“I already told him that, of course,” Fana said, enjoying the way her voice sounded so grown-up, not like when she was awake. “He was here before.”
“He’s nearly dead, you know,” Moses said, whispering. “He’s already half a spirit.”
“I know.” Before Fana could wave at the boy again, he was gone. People and things disappeared quickly here in the not-real place. In fact, Fana felt startled and turned around to make sure Moses was still there, too. She was suddenly afraid Moses might already be a half spirit like the pale, dying boy. But Moses still sat behind her, cradling her on his lap.
“Ugh! My mother’s tears are making holes in me,” Moses said painfully.
“I know.” Fana blinked away her own tears. She would miss being able to talk to Moses like this, in the place without secrets, where Moses felt no fear and she could always think of the right words to say. “When the sun comes out, you’ll wake up.”
“That’s a true-true promise?”
“Yes,” Fana said, annoyed he didn’t believe her.
“Then, good-bye, my little baby princess. Sala sentle, you queer little witch.” He sounded like the old Moses again, but Fana didn’t mind being called that name so much, not like before, because he kissed her cheek when he said it.
Then Moses really was gone. Fana found herself leaning against the mopane tree by herself, and suddenly the feeling of the rain against her face was not nearly as pleasant as it had been before. The droplets were bigger and colder, stinging her skin.
Fana stood up to look for The Man on his camel, so she could tell him she wanted to go back to the world with her mommy and auntie and Sarah, but she couldn’t find him. She was standing in the middle of a field of tall grass, and the grass was so tall that she could no longer see the kraal where the pale boy had been sitting, and she certainly could not see as far as her house.
Fana began to walk, taking those light, flying steps, but all she found was taller and taller grass. The sky was no longer golden the way it had been when she had first come; it was turning violet-black. She began to wonder if she could get lost here. After all, The Man had always been here before to tell her where to go.
Then, Fana stopped walking, gasping with fright.
The grass had simply stopped, and she stood at a great, vast edge that stretched as far as she could see when she turned her head right and then left. When she looked down, beyond her toes, she saw nothing except a blackness that was darker than the night sky and thicker than clouds. The blackness blew hot breaths against her face.
Quickly, Fana took a step back and covered up her nose and mouth with both hands. It smelled so bad! Like dead things, she thought. She had never come across bad smells in her special, not-real place before. And if she hadn’t stopped walking in time, she might have stepped right over the edge and fallen down! What would have happened to her then? Fana could tell she was standing up very high, and the darkness seemed to drop to nowhere. Maybe she would have fallen forever.
The darkness beneath her began to rumble loudly, as if the sound was coming from many places at once, some far away and some right near her. Somehow, inside all that noise, she heard a low, rough voice that scraped the bottom of her belly when it spoke: Come here, Fana. Don’t you know you’ll be much stronger here?
Was it The Man? She didn’t think so, but she wasn’t sure.
Fana saw faint flashes inside the darkness, like lightning, except the lightning wasn’t in the sky and it was the wrong color; Fana had only seen white lightning before now, but these flashes from below were bright green and red and orange. They were scary, but pretty, too.
Don’t you want all of them to be afraid to call you bad names?
The voice shook the ground, tying her belly in a knot, and Fana was too scared to move. That wasn’t The Man. She was so scared, she forgot about the pretty lightning. Then, she remembered Alice in her book, and how Alice kept seeing strange, scary things, but none of the things she saw in Wonderland could really hurt her—not even the queen who wanted to chop off her head—and all the while Alice just kept searching until she found her way back home. And Fana knew if she just turned around and walked back the way she had come, she was bound to wake up soon. She always did.
And when she woke up, she wouldn’t remember the way the world had dropped off into nothing, or the terrible rotting smell, or the sound of that awful voice that hurt her belly and tried to put mean thoughts in her head. Just like always, Fana knew she would hardly remember a thing.
7
“Fana? Oh, look at you! Get up, child.”
