If You Come Softly (9 page)

“Miah ... ?”

“Be right there,” he said, taking off his jacket and loosening his tie. He could hear voices and laughter—Lois’s laughter rising up higher than everyone else’s. It had always been like this-the house full of people. When his mother and father were still together, he had liked it. But heading into the room now, he realized again how rarely he got to be alone with his father for more than a short time.

“This my boy I talk so much about.” His father grinned. He was sitting in an overstuffed chair, a beer on the table beside him. Lois was leaning on the chair behind him, her arms draped around his shoulders. She was pretty-with curly hair and clear red brown skin. Not as pretty as his mama but pretty enough to turn heads. His father looked good this evening, relaxed and smiling, his long legs propped up on an ottoman.

Two couples sat on the couch smiling and looking like they had been there a while. Miah mumbled hellos to them, leaned forward to shake everyone’s hand the way he had done since he was three.

“Oh, my lord, Norman, this child is
beautiful,”
one of the women said, an older plump woman with short locks. “Where’d you adopt him?”

They laughed. Miah smiled but didn’t say anything. He knew he looked a lot like his dad but mostly like his mother. His dad was tall and brown with jet-black hair that had begun to recede and a wide opened smile.

“How old are you? Twenty-five?” the woman teased.

“Fifteen,” Miah said. He grinned. It always made him feel good when older women flirted with him.

“Well, I can wait,” she said.

“You better wait until I die,” the man sitting beside her said. “ ‘Cause
no one
is going
nowhere
until I do.”

They laughed again.

“Sit down, Miah,” his father said. “Get yourself a soda or something.”

“Ahm—I have a lot of homework.”

“Percy working you?”

He nodded to his father. “They’re trying to. I think I have it under control.”

“You eat anything yet?” Lois Ann asked. “I can make you something right fast.”

“Thanks. I got a slice of pizza after practice. I’m okay.”

“Well, you go get your work on then,” his father said. “I’ll be up later on to say good night.”

“You still getting tucked in?” the heavy woman asked.

Miah smiled but didn’t say anything. “It was nice meeting you all.”

“See you when you’re twenty-five,” the woman said.

 

 

Upstairs, alone in his room, Jeremiah lay back on his bed and stared up at the ceiling.
I kissed her. I kissed Ellie. Elisha Sidney Eisen.
He wanted to scream, to run to his window, throw it open and yell it to the world.
Right there in Central Park with the sun coming through the leaves and everything around all right. Everything all right.

Outside the sun was beginning to set. He wanted to tell somebody-not the way he and his homeboys talked, bragging about which girl they’d been with, giving all the details, lying mostly, and slapping each other five over it. No. Not like that. He wanted to sit with his head bent toward somebody, whispering-how strange and perfect it all was. How ... how
precise
and brilliant. Yeah, those were the words he’d use if someone was there. If someone was listening.

Miah sighed and turned toward the window. He could hear his father and Lois Ann laughing with their friends. He could hear girls outside chanting,
Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, one, ten, twenty, thirty,

forty, two.
And in the distance, he heard the vague sound of a basketball, someone bouncing it slowly, some young kid somewhere, learning how to handle the ball, how to keep it near him. How to keep control.

He remembered those early days-the ball feeling big and unmanageable in his little hands. He remembered trying to dribble with two hands and the big boys saying,
Nah, Little Miah
—
you got to handle it. You got to use one hand. Make the ball yours. Show it who’s the boss.
And the first time he felt a leather ball leave his hands and sail into the basket—a leather ball his father had given him for his ninth birthday. How different it felt from the vinyl ones he had always known.
Don’t use this playing ball in the park,
his father had warned. But, of course, he had taken it to the park and played game after game there until the ball was ragged and dead.

And he remembered being older, running along the sidewalk, feeling like he was flying, and the ball, a vinyl one again, right there beside him, flying beside him like they were connected by some invisible string.

