Every Time a Rainbow Dies Read online

She placed two ten-dollar bills in front of Thulani’s bowl, waited for him to acknowledge her gift, then counted and re-counted over three hundred dollars with her stubby fingers.

  Thulani felt their eyes preying on him, like a cat waiting for a sparrow to make the wrong move. He wouldn’t touch the money.

  Shakira chattered on about the parade while she made out a deposit slip to their cherished savings account, the window of their dreams. Truman insisted that she treat herself to a dress or perfume with the money, but Shakira wouldn’t hear of it. Every cent was going to their nest egg. Their dream house in New Jersey.

  They weren’t speaking to each other but to him: This is what responsible people do, Thulani. Save for the future. He ate his cereal.

  Shakira drummed her nails on the table to get Thulani’s attention. “Go collect the rent from Dunleavy. Take the rent and our carnival earnings straight to the bank.”

  With a mouth full of cornflakes he said, “Ask me.”

  “She just did.” Truman was firm. End of discussion.

  Thulani shook his head.

  “And you might want to take a dollar or two from your earnings and deposit it to your savings account.” She was trying to sound like Mommy.

  He refused to look as if he were considering her suggestion. It did not matter. Truman held on to Thulani’s savings book, and it would snow in hell before his brother let him see it, let alone draw from it. Having him ask for every dollar was how Truman kept him underfoot.

  “You can’t just spend, spend your money,” Shakira said. “You must put something away.”

  This was precisely why he was slow to pick up the money. If the twenty dollars was his money, then it was his alone to do as he pleased. If it was theirs, they should keep it.

  Truman pointed to the bank envelope. “That’s a lot of responsibility we’re giving you,” he told his brother. “A lot of trust.”

  Thulani put the bank envelope in his pocket but left the two tens on the table. It was not the first time he had deposited Dunleavy’s rent check. They were making a big deal for no reason.

  “There’s a party at my sister’s,” Shakira said. “Come with us.”

  He looked up at her with his mother’s almond-shaped eyes.

  “My cousins will be there, and it will be nice. Plenty of food. Music. Dancing.”

  Shakira and Truman exchanged looks. They had been discussing him. Again. He did not have to actually hear these talks to know what was said. “Sixteen and no future, no plans, no friends.” “Get him a job, a woman, and kill those birds. That will set him straight.”

  At Truman’s urging, which consisted of a look, lips pursed in a kiss, and a slight turn of the head, Shakira left the room.

  “Hey. You.”

  Thulani looked up.

  “Shakira’s been tellin’ her cousins about you. Talkin’ you up good.”

  He meant her female cousins. The ones his age. Thulani shrugged.

  “You’re sixteen, braa. Dead is dead.”

  Thulani cut a look into his brother.

  “I no stuttah,” Truman said. “Let go of Mommy. Live your life.”

  “She was our mother. I can’t erase her.”

  “No one said erase,” Truman said. “Just grow up. Be a man. Mopin’ won’t bring back Mommy. Mommy gone, Thulani. Mommy dead.”

  What did Truman know or feel? By the time Mommy left, Truman was twenty and had climbed out of his youth into manhood. He had met his wife-to-be and had passed the test for the Transit. He had only to deal with the grief of losing Mommy and not the pain of needing her.

  From the time Mommy announced that she was flying home to Jamaica for a short while, Thulani had begged to go with her each and every day. He seemed to exhaust her, but she remained firm about leaving him behind. She had to visit Daddy alone. Thulani would come home another time. She said good-bye at the airport—nothing too emotional, just a kiss and a hug—and she was off to their home in St. Catherine, where the hills were covered with trees, and the rains poured down, the sun broke through the mountain peaks, and Daddy waited. There she spent three weeks with Daddy, while he cared for her and built her coffin.

  Mommy always said she had three lives: her past life in Jamaica, life with her sons in Brooklyn, and the life to come. Thulani never sought to understand the riddles she spoke in. When he was thirteen, and his mother began to speak in riddles, he cared about video games, briefly for a girl who flirted with him in class, and about his music. Only Truman and Mommy knew that she was dying. Only they knew that this was a kiss good-bye.

