1980
The summer my pop disappears, I am not allowed to play in the front yard anymore. Ma says it’s because of the heat, but it’s really about the police cars that circle our house like sharks.
The cruisers slow-crawl down our street a few times a week at first, then twice a day after Pop loses his job at the mill. Soon it becomes as regular as my TV shows. I press my face to the window during commercial breaks from Gilligan’s Island, hoping to catch a peek of a white, meaty arm dangling on a car door, a dark uniform—neck bulging over the collar like a big belly, sparks of silver badge and pins. As they go by, the cops flick their head between our house and the road in front of them. They don’t wave back.
Some things I need to know: Is it the same car and the same two cops going round and round, or do they take turns with other cops? Do they take a break to talk about the clues they’ve found to whatever mystery we’re a part of? What is the mystery? When will they stop?
One day when Ma is at work and Pop is fixing something in the basement, I decide to follow the cops on my purple Huffy. I wait for thirty minutes by the door until I hear radio static and the pop pop of tires chewing gravel.
I don’t show off my new peddling-no-handed skills, because they are driving very slowly—I have to stay far enough behind to not look suspicious. Together, we’re a slow parade of mystery chasers.
The street is twisty and shaded by tall trees—they stand straight like soldiers on both sides, the wind bending them down for me as I pass. I pretend that the shadows they make on the ground keep me hidden; I can only be seen in the sunny patches. The seed fuzz in the air joins us, swirling around my head like a cocoon. My heart thumps so hard I can feel it in my whole body. I am a heartbeat.
At the end of each street, the cop car makes a left turn; soon we are on the other end of my block, where the sprinkling of trees on one side becomes thick woods, where long driveways lead to hidden houses with no lawn chairs or broken toys in yards. The car stops in the middle of the road at the end of the street and the engine cuts off. These are the kind of police who don’t even need to pull over to the side. I realize I have also stopped in the middle of the street, in a sunny patch, so I turn around and ride straight into the woods like that’s what I meant to do all along.
I ditch my bike, then crouch down behind trees nearest the car, where I’m hidden by tall weeds and curling ferns. The cops are smoking now, laughing loudly as they wait for something. The radio spits out loud, fuzzy voices I can’t understand. The lights flash for a second and the siren whoops loudly, just once, like a scream. It scares me so badly I pee myself. I won’t cry.
“Where’d that little colored girl go?” One of them gets out of the car and looks into the woods, right at the ferns that cover me. He’s fat and gray-skinned; his no-lip mouth draws a straight line across his face.
“Come on, don’t fuck with her,” the one still in the car calls out through the open window.
“You following us, girlie?” No-lip says, ignoring him.
The seed fuzz is everywhere now, a whirl of summertime snow. The cop swats it away from his head.
I squeeze a cottony puff tight in my hand.
“It’s against the law to hide from an officer when you’re called.”
He reaches into his pocket and tosses a coin into the brush behind me.
“If I have to come and find you I’m not gonna be happy about it.”
“Here I am!” I say, popping up from the weeds like we’re all just playing hide-and-seek.
I get my bike and go stand in front of him, using it to hide the pee spot on my shorts. I feel hot all over, except where the damp cloth touches my skin, cool like something to calm a fever.
“That your bike?”
“Yes.”
“You sure you don’t have sticky fingers like your daddy?”
“Oh, for Christsakes, quit it,” the one in the car says through the open window.
“Well, yes I do, sir,” I say, looking at the sticky seed puff smushed in my hand.
They both laugh.
“Who gave you that bike?” No-lip asks.
“My Grandma Sylvia.”
“Your daddy can’t afford to buy you a bike?”
I know he’s saying something mean. It lands somewhere in my body and digs a hole.
“Why are you driving in circles around my house?” I ask. I am a detective. The wind bends the trees for me. I belong to my father.
Seed fuzz swirls around his head, making him sneeze, over and over.
“Ask your dad,” he says, wiping his nose on a sleeve before getting back in the car.
I start to go home, back to my seat at the window, but instead—I ride around the cop car once, twice, three times; a human lasso. It works. They just sit there and watch. On the end of the last loop, I skid out, just as I’ve seen the neighborhood boys do. My tires spray street dust and gravel.
