Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Hello?” Leonie says.

I grab Kayla’s arm and lean in to the flames. She struggles, transfixed.

“Yes.”

I blow.

“Baby.”

Half the candles gutter out.

“A week?”

The other half eating wax to the nub.

“You sure?”

I blow again, and the cake goes dark. The mosquito lands on my head. So scrumptious , he says, and bites. I swat him, and my palm comes away smeared with blood. Kayla reaches.

“We’ll be there.”

Kayla has a handful of frosting, and her nose is running. Her blond afro curls high. She sticks her fingers in her mouth, and I wipe.

“Easy, baby. Easy.”

Michael is an animal on the other end of the telephone behind a fortress of concrete and bars, his voice traveling over miles of wire and listing, sun-bleached power poles. I know what he is saying, like the birds I hear honking and flying south in the winter, like any other animal. I’m coming home.

Last night, after I hung up the phone with Michael, I called Gloria and got another shift. Gloria owns the country bar where I work up in the backwoods. It’s a hole-in-the-wall, slapped together with cinder blocks and plywood, painted green. The first time I saw it, I was riding with Michael upcountry to a river; we’d park under an overpass on the road that crossed the river and then walk until we reached a good swimming spot. What’s that? I asked, and pointed. I figured it wasn’t a house, even though it sat low under the trees. There was too many cars parked in the sandy grass. That’s the Cold Drink , Michael said, and he smelled like hard pears and his eyes were green as the outside. Like Barq’s and Coke? I said. Yep. He said his mama went to school with the owner. I called his mama years later after Michael went to jail, thanked God when it was her that picked up the phone and not Big Joseph. He would have hung up in my face rather than speak to me, the nigger his son had babies with. I told Michael’s mother I needed work, and asked if she could put in a good word with the owner. It was the fourth conversation we’d ever had. We spoke first when Michael and I started dating, second time when Jojo was born, and third when Michaela was born. But still she said yes, and then she told me I should go up there, up to the Kill, upcountry, where Michael and his parents are from, where the bar is, and I should introduce myself to Gloria, so I did. Gloria hired me for a probationary period of three months. You’re a hard worker , she said, laughing, when she told me she was keeping me on. She wore heavy eyeliner, and when she laughed, the skin at the sides of her eyes looked like an elaborate fan. Even harder than Misty , she said, and she damn near lives here . And then waved me back out front to the bar. I grabbed my tray of drinks, and three months turned into three years. After my second day at the Cold Drink, I knew why Misty worked so hard: she was high every night. Lortab, Oxycontin, coke, Ecstasy, meth.

Before I showed up for work at the Cold Drink last night, Misty must have had a good double, because after we mopped and cleaned and shut everything down, we went to her pink MEMA cottage she’s had since Hurricane Katrina, and she pulled out an 8-ball.

“So he’s coming home?” Misty asked.

Misty was opening all the windows. She knows I like to hear outside when I get high. I know she doesn’t like to get high alone, which is why she invited me over, and why she opens the windows even though the wet spring night seeps into the house like a fog.

“Yep.”

“You must be happy.”

The last window snapped up and locked into place, and I stared out of it as Misty sat at the table and began cutting and dividing. I shrugged. I’d felt so happy when I got the phone call, when I heard Michael’s voice saying words I’d imagined him saying for months, for years, so happy that my insides felt like a full ditch ridden with a thousand tadpoles. But then when I left, Jojo looked up from where he sat with Pop in the living room watching some hunting show, and for a flash, the cast of his face, the way his features folded, looked like Michael after one of our worst fights. Disappointed. Grave at my leaving. And I couldn’t shake it. His expression kept coming back to me through my shift, made me pull Bud Light instead of Budweiser, Michelob instead of Coors. And then Jojo’s face stuck with me because I could tell he secretly thought I was going to surprise him with a gift, something else besides that hasty cake, some thing that wouldn’t be gone in three days: a basketball, a book, a pair of high-top Nikes to add to his single pair of shoes.

I bent to the table. Sniffed. A clean burning shot through my bones, and then I forgot. The shoes I didn’t buy, the melted cake, the phone call. The toddler sleeping in my bed at home while my son slept on the floor, just in case I’d come home and make him get on the floor when I stumbled in. Fuck it.

“Ecstatic.” I said it slow. Sounded the syllables out. And that’s when Given came back.

The kids at school teased Given about his name. One day he got into a fight about it on the bus, tumbling over the seats with a husky redhead boy who wore camo. Frustrated and swollen-lipped, he came home and asked Mama: Why y’all give me this name? Given? It don’t make no sense. And Mama squatted down and rubbed his ears, and said: Given because it rhymes with your daddy’s name: River. And Given because I was forty when I had you. Your daddy was fifty. We thought we couldn’t have no kids, but then you was Given to us. He was three years older than me, and when him and Camo boy went flipping and swinging over the seat, I swung my book bag at Camo and hit him in the back of the head.

Last night, he smiled at me, this Given-not-Given, this Given that’s been dead fifteen years now, this Given that came to me every time I snorted a line, every time I popped a pill. He sat in one of the two empty chairs at the table with us, and leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. He was watching me, like always. He had Mama’s face.

“That much, huh?” Misty sucked snot up her nose.

“Yep.”

Given rubbed the dome of his shaved head, and I saw other differences between the living and this chemical figment. Given-not-Given didn’t breathe right. He never breathed at all. He wore a black shirt, and it was a still, mosquito-ridden pool.

“What if Michael’s different?” Misty said.

“He won’t be,” I said.

Misty threw a wadded-up paper towel she’d been using to clean the table.

“What you looking at?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“Don’t nobody sit and stare for that long on something this clean without looking at something.” Misty waved her hand at the coke and winked at me. She’d tattooed her boyfriend’s initials on her ring finger, and for a second it looked like letters and then bugs and then letters again. Her boyfriend was Black, and this loving across color lines was one of the reasons we became friends so quickly. She often told me that as far as she was concerned, they were already married. Said she needed him, because her mother didn’t give a shit about her. Misty told me once that she got her period in fifth grade when she was ten years old, and because she didn’t realize what was happening to her, her body betraying her, she walked around half the day with a bloody spot spreading like an oil stain on the back of her pants. Her mother beat her in the parking lot of the school, she was so embarrassed. The principal called the cops. Just one of the many ways I disappointed her , Misty said.