Chapter 18
If the ride from the airport was like a half-forgotten dream, the ride to her old apartment was more like a too-real flashback. She couldn’t get a cab from Jenisse’s house, so she just started walking. After half a mile, her feet began to hurt in the pumps from her previous day at the office. She stopped and waited for a bus. She got on with a cluster of kids headed to school and adults headed to work.
The kids talked loud and joked, their bursts of laughter erupting at intervals. She remembered that feeling. Back in elementary school, when the front and sides of her body were straight lines, she ran with a crew of kids from her neighborhood. Every moment that wasn’t school or church was playing. Kickball, jump rope, tag in warm weather. Snowball fights in winter. Anything could be a toy. If you didn’t have anything, you would laugh, tell jokes, do imitations of teachers and ministers. As long as she was with her friends, it was fun. Everything was funny. She didn’t have a daddy, but that wasn’t anything special. It didn’t steal her joy.
Back then she felt light inside. Now she felt empty, felt nothing. Like her chest was full of air. Or maybe she was a stuffed doll, filled with cotton balls or a fluffy polyester fiberfill.
The blocks of public housing looked exactly the same. She knew just where to get off for her old apartment. Just before the playground, with the top of the climbing structure jutting up over the parked cars. Just past the KFC.
As she rode down the familiar street, the revelations made everything seem surreal. Every time I rode up and down this street, Zeus was my father. Every time I walked up to my apartment, I was the daughter of a woman who cheated with her own daughter’s man.
The buzzer was broken, as usual, but a group of kids exited just as she stepped up.
“See?” one of them said. “We missed the bus cause yo slow ass.”
The large metal door slammed behind her, and she proceeded to walk up the dingy staircase. As always at this time of year, it smelled of urine, bleach, and summer funk.
Three floors up, she banged on her mama’s door.
“Just a minute,” she heard the familiar contralto voice.
Her mother opened up with her eyes wide.
Tyesha just couldn’t reconcile Jenisse’s revelation with this aging woman in a headrag, bathrobe, and fuzzy slippers. For a moment, she just gaped at her mother. For the first time, she noticed the smoothness of her mother’s barely lined skin, the classic black beauty in the planes of her face, the thick bust and hips half-smothered under the robe. For the first time, she saw her mother, not as the dowdy Jesus-loving church mother she had turned herself into, but the voluptuous woman she had been before she got saved.
“Tyesha?” she said, startled. “Is everything okay, baby? How come you ain’t in New York? You got Deza and Amaru with you?”
The apartment was exactly the same. The large color television—a flat-screen now—was showing the news. And Mama’s worn chair facing it. Her walker next to it for the days it got really bad, especially in winter.
The coffee table with old copies of Ebony and Essence and a bowl of candies.
The walls covered with photographs. Tyesha’s graduation photos: high school, college, and grad school. And the bible on the table right next to the chair.
Her mother shuffled forward to hug her, but Tyesha leaned easily out of the way, and crossed to pace in front of the couch.
“What’s wrong?” her mother asked.
Tyesha didn’t know where to begin. She looked up to see the meteorologist standing beside an illustration of sun and clouds over Chicago. She picked up the remote and muted the TV.
“Is Zeus my daddy?” she blurted out.
Her mother knelt down, closed her eyes and began to pray.
“No, Mama.” Tyesha walked over and pried her mother’s hands apart. “You’ve had almost thirty years to talk to Jesus about this. Especially if you count the time you were pregnant. So now it’s time to talk to me. Is Zeus my father?”
“Yes,” her mother said in a voice barely above a whisper.
“And he was with Jenisse before he was with you?” Tyesha asked, towering over her mother.
“Yes.”
“Are you kidding me?” Tyesha asked, her forehead puckered, her eyes blinking in disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Of all the things I ever did, I don’t think there’s anything I’m more ashamed of,” her mother said. “I wasn’t even thirty. Here comes my fifteen-year-old daughter with a grown man. I thought I was gonna show her he was bad news. Not right for her. I was gonna break them up. Gonna save her.”