Fana felt someone tugging on her, and she blinked several times. It was Sarah, pulling her up by her arm. Fana didn’t remember getting out of her bed to go to the kitchen, but here she was, sitting on the kitchen floor beside the stove in her Mickey Mouse pajamas from Gramma Bea, the ones with pants that covered up her feet, and her tailbone hurt from the hard floor tile. It was mostly dark, but a little light was coming from the window above her, and she could hear the rooster outside, trying to wake everyone up. Had she walked here while she was asleep?
Suddenly, she thought maybe she had been talking to Moses, that she’d found him in the quiet place in her head, and her face filled with a smile. She was almost sure that when the sun came out all the way, Moses would be awake! And he had said he was sorry, just as he should.
“Fana, child, you don’t sit on the dirty floor that way. Why are you out of bed even before that loud, feisty old cock, huh? Your mother is calling for you.” Sarah slipped her hands beneath Fana’s armpits to stand her up. Fana’s legs had fallen asleep, so when her feet touched the floor, they tingled as if they had been plugged into an electrical outlet.
Sarah looked at her a long time, the way Fana knew she had ever since she’d drowned in the bathtub, as if looking at her would help her know if Fana had really been dead beneath that water or if her eyes had played a trick on her. Fana could see inside Sarah’s head, and Sarah wanted to know very badly. Fana longed to tell Sarah the answer, but her mother and Aunt Alex had told her how important it was to never tell anyone the truth, so she had not even told Moses about that.
“Look at the dirt on your bottom. Go to your room. Your mommy’s calling, I say.”
“Okay, Sarah,” Fana reached up to invite the tall, beautiful woman to lean over for a kiss. Sarah was taller than Mommy and Aunt Alex both. As Fana’s lips finally touched Sarah’s cheek, the nurse’s scent seemed different somehow, underneath the ordinary smells of talc, rubbing alcohol, and mealie that lingered in traces on her sweet-tasting skin. There was a little of the fear smell, and Fana wasn’t sure why. Too many unspoken things were in Sarah’s head, and not just about what she had seen in the bathtub. A question? A secret?
Sarah was worried about something. Or someone. Her brother. Very worried. Sarah’s scent had been odd this way before, a long time ago, but Fana could not remember why.
“Go, before she gets cross,” Sarah said, giving Fana a gentle nudge.
Long before she reached the doorway to her mother’s room, Fana could feel it. The feeling was so real it was almost an image, as if loops of light were twisting and turning in the air. Her mother was thinking about her. Mommy’s thoughts were boiling in her head. Fana concentrated as much as she could to try to make sense of the thick swarm of thoughts because they were muffled, but she could not hear, she could only feel. Her mommy was not happy with her. Aunt Alex had told her something about Moses, and now Mommy knew.
Fana felt a jabbing pain in her chest, and she wondered what it was until she realized she was only afraid. She wasn’t used to being afraid. She took one step after another, but she could only move a little bit at a time, her pajama feet shuffling across the floor. The hallway looked as if it stretched forever. Fana didn’t want to go to her room, not if Mommy was mad at her.
Mommy was sitting at her desk with her hands folded in her lap, and she’d turned the white wicker chair away from its normal position so that it
was facing the doorway, waiting for her. She looked like a schoolteacher, not like her mommy. Her face did not smile as it usually did when Fana came into the room, and the pain in Fana’s chest seemed to melt and spread into invisible tears that sank as far as her belly. What if Mommy stopped loving her? What then?
Tears came to Fana’s eyes. “He’s gonna wake up, Mommy, I promise! When the sun is all the way out!” she blurted, not waiting to be asked. She knew her mother might stop being angry if she didn’t lie from the start. “He called me names. And then he fell down . . . but I didn’t mean it!” Saying all that tired Fana out, and it was hard for her to catch her breath.
Mommy’s face was very still, as if she hadn’t heard. She was quiet for a long time.
“Sit on your bed, Fana,” Mommy finally said in a voice that was not really hers. Instead, she sounded as old as Moses’s great-grandmother, who never left the house and did nothing but eat boiled peanuts all day. Moses had told Fana she was already one hundred years old, and he wondered sometimes if the old woman might live forever.
