Autumn came and the DJs stopped setting up their amps and speakers in the park. The streetlights stopped flickering from the ebb and flow of stolen electricity. Our boyfriends begged, and again and again we said, No.
Charlsetta’s brother broke both his arms at Bushwick Park, the cast slings crisscrossing over his chest. Is your sister back yet, we asked him. Always, the answer was no. Damn! we said. She’s been gone forever.
Was my father as absent as I remember? A folding chair in the kitchen and him in it, his head bent toward his hands, fingers moving over the bump where a thumb had once been, his black suit pants sharply creased by a too-hot iron so that there was a shine to parts of the fabric — a near-burntness that would remain, forever. Where had the fingers gone, my brother and I asked each other well into our teens. A dog ate them, we said. His hands got stuck in a hole and he pulled and pulled until. Until.
Winter came, and by late December Brooklyn was ankle deep in ice and snow. Platform shoes dominated New York, so we stumbled through the neighborhood in knee-high platform boots that zipped up the side but were anything but waterproof. I shivered through the winter, unsteady and half-frozen while my father stared down at his hands. He was living inside his faith by then, which left little room for understanding teenage girls. Where my brother and I had once been locked behind a half-open window, we were now more free than either of us could understand. Some evenings coming home I looked up to see my brother at the window, staring over the block, blank-eyed.
A week after Christmas, a woman was found coatless and dead on the roof of the Marcy Houses projects. Women had been found dead before — in hallways, in basements, in the unlit corners of subway platforms. Sometimes, as we walked the streets, we imagined our own selves found somewhere. How long would it take to know? Who would be the first to ask, Have you seen August? Have you seen. . Angela. .?
Angela said, I don’t know where my mother is. Her voice was thick, a tremble to the words. I grabbed her hard, pulled her to me. Angela, I said, she’s fine. She’s fine!
Sylvia and Gigi stood back, away from us so that it felt like the world was spinning around an eye of sorrow only Angela and I were inside of.
It’s not her, Ang. I swear.
But it was her. A Medicaid card and a five-dollar food stamp in her left coat pocket. A photo of Angela, front teeth missing, in her right. Angela “Angel” Thompson, Age 7, carefully written in ballpoint pen. Someone at Kings County probably said Lord, I know that woman’s child.
Before we knew it was her mother, Angela spent three nights at my house, the two of us curled together on the pullout sofa, my father in my bed. Her hair smelled of sweat and Royal Crown hair grease, her breath coming fast, even when she was sound asleep. In the only light coming in from a streetlamp, I stared at her and saw deep beneath the smooth cheeks and broad nose, there she was — there was the woman staggering past us with her thin face, nearly toothless mouth, and Angela’s eyes.
In the near darkness, I saw the roof, Angela’s mother curled fetal against the cold. I saw the water. I saw Angela crumbling to the snow-covered ground. I saw my father kissing my mother good-bye, the satin lining her bed, the Bible against her chest, the thin gold band on her too-still finger. I opened my mouth to speak. Then closed it again. And stayed that way for a long, long time.
On the third morning, my father took the day off from work and took Angela to the police station. This child’s mama, he said, seems to be missing.
We had never met Angela’s mother. But now we knew we had seen her — in the clenching of fists as a pale woman staggered up our block, tried to hang on to a STOP sign and failed — as the dancing stopped and Angela bent toward us, away from her.
We had asked What is it, Angela? We said Tell us. We pressed our ears to her beating heart. .
She’s not dead, Angela, I whispered. They have the wrong person.
When she pulled away from us days later, we didn’t know to yank her back. We didn’t say Wait! We said We love you. We said See you tomorrow. We said Always and all ways, Ang. We didn’t say Don’t leave. We didn’t say We’ll come with you — wherever you go.
We were teenagers. What did we know? About anything.
January came, and for days Sylvia disappeared into her Catholic school and pink room, safely tucked between her glaring mother and Merleau-Ponty — spouting father. Gigi stepped deep into the world of theater, rehearsing late into the evening, too tired, she said, to come around for a while.
She’s not dead, Angela, I whispered again and again. Don’t believe them.
But Angela wasn’t me.
That’s where I live, Angela had said one summer, pointing to a beautiful red-brick building some blocks away from us. But we had never been inside. Two weeks after the woman was found, Sylvia and Gigi returned to me, and together we pushed past the broken-lock foyer door and searched the mailboxes for Angela’s last name. We didn’t find it. Does Angela live here? we asked the people who came in and out of the building. Nah, they said. I don’t know no Angela.
When we called her number, a recording informed us that it had been disconnected. Shit, we said. Damn!
It wasn’t her mother, I said to Sylvia and Gigi. They made a mistake. Believe me. I know.
We waited, shivering. Frayed and awkward now, the three of us too often falling silent.
My brother had grown tall and thoughtful. He loved Sister Loretta, followed the teachings of the Nation of Islam, and searched my face for anything he could find there.
You okay, August?
Yeah.
You sure.
Yeah.
What are you thinking about?
Nothing.
One evening, long after my father had gone to bed, but only days after Angela’s mother had been found, he shook me awake.
You used to say she was coming back, he whispered. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
I pressed my eyes tighter together, turned toward the wall.
But you were wrong. She won’t be coming back until the resurrection.
In Tennessee, honeysuckle vines bloomed thick and full in our yard every summer. My brother and I ran out in the early hours, barefooted and still in pajamas to suck the sweetness from the bright flowers. It was never enough. That faint hint of honeysuckle on the tongue an almost broken promise of something better hidden somewhere deeper.
You gonna make yourselves sick, our mother called from the screen door. Behind it, aproned and high-heeled, she was perfect, full-lipped and dark-skinned, her hair cut into an Afro. Let that honeysuckle grow like you grow.