The Queen of Secrets
by Lisa D. Gray
Bradley Street
On Saturday when my mom and Aunt V picked me up from ballet class, the last dregs of their argument stunk up the car like chitlins at Thanksgiving, thick and spicy. We were headed down Whalley toward Aunt V’s apartment, and while we waited for the light to change, my mom asked her, “Vanya, you did make the appointment for Thursday?” My aunt didn’t answer and her eyes slid across my mother’s face like a slap.
I waited a few minutes before leaning over the seat and snapping on the radio. My aunt’s hand gripped the door handle, her knuckles bulging like little hazelnuts as we passed the empty playground. A drizzle sprinkled the window, making the swings, slide, and jungle gym’s bright colors all runny like in those French paintings at the museum. I love that place. All those paintings and beauty under one roof.
“Sit down, Janelle,” my mother said as we pulled up in front of my aunt’s brick apartment building on Kensington.
Before Aunt V lifted the handle to get out, she turned to my mom and said, “Yes, Olivia, Thursday. Night, Janelle.” She smiled at me and then she was gone.
A huddle of boys shot craps against Aunt V’s stoop as they waited for their customers to creep out of the shadows. She stopped for a second and spoke to them before they moved to let her pass.
“What’s Thursday?” I asked my mom.
“I don’t recall anyone inviting you into the conversation,” my mom said, like she did anytime she thought I was minding grown folks’ business. I wondered what they’d argued about, but not for long, because my mom and aunt bickered one minute and laughed the next. “That’s how sisters are,” my mom would tell me after one of their melt-into-nothing arguments.
Tuesday, I was wiping the table and counter after dinner when the phone buzzed. I answered it on the fourth ring.
“Hello. Hey Auntie, yeah, she’s here.” Aunt V’s voice sounded wavy. “Mom, pick up the phone!” I hollered into the family room, but I didn’t hang up.
“Does she know?” my aunt asked my mother.
“Of course not,” my mom told her in her I-don’t-want-to-say-I-don’t-have-time-for-this-but-I-don’t-have-time-for-this voice.
“I want to tell her, O.”
I wanted to keep listening but they might hear the TV. I was watching the news for my homework and it was kind of loud, so I hung up the phone then tiptoed to the door and cracked it a smidge. Mom was still folding clothes. Hills of socks, T-shirts, and jeans covered the coffee table in front of her. She had tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder as she talked and folded. “V, you were doing so well. What happened?” That was all I could hear because Mom’s voice got softer.
I swept the floor, fed the dog, grabbed a Coke from the fridge, then headed into the family room hoping to catch more of their conversation. My mom was still on the phone and she lowered her voice, her eyes tracking me as I crossed the room to the sofa. I picked up the remote and sank into its fat brown cushions. The couch was my command station, like Captain Kirk’s on Star Trek. The TV popped to life and my mom whispered into the phone, “Let me call you right back.” Mom didn’t say anything to me; she just hung up and climbed the stairs.
On Thursday, I got home from swimming practice just before four. I was late and hungry. Swimming always made me want to eat. A note sat on the counter next to a covered plate: Out for a bit. Home soon. Mom.
I remembered Mom and Aunt V’s chitlin-funky conversation in the car and figured she must be with her or out with her friends. She did that sometimes, had a girl’s night. But six hours later she still wasn’t back and I was getting worried. I’d finished my homework and was balled up on the couch, TV on, a bag of chips on the floor. I flipped through Essence and half paid attention as Janet Peckinpaugh said, “The body of a man found at the Pond Lily Hotel several months ago has been identified and an explosion yesterday evening rocked a local women’s clinic. Details at eleven.” I changed the channel.
Vanya and Olivia were sun and moon, oil and water, opposites with nothing in common, but they’d been best friends since they were pinkie-hooking secret sharers. At fifteen, Vanya was what her sister and friends called a “goodie-goodie.” She’d won spelling bees and science fairs; she volunteered at the Hospital of Saint Raphael and earned straight As on most of her report cards. Sixteen-year-old Olivia, on the other hand, had managed to earn little more than a reputation. She skipped school, smoked cigarettes, and snuck into bars like Ernie B’s and the Oasis over in Newhallville. Olivia and Vanya were still as close as they’d been as girls and had had to depend on each other after their mother died in a car crash. Their worlds circled each other’s, in distant orbits held together by an invisible pin.
It started the year their mother died. She’d picked them up from school, and as they drove down Dixwell Avenue the car skidded on some ice and spun around and around. The girls screamed and held hands in the backseat even after the car barreled into a tree. Everything turned silent and snow sprinkled the windshield where a spiderwebby crack now crawled. Their mother didn’t move. The girls tried to scramble over the seat to get to her, but they couldn’t undo their seat belts. Faces peered in the windows, voices called out to them, and then they heard the sirens.
After the funeral, their father was as much of a ghost as they imagined their mother to be. He plunged himself into work at their school where he was a principal, and spared little time for them, his grieving girls. He never dated and spent his nights staring at the television. The girls didn’t know what to do with their grief or their father’s indifference and tried to win his attention in their own ways. The thing the girls held onto was each other, even as they started moving in different directions. At night after dinner they sat on their beds and gabbed about their day. On Saturday afternoons, they washed and pressed each other’s hair, and on Sundays they cooked dinner while talking about books and boys. They reminisced about their mother as they prepared the recipes in the cookbooks she kept above the stove.
At seventeen, Vanya was a tall girl with high cheekbones, a broad nose, and almond-shaped eyes. She possessed a quiet, easygoing nature and was well liked, but had become a loner like their father. Girls in her class called her stuck up and snooty. Olivia was petite with a nose that turned up at the end and ears that stuck out a little like their mother’s. Her smile drew people to her and she reminded almost everyone of their mother, who had sparkled at the center of any group.
I woke up on the couch Friday morning, and potato chips and empty Coke cans littered the coffee table. The house was quiet. My mom would kill me if she knew I’d guzzled three cans while doing the rest of my homework. The TV was still on and a reporter stood in front of a charred building on what looked like Bradley Street near my school, Saint Mary’s. People swarmed behind the reporter, a few of them waving while others seemed to just want to hear what she was saying. I spied my mom in the back of the crowd, wearing her faded jean jacket. Her eyes were puffy, her hair uncombed, and my mom did not do uncombed hair, ever.
The reporter introduced a tall man named Captain Johnson who stepped up to the mic. Sweat trickled down his pale, heat-reddened face as the camera zoomed in on him. Looking directly in the camera, he began, and I listened.