“Eat my dirt,” I yell, and peel out before the cops can arrest me.
That night, I ask Pop why the cops are after us.
“Nobody is after us!” He shouts it at me, right up close in my face like a roaring lion. I stay very still. Hot, cherry cough-drop breath pushes into my nose, mentholated spit sprays my cheeks. I close my eyes as the sound rattles through my whole body. I can’t think about anything other than wiping the droplets off my face, like they might burn clear through flesh to the bony shield of my teeth.
“Stop hollering at her like that!” Ma yells back. “I swear to god if you don’t cut that shit out…”
“Then be a mother and get her away from that damn window.” His voice goes low, like a growl. “She should be playing with friends, doing kid things. Invite ’em over here—look at all these toys,” he says, sweeping his arms across the living room, pointing to my blocks corner, my Care Bear collection, my Baby Alive in a little crib. All things I’m too old to play with.
The next morning, Ma asks me if I did something bad to Champei. Champei is my best friend, but she has just told her mother that she doesn’t want to come over my house anymore. Leah sin houwy, Champei, I think to myself. I’m sad, but not surprised. “Leah sin houwy” is how you say goodbye to a friend in the Khmer language.
Last year, my teacher, Mrs. Kelly, held up a picture of a small brown girl with shiny black hair holding a soccer ball and told us that the Allens, who live down the street from me, were adopting a Cambodian refugee from a war. We learned that this meant Champei had no parents, and that the fighting all around her meant she had no home.
“This is your new home,” I said, holding her face and kissing her cheek when she got scared during dodgeball.
Until then, Pop had been the only other person in Swift River besides me with brown skin. Everyone else I knew was white and pink, including Ma. Because Champei was brown, too, I knew we would be just like sisters. Except she couldn’t understand a word I said. So I asked Ma if we could learn how to speak to her in her language. After school, Ma and me would spend hours in the library reading about Cambodia—the monks and temples, Kampot and the Cardamom Mountains. I learned “Welcome!” “How are you?” “I love you!” “I am going to school!” “Where is the toilet?” and even how to count from one to ten.
Lately, when Champei has come over, we’ve had fights that lead to me crying, and then to me screaming. The screaming is new; it comes when I feel so bad the words get stuck. I don’t know how to stop it once it starts. Something that needs to leave my body is leaking out of me; I scream until I’m empty. Then I’m back to me, until it fills up again.
“If you scream one more time, I never come back here,” Champei said to me last week.
“Leah sin houwy, Champei,” I said to her. I can’t give up the screaming.
I should have added Knhom srolanh neak, Champei, which is “I love you, Champei.” Maybe she would have forgiven me; I could have had both.
After Ma tells me Champei won’t come over, I scream. And scream. Champei is gone.
Pop runs from the kitchen, grabs me by the arm and twists.
“Owwwie! Pop, my sunburn!!”
It feels like my skin has been lit on fire.
“You’re hurting my sunburn!!!”
The neighborhood kids don’t believe that my kind of skin can get sunburns. Now I could finally show them the giant white bubbles, the curling rolls that peel off in long strips. They leave behind the outline of island shapes surrounded by ocean. The kids peel each other for fun; I want to be peeled, too.
“Stop it! You’re twisting off my skin!” I yell, and then go back to screaming.
“How about you stop that, OK, baby?” he asks sweetly with a smile I’ve never seen. He doesn’t raise his voice.
For my whole life, I’ve only had time-outs. Ma and Pop both got beaten for being bad when they were kids, but I heard them tell Grandma Sylvia they’d never hit me. They made a promise to each other. It’s not 1950, they said. Grandma is always saying I need a good spanking. Pop says Lessons should be taught with words, not violence.
Pop is breaking his promise.
He squeezes my arm even harder and smiles bigger. It’s the pain and weird sweetness together that scare me enough to stop screaming. Then he grabs me and holds me so tight I can’t breathe, like a time-out pretending to be a hug.
“There will be plenty of kids for you to play with at the barbecue,” Pop tells me the following Saturday. “You can make some new friends.”
All week, Ma and Pop have been talking about this important barbecue party at Mindy and Tom Campbell’s house. We don’t get invited places very often, so this is special. The Campbells have leftover fireworks from a 4th of July party last year, and Pop says I can hold a sparkler. Tom is a man Pop used to work with at the paper mill. Mindy is his wife who sells makeup and drives a pink car.
