Hold Love Strong (9 page)

Donnel had a fascination with knowledge, with discovery, with being the first one to know. He took a moment to gather himself. He gripped the doorknob and turned it. Then he stopped, reached around
his hip, and took the chopping knife out of his back pocket. He held both knives in his hands and raised them like a boxer with clenched fists.

“You ready?” he asked.

Eric's eyes were huge. He nodded.

Donnel darted his eyes to me. “Ready?” he asked.

I swallowed and gripped my knives as tightly as I could. Donnel turned the doorknob until it clicked, and my legs went weak. Donnel took a deep breath and slowly opened the door. The stench was so strong it bit through my nose and scorched the back of my throat.

“Fuck,” Donnel said, putting his face back beneath the neck of his T-shirt.

Dipping his toe into the hall like he was testing the temperature of water, Donnel took a hesitant first step out of the door. Then he took a second step and Eric and I put our faces beneath the necks of our T-shirts and followed him. The first thing I saw was a dark purple pool on the floor. It was blood. And there were little white feathers in it. Some of the feathers sat on top of the blood like boats. Some were half soaked. Others were sunk and saturated. I looked at the foot and saw that it bloomed from a pair of jeans, but I wasn't ready to see the body and my eyes leapt to the wall, splashed with blood that was riddled with feathers and little clumps that looked like raisins.

“Damn,” Donnel breathed. “It's Beany.”

Beany lay on the floor like he'd fallen from the sky and broke, his head at an odd angle, one arm twisted awkwardly beneath his body, one leg splayed, the other bent. He wore a black down coat, and the sleeves and the front of the coat were blasted open and feathers spilled from the holes. I don't know why he had his winter coat on in the spring on a Saturday morning when he didn't even have shoes or socks on. But it didn't matter. Beany was mutilated. He had been shot twice in the stomach and once in the face and because he'd put his arms up to
protect himself the bullet tore through his sleeves, his arms. Half of his face was missing. From the nose down: gone.

“Should we call the police?” Eric asked, so stunned by the sight he sounded calm.

“We ain't calling nobody,” Donnel answered, his arms, his hands, the knives hanging limp at his sides.

I looked at Donnel. His nostrils flared. He rolled his lips in and out of his mouth. He was fighting fear, fighting nausea, fighting to be what he thought a man should be, and thinking harder than he'd ever thought before, scouring each and every one of his cells for what to do next.

“D?” I said.

His eyebrows lowered. “We got to pray,” he decided. “Then we gonna go back inside and act like nothing.”

I was shocked. What was he talking about? Without hesitating, Donnel lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

“Dear God,” he said. “This is Beany. Please let him into Heaven so the nigga can rest in peace. Protect him. And protect us, and keep us strong. And next time make sure my mom listens to me. I told her this nigga was no good. You too, Jesus. Thank you. Amen.”

He looked at Eric and me.

“Say it,” he said.

“Amen,” Eric mumbled.

“Amen,” I said.

When the police arrived, they needed witnesses. But who heard? Who saw? Not us. The police and people from our hall and from the floors above and below talked in the hall. There was shouting and crying, and there was speculation. Mr. Bradford, the old man from down the hall who always wore a yellow cardigan, said,
This ain't right; I'm too old for this shit.
And Ulysses, the boiler man who could have been a world-class chess champion, said,
Something's got to be
done;
and Ms. Brown, always dressed like she had somewhere holy to go, said,
When will these young boys do some good?
Smudge talked through his cleft lip and told the police Beany's parents were away for the weekend. On a church trip, he said, a church trip to Atlantic City. No one knew where Beany's sister Cecily was. Chamique said she might've slept over at her friend Audrey's, but she couldn't be sure because sometimes Cecily woke up early on Saturdays and went to one of the libraries in the city because there were so many libraries and so many books. Nobody knew where my Aunt Rhonda, Beany's girlfriend, the love of his life, was. Questions were raised. Maybe she knew who shot him. Or maybe it was over her. She was always running around with some other brother anyway. Or maybe it was her; maybe she pulled the trigger. Accusations, insinuations, condemnations were hurled like scrap metal and stones against our door. Voices crashed and boomed. Some brothers and sisters tried to defend my aunt, said she wasn't doing anything anyone else didn't do. She wasn't wrong. She wasn't immoral. The police knocked on our door, announced themselves, asked if anyone was home. Eric and I stood in the middle of the room, a few steps behind Donnel, and we all faced the door. Donnel glanced at us over his shoulder and put his finger to his lips, making sure we knew to be silent. Then he turned back around and faced the door, one fist balled at his side, the other clenching the chopping knife.

