Miracle's Boys (7 page)

“Then Daddy was pulling the woman and the dog out of the water,” Ty'ree said. “And far away I could hear sirens.” He looked down at his hands. “Sirens and my own self
screaming.”

I STARED AT THE BOTTOM OF MY EMPTY CUP. Ty'ree had stopped talking, but I couldn't look at him. Not right away. Nobody had ever told me that he was right there watching our daddy slip into that frozen pond. Everybody had known it, but nobody had told me. It was like a secret—a lie that had been in my life since before I was born.

I could hear people talking all around us. Talking and laughing. I tried to imagine my daddy running out into that pond, but I couldn't. I could only see Ty'ree there, screaming from under that tree.

“How come y'all never told me?” I whispered. I wanted to scream it, but I didn't know what the words would do. Maybe they'd just sink into the walls and disappear. Maybe they'd reappear years and years later—in front of some boy who had spent his whole life thinking otherwise.

“Why?” Ty'ree asked.

I looked up at him to see if he was serious. What'd he mean,
why?
‘Cause I was his brother. 'Cause it was my daddy. ‘Cause it mattered.

“ ‘Cause,” I said. “Just 'cause.”

“You think it would have made a difference if you had grown up knowing that I was there?”

I nodded.

“Why?”

“How come you asking why, Ty‘ree? You must've known it would've made some difference, 'cause y'all decided not to tell me. I'm not
stupid.”

“You know how you always want to know what were the last words I said to Mama?” Ty'ree asked.

I nodded.

“Well, it always makes me think of the last words I said to Daddy.”

“You know what they were?”

“Yeah. The lady was in shock when the ambulance got there. But Daddy was okay, so they let him and me go home.”

Ty'ree swallowed and looked away from me. He stared around the restaurant a minute before going on. “They gave him this blanket to wear even though he kept insisting he was fine in all those wet clothes. But he put the blanket on anyway and the cops drove us home. Mama nearly went crazy when she saw him. She was scared something had happened to me.”

“Where was Charlie?”

“By the time we got home, Mama'd put him down for a nap.”

He got quiet again. I waited, and when he started talking, his voice was real low.

“After Daddy got out of those wet clothes and climbed into bed, I came into the room. I asked him if he thought the dog was going to be okay.” Ty'ree smiled. It was the saddest smile I'd ever seen in my life.

“Then what happened?”

“Daddy said, ‘It's all right, T. I'm warm now. I'm warm now.' ”

Ty'ree shook his head.

“I wouldn't talk about it for a long time. Charlie used to always ask me about what happened, but I wouldn't say. And I made Mama promise not to talk about it. I wanted to make believe I wasn't there. Figured if nobody talked about it, I wouldn't go around blaming myself 'cause I had told Daddy to help them. And you know why I told him to help them?”

I shook my head. Something was coming to me—slow and clear as pancake syrup. Charlie, I kept thinking. Charlie.

“ ‘Cause I wanted a stupid dog!” Ty'ree said. “I wanted a dog more than anything in the world, and because of it I lost my dad. You know what that does to you?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. But Ty'ree didn't hear me. “He would've gone in there anyway,” I said a little bit louder. “Right?”

Ty‘ree shrugged and kept looking around the restaurant. He was sort of bobbing his head, like he was hearing music inside it. The waitress came over and asked us if we wanted anything else. When Ty'ree didn't say anything, I ordered two refills.

Sometimes I stared in the mirror and was surprised to see how little and lost I looked. That was how Ty'ree looked now—like he was waiting for somebody to come and take his hand and show him the way home.

“How come Charlie didn't go to the park with you?”

Ty'ree kept bobbing his head. “Too small,” he said, still looking out at the restaurant. “Daddy wanted to read his paper. Didn't want to have to keep an eye out for him. Sundays were me and Daddy's time.

“The thing is,” ‘Ty'ree said, “Charlie wasn't there for any of it—for Daddy, for Mama. And it's made him mad. Mad and helpless.”