• • •
Jessica sat immobile in her chair, barely able to think, much less move, just as she’d been the day of the funeral, when she’d vacantly pulled dress after dress from hangers in her closet, allowing them to crumple to the floor virtually uninspected except for obligatory sniffs beneath the armpits. Nope. No. No. Jesus God, no. None of them was right.
No dress was right for her child’s funeral.
She barely remembered the day itself because of her state, numb and fumbling through a horrifying dream under a haze of prescribed tranquilizers. She’d wished since that she could remember more details—what was said? Who were all those people, those strangers, in the back pews? What hymns had been sung besides “Precious Lord,” which her mother had selected and had now been destroyed to Jessica’s hearing because any strains of it took her back to that day? What food had been served in the church basement afterward? She didn’t know. Alex still sometimes made comments about how the news cameramen camped outside the church had trampled the hibiscus bushes, and how surreal it all was, but Jessica didn’t remember that either. The pills had swallowed her memories along with her pain that day.
But she would always remember the dream she’d had a week later, when the pain had long ago crept back into her pores, into her perspiration, her breath. When it permeated her every step, her every touch, like a physical growth blanketing her beneath its folds. Sleep was her only refuge from the pain, so she rarely left her bed during that time.
And one day, dozing during daylight, she realized Kira was back. Bea had told her about a dream visit from Kira two days after she’d died, and Jessica had begun to worry her visit might never come. She had been waiting for Kira.
And there she was. In her dream, she and Kira were both in Kira’s bedroom, squeezed side by side in her tiny walk-in closet, and together they were flinging clothes to the hardwood floor, trying to get Kira ready for her funeral.
“Will Daddy be there?” Kira asked in the dream, holding up her favorite lilac dress for Jessica’s approval. Kira’s hair was tied into adorable Afro puffs, the way Jessica’s mother had fixed her daughters’ hair during summertime a generation before. Her eyes were David’s.
“Yes, Daddy will be there,” Jessica told her, lying. Best for Kira not to know Daddy was gone. Jessica had been through this funeral day once, so she knew it was going to be hard enough already without bracing for David’s pointed absence again. But she realized, with a glow of relief, the funeral would be so much easier this time, with Kira at her side instead of lying shrunken and waxen, like an oversize doll, in the casket.
“And then what?” Kira asked, the way she always did when she was about to be taken somewhere she knew would bore her, a place children didn’t like to go.
“And then we’ll come home.”
“And then what?”
“And then we’ll do something else.”
“I want to watch Good Times, Mommy,” Kira said. Wasn’t that funny? That had been Jessica’s favorite show at that age, too. She didn’t know Kira had ever seen Good Times.
“You can do anything you want.”
“Okay,” Kira said, satisfied, and she smiled at her. But the smile faded before Jessica could savor it to help her fend off the pain she knew was waiting to ambush her once again soon. Part of her knew she was only dreaming. “My sneakers are dirty, Mommy.”
“I know,” Jessica said, reaching down to stroke the muddy neon-orange Keds Kira had been wearing the day she died. They were filthy—how the hell had she gotten them so filthy?—but Jessica didn’t ask Kira to take them off. She wasn’t ready to do that. She knew if she really did finish dressing Kira for the funeral, if she replaced those dirty sneakers with Kira’s black patent-leather shoes, or her white church shoes with the lacy bows, she would wake up and the visit would be over.
And then, precisely because of that fear, she’d found herself suddenly wide-awake, her eyes despising the unwelcome sunlight in the waking world. She’d heard too real traces of Kira’s voice ringing in the outskirts of her mind: My sneakers are dirty, Mommy.
Except that Kira had not been there, only her voice. Kira was dead.
That was the last time Jessica had felt this alone, when she’d lost Kira yet again. And now, she realized, she was losing Fana—Bee-Bee, her mind railed stubbornly, a sluggish afterthought. She’d lost her already, maybe. Oh, God, yes, she had.