  There was no telephone in Daddy’s house, so Thulani wrote letters to let his mother know he was no longer angry she had left him behind. How many letters she actually read he did not know. Truman let him mail those letters, make a Mother’s Day gift, and talk of “when Mommy comes back” until one day Truman just said it: “Mommy died two weeks past.”

  Thulani had watched her get on the plane and watched the plane take off. It had not occurred to him that she would not return.

  “Mommy had cancer, and she went home to die. That’s it,” Truman continued.

  “You should have told me.”

  “And what could you do? What could I do? She was gone. Before our eyes.”

  Anger had Thulani by the throat. He didn’t speak for a time. Then he said, “You knew good-bye was good-bye.”

  Truman stood up. He didn’t have much use for this kind of talk. He said, “The party’s at Shakira’s sister. We’re all going early to help out.”

  Shakira materialized to say, “And take a hot, hot bath. I don’t want anyone smelling pigeon shit.”

  Only when Truman and Shakira both went to their bedroom did he take the twenty dollars. He went up to the roof and unlatched the crates. His birds had been locked in for too long.

  He asked for their forgiveness and sprinkled the gold flakes he had in his pocket onto the tarp. “I’m gonna build you a dovecote like no other,” he promised while they clamored for the cereal.

  He watched them fly off into the final days of true summer. In a week he would be one of a thousand lost heads locked in school, roaming the halls. Already he mourned the warm kiss of the sun on his face, arms, and chest.

  He knew he would not go to the party with Truman and Shakira. The lure of good food, music, and Shakira’s pretty cousins could not disguise what the gathering was about. An attempt to grow him up. Have him think family, earning, contributing, marrying one of those she-cousins one day soon, and taking root in a house in New Jersey with his brother and Shakira.

  Thulani knocked on Mr. Dunleavy’s door and waited. Dunleavy moved slowly, relying upon his walking stick, which Thulani could hear tapping against the floor.

  Thulani dreaded collecting the rent. Mr. Dunleavy would never simply hand him the check and let him go. The old man always wanted to show Thulani an old camera or photographs of Jamaica. Mr. Dunleavy had made his living as a photographer, taking pictures for newspapers, magazines, and even postcards. The photographs covered his walls.

  If Mr. Dunleavy did not try to interest Thulani in photography or Jamaica, he always spoke of Thulani’s mother. That he had known her when she was a schoolgirl, no older than Thulani.

  Mr. Dunleavy cracked the door ajar. Thulani thought, The snow came down hard on a man, an expression his mother used. Dunleavy’s hair and mustache were completely white.

  To Thulani’s relief, Mr. Dunleavy had the rent check in his hand.

  “Not feeling too well,” Mr. Dunleavy said, giving him the check. “You run along.”

  Instead of going directly to the bank, he went to the big library at the edge of the park. He pulled two books from the shelves—one on carpentry and another on bird habitats. As he sank down in the stacks and flipped through pages of dovecote designs, he lost track of the bank, the party, the plane, and his mother.

  He studied the architecture of these mostly open-faced cubbyholes and thought of ways to add a protective screen with a latch. He needed a d
oor of some kind to lock his birds in at night. How else would he free them in the morning?

  He returned the books to their shelves and left the library. It was after two-thirty. He had to cut through Prospect Park to make the deposit at Carver Federal. He couldn’t dally at the fishpond, or linger over the orchids—orchids his mother said grew like weeds in her garden in St. Catherine.

  He hurried along, thinking of the deposit envelope in his pocket. Then he stopped. Before him, cutting across the park, he saw a sway of color, a bouquet in the breeze. It was a skirt—lavender, yellow, green, and blue. This time he was not deceived by his eagerness. It was her.

  SIX

  Don’t run, don’t run, don’t run, is what his heart said, each thump-thump a plea to both himself and to her. If he rushed her in all of his excitement, she would run. If she ran from him, he’d have to let her go, even if he never got to know her.

  He tried to slow his pace, but she was too near. Sooner or later she would feel him behind her. He called out, “Hey!” louder than he intended, but she didn’t turn around. He tried again. “Hey, girl in the—” He stopped, tongue-tied on those colors she wore. A rainbow of them. Still nothing. She had to know he meant her. There was no one else in the park but them.

  He watched her. Her skirt billowed. Her hair was gathered on top of her head, which she held high. Just as he remembered from those Wednesdays from the roof. If she saw him and smiled, if she saw him and smiled…

  He ran out of small steps. When he was abreast of her, but not too close, he said, “Please don’t run.”

