Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

It’s the drug but then it’s not the drug. He is all eyes and hands and teeth and tongue. His forehead against mine: his head down. He is praying, too low for me to hear, and then I feel it. Leonie, Loni, Oni, Oh , he says, his voice there and then nothing, his fingers there and then nothing and then there again, and my skin itches and tingles and burns and sears. So long since I had this. My chest is hollow and then full; now a ditch dusty dry, now rushing with water after a sudden, heavy spring rain. A flood. There are no words. All around me, then through me, a man praying, and silent, praying and silent, a man who is more than man, a man with a shining shock of hair and clear eyes, a man who is all fire, fire in his mouth, flames his hands, smoldering coals the V of his hips. Fire and water. Drowned clean. Born up. Blessed. Like that, yes. Like that. Yes.

I pee in Al’s cold white half bathroom, listen for the kids, hear nothing. Walk back into the living room, the windows sparking dust to gold in the air. There is something wrong. Michael smiles at me, rubs his neck where I sucked on him, says, “I think you left a mark.” And Given-not-Given, black-shirted, sits slumped at the other end of the sofa. He waves his arm for me to come sit between them. The buzz loops through me, and drops. I sit, and Michael takes my face in his warm, real hands, and his lips meet mine and I am opening all over again. Losing language, losing words. Losing myself in that feeling, that feeling of being wanted and needed and touched and cradled, all the while marveling that the one doing it is the one that wants, that needs, that touches, that sees. This is a miracle, I think, so I close my eyes and ignore Given-not-Given, who is sitting there with a sad look on his face, mouth in a soft frown, and think of Michael, real Michael, and wonder if we had another baby, if it would look more like him than Michaela. If we had another baby, we could get it right.

I expect him to be gone when I pull my mouth from Michael’s, but Given-not-Given’s not on the sofa anymore, he’s standing by the mantel, looking just as solid as the Michael I’m straddling, but still as those urns. Michael groans and wipes a hand over his face, his neck and chest red, the freckles on him welted as ant bites.

“Sugar baby, what you do to me?” he says.

I don’t know what to say because Given-not-Given is watching me closely, waiting for my reply, so I say nothing and shake my head and root into Michael’s neck with my face, inhaling the smell of him. So alive: so here. Hoping that when I sit up, Given-not-Given will be gone back to wherever he stays when he’s not haunting me, back to whatever weird corner of my brain calls him up when I’m high: the hollow figment. But Given’s still there, and he’s standing outside of the hallway to the kids’ room, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. He rubs his face with his hands.

“I love you,” I tell Michael, and he cups me to him and kisses me again. Given-not-Given frowns and shakes his head. As if I have given the wrong answer. I look at Michael beneath me, and I ignore the phantom, don’t even look toward the kids’ room, so that for the rest of the hour and a half that Misty and Al are gone, Given-not-Given is a light smudge at the corner of my eye, sitting outside the kids’ room, guarding them. But Michael is rubbing my back and scalp, and that is all that matters.

They sleep as one: Michaela wraps herself around Jojo, her head on his armpit, her arm over his chest, her leg over his stomach. Jojo pulls her into him: his forearm curled under her head and around her neck, his other arm a bar across them both to lay flat against her back. His hand hard in protection, stiff as a football pad. But their faces make me feel two ways at once: their faces turned toward each other, sleep-smoothed to an infant’s fatness, so soft and open that I want to leave them asleep so they can feel what they will. I think Given must have held me like that once, that once we breathed mouth to mouth and inhaled the same air. But another part of me wants to shake Jojo and Michaela awake, to lean down and yell so they startle and sit up so I don’t have to see the way they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other’s light.

“Wake up,” I say, and Jojo sits straight up, still hugging Michaela to him. Given-not-Given sat outside their door until Misty and Al came back: it’s strange to see echoes of him in the way Jojo’s shoulders curl inward over Michaela, in his wide-open eyes that scan the room and stop on the one dresser, in how still he suddenly is. “It’s time to go,” I say.

“Home?” he says.

Michael has to sit on the trunk to close it. With three people in the back, we ain’t got room for the bags we rode up here with, so even though Jojo whined about it, I made them put everything in the back, including the sandwiches Al’s sending us down the road with. Jojo’s still pouting, and I’m two minutes away from turning and leaning over the backseat and slapping the expression off his face: the thread line, the moue of his lips, the low eyebrows, all wiped smooth. He sings nursery rhymes to Michaela through the pout: the baby claps her hands and works her fingers like little spiders and looks bored and fascinated in flashes. Every fifth word, she touches Jojo’s nose. Misty’s sleep after complaining for a good hour that the car still smells like throw-up, and Michael’s driving, so I watch the kids when I ain’t watching Michael, watching his skin eat up the light from the growing day.

When Al handed Michael the sandwiches, Al was sweating all over, damp with salt and smelling like raw onions. He’d packed the sandwiches in a small hard plastic bag, a portable cooler with a Chimay logo printed on the side. We don’t want to take your bag , Michael said. I insist , Al said, his breath shuttering in and out of him fast, his eyes everywhere: the woods, the yard, the house sinking in gentle decline. Al was high again. For services rendered , he said, and smiled at me then. His teeth were bad, each one ringed with black like a dirty bathtub, his gums red. He never brushes , I thought. The men shook hands, and Michael curled a loose fist over whatever Al gave him. Michael slid it into his pocket.

“Come here,” Michael says. His blood thuds thickly under my ear, the skin of his arm like tepid water. The road winds through fields and wood, all the way south to the Gulf, and the light that cuts through the windows flutters all around. Where the road meets the Gulf, it skirts the beach for miles. I wish it ran straight over the water, like the pictures of the bridge I’ve seen that links the Florida Keys to the coast, wish it was an endless concrete plank that ran out over the stormy blue water of the world to circle the globe, so I could lie like this forever, feeling the fine hair on his arm, my kids silenced, not even there, his fingers on my arm drawing circles and lines that I decipher, him writing his name on me, claiming me. The world is a tangle of jewels and gold spinning and throwing off sparks. I’m already home.

I’ve never had enough of this. After Michael and I got together in high school, I got pregnant with Jojo in just under a year: I was seventeen. Ever since then we had Jojo and Michaela around us, making those spaces bigger between us. I remember it in flashes, mostly when I’m high, that feeling of it just being me and Michael, together: the way I swam up and surfaced out my grief when I was with him, how everything seemed so much more alive with him. We parked out in a field under the stars, in his pickup truck. We’d sneak and swim in his parents aboveground pool, sinking under the water in the blurry blue and kissing. On the beach near a seafood festival, with the lights from the carnival rides flickering in the distance, bad zydeco music sounding over the loudspeakers, he’d twirl me and make me dance with him until we tripped and fell in the sand.