First, I was a distraction, an annoyance, a responsibility my mama didn’t want and finally denied, and now I had graduated to being a burden, but not just an ordinary burden, oh no. I was a blessed burden, a gift from God. The way she made it sound, I should be grateful. Think of all the young women my age who weren’t a burden, who had a family that loved and cared for them, who were good students and behaved and said their prayers without being reminded to do so. Of what use were they for the struggle to reach the pearly gates Aunt Mae Louise saw parting for her celestial entrance? If there were no poor, there would be no charity, and how would my aunt get herself blessed?
I turned and walked back to my bedroom. When I got there, I closed the door and then I pressed my back to the wall and slid down slowly to the floor, where I sat next to my suitcase. I wanted to cry for Daddy, but I couldn’t. None of this seemed real to me. Surely, Uncle Buster and Aunt Mae Louise would be coming to my door any moment to tell me that was all just meant to put the fear of God into me and make me behave.
“Now go to sleep and count your lucky stars that it isn’t so,” she would say.
Right? The little voice inside me, a voice I hadn’t heard since I was no more than Jake’s age, was asking.
Whether they felt sorry for me or what, I don’t know, but a while later, there was a gentle knock on my door. I didn’t open it or call out, but Uncle Buster opened it and peered in, confused at first when he didn’t see me.
“What?” I asked him, looking up.
“What are you doing on the floor? Why is your suitcase out?” he asked quickly.
“I was going to leave,” I said.
“No, no, no. You can’t leave now, Phoebe. You’re just confused and in shock,” he told me. He didn’t understand that I meant I was going to leave before the phone call. “Everything will be fine. You just get some sleep. I came by to see if you needed anything.”
I stared up at him, and he looked uncomfortable.
“You should go to bed, Phoebe. It’s going to be hard for the next few days. Go on. Get some sleep,” he advised, and backed out, closing the door.
I lowered my head again and soon, I was feeling so tired I had to get up and go to bed. I was afraid of sleep, afraid of those shadows. They were closing in around me, encouraged by the news of Daddy’s accident. Now there was definitely no one to come to help me chase them off. They would sink into my brain and make a home for themselves, swimming to the top of my thoughts whenever they pleased. Shout and scream, run and hide, I could do whatever I wanted and it would make no difference, not to them.
I kept my eyes slightly open as sleep crawled over me, slithering around my legs, my waist, and my breasts until it could tighten like a vise and close me in darkness. The shadows kept coming. I could almost hear them swishing over the walls and over the floor.
“Daddy!” I moaned, and then I closed my eyes completely and saw him again, rushing away, leaving me behind forever. It did no good to run after him. My nightmare diminished into a blob of darkness, and I woke with a start. For endless hours, I drifted fitfully on the rim of sleep, never finding the peaceful oblivion I desperately sought.
A cloud of silence came over my aunt and uncle the next morning. They kept Jake and Barbara Ann from making much noise and got them both off to their respective schools. When they spoke to each other in front of me, they practically whispered. Uncle Buster said he had to drive to where they had taken Daddy and make an identification. He never asked if I wanted to go along.
“I spoke with the police last night, and they are trying to locate your mama,” he said. “Your aunt Mae Louise and I are making arrangements for your daddy’s final resting place. We’ll have a nice service for him here. My father will conduct it for us.”
I listened to everything he said, but I didn’t say anything.
“You better eat something,” Aunt Mae Louise told me. “This isn’t the time to get sick yourself.”
I looked up at her. She almost sounded like she cared, but on second thought, I imagined her concern was that I might add some unnecessary complication. While Uncle Buster went to see about Daddy, Aunt Mae Louise left to talk to her father-in-law and make the arrangements for the funeral. She didn’t ask me to go along, either.
Not more than an hour after she left, the phone rang. I wasn’t going to answer it, but it rang so long, I finally decided it might be Uncle Buster.
“Is this Mrs. Howard?” a man asked.
“No, it’s her niece,” I said.
“Well, is she home or is Mr. Howard home?”
“No.”
“Well, this is Detective Morgan. I was able to track down Mrs. Elder,” he said.
I held my breath.
“Where is she?”