Outside, it sounded as if the police would burst into our apartment at any moment. And if they did, they'd have to face Donnel, fight him until either he or every last person outside was dead, and that's what Donnel seemed to be waiting for; for all of them, for the police and everyone else, and everything they said about his mother, to be brave enough to come into our apartment.

Suddenly, the hallway went silent. Had my Aunt Rhonda returned? No. It was Beany's sister, Cecily. And when she came upon the police
tape and the fact that it was Beany, her brother, who was dead, she cursed and wailed and the hallway echoed her and everyone else, swaying apologies and grief.

“My brother,” she screamed. “No! Not Beany! No, it can't be! Why God? No. Not my brother!”

F
or weeks, my Aunt Rhonda was more exhausted, broken, and disheveled than a sober sister had ever been. Her face, her lips and eyes, her breasts, her shoulders, each follicle, kink, and strand of her hair, every part of her, even the parts no one had ever seen, the parts doctors have yet to discover, were dry and wilted. She didn't eat or bathe. When she had her period she stained her jeans and the couch and left her bloody panties on the bathroom floor for all to see. She was gutted, splayed. She was battered, beaten, but without bruises or abrasions. She wept. She moaned and shivered when she slept. Beany had told her that he loved her, that he always would, that he wanted her to have his child, that he wanted for them to get married. But she hadn't been able to bring herself to believe him, hadn't been able to accept that she was lovable for such an infinite amount of time. The most she had been able to muster was the hope to be loved; like a red coal-filled fire, her belly was swollen with the heat of this desire. Why did she need; why did she keep a stable of men, and move
from man to man; why couldn't she just be with one? She mumbled to herself. Sometimes she shouted, asking no one in particular. Sometimes she looked at one of us and demanded answers. Why not Beany? What wasn't he? Why was she always seeking greater love? Now she doubted if she'd ever be properly loved again. The other brothers? They didn't love her. They couldn't. It was Beany, only Beany she loved. But only with his death did she realize it.

Once, when the phone rang and it was for her, she asked: “Is it him?”

“Who?” I said, holding my hand over the receiver.

“Him,” she said, rising from the couch, heavy and limp.

“Who?” I said again, innocent but painfully ignorant.

Suddenly, my Aunt Rhonda realized how ridiculous both her hope and her assumption were and she swallowed. Her features drooped, made her face look like a saturated paper bag. But she couldn't stop herself from continuing, from uttering his name. “Beany,” she said. “Beany.”

“Aunt Rhonda,” I said, softly offering her the nothing I knew to say, just naming what I saw.

She wrapped herself in her own arms and heaved. “Oh God,” she moaned. “Oh my God, no!”

The pride my Aunt Rhonda had once carried herself with, how she walked with her chest out, always one foot in front of the other, her hips rocking like a chair, was stripped from her, her sexiness snuffed. She never wore more than house slippers on her feet. She could not bring herself to go outside, to face Ever, the gossip, the rumors, the venomous denunciations, or those who had the independent courage to console her. She was hated. When Beany's sister, wholesome, pious Cecily, walked down the hall she shouted
Bitch! Slut!
She pounded her fists on our door and called my aunt a whore. She hoped she'd burn in hell. Sometimes Cecily's friends joined her, creating a chorus of hatred
in the hall. But when my grandma, Donnel, or my mother made a move to chase it away, to throw open the door and threaten the lives of all those outside, my Aunt Rhonda would say
No! Stop!
in such a guttural tone their momentum would cease and they would deflate in the middle of the room, swamped by my aunt's depression. My aunt wanted nothing for herself, not a drip of water, a gasp of air.

