There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,15
gave up or to get help. The sun was setting and a cold wind came in. Rocky stepped off the boat and tied it up. I wondered where he learned how to do something like that. I stepped off too and felt the boat rock as I left it. Fog was coming in low, slow to the point of creeping, up past our knees. I watched the fog for what felt like minutes, then I came up from behind Rocky and grabbed his hand. He kept his back to me, but he let me hold his hand like that.
“I’m still afraid of the dark,” he said. And it was like he was telling me something else. But before I could figure out what that was, I heard screaming. It was Jacquie. I let go of Rocky’s hand and went toward the screaming. I caught the words fucking asshole, then stopped and looked back at Rocky like: What are you waiting for? Rocky turned around and headed back toward the boat.
When I found them, Jacquie was walking away from Harvey, every few steps picking up rocks and throwing them at him. Harvey was on the ground with a bottle in his lap, his head swaying—top heavy. That was when I saw the resemblance. And I didn’t know how I hadn’t noticed before. Harvey was Rocky’s older brother.
“C’mon,” Jacquie said to me. “Piece of shit,” she said, and spit on the ground toward Harvey. We made our way up the incline that led to the stairs to the prison’s entrance.
“What happened?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“What did he do?” I said.
“I told him not to. Then he did. I told him to stop.” Jacquie rubbed at one of her eyes hard. “It doesn’t fucking matter. C’mon,” she said, then started to walk faster.
I let Jacquie go ahead. I stopped and held the rail at the top of the stairs, next to the lighthouse. I thought to look back, to find Rocky, then heard my sister yell for me to catch up.
When we got back to our cell block, our mom was there sleeping. Something felt wrong about the way she was lying. She was on her back but she always slept on her stomach. Her sleep seemed too deep. She was positioned like she hadn’t meant to fall asleep the way she had. And she was snoring. Jacquie went to sleep in the cell across from us and I slid under the blankets with my mom.
The wind had picked up outside. I was afraid and unsure about everything that had just happened. What were we still even doing on the island? But I fell asleep almost as soon as I closed my eyes.
* * *
—
I woke up with Jacquie right next to me. At some point Jacquie had taken our mom’s place. The sun came in on us, making bar-shaped shadows across our bodies.
After that we did nothing every day but find out what the meals were and when they would be served. We stayed on the island because there was no other choice. There was no house or life to go back to, no hope that maybe we would get what we were asking for, that the government would have mercy on us, spare our throats by sending boats of food and electricians, builders, and contractors to fix the place up. The days just passed, and nothing happened. The boats came and went with fewer and fewer supplies. There was a fire at some point, and I saw people pulling copper wire out of the walls of the buildings, carrying the bundles down to the boats. The men looked more tired and more drunk more often, and there were fewer and fewer women and children around.
“We’re gonna get outta here. Don’t you two worry,” our mom said to us one night from across the cell. But I no longer trusted her. I was unsure of whose side she was on, or if there were even sides anymore. Maybe there were only sides like there were sides on the rocks at the edge of the island.
On one of our last days on the island, me and my mom went up to the lighthouse. She told me she wanted to look at the city. Said she had something to tell me. There were people running around like they did in those last days, like the world was ending, but me and my mom sat there on the grass like nothing at all was happening.
“Opal