“By fucking her man?” Tyesha asked, incredulous.
“I remember going to her and telling her what had happened, what the fool she called ‘her man’ had done. A man who would be with her own mama. But it didn’t work that way. She took it in stride. ‘He has other women. So what?’ Jenisse said to me.” Her mother looked out the window. “He told her it didn’t mean anything. He would have other ladies, but she was the queen.”
Tyesha collapsed onto the sofa, but her mother didn’t seem to notice. She was still on her knees. The monologue became almost a prayer of its own. “I was so young when I had her. Not done being cute and silly. I competed with her when she was young. Mostly I won. This time she was determined to win.”
Behind her mother, Tyesha saw the image of a doctor’s office on the TV, which cut to a newscaster with the headline “MEDICAL MALPRACTICE.”
Her mother went on: “Was a couple of trifling niggas I was seeing at the time.” Tyesha blinked. She couldn’t ever recall hearing her mother use the n-word. “I just said you must be one of theirs. When they found out I was pregnant, they stopped coming around. Didn’t none of them come forward trying to claim nothing. I don’t think Jenisse knew until Deza was born and she looked so much like you had looked as a baby.”
“I was nine,” Tyesha said, a sudden, sharp recollection.
Her mother nodded. “Still a few baby pictures I don’t know which is which.”
“She started being so mean to me,” Tyesha said. “I was always trying to figure out what I had done wrong. I could never understand it. We had been close and then . . .”
Years later, when Tyesha had learned about post-partum depression, she had clung to that as an explanation.
“I apologized to her so many times,” her mother said. “I insisted you weren’t Zeus’s, and I begged her not to take it out on you. At one point, she threatened to get a DNA test. But I think she didn’t tell him, because she was trying to keep him focused on her own kids. Lord knows there were always plenty of other baby mamas coming around in tight dresses with they hands out.” She shook her head. “I certainly didn’t wanna be one of them, so when I found out I was pregnant, I just started going to church. I asked Jesus to forgive me.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” She couldn’t look at her mother. Instead, she looked at a silent TV segment with elementary school children doing jumping jacks.
“Like I told you, I was just plain shamed,” her mother said.
“I had a right to know,” Tyesha said.
“I never knew who my own daddy was,” her mother said. “It don’t kill you not to know. Though I always told myself I wouldn’t do that to my kids. Jenisse’s dad was locked up, so she didn’t have him, but she knew where to find him. But you having a daddy I couldn’t claim? I wasn’t no teenager. I was older than you are now. I sowed spite, and I reaped shame.”
“But I was gonna find out eventually,” Tyesha said.
“I kept waiting for Jenisse to tell you in a moment of evil,” her mother said. “But she never did. I just figured if it didn’t come out when you were a teenager, it never would.”
“Jenisse wanted a DNA test for Amaru,” Tyesha said. “So Zeus would pay for her athletic boarding school.”
Her mother pursed her lips. “Around the time Jenisse got pregnant with Amaru, they were kinda broken up. I know she was seeing other men. He was never sure if Amaru was his. And then, when she grew up to be gay, well, he wasn’t sure he wanted her to be his.”
“Well, that’s fucked up,” Tyesha said. “And she’s definitely his. We all are.”
Her mother began to cry. “All these years I begged Jesus to forgive me. And I seen how good your life was going, and I assumed He did. But now I know it’s you I need to forgive me. You and Jenisse.”
Tyesha looked at the screen. A slender white homemaker was smiling and wiping the counter with some miraculous cleaner.
Tyesha shook her head. Her mother was fourteen when she had Jenisse? Amaru was fourteen. She imagined Amaru with a baby, suddenly responsible for another person’s life. Amaru could barely remember to put the lid back on the toothpaste. Her mother, competing with her own daughter, setting out to spite her and getting caught in her own trap.