My grandma did everything in her power to free my Aunt Rhonda from misery. She demanded it of her. She championed. She begged. We all did. Every time Donnel came home and left he told my Aunt Rhonda he loved her, pushed his face through the stench that hovered around her, hugged her although her arms hung limp, kissed her forehead, and promised everything would be OK while she rambled on and on about him being careful, that they were out there, looking, waiting, ready to kill him too.

Like my grandma and Donnel, my mother, who knew what it meant to suffer the loss of love and hate herself in its absence, did and said everything she could imagine to say and do in order to shake my aunt from her state of perpetual self-hatred. Sometimes they kept me awake and I listened to their voices slip beneath the bedroom door or seep through the walls as I lay head to foot in the bed beside Donnel.

“He said we were gonna go to Mexico,” my Aunt Rhonda might say. “That we were gonna live in a mansion on the beach.”

“Well, shit,” my mother would answer. “You don't need a man to do that. A sister like you can get that all by herself.”

“How?” my Aunt Rhonda might respond.

“God damn it, how am I supposed to know!” my mother would plead. “Love yourself! Believe that you're worth it!”

Sometimes, Donnel lay awake beside me, listening to his mother and mine, dwelling in how their roles had reversed, and when he thought I was sleeping, he would pray for his mother and wish that he'd wake with the power to end her pain.

“Just give me the chance. I swear,” he'd say. “Just something. Anything.”

My mother pushed my Aunt Rhonda to get out of the apartment, to look fly. She took out old pictures of my aunt, smiling, dressed to the nines. At first she led by voice. She told my aunt all of the things she was missing, all of the things she could be doing if she got herself together. She told her about parties, DJs at clubs. She told her about who asked for her, how many fine men said:
Where is Rhonda; where she been; what she up to?
The world was waiting for her, said my mother. How much longer was she going to make it wait? She couldn't stay shut in forever. Eventually, my mother took her own advice. So in addition to her cajoling, she led by example. First, she went out with Cherrie on the weekends. They went to this party or that dance. Then she added going out to some bar or club without Cherrie a couple of days during the week. She wore increasingly sexier, more revealing clothes. First, a few of her shirts were tight; then they all were; then each shirt she wore was stretched to translucency and beneath it, the bra she wore was always red. Soon a plethora of brothers called for my mother and she spent hours on the phone, giggling, talking coy. There was Rodney with a deep, rumbling voice; Derrick who always said please when he asked to speak to my mother; and Tyrone who, despite never meeting me, always said
What's up my little nigga?
There was Marcus who sounded as if he just woke up, Samuel who slurred his R's and S's, Leviticus who enunciated each syllable, and Farooq who was quick to tell me that his name meant
he who distinguishes falsehood from truth.
Sometimes my mother came home with a rose. Sometimes she came home with new shoes. She got gold earrings. She got a gold necklace. She got pedicures and manicures every week. Sometimes she would only be home long enough to sleep and shower. Sometimes she'd pack a backpack with clothes and cosmetics and not come home for two or three days. Sometimes, it seemed as if I didn't exist. She'd
walk past me as I watched TV with my Aunt Rhonda, or walk in and out of the kitchen as I ate; once, twice, three, or four times before she'd finally meet my eyes, say my name, tell me what I didn't do, what I needed to do, or something.

My mother's sudden determination to live and celebrate life, her hedonism, drove my grandma crazy. She tried to remind my mother that she was a mother, that she couldn't be coming and going and leaving me for her to take care of. I wasn't her responsibility. She'd raised three of her own children. She was my grandmother, not my mother. And she needed help with my Aunt Rhonda and help with Donnel and Eric. And she needed my mother to contribute some money to the upkeep of our apartment.

