and out onto the porch, where she waited for her mother again. She saw the boxes rowed one after the next leading down the steps and the miscellany of objects contained in them: now she caught on and understood what would come next. She didn’t want to put him out, not like this. She just stayed there, staring at each different-marked box.
“As much things as he’s put me through. Since the beginning, I had his back, Lord knows why. Cut my roots for this nigga. Didn’t judge him. Didn’t play him short. Not once. Not even when I’s eighteen an’ stupid an’ I’s cuttin from my roots, leavin home for a nigga in prison.” Her mother stopped and glanced fast at Erycha, like she was trying to judge something about her girl. Erycha was so confused now, she was half-ready for the world to end. She didn’t know why her mother was looking at her like this, or why she was putting her man out, or why winter was the beautiful season where she lived. Everything from plain little words to the turning earth was a mystery.
They started down the stairs, packing first the Salvation Army box, then the Goodwill box, then another Salvation Army box. They had scavenged so many clothes and things from Goodwill and the Salvation Army that now they had plenty of moving boxes, enough boxes to travel across the country and back.
As she went back up the stairs, Erycha heard a faint rustling just above her head, like the flutter of birds. But it was nighttime and no birds were out, only the moon and the stars. The sky and the street below and everything seemed wrapped in the same silence and emptiness, and she remembered again that she should have heard the bullfrog by now. She wondered when he would come back.
Re-entering the apartment, she asked, “Why idn’t he back yet?”
Her mother bobbed her braided head as she bent down to gather up the last of his things. “It’s what he gets for leavin the civilized labor force,” which didn’t answer the question.
“But why cain’t he come back?” Erycha wanted to know.
“Ask him.”
How could she ask him if he wasn’t home? How could she ever ask him if he never came home? Erycha wanted to know. But she could tell by her mother’s hardening face that she probably shouldn’t ask. It was such a tired, frustrated face. Erycha watched the face and the woman with it struggle out through the open door and down the stair-steps one careful one at a time and decided against any and all questions. She figured her father couldn’t stay away forever. He’d get hungry or cold eventually, just like the bullfrog would eventually return to the pagoda: as many times as he had left, he had come back home. She looked up into her mother’s eyes as she returned through the open door and closed it behind her, pushing back the frozen night.
By the time he returned, the bullfrog was croaking again. Erycha was listening for the occasional croaks and she almost didn’t hear her father’s small, resigned knock-knock noise on the apartment door. Then she heard it only faintly. But as she listened closer, she heard her mother rolling over in bed. How she made that old contraption creak and wail in ways that no inflatable air mattress ever could. She listened to her father’s retreating steps down the staircase and onto the cement walkway, where in the silence he fumbled clumsily through the cardboard boxes. But she didn’t hear him leave. She didn’t hear his brogans go down that walkway any further. The sound of his shoes told her where he stood and where he walked, and for now they made no sound and no stand at all, as if he had simply stopped.
She heard the bullfrog croaking.
She reached her head over the bedsheets and looked around. It was safe to come back into the world, she decided. When she pulled out of the sheets, the mixture of silence and sound felt strange in her ears: it was easing her through sleep and calling her out into the world all at once.
Excitement thrilled through her as she slipped out of the bedroom that was not a bedroom and past her mother’s closed door, out the apartment and down to where her father lay sleeping in amongst his scattered life. This was another new dance she’d made for herself, except now she had a partner to hold her in his arms.
Then, dawn. The boxes were looking down at them from the staircase when they came awake in each other’s arms. She noticed that some had been turned on their sides, their contents spilled along the steps. But despite all that, her father started in thanking God and Stevie Wonder and Raphael Saadiq: he made it seem like a miracle that he got to wake up with his stuff all put out of doors just as long as no one had robbed or cut him and his daughter up. “Thank you,” he mumbled. “Thank you. For not lettin these niggas do nothin. For not lettin none of these heartless-ass people take us out. Thank you.”
Erycha had never been afraid of her neighbors or her neighborhood day or night. It was her neighborhood, her home, after all. So it surprised her to see her big strong dad getting all thankful for divine protection when all that had happened was that they went to sleep and woke up. What was there to be frightened of? she wondered. Scanning their quiet, familiar surroundings she didn’t see anything new or exciting or scary. “Why you scared?” she asked, looking into his dancing eyes. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head real slow. “Because.” She waited for more, but he didn’t elaborate.
Because. It was the kind of answer Erycha heard all the time in her classes and on the playground. It didn’t seem appropriate for any adult to be saying it and plain wrong for a dad-adult. Her teachers told her not to begin sentences with that word, and he told her to listen to her teachers, so why didn’t he have to, too?
“Because what?” she challenged him.
He looked at her with surprise and hurt. “Babygirl,” he said, his lips parting in the silence, his boyishly handsome face dropping as if suddenly loaded over with responsibility, “Babygirl.”
She stared back at him in frustration.
“Don’ turn into one ’a them type women. Please. For my sanity sake.”
It was only morning, but she already noticed his mood darkening over like a lowering sky: she could see the future as he saw it, not one but two women berating him. Telling him when to come and when to be gone, when to speak and when to elaborate even though he felt like he had already said enough. She was coming into intuition like into a bad cloud: her dad would never really leave. She realized that. He was too scared of something out there in the world to leave, and he was not enough of whatever it was her mother wanted him to be to make peace at home. He would always be somewhere between staying and going. Her poor daddy. He was about to go back up those stair-steps, pick up the boxes and return to whatever waited for him inside.
She felt him stir and then stand up, raising her off the ground with him. He held her there for a second, like a jewel, his and not his.
“OK, Erycha, I’ma drop you. We bout to go back up the stairs, K? Ladies first.”
“K.” She nodded. She seemed to have all the answers and he all the questions. “OK.”
She squirmed in his grasp, a signal to let her go. But he didn’t, not right away. She had the sense that he didn’t want his hands empty. She squirmed some more, but he kept her tucked in his arms. After her, there would only be boxes for him to hold and at that point he might as well be empty-handed. She wondered if her mother was waiting on them right now and listened for her call. She thought of the pagoda and the bullfrog, wondered if he was still in his little chamber, waiting for her too. It was nice to think that people and things thought of her and waited for and wanted her. Many years later, after she had become a college student and left her mother’s home for the last time, Erycha would buy a baby iguana that ate the rose petals from off the walls of her apartment building. The iguana would eventually grow to