“She’s in the detox unit of a hospital outside of Macon,” he said. “She was admitted two days ago after causing a disturbance in a nightclub and being taken to the emergency room. You can have the telephone number and address,” he continued, and I jotted them down. “Have either of them call me if they would like,” he concluded.
I didn’t thank him. I hung up the phone and stared at the notepaper.
Then I crumpled it in my fist, but I didn’t throw it away. I put it in my room.
But I never told either Uncle Buster or Aunt Mae Louise about the call.
Uncle Buster returned before Aunt Mae Louise. I saw from the look on his face that I would have had a hard time. It really wasn’t until he walked into the house and stopped to look at me sitting there in their living room that the full impact and reality of Daddy’s death hit me. For a while I was able to put it out of mind, pretend it never had occurred, that it was all one of those nasty dreams the shadows brought into my sleep. Most of the time Daddy was away from me, out there doing his selling. It wasn’t hard imagining that he was doing that now, and that some day he would return or call, even though I had told him not to bother unless he was going to take me home. Now, he would never take me home; he would never call.
“Was it really my daddy?” I asked Uncle Buster, and his droopy eyes widened and even brightened.
“For a few seconds after they showed him to me, I had doubts,” he replied. “Seems he didn’t have his seat belt on after all, Phoebe. It must’ve slipped his mind. He was carrying a lot of worry. He hit the windshield pretty hard,” he added, and immediately shut his lips, regretting that those words had somehow gotten out.
“Are you blaming it on me?” I asked in a voice much shriller than I had expected it to be.
“I’m not blaming nobody,” he said. “That’s the Lord’s work. If you have a guilty conscience, you bring it with you to the church. Your mama should do likewise,” he added, and then he thought a moment. “Where is that woman?”
He mumbled something I didn’t understand and then went into the kitchen to use the phone. In the meantime I heard Aunt Mae Louise come in. She looked at me, shook her head, and sighed deeply.
“It’s all arranged,” she said. “Day after tomorrow, whether we find your mother or not.”
“We found her,” Uncle Buster announced, and returned from the kitchen. “Why didn’t you tell me, Phoebe? Why didn’t you tell me the police had called?”
“You knew and didn’t tell?” Aunt Mae Louise exclaimed. “Why not?”
“What difference does it make? She’s no good to anybody,” I said, and left the room with both of them staring after me.
I should be feeling more pain, I kept telling myself. I shouldn’t feel numb. I should feel sad. I should be crying hysterically, beating the walls, something. My daddy was killed. He’s gone for good. My mama is in some nuthouse babbling helplessly. I had seen people lose their loved ones. A girlfriend of mine lost her five-year-old brother last year when he got caught in between two gang members shooting at each other. I never had seen so many tears, heard so many wails of agony. The pain in their hearts was so thick I could feel it in the air.
And then there was Rodney Marks’s father, who had a heart attack playing basketball with Rodney and his friends. A tall, healthy-looking man who had something called an aneurysm and died right there on the court. I was watching them play and saw the look of disbelief on Rodney’s face. I used to be jealous of his relationship with his father. They were together lots of times. He wasn’t just losing a parent; he was losing a friend.
Maybe that was what was wrong with me and my parents. I never thought of them as friends, just as keepers of the cage. There was never much holding us together, but whatever there had been was now gone.
That’s why I feel so numb and light all over, I told myself. I’m like a feather, floating. I have no interest in staying where I am and I have no idea where I should go. I’m in the hands of the wind.
That’s how I felt over the next few days, Like someone being carried along. Uncle Buster’s father being the minister and all made it easier to arrange the funeral and burial. None of my friends back in the city came, and I was sure by now word had spread. Bad news had a way of working its way through walls. Maybe people were just happy to talk about terrible things happening to someone else and not to them. Maybe it made them feel safer.
Daddy’s boss showed up with one of the other salesmen in the company. Some of Uncle Buster’s and Aunt Mae Louise’s church friends attended out of respect for them, or maybe out of pity for them being weighed down now with the responsibility of me. I could feel it in their eyes when they looked my way, and I saw it in the almost imperceptible shaking of their heads. They probably didn’t realize themselves how clearly they were showing their thoughts and feelings. I didn’t blame them. Like Uncle Buster had told me, there’s no one we can blame. That’s not our job.
