Hush (5 page)

“They know what I know,” my father said softly, staring down at his plate without touching his food.“All my life I’ve walked into the precinct as a black cop. But I was a cop first, so when the racist jokes were flying, I let them slap me on the back and sometimes laughed right along with them—even had my own to tell about white folks. It was like that—black, white, we were all cops, that’s all. Cops first.” He balled his hand into a fist and stared at it. Then stared at me, his eyes starting to water. I swallowed, hating Randall and Dennis and every cop that had brought us to this moment. “Cops first. That’s always been the rule. No matter what. When I saw that boy falling, I wasn’t a cop anymore.”

Seven days after the shooting, the mayor called for a full investigation. A few days after that, Daddy met with the district attorney.

We can protect you,
the D.A. said.
But it might mean having to leave here. Ask yourself if it’s worth it.

That night at dinner, Daddy said
I’m a man, I can testify.
He walked slowly through every room of the house, touching the walls, picking up pictures and putting them down again, fluffing pillows and pressing them to his face. When he got back to the kitchen, he sat down at the table and said
We can leave here.
Then he leaned into his fists and cried.

 

 

 

TWO DAYS AFTER MY FATHER MET WITH THE DISTRICT attorney, he sat me and Cameron down at the kitchen table to tell us we’d be leaving. By then, I had known this was coming. I had been listening to him and Mama go back and forth about the consequences. The night before, I had walked in on Mama sitting at the kitchen table, marking spelling exams and crying. But Cameron had gone on like nothing was happening, even though every radio station in Colorado was telling the story.

“I can’t believe you’re gonna screw up our lives like this,” Cameron yelled.

“I’d want someone to do this if it was one of you,” my father said.

“They didn’t kill
us,
” Cameron said. “Don’t do this to
us,
Daddy.”

At dusk, someone fired three shots through our kitchen window. I was upstairs in my room, spying on my father. I could see him from my window, standing on the back deck, staring out at the trees, every now and then his shoulders rising and falling. Cameron was in the basement. Mama had just walked out of the kitchen to set the table for dinner.

Outside, a few birds were making noise. When I ran downstairs, Mama was slumped against the dining room wall, her head in her hands. Daddy was beside her, his arms around her shoulders. Cameron stood in the corner of the dining room, hugging herself hard. Glass covered the kitchen table and floor. The bullet holes were like small black caves against the white kitchen wall. I stared at them without blinking. I was not afraid. Some part of us that had been the same way forever was gone. The holes in the walls proved it. The dead boy, his mother in his room at night calling and calling his name. I thought of dead people in the movies. How their eyes flutter open like magazines. I thought
This part of my life is over now.

7

MAYBE SOMEWHERE IN HIS HEAD MY FATHER imagined Raymond Taylor as his own son. Maybe he looked at us in that moment and saw two daughters—his copper pennies—safe, but not safe. Girls. But black girls. And me, tall and skinny and always running and climbing trees and, even at thirteen, still coming home with skinned knees and jammed fingers. Me, who was always begging to have my braid chopped off so I didn’t have to deal with my hair every day, closer to a boy in some ways than a girl. Maybe he looked at me, his youngest copper penny, and thought
It could happen like this.

Me and Cameron sat there, my love for Daddy blossoming into something deeper, Cameron’s disgust growing fast as a weed.

Later that night, I walked into the den to find him holding a picture of himself with the cops in his precinct.

“I don’t feel safe anymore,” he said. He put down the picture and left the room.

I looked at the picture for a long time after he left. I had known everyone in that picture my whole life. Twenty-two officers, all in blue. Look again, though. Blue and white. Blue and white. Blue and white. Then Daddy. Blue and black. Look again. Harder. Longer.

That night, the men came for us.

8

MY MOTHER USED TO LISTEN TO HER OLD records all the time. She’d put the album on our old turntable and set the needle down gently. Then the music would lift up around the room. Sad, cloudy-sounding music. Songs about people going off to look for America and hearts being broken. Songs where the men sounded like they were singing with the last breaths they had in the world and the women sang low and gravelly about men coming and going. Now the songs come to me—bits of phrases, pieces of tunes. They come to me late at night when I’m not expecting them. Words and words and words.
You know us,
they whisper.
You know us.

