“Kenia,” her mother said between chops to the carrots for their salad, “it still sounds like a good opportunity, and maybe you can go to Haiti next summer.”
Kenia was home, the spring semester finals over, her second year of college complete. Now it was a question of her practicum.
“Is Dr. Quientela still waiting for an answer?”
“Yeah,” Kenia said, sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, tracing a pattern in the granite countertop with a fingertip. The kitchen smelled like her mother’s chicken marinara baking in the oven. The recessed lighting was warm and soft. Marvin Gaye was playing on the audio system. The kitchen was the centerpiece of the custom home her mother had designed herself—built to raise four children with room for all of them to sit on stools sidled up to the oversized island. “It’s just not exactly what I planned to do when I signed up for a degree in global health.”
“West Virginia is part of the globe too,” her mother said, looking up, her eyes large, luminous, and hazel-green. Kenia had her mother’s eyes, but she still felt a thrill to look upon them. They could be, by turns, pools of sympathy or lasers of focus. Many an internist had stammered, feeling the weight of them, and many a patient a sense of calm. They epitomized her mother to her, closely followed by the size of her heart—her mother would save the world if she could—and the sharp edge of her intellect, the tool by which she would save it. Kenia had grown up hearing people compliment them. They were what first attracted her father to her mother, and she felt pride in having inherited them.
Her mother chopped the last of the carrots and slid them off the cutting board into the greens, waiting for an answer.
“Audre said something similar,” Kenia said.
“Have you spoken with her?”
“Not since she left for Haiti.” Kenia felt a pang of remorse as she said so. She missed her friend, but even more so, her absence was confirmation that there would be no last-minute reprieve. The chance to go to Haiti was closed to her.
“What is the name of the town you’d be in again?” her brother, Chiazam, asked from two stools down. He held his phone length-wise with both hands. Chiazam took after their father. He was dark, had large dexterous hands, and an easy smile.
“Selah Station,” she said, picking a carrot out of the greens and crunching down on it. Amy Winehouse came up in the rotation and began to insist on not going to rehab.
“Selah Station . . . .” He was quiet for a moment while his eyes scanned back and forth through the Wikipedia entry. “According to this, it was a station on the underground railroad. It was where escaped slaves would cross from Virginia—later West Virginia—to Maryland. The town was founded in the early 1800s by a family from Buffalo. They were business men and abolitionists who wanted to start a town with an economy based on something besides slave labor. It was supposed to be an experiment, an example for southerners, an alternative to the slave-labor-based model they already had.”
“Well, we’ve seen how that caught on,” Kenia said.
“Hey, there was even an HBCU there, one of the first historically black colleges in the country,” he added.
“Now that is something I did not know,” her mother said, opening the oven door to check the chicken. She closed it and returned to the island while Kenia moved over to the stool closest to her brother.
“Why have we never heard of it?” she asked.
Chiazam read from the entry: “Selah Branch University was the first historically black college, although it was open to students of all races and therefore also the first fully integrated university of its time. The school thrived from 1905–1953 when an industrial accident at the Selah Island Coal Processing Plant spread toxic waste throughout the original town center, surrounding neighborhoods, and the university campus. The island has been declared uninhabitable since, with most of the population shifted to the West Virginia shore of the Potomac.”
He scrolled through the entry and tapped a few of the photos. “Looks like you can visit the island and the old campus if you wear a hazmat suit.”
“I don’t want to be living near a superfund site,” Kenia said, leaning over the phone. “Click back to the map.”
Chiazam did so. The entry showed the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers with Maryland to the north, Virginia to the south, and West Virginia on the triangle of land in between. Selah Island held fast in the Potomac, the river channeled into narrow gorges, the river there labeled the Selah Branches, north and south respectively. “Selah Station was the last stop on the underground railroad before escaped slaves reached freedom,” her brother continued to read. “It was a center of African American culture until the accident, one of the most environmentally destructive in US history.”
“Cheerful,” Kenia said. Tired of looking over her brother’s shoulder, she pulled out her own phone and looked up Selah Station herself. “Not too many people of color left,” she said, scanning the demographics. “Population of African Americans is 4.7 percent, just a bit higher than West Virginia as a whole; 68.7 percent of the population voted for Trump.”
“And it says here that it is one of the few states where deaths outnumber births in the last census, so at least they are dying out,” Chiazam added.
“Chiazam Iniabasi Dezy!” their mother snapped. “I raised you better than that.”
Chiazam made a sheepish apology and continued to scroll in silence.
Kenia offered a modest defense; “Doesn’t exactly sell the place though, Mom.”
“It certainly highlights the need for public health interventions,” her mother said. “I see Trump supporters in the clinic every day and I still treat them. With the textile industry gone overseas there are just as many poor whites here as blacks. We’re not about to discriminate who gets services and you won’t either.”
Kenia wondered if she could simply volunteer at her mother’s clinic for the summer and turn it into practicum credit. The only thing holding her back from asking right then was the fact that she would be letting Dr. Quientela down.