She wasn’t sure she felt it, but she couldn’t deny her mother the clemency.
“I forgive you, Mama,” she said, and embraced her. Tyesha held on, as her mother shook with sobs.
* * *
Tyesha felt lost. She couldn’t get a flight out until midnight, and it was only afternoon. She had borrowed a pair of her mother’s old sneakers and found herself wandering around the neighborhood with her ruined fancy New York shoes in her hand.
And then, without realizing it, she found herself at the burned-out remains of the Urban Peace Accord youth center. Almost fifteen years later, it still hadn’t been repaired. Except the basketball courts, which had only been minimally damaged. They had gotten new nets later that same year, but by now they had frayed into ragged strings. A Boys’ and Girls’ Club had popped up next door.
Tyesha stood by the edge of the court. The memories flooded in from the night she had stood there with her aunt.
“Hey, girl,” a throaty woman’s voice said from behind her. “Tyesha, right?”
She turned around to see Sheena Davenport, Amaru’s mentor from the WNBA, grinning at her out of the driver’s side of a white luxury car.
“I thought I told you to look me up if you ever came to Chicago,” she said, taking off her shades and looking Tyesha up and down.
“It was an unexpected trip,” Tyesha said, returning her smile.
“Well, how long are you here?” Sheena asked. “I’m waiting on this girl, a great player, but I don’t think she’s gonna show. At one thirty, I’m outta here. Wanna come have a drink with me? I know a place near here with a great lunchtime cocktail menu.”
“Sure,” Tyesha said, and walked around to the passenger side. Her mouth smiled, but she still felt numb inside. The car’s interior was the color of chocolate. She slid into the plush leather seats.
“Your niece has definitely got talent,” Sheena said. “I’m just sorry she wasn’t able to go to that athletic academy.”
“There still may be hope,” Tyesha said.
“So what brings you home to Chicago?” Sheena asked.
“Some . . . family business,” Tyesha said.
“Are you staying long?” Sheena asked. “Can I invite you out on a proper date?”
“I leave at midnight,” she said.
“Maybe an improper date then,” Sheena said and grinned, putting a hand on Tyesha’s knee.
For the first time since getting the DNA test, Tyesha felt something familiar. Being turned on. She breathed it in. Sex. If nothing else made sense, sex always did.
She leaned in and kissed Sheena.
“Hold up,” Sheena said. “I’m still on the clock waiting for this girl for the next fifteen minutes. I can’t have her come here and see me kissing somebody while I’m supposed to be waiting for her.”
“You said she’s probably a no-show,” Tyesha said. “Let it go. Let’s get out of here.”
She pulled Sheena into an intense kiss. Sheena kissed back, and Tyesha’s scarf slipped off.
Sheena peered more closely at Tyesha, then took her hand off her thigh.
“Are you okay?” Sheena asked.
“I’m fine,” Tyesha insisted, and slid closer on the long bench seat.
“Uh-uh,” Sheena said. “This ain’t gonna work.”
“What do you mean?” Tyesha asked.
“I mean, you got something going on that a little lesbian moment isn’t gonna fix,” Sheena said.
“I’ve been with women before,” Tyesha said.
“This isn’t about—” Sheena broke off. “What’s up with your hair?”
“My hair?” Tyesha said. “You don’t want to get down because of my hair?”
“I don’t want to get down because something ain’t right with you, girl. You don’t look sexy, you look upset.”
“I’m not upset,” Tyesha said.
Sheena’s mouth slowly opened. “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “You a Couvillier.” She gave Tyesha a quizzical look. “How you gonna be standing on the spot your auntie died and not be upset?”
“What do you know about it?” Tyesha asked.
“I know there were flowers and candles at the base of that telephone pole for nearly a decade,” Sheena said. “I know your mama was the one bringing the flowers for years, til she got too sick.”
