I’ve been saying goodbye to all of that since the crash.
I’ve been saying goodbye all along.
WHEN WE PULL up to the house, Dessalines is peeking out from behind the glass on the side of the front door. I call for him as soon as Josiane opens the door. Dessalines wraps himself around my legs and curls up there like a boot I want to keep on forever.
I take off my glasses so they don’t scare him. Josiane bends down and picks him up. We walk over to the living room couch and she puts him in my lap. Dessalines licks my face as though it’s covered in tuna oil, and I’m so wrapped up in him that at first I don’t notice anything else.
The house is filled with flowers, balloons, and teddy bears. Josiane tells me that some of these things came from total strangers who’d read about Isabelle’s death in the newspapers or had heard about us on the news. The island between the kitchen and dining room is covered with cards: open cards lined up in rows, probably by Grandma Régine.
Dessalines stays in my lap for a minute or so, then leaps across the coffee table to where my parents are sitting: Dad with his legs stretched out in front of him and Mom with her arms bracing her body as if to safeguard her bruised ribs. Dessalines curls up between them, and Mom and Dad take turns rubbing his back.
In the car on the way home, Grandpa Marcus, Grandma Régine, and I said very little to one another, not even to tell Grandpa Marcus that he was lost again and that everyone else was going to make it home before we did.
Grandpa Marcus had only attempted a few words.
“Izzie looked like Izzie,” he said.
Now, in the house, there is even less to say.
Josiane walks to the refrigerator and pulls out some of the food people had brought by, large trays of food covered in aluminum foil, more than we could ever eat.
“Anybody hungry?” she asks.
None of us are.
Only Dessalines seems to be hungry, or maybe he’s just bored with us. He rushes off to his kitchen-corner lunch.
After a while, when there’s nothing else to do, Josiane carves out pieces from the different lasagnas and casseroles, and she and Grandma Régine set up a microwaved meal for us in the dining room. I can barely taste the food. I can only think of Isabelle, and how we left her all alone in that place, and how later, she would be ignited like a sparkler, then smolder into ashes.
Grandpa Marcus is sitting in Isabelle’s chair, the one facing the colorful Haitian paintings on the wall. Sometimes when Isabelle was daydreaming, I’d see her staring at those green hills and blue mountains, like the ones above Grandma Régine and Grandpa Marcus’s house, while quickly stuffing food in her mouth.
Mom would remind Isabelle to slow down and take her time with her food.
“There’s no famine, Isabelle,” Mom would say.
“Evidently,” Isabelle would reply.
We all eat very slowly now, as if trying to make that meal last forever. This is what we’d have to do from now on, make things last a lot longer so we won’t have to worry about what to do next.
The doorbell rings towards the end of the meal. The interruption is a relief. Both Uncle Patrick and Aunt Leslie get up to answer it. Josiane is faster and makes it to the door right before the bell rings again. She parts the curtain on the side of the door and looks out.
“Lapolis,” she says.
“Let them in,” Dad calls out, as though he’s been expecting them.
Josiane opens the door and the same policewoman from the hospital walks in. This time there’s a male officer with her; he’s a little shorter and has a faster gait.
They look over at the table, then whisper something to Josiane.
“I’m not sure this is a good time,” Mom calls out loudly.
Dad waves them over anyway.
“Are you sure?” Grandma Régine asks Dad.
“She has to talk to them,” Dad says, meaning me.
The officers stand at the far end of the table, where I’m sitting. They’re wearing the same black pants and long-sleeved shirts and matching stars, like the one that exploded in my head in the hospital room that day.
“Please forgive the intrusion.” The female officer speaks first.
“No intrusion at all,” Dad says.
He seems glad to have someone to talk to other than us.
“I’m familiar with all of you now,” the female officer says, then, looking over at me, she adds, “except maybe your daughter.”
I am familiar with you, I want to say, but mostly with the star on your chest.
“Again, please accept my deepest condolences,” she says.
The officer next to her nods, silently adding his own condolences.
“My name is Officer Butler,” she says just to me. “And this is my partner, Officer Sanchez. We’re investigating the incident that led to your sister’s death.”
I notice she says incident and not accident.
We think what happened was not exactly an accident.
“I saw you in the hospital,” Officer Butler says, keeping her eyes on me. “Officer Sanchez and I have already talked to your parents. We’re here to see if there’s anything you want to add. Anything we might be able to learn from you about what happened that evening. Can you please tell us what you’re able to remember?”
I don’t know what my parents have already told them, so I’m not sure what needs to be added. We were in a car driving to a concert, and now my sister is dead. I can’t even get those few words out.
“How about we ask you a few questions?” Officer Butler pulls out a small pad from her shirt pocket and begins scribbling things down even before I can speak.
“Was there anything unusual happening before the crash?”
Everyone is staring at me now. Not just the officers, but my parents and grandparents and Aunt Leslie and Uncle Patrick and Alejandra, too.
