Mat Johnson - Loving Day

Divorce. Yes, I’m familiar with the malady. I don’t even think of mine, but of my parents’. That’s the only reason I let him head around the perimeter, to wait in the woods at least for a little while.

Cop cars aren’t that surprising in the park, they roll up and down the valley road most of the day, checking to see if the leaves are still there. The cops themselves are standing outside their vehicle. One with a phone to his ear, the other farther down the hill, smoking. Cops make me nervous even in casual mode. Kimet’s dad, he makes me nervous too. Here I am in the buttermilk, having chosen this Europeanized blackness when I was offered the full, undiluted glory of Africana. We still cool, right , my expression says, and I attempt to cut off all awkwardness by approaching him directly as he stands next to Roslyn.

“What?” is all he says to me. Then he looks at my outstretched hand as if this is some curious custom the local vagrant population insists on. He takes it, limply, and lets it fall again with only the slightest of nods. I have not joined the Oreos, I want to tell him, but he doesn’t recognize me. No, he does, I see a faint glimmer in his eyes. He just doesn’t care. Somehow, the current status of my racial patriotism, while highly important to me, is of shockingly little concern to him at the moment. He stands with his arms folded and stares down Roslyn, while she types into her phone with her thumbs as if spell-casting. I wait for her to finish, but when she does, no conversation follows. Eye contact brings a flash of a grin my way, but it just says, This is the face I’m supposed to make when I’m happy , and then it’s gone as soon as she turns away again.

“Let’s go for the second leg of the nature hike,” Spider yells over. I look at him, waving at me frantically, the students all huddled around him. But there’s no second leg. That hike was a one-leg beast and we hopped it.

“Excuse me,” one of the officers comes through, breaking the silence. He’s got a roll of yellow tape in his hand. He walks past, heads to the sealed gate.

“Really, do you have to? Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” Roslyn purrs, but apparently he lacks the necessary mommy issues to be swayed by her. And then it says POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS as yellow tape decorates the entry.

—

“The cops are just doing the whole ‘You’re not supposed to be squatting on public property thing.’ It’s no biggie,” Spider tells me. We cut back and walk single file around the side of the perimeter after feigning like we were walking north toward the creek again.

“What do you mean it’s ‘no biggie’? Why are they doing that?”

“Because we’re not supposed to be squatting in a public park.”

The kids trail behind us, Kimet, the oldest, picking up the rear. A few kids actually ask, “Are we there yet?” They just arrived on earth, so lack all consciousness of cliché.

“It’s over there,” Spider yells and keeps hopping forward, short enough to avoid all the low-hanging branches that I have to push through.

“What’s over where?” I can see the fence through the brush. We’re at the back of the camp.

“The VIP entrance,” Spider tells me, then lifts up one end of a flap created by a cut in the mesh fence. I pull up the other end, make sure the kids don’t get snagged on the edges while crawling inside. I count them off. We still have eleven, and I’m pretty sure they’re the same kids we left with. The mixie pixies, they love this. They think it’s a joke. They think it’s an adventure. They laugh. I don’t laugh.

“Come on, it’s fun!” Spider insists. He actually is having fun. Kimet is the last one through, and he’s out of earshot walking with the others back to the classroom when I say, “No, this is bullshit. So this place really could get evicted at any minute?”

“Roslyn’s got good lawyers, though. Like, the best ones. They get a judge to get an injunction, it’s a whole thing. Usually takes about four hours, tops.”

“Usually? What do you mean, ‘usually’?”

“Like a dozen times. Once a month since last year. First it was the neighbors fussing, but Roslyn finally won them over. Last couple times it’s been that guy from the Umoja School. He keeps calling the cops, I’m pretty sure. You know the type. Black folks like him are used to having the power to say who’s black and who’s not. It really pisses them off that some people just opt out.”

“It pisses him off now because his son is here. Kimet.”

“Oh. That makes even more sense. Oh well. It’s cool, though. The whole place is on wheels. If it hits the fan, we just roll.” Spider giggles at the vision. I see it too, and the only response I make is the clenching of my jaw.

I look around at the buildings. I look around again at all the wheels. Even the fence is attached at its base to mere concrete blocks. I can see the grass beneath our feet and imagine this whole space empty again, with just those blades remaining. For a second, I am standing on a vacant lot. Gone are all the black-and-white harlequins.

For her crucial final precollege year, the launchpad to a life of more promise and less struggle, the sole paternal gift I’m not too damn late to offer, I have enrolled my daughter in a school that can literally disappear overnight.

—

I’m Googling “prestigious GED programs” on my phone before I even get home. I’m searching for “Philadelphia Magnet Schools Late Enrollment.” I start thinking, if Mélange collapses maybe I can get Tal to stay with me and do over her senior year. Private school, even — I might be able to cash in on the house by then, possibly even sell it. I start hating myself for not plastering and painting before, not doing all I know how to do to repair this hermitage every moment of the day and faking what I don’t. We’ve already compiled the list of prospective colleges, schools with decent dance programs in California, Rhode Island, and Washington State, the latter being my favorite as it’s the farthest away. It seems an impossible goal, remote yet imminent when I think about how I have to pay for it.

Irv’s car is in my driveway. I get the gate open, get back into my car then pull up slowly behind it like it might decide to suddenly lurch back and smash me. My headlights flash into its cab as I head up the hill. It’s empty inside. The lights inside the house are dark, upstairs and down. There’s someone lying on the porch. Not Irv. Not Tal, either. I can see Tal in the kitchen, through the window.

The fear comes back but I don’t listen to it. I decide the fear itself is nothing of merit, a few little chemicals in my brain, dripping the wrong way. I walk right over and if I must I will walk right through.

“Tal’s home,” Sunita Habersham tells me, pulling herself up off her back and onto her elbows. “She looks exhausted, needs the quiet. She came by Mélange looking for you, but it was locked up. She gave me a ride here in her grandfather’s car. I said I’d wait out here for you.”

Sunita Habersham in the dimness of the one yellow lightbulb. Life can have a sepia tone.

“And why’d you want to see me?” I ask, because the time to ask her is now, before it gets weighted.

“It’s Wednesday. I brought the new batch of comic books. My whole pull list.”

“You came to show me your comic books. You don’t talk to me for weeks, and now, comic books.”

“I had to think, okay? And I decided I wanted to see more of you.”

“You seemed finished when you left before.” My aim was to be jovial. The actual sounds that I emit are nothing like that. No humor can be found there, by either one of us.

“I guess I wasn’t finished with you yet.” She shrugs, as if her own self was a mere acquaintance. “If that’s not okay, I can go. I need a ride, though. You can still borrow my comics. Except for this…one.” She flips through the comics, pulls out an issue of Locke & Key . “Haven’t read this one.”