“My mama?” Tyesha said.
“This ain’t New York,” Sheena said. “This part of South Shore is like a small town. I don’t just know Amaru, I know all your people. And I knew your aunt.”
“Well, you don’t know me,” Tyesha said, and stormed out of the car on the traffic side. A driver swerved and honked at her.
She took off walking fast down the street in the opposite direction of the traffic, so Sheena couldn’t follow in the car.
* * *
She remembered that night. She had stood beside her aunt as she spoke to the crowd assembled on the basketball court. She was nearly as tall as her aunt by then. Tyesha held the megaphone aloft, while her aunt held the microphone in one hand, and her carefully prepared speech in the other.
They stood on the court because the center had been burned to the ground. Their auditorium, their chairs, their sound system, all reduced to rubble and char. The stench of gasoline and flames was still so strong that they stood with their backs to the street, against the chain-link fence at the far end, because the smell was just a little better.
Her aunt had rescued the sign: URBAN PEACE ACCORD, spray-painted on a piece of plywood. On the very bottoms of the letters the wood and paint were singed. This was likely because they had balanced the sign on a plastic ledge above the door frame and glued it in place. Her aunt had always meant to secure it better, but had never gotten around to it. When the building burned, both the plastic ledge and the glue melted. The sign fell down just beyond the reach of the fire.
Her aunt held up the sign during her speech. She held it up as a talisman that they shouldn’t lose hope.
“You can’t burn down an idea,” her aunt had bellowed. “You can’t burn down the desire for a better life, a better community.”
The assembly offered yeses and amens.
“People wanna come and tell me that some gang members did this,” she said. “I don’t know any gang members. I know young men with names. Young men I’ve known for decades. These are our young people. Some police gang task force is not the solution. The police are part of the problem. Sometimes I think the police are the biggest gang. We are the solution. This center is part of the solution and I will rebuild it as many times as I have to!”
Later, Tyesha would hear stories about high-level gang leaders who had been won over by her aunt. They wanted to leave the life, they insisted, but they had too many ties to the police department. Even if they could convince the drug kingpins that they wouldn’t snitch, the cops weren’t about to let them walk away.
But that came later. All that Tyesha knew from that night on the Peace Center’s basketball courts was the smell of burned building and that giving a speech makes you a target.
Tyesha recalled the screech of tires as the car came around the corner. The quick whip of dreadlocks brushing against her face as her aunt looked over her shoulder. And then her aunt had pushed her down, pushed her away. And Tyesha had been down on the concrete when the bullets sprayed from the car window.
She had screamed. Kept her head covered. And then had stood to find her aunt lying in a pool of blood. “Auntie!” Tyesha had shrieked and run to her. Had gathered her in her arms, the best she could. The blood had soaked her clothes.
Around them all were screaming and scattering. Several other people appeared to have been shot, as well.
“You okay, baby?” her aunt had asked. Even dying, she was worried about someone else. “Did they hit you?”
“I’m okay,” Tyesha had assured her aunt through her tears. “You gonna be okay, too.”
By then, her mother was running up to them. Someone had called and told her.
“Please, Jesus, oh please, Lord Jesus,” her mother begged, her body rigid, clenched in prayer.
But her aunt was dead by the time the ambulance came wailing to where she lay, only a few minutes later.
Tyesha screamed as her mother pried her hands from the ambulance gurney.
They sobbed together as the ambulance took her aunt quietly away.
A week later, Tyesha stood in the church for the memorial. She had her carefully written speech in her hand. She had on a blue dress, stockings, and low-heeled black pumps. She had white gloves and even a small blue hat. Her mother didn’t insist she go to church anymore, but when she did choose to go, she needed to dress up.
She stood beside the pulpit, waiting for her turn. And then the pastor introduced her. He ran down her list of accomplishments: valedictorian of her class, on the track team, tutoring younger kids in math. “We expect great things from her, just like from her aunt Lucille. Please give a warm godly welcome to Tyesha Couvillier.”