There was a lot of traffic and a lot of cars stuck in it, but that wasn’t so unusual for rush hour in Miami. I don’t know what to say, so I shake my head no.
“Have you ever seen the car that hit you? I mean before that day,” she says.
I had never seen that car before, so, even though it hurt a little bit, I shake my head no for that one, too.
The way the questions are going, it seems like they already know something I don’t. It almost seems like I should be questioning them. Were there unusual things happening that I hadn’t noticed? Was I supposed to have seen that red minivan before?
“The young woman driving the red minivan was a student at your school,” Officer Butler says. “She was enrolled there up to the night of the incident.”
She’s speaking so slowly that I think maybe I’m still deaf. Am I actually hearing those words or am I reading her lips?
“Morrison?” I ask.
“That’s where you go to school, isn’t it?” she asks.
Who at school would want to hurt us enough to ram a car into us?
“Are you familiar with a student from your school named Gloria Carlton?” Officer Sanchez takes over the questioning. He speaks slowly, too, except his face edges closer with every syllable, before he pulls back again.
Morrison is one of the smaller charter high schools. Still, over six hundred kids go there. I don’t know all of them.
“What grade is she in?” I ask, as if this would matter. Was she more likely to want to kill us if she was a freshman than a senior?
“She’s relatively new to your school,” Officer Sanchez says. “Ninth grade. Midyear transfer.”
Why is he calling it my school, as though I own it?
“I don’t know her,” I say.
“She was the one driving the car,” he says. “We’re just trying to gather all the facts.”
Who is this Gloria Carlton, and why would she want to hurt us? It doesn’t sound like she’s even old enough to be driving.
“I didn’t see the driver’s face,” I say. “All I saw were the lights.”
“That’s understandable,”
Officer Butler says.
Before Mom had mentioned it, I thought we might have been hit by someone older. An old man who’d had a heart attack at the wheel. An old lady who was driving way past her ninetieth birthday. A drunk with an expired license. I never thought it could be someone close to my age.
“Gloria Carlton was taken into custody at the scene,” Officer Sanchez says, “and she’s been positively identified as the driver.”
“What does she look like?” I ask.
As if he’s just been waiting for me to ask, Officer Sanchez yanks a large-screened phone from his breast pocket and taps a few keys. He zooms in, then hands me the phone. The screen is even brighter than the sun outside, or Officer Butler’s star in the hospital that day. Even when I put on my shades, I still feel like I’m being stabbed in the eye with a thousand needles. But I can’t look away.
What I’m looking at could be Gloria Carlton’s mug shot. Even with the blinding glare, it looks sepia, like Gloria Carlton’s skin. Gloria Carlton has short brown curls and freckles on both her cheeks. She has a moon-shaped face. Her eyes are droopy. She doesn’t look like someone who would stand out in a crowd, someone you’d notice right away. She looks like someone who always wanted to be somewhere other than where she was. She looks like she’s always tired.
“What did she say happened?” I hand Officer Sanchez back his phone.
“She claims it was an accident,” Officer Sanchez says.
“You don’t believe her?” I ask.
“Whenever we have a fatality, we have to investigate,” Officer Butler chimes in.
“Are you sure you’ve never met her?” Dad asks me.
Every member of my family has their specialty. Grandpa Marcus and Grandma Régine’s is organizing and planning things. Aunt Leslie’s is medicine. Uncle Patrick’s is music. Mom’s is beauty, makeup, making people look good. Dad’s is the law. Interviewing people and trying to better understand their stories is part of Dad’s specialty.
“Did Izzie know this girl?” Dad asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, I don’t think so.”
Maybe it was a mistake for me and Isabelle to try so hard to keep our school lives separate. Now there are questions I can’t even answer about her. I wasn’t with her all the time. I don’t even know if some pyscho freshman wanted her dead.
“Where is she now?” I ask the officers.
“She’s in her parents’ custody,” Officer Butler says.
“So she’s out,” I say.
“Yes,” Officer Butler answers.
“Will I have to see her in school when I go back?” I ask.
“Her parents are using an online school,” Officer Sanchez says.
“So nothing might happen to her,” I say.
“We’re still investigating,” Officer Butler says. “We’ll check in again and keep you up to date.”
The interview is over. They wave goodbye and Josiane leads them to the door.
“Unbelievable,” Dad says, after they leave.
Mom gets up and, with her arms still wrapped around her body, walks to the other side of the house. We can hear her sobbing just as clearly as if she were still sitting next to us. Aunt Leslie goes after her, and when she gets there, Mom’s sobbing stops.
I am relieved when the doorbell rings again. This time it’s Mrs. Clifton. Word must have gotten out that we were back from the service. The Marshalls also stop by with Pastor Ben. By then the house is so full, there’s barely room for anyone to sit down.
Tina looks angrier than anything when I finally get to see her again. She fidgets while her parents greet mine, her five-foot frame shaking as she plops herself down on the sofa next to me.
“Let’s go to your room,” she says.
Turns out she’d come to rescue me. Tina is like my second sibling, my “untwinned” one, my dosa. You don’t have to explain yourself to a dosa, either.