I don’t like that the barbecue is interrupting our regular weekend plans. Saturday mornings we have our thing: Pop and me make breakfast, watch Jonny Quest, and then sweep the kitchen while Ma stays in bed smoking cigarettes and painting her nails with the radio blasting. Sometimes we hear thumps, like she’s jumping or dancing—most likely practicing routines to teach her students at The Creative Talent Dance Studio. It’s hard not to go inside that room, knowing how much fun is being had without us.
This morning, Pop makes me fried onions, peppers, and tomatoes for breakfast, and says that instead of cleaning up and cartoons, we have to go outside to get salad makings in the garden.
When Pop was still working, he took night classes at a college an hour from our house. Plant Propagation and Introduction to Plant Pathology were the names he’d read me from the covers of his books. Two times a week he’d burst through the door with new things he’d learned, holding baby plants peeking through the tops of tiny containers.
“I’m happiest in the dirt, sweet pea, always have been,” he said. “I’m filling my head up with what my hands already knew how to do.”
He planted ferns and coral bells around the eastern redbud in our front yard. In the side yard, he made eight rows of vegetables into a rainbow: bright red tomatoes, bushy carrot tops with the orange root poking out of the dirt, yellow turnips, green bell peppers, a blueberry bush, and baby eggplants—fat and shiny, like purple dragon eggs hanging off of their branches. He poked holes into a hose and built a watering system, hung a mesh screen around the delicate herbs to keep them from being bossed around by the wind.
“Look at this, sweet pea.” He swept his arms out, holding all eight rows between his hands. “I can always feed my family. Always.”
Ma called Pop “Farmer Rob” and Grandma Sylvia said he should sell his plants on the side of the road to make some money.
He had to quit his classes when he lost his job, so he doubled up on the planting, adding three new summertime rows of cucumbers, peas, and spinach.
We are in the garden, picking our barbecue salad.
“These motherfuckers are doing it on purpose!” Pop yells, lifting the neighbor boy’s basketball off a now squished section of lettuce. He never says the f-word in front of me.
“Took me a whole year to get this romaine growing good.”
He holds the ball in his hand for a moment before throwing it, hard, over the fence back into their yard. This is the third time this week the ball has appeared, an orange bomb leaving behind crushed flowers and broken stalks.
“Why don’t you just keep the ball, Pop, so they can’t do it again?” I ask.
He looks at the fence, then back at me. And again at the fence.
He knocks himself in the head with a fist.
“How’d you get so damn smart?”
“Pop, no!” I say, but he’s already climbing the fence, flinging his long, skinny body over to the other side.
“You’ll get in trouble!” I say when I don’t see him for a few minutes. It’s all my fault. “Hurry!”
The ball flies back over the fence, crushing all new things when it lands.
His dark hands peek over the top first, then he straddles it and drops down, landing on his feet.
“I’m the daddy. Don’t you worry about trouble,” he says.
He picks up garden shears and stabs the ball, smiling as the air oozes out. He looks toward his bedroom window, where sometimes Ma watches us. I can’t tell if he wants her to see, or if he’s afraid she already has. He pauses a minute, considering his options, then throws the ball back over the fence.
“They’re on notice,” Pop says.
“So we can’t even bring chips. Nothing?” Ma says, frowning at the pretty bowl of salad she’s carrying: our lovingly picked lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and radishes. I put three of the wild yellow dandelion flowers that grow everywhere in the summer right on top. You can eat those, too.
“There has to be change lying around the car, enough for chips,” she says.
“Annabelle, they’ll appreciate a fresh salad,” Pop says.
“Car’s out of gas?” Ma asks. Pop nods toward me, then glares at her until she looks away.
We’re walking along the side of the road next to the riverbank, on our way to the Campbells’ house.
“Cigarettes are almost gone, too,” Ma says. She makes a face that says this is a good enough reason to turn around and go home.
“You know how important this is, Annabelle. Get it together.”
Ma is beautiful.