When the men came, the moon was out, hanging down close outside my window. I’d never seen it that way before—full and yellow and looking close enough to touch. The men came in the night with guns under their coats and the moon saying its own good-bye. Their coming surprised me. And then it didn’t. They’d always been coming. From the day I was born they’d been coming. Lulu used to say that we’re just paper dolls made at one of God’s play dates.
He knows the scene,
she’d say.
From start to finish already. Even if we don’t have a clue.
When the men came, something stepped outside of me and watched with its arms folded. Nodding. As the men drove us away, that something lifted its hand and waved. I watched it. I
was
it. It’s gone now.

Lulu lived five doors down from us. Earlier that evening, before the bullets came through the kitchen window, she had tiptoed up to my room and hugged me the way she had done so many nights before.

We had known we would be leaving but didn’t know exactly when. Each morning before school, Lulu and I hugged each other hard—thankful for another day together. Each night, we cried and said our good-byes. Lulu and I had been born in the same hospital. Our mothers said we turned toward each other in our neighboring incubators and smiled. We were both born a month too soon in the middle of the night. We both weighed less than five pounds. When Lulu left my room, I pressed my face against the pane and cried.

Cameron was in her own room. Months later, she would tell me that when the men came, she was in the middle of writing a letter to Joseph.
I think I loved him once,
she said.
I hope you don’t ever have to know what it’s like to leave a guy you loved.

I loved Lulu,
I said.
And Grandma. And Matt Cat. It’s different, though. The way I felt for Joseph, before he started saying all that stupid stuff and showing his true colors, is . . . I don’t know. It’s something in your heart. You don’t get it. You’re too young.

I’m old enough to know we only have one heart,
I said.
Love is love.

 

 

 

THE MEN WERE QUIET, TALL. ONE BLACK. ONE white. When Cameron asked where the next place was, the men said it was too unsafe to tell us. We climbed into a van with blacked-out windows. Matt Cat had gone to live with Grandma two days before. But as the van rumbled off, I swore I could hear him howling.

The black man wore a yellow jacket. The white one wore a peacoat. The black one’s hair was cut like my father’s—a little on the top, the sides and back shaved close. He was the one who told us what our last name would be.

You’ll have to pick new first ones,
he said.

Toswiah was my grandmother’s name and her mother’s name, too. Whenever I told someone my name for the first time, I had to spell it out for them.
Toswiah,
I’d say slowly—pronouncing it
Tos-wee-ah
so that it didn’t get mispronounced. Then I’d wait for them to go on about how unusual it was. I am tall and narrow like Cameron and Mama. We wear our hair the same way—pulled back into a braid that stops between our shoulders. Our hair is kinky enough to stay braided without any elastics or barrettes. We all three have the same square jaw and sharp cheekbones.
Striking,
my mother used to say.
Does that mean pretty?
I’d ask her. But she’d just smile and shake her head, tell me being pretty didn’t matter. Cameron has eyebrows like our father—thick and black. Sometimes I think she’s beautiful. Sometimes I can’t stand the sight of her. The night we left Denver, we were dressed almost alike—blue hooded sweatshirts underneath purple down vests. Cameron was wearing the tights and turtleneck from her cheerleading outfit and a long black skirt. I was wearing jeans.

Are you twins,
the black one asked.

Of course not,
Cameron said.
Jeez!

Toswiah and Cameron—Jonathan and Shirley Green’s girls. My name is Evie now.
Evil Evie. Evie Ivie Over. Here comes a teacher with a big fat stick. . . .

For more than thirteen years I’d been Toswiah. Then came an end to that system of things.

First they took our names away.

