Small Great Things (6 page)

And it worked. My, how it worked. It took me advocating for him at first—making sure that he had teachers who noticed his intelligence as well as his skin color—but as a result, Edison is in the top three of his class. He's a National Merit Scholar. He is going to college and he will be anything he wants to be.

I've spent my life making sure of it.

When I get home from work, Edison is doing his homework at the kitchen table. “Hey, baby,” I say, leaning down to kiss the top of his head. I can only do that now when he's seated. I still remember the moment I realized he was taller than me; how strange it felt to reach my arms up instead of down, to know that someone I'd been supporting his whole life was in a position to support me.

He doesn't glance up. “How was work?”

I paste a smile on my face. “You know. Same old.”

I shrug off my coat, pick up Edison's jacket from where it's been slung on the back of the couch, and hang them both in the closet. “I'm not running a cleaning service here—”

“Then leave it where it was!” Edison explodes. “Why does everything have to be my fault?” He shoves away from the table so fast that he nearly knocks over his chair. Leaving his computer and his open notebook behind, he storms out of the kitchen. I hear the door of his bedroom slam.

This is not my boy. My boy is the one who carries groceries up three flights of stairs for old Mrs. Laska, without her even having to ask. My boy is the one who always holds open the door for a lady, who says please and thank you, who still keeps in his nightstand every birthday card I've ever written him.

Sometimes a new mother turns to me, a shrieking infant in her arms, and asks me how she's supposed to know what her baby needs. In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn't all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they're incapable of saying exactly what it is that's causing pain.

So although all I want to do is go into Edison's room and gather him up close and rock him back and forth the way I used to when he was little and hurting, I take a deep breath and go into the kitchen instead. Edison has left me dinner, a plate covered with foil. He can make exactly three dishes: macaroni and cheese, fried eggs, and Sloppy Joes. The rest of the week he heats up casseroles I make on my days off. Tonight's is an enchilada pie, but Edison's also cooked up some peas, because I taught him years ago a plate's not a meal unless there's more than one color on it.

I pour myself some wine from a bottle I got from Marie last Christmas. It tastes sour, but I force myself to sip it until I can feel the knots in my shoulders relax, until I can close my eyes and not see Turk Bauer's face.

After ten minutes pass, I knock softly on the door of Edison's room. It's been his since he was thirteen; I sleep on the pullout couch in the living room. I turn the knob and find him lying on his bed, his arms behind his head. With his T-shirt stretched over his shoulders and his chin tilted up, I see so much of his daddy in him that for a moment, I feel like I've fallen through time.

I sit down beside him on the mattress. “Are we gonna talk about it, or are we gonna pretend nothing's wrong?” I ask.

Edison's mouth twists. “Do I really get a choice?”

“No,” I say, smiling a little. “Is this about the calculus test?”

He frowns. “The calc test? That was no big deal; I got a ninety-six. It's just that I got into it with Bryce today.”

Bryce has been Edison's closest friend since fifth grade. His mother is a family court judge and his father is a Yale classics professor. In their living room is a glass case, like the kind you'd find at a museum, housing a bona fide Grecian urn. They've taken Edison on vacation to Gstaad and Santorini.

It feels good to have Edison hand me this burden, to wallow in someone else's difficulties for a while. This is what's so upsetting to me about the incident at the hospital: I'm known as the fixer, the one who figures out a solution. I'm not the problem. I'm
never
the problem.

“I'm sure it'll blow over,” I tell Edison, patting his arm. “You two are like brothers.”

He rolls onto his side and pulls the pillow over his head.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey.” I tug at the pillow and realize that there's one single streak, left by a tear, darkening the skin of his temple. “Baby,” I murmur. “What happened?”

“I told him I was going to ask Whitney to homecoming.”

“Whitney…” I repeat, trying to place the girl from the tangle of Edison's friends.

“Bryce's sister,” he says.

I have a brief flash of a girl with strawberry-blond braids I met years ago when picking Edison up from a playdate. “The chubby one with braces?”

“Yeah. She doesn't have braces anymore. And she's
definitely
not chubby. She's got…” Edison's eyes soften, and I imagine what my son is seeing.

“You don't have to finish that sentence,” I say quickly.

“Well, she's amazing. She's a sophomore now. I mean, I've known her forever, but lately when I look at her it's not just as Bryce's little sister, you know? I had this whole thing planned, where one of my buddies would be waiting outside her classroom after each period, holding a note. The first note was going to say
WILL
. The second was going to say
YOU
. Then
GO, TO, HOMECOMING,
and
WITH
. And then at the end of school, I'd be waiting with the
ME
sign, so she'd finally know who was asking.”

“This is a thing now?” I interrupt. “You don't just ask a girl to the homecoming dance…you have to produce a whole Broadway event to make it happen?”

“What? Mama, that's not the point. The point is that I asked Bryce to be the one who brought her the
HOMECOMING
note and he freaked out.”

I draw in my breath. “Well,” I say, carefully picking through my words, “it's sometimes hard for a guy to see his little sister as anyone's potential girlfriend, no matter how close he is to the person who wants to date her.”

Edison rolls his eyes. “That's not it.”

“Bryce may just need time to get used to the idea. Maybe he was surprised that you'd think of his sister, you know, that way. Because you
are
like family.”

“The problem is…I'm
not.
” My son sits up, his long legs dangling over the edge of the bed. “Bryce laughed. He said, ‘Dude. It's one thing for
us
to hang out. But you and Whit? My parents would shit a brick.' ” His gaze slides away. “Sorry about the language.”

“That's okay, baby,” I said. “Go on.”