The buzzer on the oven interrupted her thoughts. Her mother slipped on a pair of hot pads, removed the chicken from the oven, and set it on the counter.
“Dinner is ready.”
Kenia was on the trellis again. The feel of the ties under her hands and bare feet and the stickiness of the tar seeping from their cracks was familiar this time. She anticipated the tremors before they arrived, accompanied by the snow of rust from the girders above. This night was cloudy, the broken clouds racing across the crescent moon so that it looked to be tracking backwards along the horizon. She caught sight of the locomotive’s head lamp, the rails gleaming in its light just before the whistle blew.
She had been here before. She knew this dream by now, how it unfolded, how it ended.
It just feels so real.
She noted the approach of the train. She would not run this time. She could never make it to the end of the trellis anyway. Instead she studied the dreamscape conjured by her unconscious. The train made its way out of a bend, its length still concealed by trees. Beyond she could see the land sloping upward in dramatic fashion, dotted with the lights of homes, like some town set in the foothills of the Alps. Beyond, the black shapes of mountains loomed, with bare shoulders of granite outcroppings, treeless and marbled with the moving play of light and shadow from the moon and clouds. The wind was carrying the cinders in a lateral angle from the locomotive like a cloud of fireflies, their light expiring over the gorge.
It’s a dream, she thought, so what were the consequences of not running? She had leapt from the bridge in previous episodes, only to wake just before hitting the water. She was determined, this time, to learn. Perhaps there was a reason she kept being called back to this place, this tableau.
She stepped onto the rail, folding the flat of her foot against it. It was cool to the touch, the vibrations of the approaching locomotive growing. Off balance, she stepped onto one of the ties to steady herself. The cone of light would fall on her soon. Then the engineer would blow the whistle. If it was a dream, why not balance on the edge of one of the sleeper-ties and try to jump onto a passing railcar, like a traveling hobo. The possibilities are endless in a dream, she reminded herself.
She went to the edge of the sleeper-tie. Would there be room? Her toes curled around the end, the edge rough under her skin. The tremors were tremendous now, the trellis coming alive all around her. The light fell on her, blinding her so that she could no longer see the dimensions of the train. The expected noise of the whistle followed, deafening. She could sense the desperation in the engineer’s long sustained blast. It erased her sense of calm as the avalanche of fire, metal, and motion barreled towards her. It awoke a panic in her own body. There was no sense in waiting. She stepped off the trellis and began to fall . . . .
She woke with a gasp, slipping out of her bed to the floor. It took her a moment to remember she was home, in Raleigh, not at school and not on a trellis. The familiar items in her room came into soft focus in the gray light of early morning. Her poster of Janelle Monae, her debate trophies, the picture of her and her siblings crawling over their father as he smiled on their plaid couch. The couch was hideous. She could not believe her mother had even let it in the house, but the memory was precious to her. She sat up, her back against the bed, her eyes sliding to a more recent picture on her desk: her sisters, her brother, mother, and father at a Sigma Pi Phi event. Kenia, her mother, and Chikmara were all in formal gowns; her brother, father and sister Chinemere in tuxes. It was shortly after her oldest sister had come out. It had been one of the last times they had all been together before her father had vanished.
Despite his professional accomplishments, his intellectual exceptionalism, and his association with so many other professional black families—despite a life lived counter to the stereotypes of black men and broken black families—none of it had protected him from becoming another statistic. Somehow, something sinister had reasserted itself, and he had disappeared. The fact that no one knew what exactly had happened to her father, where he had gone or who was responsible, made it all the worse.
“Kenia?”
The voice was outside her door. Chiazam, although his voice sounded eerily like her father’s.
“Yeah, come in.”
The door opened, those precise surgeon hands guiding it, followed by his face peering around the edge, his expression serious as he searched the bed then found her on the floor.
“I heard a thud.”
“Weird dream. Been having them a lot lately.”
He stepped inside. He was wearing a black Batman T-shirt and a pair of Harvard sweatpants. He set himself down on the end of the bed and the two of them remained in silence together. They were two years apart, so often they had paired off, almost like twins. She never really remembered him not being there, in some form. One of her earliest memories was of putting her ear to her mother’s tummy to listen for Chiazam, only to be thrown into a spiral of wonder when she had felt his body move through her mother’s womb.
She knew what he was asking her now, in this moment, even without words.
“I just keep dreaming I’m on this train trellis and this train is coming at me.”
He said nothing, but raised his eyebrows, letting her continue.
“And it’s ultra-real.”
“Is it a place you’ve been before?”
“No. It’s in the mountains. It’s weird, the whole setting feels old-timey. Sometimes it’s a steam locomotive, but mostly a diesel. Always on a collision course for me.”
“What do you think it means?”
She laughed, “It’s my future bro. It’s the real world coming at me and all I can do is jump.”
“I had a dream like that, except I was on a rope bridge. It was right after Dad died.”
“Disappeared.”
