Simone
Momma used to set a glass of milk in front of each of her kids every morning and tell us to drink up so our bones didn’t get weak and snap in half. When I was seven, I looked at my cup of milk on the table that was also my bed and then down at my hands, arms, legs, before I settled my eyes back on Momma with a dimpled chin and a face full of betrayal.
“There’s milk up in there? Inside my bones? I don’t want milk up in there, Momma. Get it out!”
Momma laughed until her muscles seized, and she shook her head.
“No, child, ain’t no milk inside your bones. It just makes ’em stronger.”
“That why they white? The milk make my bones strong and white?”
Momma laughed some more and then just shrugged and nodded.
“Sure, baby. Sure do.”
Every morning, I mixed Luck and Lion their own cups of milk from powder and they both drank it, rain or shine, even though Lion complained the whole time ’bout how he don’t like the way it tasted. I just looked at him and said, “You want your bones to snap right off?” Most days, his eyes turned wide and wild as a scared cat as he gulped down the last swallows of his milk.
It’s a horrifying thing to think you could crack so easily, but it’s a worse fear to look at these little people you made with your own bone and marrow and know that there are more than two hundred ways they could break open, just inside those tiny little bodies. So I kept them drinking that milk, even when it was the last thing they wanted.
Lion was getting more stubborn the older he got, and pretty soon no threat of broken bones was gonna get him to drink his milk without a fight. Today he was straight-up refusing. Lion’s full glass balanced in his hands while he sulked and kicked his feet.
“Just drink it and you won’t even gotta think about it no more,” I said.
“Nuh-uh. I don’t like it, Momma. It’s nasty.”
“And I don’t like my baby having brittle bones.” His waterline was filling with tears and I didn’t like to see my baby cry, even when what he was crying about mighta been silly as a fish sobbing ’bout swimming in some water. I set the spoon down and turned to Lion. “How ’bout I make it taste better, huh? I know what might make it real tasty…”
I went around to the side of the truck cab and opened the door, fumbled in the glove compartment for a little jar of honey stuck behind some old baby wipes, and brought it back to Lion. He lit up at the sight.
“We got honey?”
I nodded. “Fixed your sister’s allergies right on up and I forgot all about it. If I put some in, you gonna drink that milk?”
He squinted at me. I squinted back.
“You gotta put lots in, okay?”
I smiled. “Lots. Promise.”
I unscrewed the jar and held it over his cup, the honey slowly drooping, viscous and thick, toward the jar’s edge. As it plopped into the creamy center of the glass, I remembered what Momma always told me, after I finished my milk. Now those bones gonna be as strong as you. You feel it? You feel ’em growing?
I stirred the honey till the milk glowed just a little bit golden, and Lion lifted it to his mouth and sipped, just enough so his tongue touched it, and then he tilted that glass back and gulped until there were no drops left.
Luck watched him and placed her bag of pebbles down, kicked her feet. “I want some, Momma. Can I get some?”
“You already had yours. You can have another tomorrow.”
“With honey?”
“Until all that honey’s gone.” I took Lion’s empty glass. “Don’t that feel good? Now those bones gonna be strong as you.”
He smiled. “I’m strong as a gator.” He lifted his lip and showed me that toothy little mouth.
“Is that right?” I looked down at the half-empty jar of honey and wondered if Momma still gave my sisters milk. Wondered if she still thought I was strong.
“Y’all wanna do something different today?” I asked them. They both perked up.
Luck gaped at me. “Like go to the zoo?”
Lion squeaked, “Or go on a plane?”
I shook my head. “How ’bout we go see your grandmama?”
Momma raised me right till she refused to raise me at all.
In the confines of our trailer, she wrapped her children in the sacred fabric of her hums, the tap of her wet spoon against the hot plate, and then the sizzle that told her it was hot enough to fry an egg. The squeak of the screen door opening and then the clap of pillows releasing dust into the outside before bed.
Some of the Girls had mothers who didn’t know how to love them, who saw their children as an obstruction to their freedom. But my momma wanted us. My momma worked every day to love us with the tender touch of someone who spent every breath learning how to mother, choking down all the urges to burst and batter.