Last Sunday, he had helped Little Ray from down the block dribble, helped him wrap his tiny six-year-old hands around the ball, stood behind him as he lifted it toward the basket and missed. You gotta
want it to go in, Little Ray,
he’d said.
You got to believe it can.
And they had practiced shot after shot until finally, late in the afternoon, the ball sailed in smoothly, without touching the backboard or the rim. Swish. And Little Ray had grinned, jumped up and down, and slapped Miah five.
Yeah,
Miah had said.
I know the feeling.

A WEEK PASSED. AND THEN ANOTHER. AND SUDDENLY it was cold and the whole city seemed to be wrapped in a thin layer of wind and rain.

Early Saturday morning, Susan called to apologize again for not making it home for Yom Kippur. I sat at the top of the stairs, listening to Marion give her a hard time. “Not one of my kids showed up,” she said.

Marion was an expert at the guilt thing. “Don’t forget to tell her that you and Daddy and the kid that is still stuck here didn’t do anything for Yom Kippur. Make sure you tell her we broke the fast at Wendy‘s—and that you had a
cheeseburger.”

Marion put her finger to her lips and scowled at me.

“If I told her that,” she said, after she’d hung up, “she’d find a way not to show up for Hanukkah either. You want to spend that holiday too with just me and your father?”

I shook my head.

“Anyway, Anne called while you were in the shower,” Marion said. “She said give her a call as soon as you can.”

“What else did she say?” We hadn’t spoke since the afternoon I told her about Jeremiah.

Marion gave me a puzzled look. “To call her—what—do you think she’s going to tell
me
what it’s about. Does anyone tell me anything about anything.”

I smiled, tucked my hair behind my ear, and headed back toward my room. “The rumor is you have a big mouth, Marion.”

“As if I care about commitment ceremonies and boys ...” Marion called.

I turned and glared at her. I hated Anne. “What exactly did she tell you?”

Marion shrugged. “That you two had fallen out over a boy. And I’m guessing it’s not because you like the same one either—since boys aren’t exactly Anne’s type.” She looked at me a moment, then grew serious. “You can talk to me too, you know ... Ellie. We can be close if you want. We can talk about things.”

I sighed and sat down on the stairs again. How could I tell her it was too late to start growing close-that we had lost that chance years and years ago?

“There’s nothing to talk about ... Ma,” I said softly. “When there is, I promise, I’ll talk to you.”

Marion nodded, turned to the sink, and began washing breakfast dishes. She tucked one foot behind the other in a way that made my eyes fill up. She looked broken. Defeated. Lonely.

No ONE AT PERCY SAID ANYTHING. IT WAS STRANGE the way the students seemed to turn away from it, from him and Ellie holding hands on the Percy stairs. From his arm around Ellie’s shoulder as they walked through the halls. Turn away from them kissing outside their classrooms. Sometimes Miah imagined their turning away in slow motion-the eyes cast downward, the heads moving slowly above the collars of Percy uniforms.

Yeah, they looked, and once, Miah had caught two black girls staring at him and Ellie and whispering. When he looked up, the girls turned away. They didn’t seem angry or surprised or hurt. Nothing like that. Just two girls talking-saying something about him and Ellie, then getting caught. And, slowly, turning away.

Even Braun. Even Rayshon and Kennedy. Some days Miah thought he’d ask them—try to get it going the way he used to do with his homeboys. Maybe mention the afternoons they spent in Central Park. Get them all talking about the girls they’d been with and see what happened when he got around to
really
talking about Ellie. Would they turn away then? Ask what it was like with her? Maybe Kennedy or Rayshon would ask if it was different with white girls. Or Joe and Braun would wonder about the black girls at school. Maybe all of them already knew.

“Can I take your picture?” a kid asked one morning.

They had been sitting on the stairs, waiting for the bell to ring. There were other Percy kids around them, talking and looking over notes. Two boys were doing tricks on skateboards, jumping over the fire hydrant and twirling on two wheels.

Miah looked at Ellie. When she nodded, he nodded too, and the camera flashed on them.