Then the house would be sold, the money from it tunneled through this system and that system until it became a check for Evan Thomas. We were running away from death in a black minivan with a brown leather interior. It wasn’t our car, the old brown BMW. That car was behind us, too. As we drove away, I closed my eyes, trying to remember Lulu and that yellow moon. The night got quieter. I knew Denver was growing smaller and smaller behind me.

It was late May. The air smelled like pine and cedar. I took a deep breath and tried to hold it. Tried to hold on. Cameron pulled her vest over her head and cried. Our mother sat with her hands in her lap. Daddy stared at the blacked-out window. His face was blank as the pane.

When I closed my eyes, I wasn’t in the van anymore. I was back at our house, waving good-bye to these strangers. Holding my father’s hand.

9

AFTER WE LEFT DENVER, DAYS GOT ALL WEIRD. We’d wake up and it would be Thursday and I couldn’t remember the weekend before. For the three months in between this apartment and Denver we stayed in a place called a safe house. It was an old motel, falling apart and empty save for us and the men who’d driven us out of Denver. Each morning, Mama would give them a grocery list and one of them would leave, returning hours later with bags of food and supplies. Sometimes Daddy had to go with them and testify. When he left, minutes passed slowly and the hours went on and on. When Daddy returned, the sun was usually down. He’d look tired. On those evenings, he went into his bedroom without saying anything and wouldn’t come out again till late the next afternoon. No one would tell us where we were, and after a while we stopped asking. I knew we were still in Colorado, because I could see the mountains. But there were no houses nearby and no major roads. The television got only three channels. One night as I was flipping among them, I saw my father’s face on the screen.
Turn it off,
my mother said quickly. After that, we were only allowed to watch the videos the men brought back for us. Before they gave them to us, they took them out of their plastic rental cases so we wouldn’t even know the name of the video store.

“I feel like I’m going crazy,” Cameron said. “I feel like I’m going to
die.
”

I didn’t tell her, but I felt like we had already died. We were nowhere. We were nothing. Two grown-ups and two kids waiting to be reborn. Cameron cried and screamed outright, but I cried late at night, in the darkness, holding the sobs in so hard, it felt like my chest was going to explode.

I wanted to be brave.

Three months—of not seeing anybody but each other and the men who were working on the case until me and Cameron thought we were going to rip each other’s necks off or die trying.

“I think I’m from another family,” Cameron said one night. Our beds were about three feet apart. The room was tiny and smelled of old carpeting and rust. I stared at Cameron’s profile. The moon was coming in through the window, and the little bit of light from it made her look about a hundred years old.

“I think I was switched at birth and separated from my real parents,” she said. “They’re sane and living somewhere in Colorado. They have some other children, including your real sister, who they took home by mistake, instead of me. She’s a lot more like you than I am. They go on picnics. My real mother’s into line dancing. It embarrasses my real sister and brother, just like it would embarrass me. Your real sister doesn’t care, though. It makes my mother happy.”

Cameron sighed, then turned toward the window. “The name she gave your real sister is supposed to be my name. Your sister still has it. Nothing in her life has changed. She’s happy and well-adjusted.” I could hear her crying softly. “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

“It’s not forever,” I said.

She sniffed. “Not this skanky place. But everything else is. Everything.”

I turned onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. Lulu was back in that real world. I stuck my arm into the air. In the weird moonlight, it looked dark blue and skinny enough to be out of some creep show. I reached my hand up higher, stretching it until my shoulder and back hurt. If I stretched it back in time, back around Lulu’s shoulder, it would get cut right off. Someone would find it back in Denver, recognize it as part of the Green family and trace it right to us here, where nobody’s supposed to know where we are.

“I’m going back someday.”

“You can’t,” Cameron said. “You know that.”

“Someday,” I said again. “I don’t believe in forever. That’s too long a time.”

I didn’t tell her that Lulu and I had made promises. We’d go to the same college. We’d room together. We had already picked the school—University of Wisconsin in Madison, because Lulu’s father had gone there and always talked about how big and beautiful it was. Far enough away from Denver and this place. I’d have a new name. I’d be taller. But from the incubator till thirteen is a long, long time. She’d remember me.