I shook my head again, trying to shake Charlie thoughts out of it, but I couldn't. All those years Charlie must have grown up watching Mama and Ty'ree at the table trying to figure out how to keep us eating and wearing clothes, and him not being able to help. All those years of him being too small or too much trouble. Him not being the one Daddy wanted to take to the park.

I looked around the coffee shop. There were a lot of people in it now. A woman was sitting in one corner by herself reading a magazine. I wondered if she'd ever been jogging in Central Park. Wondered if she'd ever had or wanted a dog or had a brother who was mad all the way down to his bones.

“We got all this stuff to carry around with us,” Ty'ree said “You know how they say drug addicts got a monkey on their back?”

“Nah.”

“Well, that's what people say. And it's like we got monkeys on our backs, except it ain't drugs.”

“You wanted that dog,” I said. “And I wanted some breakfast. Just regular stuff people want. We didn't know what was gonna happen or anything. Charlie didn't want anything from them... I don't think. I mean, maybe he just wanted them—maybe he wanted Daddy to take him to the park and you and Mama to let him help with stuff. But that ain't no monkey.”

The waitress brought us refills, and Ty'ree waited till she left again before he started talking.

“Yeah, it is,” he said. “Charlie got the biggest monkey on his back. I can remember the last thing I said to Daddy and you can remember the last thing you said to Mama. Least we got to be there. But not Charlie. And I think he carries that around. It's more like a gorilla on his back than a monkey.”

“Nobody told him to go hold up that store,” I said.

“But he did,” Ty'ree said. “And while he was gone, me and you had each other after Mama died. And he just had Rahway, you know.”

“It turned him mad,” I said.

Ty'ree nodded. “And I don't know where he's gonna take that mad,” he said. “I really don't.”

“Should send him to Dr. Vernon,” I said. “That shrink y'all sent me to.”

Ty'ree shook his head. “We don't have Dr. Vernon money anymore. And Charlie said he didn't want to go to a psychologist—said he had to see one when he was in Rahway. And since he hasn't really gotten into trouble again, I can't make him.”

“But he's evil incarnate,” I said. I kept thinking about the way Newcharlie's face twisted up every time he called me Milagro killer. It reminded me of somebody possessed.

“Evil incarnate?”
Ty'ree smiled and shook his head. “You'll probably grow up to write those thriller movies where everyone's always screaming.”

“If I have to keep living with Newcharlie, I will. I'll have firsthand experience.”

TY‘REE WAS ALL RIGHT AFTER MAMA DIED. BUT I was all wrong. The year before, I'd seen this show about snakes. They showed this one snake slipping out of its old skin and then leaving that old skin on the ground behind him. That's how I felt—like Mama'd been my skin. But I hadn't grown a new skin underneath, like that snake had. I was just blood and bones spreading all over the place. Every night Ty'ree stayed with me in my room till I cried myself to sleep. And the next morning he'd find me sleeping curled up on the floor beside his bed.

After a few weeks of me ending up on the floor, he called Aunt Cecile, and she came back to New York and asked around trying to find a doctor I could go to—a psychologist. Some afternoons I'd come home from school to find Aunt Cecile sitting at the dining-room table writing down and crossing out numbers as she talked on the phone. And some evenings I'd catch her and Ty'ree whispering about different doctors, their fees, and social service benefits.

Then one afternoon Aunt Cecile announced that she'd found a person I could talk to named Dr. Vernon. That Wednesday and for a whole lot of Wednesdays after that, Aunt Cecile would take me to Dr. Vernon—an old man with a nice office in Harlem. His office was all wood and windows and smelled like heat and dust and warm blankets. Smells I'd always liked. So while Aunt Cecile sat in the waiting room, I went into Dr. Vernon's office. I wasn't afraid, 'cause the warm-blanket smell felt like it was covering me up, protecting me.

The first time I went to Dr. Vernon, he put some paper and some markers on his desk and asked me to draw a picture for him. There was a little table in the corner, and he told me I could sit there and draw for as long as I liked. But I didn't want to draw. I sat at that table for a long time just feeling the warm blanket around me and staring at that blank white paper and those markers until Dr. Vernon told me it was okay to go.

