By the time he returned, the bullfrog was croaking again. Erycha was listening for the occasional croaks and she almost didn’t hear her father’s small, resigned knock-knock noise on the apartment door. Then she heard it only faintly. But as she listened closer, she heard her mother rolling over in bed. How she made that old contraption creak and wail in ways that no inflatable air mattress ever could. She listened to her father’s retreating steps down the staircase and onto the cement walkway, where in the silence he fumbled clumsily through the cardboard boxes. But she didn’t hear him leave. She didn’t hear his brogans go down that walkway any further. The sound of his shoes told her where he stood and where he walked, and for now they made no sound and no stand at all, as if he had simply stopped.
She heard the bullfrog croaking.
She reached her head over the bedsheets and looked around. It was safe to come back into the world, she decided. When she pulled out of the sheets, the mixture of silence and sound felt strange in her ears: it was easing her through sleep and calling her out into the world all at once.
Excitement thrilled through her as she slipped out of the bedroom that was not a bedroom and past her mother’s closed door, out the apartment and down to where her father lay sleeping in amongst his scattered life. This was another new dance she’d made for herself, except now she had a partner to hold her in his arms.
Then, dawn. The boxes were looking down at them from the staircase when they came awake in each other’s arms. She noticed that some had been turned on their sides, their contents spilled along the steps. But despite all that, her father started in thanking God and Stevie Wonder and Raphael Saadiq: he made it seem like a miracle that he got to wake up with his stuff all put out of doors just as long as no one had robbed or cut him and his daughter up. “Thank you,” he mumbled. “Thank you. For not lettin these niggas do nothin. For not lettin none of these heartless-ass people take us out. Thank you.”
Erycha had never been afraid of her neighbors or her neighborhood day or night. It was her neighborhood, her home, after all. So it surprised her to see her big strong dad getting all thankful for divine protection when all that had happened was that they went to sleep and woke up. What was there to be frightened of? she wondered. Scanning their quiet, familiar surroundings she didn’t see anything new or exciting or scary. “Why you scared?” she asked, looking into his dancing eyes. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head real slow. “Because.” She waited for more, but he didn’t elaborate.
Because. It was the kind of answer Erycha heard all the time in her classes and on the playground. It didn’t seem appropriate for any adult to be saying it and plain wrong for a dad-adult. Her teachers told her not to begin sentences with that word, and he told her to listen to her teachers, so why didn’t he have to, too?
“Because what?” she challenged him.
He looked at her with surprise and hurt. “Babygirl,” he said, his lips parting in the silence, his boyishly handsome face dropping as if suddenly loaded over with responsibility, “Babygirl.”
She stared back at him in frustration.
“Don’ turn into one ’a them type women. Please. For my sanity sake.”
It was only morning, but she already noticed his mood darkening over like a lowering sky: she could see the future as he saw it, not one but two women berating him. Telling him when to come and when to be gone, when to speak and when to elaborate even though he felt like he had already said enough. She was coming into intuition like into a bad cloud: her dad would never really leave. She realized that. He was too scared of something out there in the world to leave, and he was not enough of whatever it was her mother wanted him to be to make peace at home. He would always be somewhere between staying and going. Her poor daddy. He was about to go back up those stair-steps, pick up the boxes and return to whatever waited for him inside.
She felt him stir and then stand up, raising her off the ground with him. He held her there for a second, like a jewel, his and not his.
“OK, Erycha, I’ma drop you. We bout to go back up the stairs, K? Ladies first.”
“K.” She nodded. She seemed to have all the answers and he all the questions. “OK.”
She squirmed in his grasp, a signal to let her go. But he didn’t, not right away. She had the sense that he didn’t want his hands empty. She squirmed some more, but he kept her tucked in his arms. After her, there would only be boxes for him to hold and at that point he might as well be empty-handed. She wondered if her mother was waiting on them right now and listened for her call. She thought of the pagoda and the bullfrog, wondered if he was still in his little chamber, waiting for her too. It was nice to think that people and things thought of her and waited for and wanted her. Many years later, after she had become a college student and left her mother’s home for the last time, Erycha would buy a baby iguana that ate the rose petals from off the walls of her apartment building. The iguana would eventually grow to six feet in length counting its tail, and every day when she woke and left her room the iguana would see her and whack the thin wall with its thunderous tail, making the apartment shudder just a little. It was, she figured, its unique way of saying good morning and breaking the loneliness that was her life, just like the bullfrog of her girlhood had kept her company at night with its own reptilian kindness.
Ballet slippers might as well be glass slippers; matter-fact, might’s well be glass ceilings, Erycha thought. The ballet slippers she could buy, but it was all the expenses that purchasing the slippers entailed that became the problem. The slippers were an investment, followed by one expense after the next, so much money down the rabbit hole that her dancing life had become. There was no way to justify spending all that money, but once those slippers were on her feet again Erycha knew how hard it would be not to take the next step. Her whole body went tense at the thought of those slippers, like a noose drawn tight. The boy sitting next to her in the bleachers must have felt it, too, because he flinched a little and gave her a quick, concerned glance.
Erycha looked back at him. Couldn’t take her eyes off him now. She hadn’t had but two hours of sleep and figured the Kool-Aid red veins around her pupils probably made her look crazy. She noticed how the boy was leaning away from her and into his mother as he frowned back in her direction. He even lowered his gaze. But she couldn’t take her eyes off him.
Erycha didn’t know what college would be like. Already she was having trouble concentrating on what the student speaker wearing a gray U.S. Army T-shirt was preaching from his pulpit of a podium at the basketball gym’s center court. Her attention had run off and hid and no matter what the man said, he couldn’t call it back.
Sitting next to her but leaning away and into his mom, Touissant Robert Freeman wasn’t interested in ethnic diversity or a more perfect university culture or anything else that the student speaker had to say. The speaker was from the military, which meant that he probably knew a lot about the mercenaries and losers that populated college campuses. A speech along those lines, or to do with the coked-up Christian college kid who earlier that year went wilding like an act of God and burned down the neighborhood Buddhist temple, now that would make for an interesting speech. Touissant thought about the brand new mega church, its cement foundation snuffing out smoldering embers. The best stories never got told, or people long after the fact and far from the source mixed things up and got it all wrong.
He listened to the speaker firing off automatic rounds of platitudes, but his attention drifted to the girl sitting next to him: just a second prior she’d leaned into him out of carelessness or suggestion and he’d noticed the momentary friction of her skin on his. She was the color of chocolate and wood, her body small and light so that it only slightly moved him when she leaned