She is wearing her best summer outfit—a blue-and-white flowered sundress. I am wearing a matching one that covers the bruises on the tops of my arms from Pop’s squeezing. She is sharing her prettiness with me. Her long hair is still wet from a shower; she sprinkles us with flowery-smelling water whenever she turns her head. Her skin is shiny with lotion, and the freckles that cover her face and body are so summer-dark, she’s almost as brown as me. She has on the bright pink lipstick that, by the end of the day, stains her teeth like berry juice. Pop looks handsome too. He is wearing jeans and a white shirt that shows off his arm muscles. His Afro is newly cut short, and he’s wearing the spicy cologne that pulls all the air in a room to him.
“You know Mindy’s gonna corner me to buy makeup and that butt-ugly jewelry she sells,” Ma says to Pop.
“Tell her you don’t need that stuff to look good,” Pop says.
He presses up against her from behind, putting his arms around her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder as she walks. She stops, standing perfectly frozen until he lets go.
“That’s a ridiculous answer,” she says.
“I’m happy to be walking, Pop. I’m glad we’re not driving,” I say to be helpful.
He grabs my hand and squeezes it. I squeeze back.
“Me too, baby. Feel that breeze? The river’s like a natural fan.”
We walk single file on the path whenever we hear a car coming or a biker whistle. A few cars honk at us. Kids in backs of cars smush their faces into the window. The cops go by two times, three times, four. Pop waves at them like they’re friends, except without a smile.
“We’re pirates, Pop,” I say, whipping at everything I see with a branch I find on the side of the path.
“Just don’t throw me off the plank,” he says, sounding distracted.
“Cattails!” Pop points to the plants along the riverbank that look like hot dogs on sticks. He tells me how when he was a little boy in Georgia, there were no streetlights on his road. At night, the kids lit cattails from the swamp—they called them mosquito pumps—and caught fireflies in jars. He and his cousin Lena would go from porch to porch, watching all the grown-up bodies moving around in the moonlight. Talking. Laughing. The kids sat at the edges, getting “snapped at and slapped at, and loved up,” his aunt used to say.
Pop’s mother was from Woodville, but she died while he was being born. His father thought there would be a better life for them in Swift River, where they would both come to live with his Aunt Clara. She would help him raise Pop; she would be Pop’s new mother. They would be the only Black people in town. Pop was seven years old, just two years younger than me. I asked him, what did he mean “a better life”? Better how?
“He thought it would be less hard up here,” Pop said. “More opportunity.”
“Less hard how?” I asked. His face puckered and he fell into the place of “down South,” and lost family.
“This is shameful, why doesn’t the town clear this out?” Pop is disgusted. He says the same thing each time we pass by the small, abandoned house where he lived with his aunt and father. It’s missing most of its roof shingles, and the grayed wood siding is being overtaken by something green and mossy. The yard is just dirt with a few tree stumps. It’s the worst off in a clump of identical small houses, like a rotting tooth. “My aunt is rolling over in her grave right now,” he says.
“Doing cartwheels in her grave!” I add, to be helpful.
The mill houses are in bunches throughout town. There’s one here, and another where we live in Grandma Sylvia’s old house. It’s a twenty-minute walk in between the two, with an abandoned church and a one-room schoolhouse in the middle. I ask Pop why they called it The Delta, and he tells me a delta is a triangle of land at the mouth of a river, the in-between spot before the river splits into branches and heads off to a different place, like the ocean. A long time ago, a man who traveled from far away said “The Quarters” reminded him of Southern river country—the shape of it, the fertile soil, and the ways of the Black people who lived there, how it was separate from the rest of the town. When I ask Pop where all those Black people went, he tells me, “Out West, back home down South. Long time ago, before I was even born. Aunt Clara was the only one stayed.” He always says the same thing. I ask why, and he’ll only say, “To deliver babies.” Ma says Pop misses Aunt Clara, and that she is a sore spot we should try not to touch.
“Thank god we never moved over here,” Ma says, pointing to the rundown mill, almost directly across the street from the Campbells’ house. “I give it a few more months before it shuts down for good. We would be looking at that thing every day.”
Unlike the other mills and factory buildings in town, which are ugly and brick and filled with rows of square glass windows, this one looks like a giant house and a barn. The barn part is connected to a covered bridge that straddles both sides of the river. I used to visit Pop on his lunch break; we’d head out to the middle of the bridge and look down to where the water smashed over rocks, headed angrily toward a waterfall. We made paper boats and threw them out to their deaths, hoping they’d make it to the peaceful patch of river where the current slowed and the top of the water was unbroken, right before the drop. “Go, little boat!” we’d cheer, as it coasted off the edge into nowhere.
