In the Thornwood-Brink flowerbeds were the strangest blooms of alclass="underline" tall leafless stalks crowned by purple floreted globes. They looked like probes, or sentries, or gaslights, or wands, the handsome goons of the garden. Allium, they were called, and in actuality were giant mutant chives. Their bulbs were like onions, and squirrel-proof, and they were supposed to be a kind of accent flower, but Sarah had planted them thickly all around the house in a kind of fierce, orchardlike fence, as if to enhance TV reception.
“Look at this!” exclaimed Sarah at the front door, pulling a printed sheet of paper from her mailbox. “The plant nazis are back! Apparently I have buckthorn and nipplewort in my yard and they would like me to get rid of them pronto! You know, the thing with plant nazis is that they start with the plants …”
The dogs next door were wild with their games. In the sky the returning geese were winging over, their honking alto bark like the complaining squawk of a cart.
“Last year they were after me about the nap of the lawn! They said I was mowing in the wrong direction and it disrupted the look of the neighborhood to have the blades of grass bent in a slightly different direction in one of the yards! I was mowing this way”—and here she tipped her whole body—“when I should be mowing thattaway.” She tipped her body back the other direction. Indignation gave her a dancer’s energy. And the warming weather caused her nervous thinness to emerge from beneath her usual thick sweaters.
One of the pictures Reynaldo took of Mary-Emma that I liked best showed her looking upward at the camera in hope and joy, and I took it to Kinko’s and had it blown up and then I went to Walgreens with Mary-Emma herself in tow and bought a shiny red made-in-China frame. The African-American cashier looked quickly at me and then at Mary-Emma and said, “You should braid her hair. No black girl’s worn an afro since 1972.” Then she handed me my receipt without looking at me. I took the purchase back to Sarah’s, put the photo, which was in my backpack, into the frame, and then propped the whole thing on the dining room table as a gift. I could hear Sarah on the phone in the kitchen, working out the wording details on this week’s menu. “ ‘Sheathed in bacon’? I don’t think so. It sounds — well, I don’t need to tell you what it sounds like. And look at that chicken again: there are too many adjectives in front of it. It’s like we’re trying to hide something.”
“Whossat?” I whispered to Mary-Emma, pointing at the dining room wall, toward the sound of Sarah’s voice.
“Mama,” she said, smiling.
“And whossat?” I pointed at the picture of her on the table.
“Emmie!” she said, excited.
“That’s right,” I said, and I danced her around the living room. The windows were open and we could hear the dogs yapping and chasing each other next door. When I spun and stopped I then saw Sarah just standing there in the dining room. Oddly, I could smell her: she was wearing my perfume.
“Who took this?” she said, indicating the photograph on the table.
I was taken aback, as if struck by a mechanical hand belonging to no one. “A friend. I thought you might like it.” Sharp heat plucked and pinched at my eyes. I had only wanted to please and surprise her, but now I felt suddenly very tired. I glanced at the photo again, to try to see it from her point of view, and noticed that in it Mary-Emma was sitting on Reynaldo’s prayer rug. I hoped it looked like a yoga mat.
“What friend?” she said, looking stern and troubled.
“A friend of mine,” I said stupidly, as I was now afraid and unsure. At this point Sarah seemed to lose concentration. Out front a car was idling high but driving by slow, the bass of its stereo deep in a rap song, vibrating and loud. It was a local hit, one recorded here, and it went “Out of Troy! Black Boy! You show your indignation, you end up on probation!”
“Whoever that is, they keep driving past: this is the fourth time this week and the second time today. That’s not your friend, is it?”
“No,” I said. “My friend is Brazilian.” As if this explained everything, the innocent photography, the innocence generally. A maiden knows her love like the sky the distant grass. That is, knows her love sort of, and from aloft sees not a blade. My head was full of middling poetry, only some of it my own.
“There it is again!” she exclaimed, and then she turned quickly to get to the front window to see, I assume, if she could actually make out the driver, the car, the spinning rims, the license plate.
She turned back toward me. “Have you noticed this car going by anytime before?”
“I don’t know what car it is.”
“Well, any car going by with a thundering bass and slowing down on this block?”
Actually, I had noticed it. The rap music and the car. You could hear its approach, the car turning the corner, the music booming like a furnace firing in a basement below you. I was attuned to the bass notes. But what I had noticed more, and what concerned me more, was the phone ringing and then when I answered it, as Sarah had instructed me to do, “Thornwood-Brink residence,” there was a long silence, then a hang-up. My thoughts had wandered to Bonnie, that she was home alone, not getting her life together at all, not nearly as she had hoped, not even close, and was instead lying fetally on a sofa in a position of seller’s remorse, tears of devastation streaming down her cheeks. How not.
But I could see now that Sarah’s concerns were not with Bonnie but with the mysterious, gone-missing birth father. I could see she imagined that it might be he who was driving past, having somehow found out Mary-Emma’s new address. He had not officially signed off on any papers. And though the agency had done all the things it was supposed to do, advertise in the local papers and seek him out in the halfhearted legalistic manner that fulfilled their obligation, it was easy to imagine a young guy in a bar or at work or walking with a cousin on a nice day back from church or home from school and suddenly hearing he had a child given up for adoption, and somehow wanting the child back. Had she not imagined the birth father as one of the Green Bay Packers, as I had? A minor celebrity, handsome, carefree, with no time for a relationship, let alone a child? At the very least she should have imagined him as perhaps the wayward son of one of the aging running backs.
“I’m not sure that I’ve paid that much attention,” I said.
“OK!” Her face reddened. “Have you paid attention to this?” She pointed wrathfully at the photo. “The photographer? Have you paid attention to him? Who is this person taking pictures of Emmie?”
I did not say anything, because I could no longer speak.
The car with the booming rap song trawled by once more. “There it is again!” Sarah cried, and raced to the window. I could see her lips moving silently, memorizing, and then she went quickly into the kitchen and wrote down the license plate number on a Post-it.
“I’ve put the license plate number by the phone. If you see that particular car again, let me know.”
“OK.”
“It’s just …” And here she moved both hands through her hair in anguish, her words a kind of muttering to herself. “My whole life feels like a horror show of slowly moving cars …” I didn’t know what she meant by that — a funeral? “Look, I’m sorry. I’ve upset you,” she said. She touched my shoulder in what might have been tenderness, but I was too frozen to discern exactly. “Thank you for the picture. I understand. It’s a lovely picture. She looks darling. But no more. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said automatically.
“It’s not that I don’t trust your friend. It’s just, I might not trust his Rolodex.”
“I don’t think he has a Rolodex,” I said daftly.