“Good to see you too, Sharlene.”
“It’s Shar,” she said. “In my house, you call me Shar. And you can go now.”
“Shar, don’t,” Nidra said. Her spontaneous plan had felt foolish as soon as she opened her door—indecent, really—but Shar had started downstairs before she could tell Devon she’d changed her mind. Shar stood halfway down the stairs, knuckles tight on the railing, undecided.
When Nidra saw the living room through Devon’s eyes, everything was crooked: the books, the rug, the sofa cushions, the photo frames. Everything.
“Did Asia finish her homework?” Nidra said.
Shar stared at Nidra with what looked like real loathing. “Yes, Mother. Anything else?”
“Are you done with yours?” Devon muttered, and Shar’s eyes shot lasers at him.
“Yes, there’s something else,” Nidra said. “Devon’s having dinner with us tonight. That all right with you?” She tried to sound casual. Like she wasn’t begging.
Shar’s lips shrank, tightening. “Is it all right if my arch-nemesis Mr. Roy, my geometry teacher drone, has dinner with us here in our house? At our table?”
“Yes, Shar. Is it all right?”
Shar still hadn’t moved from the stairs. Nidra braced for the storm, in front of company this time. None came. “Your life,” Shar said. “But he’s a royal pain.”
“Only during daylight hours,” Devon said. “After dark, my true personality emerges.”
He picked up the Christmas portrait Nidra and the girls had taken at Sears last year at her parents’ insistence, their smiles so forced they looked manic.
“I’m sorry, Shar,” Nidra said. “Hiding doesn’t feel right. You said to stop pretending.”
“It’s nothing at all to you,” Devon told Shar. “You’re any other student, and your mother and I are friends.”
Shar shrugged and went to the kitchen to get the dinner plates. Shar used to hide in her room to avoid her chores, but she never needed reminding since Karl left.
“Asia?” Nidra called upstairs.
“Right here, Mom.”
The voice came from the stairs, but hung weightless in the corner shadows. Then, just that fast, Asia was midway down the stairs in a long black T-shirt. Asia’s skin was the color of the stained teak-colored paneling on the wall behind her. Light from the foyer lamp shimmered, making her face seem to phase in and out against the wood’s grains, like an optical illusion.
When Devon drew a hitched breath, Nidra realized she’d been holding her own since she heard Right here, Mom from thin air.
“Well,” Devon said, sunshine in his voice. “It’s good to meet you, Asia. Your mother has told me a great deal about you.”
A lie, but a forgivable one for the way it made Asia’s teeth gleam with a smile.
“This is my friend, Mr. Roy. He’s—”
“I know,” Asia said. “I heard.”
Nidra served the macaroni and cheese as they sat at the table. Devon silently said grace before he ate, a habit she had never noticed. Could it be they had never eaten together? She remembered the sound of his lungs hissing when he’d seen Asia.
Why had everyone seen how sick Asia was but her?
“My daddy’s vanished,” Asia said to Devon.
Quickly, Nidra patted Asia’s hand. “That’s just what the police told us. We don’t know.”
Shar’s stare was so pointed that Nidra had to fight to hold her daughter’s eyes.
“He’s not coming back,” Shar told Asia, an assurance, as if Nidra were a stranger who had just said something profane. Her stare held, daring Nidra to dispute her.
“No,” Nidra said. “Probably not.”
Packed molecules in the air seemed to drift clear of each other, making it easier to breathe. Karl would want them to have the insurance money. Both of the girls needed new jackets instead of the old ones she’d had to dig out of the coat closet. It was only late November, but it was cold.
Maybe Karl’s truck had skidded in icy rain. Maybe that was how it had happened. He’d been on his way home. Maybe his last thoughts on this Earth had been of them.
“How do you like school?” Devon asked Asia.
Asia shook her head. “I hate it. Everybody looks at me because I’m sick.”
Nidra tried to keep the panic she felt from her face.
