Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

When we first began dating, Michael and I spent a month of nights parking on the boat jetty out on the bayou, kissing, his face against mine, smooth skin, as the wind came in the open windows, briny and sweet. A month of riding everywhere but near his house in the Kill and getting dropped off at my house an hour before dawn. I jumped off the cliff at the river one of those nights. I ran before I leapt to clear the rocky bank; I dropped into the feathery dark heart of the water and went all the way to the bottom, where the sand was more muddy than grainy and downed trees decomposed, slimy and soft at the core. I didn’t swim up; the fall had stunned my arms and legs, the thunderous slap of the water numbed them. I let the water carry me. It was a slow rise: up, up, up toward milky light. I remember it clearly because I never did it again, scared by that paralyzing ascent. This is what it feels like to wake with my head in Michael’s lap, his fingers still on my scalp, the car rumbling, light slanting sharp through the window. This is what it feels like to rise from a dark deep place. I lift up a little and put my forehead on Michael’s thigh and groan.

“Hey.” I can hear the smile in his voice; the word sounds higher, thinner. I’m too close to his crotch.

“Hey,” I say, and raise up further. By the time I’m sitting up straight, it feels wrong. Like every bone in my spine, each locking piece, been knocked over and built back up crooked.

“How you feel?”

“What?”

Michael pushes my hair back off my forehead and I close my eyes at the touch. My throat is burning. Michael looks in the rearview, and then pulls me over so my head is on his shoulder, his lips at my ear.

“The cops pulled us over, remember? You swallowed that shit from Al because wasn’t no time to dump it. The fucking floor was covered in shit. You should clean your car, Leonie.” He sounds like Mama when he says it.

“I know, Michael. What else?”

“I got you milk and charcoal from a gas station. You threw up.”

I swallow, and the root of my tongue aches.

“My mouth hurts.”

“You threw up a lot.”

The world outside the car is a green, shaky blur, the color of Michael’s eyes, of the trees bursting to life in the spring. The memory that eased me up out the dark, the memory of jumping from that cliff, is a buzzing green, but there is none of that inside of me. Just some water oak limbs, dry and mossy, burned to ash, smoldering. I feel wrong.

“How long to the house?”

“’Bout an hour.”

Even the pine trees, with their constant muted green, seem brighter. Through them, I see the sun will set soon.

“Wake me up.”

I lie down in the ashes and sleep.

When I wake, Michael’s rolled all the windows down. I’ve been dreaming for hours it feels like, dreaming of being marooned on a deflating raft in the middle of the endless reach of the Gulf of Mexico, far out where the fish are bigger than men. I’m not alone in the raft because Jojo and Michaela and Michael with me and we are elbow to elbow. But the raft must have a hole in it, because it deflates. We are all sinking, and there are manta rays gliding beneath us and sharks jostling us. I am trying to keep everyone above water, even as I struggle to stay afloat. I sink below the waves and push Jojo upward so he can stay above the water and breathe, but then Kayla sinks and I push her up, and Michael sinks so I shove him to the air as I sink and struggle, but they won’t stay up: they want to sink like stones. I thrust them up toward the surface, to the fractured sky so they can live, but they keep slipping from my hands. It is so real that I can feel their sodden clothes against my palms. I am failing them. We are all drowning.

“Feel better?” Michael asks.

The sky has turned pink, and everybody looks ragged, even Misty, who has fallen asleep with her face smashed against the window, her hair falling over her forehead and down the line of her nose and cheek: a yellow head scarf.

“I guess,” I say.

And I do, except for the dream. It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it. I turn around to check on Michaela. Her shirt, cold and wet, clings to her small, hot body.

“We could drop the kids off. Go get something to eat before we go home.”

“Home?”

“To your mama and daddy’s,” Michael says.

I knew that’s where we were going, knew there was nowhere else for us to go. Not to the Kill, not to his parents, who’ve never even seen their grandkids in the flesh. We could not go where we aren’t welcome. But I guess I had an apartment in my head. Once we’re on our feet we’ll get to it, but I had so envisioned it that when I thought about us going home, I only saw that place. I imagined us settling in one of the bigger towns on the Gulf Coast, in one of those three-story complexes with metal-and-concrete stairs leading from one level to another. We would have big whitewashed, carpeted rooms, and our little family have space, anonymity, and quiet.

“Yeah,” I say.

“So you want to?”

Michaela kicks the back of my seat. Her hair is matted to her head, and she’s chewing on a sucker stick, the cardboard melting and coming away in papery bits to stick on the side of her mouth. I smile at her, wait for her to smile at me, but she doesn’t. She kicks again and bares her teeth around the stick, but it is no smile.

“Michaela, stop kicking Mama’s seat.”

“Ony,” she says, and sucks on the stick and waves both hands in the air. Jojo looks away from the window, down to her kicking feet, and frowns. “Ony!” she screams.

“She’s saying your name,” Michael says.

“Mama,” I tell Michaela.

“Ony,” Michaela says, and for a moment I’m in my drowning dream again, and I feel her hot, wet back buoyed up by my palms, slipping, slipping.

“Yeah,” I tell Michael. “Drop them off.”

Michael turns from one narrow, tree-shrouded road to another, water dripping from the leaves to dot the windshield, and I know we’re in Bois by the map of the limbs. Two people walk in the distance, and as we cruise through the green tunnel, I see a man, short and muscled, who leads a black dog by a chain. And next to him, a skinny little woman with a black, coily cloud of hair that moves like a kaleidoscope of butterflies. It’s not until we’re right up on them that I see who it is. Skeetah and Eschelle, a brother and sister from the neighborhood. The siblings walk in sync, both of them bouncing. Esch says something, and Skeetah laughs. We pass as dusk darkens the road.

Michaela kicks my seat again, and I turn around and slap her leg so hard my palm stings. Jealousy twins with anger. That girl: so lucky. She has all her brothers.

The house looks like it sunk. Drooping at the crown. Jojo seems taller than he was when we left as he jiggles the doorknob, as he disappears through the dark door. But soon he’s walking back out to the car, and it’s so dark now that I can’t see his face. Even when he leans into the window of the car and Michael turns on the overhead light, there is still a black film over his face.

“They not here,” he says.

“Mama and Pop?” I ask.

“No.”

“Did they leave a note?”

Jojo shakes his head.

“Get in the car,” Michael says.

“What?” I ask. I’m so tired that it feels like someone has placed a wet towel over my brain, the weight of it suffocating thought.

“We can wait here.” Jojo stands.

“Get in the car,” Michael says.

Jojo’s lips thin, and he climbs into the back of the car. Michaela has her face hidden in his neck again, one finger twirling a lock of Jojo’s hair. Michael reverses into the empty street.