Authors: Laurie Jean Cannady
At home, she would have cut the chicken breast into little pieces, added water, flour, and made gravy. This she would have separated into fours. Chicken gravy on rice one day, chicken on bread the second, chicken soup the third day, and broth the fourth. She would have mixed most of the rice in the concoction with just a little salt and sliced the green beans into oval pieces, which would give the allusion of more. She'd have added water to the juice until it was lavender and sipped it for breakfast and lunch as she imagined the taste of the chicken strands against her tongue for dinner. She would have cut the Jell-O into cubed pieces and put them in the freezer so she could suck the cubes if she had a sugar or soda craving. The milk she would have saved just for Champ. She would have diluted it of course, but left it thick enough for the top of his tongue to turn white with the sucking, so he would know what real, not evaporated or powdered, but real milk tasted like. She could have done so much with so little, as she had always done.
Weeks into my stay, the doctors released me. I wasn't the baby Momma brought into the hospital. Rolls of fat gathered under my neck, in the creases of my arms, and hugged disposable pampers, which replaced Momma's hand-washed ones. I had cut two new teeth, those which Momma discovered as I bit down when she tried to extract a clump of bread I'd stuffed in my mouth. I was walking then, teetering across the hospital room, pulling at oxygen lines hanging from the wall. The nurses, with pride, had shown Momma I had learned to walk as one held my arms over my head and the other stood at the end of the hall beckoning me to her. Momma said she cried when she saw this. I've always wondered why.
The plastic tent was gone. The needles, too, were gone and the only indication I'd been sick was a dried patch of mucus sitting atop my lip. Momma said I was a favored baby on the floor. The nurses all bragged I never fussed, that I always ate well, and smiled the brightest when they entered my room. It wasn't unusual for Momma to visit and find me draped on the hip of one of the
nurses at the nursing station. This made Momma proud. Good babies came from good mommas, and according to the nurses I was as good as they get.
After my discharge, all of the nurses gathered to say goodbye. They kissed my cheeks, held me one last time, and showed Momma again how well I could walk. One of the nurses planted me on the floor. Momma held out her pinky finger. I teetered forward, then backward. I reached for one of the nurses and then for Momma. Seeing me walk and laugh made her happy I was well, but many milestones separated me from her. I looked to the nurses for food. I looked to them for comfort after only a few weeks. The only times she was allowed to be my sole caretaker were the early morning feedings, which she never missed. Every day, she was there to spoon me my first meal. She even took a spoon for herself when the nurses weren't looking. Every day she visited that hospital, rubbed my back, fed me my food. Still tired, still worried about Champ back home, there was happiness in seeing me grow strong. Strength was what I needed. She, alone, knew what we had to go back to.
Momma carried me as we exited the hospital. Her back began to hurt so she put me on the floor. Since I was walking, she'd brought “new to me” shoes from the Goodwill. They were heavy roach stompers with a few scrapes on the front, but I pranced in them as if they'd just come out of Bradlees. I was small for my age and the chubby parts looked foreign on my body. I teetered forward fast, periodically looking back at Momma, waiting for instruction, but she just smiled, waiting to see how far I would go without her. Nurses and patients stopped and smiled as I walked down the corridor. Momma, still behind, walked slowly, keeping her eyes trained on my movements, ready to dart if I appeared to be losing ground.
There was more snow that morning than Momma had seen in her whole life. The flakes, as large as rocks, were falling hard enough to crackle against the snowdrifts. Momma felt ice pangs in her hip, and the muscles in her back were taut like a timing belt. She trudged, one baby on her hip, one at her side, one in her belly. Her eyes were squinted so tightly, she could barely see my father walking toward us. He, too, was bent, face turned to the ground, snowflakes jamming around his head, wrapped in a skullcap. But for his strut, off balance, vacillating side to side like he was walking in two directions at the same time, Momma wouldn't have recognized him.
She smiled when she saw him, even though the last time they'd spoken they had argued about the other woman, the one she had stabbed him over when she caught her in our house. But none of that mattered on that snowy morning because I was dead weight, and Champ, only two, was tripping on every bump in the snow, and Dathan, the baby inside, was kickboxing her bladder, her ribs. Momma worried that he too was cold.
