“I had sushi today. Maybe it was bad or something.”
“We were gonna go grab some oxtails from that place on Flatbush,” she says tentatively. “You wanna come?”
We’re never tentative with each other, and I wish I could tell her the truth, tell her everything, but I wouldn’t know where to start my story, and it feels like there is no end.
“You go on. I still feel a little queasy,” I say, willing myself to sound normal. “And I need to edit the podcast anyway.”
“You sure? Because I could—”
“Ri, I’m good.” I need her to leave. “See you when you get back.”
“Okay, if you’re sure.” She still doesn’t sound sure.
“Have fun.”
After a few seconds, long seconds where I silently beg her to leave me alone, I hear the steps carrying her back out to the living room. I release a long, calming breath once the front door closes. I flip onto my back, link my hands behind my head, and fix my eyes on the tree. The longer I watch it, the calmer I become. I watch until my body goes silent and still. I watch until the serenity of the room feels like loneliness. And then I call the only person who knows how it all started, even though I’ve never told her it’s not over.
“Hey, Lo,” my cousin Iris says from the other end of the line. “What’s up, girl?”
I’m silent for a second, letting the voice I’ve known all my life wash over me. Familiar. Family.
“Lo?” Iris asks again. “You okay?”
“I don’t know, Bo,” I whisper, abbreviating her childhood nickname Gumbo.
“What’s going on?”
“You remember that day?” I ask, my voice hushing over the secret. “The day it happened?”
For a moment, I’m afraid I’ll have to explain—that I’ll have to say something awkward, something awful to trigger the memory I cannot escape, but she answers. She knows.
“Yeah,” she replies softly. “I remember.”
“It . . . I thought I had this shit under control, you know?” One tear at a time rolls from the corners of my eyes and singes the skin on my cheeks. “But it’s like . . . you remember that big hole in MiMi’s kitchen?”
“Yeah. She patched that hole all the time,” Iris says with a short, rough laugh.
“And nothing ever helped.” I bounce the laugh back to my cousin. “She kept patching it up, and every time it rained, water would leak through that ceiling.”