Part 14 (1/2)

One time when Dad was blue he told me that his father wasn't French after all.

Mom was with the brat at soccer and Dad was sitting at the kitchen table trying to work. When his writing didn't go well, he got sad.

I'd gone into the kitchen to get some juice. I was thinking about going for a run. Dad looked up and I knew immediately he was going to unload.

”I went all the way to Ma.r.s.eille,” he told me, without any word of greeting. ”I was trying to find him. I knocked on the door of every black family in the city, which is way more than you'd think.”

Okay, I thought. He's talking about his dad. I wondered how he knew he'd knocked on all their doors.

”My mother lied to me,” he said. ”Again.”

I leaned against the sink. ”Maybe he moved?”

”Ha!” Dad looked at me like I was being crazy. ”I found a letter. Upstate. It was in English, not French-American English. Addressed to 'My darlin Hope.' Your grandmother's name is Hope,” he told me unnecessarily. ”The letter was asking after their child-after me. It was all about how much my dad missed my mom. How much he wanted to hold the baby-to hold me!” Dad's eyes are welling. ”It was signed, 'All Yers Always.' There was no other name unless my dad's name was Always or Yers Always. There's no way a Frenchman wrote it.”

”Oh,” I said.

”I waved the letter in Mom's face. You know what she did?”

He was looking at me. I shook my head.

”She told me not to be so melodramatic. She told me to act my age. I was twenty-two! I was acting my age.”

”Did Grandmother say why she lied to you?”

”She said, 'You had a good time in France, didn't you, Isaiah? Found yourself a good wife.' She wouldn't tell me who my father is. She said I didn't need to know. That it's better to keep the past muddy. That's her all over, isn't it? I don't think my past could be muddier.

”I still haven't gotten anything out of her. She's back to acting like my dad was French. So I do the same. Push the truth out of the way. Go on acting like the lie is true. Don't tell your mom. She doesn't know.”

He grinned, gave me a wide-open smile that made his eyes crinkle. Dad's teeth were s.h.i.+ny white. ”Just another family secret to add to the pile. This one's between you and me. Like Hilliard.”

”Right,” I said. Dad opened up his laptop. I got myself a gla.s.s of orange juice. The end of our father-daughter bonding.

Is it any surprise that I turned out the way I did, with so many family lies?

I'm at least a third-generation liar. Though I bet it goes back earlier. If I could get Grandmother or Great-Aunt Dorothy to talk about it. I wouldn't bother asking Hilliard. I don't think I've ever heard him say a whole sentence.

I wonder if there is a lying gene. If so it runs strong in my family. Which makes me wonder about Dad's story. Was there a letter? Is anything he said true? The only story I've ever had out of the Greats is the one about the French sailor. Maybe Dad lied to me about the letter? Maybe he lied about having gone to France?

No, that has to be true because my mother really is French. Ma.r.s.eille is where they met. Sometimes I think she's the only part of the story that's true. I stick to the French sailor story because I've heard it so many times before. Because Dad only told me about the letter once. I have no idea which version is true. Maybe neither is.

”Keep the past muddy.” I believe my grandmother would say that. It was something the whole family lived by. Dad, too, whether he admitted it or not.

It leaves me feeling unanch.o.r.ed.

Telling you the truth is my attempt to anchor myself. It's all I've got.

BEFORE.

The next time I saw the white boy was in Central Park.

Me and Zach were running. Lockstep. Not talking. Just breathing. My thoughts weren't anywhere but in the feel of my feet hitting the ground, my elbows at my side, the breath in and out. Zach beside me: feet to ground in unison. Breath in and out at the same time.

The boy came from the other direction. Running toward us in jeans and a T-s.h.i.+rt and beat-up pair of boots. Not regular running-in-Central-Park clothes. And so skinny the clothes flopped around him, engulfed him, slowed him down, almost tripped him. He was still fast though. Even with his elbows askew and his heels. .h.i.tting the ground.

Zach nudged me. But I'd already seen. Already recognized. The boy was looking at me, too. I didn't have words for the expression. Intense. Almost like he hated me.

Then he was past us.

”Ha,” Zach said. ”Freak.”

I didn't say anything. I couldn't help thinking that Zach thought the same of me. Or used to. I imagined him in school, watching me walk past, then turning to Tayshawn to spit out the word: freak.

I had more in common with that boy than I did with Zach, running with his high-knee lift and elbows tucked tight at ninety degrees. No one ever called Zach a freak.

AFTER.

This is how it feels now.

Blankness.

Numbness.

Nothing.

Without Zach I'm nothing. I'm not even half of anything, not even the in between I was before. Not girl, not boy, not black, not white.

It's all gone.

I'm gone.

AFTER.

Tayshawn shows us the court where he and Zach first played ball together, the court where they first dunked, the spot in the park where they first got drunk together. He shares a whole series of firsts.

It feels as if Tayshawn's telling us that Zach was his. That we could never know him the way he did.

I don't care. I know he belongs to them more than he did to me. Sarah's been with him-on and off-since freshman year, and Tayshawn and Zach go back to the third grade. I shouldn't be here.

He takes us to a little cave deep in Inwood. Their firsts here were playing truth or dare with neighborhood girls and smoking pot.

It's dank and musty. My nose wrinkles. There are lots of cigarette b.u.t.ts, empty beer bottles.

”Cla.s.sy,” Sarah says.

Tayshawn laughs. ”You're probably the only one of his girls he never took here.”

Sarah stiffens. I don't. I'm not even offended that Tayshawn clearly doesn't think of me as one of Zach's girls.

He sits down a little bit in from the cave's mouth, where it's still light enough that we can see each other but not so far forward that people walking by on the path below would know we're there. Sarah crouches next to him, unwilling to get her dress dirty. She clutches her purse. I sit cross-legged on Tayshawn's other side, letting the skirt of Mom's dress pool in my lap.