“Yes, that’s very rude,” she heard Devon say somewhere far beneath her. “It was that way for me, too, when my parents first moved us from my country. I was in a private school where no one had brown skin but me. They all stared. I ignored it.”
“Yeah, screw them,” Shar said.
“Who wants dessert?” Devon said, pulling out a produce bag.
Shar peered into the bag and blanched. “Do you know what those look like?”
“They’re dates,” he said.
Karl didn’t like dates, so Nidra had gotten out of the habit of buying them by the time the Shar was old enough to eat them. She could hardly remember who she had been when she was twenty, dropping out of Georgia State and marrying Karl because he had plans and made her laugh. Two months later, she was pregnant with Sharlene. Eight years after Sharlene, Asia. A life lived in a blur.
“I don’t think they’ve ever tasted dates,” Nidra said.
Devon cast Nidra a playful look. “Why are you depriving these girls?”
While Devon helped Asia choose the plumpest date, Shar peered over to study them.
“I’ll try one,” Shar said.
Asia squealed when she took her first bite. “It’s so sweet! Like cake.” She ate three more. She had a good appetite. Watching the fruit find Asia’s mouth, Nidra remembered the bubbles in Asia’s baby bottle when she drank, the way their dance had quieted Nidra’s worries when Asia was small.
“Well?” Nidra said, watching Sharlene wrap her date pit in her napkin.
“It’s okay.” Shar scooted out her chair. “It’s time for Asia’s bath.”
“I’ll take her up in a minute.”
Shar stood and reached for Asia’s hand the way she would at a busy intersection. “It’s a school night, so the sooner the better. Come on, Asia.”
After the polite good-nights, Devon watched as they walked away.
“You’re so lucky,” Devon said once he was alone at the table with Nidra.
“Which part?”
Devon slipped his hand over hers on the tabletop.
“Sharlene is such a big help to you,” he said. “You have a lovely family.”
The bathtub was full, the water crowned with bright white suds.
When Asia was two and Karl got a bonus at work, they’d used most of the check to refurbish the main bathroom upstairs. The floor, wall tiles, and bathtub were slick aquamarine, the color of the bathroom in her grandmother’s house. The picture window overlooking the backyard was the biggest luxury of her lifetime.
Neighbors’ lights twinkled in the dark like constellations. When the treetops were a full canopy, they never saw lights at night. Now, even in the darkness, her backyard trees’ steady shedding unmasked the lighted construction site down the hill: bare concrete walls half finished, machinery painted brightly in unnatural colors. She’d stopped noticing the view when it was pretty, and now it was gone. She could never catch hold of a moment.
Karl’s good razor hung suspended in the toothbrush rack, coated with dust and powdery shaving cream residue. Nidra took the razor and almost put it in the drawer, but she buried it in her front pocket instead. It would still smell like his face.
“Asia?” Nidra called into the hall.
“I’m right here.”
A splash echoed behind Nidra, from the bathtub. Suds parted at the foot of the tub as Asia sat up, a watery shadow against bathwater the color of the ocean. The bubbles clinging to Asia’s hair and face framed her features. Nidra couldn’t believe how pale Asia was since her last bath. Her bare skin was nearly invisible.
She would call Dr. Ross as soon as Asia was in bed. Nidra k
new his cell phone number by heart. She wondered at her calm, but knew she was not calm anywhere except on the outside.
“You were hiding,” Nidra said.
Asia giggled. “If I was a snake, I woulda bit you,” she said, imitating Grandma.
Nidra sat on the rim of the tub and dunked Asia’s washcloth into the warm water. “Here comes the snake,” she said, slithering the cloth beneath the suds toward Asia’s back. Asia pretended to scream, splashing to the other side of the tub. Nidra wanted to ask why Asia never told her she wasn’t feeling well again, but she didn’t have to. She probably had tried to say it, or expected Nidra to notice. She was Asia’s mother, after all. A mother should see it first, not last.