The second time I went, Dr. Vernon gave me the paper and the markers again. I wrote my name in blue.
Lafayette Miguel Bailey.
Then I wrote Ty‘ree's whole name, which is Ty'ree Alfonso Bailey. And Charlie's name, Charles Javier Bailey. I stared at the paper until Dr. Vernon came over to see. He was tall and thin the way Ty'ree said my daddy had been. But Dr. Vernon's hair was white like Aunt Cecile's. And he had a white beard—a skinny black Santa Claus. I stared at the paper, and I could feel him standing above me staring down at it, too.

“That's your family,” he said.

I shrugged.

“Any other members?”

I shook my head.

“How does that make you feel?” Dr. Vernon asked.

I shrugged again. “Like nothing.”

“You feel like you're nothing, Lafayette?”

“No. I know I'm something. I'm just saying that not having a mama and a daddy don't feel like nothing. It's just the way things are.”

“And how does that make you feel?” he asked again.

I stared down at the paper, at me and my brothers' names. It was a lot of white space where there wasn't any writing. I had tried to write our names real big, but they still looked small, almost like nothing against all that white.

“I want my mama back,” I whispered.

Dr. Vernon patted me on the shoulder and said, “I know you do, Lafayette.”

We stayed like that a long time—me staring down at the paper, Dr. Vernon softly patting my shoulder. We didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say. After a long while had passed, Dr. Vernon said, “You can go now, Lafayette.”

But I didn't want to go. I liked the way it felt to have Dr. Vernon patting my shoulder. I liked how deep and soft his voice was. So I came back. Every Wednesday for a whole year. And while Dr. Vernon stood above me or sat beside me, I drew pictures and told him what I remembered and what I wished for. I told him about the hairy hands that came at my throat in the middle of the night, the hands that wanted to choke me for not saving Mama. And how the only way I could keep them away from me was to go into Mama's room, where she was waiting for me, where she told me to lie down and go to sleep, that everything would be all right soon.

“What does ‘all right' mean, Lafayette?” Dr. Vernon asked me one Wednesday. By then Aunt Cecile had long gone back down south, and I took the train by myself. I'd gotten used to the train ride, to Dr. Vernon's wood-and-window office, to his soft voice telling me all the things I'd done right in my life and how it wasn't my fault Mama had died.

I looked down at the picture I'd been drawing. It was a picture of me and Ty‘ree walking together down our block. Ty'ree had his hand around my shoulder and was smiling. I had my hands in my pockets and was looking up at him.

I held the picture up so Dr. Vernon could get a closer look at it. “This,” I said, feeling a smile coming on.

“If you're scared at night—” Dr. Vernon began, but I didn't let him finish.

“Then Ty‘ree's there for me. Ty'ree and Mama.”

“Where's your mama, Lafayette?” Dr. Vernon asked softly. His white eyebrows crinkled, and he looked at me like he was searching my face for something.

“She died,” I whispered. “I know that. But I still feel her.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

I looked at Dr. Vernon. It was almost time to go. He'd told me a while back that this would be my last visit with him, that I'd done all the work I needed to do here. He said I was gonna be okay.

Dr. Vernon smiled and patted my shoulder. “You can go now, Lafayette. Maybe I'll see you around sometime.”

“Yeah,” I said. When I got to the door, I turned to him and waved good-bye, then ran back over and hugged him hard. “Maybe,” I said.

IT WAS ONLY A LITTLE BIT AFTER TEN WHEN ME and Ty‘ree got back Friday night. The apartment was dark, which meant Newcharlie hadn't come home. He didn't have to be home until eleven thirty on Friday and Saturday, and most times he squeezed in right as the second hand was moving toward eleven forty-five. Ty'ree didn't fuss with him about that. A long time ago Ty‘ree had said he was going to choose his arguments with Newcharlie or else they'd be fighting every minute of the day. Even though people call him St. Ty'ree, he's not really. He's flesh and blood and makes mistakes just like other people. Once I saw him push this man out of his way when he was running for the train. It was like he didn't even see the man as a human being. And the year before, when his girlfriend dumped him, he was just pure evil to live with for a while. And not telling me till now that he'd been there when my daddy went in that lake. Nah, he wasn't all good.