Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,64

bed, takes off my shoes and gives me a glass of water with two Tylenols. He turns off the light so that he doesn’t have to look at me any longer.

“I think I have a concussion,” I say sleepily.

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“I won, though, Christopher. I know I did. Wait, maybe it was a tie.”

“You know it doesn’t matter, right? And stop calling me Christopher. It doesn’t sound like you.”

“I killed my father.”

He sighs. “It was an accident, Trish.”

I try to push myself up on my elbows, try to peer at him in the darkness, but my elbows won’t hold me up. I’m numb all over. I fall back onto the bed and blink up at him.

“Do you ever miss your dad?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “No. I’m glad he’s gone.”

“Me too.”

“Go to sleep,” he says, sounding older than he is. Older than me, which never happens. He pulls the covers over me and lowers his voice to a whisper so low I barely hear it. “You’re my best friend, you know.”

He hesitates and I think he’s about to say something else, but he doesn’t. He leaves the room. I feel his absence, feel the cold take hold of my body, then I fall asleep.

thirty-three

Rain on galvanized roofing. Pansticks on hammered steel. Liquid rhythms so loud that for a moment I think I’m in Trinidad, but I realize I’m in Columbus’s bed and the music is coming from the other side of the wall, in my room.

Ma. She’s calling to me.

I’m still numb from painkillers, feeling just fine. I slip downstairs, past Columbus on the couch. I don’t wake him. Pammy is in her kitchen, singing softly to herself, gold glinting at her wrists. There’s no trace of chamomile anywhere because she’s in a boxed-wine kind of mood tonight. She’s turned away from me, doesn’t see me, so I back away and continue my journey down.

In bare feet, I cross from their front door to ours. It’s unlocked.

I know I’ll find her in the kitchen, so that’s where I look first. But it’s not her calling me. It’s someone else.

“Where you been, girl?” says Ravi, from behind me.

I turn slowly. I didn’t expect to see him. Columbus said he disappeared. I guess I’d hoped he was gone for good.

He’s staring at me without seeing me at all. There are tears in his eyes, but I can’t tell if they’re from grief or anger. Maybe a bit of both and as soon as I realize that, he takes a step toward me. He’s got the envelope in his hand. The one I left for him, with the insurance papers inside.

“You were supposed to kill my dad, weren’t you, Ravi? In Trinidad, and here, too. You broke in here through the back door and there was supposed to be an accident, right? But he was late and we were coming home. Then he got hit by the car. But you were the one who was supposed to do it.”

It’s like he’s not even hearing me. He’s off in his own world. “Take money from me? Like I ain’t been with you from the start? From when we was little kids?”

It takes me a minute to realize it’s not me he’s seeing, it’s her.

He thinks I’m Ma.

“I almost kill a man for you,” he says, and the tears stream down his face now. “I woulda done it, too. Before you did it yourself.”

There’s a possessiveness about him that’s so much like how my dad used to look at Ma.

An expression on his face that tells me he isn’t ever going to leave her.

That he did it for love, attacking Dad in Trinidad, pretending to break into the house and “surprise” Dad the night everything went wrong. When he found Dad drunk in the parking lot instead, in the moments before our car came smashing through the darkness.

Ravi did it out of love but for Ma there were other reasons, reasons that had nothing to do with him. I think about the bruise on her hip I saw when Dad came up from Trinidad that last time and, you know, I can’t help but think about all the other bruises I’d been seeing on her my whole life.

My ma, she’s had it rough.

Now what I see is the anger cloudy in his eyes and it’s like he can tell what I’m thinking, that I need to get away somehow. He’s as thin as I am, but slower, because when he reaches to grab me,