What if I’m the answer? she had asked herself. What if I’m the one we’ve been praying for?
Two blocks away, in an apartment across the street from the Baptist church, a phone rings.
There’s no one in the sergeant’s office when we get to it. The chaplain waits in the doorway and I want to smack that pitying look off his face, but then the door closes. I wait for someone to come in and tell me what to do or to hold out a phone for me to answer into, but nobody comes. I go to the phone on the wall, pick it up, and dial. It rings three times before something cold washes over me, and when I turn back to the desk, Ella’s holding herself, like she’s trying to keep from being torn apart.
I drop the phone.
“Ella, what… what are you doing here?”
“Nobody can hear us,” she says. Her doing. Her Thing.
This is it. The reason nervousness had spider-walked along my spine this morning. I steel myself. “Yeah?”
“Mama’s gone.”
My jaw twitches, and I fight to stand still. But my hands, my legs, my whole body is trembling. People don’t live forever. People die every day. Some of them die unlucky, they all die either way. And there’s no order to it, it happens to all of us, but this. Ella said they couldn’t hear us, but I know if I let go, they’ll hear me wail. They’ll have an idea what it’s about, and maybe some of them would understand, but they’ll hear it anyway, and I can’t let them hear it.
I close my eyes against the scream building in my throat. My whole body tenses. The ground shifts beneath me. Books shuffle along the shelf and nearly fall off. The paperweight on the sergeant’s desk dances to the edge. Chairs scrape along the floor.
“Kev.”
Someone’s calling my name, but all I see is black. All I hear is the roar in my ears.
“Kev.”
Tear this place down.
“Kev.”
I want to see her. I want to see her so bad, and maybe if this place is erased, maybe that’ll bring me closer. The dust in the air stills. Electricity sparks to life around me. I can hear it pop.
“Kev!”
Then it’s gone, and I’m cold again.
For a long time, we stare at each other.
“Aight, then,” I say. That’s it. I feel like it’s over, even though I have no idea what “it” is. Either way, something important is finished. Ain’t no reason to be here anymore. Ella takes a step closer, and I know she means to hug me, but I put an arm out to stop her. “You ain’t gotta do that. You’re a ghost too.”
I don’t wait for her to vanish before I open the door and walk back out into the hall.
“Take a walk, Deuce,” I tell him when I get back.
He peers up over the top of the Hustler he was thumbing through and looks me over, and I know he’s doing the calculations in his head, knows the news I got is the person-shattering kind and sees it, even though my words came out calm and measured. And he knows what I’m gonna do because he’s seen it before or, like all of us, has heard of it happening, and on the outside, maybe he would’ve tried to stop it, but because this is what happens in a place like Rikers, he merely folds his magazine back up, stuffs it under his mattress, and walks to the cell door, leans on a bar with his arms out and makes to start conversation with a neighbor.
My body moves like a machine. I take my sheet and tear it and, even though I’ve never done this before, I know just how to tie the knot and just how to get the sheet over the bar from which our privacy sheet hangs. I know how to test its strength without yanking the bar out, and I know how to make sure it’s all set up high enough that when I step off my bed, my feet won’t touch the floor.
In less than a minute, it’s all set up.
I’m up and have the makeshift noose around my neck, and I’m about to step into my blank future when I smell sulfur.
When I look up, I see a wood-paneled room. My hands go to my neck. There’s no noose, not even the burn of skin rubbed raw with me jerking as I hang from the ceiling. No, I’m standing on solid ground, and this feels too real to be whatever waits to grab you after you die. Too much like what I left behind. I can smell it, the Clorox, the mustiness that has come in waves off of all the bodies that have walked through here. And incense.
It’s a chapel.
Behind me is a green door, unlocked. Before me, pews, and a scratched wooden cube for an altar.
In front of the altar, two people: a woman in black slacks and a white button-down shirt, and a chaplain in those same colors. He’s got what looks like a portfolio in his hands. I start when I realize it’s the same chaplain that pulled me from the line earlier. His face is softer, still wrinkled, but looser. He’s smiling.
The chaplain whispers something to the woman, and she sits in the front pew.
They wait in silence for what feels like an uncomfortably long time, a Rikers minute, then the green door opens.
I step to the side, out of sight. I don’t know why I’m scared people will see me if this is the afterlife or a dream or something other. But I can’t kill instinct, I can only kill myself. So I cling to a shadow. The sound precedes them. The clink of shackles working against themselves. In walks a woman in Rikers beige with a CO holding her arm.
The woman in the pew stands at the sound of the door slamming shut, looks behind her, and immediately tears start falling down her face.
When the white inmate and the woman in the fancy clothes stand in front of each other by the altar, they hold hands. A strand of blond hair falls from the topknot on the inmate’s head, but she doesn’t bother to flick it away. The women can’t stop grinning at each other, like the chaplain’s joy is contagious. He puts their hands together. I now pronounce you wife and wife. The witness, a captain, signs the marriage license the chaplain pulls out of his portfolio.
My ears are buzzing. The world dissolves in a mess of colors. I’m crying.
I try to hang back, deeper into the shadows, but they’re certain to see me, and just when they get close enough for me to see the lipstick stain on the inmate’s jumpsuit, I’m standing on my bed again, breathing hard.
Deuce, still leaning on the door bars, lifts his head but doesn’t look all the way back.
I haven’t done it yet. I haven’t jumped.
My fingers are shaking, but something is different inside me. Like underground plates shifting, piecing themselves together or breaking apart or both. And suddenly, I don’t have the energy anymore. My fingers won’t stop shaking, and when Deuce looks back, for real this time, the features of his face slacken. I can’t keep my bottom lip from trembling. I can’t move. I don’t know how he knows to do this, but he walks back over and grabs me by the waist while my trembling fingers work the noose over my head. He lets me back down and I fall forward. He doesn’t push me away. He doesn’t cuss me out. He doesn’t size me up for a beating. He holds me, and what the fuck kind of place is this that can let me cry into this big nigga’s shoulder about my mama dying?
Banging wakes me up. Soon as I open my eyes, nothing but white. I know by now that it’s a flashlight. Brightest flashlight in the world. And my body moves before my mind does. I got ten minutes to get dressed. But I’m up and stretch out the pain in my back, and, in a few moments, I’m in my prison sweats.
In the beginning, being escorted by a guard down to the isolation cells at 1:30 in the morning would mean there was only pain waiting for me at the end. I’d been singled out for a beating or I was going into AdSeg on a write-up or some other horrible thing was about to happen. But I’m on my way to a job, and that kind of knowledge puts a strange feeling in a man. When you have purpose that doesn’t involve hurting someone else, it changes the way you walk. I’m not moving through here with a bounce in my step, nothing like that. But I don’t have the same tension knotting up my shoulders. I don’t have my head ducked and arms loose and ready for when I gotta swing on someone. You let that go when you’re on your way to work.