Then the kid with the camera was gone. And the students around them were gathering their books together and heading inside. First period bell rang and the kids with the skateboards rushed past them, their boards jammed under their arms. Someone said hi to Ellie. A guy from the team tapped Miah on the head as he passed him.

The morning moved on as if this moment, the moment of him and Ellie, had always been here.

And always would be.

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, ANNE USED TO TALK TO ME ALL the time about love. She said sometimes it happened slowly, an investment of work and time over months and years. She said that kind of love was sort of like the stock market-that, little by little, you put all of yourself into it and hoped for a decent return. She said there were other kinds too-the quick-fix binge love—when a person bounced from person to person without taking a bit of time out to examine what went wrong with the last one.

“And there’s the Marion-Edward love,” she said once, sitting across from me, her fingers against her mouth the way they always were when she was thinking. “When a person thinks they know somebody inside out and then boom-one day she just ups and leaves. Thing is
knowing
and
loving
are different.”

“Do you think they ever loved each other, Anne?”

Her eyes grew dark then, serious. “Once. Maybe. A long time ago. They were so excited about it, they jumped right in. And then they were lost.” She shrugged. “And now they’re old-and each is all the other knows-so they just hold on.”

“To what?”

She shrugged again. “To whatever.”

Then we were silent for a while. I sat against the fireplace imagining my mother and father in the middle of the ocean, stuck out there, but each keeping the other above water.

“And sometimes,” Anne said softly, “there’s just plain love, Ellie. No reason for it, no need to explain.”

Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee, and grinned. “Perfect love,” she said.

“And what’s that like?”

“When you find it, lil sis. You’ll know.”

Some mornings, there is only this in the world—Jeremiah’s hand reaching for my own. There isn’t Marion’s warning about time making changes we can’t ever anticipate. Only Miah’s hand in mine and a voice much louder than Marion‘s—my own-saying,
Take this moment and run, Ellie.

IT SNOWED THE MORNING HE MET ELLIE AT THE LIBRARY. Jeremiah climbed the stairs slowly, lifting his knapsack higher up on his shoulders as he walked. He had always loved this library with its two stone lions guarding the Fifth Avenue entrance. When he was little, his mama would bring him here and they’d sit for hours reading poetry in the quiet high-ceilinged rooms.

Ellie was leaning against one of the lions, the collar of her pea coat pulled up around her ears, her eyes soft and bright. She had braided her hair, one long neat braid that fell from beneath the ski cap she wore down across her back. Jeremiah made his way toward her, feeling clumsy suddenly.

“You look nice,” she said, leaning forward to kiss him. He smiled then, relaxing. She made him feel all right. Everytime she smiled or kissed him or called his name in the hallway, he felt it. That everything everywhere was going to be all right.

“You too,” he said.

They stared at each other without saying anything.

“It’s snowing,” Ellie said. “Can you believe it?” He shook his head. Above them the sky was dark, blue-gray. Ellie’s eyes changed with the weather. Now they too were blue-gray, like smoke.

“You want to go inside?” The snow was starting to come down harder.

“No.”

“Me neither.”

Around them, people rushed up and down Fifth Avenue.

“I guess we have to though, huh?”

Miah shrugged. “Yeah. Guess. Still doesn’t mean I want to.”

Ellie smiled, then leaned forward and kissed him again.

A black woman eyed them suspiciously as she headed into the library. Jeremiah felt Ellie’s hand close tighter around his own.

“You think it’ll always be like this, Miah?” she asked after the woman had disappeared through the door. “The looks and people saying stuff. I hate it. I mean, I really hate it.” She sighed, pressing her head back against the lion.

He nodded, loving this about her too-that in the little bit of time they’d been together, Ellie had come to see it, to understand how stupid the world could be sometimes.

“I think of it ...” Jeremiah said slowly. “Like weather or something. You got your rain, your snow, your sunshine. Always changing but still constant, you know?”

Ellie frowned, shaking her head. “That’s a bit too deep for me.”