Going to my room, though, means walking past Isabelle’s room. There’s still that large handmade sign on her door that says STAY OUT! She made it after Mom got a note about drug abuse prevention from school and decided to regularly check our rooms.
I want to run rather than walk past the sign, but Tina puts her hand on the small of my back to hold me up, and I feel a little bit stronger.
My room is neater than I’d left it. The bed is all made and is lined up with the dresser whose drawers I’d left open with clothes spilling out that Friday evening. Josiane probably came through and tidied things up. Even my Jean Michel Brun portrait is already back on my wall.
I slip into my bed, pulling my clean pillows under my head. The pillows smell like a potpourri cushion. Tina walks to the other side of the bed and climbs in next to me. We’re lying down, directly across from my print of Basquiat’s Riding with Death.
Had Tina, Jean Michel, and I somehow known when we’d chosen it as one of our presentation prints that one day I would actually be riding with death?
I try to remember what we’d written about Riding with Death, what Tina had said in front of Mr. Rhys’s class, that Basquiat must have known he was going to die young because in that painting he seemed to be so at ease with death. The man riding the skeleton seemed almost like he was on his way to a celebration, she said.
“How is our Jean Michel?” I ask Tina.
“He wanted to know if he could come see you later,” she says.
I wonder where my phone is. In Mom’s purse? In the wreckage of that car, probably with hundreds of messages on it.
Even though Gloria Carlton is the skeleton rider in our lives, I can’t bring myself to talk about her right away. But maybe Tina knows her, so I have to ask.
“Do you know someone named—”
She interrupts me.
“The police came to the school,” she says. “They talked to a bunch of us about her. Not that many people knew her.”
“Why would she?” I couldn’t even complete the thought. But why would Tina understand any of this better than I could?
“It might have been totally random,” she says.
I know she doesn’t mean to sound dismissive or casual about it, but she does. I know she’s struggling with what to say, but why isn’t she calling this Gloria person a murderer?
Suddenly I want her to go away. I want her to get off my bed, get out of my house, and just go away. I want everyone to go away. But if Tina goes away, I will lose yet another part of myself.
“Why didn’t you come see me in the hospital?” I ask her.
“I did,” she says, “though not for long.”
“Really?”
“Your mom said we could only stay for thirty minutes.”
“We?”
“Jean Michel and me.”
“He came, too?”
“It was scary,” she says. “Your eyes kept opening and closing, but it looked like you weren’t there. Your were a medical mystery. Granddad called you Lazarus. Your aunt kept saying your stats looked good. She said that your brain scans looked fine, but you weren’t waking up. From what they could tell, it didn’t look like you were exactly in a coma. It just seemed like you were in a really deep sleep, except with your eyes open a lot of the time. You were like a horror-movie Sleeping Beauty.”
That’s exactly how I would have put it.
“When Jean Michel and I came to see you, we talked to you about school, especially art history and Rhys,” she says. “He talked to you about that election campaign you guys worked on, and a bunch of other things. He was happy to see that portrait he made for you in your hospital room. Your grandma said she brought it there to remind you that you had family and friends who loved you.”
“I kind of remember feeling some things,” I say. “You told me stories to keep me alive.”
“We tried,” she says. “Seriously, though, we were really worried about you.”
This is the most I’ve wanted to speak since the crash, and both the desire to say more and the act of trying tire me out. Still, it make
s me realize how much I’ve missed Tina. I’ve missed how easy it is to talk to her.
“Did Jean Michel kiss me in the hospital?” I ask her.
“Basquiat?” she asks. “They must have given you some superpowerful drugs.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I sure do.” She takes a deep breath and sighs to extend the torture.
“Well, did he?”
“He sure did.” She sighs again. “I looked away to give you guys some privacy, so I don’t know if saliva was exchanged or anything.”
I think I smile. Both now and way back there in the hospital, too.
“Let’s get back to Gloria Carlton,” I say anyway.
“Why?” she asks. “When we can talk forever about that kiss. Did you feel it?”
“I think I did.”
“It must have been some kiss.”
“I think it was.”
I don’t want to dilute the kiss with our words, and I really want to learn more about Gloria Carlton.
“Tell me everything,” I say. “I know you must have Nancy Drewed her.”
“I sure did,” she says, switching now to co-detective mode. “There’s nothing about Gloria Carlton online. No Facebook page. Nothing. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”
I wish she didn’t exist, I think, because then Isabelle would still be here.
“I hear voices,” Aunt Leslie calls out from the other side of the door. “Can we come in?”
I want to ask who “we” is, but then she’s already opened the door and she’s standing there with Jean Michel Brun.
“Is everything all right in here?” Aunt Leslie asks.
She backs out of the room, leaving Jean Michel standing in the doorway.
“Come in,” I say, and he does.
He looks around my room, as if taking everything in. My green curtains, the dimming light coming from the window, the posters on my wall, his portrait, the Basquiat print.