“Fana,” Jessica said, realizing with blinding clarity how appropriate it was that her daughter had chosen a new name for herself, a name of unknown derivation that might as well be a stranger’s, “I want you to listen to me. Don’t speak.”
Fana nodded okay. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs swinging nervously back and forth, waiting for Jessica to break her long silence. Jessica had no idea what she planned to say, or how she would speak at all when her throat was tearing into pieces from a combination of pain and what could only be terror, but she heard words falling from her lips.
“What you have done is very wrong. There are no excuses for it. This situation is very, very serious. I don’t think you realize exactly how serious.”
I want to watch Good Times, Mommy.
The voice from her long-ago dream fluttered back to Jessica’s consciousness like the ding of a tiny, delicate bell. Kira. Oh, God, Jessica thought, her breath shuddering, how I miss that child. How she missed those days. Jesus God, Jessica’s mind pleaded uselessly, I want my life back. I want David and Kira and Bee-Bee back.
Fana was cocking her head to the side, her lips coming apart slightly, as if she was about to speak. Jessica saw Fana silently mouth the word Kira, her eyes full of questions, and Jessica’s spine locked tight all the way to the base of her skull.
“I’m sorry you never had the chance to meet your sister,” Jessica heard herself answering, in a voice as stiff and frozen as the damned and precious blood in her veins. “If things had turned out different . . . we would all be together. You, me, Kira . . . and your father. I’m thinking about her because she reminds me of a time long ago, when I felt safe. When I was happy. I don’t feel safe and happy like that anymore, Fana. I don’t know if I ever can, because it’s all so complicated now.” Jessica swallowed hard. “Maybe one day, when you’re a grown woman like me, you’ll look back on your safe, happy days as the time when Moses was your best friend and you played together every day. But Moses has a right to be safe and happy, too.”
Stung from the chastisement, Fana dropped her eyes. Jessica saw tears liberate themselves from Fana’s long lashes and wind down to her round cheeks.
“Is Moses your friend? Do you love him?” Jessica asked.
Fana nodded earnestly, still not daring to look back up at her.
“Then why did you make him go to sleep? Tell me.”
“He called”—Fana’s voice broke, more from the recollection than her confession—“he called me a witch.” The last word was punctuate
d, nearly sliced, by a sob.
Now Jessica felt her heart, not her throat, tear to shreds. Suddenly, she no longer felt alone. She was in the room with her child. Her child. Nothing else made sense, only that. But it was enough. Now she understood that only pure instinct was pulling words out of her mouth, past all the fear and confusion. She was speaking the words of a mother.
“Fana,” she said, patting her lap as she pulled herself to the edge of the wicker chair’s seat, “Come here. Come to me. We have to talk about some things, sweetheart.”
At the word sweetheart, Fana’s face illuminated despite her tears. She bounded from her bed and ran with veering, stumbling steps to Jessica’s chair, where she waited for her mother to lift her up to her lap. Fana was so, so small. Jessica was certain she should be taller by now, that her body wasn’t developing nearly as quickly as Kira’s had. Her walk was still clumsy, as though her limbs could not readily obey her. She was a baby, wasn’t she? Jessica often forgot this, but Fana was only three and a half, and she was still little more than a baby.
Fana sank into Jessica’s lap, molding perfectly to her shape. She rested her head against Jessica’s breast, breathing harshly, as though her desire to be near her mother was so strong that it strained her lungs. Absently, Jessica stroked the soft, matted braids of Fana’s dreadlocks, which Fana had begun twisting herself, naturally, from the time she was two. Jessica rocked her.
“The two of us are very different from all other people. We always will be.”
“Are we witches?” Fana asked, nearly whispering.
“Do you think you’re a witch? Is that why it hurt so much when Moses said it?”
The sob again, slightly muffled now. Jessica could feel warm moisture from Fana’s nose seeping through her woolen nightshirt. “Yes.”
“Well, then, that’s coming from inside of you. If you didn’t think you were a witch, would it have made you mad for Moses to say it? Maybe you only wish you weren’t so different.”