A dam further upstream used to power all the mills and factories, but most of them closed before I was born. “Someone needs to burn them to the ground,” Ma always says. “We don’t need an everyday reminder there aren’t any jobs.”
The Campbells live in a two-story house, set apart from the others, with a huge deck and a fixed-up basement. Pop says it was a mill owner’s house—the kind that’s passed from father to son, father to son. Ma jokes that it looked like the boss of the other houses, just like its bossy owners.
“Tom and his toys,” Mindy calls out to us as she answers the door. We are standing in the driveway, crammed in between a bright yellow sports car, two motorcycles, a truck with giant wheels towing a big boat, and Mindy’s pink car with a license plate that says LIPSTIK4U.
“How are they so rich?” I ask. Ma and Pop talk to each other with their eyes; something is not fit for my ears.
“Ugly jewelry sales?” Pop smiles and grabs Ma’s hand.
“Get in here!” Mindy waves us inside. Her face is bright red with white cutouts around her eyes where her sunglasses once sat. She wears a fancy necklace that looks like something from my princess play sets. It’s thick and silver with rows of big blue and red stones. She has on jean shorts and a pink T-shirt, as ratty as if she were a servant who took the queen’s jewels and ran.
“Look at you health nuts. Making us all look bad.” Mindy takes the salad from Ma and grabs both of our hands, pulling us through the kitchen toward the back sliding door. The deck is as big as our entire house. We climb down stairs that seem like they’ll never end, to a yard where Tom and his brother, Kenny, sit in the far corner around big coolers and a grill. They have the same red faces and white cutout eyes, like a pack of raccoons.
“A whole family could live under there,” Ma whispers to Pop, looking back at all that wood hanging over a small hill, long stilt legs holding it up. Another set of stairs on the side leads to two smaller decks, one with a bathtub in it.
“I’ll give you a tour later,” Mindy says, pointing back at it. “This was supposed to be a New-Deck celebration, but someone got in a fight with the manager at the lumber yard.” Mindy nods dramatically toward Tom. “Put the guy in the hospital,” she whispers above my head.
“It’s an Almost-New-Deck celebration!” Ma says.
“Why do you have it so big?” I ask, pointing up at it. Mindy doesn’t hear me, and Pop gently holds his hand over my mouth.
Ma lights up a cigarette; her hands are shaking a little. Pop puts his arm around her waist and pulls her closer. Her head finds its spot under his neck for a second before pulling away, remembering to be mad.
“Can I bum one?” Mindy says as we head for the food table. “You’re so lucky. Tom won’t let me buy them anymore.”
“B.R.! Get over here and grab a cold one,” Tom calls to Pop, slapping an open lawn chair next to his. B.R. is short for Black Rob, which is what his friends from school used to call him for a nickname. Pop hates it.
“Let them get a plate first,” Mindy says. “Diamond, look, the kids are all playing freeze tag over in the field,” she says, pointing to the sea of tall weeds and grass next to their yard.
“Is it safe in there?” Ma says. “Are there snakes or anything?”
“If there were snakes, the kids would have scared ’em off long ago,” Mindy says.
I shake my head no as soon as I hear Ma say “snakes.” I move away from her and hold on to Pop’s shirt.
“It’s OK,” he says. “We’ll let her settle in first, get something to eat.”
There is a long table of food; it makes me think of the words “royal feast,” from one of my fairy-tale books. There are many bowls of delicious-looking white and brown mushy things: potato salad, tuna salad, egg salad, two kinds of pasta salad, macaroni and cheese. There are hot dogs, hamburgers, corn on the cob, three different bags of chips, pudding with M&Ms on top, Rice Krispie treats. And now, our salad—a bright can of paint thrown on the table.
“Can we take some with us?” I whisper to Ma, who is filling her plate with small spoonfuls from each bowl. She glares at me and mouths, No. Pop’s plate is spilling over, and he’s eating before we even sit down. Ma glares at him, too.
