NEET SAT STRAIGHT up when she heard the boom boom boom of the fireworks outside. She was groggy, as if she’d had too much sleep, or too little, she wasn’t sure which. She was sure that it was hot in here. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and listened for her mother. Her radiator hissed and she remembered her mother telling her that she was going to start up the heater so that Neet wouldn’t have a recurrence of those god-awful chills. She sipped from the tea on her nightstand and tried to determine whether she was really awake or if this was an extended dream where you woke up and were still dreaming. Had she really cursed at them at the church earlier, she wondered as she started to unpeel the blankets from around her. By the time she pushed the third blanket away and propped herself up in the bed and fingered the blanket’s satiny border, she knew that that fiasco at the church had been real enough.
She dabbed at her eyes with the border of her blanket as she felt a new crop of tears boiling up in her eyes, burning her eyes because she’d cried so much the past few days. Didn’t think it was possible to cry so much. She remembered now how she’d shaken uncontrollably in the cab when she’d told her mother about Mr. G. Her mother had taken her sweater off and wrapped it around Neet and asked the driver to turn on the heat please because her baby had caught a chill. Then she’d listened to Neet as she held her like she was a baby. She’d rocked her all the way home and said her name, Bonita, Bonita, she’d whispered all the way home. The sound of her name oozing through her mother’s lips was like a balm to Neet, smoothing over the places where she’d been damaged, stripped raw, softening the roughness, erasing the pain, healing; healing all the way from deep inside back to the surface of her skin. It had felt to Neet as if her mother’s singular voice had been joined by a choir of angels telling Neet that she was good. She was. Except that the real beauty of it had been that it was just her mother’s voice, nothing like it in the world, she’d thought then, such a simple, precious thing, your own mother’s voice soothing you as you cry. Neet had been so filled up in that instant, so grateful that she hadn’t given up on her mother, she still filled up at the thought. So she cried and blew her nose and felt as if a wicked spell that had been cast over her had been broken.
She finished the tea that had been patient on her nightstand. Now she wanted to talk to Shay, was burning to talk to Shay. She stuffed a pair of jeans over her pajamas and threw a sweater over her shoulders and slid her penny loafers onto her bare feet. She stopped in the bathroom and was perplexed by the sight of her mother’s clothes in the middle of the bathroom floor. Her mother wasn’t in her bedroom and Neet started down the stairs and heard the back door closing as she did. Guessed that her mother had gone to sit out in the yard. She would go sit with her, she thought, once she found Shay. She was halfway through the living room, headed for the front door, when she saw a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. She picked it up and turned the pack around in her hands. She remembered then that Mr. Joe had helped her mother get her into the house when they’d gotten back from church and Neet was so exhausted that she could barely walk. She told herself she’d thank him by returning his smokes. She put the cigarettes in the lapel pocket of her pajama top and was about to head for the vestibule door when she saw it. A pink satiny ribbon curved along the living-room floor. This she picked up too and fingered and now she reversed her steps and headed for the back door instead of the front, now she wanted to find her mother and ask her about this most unlikely find on the living-room floor, a pink satiny ribbon that looked like a sash.
She walked through the darkness of the dining room into the yellow-lit kitchen and on through to the back. The back door was unlocked and the black wrought-iron gate was ajar but Alberta wasn’t out here. Alberta often came out here and sat on the back steps at night, but she never used the yard and the alley as an entrance or exit the way that Neet did when she was trying to sneak in and out. She jumped at a sound in Shay’s yard, a scratching and a weak cry. She looked in the direction of the Cyclone fence that separated the yards and saw a patch of white against the ground and told herself to get a grip, it could only be the cat. She walked on through the gate and out into the alley. A shallow column of chilly air moved through the alley and she folded the ribbon accordion style and put it in the pocket with Joe’s cigarettes and pushed her arms through the sweater sleeves and pulled the sweater close around her. Remnants of barbecue smoke drifted in and out of view and Neet had to push back stems of ivy that dangled from the Cyclone fence and protruded into the narrow walkway. She was thinking about that pink ribbon that felt like lead in her pajama pocket.
The block party had thinned out considerably when Neet turned onto Cecil Street, at least this end of the block had. Storms of people were crowded at the other end though, and Neet could see the last of the fireworks draining through the sky. Neet tried to see down there to locate Shay. She was so out of breath from that short trek through the alley and her heart was beating so fast and so loudly that she could feel it in her ears. She realized she could never make it down to the other end with her stamina so diminished from this flu or whatever she had and the exhaustion from the near fight at the church. She inched her way up the street, trying to make it back home. She got to her house and collapsed on the steps. She tried to take slow, deep breaths and then jumped and turned sharply when she heard someone coming down the steps on Shay’s side. It was only Joe. She lifted her hand in a weak wave. “You scared me, Mr. Joe,” she said.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, and what you doing out here anyhow? Thought you were out for the count earlier.”
“I was, but then I woke up and I was looking for, well, first I was looking for Shay, then my mother. It’s been a long night, Mr. Joe, I feel like I’m dreaming. Maybe I’m sleep deprived. Were the fireworks good?”
“I, uh, I didn’t see them. My stomach’s been messed up, I was, uh, just in the house trying to recuperate.”
“Well here, Mr. Joe, I almost forgot, you left these when you helped me out earlier. Thanks, by the way.”
She reached into the lapel pocket of her pajamas and pulled out the pack of cigarettes and the pink satiny ribbon came out too. The spotlights around the cup-and-saucer ride were turned on full blast and illuminated Neet’s hand right then as she extended it to Joe. He looked from her hand to her face and back and made no move toward her hand.
“Well, aren’t these yours?” she asked, and then she looked down at her hand and saw the ribbon and was about to say, well, of course the ribbon’s not yours, Mr. Joe. But then she couldn’t say it because of his expression caught in the revolving bright lights, his face so drained of color suddenly, so pulled back in that instant until it seemed as though she was seeing him through a fun-house mirror and his head was set a yard back from the rest of his body. It was all beginning to click into place: the ribbon, the clothes on the bathroom floor, the thump of the back door closing, the gate left open, him missing the fireworks over some excuse of a stomachache, his expression right now, even his voice that was so dry and strained sounding.
“The cigarettes are mine,” he said. “Thank you, Neet. Mnh.”
Neet didn’t say anything else as he took the pack of cigarettes from her hand. She watched him light a cigarette and take a deep drag and stare off into the lights surrounding the ride. Then he walked down off the steps. She just sat there and held on to the ribbon as its satiny pinkness shocked the night. She wanted to cry again. She was crying, thinking that perhaps her mother had used Mr. Joe the way she’d used Little Freddie, as an attempt to reclaim her goodness. Sobbed at the irony, that her mother’s church had never been able to do that, convince her that she was good. Cried now wondering what about her mother’s life had been so damaged that she needed that church in the first place. Alberta would never talk about her upbringing, her parents, other than to say that they had both disappeared when she was born. So Neet cried over her mother’s past, or rather the absence of it, the fact that it was so horrible that she’d felt the need to try to erase it. Even Neet understood that that was impossible. She pulled the sweater tighter around her shoulders and felt herself going into chills again. Thought she should go back in the house and get under the covers. But she was crying too hard to even pull herself up to standing. Crying so hard that at first she didn’t even feel the hands rubbing against the sweater, going up and down her arms, warming her. Didn’t even have to look up when she did. Knew these hands, always there for her when she needed them most, since they were babies and they’d reach their hands out to be picked up over the banister so they could be together. Shay’s hands these were. Shay, her girl. Her girl, Shay.