14

When did you first realize your mother had actually died? Sister Sonja wanted to know.

Outside, I could see the trees lining Fort Greene Park. It was clear out, warm, the beginning of spring. There was the rope of ivy on her windowsill, the leaves moving neatly along the ledge and down. There were gates on the windows, even though her office was only on the seventh floor. Had anyone ever vaulted past her? Jumped?

I looked up at her.

Why do you think my mother has died?

Three months passed before I saw Sylvia again. She was wearing her school uniform, her belly pushing against the buttons. She waved to me from across the street, two-way traffic between us.

August!

But I was leaving Brooklyn. I was already halfway gone.

It became the year of slipping into the pages of my textbooks and disappearing. It became the year of AP classes and PSAT review, of stretching toward something new, unfamiliar, a thing called the Ivy League. Because Bushwick had once been a forest and we had been called ghetto girls even though we were beautiful and our arms were locked together and our T-shirts blared our names and zodiac signs.

I pulled down the urn that had sat on the high bookshelf for as long as I could remember, lifted the top, and looked inside.

My mother walked into the water.

I moved the urn into the room I still shared with my brother, setting it on the nightstand beside my bed. All night long, I kept one hand pressed against it.

This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.

The night before Gigi landed the role of Mary Magdalene in the drama club’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar, she called me, made me promise I’d be in the front row, beside Sylvia. Let it go, Gigi said. The baby’s already been made and you didn’t want that boy anyway. She said she’d put a coat on a seat in case Angela came back.

Can we do like olden times? Gigi said. For me?

But that night, as I pulled my coat on, I stopped, remembering Sylvia’s belly and the urn filled with ashes and the boy who once winked up at me. I sat on the edge of my bed remembering running over the SweetGrove land and the sound of Clyde’s laughter and my mother with a knife under her pillow and Sister Loretta’s hands going in circles as she scrubbed the kitchen floor.

I sat there, the apartment silent, growing hot inside my coat. I sat there long after the play had ended.

Gigi faltered. During the last verse of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a crack in her voice echoed through the auditorium. Everyone laughed, I’d heard later. The whole auditorium. Everyone. We didn’t mean to. We didn’t know . . .

Sylvia hadn’t shown. Gigi’s mother hadn’t shown. The coats over the seats Gigi had saved for us remained there until her castmates took theirs and only hers remained.

Two steps to the left or right or back or front and you’re standing outside your life.

Someone’s friend knew someone who lived at the Chelsea Hotel. The cast party was on the eleventh floor.

Who was there to see Gigi lift her heels up and fly?

That year, her hair had grown long past her back. Most days she pulled it up into a braid. But on the evening of the performance, she’d worn it out, letting it fan over her shoulders. Did it lift like a dark wing into the Chelsea night? Did she really believe there was nothing on the other side of fifteen?

If the tribes of the Fijis send their living off to join their dead, it should have been me flying. Or Angela. But we remained on earth. Believing ourselves wingless.