“How do you two stay looking like goddamn teenagers?” Kenny says to Ma and Pop when we sit down in the lawn chairs. He rests his plate on his pot belly, using it like a table, pointing and laughing at his joke. Ma says people have always been jealous of her and Pop; how good they look together, how well they get along—like two best friends who are also a boy and a girl.
“That deck is a beauty,” Pop says, opening a beer. “You did all that work by yourself?”
“Nah, the fellas helped out, too. On the weekends.”
“If you need any help finishing that railing, let me know,” Pop says.
“I’ll take you up on that, bro,” Tom says. “I might have some work for you up at the cabin on Mohawk, too. I know you’ve had it rough, lately.” He looks at Ma when he says the last part, but Pop doesn’t notice.
“Thanks, man, I appreciate it.” He’s nodding like crazy.
Tom reaches behind the cooler and pulls out a jug of a strong-smelling, brown-colored drink, pouring Ma and Pop big jars full of it.
There is boring talk about boats, cars, recipes, and the mill. Kenny puts a cassette tape into the boom box. Guitars that sound like they’re crying and men with scratchy voices yelling make them all remember things. They drink more brown juice from jars and their voices get wavy. No one notices when I go to sit under the food table, right at the edge, so I can listen to what they’re saying without getting shooed away. I have a few paper plates and a pen from Ma’s purse; when anyone looks my way I pretend to be coloring.
“Hey, you.” Mindy slides up to the table where Pop is scooping up the last of the macaroni and cheese. I’m still invisible. She bumps him with her hip as she sweeps empty cups and plates from the table into a black garbage bag. I notice she keeps pulling at the front of her T-shirt, puffing it out to hide her lumpy stomach. She smiles in Pop’s face, touching the jewels on her necklace. She has corn in her teeth.
“I like your necklace,” he says in a way I’ve heard him talk to Ma when he’s trying to keep her happy.
“Oh, thank you! I made it myself. These are semiprecious stones.”
She leans in close and says something I can’t hear, then drops a Rice Krispie treat onto his plate. Pop steps back, looking uncomfortable.
“Peekaboo!” She pops her head underneath the table. I jump.
“Aren’t you a unique one,” she says, smiling.
“Thank you,” I say and pretend to be concentrating on my plate drawing.
A slower guitar song comes on the boom box and everyone gets quiet. Tom has put the grill fire out, and it feels like we’re all being held together inside a smoky meat cloud. The grown-ups sing along to the song with a happy kind of sadness, And she’s baaaa-ying a stairway to heavooooon.
“This music is gonna put me to sleep.” Ma is up and at the boom box. She pokes through the pile of tapes on the table, pulls one out and hands it to Mindy; they both smile. I recognize The Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” a song Ma plays in the kitchen while she’s cooking. Mindy and Ma start dancing together.
I’m not surprised that Ma is better than Mindy—she is a dance teacher, after all. Mindy is all jerky moves; Ma is wild but smooth.
“Anna’s looking good,” Kenny says to Pop loud enough for everyone to hear it.
“Yes, she is,” Pop says with a dead voice.
Ma’s hair is damp and stuck to her face; she leaves it there, in her eyes, in her mouth. There is a wet spot on the back of her dress, in the hollow part right above her butt. The front of her dress is wet, too; you can see two pink nipples peeking through the thin fabric. She is doing something that is making everyone’s head sway; no one can take their eyes off of her. I imagine that this is the Ma behind her bedroom door on Saturday mornings. It’s too much of something. It’s not dancing meant for other people.
Mindy stumbles; no one moves to make sure she’s OK. She sits down, mumbling to herself. The grown-ups are somewhere else, far away, each at their own private party with a bunch of ghosts.
Pop comes out of his trance and punches the side of his head, three times. Shit Shit Shit, he says to himself.
He leans in and says something close to Tom’s ear that I can’t hear.
“Oh, I don’t really care about all that,” Tom says loudly.
“I could use your help, man, you could talk to Smitty and the others,” Pop says louder, but still leaning in to make it private. “You know it wasn’t me.” His voice is high and whiny; he sounds like a young boy. “I don’t steal. I wasn’t raised like that.”
“Let’s just keep the past in the past,” Tom says.
“But see, that’s just the point—”
“Listen, I’ll throw you some work.”