The applause thundered, but she felt frozen, her feet planted in place as if they’d grown roots.
“Go on.” One of the boys gave her a little push, and Tyesha could move again. But instead of going up onto the platform and reading her speech, she turned back toward him, pushed past all the kids, and ran out of the building. Later, she would overhear her mother talking to some of the other church women: “It was just too soon.”
* * *
Tyesha had never spoken in public since that day. It wasn’t just the memory of her dying aunt, but also the terror of speaking up. It made you a target. Not just for gang violence. Once, when she googled Aunt Lu in college, she came across a blog post by an anonymous investigative journalist who claimed he had a mountain of circumstantial evidence that the cops were behind her aunt’s murder. And the arson, too. Nothing could ever be proven, so the story had been killed by the journalist’s editor. But there was a PDF file with evidence. Tyesha’s heart beat hard as she considered clicking on it. But instead, she closed the window on her browser. She didn’t need some anonymous journalist’s evidence to corroborate what she knew for sure: Her aunt was dead, the center was burned to the ground, and she would forever connect speaking in front of crowds with that terrible day.
* * *
Tyesha couldn’t recall where her aunt was buried, but she did know where she could find another shrine, this one more durable than the one that had been on the street next to the basketball court.
Two blocks down, she came to her mother’s church. Since she had left Chicago, it had expanded from a single storefront to take up half the block, and they had redone the façade with stained-glass windows and a large golden cross.
But in the front hallway she knew they had a low glass cabinet with a small shelf dedicated to her aunt. She had been a deaconess in the church. There she was, smiling, surrounded with artificial flowers. All her awards and plaques. Her deaconess gloves folded in front of the picture.
Tyesha pressed her hand against the glass.
One of the women of the church came out from the office. She was sixtyish, light-skinned, and thickly built. “Are you here for choir rehearsal?” she asked. “It doesn’t start until—”
Tyesha opened her mouth, but all that came out was a howl of grief.
She sank down onto the goldenrod carpeting, keening and weeping. The woman managed to lower herself down onto one hip and squeeze in next to Tyesha. She patted the younger woman’s back as she wailed and wailed.
Tyesha wanted to shriek with rage for losing her aunt, with terror from the shooting and the burning and the bone-chilling knowledge that the killers weren’t local teens, but men in uniforms who killed with the full blessing and protection of the state. She wanted to shriek for her mother who had been a teenage mom, stealing her teenage daughter’s man, and twenty-nine years of lies, with two sisters who had been at each other’s throats for twenty of those years. She wanted to rail for her own broken heart, and Thug Woofer, whom she could never trust again, but somehow he kept haunting her, even beyond his number-one rapper status, she was unable to get over him; unable to have him; unable to move on.
So Tyesha just crumpled in this stranger’s arms and sobbed. Her face puckered with inarticulate wailing, her face coated with tears and snot, smearing into the flowered print of the woman’s dress.
“He’ll fix it for you,” the woman promised, unconcerned about her clothes. “Oh, won’t He fix it.”
* * *
Two hours later, Tyesha stood in front of Jenisse’s door for a second time that day. It was evening now, still light, but with long shadows. Tyesha still had her designer pumps in her hand. Her makeup was cried off, and she had left her scarf in Sheena’s car. The mess that was her hair was revealed for all to see. She had been wearing the same clothes for more than thirty-six hours. She smelled like she needed a shower.
“What you want?” Jenisse asked when she came to the door. She was dressed in a camel-colored dress with nude pumps and dark lipstick. “And what the hell happened to you? You got a homeless makeover?”
“You were right,” Tyesha said. “I can’t believe Mama did that to you. That’s one of the most fucked-up things a mother could do to a daughter.”
Suddenly, Jenisse’s face puckered, and she looked like she might cry. Tyesha went to hug her, but Jenisse waved her away and took a deep breath.