Carl walking right at Momma saw her, but didn't see her. When he realized it was his wife and children emerging through the fog of snow, he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Momma did not stop. She walked faster, harder, pulling Champ so quickly he left drag marks in the snow. She stood face to face with my father. She didn't ask where he had been or why he hadn't come home for days. She just pushed me into his arms and wrapped the blanket tightly around my face. He looked into her eyes, the same eyes he'd promised forever and said, “Lois, take this girl. I'm not going home with you.”
Momma's eyes widened, as if they would help her hear better. My father's mouth was moving, but Momma refused to hear. She focused on the warm breath escaping his mouth, clouding around
his face, and the clumps of snow cutting through the haze. The sides of her chapped lips split even as she thought of forming words. But her eyes, like her daddy's, spoke sentences without words. “Help me get these kids out of the snow, then you can go where you want. You know Laurie just got out of the hospital. Do not leave us now.” This, her eyes said.
Carl's eyes were not as vocal, so he shook his head, and rolled his eyes when he didn't want to see what Momma was saying anymore. She took Champ's hand and left me in my father's arms. She walked, pulling Champ behind her, hand massaging the knotted muscles beating in her back. She walked, no intention of looking back. She had said all she had to say. So, she walked, snow crackling against ice, listening for the crunch of my father's feet behind. She stopped and listened. No crunch, just a crackle. If she could have looked into her own eyes, she would have said, “He is behind you. Even he would not do that.” But the eyes, in her case, couldn't stop the mind. She turned her head, praying it would not be. She turned her body, still listening for the crunch of two feet. A bundle, still, me, in overstuffed coat, socks on hands, sat in the snow, and there bobbed a retreating figure, crooked almost, vanishing in the haze.
It had been weeks since my father had seen his wife and children, one year since he'd placed me in the snow. That morning, with the stale taste of vodka coating his teeth, he decided it was time to go home. He swiped his tongue against the inside of his mouth. Clumps of morning mouth-lint stuck to his gums. He contemplated cleaning himself before his visit, but he was the daddy and the husband, so we would take him as he was. He might have reconsidered if he had realized alcohol divided time, which meant what he thought were weeks had actually been months and wives weren't wives once husbands stopped coming home.
He was not drunk, but he wished he were. Better to mute Momma cutting her eyes at him when he walked in the door. The last time they spoke, they argued. He couldn't remember what
the argument was about, but he knew it had been a good one. Could've been about his drinking, his women, or his disappearing. The matter didn't matter. Her words all sounded the same when libations had lubricated passage. He made his way to the door of the small house on Victory Boulevard, where he believed his wife and children were waiting for him. He didn't even think to knock on the door. He was a father and husband after all. He turned the knob expecting it to welcome his entry, but his turn met resistance. The ball wiggled loosely in his hand as if avoiding his touch.
He paused, in that moment realizing how much space was between him and the home he used to have. His heart free fell into his stomach, where it remained, as he stood eye to eye with the marble-eyed man who answered the door.
Momma exhaled when she saw him. Hip pressed against the arm of the chair, she steadied herself for a punch, a slice, a “Motherfucker, I wish you would.” But none of those came. There was just silence ping-ponging between them. Momma looked at her husband or what was once her husband. Half of himself, body so drained by vodka and anything that burned going down, she couldn't remember what she once loved about him. His brown skin had grown gray, like a thunderstorm had wrapped itself around him. He looked taller, but only because his frame was wearing skin as if it were a hand-me-down. His clothes hung, sliding off of his arms. His pants sagged around the thick of his thighs as if they were pulling themselves down.
The man moved away from the door. My father walked in. He pressed his shoulders back, puffed his chest to add inches to his stature. Carl had been known to rumble with men twice his size when he was drunk, but he was not drunk enough to buck, so he turned to Momma.
“Where are my kids?” he asked.
This question sounded awkward even to him. He had not gone there for his kids. He'd gone there for his family, but his family wasn't his family anymore because his woman wasn't his woman.
So, he called for the thing that was still his, that which another man couldn't slip himself into, yet. Momma tilted her head to the closed bedroom door. He followed her gesture.
