a long look at me and I can tell he’s thinking, This is weird and she’s maybe high, but there’s nothing he can do because it’s my box. I put the insurance papers back where I found them and get out of there as quickly as I can. The man watches me the whole time.
* * *
That night, Ma comes into my room and wakes me. “I got a message from the bank today, checking to see if we’re happy with their services. You went into the safe deposit box? Why? Where’s the key?”
“Ma, I’m sleeping,” I say, pulling the covers back over my head.
But it’s like she knows. I know that she knows that I know about the insurance papers. I feel her looking at me in the dark. Her eyes, when I see them just for a second, are like flint, like ancient pieces of stone all sharp and hard. Her hair smells like coconuts, like the oil she uses to condition it, but there’s an odd, musty scent underneath it. Like an old skin that she’s just pulled back onto herself. Her hands, when they pause on my bare arm, are rough. There’s a bruise just above my elbow. Her fingers linger on it, for just a second. Somehow she must sense the skin there is fragile. I think she’s going to press on it, and my whole body tenses in anticipation of a pain that never comes.
There’s a pause that seems to go on forever and I’m about to tell her everything, but then I feel her move away. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”
I hear her walking about afterwards, hear her in the shower, washing her old skin. I hear muttering.
A voice that comes out at me in the darkness.
Just when the house quiets, a blast of steel pan blares out. I tumble to the floor and reach into my gym bag to turn the phone off. It trembles in my hand, falls onto the carpet, and I hear footsteps coming down the hall toward me. The song stops just a split second before the footsteps pause outside of my door. I lay there on the ground, not daring to move or breathe, not even to shove the phone back into the bag or under the bed. If she comes in now, I’m dead.
In the dark, on the floor, I press my hands over my mouth and think: I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead…
Not yet, says a voice in my head, clear and sharp. But you can be.
The footsteps move away—
What was it she always said to me? I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it.
—but for now, she’s gone.
Hands shaking, I pick up the phone and dial the last number that called. “Hello?” says a quiet male voice on the other side.
“It’s me. Trisha. Can we talk?”
“That’s why I’m calling,” says Junior. My brother. It doesn’t seem so strange, after all, to think that I have a brother out there in the world.
twenty-one
When Ma was younger, she went to work as a domestic for a young family in Trinidad. There are photos in Aunty K’s album of what she looked like back then. In case you’re wondering, she was a dime. Seventeen years old, just a year younger than me.
The affair with the man of the house was no surprise to anybody. He was just married, and his pregnant bride was the size of a planet. He was no good, had never been any good, and didn’t plan on absorbing any goodness around him anytime soon. Of course he was going to stay with his wife because that shit still matters in Trinidad, no mind that he knocked up the maid. That’s just the kind of dude he was, my father. Sent her to Canada to live with some of her relatives. Gave her some money for school. By the time her sister, who was living in New York, heard about the whole thing, Ma was already six months preggers with me and enrolled in nursing courses.
Ma used all her stupidity up on one thing: my dad. And she let it use her up for over eighteen years. Let him come and go as he pleased. He paid for her schooling, which she hid from Aunty K. She thought he’d leave his wife for her, and fat chance of that.
The baby his wife had? Was a boy.
And the maid’s