He swallowed, “Yeah. Remember how we had to go to the psychologist after?”
“Oh, I had that old woman, Dr. Cooper. She was all right.”
“Well mine, Dr. Monroe, was worried about me. He was afraid it was suicidal ideation.”
“What did you think?”
He shrugged, looking down at the Batman seal on his shirt and flattening it out. “I don’t know. I think I was scared. I felt like Dad was always there for us. Then he wasn’t. Sort of did feel like being over a chasm on a rickety bridge.” He was looking at the photo of them at the ball now. “I miss him.”
“Me too.”
The silence that followed was broken by a vibration in the pocket of his Harvard sweats. He drew out his phone.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“6:49.”
“Is that your alarm?”
“No, it’s actually a call,” he said, turning the screen away from her.
“Who is calling you at this hour?”
“No one. Must be a butt dial,” he said, slipping the phone back into his pocket. He could not hide the embarrassment on his face though—she knew him too well.
“Whatever. Don’t lie to me. Who is calling you? Is it a girl?”
“A girl, okay, yes, it’s a girl I’m seeing.”
He got up and made for the door. Kenia was up and following, “What? Does my little brother have a girlfriend?”
He was already in the hallway, making a line for his room, the phone still buzzing and in his hand again now.
“She is a girl . . . and uh . . . yes she is a friend.”
“Friends don’t call friends at six in the morning.” She was at his door now but he was closing it in her face.
“I need to answer.”
“What’s her name?” she said, propping the door open with her leg.
His eyes rolled. “Her last name is Martinique.”
“Okay, sounds Cajun or Caribbean. Do you call her by her last name?”
“No,” he said, checking the phone again, while it still buzzed, the urgency growing in his eyes. “I need to take this.”
“Let me see,” she said, reaching for the phone.
“It’s Rebecca, all right? Rebecca Martinique. It’s a very elegant name,” he said, squeezing her out of the door, closing it, then answering the phone, his voice pitched ridiculously low.
“Really?” she said to the shut door. “Rebecca?”
No response came, only his unintelligible voice, straining to sound deep and full of bass, muffled by the door.
She unwrapped her hair and headed back to her room. She paused in the hallway as the sole of her foot stuck to the carpet. She kicked up her heel, as if stretching her quad to examine the underside. That’s a puzzle, she thought, finding a black smudge that reminded her of driveway sealant. She went to the bathroom, stepping on the edge of her foot so as not to spread whatever the gunk was, and washed it off in the bathtub. It would not come off with water alone, but took soap and vigorous scrubbing to remove.
Afterwards she slipped on her Georgetown hoodie and made her way downstairs. The lights were on in the kitchen and she found her mother at the kitchen table, still in her own bed clothes: a robe and an oversized T-shirt Kenia and her siblings had given her for Christmas that read “I’m Sort of Big Deal.” She was in that communal space, with no breakfast yet, only a cup of coffee, sitting still and silent. Kenia recognized the mood her mother was in. In these quiet hours of the morning it was impossible not to think of her father.
Kenia poured herself a cup of coffee and slid into the booth next to her mother, putting her head on her shoulder and savoring the softness of her mother’s body. Her mom wordlessly shifted and touched Kenia’s hair, playing gently with the curls as she would only let her mother do.
“Did you know Chiazam has a girlfriend?”
“Oh yes. Our little man is growing up.”
“Have you met her?”
“Sure, she is a nice young lady.”
“With a name like Becky?”
Her mother gave a small laugh, her shoulder shaking beneath Kenia’s head. “I had not thought of that. she goes by Rebecca.”
“Aight.”
Her mother let out a loud, disapproving sigh and pushed Kenia’s head off her shoulder, “Stop that, you know I can’t abide poor grammar.”
“Sorry.”
Her mother shifted, turned to her. “Have you made a decision about this practicum, honey, or am I going to have you around the clinic all summer?”
“The possibility had crossed my mind.”
“It would be nice,” her mother said, staring out over her cup of coffee as she took a sip, as if looking into the possible future. “Not very many summers left that I’m going to have my kids around.”
“True,” Kenia said. Chinemere had spent her summers on internships at the Southern Law Poverty Center and Chikmara had headed off to Broadway. Neither ever boomeranged back. “It would be nice to hang out with you.”
“But what would Dr. Quientela say?”
Kenia frowned, rubbing the table then tapping it with her nails. “She would be disappointed and I might not ever get to go to Haiti if funding comes around again.”
Her mother said no words but made a knowing, lilting “umm hmmm,” her inflection rising.
Kenia continued, “So I guess it is decided then.”
Her mother hummed again, saying more with her eyebrows this time than her words. Kenia had known that intonation and that look all her life. Her mother placed her arm around her and pulled her in close again, her finger twirling one of Kenia’s curls.
“Speaking of ‘good hair,’” Kenia said. “If I’m going to be in West Virginia for three months, I better get some braids. Not like I’m going to find a salon there.”
“That’s my brave girl.”