I’d stop time for you, Kev, she almost says.
The fear dampens in Kev’s eyes, and Ella realizes Kev heard her anyway.
Brother and sister smile across the table at each other.
Later, as Ella gets up to leave and walks back to the gate, she brushes past a young woman and pain spikes through her spine, and she sees it: sees the Latina with the dark, wavy hair and the little Dominican boy at her knee and sees them at home and sees the Latina woman in the kitchen on the phone screaming upon hearing that her child’s father has died and sees the Latina woman and the dead man’s mother and their lawyer poring over the autopsy reports saying he’d had ulcers and reports and memos that indicated that, when they’d ruptured, the other prisoners had called for help while the guard on duty sipped coffee at his desk down the hall and watched. Ella sees the woman and her son return to the jail to pick up the decedent’s things: a red Champ hoodie, his wallet, and a gray-red-and-black Bulls hat. The woman outside hugging herself against the cold and giving the sweater to her son, who is shivering.
Kev’s in his cell the next time Ella sees him.
“Come with me,” she says and takes his hand.
Night turns to day.
They don’t know where they are, one of those parts of the country that’s just open desert and brown-green shrub with mountains that are always far away and sky that is always blue, except when it’s diamond-threaded black. They’ve Jumped. Kev’s body is still in his cell. But with a single touch, Ella’s hand on Kev’s, his mind has been jettisoned elsewhere. She’s been practicing.
“The South might as well be Chechnya to me,” Kev says after he gets comfortable, and she wonders if he’s thinking of another inmate, his cellie maybe, or someone he met who lingers in his memory.
They’re leaning against motorbikes on a stretch of desert road, and Ella conjures a breeze and doesn’t even need her hands to do it anymore. She’s got them stuffed into the pockets of her ripped jeans, and all she needs is a cigarette for the picture to be perfect. Ella thinks of Malik and last night and how she discovered she could do this. On her mattress in the midst of an oppressively humid New York night, outlined in moonlight blue, they’d traveled at a stray thought from his twin mattress to a beach on the Dalmatian Coast. Feeling the mud of the shoreline in their toes, hearing the click of a woman’s heels against the cobblestones, seeing the clearest, purest blue of the Mediterranean. Then they were back.
Ella looks at Kev, doesn’t probe his mind, just looks at his face and the new grayness, the new hardness in it, the scars she can’t see but feel. He doesn’t look eighteen. If he thinks the South is like Chechnya, what does that make home?
Gray clouds circle far away and lightning forks down. A good two seconds later, they hear the boom.
The lightning strikes again, snaps at the earth with the recoil of a wet shower towel they used to whip each other with when they were just past being babies. Small fires puff to life.
Kev leans back against his bike and affects Ella’s posture, and with them mirrored like that their minds bleed into each other and they trade images of apocalyptic landscapes south of the Mason-Dixon. Florida is riddled with radiation, ribbed by it, and craggy with decay. The Gulf of Mexico burps toxic waste onto the sores that litter Louisiana. Arkansas and Tennessee have turned blue and white under blankets of vengeful snow that come out of nowhere just to fuck with the climate change deniers. Then they get to Mississippi and Ella pauses because Mama sometimes talked about Mississippi and Ella imagines warmth and mosquitoes and tallgrass, haze more than smoke and lounging on cars with the smell of weed making a blanket and somebody’s blasting Motown music out the open doors of their beat-up four-door and everybody is everybody’s cousin and barbecue sauce is suddenly on people’s fingers and bellies bulge with plenty. Maybe Mama didn’t say all those things when she said the word “Mississippi.” Maybe she didn’t mention the mosquitoes or the music. But it was the only time Ella ever saw her not look like she was made of iron.
The fire spreads outward in a line, but never goes beyond the boundaries of the cloud cover, like it’s trapped in a cylinder, and Ella thinks Kev’s humming, but she can’t tell ’cause of the wind. His eyes are closed, loosely. And he’s feeling the air against his face, smiling while he does it. Then wind wraps its fingers around the fire and squeezes, and the cloud cover vanishes, too quickly.
“Wake up!”
The prison guard bangs his baton on the bars to Kev’s cell, startling Ella and Kev out of the vision. Kev falls out of the dream and into his bed. Ella’s afterimage hangs in the air. It takes all of her effort to keep from lashing out at the guard and decapitating him or stopping his heart or crushing his head. Her hand, translucent, comes up off of Kev’s. Her astral projection lingers above his bed for only a moment before dissipating.
There are a million ways this can go, and Ella sees them all play out before her. In holographic projections that fill out and grow solid with wooden staircases that creak beneath boots and windows smudged so much you can barely see the rain or the snow or the sun outside, in the face that grows flesh and becomes warm to the touch, in the glint of sadness or joy or a mix of the two in the eyes.
She knew she would find herself back here. She didn’t know whether she was going to port directly to the kitchen and wait or whether she was going to stand at the door like she does now. She didn’t know if she was going to have to find another apartment or if what she was looking for would be in the same one she left all those years ago, but here it is, in front of her. The door, repaired and unmarked, like she had never lived in this place or walked up and down this stairwell when the elevator broke, lights flickering because the landlord will never repair the faulty electrical wiring.
She doesn’t know what she will say. Whether she’ll begin with an apology or whether she’ll tell Mama that she has learned how to fly. But she knows that going to see Kev was preparation for this. For seeing Mama again.
In one version, she knocks, softly, and Mama opens the door, and surprise supernovas in Mama’s eyes, and the two of them stand there, waiting for the worry that this is a dream to pass by, for the smoke to clear from the mirror. In another version, Mama guesses someone’s presence at the door, and opens it to find Ella and looks at her as though she’d left just yesterday, like it was the natural order of the universe that brought her daughter back, like she knew Ella would do this all along. In another, the shock gives way to fear, and it shoots enough hurt into Ella’s heart to remind her of what a bad idea this was and that she should never let Mama see her face again. In another version, Mama doesn’t spend a single moment stunned. Her bottom lip trembles. Her eyes glass over with tears. She knows exactly what she’s looking at, not a dream, not a nightmare wherein Ella stands before her one minute to be snatched away the next. She knows it’s Ella she sees, and she’s grateful, and she hugs Ella close to her chest, not forgetting that Ella could kill her with the wrong thought but trusting that she won’t. That all the good things Ella will tell her about, all the ways she’s brought her Thing under control, all the gifts she’s been able to bring Kev with it, are true. And she’ll sob tears of joy into Ella’s shoulder, darken her shirt with gratitude, and whisper an urgent prayer of thanks that she passed whatever test God had put in front of her this time. With this, her gifted daughter.