Even when she was tired and angry and didn’t have time for any of us beyond making sure we was fed and ready for school, I didn’t think she’d ever leave me out in the cold. That’s why it hurt so much when she told me to go. I never saw it coming.
I drove the truck slow toward Beach Row, still unsure what I was driving into.
Luck was confused about what we was doing, asking all these questions like I had any answers.
“I thought we don’t see no grandmama, ’cause you and Uncle JJ say she’s busy. She finish all her work?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe she finished all her work.”
I tried not to let my breath quiver, tried not to show them how scared I was as I pulled through the open gate of Beach Row and into the empty spot beside our trailer. Maybe no one was home.
I turned off the truck engine and looked at Luck and Lion with enough seriousness they both went quiet.
“Momma hasn’t seen your grandmama in a long, long time, so I might be a lil’ nervous and maybe I’ll even cry, but nothing’s wrong, okay? And if you scared or you wanna go, you just tell Momma and we’ll go. How’s that sound?”
Lion’s eyes grew big. “Grandmama’s scary?”
“No, baby. She’s nice. Real nice, like the lady at the gas station.”
Lion’s pupils shrunk again and he nodded. I took one more breath and opened the truck door.
Momma opened the door to the trailer before I got a chance to knock, must’ve seen me through the window. Must’ve watched as we climbed out the truck.
I got a better look at her now than I had at the doctor’s office and I could tell she’d aged, but not in the way I always thought she would. Instead of sagging, her face grew taut at the cheeks and her eyelids were the only part of her that’d grown heavy. She looked like a mother, still, just not exactly like my mother.
I couldn’t’ve imagined how it would feel standing in front of her, holding my babies’ hands, facing her not as her daughter but as their mother. Two mothers, face-to-face. Two women, tired.
“Hi, Momma,” I said.
She only looked at me for a moment before her eyes flitted to the twins and she took in each of them and, in turn, they looked her up and down before Luck said, “You got a big bottle of gas too, Grandmama?”
“Gas?” Momma frowned.
I laughed. “There’s a gas station we go to east off the highway and the woman at the cash register lets them watch the gas get pumped down into the ground sometimes. She looks sorta like you.”
“Oh,” Momma said. That was it. She seemed nervous, haunted almost, till her head snapped up and she pulled the door all the way open, her hospitality overcoming all else even though I knew she was thinking about whether or not to let me in, whether or not to say nothing to me at all. “Come in.”
Luck led the pack, skipping up the steps and into the house. Lion kept one hand in mine as we climbed into the trailer.
“Let me just make the table up for y’all,” Momma said. She hurried to throw the sheets off the bed, pulling the cushions up with it, and then she fumbled to get the tabletop to latch back in, so I stepped forward and balanced it.
“Still ain’t fixed the latch, huh?” I laughed. Momma didn’t respond, just pushed harder till it clicked. She pulled the leg down and the two of us picked the cushions back up from the floor and rearranged them, just like we used to, a dance we learned to do in the sixty seconds it took Jayden to go piss in the mornings.
“Go ahead and sit,” Momma said.
Luck obliged, climbed onto one bench of the tiny booth, and I slid in next to her, Lion on my lap. Momma ran around to all the surfaces in the kitchenette and tried to move all the little trinkets from sight. She brought glasses of lemonade to the table, salt and pepper, spoons, a kitchen timer, an oven mitt, anything that had no home.
While she ran around, I was able to fully see the place. I couldn’t believe how little it had changed. The beds on each end of the trailer remained unmade, clothes piled up at the foot of each, and beneath the table my feet rested on the bundle of bedding that would be remade when Momma converted the table back to what used to be my bed after we left.
Before my sisters was born, Jayden and me each got our own beds. I loved my bed, put stickers from old schoolbooks on the ceiling to stare at while I fell asleep and ripped the perfume pages from magazines and rubbed them all over my bedding so it smelled like alcoholic flowers.
Then my sisters came. The first couple years weren’t bad, ’cause they slept in Momma and Pops’s bed, but then they started walking and talking and next thing I knew Jayden and me had to share the other big bed so the twins could sleep on the little one that became our table in the mornings.