“I appreciate that, I really do, I need it, but—”
“Let me think about it,” Tom says, turning away from him to face the food table. He points at me. “Your kid under there?”
Pop looks at me, like he’s just remembered I’m alive.
“It’s grown-up time,” Pop says, taking me by the arm and pulling me toward the field. Ma gives me a little wave but doesn’t stop dancing.
“Anna. Come over here and dance with me,” I hear Tom say to Ma as we walk away.
When we get to the edge, Pop bends down to talk to my face.
“No screaming. OK, sweet pea?”
I part the weeds at the entrance to the field; the grass is nearly up to my chest. It thins out quickly in a zigzaggy path, beaten down by the kids’ playing. Ahead, I can see them flickering in shadowy, almost-dinnertime light. I look back and Pop is still watching me, the grass now swallowing him up to his waist. He looks like he wants to run in after me and bring me back to the grown-ups and their sad ghost party. I blink a picture of his face like this, so I can remember it when he’s mean or gone.
There are four kids in the field—Tom and Mindy’s three sons, and Kenny’s daughter, all of them around the same age as me. I know them, but they’ve never spoken to me before. Two boys are frozen, arms out like robots, while the “it” boy chases the girl in wide circles. She is fast, he is clumsy.
“Run!” she yells to me, and I’m off.
We’re more than he can handle. We whiz by him in opposite directions, quickly tiring him out. When he stumbles and falls, she grabs my hand and pulls me to the ground, giggling. We’re hidden by the grass.
“No fair!” he yells when he’s back standing and can’t see us. “They’re hiding together!”
We lie there, curled in toward each other, still holding hands. We stay like this, our faces a few inches apart, breath pushing our chests out in rhythm. She is the kind of smiley that makes me smile, too, just like Champei. I wonder if the secret to friendship might be in here somewhere, in her face as my mirror and mine as hers. She puts an arm around me; it will keep us invisible. I close my eyes and pretend she is Champei.
“Cheaters! I quit,” the clumsy “it” boy yells, his voice far from us.
In a minute, the frozen boys are standing above us.
“You suck, Tommy. Look. They were right in front of you.”
“They cheated!” Tommy shows up behind them.
“Naw, you’re just too dumb to find a bunch of girls three feet in front of you.”
We’re all standing now. Tommy steps forward to look me up and down.
“What are you?” he asks.
“I’m a pirate!” I say.
Before I can make even one pirate joke, he shoves me in my chest, so hard I fall straight back, like a knock-out punch from a cartoon. I suck in air, desperately—it feels like all of it has left my body at once.
It’s almost dark. The clouds are black against the sky. I don’t realize I’m screaming until I see most of the kids running from me. There isn’t any sound at all, until Pop.
“What happened?” he says, looking all over my body for hurt parts. He has red eyes and breath like dragon fire.
“Tommy shoved me on the ground on purpose.” I’m crying now.
“She said she was a pirate, so I had to kill her.” He shrugs. “And she cheated.”
In the distance, you can hear the other kids calling to their parents.
Tommy won’t look at me or Pop. He just stands there, yanking out grass and weeds from the root and throwing them, spraying us all with dirt.
“You need to apologize, Tommy,” Pop says. “You hurt her.”
“I don’t have to listen to you,” he says, still without looking at us.
Another dirt shower; some of it hits Pop’s white, white shirt.
Pop walks over and bends down to Tommy’s level, grabbing his wrist to prevent him from throwing another weed hunk. Tommy shakes his hand free, looks at Pop, and throws it over into his pile, daring Pop to stop the flow.
I know what’s next.
Pop grabs the top of Tommy’s arm and squeezes. He lifts him up, legs kicking in the air, until he’s dangling at eye level.
“You doing some gardening for your dad?” Pop says with a smile.
“I was just chucking grass and stuff…” Tommy looks at me, panicked.
Pop shakes him, hard and fast—like something wet he’s drying out. You can hear the sound of Tommy’s lips flapping, his breath caught. As Pop lets him down slowly, Tommy looks around frantically, like he doubts there’s still ground beneath him.
“Sorry I pushed you,” Tommy says as soon as he touches down. Then he takes off.
Pop has my hand as he leads me back through the grass maze to the party.