“So I asked him why
.
It didn't make any sense to me. I mean, I've been to
Greece
with his family. And he said, ‘No offense, but my parents would
not
be cool with my sister dating a Black guy.' Like it's okay to have a Black friend who comes on family vacations but it's not okay for that friend to get involved with your daughter.”

I have worked so hard to keep Edison from feeling this line being drawn, it never occurred to me that when it happened—which, I guess, was inevitable—it would burn even more, because he had never seen it coming.

I reach for my son's hand and squeeze it. “You and Whitney would not be the first couple to find yourselves on opposite sides of a mountain,” I say. “Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina and Vronsky. Maria and Tony. Jack and Rose.”

Edison looks at me in horror. “You do realize that in every example you just gave me, at least one of them dies?”

“What I'm
trying
to say is that if Whitney sees how special you are, she'll want to be with you. And if she doesn't, she's not worth the fight.”

I put my arm around his shoulders; Edison leans into me. “That doesn't make it suck any less.”

“Language,” I say automatically. “And no, it doesn't.”

Not for the first time, I wish Wesley were still alive. I wish he hadn't gone back on that second tour of duty in Afghanistan; I wish that he hadn't been driving in the convoy when the IED exploded; I wish that he had gotten to know Edison not just as a child but as a teen and now a young man. I wish he were here to tell his son that when a girl makes your blood rush it's just the first time of many.

I wish he were here, period.

If only you could see what we made,
I think silently.
He's the best of both of us.

“Whatever happened to Tommy ?” I ask abruptly.

“Tommy Phipps?” Edison frowns. “I think he got busted for dealing heroin behind the school last year. He's in juvie.”

“Do you remember in nursery school, when that little delinquent said you looked like burnt toast?”

A slow smile stretches across Edison's face. “Yeah.”

It was the first time a child had mentioned to Edison that he was different from everyone else in his class—and had done so in a way that also made it seem bad. Burnt. Charred. Ruined.

Before that maybe Edison had noticed, maybe he hadn't. But that was the first time I had the Talk with my son about skin color.

“You remember what I told you?”

“That my skin was brown because I had more melanin than anyone else in the school.”

“Right. Because everyone knows it's better to have
more
of something than
less
. And melanin protects your skin from damage from the sun, and helps make your eyesight better, and Tommy Phipps would always be lacking. So actually, you were the lucky one.”

Slowly, like water on parched pavement, the smile evaporates from Edison's face. “I don't feel so lucky now,” he says.

A
S LITTLE GIRLS,
my older sister and I looked nothing alike. Rachel was the color of fresh-brewed coffee, just like Mama. Me, I was poured from the same pot, but with so much milk added, you couldn't even taste the flavor anymore.

The fact that I was lighter got me privileges I didn't understand, privileges that drove Rachel crazy. Tellers at banks gave me lollipops, and then, as an afterthought, offered one to my sister. Teachers called me the pretty Brooks sister, the good Brooks sister. During class portraits, I would be moved up to the front row; Rachel got hidden in the back.

Rachel told me that my real father was white. That I wasn't really part of our family. Then, Rachel and I got into it one day and started yelling at each other and I said something about going to live with my real daddy. That night my mama sat me down and showed me pictures of my father, who was also Rachel's father—a man with light brown skin like mine—holding me as a newborn. The date on the photo was a full year before he left all three of us for good.

Rachel and I grew up as different as two sisters could be. I'm short, and she's tall as a queen. I was an avid student; she was naturally smarter than I was, but hated school. She embraced what she referred to as her “ethnic roots” in her twenties, legally changed her name to Adisa, and started wearing her hair in its natural kinky state. Although a lot of ethnic names are Swahili,
Adisa
comes from the Yoruba language, which she'll tell you is West African—“where our ancestors
actually
came from when they were brought here as slaves.” It means,
One who is clear.
See, even her name judges the rest of us for not knowing the truths that she does.

Now, Adisa lives near the train tracks in New Haven in a neighborhood where drug deals go down in broad daylight and young men shoot at each other throughout the night; she has five kids, and she and the father of her children have minimum-wage jobs and barely scrape by. I love my sister to death, but I don't understand the choices she's made any more than she can understand mine.

I've wondered, you know. If my drive to become a nurse, to want more, to achieve more for Edison all came from the fact that even between two little Black sisters, I had a head start. I've wondered if the reason Rachel turned herself into Adisa was because feeding that fire inside herself was exactly what she needed to believe she had a chance to catch up.

O
N
F
RIDAY, MY
day off, I have an appointment at the nail salon with Adisa. We sit side by side, our hands under the UV drying vents. Adisa looks at the bottle of my chosen OPI nail color and shakes her head. “I can't believe you picked a polish called Juice Bar Hopping,” she says. “That's got to be the whitest color ever.”

“It's orange,” I point out.

“I meant the name, Ruth, the
name
. You ever see a brotha in a juice bar? No. Because nobody goes to a bar to drink juice. Just like nobody asks for a sippy cup full of tequila.”

I roll my eyes. “Really? I just told you all about getting barred from a patient's care and you want to talk about what color I'm putting on my nails?”

“I'm talking about what color you chose to live your life, girl,” Adisa says. “What happened to you happens to the rest of us every day. Every
hour
. You're just so used to playing by their rules you forgot you got skin in the game.” She smirks. “Well. Lighter skin, but still.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

She shrugs. “When was the last time you told someone Mama still works as a domestic?”

“She hardly works now. You know that. She's basically a charity Mina contributes to.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

I scowl. “I don't know when I mentioned it last. Is that the first thing
you
bring up in conversation? Plus, it doesn't matter what color I am. I'm good at my job. I didn't deserve to be taken off that case.”

“And I don't deserve to be living in Church Street South, but it's going to take more than me to change two hundred years of history.”