and frightened her. Still, she insists on keeping food in her room.
But, I argue, Helen likes the mouse. She keeps the lifesavers in the dish next to her brush and comb so he will come. She even tries to wait up for him.
The gift Father gave Helen is a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Barbie. When I come home from school I find it on the floor alongside Helen’s dirty clothing, undressed. Barbie’s hair is in tangles. A pin from Helen’s Girl Scout sash, the one she received for International Friendship, is in Barbie’s eye. The gash is larger than the circle of blue.
There are other disturbances, and I wonder if our house is haunted like my friend Thea’s, who lives on the plantation her family has owned for over a century, where slaves once grew tobacco. Their main house is lit by gas, which throws an eerie and unreliable light. Beneath the foundation are underground tunnels connected to storehouses. Her brother takes us through using a flashlight. Without warning he turns it off and rushes ahead. Thea pleads with him to come back, and when he doesn’t, she starts to sob.
Get on your knees, I tell her, and use your hands to feel the wall on the left and the ground in front of you. Just crawl.
I can’t without seeing. Do you know what’s in this ground? All sorts of dead things. It is awful to even think about it.
Yuck. But you don’t want to stay here. And besides we don’t know if he is coming back.
When she doesn’t move, I squeeze in front of her. The damp soil scrapes my knuckles. It still hurts, especially now as soil collects under the nail and then a shard of glass, or something sharp, cuts into my palm. I was in the tub when Father came in. I grabbed the shower curtain to wrap around me to hide myself, but he was pulling from the other end and my fingernail got caught in the crease. He kept pulling until the nail tore from its bed.
It’s a joke. Her brother says and then turns on the flashlight.
Thea is huddled against the wall, her cheeks streaked with tears and soot. Above her head, iron hooks jut from the wall and the ground beneath is stained.
Animal blood, he says pointing, cows and chickens, what they ate back then, duck too, just like now.
The ground slopes as if the blood carved a shallow stream and its banks are tinted red. I see cow heads hung upside down so the blood can drain, then I see people, whole bodies, naked black men, the skin of their throats wrapped over the hand-hewn hooks, the way a jacket’s hood loops over a metal store-bought hook.
Thea’s mother and father sit at opposite ends of a very long table. We answer only when we are spoken to and we always begin with Sir or Ma’am and end with Thank You. The servants hover at the swinging door that leads into the kitchen. Our backs are to them, but when they approach to clear the table, the light of the chandelier outlines their dark faces, accentuating their white crisp shirts and ironed skirts, but even still I cannot see their expressions. The most they do is nod.
It is implied that not a bite of food is to be left. I wouldn’t know for sure, but I think we are eating goose or maybe duck. Something I have never eaten, more the texture of chicken than steak, although the meat is grey and oily. Her parents do not look across the table or at each other. Their eyes are focused on their plates. At the end of the meal there isn’t even dessert.
Tucked into Thea’s bed, we stare at the frilly lace and ribbon canopy. Thea takes my hand. It’s about Tilly, she whispers, the slave that haunts our house. She comes at night and stands at the side of the bed that you’re on and waits for me to wake up. She stopped growing the day she gave birth to a daughter here in this room. She was thirteen and hadn’t looked pregnant. When her baby came out more white than black, the midwife knew if she didn’t kill it Tilly would have been sold as a field hand and sent away. She told her to rest, that she would wash and swaddle the baby, but instead she drowned her. When Tilly found out, she ran from the house wandering the fields, not remembering her name or who owned her. Now she comes back because she is still looking for where the baby is buried. I have been trying to help her but I can’t find anything. In here, she pulls a composition book out from under a stack of comics, I keep a map of the places I’ve searched.
How can you tell?
By temperature. If the soil isn’t warm it means the bones can’t be there. Once you practice, I will show you tomorrow, you get the feel of it.
I hear Helen other nights. Like Tilly, she doesn’t rest.
Usually I am able to get back to sleep, but on one night Mother and Father are speaking loudly. Father tells Mother to shut up, which is something we have been forbidden to say, especially now that we live in the South where manners and rules are important.
In the morning Mother isn’t in their bedroom, and the heavy blanket from her side of the bed is strewn across the length of the couch. Father has already left, which explains why Mother doesn’t wake Helen. He is the one who insists we don’t miss a day of school even when we are sick. Mother hasn’t put our juice and toast on the table.
I call to Mother. What happened last night? Why was everyone awake?
You must have dreamed it.
She doesn’t say goodbye to Jake or to me, and she doesn’t remind us to take our lunches.
Why does Helen get the day off?
Hurry, Mother says, I hear the bus.
Father’s father—the one Helen and I refer to as the rich one because he has a personal maid who dresses him in silk, manicures his nails, and sprays him evenly at morning and at night across his neck with French perfume—takes the family photographs.
We are standing on his balcony, overlooking the ocean in Miami Beach. Mother is off to the side wearing her fall and headband, brown pumps, pleated skirt, a pink lace blouse and pillbox hat. Father’s arm is around Helen. He tries to draw her close but I can see her feet are resisting, like a tree in a strong wind, the way it must bend in order to survive. No one has noticed me, or if they have, they don’t mind that I am wearing a tee shirt and a pair of crumpled pink and white shorts.
Click.
Father’s father doesn’t know about composition. His job is to make us look our best. The column looks as if it is growing out of Mother’s head.
Say Cheese.
Click.
Then to Jake, stay still.
Click.
And to me, hold the dog or she can’t be in the photographs.
Click.
Something, maybe the light of the flash or the noise, frightens Coco and she runs.
In the room adjacent to the terrace is a life-size painting of Father’s father seated in a leather chair, even though he does not own a leather chair, and on his finger is a ring with a blue stone, which I have also never seen. In life he doesn’t wear jewelry, not even a wedding band. But the artist drew his lips the way they are—thin and long. The nose, too, is accurate and to scale. His oily skin glistens. It is the sort of painting that might hang in a castle or government building, a portrait of a king or president.
Mother’s father and mother live directly across the street with a view of a multi-level parking garage. Because we are
