Those were the days of the broken things. Nana punched a hole through the wall. He smashed the television down onto the floor, and shattered every picture frame and lightbulb in the house. He called me a nosy cunt the night I caught him raving downstairs, and my mother ran up so that the two of us could hide from him.

We blocked the door to my bedroom with a chair, but soon he was pounding against it. “Fuck you both,” he said, and we could hear the sound of his shoulder smashing against the door, and we could see the way the door wanted to give from its hinges, wanted to let him in. And my mother answered, loud in prayer, “Lord, protect my son. Lord, protect my son.” I was afraid and I was angry. Who would protect us?

It was almost better when he was high. When he was high, he wasn’t sick; he wasn’t angry. He was subdued, quiet, gone. I saw him shoot up only once. On the couch, in the living room of our house, he plunged a needle into the crook of his elbow, and then he slipped away somewhere, oblivious to me and to everything else around him. I have never seen a needle since without thinking of him. I have preferred the flesh of mice to that of humans because I never want to put a needle into an elbow. I cannot see a median cubital vein and not see my brother nodding off and away on our couch.

    How do I talk about the day he died? I don’t remember that morning, and my journal entry from the night before says only: Buzz looked tired but good! I’ve read that line so many times in the years since, and the exclamation point still mocks me. I must have gone to school that day. I must have come home, made myself a snack, and waited for my mother to get home. I didn’t expect to see Nana, but I had seen him the night before and I wasn’t worried.

I do remember that my mother didn’t come home on time. She was with the Foster family, new to her since Mrs. Palmer’s passing. She was back on day shift, so she usually got in by seven o’clock. Instead, that night, she shuffled in at eight, apologizing while unloading the car. Mr. Foster’s daughter was in town and the woman had talked her ear off.

I’d made myself dinner and I offered some to my mother. We both stared at the clock, and then the door, the clock and then the door. He didn’t come in. We had developed a routine, an unspoken rule. Nana got two days before we hopped in the car and searched for him. He got four days before we called the police, but it had only come to that once, and that night was day one. We weren’t there yet.

We didn’t know to worry, so when the police knocked on our door at about nine o’clock to tell us that Nana had overdosed on heroin and died in the parking lot of a Starbucks, we were blindsided. We’d thought our routine would save us, save him.

I didn’t write anything in my journal that night or for many years thereafter.

38

I ran into Katherine at the sandwich shop about a week after I’d bumbled through our lunch. I saw her bent over before a wire rack of chips, trying to pick out which ones she wanted, and I turned on my heels to escape.

“Gifty!” she shouted. I’d almost made it to the door. She jogged over toward me, a bag of sour cream and onion in hand. “How are you doing?” she asked.

“Oh hi, Katherine. I’m doing great, thanks,” I said.

“Why don’t you join me for lunch?”

“I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“It’ll still be there after you eat,” she said, reaching for my hand. “I insist.”

She paid for the chips and my sandwich as well, and we headed over to the high-tops at the far end of the shop. It was almost empty save a few undergrads who had made their way over to this graduate student part of campus, probably for the quiet, the decreased chance of recognition. I’d once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness. Even after I’d made a few friends in college, I would still go out of my way to create whatever conditions I needed that might allow me to be alone. If I’d done it right that day, I wouldn’t be stuck eating with Katherine.

    “Are you still having trouble writing?” Katherine asked.

“It’s been a lot better,” I said. I picked at my sandwich while Katherine popped open her bag of chips and started eating them slowly, one chip at a time.

We sat there quietly for some time. I wanted to escape the intensity of Katherine’s gaze, and so I stared down at my food as though the key to life was stuffed between sourdough slices. Finally, Katherine broke the silence.

“You know, Steve is from the East Coast and he really wants to move back after I finish here, but why would anyone want to live anywhere that isn’t California? I spent a summer in LA and now even the Bay Area is too cold for me. Seasons are overrated.”

“Did you decide about the baby thing?”

She looked surprised. Clearly she didn’t remember telling me about Steve’s surreptitious ovulation calendar. “We haven’t figured that out yet. He wants to start trying, but I want to wait until after my postdoc at least. I’m thirty-six, so it might be an uphill battle maybe, but that’s true of my work too. I just don’t know. What about you? Do you ever think about having kids?”

I shook my head quickly, too quickly. “I don’t think I’d be a very good mother,” I said. “Besides, I haven’t had sex in like a year.” Suddenly, I felt embarrassed by my revelation, but Katherine didn’t seem even the least bit fazed. I felt like I’d shrugged the shoulder of my dress off, revealing skin. I’d lost some of my timidity around the subject of sex, but not all of it. For years I hadn’t been able to reconcile wanting to feel good with wanting to be good, two things that often seemed at odds during sex, especially sex the way I liked it. Every time, afterward, I would lie there staring at the ceiling, picturing my promises like little balloons floating up and away, ready to be popped.

I met Justin, the guy I officially lost my virginity to, at a mixer in New York called POC x Ivy League the summer after I’d graduated college. The first time we had sex, my body had been so rigid, my vagina so tense, that he looked at me uncertainly and said, “I don’t think I can do this. Like literally, I don’t think I can get it in.”

    “What should we do?” I asked, mortified but determined. I was taking the train back to Boston in a few hours, and I wanted this, wanted him. He left the room and came back with a jar of coconut oil, and after some massaging and encouraging, he was inside me. It hurt then, but by the end of that summer, we had found a delicious rhythm, visiting each other every few weekends just to spend a night or two together. I started to want more, more scratching, more talking.

“Are you a bad girl?” Justin would ask in bed. I was heading to California soon for graduate school, and we both knew, had always known, that the end was near. “Are you a bad, bad girl?”

“Yes,” I said through gritted teeth, enjoying the pleasure he gave me, but in my head, I thought, No, no, no. Why can’t I be good?

Katherine finished eating her chips and wiped her hands on a napkin. “You’re still in your twenties, right?” she said. “Jesus, you’re so young, and so damn brilliant. I honestly can’t wait to see what you do in like five years, and if kids aren’t a part of that equation, who cares? Your work is going to be big. I can feel it. What got you into this field anyway?”

The question threw me off guard, which was probably what she’d intended. I looked at Katherine. Powder from the chips had collected on her lips, giving them a pale white shimmer.

“My mom’s depressed. She’s staying with me at the moment. In my bed. She’s suffered from depression in the past and had a bad experience with psychiatric care, so she’s really resistant to getting help. So, yeah, she’s been here with me for about two weeks now.” The words rushed out of me and I was so happy, so relieved, once they were said.

    Katherine stretched out her hand, placed it over my own. “I’m so sorry. This must be really hard for you,” she said. “How can I help?”

Gye Nyame, I wanted to say. Only God can help me.

* * *

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