With eyes trained on the door, he felt his throat closing. So many things he wished in that walk across the living room, that he had a drink, that he hadn't taken that first damning drink, that he'd never touched her with anything but affection, that he'd gotten to know those three kids in that room, the ones he had decided to say goodbye to.
“If you want to see your daddy, look in the mirror.” This Momma said whenever I asked why I was lighter than everybody else and why my eyes were caramel drops and hers, my brothers', and sister's were Milk Duds. This she said when I asked, “Who do I look like, if I don't look like you?”
I never found answers in the face looking back at me from the mirror. Yet, I ventured, time and time again, into that bathroom, with the tub scrubbed so ferociously it shined, to the place where Pine Sol was the breath of porcelain fixtures. I gawked in the mirror, stretching and scrunching my face, holding my lids open with my fingers, examining the specks of chocolate in my eyes. I never found him there. I covered my mole, the one set between my lip and nose, large, obtrusive, like a raisin in an oatmeal cookie. I did not find him there either. I sometimes pulled back my hair, turned my chin to the right, squeezed one eye closed, in an attempt to piece together my father. Still, all I saw was me.
Then I turned from that mirror to the father in my mind, the one who'd said, “See you later” right before my second birthday. In that version of him, my father had a hairline that swooped across the top of his head like a fat check mark. His skin was fair, like mine, and clear, too smooth for a man's man. This might have prompted others to try him, but for his eyes, which could punch holes through faces with one glance. My father was not a big man, not a tall man, but the way that he walked, long, like he knew people were watching, added six inches to his stature. His gait was lengthy, hurried because he had places to go, people to seeânamely me. And when he moved, his arms propelled him forward as if they were oars and life, his boat, cutting through seas constantly working to toss him over. In my mind, my father had never been capsized. He was not somewhere clamoring for air, every second drowning. My father had just drifted away because
arms weren't meant to be oars nor life, a boat, but he was finding his way back to me. This I knew because Momma told me that is what fathers do.
When I was twelve, I decided I would no longer search for my father in the bathroom mirror. He was in the world somewhere, which meant he could be found. I started in my small city of Portsmouth, Virginia, where the only limits were my two feet and the will to walk. First, I walked the streets, from my own projects, Lincoln Park, to the projects of Ida Barbour, Swanson Homes, and South Side. That search led me straight up Deep Creek Boulevard, with a left on Scott, another left down Elm, and back around to Prentis Park. During those expeditions, I traveled a perfect square, ending where I began, but I did not know that then. I just walked the road in front of me, with no destination in mind, hopeful my daddy would find me, just as I was trying to find him.
After months of walking, I grew physically and mentally tired of that strategy. My next step had to be more guided, purpose driven. Then I turned to Momma's stories, the ones which dropped seeds into the garden of my imagination. He had an uncle, Uncle Benny, whose house Momma pointed out each time we visited my Aunt Vonne in Prentis Park. The small house sat quietly on the corner of Peach Street. It was a ranch with deep, emerald grass sparkling from the foundation to the curb. When we walked past, the windows were never open, neither was the front door. It looked as if the house were a time capsule waiting for someone to open it.
Each time, Momma pointed, “This is where your Uncle Benny lives. He's your Grandma Mary's brother.”
I wanted to ask if we could stop there, if I might ask him where my daddy was, but by the way Momma picked up speed and kept her face forward as she pointed at Uncle Benny's home, I knew the answer would be “No.”
When I walked alone, I did not have to ask if I could stop. I didn't need permission to go where directions to my father might be housed. One humid Saturday, I walked that perfect square, but I wasn't staring into the windows of cars. I wasn't looking to
recognize faces whizzing by. I focused on my future with my daddy, something I believed Uncle Benny could give me.
I prayed the whole way there, asking God to make Uncle Benny love me, to make him see how good of a girl I was, so good he'd call my daddy and say, “We found your baby and she's as perfect as you left her.” I prayed that the whole of the Carter family would descend upon that little house on Peach Street bearing gifts, money, food, so much food I would have forgotten ever being hungry. And I'd see me in them, my face in theirs, my color on their skin.