Water splashed again, and a stream trickled from Asia’s fingers. Asia played with the water for a long time. Nidra ran Dr. Ross’s telephone number through her head, sixes and threes.
“After your bath, you pick a story and I’ll read it to you,” Nidra said.
“Anansi, then.”
However small, it was a plan. No mysteries or new tragedies waited in the next thirty minutes. A maw gnawing inside Nidra’s stomach felt like a scream from her heart and womb, but Nidra enjoyed the sound of Asia splashing in the water, playing unafraid.
“Look, Mom,” Asia said in a hush, entranced. “I’m vanishing.”
Crystalline threads twined Asia’s fingers, blending her skin to the color of blue bathwater where her fading flesh rose and fell, rose and fell, across the liquid plane.
Throughout my writing career, I have sought ways to convey the feelings and images of death and dying as my own coping mechanism. This story, first written in the wake of my mother’s death in 2012, has never before been published.
I am still trying to understand how our loved ones can simply disappear.
Afterword: On Tananarive Due
Steven Barnes
In 1997, I met Tananarive Due at the African-American Fantastic Imagination conference hosted by Clark Atlanta University. She was cute and smart and terribly young, and when I heard her explain how she combined social networking, musical skill, and raw chutzpah to get a cover blurb from Stephen King, it was pretty much love at first sight. Literally, within three days we were all but engaged, sitting in the airport holding hands, our heads resting together, speaking of building empire . . . and a life . . . together.
And in 1998 we were married in her parents’ house, by her father, and she moved to Washington State, where I was raising my daughter, Nicki, in a little lumber town called Longview. When Nicki graduated high school, the idea was that we would move down to California and my home town of Los Angeles, and take on Hollywood.
In the mean time, we wrote. T (as I call her, figuring that there was no reason to invest the extra syllables, or even fearing that by the time I got out “Tananarive” I could have said “T . . . the bus!” and saved her life) was a writer of such clarity, imagination and emotion that Hollywood immediately saw the value of her work, and fought to back dump trucks filled with money up to our door. We believed that if we could learn to work together, we could graft the best of her approach and mine together, and create something extraordinary, and effective.
Well . . . anyone who has tried to collaborate with anyone at all has experienced the difficulty of weaving two creative instincts into a single braid. Now add being married. The natural jostling and arguing that is a natural part of the collaborative process now has to also carry the weight of the natural stresses of living and loving. One answer was to take the relationship itself “off the table.” In other words, no matter how passionate the fight, it was never personal. It was just about the work.
To a degree it worked, although our initial attempts to work with movie studios were pretty much stillborn. We just couldn’t figure out how to leverage our different approaches.
Then in 2005 we were asked to submit a story to a horror anthology, and wrote the tale “Danger Word,” which is also included in this collection. This was our first fictive collaboration, and we bounced ideas back and forth until we came up with the idea of a grandfather trying to protect his immature and traumatized grandson post zombie apocalypse. (By the way, this simple short story led, in time to our Devil’s Wake young adult zombie series, and the short film we co-produced and wrote, Danger Word, in which the young boy protagonist of the original story morphed into a slightly older girl. But that’s another story.)
What happened during the writing of the short story was fascinating and educational. The process moved from plot to character to rough draft to polished draft. But it was in the polishing that something remarkable happened. The first time I read Tananarive’s work, a passage of her first novel, The Between, I recognized that this young woman had phenomenal storytelling skills, but I didn’t fully understand what it was I was seeing.
When we worked on “Danger Word” on the other hand, we talked about every sequence, every scene, every paragraph, every sentence, every word. And as we “passionately discussed” all these things, what became clear is that she did not use the same dyadic relationship that had been so valuable in my own career. Yes, she understood plot beautifully. And her characterization was superb—she had a feeling for humanity that simply shone from the page. But there was something else: poetics.
