My mother said Clyde hadn’t died in Vietnam. They had the wrong man. So many brown and black men, who could know? my mother said. It could have been anybody. He told me.
Another nurse wanted to know if I was all right.
Your brother will be fine, she said. Everything’s going to be all right, Sweetie.
Clyde is fine, my mother said. He’ll be home soon.
Kings County Hospital. No rooms, just wards. Slide a curtain back and there’s a baby crying. Slide another one and there’s the girl with the crazily hanging arm. Curtains and children. Nurses and noise. Where was my brother?
You enjoying those cookies, Sugar, the nurse asked. You was hungry, wasn’t you?
The Benguet of the Northern Philippines blindfold their dead then sit them on a chair just outside the entrance to their home, their hands and feet bound.
My mother turned the telegram around and around in her hands, smiling. Her eyes on the door.
For a long time after the broken glass, there was no room in my head for the newness of Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi. When they hollered at each other under my window, I didn’t look down. I lay in my bed, my eyes on the ceiling. A medallion circled the bulb. Off-white flowers orbited the light, stem to blossom to stem again. If my mother was coming, she would be coming now, so close to splintering glass, my brother’s slit-open then sewn-up arm.
When my brother called, Those girls are out there again, I didn’t answer, curled my toes inside my socks, and turned my face to the wall. Beneath the bandages, black stitches folded my brother’s skin back onto itself. I wanted my mother.
3
Soon after the window shattered, my father began to let us go. The front gate first—Stay inside it. Keep it closed. Then to the tree in the middle of the block. Then to the STOP sign on the corner. Around the corner to Poncho’s bodega, but only together. Hold your brother’s hand. Then onto the curb, into the street, the handball court, down Knickerbocker, across to the park, the baby swings, the big swings, until my brother and I were finally free.
Some days, I roamed the streets alone, searching for my mother. Would her hair be gray now? Still in an Afro? Would she be skinnier than I remembered her or had the years added a weight to her like the old Italian and Irish women who had moved away, who had once walked our streets slowly, heavy-breasted and waist-less. Did she still call Clyde’s name in the night, curse my father, walk through the land that used to belong to her, walk down to the water and believe it belonged to her still?
Come with me, I said to my brother again and again. Let’s go look for her.
Before Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela were mine, they arrived at our public school each morning, far away from me. They called to each other across the yard. They linked arms and laughed. They curled into each other to whisper when the teacher’s back was turned. Before I knew their names, I knew the tiny bones at the back of their necks, the tender curve of their hairlines. I knew each Peter Pan — collared shirt and turtleneck they owned. I knew Angela’s scowl as she waited in line in the lunchroom. I knew Sylvia’s bronze arm draped around Angela’s waist in the school yard. I knew Gigi’s voice, a waxed-on Spanish or British or German accent as we pledged in the auditorium.
Every teacher who entered the school yard loved them best, the rest of us sinking into invisibility.
Before they were mine, I stared at their necks, watched their perfect hands close around jump ropes and handballs, saw their brightly polished nails. As they grabbed each other’s arms and bounce-walked down the hall, I was sure no ghost mothers existed in their pasts. I truly believed they were standing steadily in the world. I watched them, wanting to have what they had — six feet planted. Right here. Right now.
That year, before we all grew to one height, Sylvia was the tallest. The day we finally became friends, Angela wore a too-small coat, her thin pale arms protruding from the sleeves. My own jacket was also too small, so I met her eyes first, hoping she’d see we came from the same place — a place where we cornrowed our hair and were unprepared for how quickly winter settled over this city.
The sadness and strangeness I felt was deeper than any feeling I’d ever known. I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone? And now the four of us were standing together for the first time. It must have felt like a beginning, an anchoring.
I held my nearly flat book bag with both hands.
Why do you stare at us like that, Sylvia said. What are you looking for?
Years later I’d remember how shaky her voice was, how I wondered if it was the cold or fear that made it quiver. And in it, there was the slight lilt of Martinique, an island as foreign to me as the Bronx.
Sylvia came closer to me. Really, I’m asking what are you seeing? When you look at us? I’m not trying to be mean.
Everything, I said. I see everything.
You’re the one without a mother, aren’t you? Sylvia touched my cheek, her mouth so close I could smell her wild cherry Life Saver.
No. That’s not me.
It was years before the woman with the hijab. Years before the silence and afternoons of watching ivy cascade down from a windowsill, a pen stilled in a thin dark hand.
The sky was overcast. The school bell was ringing. All around us, children were running toward the entrance. Sylvia took my hand. You belong to us now, she said.
And for so many years, it was true.
What did you see in me? I’d ask years later. Who did you see standing there?
You looked lost, Gigi whispered. Lost and beautiful.
And hungry, Angela added. You looked so hungry.
And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.
Months later, I would learn that Sylvia had arrived the year before me, with her parents and three older sisters from the small island of Martinique. She had spent the summer walking the few blocks her parents allowed with Angela and Gigi, quickly forgetting the French she had always spoken. Her father, who had her same reddish brown hair, thick coils of it, read Hegel and Marcel, quoting them back to Sylvia in a French patois she swore she no longer understood. When she laughed, her beauty stilled me.
Gigi had also come to Brooklyn the year before me, from South Carolina, because her mother’s dream was to celebrate her twenty-first birthday in New York City. Don’t do the math, Gigi said every time someone asked if her mother was her sister. It just adds up to teen pregnancy. It was late autumn and we were friends by then, Gigi tucking a heavy braid behind an ear, rolling her eyes.
This would never happen to us, we thought. We knew this could never be us.