“I need a cigarette,” Jenisse said, and walked Tyesha through the house to the back porch. The older sister sat down on a wicker loveseat and motioned for Tyesha to sit across from her on a matching chair. The railed wooden deck stretched the length of the house and led out to a grassy yard. On the rail beside Jenisse was an ashtray, matches, and a pack of cigarettes. She pulled one out and lit it.
She took a deep drag into her lungs and spoke. “Yeah, that shit was fucked up,” she said, exhaling smoke. “I’m just sorry I took it out on you. Every time I saw you, I thought about what she did.”
“Well, it’s good to know why you were such a bitch to me all these years,” Tyesha said. “Now that the truth is out, do you think maybe you could stop?”
Jenisse laughed. “I’ll think about it,” she said, and took another drag. “Being a bitch is one of the few things I’m good at.”
“You’re good at advocating for your kids,” Tyesha said. “You think Zeus will pay for Amaru’s school now that the paternity test came back positive?”
“He better,” Jenisse said. “But in the meantime, I’m glad they’re staying with you in New York. I was never the mama they deserved.”
“They love you,” Tyesha said.
“That’s just cause I’m they mama,” Jenisse said. “But I know I didn’t really wanna raise babies; I was just trying to keep Zeus. But look at you. You stayed out the trap. You got a good job. No kids. You got that rapper chasin’ you.”
“Not anymore,” Tyesha said.
“So fix that,” Jenisse said tapping ash into the ashtray. “Deza told me how it is wit y’all. A million chicks wanna fuck with that nigga and you like, he ain’t good enough.”
“He was gonna do an album with Car Willis,” Tyesha said.
That stopped her sister. “He doing an album with Car Willis?”
“No, but he was gonna,” Tyesha said.
“Girl,” Jenisse said. “People who ain’t from Chicago don’t know how it was. He canceled the album?”
Tyesha nodded.
“Then get over it,” Jenisse said. “Wait, is he a good fuck?”
Tyesha laughed. “Yeah.”
“Then call his ass. Fuck him. Enjoy it.”
“If I could do it like that, I would,” Tyesha said. “But I like him too much.”
“So?” Jenisse asked. “Let him know you want him to put a ring on it.”
“It’s not that simple,” Tyesha said. “He doesn’t exactly see me as the wifey type. I used to be an escort. That’s actually how we met.”
Jenisse grinned and stubbed out her cigarette. “An escort? I thought you were the big college girl.”
Tyesha sucked her teeth. “How do you think I paid for college?”
“I was, too,” Jenisse said. “That’s how I met Zeus. I was always afraid he didn’t wife up with me because I had been a ho.”
Tyesha shrugged. “He’s as wifed up with you as he’ll ever be with anybody.”
Jenisse sighed. “Here’s the big mistake I made. We talked about getting married at one point, but he had this big prenup. I refused to sign it because I thought it meant he thought of me as a ho, that he didn’t trust me. But I learned my lesson. A nigga like him needs me to prove I’m loyal and not after the money. If you love your rapper, put him on a marriage track. Let him know you want him to put a ring on it. After a year, if he don’t propose, drop his ass. Thug Woofer will probably want a prenup, and you’ll think that it means he doesn’t trust you. It means he wanna trust you. He needs to know you ain’t after his money to believe you really want him. Besides, with all you got going, the prenup might end up protecting you. You should write a book about the stripper strike, going from being a ho to running that clinic. You might end up being the one with the money in twenty years. Wait and see.”
“Maybe so,” Tyesha said. “What about you and Zeus? You ever gonna get married?”
“You trying to make me your stepmama?” Jenisse asked.
Tyesha cringed. “I still can’t wrap my head around it.”
“We ain’t never getting married,” Jenisse said. “He put some money away for me. When he dies, I’ll be better off not being associated with his estate. Meanwhile, we know how to make it work. I let him fuck other women from time to time, and he lets me buy what the fuck I want.”