“Roosevelt's gone,” my grandma would say. “And Rhonda ain't doing good. And you still thinking like you thirteen! You still thinking about only yourself!”

My mother shouted back. She said I could take care of myself, that I was damn near a man, and that sooner rather than later I had to depend on myself. She'd raised me as best she could, the only way she knew how, the same way she'd been raised. It was a hard world. There was no room for soft men. And she'd give my grandma money when she had it. But she didn't have it. In fact, she barely had enough money to get things she needed.

“Like what?” shouted my grandma.

“Like,” said my mother. “Like things.”

Back and forth they'd argue, their voices blowing and battling as if everyone in Ever was never there; as if the walls were not thin; as if no one was ever in earshot.

“Slow down!” my grandma ordered her. “You loose!”

“Momma, life is short!” my mother shouted. “This is my life! I'm a woman! Don't tell me what to do! I been going slow for too long!”

I was old enough. I was too young. I could take care of myself. I need
ed to be reminded, pushed. He couldn't. He could. He did. He didn't. He knew. He knew no such thing. My mother gave me money, ten dollars here, five dollars there. She tried to buy my love. She had Farooq pay for a pair of Jordans for me and this brother named Clayton paid for my new clothes. Sometimes my mother would come home late at night, wake me after I fell asleep on the couch waiting for her to come home, and cuddling with me, having me rest my head in her lap, stroking the side of my face, smelling of cigarettes or booze or cologne, she'd whisper that she loved me, that she'd go to war for me and only me, that nothing and no man meant more than me. I, Abraham, was her everything. I was her prince, her king, her little soldier. She swore to it.

She confused me. Who was she? Who was this woman who so loved me while I slept yet was so uninterested in me when I was awake? And which Abraham was I, the one my mother saw or the one my grandma knew; the one who needed to be scolded and coddled or the one who was deemed a man, albeit prematurely and without warrant? What had my mother done to the way we loved? And what had happened to my Aunt Rhonda? Was it irreversible? Would she be who she had become for the remainder of her life? And Donnel and Eric, who suffered the same affliction as me, who oscillated between despising my mother and my Aunt Rhonda and being desperate for them, what would they do? I waited. I hoped for their leadership. I followed them outside. I searched for answers. I looked for them on the sidewalk and the street corner. I looked for them in the park. I looked everywhere young brothers gathered for the solace and sanctuary we needed to fortify one another, to be one another's ancestry.

R
oosevelt never answered any of the letters my grandma dictated to me because she was embarrassed about how poorly she wrote and spelled. My mother, in addition to all of her social activity, got a job working part-time in McDonald's, stocking the condiment station and napkin dispensers, microwaving fish fillet sandwiches, and putting the cheese on cheese-burgers, so she only stayed home long enough to unload soiled clothes and empty the contents of one pocketbook into another. My Aunt Rhonda slowly but steadily rose from the depths of her self-hatred and depression, surpassed her original capricious promiscuity, and came and went as she pleased. And Donnel, Eric, and I were preoccupied with missing our mothers, and the throes of our daily lives: what happened in school, what happened at the park or on the street, what bounced and banged in our hearts and heads and the hearts and heads of those who were of similar age and circumstances in Ever Park.

So my grandma was alone. Of course, she had friends. But life had
taught her to keep people at arm's length, so those whom she would have called friends were really no more than casual acquaintances, people she talked to but never really opened up with. My grandma did not complain about any loneliness or ask for company. She did not request or beg for attention. She never so much as whimpered or asked for a hug and kiss. Instead, my grandma did her best to keep the apartment immaculate, hounded us to do the same, and maintained an indestructible disposition that would have been a prison if there were men inside of her. But then she finally found a full-time job as a porter in a shiny Manhattan building she called the real white castle and something inside of her bent. My grandma worked twelve-hour shifts. She worked overtime on the weekends. She returned home with barely enough energy and desire to drag her feet and keep her eyes open. And slowly, a little more each day, some perverse force, some invisible and unnatural disaster infected her, and the laughter I had always known her to fill our home with became infrequent. Then it stopped altogether.