I hated sharing a bed with Jay, but not as much as I hated sharing a bed with my sisters after Jayden hit puberty and insisted he needed his space, as a man, and Pops backed him up. Now I imagined the twins slept in the little bed that sat on top of the table and Jay got the other big bed to himself and it was one less thing to worry about, not having me there. A little more room for everyone to sleep easy.
Momma finally slid into the booth across from us, though she still wasn’t looking me in my eyes.
“Your pops took the twins to youth group and I trust Jayden is off with your little friend somewhere.”
Momma said it like she was answering a question I never asked.
“I don’t know where Jayden is. I came to see you.”
Luck fiddled with the timer on the table and then looked up at Momma. “Uncle JJ likes to work, like you. He prob’ly working.”
“Yeah,” I said, “prob’ly,” even though I knew he was with Emory, since Sunday afternoons he always saw Kai. Luck’s idea of things was easier, simpler.
“When your momma was a kid, she liked to help me cook and she’d be in charge of that timer.” Momma pointed to the little thing in Luck’s hand and smiled, stared out the small window, talked about me like I wasn’t sat across from her. “Every day, she’d come home from school, wash her hands, and tell me it was time to cook. Except for one day when your momma came home so excited ’cause she said she was special.”
“Special?” Lion whispered.
Momma nodded. “Thought she was magical or something, ’cause she had what she called her mark.”
The mark was a constellation of deep brown, almost-black spots on my right ankle. I didn’t notice it till I was six years old and showed it to one of my friends at school and he said it was a special mark, that he had one that looked like an octopus on his butt. But no one else had nothing like mine, dark and wide. That’s how I knew I was special.
When I got home that day, while Pops and Jayden were out fishing with a couple of Pops’s friends, I whipped off my sock and shoe and twisted around to show Momma my mark. “Look, Momma. I think I might have real magic.”
“Is that right?” Momma laughed but didn’t look.
“No, look, Momma!”
Momma made a show of turning off the hot plate and finding a rag to put the dripping spoon on before she kneeled to look at my ankle. “How you know it’s not just some dirt?” she asked.
“Pass me that.” I pointed to the wet rag and she grabbed it, cussing as the spoon that had been resting on it fell to the floor. She picked up the spoon to wash it and I started scrubbing at my brown-black spots with the dirty rag, going at it so hard I felt like my skin was about to break open.
“See, Momma? It’s still there.”
Momma returned to the hot plate. “I see, baby. You right. Now you wanna help me stir this or what?”
Momma asked Luck and Lion if they was hungry and of course they said yes. She’d gone on telling all sorts of stories, keeping herself talking so there wasn’t room for me to say nothing at all. I was starting to squirm, wanted nothing more than to take Luck and Lion and go back to the life I’d made for myself, away from the time warp this trailer kindled. But I had come here of my own free will and my kids was hungry, always hungry.
“How ’bout I fry up some hush puppies, hmm?”
“That’ll take too long, Momma. We really should be going if we’re not gonna talk—”
“I’m hungry,” Luck said, the timer dinging, her rewinding it. “Lion too.”
Lion didn’t say nothing but he didn’t object neither.
“You will sit there and you will wait while I feed these children some hush puppies and then you will leave and you won’t never show up at my house without no warning again. You hear?”
I cowered. I might have my own kids, but she was still my momma. “Yes, ma’am.”
She took the batter from the mini fridge and started heating a pot of oil on the hot plate.
“I’m sure you remember when your sisters was born and you insisted you be the first to hold them. I told you you was, even though me and your pops both held ’em after I gave birth. You was just happy to think you was first. Told everybody you knew that you was the first person to hold your sisters, before their own momma.”
When you grown, you think a child believes all your lies. When you grown, you can’t imagine they know the truth from the way your eyelashes flutter, the croak in your voice at the beginning of every false sentence.
But when you a kid, you know. Or at least, somewhere beneath all the layers of you that want to believe what the grown-ups are saying, you can feel the lie in it all. Some kids, like Luck, know how to unbury all that and say, Uh-uh, Momma, that’s not right.
