shoulders.

The old lady held me to her massive boobage for a long time, trying either to suffocate me or to give me succor. I wished she’d done the former.

I was captive for four, five days at the most. Then Effie, whom I hadn’t seen or heard from since we sped away from the airport together, came and got me. Just like that. She didn’t say where we were going or why. I grabbed the plastic bag with my new two-piece in it and climbed back into the getaway car from just a few days before. I didn’t say good-bye to Humongo or LaNieceMichelle. I never saw them again, and at six I knew that would be the case. We drove in smoky silence through L.A. smog. Me trying not to choke her with the strings of my bikini. Her eyeing me every once in a while from the car mirror. I knew where we were once we got to the brick alley that always led to the back of Effie’s house. She still wasn’t talking, but I knew Frances was around here somewhere.

The car stopped. The engine cut off. A front door opened. I pulled a handle. I jumped to the concrete. I saw her.

Someone grabbed my arm, slapped a vein, and shot me up with Christmas morning, new puppy, the last day of school, and snow boots all at once. I ran to her, my arms flying open involuntarily, straining like ghost limbs for feelings that had been snatched away. Frances didn’t make a sound. She dropped to her knees and let me smash into her chest. Whatever tears refused to come when I first lost her marched from my eyes, tiny soldiers on a steady and quiet advance down my cheeks. I put my hands on her face, pulling her skin to the right and left, making sure it was the real her under there and not a fake. I circled my arms around her neck, landed my ear between her breasts, closed my eyes, and listened. We rocked. Finally, after what seemed like forever, we would get up from the patch of grass. Frances suggested out loud that we take a walk around the block to get reacquainted. My grandmother nodded, and we left.

We were about halfway around the block when a van screeched up to the curb beside us, the side door slid open, and a man pulled me in. You gotta be kidding me! Thank God, Frances came too.

I’d like to think we were to Catalina Island as Jesus will be to the Rapture—thieves in the night. That I was whisked to this secret place via some covert method of whisking from the big red boat that brought us there to the brown van that zipped up the street of Avalon to the twin beds of the Edgewater hotel, where I was finally settled. That we stole the souls of all the white, Christian, and blond, with her blackness and my ashy knees.

In real life, Frances and I arrived in broad-ass daylight. We walked the half mile to the hotel by the beach that would become our newest home. She carried the big bag, and I carried the small one. It knocked against my six-year-old thighs with every step I tried matching to hers, our shadows moving like one three-legged, lopsided monster.

That’s how we ended up walking down Crescent Avenue in Avalon with only two bags. The small town on the small island was only twenty-six miles across the sea, but we might as well have been on the moon. This would be the start of my factual childhood, not the new Helena but the real one. Everything before it was a blessed blur—Jocelyn, Lancaster, Misty the pony, moving, kidnapping. Memories of this place had more weight than the six years that came prior—capture the flag in People’s Park, sixth grade with Mrs. Paul, breeding Crystal the rabbit, my first drink at Descanso Beach, throwing peanuts on the floor of Antonio’s, Bobby M.’s sandy blond hair. Little more than two thousand people lived on Catalina, most of them religious, all of them white. Frances and I increased the black population by 200 percent. Here we were memorable, and I remembered nothing from the previous us. We were technically from Los Angeles, but Catalina is where I originated.

“Really, sweet the beat? You’ve been here before?” Frances asked, probably tired from kidnapping her own daughter back from her own mother but still sounding interested.

“Yeah, over there.” I