All was quiet with Momma and me in that hospital room. Not even a history existed behind the plastic wall. There, she was not my father’s wife, his punching bag, nor his cash register. She was not eighteen and soon to be the mother of four minus one. She was a nurse, a nurturer, things so easy to be when all is quiet.
That is why I think my sister died. Too much noise. She might have made it if she’d have lived behind a tent like I did. I sometimes dream of her, the one who is dead, and I see her inside Momma, rushed to the hospital, doctors barking orders, white all around swallowing her existence. Momma must have cried the same tears, averted the same discerning eyes, but with a profoundly different outcome. I am here. She is not. That baby, my big sister, a casualty before birth. Momma reminds me I would not have been conceived if she had lived. I owe her my life, this girl I do not know.
I was seven when I first learned of my sister’s death and I felt immense guilt, as if my living had stolen life from her. I feared my spirit had celebrated from the Heavens, knowing her death meant life for me. Once I learned of her passing, I set out to right the wrong I was certain I’d caused. My job was to give her life even though she’d never had breath. I gave her an identity; she was my twin. And a name; she was LaTanya. I worked to see her running with me through grass, heading to the bus stop on chilly mornings, but she was never there. I tried to imagine us, together, playing house and combing the hair of the one doll we shared, but only my hands tangled through the doll’s hair.
No matter how I tried, no amount of rewinding could undo LaTanya’s brief existence; one in which Momma’s insides churned with hunger while she sat quietly, pressing the side of her belly. My brother, Champ, barely one-year-old, sat next to Momma on the floor. Hungry too, he rocked side to side, gumming his lips as if they were something to be savored.
There was no food for Momma, which meant there was no milk for him. When water mixed with the last of the sugar didn’t satisfy, Momma let him gnaw on her nipples even though they were dry. She sat in a chair, one of the only furnishings left in their sparse apartment, waiting for my father to come home. He had not been at work, nor had he been running errands. Rather he’d been riding life from one woman, one party, one drink to the next. Momma’s home, his family, was the pit stop he slammed into only after his wheels had worn off and his body was dented past the point of function.
Despite his less than pristine condition, he was the man she’d married, which meant he was Champ’s daddy since he’d graciously given his name. Now, he was not so gracious. He had not lived in the titles of daddy nor husband since Champ was born.
Momma heard the door pull open. The incoming cold sucked the warm out of the room. My father’s frazzled frame chilled the space even more. He wore a Kangol hat, unfashionably tilted to the back. His skin, the color of cigarette ashes, was dry. The whites of his eyes were a rusted red. His lips held a cigarette pressed between them. His pants, once a sandy beige, were decorated with dark, camouflage-like splotches. He wore a striped shirt, one that used to be too small, which now draped over him like a poncho. He saw Momma sitting in front of the door, straightened, and then pressed one shoulder into the space behind him. He fingered his Kangol, slipped the lip to the front, turned his head to the side, and smiled.
“Hey Lois,” he cooed, as he slunk to her and placed his hands on both arms of the chair, becoming a living cage around Momma. He leaned in, went for a kiss on the lips, even as Momma’s hands were raised and her head pressed into the fabric of the chair. He kissed her anyway, tongued her neck, stuck his hand down her shirt and asked, “Did you miss me?”
When his kisses weren’t returned, he clamped his hands around her wrists, raised her body to his, fixed one hand on the small of her back, and held her other arm in place. They danced. He swung her around the room, as her feet slid in objection across the hardwood floor. She arched her back outward, attempted to bend away at the waist, but his grip was stronger than her opposition. Finally, her body went limp. That, he found less entertaining, so he hustled her back to the chair. Then he found a new partner, Champ, whom he raised over his head and swung around the room. A squelch exited Champ’s mouth. Not finished with the crying that had occupied him minutes before, his body stiffened and tears covered his face. Momma grabbed at my father and jumped to reach her son. Carl laughed, amused by what he deemed her aspirations to rejoin.
He welcomed her back to the dance. The higher she jumped, the higher he held Champ. Eventually, he was holding him with one hand, arm fully extended, over his and Momma’s head. She continued jumping, reaching, afraid Carl would decide to play keep-away even though there was no one on the other side to catch.
The jumping dance continued until his arm cramped. Annoyed with his own amusement, he went to Momma and slapped her across her face. Accustomed to his beatings, she did not cry, so he slapped Champ in the face and pulled tears from her that way. Momma screamed until he lobbed Champ into her arms, rubbed his belly, and asked, “What’s to eat?”
Momma, watching him through the slits of her eyes, saw a shadow of the man she’d loved so briefly, the one who’d courted her at Cradock High despite the fact that she was pregnant, the one who’d spoken to Champ in her belly with a tenderness that made her envious. During the earlier days, when they shared lunch in the school library, where they read poems he’d written, he begged softly for a kiss and promised he’d take care of her.
Less than two years later, he’d grown into a lanky, drunken man who broke everything he touched.
“What’s to eat?” Momma responded. “Where is the money I gave you?”
He did not look at her as he opened and closed the refrigerator door.
“What money?” he said as he checked the cabinets and donned that smile again.
“The last of the money we had.”
“Oh, that money,” he said, this time with a laugh and no smile. “I lost it on the way to the store.”
Momma thought of the fives, tens, and twenties that should have been littering the sidewalks of Portsmouth, Virginia. He’d lost money, time, wedding vows, and memories. More of him was lost than she’d ever found.
“Carl, you know that money was for food. I pray you didn’t drink it up again,” she said.
“Look, girl, I was just having some fun. Ain’t nobody drinking nothing up.” He said this as he slid toward her. “Lois, you so serious, gotta learn to live hard, girl, ’cause when you get old, you gone be soft.” He accented his last sentence with a thrust and a wind of his pelvis.
“This is not funny, Carl,” she said. “We have no food.” She rubbed her belly. “Champ is hungry.” She pointed at him on the floor. “I am tired.” She pulled her hand through her hair. “And I am alone.” With that, her hand went to her face to stop tears she did not want to fall. “All I have is two dollars and that is only enough to buy milk. I can’t take this anymore. I’m sick. The baby’s sick and I can’t even count on you to go to the store.”
“Give me the money,” he said with a grin. “I’ll go to the