But children like me, like Lion, we wanted so desperately to trust what those big people who loved us said that we disregarded that tingle of feeling, slimy as marrow in the bones. It’s when the lie comes out that you realize you knew it all along. When finally I saw a picture of the day my sisters was born and on the bed where Momma gave birth, she was holding both twins close, their umbilical cords still uncut.
“You ever had hush puppies?” Momma asked Lion.
He shook his head.
“Yes, you have,” I said. “On your birthday, when we go to the diner, remember? They the fried little balls.”
Momma lifted the first batch from the oil and set it on paper towels. “It was always one of your momma’s favorites.”
I wished she’d talk to me. I wished she’d look at me. I wished she’d tell me she was happy to see me and she’d missed me all this time. I’d even take her yelling at me over this. Anything but this polite treatment, the way you’d talk to a guest in your home and not the child you birthed.
Momma placed a plate piled with hush puppies on the table, and Lion picked one up and dropped it.
“Hot,” he whined.
Luck proceeded to puff up her cheeks and blow on each one till she was heaving.
“Careful, now, we don’t want you passing out,” I said. “I think this one’s cool. And this one.”
Luck and Lion each picked up a hush puppy, bringing it to their mouths.
Momma stayed standing. I placed Lion down next to Luck on the bench and stood too, getting close enough to Momma that the kids wouldn’t hear nothing.
“Talk to me.” She stared at the sink. I got closer to her. “I came here ’cause I miss you, Momma. I don’t want no life where you don’t even know my kids’ favorite foods, where you’ve never even spoken their names. I want them to know you. I want you to know me, Momma.”
Momma didn’t move an inch, like she could statue herself out of witnessing me. The kids was making all kinds of noise, eating their food, but all I could hear was Momma’s breath, all I could see was the way her eyelashes fanned. She didn’t look at me as she spoke.
“If I wanted to know you, I woulda come and found you. If I wanted some part in your life, I woulda asked you to come home and see me. You seen me begging you to come here? I let you in ’cause I wasn’t about to make no fit in front of some children, but I won’t stand by what you done. It’s not right. None of this…none of this is right.”
Momma shook, her hands clutching the lip of the sink. I reached out and touched one of her hands and she snatched it away. I couldn’t figure out how she’d sat here telling all kinds of stories about me as a kid and now she was saying she didn’t even want to know me.
“It’s been years. I’m a good mother. I don’t need you to like the choices I made, but can’t you at least forgive them?”
“Forgiveness is a gift only God can give you, baby. But me? I raised a child who shoulda known the difference between sugar and salt.” Her words were spit hitting hot coals, sending steam up from the ground where she slung them.
Now I was thinking about all those stories Momma’d told, and I realized she’d never finished a single one. She left each one hanging in the before. Before it fell apart, before hot grease spilled down my shirt, before I saw my sisters’ first photo, before she finally told me my mark was nothing special at all.
It was easy to look at Momma and remember her warm hands on my chest as she smoothed in Vicks VapoRub for the cough that wouldn’t leave when I was nine; her church heels clacking down the hall of my middle school as she marched into the dean’s office to argue my detention for selling homemade earrings out of my locker; her sweat-drenched nightshirt as she held me in a too-crowded bed on a too-hot night after a bad dream.
But maybe all the things I loved most about my momma were easiest to remember when all I wanted was to hug her, when the dream of an intact family was more enchanting than the truth of it all. And sometimes I wanted the lie. I wanted the easy story without its cold end.
The truth was, one day Momma got tired of me being special, tired of hearing me chant about my magic, and she turned to me from the stove and said, “You got a birthmark. It’s not magic. It ain’t special. It won’t scrub off ’cause it’s just some mishap God made when you was growing inside me. That’s it. A mistake.”
She’d let me scrub my skin like a dirty dish, let me prance around Beach Row knocking on doors and claiming I might get my superpowers soon. When really, all along, she’d known the truth, that her child had a birthmark just like any other. And when she told the truth, she said the words that would crush me. You’re not special.
Both my twins was born with identical birthmarks on different parts of their bodies. Luck, a bell below her collarbone. Lion, a slightly smaller bell above his right knee. I’ve memorized every dip on the bells, the exact shade of brown, whether you’d think they were right side up or upside down depending on the direction you looked.