The language itself. And more than that, please remember the saying that “poetry is what happens between the lines” in the same way that “jazz is what happens between the notes.”
Tananarive was looking at the invisible world of the almost psychic connection between the writer and the reader, the creative dream-space that the storyteller creates where emotions trump logic, and we are willing to accept the fantastic as real.
Plot, yes. Characters, yes. But the POETRY of the language, the imagery, the rhythms, the secret meldings of their proportions, the thing that can’t quite be quantified but is the instinctive gift of the natural storyteller, that thing that teachers seek to educe from their students, often with despair. It is indeed a gift that keeps on giving, and Tananarive Due, my darling wife, has it in spades.
I fought her for a couple of years, but finally surrendered, and added that third element to my basic structure, which then became: Plot, Character, Language (what I call “poetics”). Each has a relationship with the other two. Each can be viewed individually, or in dyadic relationship with one of the others.
View this as life itself. We have human beings. And we have the world that they inhabit. And the lives they create in reaction with that world.
And then there is the poetry, the world of meaning they seek to create . . . we seek to create . . . out of our day-to-day lives. Seeking every day to not merely survive another sunset, but to find pleasure, and beauty, and even that elusive quality called “art,” spinning gold from the straw of our existence.
Tananarive’s fiction seeks to add or extract meaning from the chaos of life, to give us the perspective that helps us see that the crying child, the departing lover, the discontented customer, the senile grandparent who used to be so alive and wise, are somehow all part of a world of meaning. We see the people. We experience the events. But it is the poetry we yearn for.
We work, we play, we give, we share . . . seeking that poetry. Seeking love, and connection with our own hearts. And fiction reduces the infinite universe into a knowable few words and scenes that represent a greater whole, and to the degree that the writer is honest about their own experiences, needs, strengths and weaknesses their characters live more vibrantly than the actual “real” human beings in our lives. There is something magical about a writer who can do this, give us these insights, extract and convey that meaning.
And Tananarive is a magician. She loves her characters, because she loves people deeply. Her connection to her family, her friends, her readers, her students, and even teachers is profound. And as the man fortunate enough to share her life, I have been able to observe her in all moods and times, through triumph and tragedy, and seen the depths of her strength and
the very real and tender weaknesses, all of them connected to how very much she loves life, and fears what that life can do to those she loves.
The poetry of life is the invisible connection between people, things, and events. Love is the binding emotion between those exact same things. By seeking to orchestrate the emotions and images experienced by the audience when they read her stories, she is saying: I love these things. These people. This world. I want you to experience that love. To open your heart, despite the fact that there is much to fear. Do not let fear stop you from loving, ever, because it is, in the final analysis, the only thing that blunts the terror of existence.
Tananarive Due’s stories are filled with terrors, extraordinary and mundane. And with beauty. And love. And poetry.
The human heart is just that large, that immense, with that many chambers. If all there was in the world was people and problems . . . character and plot . . . it would be a sterile world indeed.
But there is more. There is poetry.
There is love.
She is mine.
Steven Barnes
June 10, 2015
Acknowledgments
“The Lake” © 2011 Tananarive Due. First published: The Lake (St. Martin’s Press).
“Summer” © 2007 Tananarive Due. First published: Whispers in the Night, ed. Brandon Massey (Dafina Books/Kensington Corp.).
“Ghost Summer” © 2008 Tananarive Due. First published: The Ancestors, ed. Brandon Massey (Dafina Books/Kensington Corp.).
“Free Jim’s Mine” © 2014 Tananarive Due. First published: Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, eds. Daniel José Older & Rose Fox (Crossed Genres Publications).
“The Knowing” © 2002 Tananarive Due. First published: Gumbo: A Celebration of African-American Writing, eds. Marita Golden & E. Lynn Harris (Harlem Moon).
“Like Daughter” © 2000 Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, ed. Sheree R. Thomas (Aspect/Warner Books).