Our apartment became a mess. Empty soda cans, paper cups, glasses, and plastic bags filled with wrappers and Styrofoam containers were left beside the couch. Sneakers and socks were left in random spots, and stains dappled the grey carpet as if sprung from some pulsing well below. In the kitchen, pans with crisps of food floating in used oil and pots with murky spaghetti water sat on the stove, spilled drinks and food made tacky spots on the linoleum floor, and birdseed was strewn around the edge of the lovebirds' cage.

Then late one evening I came home from playing basketball at the park with my ball on my hip and squiggling lines of dried sweat dancing down my cheeks. I was eleven and my childhood love of basketball as a game had grown into my great escape. While playing at the park, there was nothing else, no Ever, no wondering about the whereabouts of my mother or Donnel, no having to defend myself, no familial or
emotional or communal pain, just running, jumping, leaping. I could channel everything into it. Playing basketball steeled me. It blinded me and made me deaf to truth.

All of the lights in the apartment were off. It was no surprise to me. Eric and Donnel could be with friends. My mother could be out. My aunt too. My grandma could have been working overtime or she could have come home early from work and gone to sleep. I did not turn on the living room light because I didn't want to see the mess around me. I walked slowly, never lifting my feet more than an inch in case a plate or bowl or a shoe might be waiting to trip me. I made it to the kitchen's threshold safely. I was hungry. The light switch was to my immediate left. I reached up and flicked the switch. As they did each time the light was turned on in the kitchen, the lovebirds chirped and tweeted.

But I didn't hear them. I didn't hear them because as soon as the kitchen lit up I gasped. It was a petrifying sight. My grandma stood on a kitchen chair in her underwear and a white T-shirt that only reached the uppermost part of her thighs. She held a near empty bottle of Boone's Farm wine in one hand and specks of blood were spattered on her feet and shins. On the floor was one of the red bricks Donnel ran with and a dead rat, smashed and leaking blood. My grandma had killed the rat, followed the sound of its pattering feet and squeaking as it walked about the kitchen then hurled the brick where she was sure the rat was. The thud she described as the sound of a dropped carton of milk hitting the floor. The rat's squeal she described as a nail on a chalkboard. The rat had then stumbled about, wheezing and moaning like an old man with emphysema as it dragged its busted body on the floor until it could drag its death no more. Then the rat breathed a few last heavy breaths and died. But until I turned on the light, my grandma didn't know where the rat had stopped, where it had crumpled and stiffened. And so she remained on the chair, drinking the wine she originally opened to fortify her against the rat and then continued
to drink because she could not stand the thought that she had killed something so brutally, and because she was afraid if she climbed off the chair she'd step on the rat's bloody body.

“Abraham,” she said, her voice full of sad breath.

Her eyes were only half opened, and she was too exhausted and drunk to be surprised to see me. She rubbed her face in a sloppy, forceful fashion, burrowing the heel of her hand into each eye then dragging her hand beneath her nose, over her lips and chin, and down her neck. She dropped her eyes to the floor and looked at the bloody tracks the rat had made and where its life ended, halfway between us in a pool of blood. Then she raised her bottle of wine level with her eyes, swirled its contents to see how much she had left, and swigged it down in one gulp. She studied the empty bottle for a moment. Then she lifted her eyes up the length of my body, ascending my legs and torso until she met my eyes. Although we were ten feet apart, I felt her weight lean on me. Her eyes drooped and seemed sure to burst. Her lips trembled. She slapped her free hand over them and this caused her eyes to close, which caused tears to flood her face. Suddenly, she was aware of our reality.

“Abraham,” she said.

Then she stopped everything: speaking, breathing, and crying. She wiped her face with her hand again. Then she stood as tall as she could.

“Come,” she said raising her chin, focusing, forcing her eyes wide and pressing a wobbled but determined look on me. “Help me get this mess cleaned up. Hurry. Before anyone else has got to see it.”