When they discovered their marks and asked what they was, I said, “These are some of the only things in the world that’s always gonna be just yours, unmistakably yours. And you know what that means? It means you’re special, ’cause you yourself and this your skin and every inch of it is precious.”
Momma looked at me and I could see the disgust, with me, with herself, and beneath all the unresolved shame, I felt sad for her. She would never know a love as pure as the one I had for my babies, a love that began and ended the way oceans did: nowhere and everywhere, a thrashing constant.
Momma growled, “I did my job and maybe I failed, maybe I shoulda been harder on you, I admit that. I shouldn’t’ve let you think that birthmark was magic for so long. But I won’t make the same mistake, telling you just what you wanna hear, accepting your sins like they not dirty. Those children deserve a real mother. They deserve—”
At first I thought the scream was coming from my mouth, with my tears, but then I remembered where I was. I looked down at myself and saw grown hands, grown feet, and then I turned and saw my children. Luck was screaming. Luck was on the ground.
Splayed on the floor below the high-up bed, her right arm already swelling, the bottom of her forearm bent crooked, her head spilling blood. When Luck’s eyes met mine, the screams ceased, but her mouth remained open, hung at the jaw like she couldn’t believe where she was, her eyelashes spread open with drops of tears clinging to the ends.
She sat up, squeaked out, “Momma?” and then looked down at her arm, saw the swollen mass of limb in front of her, the puddle of blood where her head had been, and threw up soggy hush puppies all over the floor.
If you chastising me for what I did and didn’t do, you should know I was already punishing myself. I got Luck and Lion into the truck and to the hospital in less than ten minutes, both of them sobbing the entire time, but Luck’s cries were silent, her tears simply streaming. Momma remained in the trailer, didn’t offer to come with, even if I would’ve let her. None of what she said, none of what any of you might say, could mean nothing now, not until my baby was okay. Not until I could release this breath.
I pulled up outside the emergency room, stopped the car by the curb even though the curb was painted red, and hopped out. I opened the passenger-side door and picked Lion up, setting him on the ground, before carefully picking up Luck and holding her close to me.
“Lion, I need you to walk. Stay close to Momma and walk. Fast.”
He blubbered but followed as I quickly made my way to the entrance, through the doors, to the nurse at the front station.
“My daughter fell,” I said. “She needs to see a doctor. Now.”
The woman looked up at me, at Luck in my arms, at Lion hiding behind my leg. “Name and birth date.”
“Luck Turner. She’s five, she was born on February—”
“Not the child’s name. Yours.”
“I’m not the one hurt, it’s her. Her head’s bleeding. Please, can y’all just call the doctor and—”
“Miss, the quicker you answer my questions, the quicker I can try to get your daughter seen.”
She clicked on her keyboard and then told us to sit and wait.
“Wait? My daughter needs to see somebody. Now.”
The nurse shrugged. “It’s probably a sprain, maybe a small fracture. Head cuts bleed a lot. There’s people ahead of her with much worse.”
I looked to the waiting room, the green vinyl chairs, the dozens of people slumped in them, in all states of decay. I couldn’t wait here. It would take forever. Then I remembered something Adela had said, in her basement, before I drank the tea. If something goes wrong and we go to the hospital, tell them you have chest pain. They’ll see you first. That’s what my noni says.
I turned back to the nurse. “She got chest pain. Right, Luck? Your chest hurt?” I looked at her with a stare only my child would understand.
Through her teeth chatter, her sweats, she nodded, but she still wasn’t speaking.
The nurse glared, and stood. “Give me a minute, I’ll check with the doctor.”
Two minutes later, she returned. “The doctor will call you in a moment.”
I nodded and took my babies to sit. Despite everything in me that didn’t want to, I knew I had to call Tooth. He was Luck’s daddy and at some point soon she was gonna look up at me and ask where he was. I wanted him to already be here so I didn’t have to tell her, He’s coming, baby. He’s coming. So I picked up the phone and called him despite how much I wished we wouldn’t never have to share the same room’s stale air again.