I knocked so softly it was as if I didn't want the person inside to hear. I listened for movement on the other side, just in case the door never opened. I'd never met Uncle Benny before, so he couldn't have known who I was by looking through the peephole, but I believed he could recognize my father, Carl, in me. There was part of me that celebrated and feared that.
Momma had described nights of merriment between Uncle Benny and my father. They sang, played cards, told jokes late into the night. Later, as if the room and all of its occupants had been turned inside out, the merriment would vanish. Curses would be flung like horseshoes clanging around a pole. Fists would be thrown for insignificant reasons. It didn't take much for the laughter and hugging to turn to screams and heads clamped in headlocks so restrictive they put everyone in the room to sleep. Momma said most arguments ended with either Uncle Benny or my daddy sprawled on the floor, nursing a busted lip or a bruised head. I prayed Uncle Benny wouldn't recognize that part of my father in me.
I knocked again, a little harder the second time. Whichever Carl he saw, I had to see him. I heard a shuffle on the other side of the door, but no lock turned. “Who is that?” His voice cut through the wooden slab. I cleared my throat and plastered a smile across my face, in case he could see me through the peephole.
I spoke directly into it as if it were a microphone. “I'm Laurie, Carl and Lois Carter's daughter. Their eldest girl.” There was silence on the other side of the door. I wondered how much of me could he see through that tiny hole. The lock turned. The door squeaked
open. There stood a short man, with salt-and-pepper hair, and skin darker than Momma and all of my brothers and sister combined.
I leaned forward, ready to apologize for having the wrong house and the wrong person for so long.
“So, you Carl's girl,” he said.
I fought to stand still as I stared into his yellowed eyes, swimming in cataracts. He looked nothing like the father in my mind, so much shorter, darker, and his hair held no hints of the red that streaked through my ends.
“I am Carl's,” I replied.
“Girl,” he responded abruptly. “I ain't seen your daddy.” My face burned with his gruffness. I hadn't asked any questions and he'd already decided he had no answers. Still, I prodded. Maybe my father's location would slip past his nonanswers.
“Have you talked to him lately?” I asked.
“No, I don't know where he is or what he's doing. He's probably up to no good if he's doing anything.” He stepped aside and waved me into the foyer with the flick of his hand.
The house smelled like hickory-smoked sausages mixed with the scent of decaying pine. I stood in the hallway, eyeing the rabbit ears of the floor model, wrapped in balls of aluminum foil. The carpet, like the lawn, was a sea of green, the color and consistency of a dirt-covered tennis ball. The walls where white, but under the haze of the room they looked like a roaring gray sky. I could only see two chairs, a sofa, and a lone armchair sitting in the middle of the room like a person with elbows pressed into knees, waiting for something to happen.
I had seen enough to know Uncle Benny wasn't a man of money. In fact, I wondered if my family was better off than he was.
“Are you Carl's uncle, my Uncle Benny?” I asked.
“Yep, but like I said, I don't know where your daddy is.”
“Momma said you probably didn't know where my daddy was, but that you could get me in touch with my grandma. I just want to meet her.”
He paused, peering at me through the sides of his eyes.
“How is your momma doing?” his voice softened.
“She's good. She told me to see you because she wanted to see my grandma, to see how she was doing.” I could tell by the way he reversed to that lone chair that he had cared about Momma. He could shut me out, but Momma was already in.
I pried again. “Have you talked to my grandma lately?”
“Nah, I haven't talked to her in a minute. She and your granddaddy up in Suffolk.” I turned my head toward the door, trying to hide my smile. I had another granddaddy. He would be a new person, a new life for me to imagine.
“Can I get their number?” I asked as he leaned back in his chair.
“Well, I think I have it somewhere in here.” He brought his hand up to his chin and tapped. Uncle Benny rose from the chair, like a mechanical hand was pressing him forward. I remained still, hands clasped in front of me, careful not to move as he made his way to a small dresser. He rummaged through drawers as if the number were hidden under years of mail. His hand surfaced holding a pen and piece of paper adorned in grayed wrinkles. He scribbled ten numbers, no name, no address, just numbers. With his crooked, gnarled fingers, he slid the paper toward me.
