought, because Audrey never mentioned she had lived there. Maybe they moved after Pierre was born. Though I could have sworn she said Gillian’s parents are still together.
Pierre clears his throat. “After what happened to my brother, my mom wanted me out of our neighborhood. Someone on our street knows who shot Braden and nobody talked. Nobody. My brother was, like, a fucking golden boy. Straight-A student, good at every sport, nice to people who didn’t deserve it. She didn’t want the same thing to happen to me, so I went to live with Gillian and her family. She’s not my real sister—we’re, like, foster siblings. My mom knows her dad from the hospital.”
I’m surprised I didn’t catch on before now; they don’t look anything alike. But lots of brothers and sisters don’t resemble each other. And Audrey and Gillian have always referred to him as her brother—no clarifiers.
“Is it weird?” I ask. “Living with them?”
“It was at first.” He glances back toward the bedroom, as if Gillian can hear him, but she’s still passed out. “I miss my house and living with my mom. And I wish she didn’t blame herself for what happened to Braden. She still talks about how maybe if she hadn’t been working so much and—God, I hate that she does that. She couldn’t have helped it. Braden couldn’t help it. He was doing everything right. Sometimes really bad shit just happens.”
“Yeah,” I say, my voice quiet. “It does.”
“Gillian’s family is great. They make me feel like I’m part of them. And … just so you know, Gilly is the reason I’m living with them at all.”
“I thought you said your parents knew each other?”
“They do, but we didn’t know that. Not at first. She was part of the rally some people organized when Braden died, and she came up and introduced herself. Everyone knew my mom and me from the news.” He pauses. “She started hanging around. Showing up after school, offering to take me to the library or White Sox games on the weekends. People talked about how sad it was, what happened to our family, but Gilly was the only one who stepped up and really made sure I was okay.”
Maybe Gillian is more like Audrey than I realized. Everyone was concerned about the kid left behind after my mother swallowed a bottle of pills, but their concern tapered off in the weeks after the funeral. Besides my father, Audrey was the only one who checked in every day, who made sure I ate and did my schoolwork, who took me to the lake and museums to keep me busy and get me out of the house.
“I’m sorry about Braden.” I touch Pierre’s arm without thinking, then quickly pull my hand away, even though it felt good, my fingers against his skin.
He looks at me now, his eyes serious but kind behind his glasses. Then he nods, his head dipping down in one quick movement, as if he’s putting a period onto the end of a sentence. “Thanks. It’ll be three years next month.”
“Sometimes I get mad when people don’t remember the day my mom died,” I offer. “My dad and I used to spend the whole day together, but then last year I woke up and he was gone and I just … I felt so…”
“Abandoned?”
“Yeah.” I squeeze a hand around my curls. “Exactly that.”
We used to get up early and eat her favorite breakfast, mushroom and spinach frittatas, then we’d visit the most expensive florist in the neighborhood and leave tulips on her grave.
She loved flowers, especially the tulips that overtake downtown Chicago in the spring. But her love for them became a family joke, because she had the greenest thumb of anyone we knew but always forgot to plant tulip bulbs in the fall. So we harvested delicate asparagus stalks, and plots of Swiss chard and arugula, and bulbous, blood-red beets that stained our fingers when we chopped them. And after we’d spent whole days in the backyard digging and pulling and planting and watering, we’d ride the train down to the Magnificent Mile just so she could see the tulips, the brightly colored blooms and pointed leaves lining the tourist-filled sidewalks with simple beauty. She’d lean into me as we walked among the crowds and say, “Just wait until we have our own next year—we’ll make this look like amateur hour.” And every year she’d forget about them until the soil was too hard to dig into, refusing new life.
Pierre and I sit there not saying anything, and I wonder if I’ve ruined our evening. Even friends and family members get uncomfortable when I bring up my mother. They try not to be, and yet their body language gives them away every time. But Pierre doesn’t look like that, so I keep talking.
“My mom was a painter,” I say. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and honestly, she and my dad spoiled me a lot. Everything was pretty perfect until … I didn’t know she was dealing with depression. My dad knew, of course, and I can remember some days when she wouldn’t get out of bed, but I didn’t understand. No one talked to me about it. And then she was gone, and I was only thirteen. Now I’m obsessed with looking in my aunt’s medicine cabinet…” I glance at him to see if my confession registers, but his expression doesn’t change. “I want to know exactly when she starts feeling anxious or depressed, because what if it runs in the family?”
“Do you think it does?” Pierre sits up taller as he looks at me.
I focus on the dimple in his chin and wonder if I’ll ever get the chance to touch it. “No. I mean, I don’t think so. But I was too stupid to see it in my mom, and what if I’m too dumb to see it in my aunt … or me?”
Pierre lets out a breath and I know instantly that what I said was too heavy for this room, for this night. Even for someone else in the secret club, even when we are sharing our life stories.
“You know, I feel like black people think we’re not supposed to take medication for mental illness. Like we’re supposed to be stronger than that. And that’s fucking bullshit,” he says, without an ounce of hesitation. “We’re not
superhuman. I was on antidepressants for a while after my brother died. And I never thought I would be on them … but it helped.”
“I think that’s the worst part.” My eyes are dry but my voice is faint. “She was trying to get better. She knew she needed help, but it wasn’t enough.”
“But you’ll always know she tried, right? I knew I had to stick around for my mom. The meds helped with that … And you were close with your mom, right?”
I nod, staring at my feet.
“She was trying for you. I’m sure of it.”
I’ve always known that, deep down, but to hear it said out loud, directly to me … It means more than any sympathy card or phone call or “I’m sorry about your mother” that I’ve received in the past four years. It means the world to me.
“It sucks to lose people,” Pierre says, and I feel him watching me, so I meet his gaze with a newfound respect. Because he’s looking straight at me. Not away, where it would be comfortable for everyone else. “But I have to keep telling myself I’m not losing Gillian. She’s leaving, but she’ll still be around.”
“Yeah.” But then I break eye contact, because it’s too much. He’s too … him. Knowing what to say and when to say it. I don’t know how he’s so good at that when he’s just met me.
“And I bet … well, I know it’s the same with Audrey. I heard about you so much before I even met you. She’s not going to forget you, Rashida.”
“What did you hear about me?” I blurt.
It lightens the moment. It makes him smile.
“Well,” he says, “all good things. That you’re smart. And sweet, even if you try to hide it. And that Audrey loves you more than anyone.”
I don’t say anything to that. I concentrate on breathing and I blink hard and I try to ignore the tightness in my chest, the strange pressure that makes me feel as if my sternum might break like a faulty dam. I stare at his sneakers to distract myself, at the blue ink running along the cracked, off-white sides. At first I think it’s doodles, words and sentences strung together nonsensically. But I make out a thou and a hast. “Are those Bible verses?”