Shit Shit Shit Shit, he says it over and over again, until I think he may have forgotten words.
“We’re so sorry,” Mindy gushes, running over to meet us at the edge of the yard. “I heard what happened from the other kids. Tommy Jr. is so sorry.”
Tommy is up on the deck with his dad, who is yelling. Tommy is limp and crying.
“It’s just kid stuff. It happens,” Pop says, nervous. Ma looks at him, confused, waiting for a signal. She comes over to hug my head.
“It’s getting late, anyway. We should go,” Pop says.
“You’ll have to come out on the boat with us sometime,” Mindy says.
Tom comes down from the deck, handing Pop another jar filled with brown juice. “For the ride home.” He slaps Pop on the back. “Sorry about all this. Let’s talk tomorrow. I can help you out.”
There is a blur of goodbyes. Tommy Jr. comes up to me and whispers, “I’m gonna tell on your dad.”
The girl from tag hands me two Skittles. I want to ask her to come play with me and Champei sometime; I think maybe if I bring this girl, Champei will take me back. We will be three friends. But Ma grabs the bowl of wilted, untouched salad, like a thief, and we’re gone.
The breeze along the riverbank is perfect, and therefore it’s terrible—the sweetness smacking up against our misery. Pop is all the way under now, stumbling and mumbling and singing to himself. The streetlights are spread out, so in the gaps of darkness it’s just us and the reflections off the other side of the river. And the fireflies. They’re everywhere.
“We didn’t get to do the sparklers,” I say softly.
“You’re right, sweet pea.” Pop stops. Something catches his eye.
“I have something better.”
He points toward the edge of the river at the bottom of a small hill.
“We’re gonna catch fireflies,” he says. “Down there.”
He chugs the rest of his brown liquor drink and holds up the empty jar—the perfect firefly holder.
“Have you lost your mind?” Ma says. “Haven’t we had enough for the night?”
“We most definitely have not had enough. It’s time for some fun.”
He grabs on to Ma’s arm and does the squeezing thing. She makes a hurt, shocked face and yanks away from him.
“Come on, sweet pea, let’s do what crazy Daddy says.”
She grabs my hand and pulls me down the muddy hill toward the river’s edge. She trips once but catches herself. She pulls me in close to her at the bottom.
Pop follows after us; he slips and falls roughly down the rest of the hill, landing close to our feet. We don’t move.
His arms and legs are spread wide.
“Am I still alive, Annabelle?”
Ma doesn’t answer.
He lies there like that for a minute. Eyes staring straight up at the sky. A high-pitched sound eeks out of him, a whimper like a hurt dog, or a balloon losing air.
“I’m OK, nobody worry.” He jumps up suddenly, laughing hysterically.
“Show her how to do it. She’s never done this before.” Ma stands with her arms crossed.
“You just grab them. Cup them in your hands and bring them to me.” Pop shows me, grabbing one easily and letting it go into the air like a magic trick. “Then we put them in the jar,” he says.
I look back and forth between Ma and Pop.
“Let’s go, baby, start grabbing,” Ma says to me. Even in the blue darkness, I can see splatters of mud on her dress. She looks scared.
We run up and down a small patch of the riverside, reaching up, out, everywhere. Pop whoops each time we bring him one, but otherwise it’s just crickets, cicadas, frogs, and our heavy breathing. He holds his hand over the jar, a mini world of blinking light.
“Please, Rob, it’s late. She has to get to bed. Do you have enough fireflies?”
“Yes, this will do,” he says, looking over his firefly prison. “It was an important thing for her to learn, Annabelle. A good memory. Right, baby?”
He crouches down in front of me, unsteadily, holding the jar of fireflies between us, the twinkles bouncing off our faces. His breath still smells sharp, but sweet.
“God you are such a beauty,” he says.
I look to Ma.
“Say thank you,” she whispers and nods. Her face has mud on it, too. Tears have cut two clear streams down the middle of her face.
“Thank you.”
Pop flicks his hand at Ma, no, that’s not what he wants.
“I don’t want to hear that screaming ever again, OK, baby?” He doesn’t lay a hand on me.
My eyes are itchy with salty powder from old tears, but I keep them focused on his face. My mouth clicks open and closed, something like a yes but without the sound. Chomping down on a promise.