August, she said, after my father left. I want you to know you can trust me.
August, she said. Tell me about your mother.
Orba (feminine), the Latin word for orphaned, parentless, childless, widowed. There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death’s enormity. But it has. Orbus, orba, orbum, orbi, orbae, orborum, orbo, orbis. .
The shortcut from the subway meant walking through Irving Park, past the boys slamming balls into hoops and the handball players with their single-gloved hands. So many nights, this park transformed itself into a party, silhouettes of bodies moving to the DJ’s music, couples disappearing into the deep pockets of it. But it was early spring and the DJs weren’t jamming in the park yet. I walked through it slowly, my head down, my mind on the AP exam I’d be taking come Monday.
When I looked up, my eyes landed on Sylvia and Jerome, her head on his shoulder, her hands small and warm inside of his. I knew that warmth, that kind of holding.
Sylvia?
August. Hey.
Hey yourself.
When you’re fifteen, pain skips over reason, aims right for marrow. I don’t know how long I stood there staring at them, watching Jerome slip his hand from Sylvia’s, watching Sylvia inch away.
Where’re you heading?
When you’re fifteen, the world collapses in a moment, different from when you’re eight and you learn that your mother walked into water — and kept on walking.
When you’re fifteen, you can’t make promises of a return to the before place. Your aging eyes tell a different, truer story.
Linden, Palmetto, Evergreen, Decatur, Woodbine — this neighborhood began as a forest. And now the streets were named for the trees that once lived here.
It’s crazy, Sylvia said. The way this me-and-Jerome thing happened. Don’t be mad. You guys broke up. I was gonna tell you.
What about law? I wanted to ask. What about your father? The question vast as the silence between us: What about me?
My geography text had shown me the complexity of the world, and that night I leaned over it, hungrily, intrigued by all the places out there beyond Brooklyn — Mumbai, Kathmandu, Barcelona — anyplace but here.
In Fiji, so that the dead were not left alone in the next world, their loved ones were strangled in this one, the family reunited in the afterlife.
You said she was coming tomorrow and—my brother said.
For a long time, I believed it was true.
14
When did you first realize your mother had actually died? Sister Sonja wanted to know.
Outside, I could see the trees lining Fort Greene Park. It was clear out, warm, the beginning of spring. There was the rope of ivy on her windowsill, the leaves moving neatly along the ledge and down. There were gates on the windows, even though her office was only on the seventh floor. Had anyone ever vaulted past her? Jumped?
I looked up at her.
Why do you think my mother has died?
Three months passed before I saw Sylvia again. She was wearing her school uniform, her belly pushing against the buttons. She waved to me from across the street, two-way traffic between us.
August!
But I was leaving Brooklyn. I was already halfway gone.
It became the year of slipping into the pages of my textbooks and disappearing. It became the year of AP classes and PSAT review, of stretching toward something new, unfamiliar, a thing called the Ivy League. Because Bushwick had once been a forest and we had been called ghetto girls even though we were beautiful and our arms were locked together and our T-shirts blared our names and zodiac signs.
I pulled down the urn that had sat on the high bookshelf for as long as I could remember, lifted the top, and looked inside.
My mother walked into the water.
I moved the urn into the room I still shared with my brother, setting it on the nightstand beside my bed. All night long, I kept one hand pressed against it.
This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.
The night before Gigi landed the role of Mary Magdalene in the drama club’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar, she called me, made me promise I’d be in the front row, beside Sylvia. Let it go, Gigi said. The baby’s already been made and you didn’t want that boy anyway. She said she’d put a coat on a seat in case Angela came back.
Can we do like olden times? Gigi said. For me?
But that night, as I pulled my coat on, I stopped, remembering Sylvia’s belly and the urn filled with ashes and the boy who once winked up at me. I sat on the edge of my bed remembering running over the SweetGrove land and the sound of Clyde’s laughter and my mother with a knife under her pillow and Sister Loretta’s hands going in circles as she scrubbed the kitchen floor.
I sat there, the apartment silent, growing hot inside my coat. I sat there long after the play had ended.
Gigi faltered. During the last verse of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a crack in her voice echoed through the auditorium. Everyone laughed, I’d heard later. The whole auditorium. Everyone. We didn’t mean to. We didn’t know. .
Sylvia hadn’t shown. Gigi’s mother hadn’t shown. The coats over the seats Gigi had saved for us remained there until her castmates took theirs and only hers remained.
Two steps to the left or right or back or front and you’re standing outside your life.
Someone’s friend knew someone who lived at the Chelsea Hotel. The cast party was on the eleventh floor.
Who was there to see Gigi lift her heels up and fly?
That year, her hair had grown long past her back. Most days she pulled it up into a braid. But on the evening of the performance, she’d worn it out, letting it fan over her shoulders. Did it lift like a dark wing into the Chelsea night? Did she really believe there was nothing on the other side of fifteen?
If the tribes of the Fijis send their living off to join their dead, it should have been me flying. Or Angela. But we remained on earth. Believing ourselves wingless.
15
When I stepped off the bus in Providence, Rhode Island, I was alone. I had wanted this — to step outside of Brooklyn on my own, no past, just the now and the future.
Auggie, I corrected the professor on my first day. My name is Auggie. I’m here because even when I was a kid, I wanted a deeper understanding of death and dying.
That’s crazy, the white devil of a boy who would become my first lover turned to me and said, his skin so pale I could see the blue veins running through it. Me, too.
How do you begin to tell your own story? The first time I heard the Art Ensemble of Chicago, I called out Gigi’s name. How could any of us have known? Roscoe Mitchell on saxophone, Lester Bowie on trumpet, the stumbling together of horns and drums and bells into music until so much beauty rose into the world breathing had to be remembered again, forced. How had Sylvia’s philosophy-spouting father missed this? How had my own father, so deep inside his grief, not known there were men who had lived this, who knew how to tell his story? How had the four of us, singing along to Rod Stewart and Tavares and the Hues Corporation, not turned our radio just that much to the right or left and found Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis?