I don’t ask myself why those men showed up at the door. They’re the same ones who passed in and out of the house the night Mom died. They presided over the dusting of prints, the cataloging of evidence and the collecting of my mother’s body. My mother was placed in a black bag and loaded into a white van while I sat in a police car covered in her blood.
The door slams shut. I’m relieved. Lebanon is gone and I am left alone. That’s the best way to be.
My neck still throbs when I think about it, and I’ll have a bruise on my left hip from where I hit the edge of the table before I crashed to the floor. Lebanon always looks the same way when he hurts someone—surprised. Like he didn’t know he was capable of such harm. It’s the closest thing to sorrow or regret he feels. I think that’s why Mom forgave him the many times he hurt her. Maybe she believed it wasn’t really him who did it. Not his true self. It wasn’t his fault. It was something she could pray away.
She probably thought she failed him. She probably thought she wasn’t strong enough, or good enough or deserving enough to change him. She couldn’t own up to her defeat and he couldn’t hold himself accountable because no one else did. So we all suffered. Mom was a failure. Lebanon was a monster. I was a prisoner.
Save yourself, baby.
Layla called nine times.
Turning on the shower, I undress and notice blood on my shirt. It looks like raindrops. The water feels good on my body. It’s my own kind of baptism. Christianity has to be the only religion where you can attempt to drown someone three times and call it salvation.
Each steamy droplet clears my mind before I step out and dry off. The color on my neck has gotten worse. I’ll go to my room and grab some clothes, ones with long sleeves and high necklines. I have an anthology of these teachings from Mom.
I hate looking at my eyes in the mirror because they are His. Contrasting with my deeper skin tone, they are vivid reminders we share the same blood.
Leaving the bathroom, I walk past the living room and notice a manila folder on the table. It’s something the police left behind. I open it.
Lebanon stares at me, younger, vulnerable and scared and hurt. A black eye and a swollen bottom lip adorn his skinny face. For a moment, I see me in him, and I don’t want to see that. I don’t want to empathize with him. I don’t want to believe I can reach him because then I’d be like Mom, and I can’t afford her version of hope.
There are other papers, ones listing a charge for murder, an arraignment, a plea deal to involuntary manslaughter. All of this in 1979. I didn’t know. I didn’t know he murdered anyone. Yes, I knew he spent time in prison. It would have been hard to not know that because people talk. But he killed someone. We were living with a murderer this whole time. This dark side of him was always lingering under the surface like a riptide.
Violent people do violent things, and in the end, someone pays for it. A smile grudgingly crosses my lips at the picture of his wounded face, knowing he can hurt, but be hurt in return.
Those bruises, the cause of them, isn’t hard to explain. I’ve only heard about this, from news sound bites and front-page articles in the Sun-Times or Tribune. Men being tortured, being freed after hasty convictions, spending decades of life in a prison cell. These aren’t fantasies made up by a marginalized sect of society. The men are real and the horrors experienced to this day hang over the city. A legacy of law and order remain frayed in the very communities police are sworn to protect. Black people don’t trust the law because there is no accountability for when the law fails us. We know heroes are capable of evil things. Fathers are capable of evil things. Every person on this earth is capable of evil. Maybe Lebanon didn’t commit this murder, but I doubt it. I’m certain he deserved every punch and kick, every wound and cut, every desperate cry for taking a life.
You reap what you sow. You always reap what you sow.
I leave the folder on the table and walk past the guest bedroom. We never had guests, so Mom used it as a place to do her crafts, to get away from Him. It was her protection. Her sanctuary away from church. I open the door and for a brief moment, hope to find my mom there. I don’t. I hope to find forgiveness there. But that’s not there either. So I sit down at her desk. My knee bumps against it and I hear the smallest jingle. I open the drawer and see an envelope. I open it and I smile.