Tyesha laughed. “Now that everything’s out in the open, will you talk to Mama? She wants to make it right with you.”
“I’ll think about it,” Jenisse said. The two of them looked out into the gathering dusk in the yard.
“Mama’s an old church lady now,” Tyesha said. “Forgive her. She’s gonna be your only family here, now that the boys are locked up and Amaru’s going to school, and Deza’s working on her music in New York.”
“Like I told you,” Jenisse said. “I’ll think about it. Now let’s get you cleaned up. You can’t go back to New York City like this.”
Jenisse walked Tyesha back to the house, into the part that they actually used.
* * *
Tyesha arrived back at JFK in an old pair of Jenisse’s jeans and a Chicago T-shirt. But before she went home or to the office, Tyesha went to see Zeus. Outside his room, the hotel corridor was empty. She hoped that meant that Reagan had returned to Chicago or crawled back under his rock.
As a kid, she had fantasized about one day meeting her dad. In the younger years, he was a dashing, powerful man, not unlike Zeus. But he would sweep her away in a montage of father-daughter activities that she saw white kids do on TV like ice-skating and berry picking.
She knocked on the door.
Unfortunately, after a few minutes, Reagan answered.
“Umph,” he grunted. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“You got no pleasure coming from me, Reagan,” she said. “Where’s Zeus?”
“Tyesha.” Zeus stepped out of the bedroom dressed in a dark suit. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” she said, almost shyly. How had she not noticed it before? His big eyes. He had the thick eyebrows she was so careful to pluck. The goatee sort of muted the shape of his lips but they were so like hers. His lighter brown skin mixed with her mama’s dark brown would perfectly blend to her coloring.
He cleared his throat. “I wanna thank you for keeping the girls,” he said. “I shoulda did something sooner. Please let me give you a little something for them.”
Tyesha shook her head. “No, Zeus,” she insisted. “It’s fine. I got a good job and they been helping out around the apartment,” she said. “Actually, I came to talk to you about something else.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
She cut her eyes at Reagan. “Can we speak privately?” she asked. “It’s a family matter.”
“This is family,” Zeus said. “Reagan is like a son to me and is in on everything, as he’s gonna inherit the business one day.”
“Yeah,” Reagan said. “I knew your aunt Lucille, and was part of her program.”
She fixed a hard stare on him. “Please don’t speak her name to me,” she said. “I just came back from visiting the place where she was shot.”
Reagan dropped his eyes.
“Anyway,” she said, “as you know, Jenisse asked me to get DNA samples from the girls, and here are the results. They’re yours,” she said handing him the envelope. “Both of them.”
“You came all the way here to tell me that in person?” Zeus asked.
“No.” Her voice dropped slightly in volume. “There was a—well, I couldn’t get a saliva sample from Amaru. She refused to cooperate. So I used the hairbrush, and they tested me by mistake. Apparently, I’m your biological child, as well.”
“Oh, shit,” Reagan murmured.
Zeus’s eyes widened. “I had no idea,” he said.
“I just wanted to come by and explain what it says on the results paper,” Tyesha said. “Doesn’t seem to me that anything needs to change. I mean, I don’t want anything from you. But I’d like to be the one to tell Deza and Amaru . . . in my own time, if you don’t mind. My mama kept the secret all these years, but it’s out now.”
He looked at her more closely. “I can’t believe I never saw it before. You and Deza favor so much.”
Tyesha shrugged. “I just hope you’ll consider sending Amaru to that school. She’s got so much talent. Anyway, I gotta get to work. I’ll see you around.”
As the door clicked behind her, she let out a small shudder. The experience of telling Zeus had been nearly as surreal as finding out he was her biological father. But looking him in the face and telling him was refreshingly real. As she walked back to the elevator, she felt like she could breathe easier.