I never looked upon Daddy in death. Because of how badly injured he had been in the accident, the coffin was kept closed and I didn’t want any private visit. It was easier for me to keep pretending he wasn’t dead, but just gone. I heard his name mentioned in the sermon, but I reacted with surprise every time.
Afterward, after Daddy’s boss and fellow salesman and all of Aunt Mae Louise’s and Uncle Buster’s friends had left the house, she came to my room.
“Uncle Buster and I have been thinking about you,” she said.
I kept my eyes down. I had found a comfortable, warm, and dark place inside myself, and for the time being, I didn’t want to leave it.
“We decided we would give you another chance here, Phoebe. I had a long talk with Dean Cassidy and the school authorities. Your teacher thinks he can help you, too, and really make progress with your reading. It’s going to be up to you entirely. If you behave, if you listen to people and you do your work, you can still save yourself.
“I don’t hold up much hope of your mother ever straightening herself out, but who knows the will of the Lord? Maybe someday, she, too, will wake up and realize she can be a decent person, and the two of you can help each other.”
I raised my eyes toward her. What enabled her to live in such a world of fantasy? I wondered. Her faith? Or was it just her ignorance of how hard it could be?
“All I ask of you is that you try, Phoebe, you really try. You going to do that for yourself? Well?”
I looked down again.
“I hope so, Phoebe. I really pray for it. You should go back to school tomorrow. It’s not healthy for you to hang around here doing nothing but stare at four walls.”
“What about my father’s home?” I asked.
“All that’s being handled by Uncle Buster. He’s trying to get all he can to keep in trust for you so you’ll have something out of all this misery, but I got to tell you, right now it doesn’t look like there’s much. That old furniture in that rented apartment isn’t worth trucking out, and from what we can see so far, your daddy didn’t keep up his payments on his term life insurance. I’m sure he needed every cent he could earn just to keep up ordinary expenses. And your mother, your mother is in the hands of welfare.”
So I have nothing but Aunt Mae Louise’s and Uncle Buster’s charity, I thought, nothing but the few rags that hang in this closet.
“I’m sorry, child,” she said. “But this is why you have to try harder to be good.”
With that she left me.
Try harder to be good? She might as well have said try harder to fly like a bird.
What did being good mean? Doing everything they wanted me to do and never doing anything I wanted to do. That was the way I saw it. That was the way I always saw it.
And that was the way I always will, I thought.
Maybe I would go on the roof, wave my arms hard, and jump.
During the funeral and after, I saw that my cousins Barbara Ann and Jake looked at me with fear and expectation in their eyes. I felt they were waiting for me to go crazy, scream, and be wild, or maybe just explode as if a bomb of misery and sorrow had finally been ignited inside me. I understood they were expecting me to be as destroyed and distraught as they would be should something as horrible happen to Uncle Buster. I was at least smart enough to realize that for children their age, parents were their whole world, even if it had never been true for me. Parents brought sunshine and happiness, laid out their daily lives, and moved them about with godlike power. Nothing made you see that you could get sick or have an accident, whatever, and die too as much as the death of your daddy or mama. You look down into your own inevitable grave when you look down into theirs, and that puts the ice into your veins.
I suppose my lack of a real relationship with my daddy and with Mama helped me face a world without them. Maybe that was a good thing after all. I wasn’t thinking all that much about them after I had been brought here, except in anger. In other words, we didn’t miss each other the way parents and children should miss each other. They were almost completely gone when we lived together. This numb feeling that kept me from crying at the cemetery wasn’t something I could explain or wanted to explain to Barbara Ann and Jake. They would eventually understand it themselves by just watching me go on, plodding through my day instead of crawling under my bed.
Barbara Ann didn’t talk to me at all in the morning. Jake avoided my eyes. When it came time to go on the school bus, Barbara Ann hurried away to sit with her friends. Since my trouble at school and the death of my daddy and his funeral, it was easier for her to pretend she didn’t know me. I didn’t blame her for that. Actually, I thought, if I was her I would probably have acted the same.