Gas

Noun. Rhymes with never last. Yes it does. Miss Black says that’s a near-rhyme, you ig . . .

“Ain’t you supposed to be at work?” I say to my mom when I get home.

“No. I don’t like it no more. It’s cold now so Chuey moved us inside. Now he wants us to dance. Anyway, Jaime says he don’t want me working for Chuey no more. He’s got things lined up. Gonna give me money to stay home, if you can believe that?!”

Me: “Well, shit, I can tell you really thought this through!”

I stomp into the bafroom and stare at the mirror, just like I used to stare out the window with Zane. Flashback time: you knew I’d get to it eventually.

I’m staring out the window with Zane.

My mother says, “STOP, you’re going to see something.”

By “seeing something,” she means be a witness. I already am, but I ain’t going to say nothing about nobody.

“Get away from there,” my mother says.

Zane says, “I’ma wait. I’ma wait.” What he means is he’s going to wait at the window until Daddy gets home from prison.

My mother tells us to shut up and get in the car. I ask her does she have enough gas.

She says, “NOW.”

We both get in the back. She turns the radio up.

If the car music is turned way up you don’t think about running out of gas. You don’t think about how you have nowhere to go. You just drive.

“If we run out of gas,” I say to Zane, “we can just up and move. It would be a adventure. Wherever the car dies is where we live. If it dies at a pizza shop, we live by the pizza shop.”

“Pepperoni!” Zane claps. “Pepperoni!”

“Oh shit,” I say. “It would be fate. Our mother could get a job. AT THE PIZZA SHOP.”

If Zane had a tail, it would be wagging. He opens a window. Sticks out his head and lets his tongue hang out. (See B for Blessing.)

Sometimes at night Zane and I would stick our heads out our bedroom window and howl at the moon. I still do sometimes, thinking maybe somewhere he’s howling back.

I start to relax. I keep checking the gas gauge and making wishes. Let it die at the Chinese restaurant. At the skate rink. At the bowling alley.

But then I start thinking. It would still be us. Same shit, different bowling alley.

I want it to be like a shipwreck. A plane crash. When the car dies I want to end up in the middle of nowhere. Where the food is nothing we’ve ever eaten, the language nothing we ever speaked. Maybe if we could just start fresh knowing nothing and no one, then we would figure everything out. I start thinking about Canada again. I start to relax. To tune out.

So does my mother. She’s jamming to the radio up front and hits the window button by accident. The window closes on Zane’s neck. And then the car runs out of gas.

Me: “Ma!”

Zane: “Gwrft . . .”

God: “Did you not say you wanted—?”

My mother steers us to the curb. Hammerfists the button. Jams the key in the ignition: “It won’t open! Oh my God!! OH MY GOD!!!”

Me: “You’re gonna break the key!”

My mother: “What do we do? Oh my God!”

Zane turns white, then beet red.

Me: “I don’t know. Get in the back and hold him so he stops moving around so much.”

My mother: “Okay! Shit!”

We switch places, her in the back, me in the front.

I know breaking the window won’t work. Daddy showed me how to mess with the wires a bunch of times, but I’ve never done it alone. I move the seat back so I have room to work.

The car turns on. The window goes up. Zane throws up. I channel the Force, jackhammer the button. The window goes down.

Zane slumps over. We have to get to a hospital.

What my mother says to the doctor is we kids were probably messing around with the buttons. That she’s going to sue the car company. Maybe we could sue—if the car wasn’t a 1982 model repossessed from seven generations of migrant workers and abandoned at a 7-Eleven before my dad got it.

The doctor asks why Zane’s head was sticking out the window in the first place. “If he was in a seatbelt, and a booster seat . . . as required by law,” he adds.

“He’s never been right in the head,” my mother answers. “He must have . . . wiggled out of his seatbelt—and thrown the booster seat out the—no . . . Wait—”

I put my head in my hands. The doctor calls CPS. My mother says it’s discrimination. Really LOUD. The doctor says he’s going to call security. She starts pulling me out the door.

Me: “Ma? We can’t just leave Zane here!”

“He’s not going anywhere, Macy. We gotta bounce. We’ll go home, get his things, come back.”

I keep stopping as she drags me out Zane’s room. Out the hospital.

My mother: “Would you hurry up? We might need a jump.”

I look up at the building where Zane is sleeping in a bed with a neck brace. Where Zane will wake up and not know where he is.

My mother sweet-talks a guy for a jump. She talks to herself all the way home. But not to me. She knows better.

She tries to turn on the radio. I punch it off. Literally.

The next morning Sleeping Booty actually wakes up when it’s barely light out. She throws a bunch of clothes into a Hefty bag.

I grab a Sharpie so I can sign Zane’s neck.

We run out of gas and have to hitch a ride home. The driver wants to kill us but that’s only because me and mother won’t stop fighting. He tells us to get out a block away from home. My mother heads off to a “friend’s” house. I walk home alone. That’s when the neighbors tell me CPS has been knocking on doors looking for me. They took Zane from the hospital. (See A for All About You.) I tell my neighbor to tell my mother I’m at George’s.

I run to George’s house. He answers the door. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without his helmet and coat on. His hair is black and thick and sweaty except in one spot where a scar runs across his scalp.

I can see George’s mom sitting in front of the television. “Is Valentina here?”

Valentina. George’s dead sister.

George: “No, no, no. Macy.”

His mom takes a long time to stand up. She blinks like her brain is erasing whatever it had drawn over me. I think maybe she only stands up when she has to go to the bafroom.

George: “Mommy, you can sit down.” That’s the first time I’ve ever heard George speak in a complete sentence.

Me: “Uh. George. Uh. I need . . . Can I . . .” God, am I really asking him what I’m asking? “St—st—”

George: “Steak?”

Me again: “St— St— Steak? Yes. I need steak.”

George makes me a steak.

Don’t take long before CPS gets to me. The neighbors told my mother and everyone else—including 3211—where I was.

George tells his mom, “Tell CPS, Mommy. Okay? Macy stay. Macy, mom, okay?” And she tells the CPS worker: She can stay.

The house is clean. No cockroaches. Food in the fridge. Steak and rice on the table. The worker lets me stay.

I stay two weeks. George keeps a clean floor. It’s cleaner than my kitchen table.

I HEART George.

As soon as CPS is out the picture, I go back home. Daddy’s out on probation. But there’s no barbecue, no cake as I had always imagined it. “How could you let this happen?” he keeps asking Yasmin, and as mad as I’ve been at my mom, I know that’s bullshit.

Losing Zane was a group effort.

He punches holes in the wall that I have to plaster. He breaks a window I have to replace with one from the junkyard. It’s the first time I’m madder at him than my mother. Shit, he had heat in prison. He didn’t have to worry about freezing to death. We do.

When the lights come flashing down our block, we know they’re for him.

“I’m sorry, Yasmin. I’m supposed to be the man of the house! Why am I like this? Macy, I’m sorry!” He falls to his knees and cries.

I don’t think I ever saw him cry before. Not even when Baby Girl died. Daddy had finally run out of gas.