I wanted to hug him, to tell him I'd do the right thing and he wouldn't have to worry about me anymore, but he didn't look like he was up for hugging. I hadn't said much as I'd stood in his home and he'd given no indication he wanted me to say more. I bounced home, anxious to dial those ten numbers.
That first day, after the first dialing, that number was a dead end. The phone hiccupped a busy signal from the time I put my quarter into the phone booth to late at night, when Momma said it wasn't safe for me to go outside anymore.
I visited Uncle Benny several times after that. Each visit he stood guard over his foyer until he'd written ten new numbers. Each time, I either got a lady on the other end, singing, “This number has been disconnected,” or her twin chiming, “This number is not in service.”
There were those times the phone just rang and rang and rang or the busy signal's broken chirp kept pace with my tears. Those were good days because there was the possibility someone would pick up the phone after I let it ring for the one-hundredth time, and there was the chance the busy signal would be silenced once they put the phone back on the receiver. As long as Uncle Benny lived on Peach Street, as long as there were ten numbers he could write, there was hope I could find the man that filled my imagination with the life we were supposed to be living.
One day Uncle Benny's ten numbers silenced the incessant ringing in my mind. The voice of a girl, nasal, twisted in a southern drawl, breathed, “Hello.” I almost dropped the phone, almost ran from the booth when the ringing was replaced by a live person on the other end. I met my cousin, Tiffany, daughter of my uncle, Frank, Jr., who introduced me to my grandfather, Frank, Sr., whose laugh reached through the phone and poked a dimple into my cheek. He introduced me to my grandma, Ms. Mary, and she whispered, “Laurie? Carl's girl?” so quietly I thought she didn't mean for me to hear.
We became a family, in the span of minutes, me on one side of the phone, them on the other. I didn't even ask where Carl was. If I got where they were, I was sure I'd find him.
They lived in Ivor, right outside of Suffolk, the same house my daddy was born in. Momma had been there many times, but she had never taken me there. I'd never thought to ask where my daddy had lived when she met him. The obvious can easily be overlooked when one's search becomes blinding.
Momma agreed to take me to see my family soon after that conversation. Address and phone number in hand, I was on my way to meet my daddy. That summer morning, Momma loaded all five of us into Uncle Bruce's car. It didn't matter that I and my middle brother, Dathan, were my father's only biological children. We all wore his last name, so by law and according to Momma, he was everybody's daddy. We all sat in the back seat, amidst fidgeting
and chattering about all of the fun we'd have in Suffolk with the other half of our family. Dathan wondered about cousins we'd never met and Mary asked if we'd see goats or pigs since we were going to the country. I prayed quietly my father would be there. I wanted to look into the eyes of the man I had imagined for so long.
On the hour ride to Suffolk, I rewound mini-soap operas I had orchestrated around my father's existence. Would he, as I'd often imagined, be a drug dealer with lots of money, houses, and cars, and I'd have to arrest him, and turn him from a life of crime once I became an undercover detective? Would he be on his deathbed, drenched in sweat, begging for medicine, and I would walk in, wearing doctor's scrubs, with a serum I manufactured myself just to save his life? Or, would I meet him through the love of my life, after I learned my new beau's stepfather was actually my real father, and then we would all live happily ever after? I was anxious to learn which scenario fit. Wedged in between Mary and the door, I peered out of the window, watching as road, trees, and miles blurred by. Every so often, Momma slowed and I caught a glimpse of a tree limb, shrouded in leaves, still amidst the wind. I wished life could be lived in snapshots. If that were so, there wouldn't have been ten years between the last time I'd seen my father and that day.
I just knew my father would be waiting for me once we arrived. I just knew they'd called him after our phone call, and he'd left wherever he was so he could meet me. I wouldn't even let myself think he wouldn't be there. In my mind, in that snapshot, we were going to be together.
When we pulled up to the house in Ivor, all of my allusions about my father being rich were slashed. No man who had money would allow his parents to live in the home Grandma Mary and Granddaddy Frank lived in. The house looked like a drunken old man, hands resting on a cane, teetering over. The porch, built of wooden planks, inclined from the dirt ground up to the front door. Even the door leaned, like a broken nose, crooked. The steps were wooden slabs. They too were uneven, stacked on top of each other, leading into a dark hole of a room.