  She gave a side glance and said, “You.” She was suddenly real, not the blur of a face he’d color in minus scars, but a face full of disdain and beauty that up close he could see he had gotten wrong.

  “Look. I didn’t mean to scare you that day.”

  Her eyebrows, thick and arched, said, Me, scared?

  For nearly two months he had been rehearsing this moment. He had been sitting on his rooftop practicing his speech for Yoli and Dija; Esme didn’t care. He had been lying on his bed in the dark, apologizing to the skirt nailed to his wall. Suddenly no words could be enough to offer this very real, angry girl whose quick, mad glances speared him. All he could do was walk with her and hope to find himself and say what he needed to say.

  She cut another look at him and tossed her head. He loved her hair. It was thick and rippled like hair that had been braided and unbraided. In spite of that evil glance his first thought was to touch it.

  “I don’t like how you follow me,” she said. “Everywhere I turn, there you are. What do you do—watch and watch me?”

  He wanted to say no, but he didn’t lie easily. He did watch her at every opportunity.

  “Stop following me.”

  “I—I was going this way when I saw you coming across the park.”

  “Oh? And you was going to St. Augustine’s? To get down on your knees? Say ‘Hail Mary, don’t put fruit in my womb?’ Yeh?”

  He was struck dumb by her and couldn’t come quick enough. Everything about her threw him off. Her lips, her eyebrows, her hair, her blunt little nose.

  When he couldn’t answer, she gave him yet another look of disgust and walked away.

  He stayed with her, which only annoyed her, but he had to speak now or forget it. “That day…at your church…”

  She stopped.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waited for her to speak, to accept his apology but she said nothing. Since she didn’t walk away from him, he kept talking. “I don’t want you to think the wrong thing about me. Ever since that night…” Her eyes stopped him cold. It was too late to take it back. “I—I’m just sorry….”

  “Why?” she snapped. “Did you do it?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Then keep your sorry.”

  Nothing was as it should have been. She was supposed to recognize him as her savior. They were supposed to be joined by that bad night like survivors of an airplane crash. In his dreams they embraced. She cried in his arms. He said everything was all right.

  “I wonder about you,” he said softly. “All the time.”

  “What you need to know?” Her fury spun out at him. She, the girl who knelt so humbly with her head lowered, was in his face. “You know everything of mines. You see everything of mines. What else you need to know?”

  “That you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine. See?” She twirled on her heel, flipped her hand at him, then walked faster.

  “Hold up,” he said. “I’ll walk you through the park.”

  She gave him eyebrows. Why?

  “Make sure you’re all right.”

  “Ha. What you gonna do, protect me? Look at you.” She had the nerve to smirk at his lanky, unmanly body. “You can’t do nothing.”

  She was hitting him again. Stinging him. And like the night he charged down from his rooftop, he let her.

  “I’d at least try.”

  Again her face said, Why?

  There was nothing left to lose. In another fifteen minutes he would miss the bank’s closing time. She was already disgusted with him. Nothing mattered.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he told her. “I wonder if you sleep at night or if you toss and turn.”

  She didn’t react.

  “I wonder if you went alone to be tested. If you was scared when you told the police.”

  She laughed, “Ha!” Big. Loud. From that laugh he knew she had done neither, and now he was disgusted with her.

  “I don’t understand you, girl.”

  “Ha, ha. What a big surprise.”

  “You go for Chinese herbs and to church, but you can’t report it?”

  “Why go to the police?” she said coolly, almost singing. “Did they come when I cry out? What can they do? Get back my stuff?”

  He wanted to be mad at her, but she was right. Even he would run from the police before he’d run to them. But she should have done something, he thought.

  “People should know,” he said. “We could put up flyers.”

  “Flyers. Ha.”

  She was trying to make herself seem older, laughing at his innocence. It only made him angry.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Laugh. Take herbs. Get on your knees. Pray.”

  “Leave me alone.” She walked faster, but he easily matched her stride. He had not found her after all this time so he could fight with her.

  “Look. I’m sorry, girl, I’m sorry,” he said until she slowed her pace. Even so, she wouldn’t look at him.

  “I spoke out wrong,” he said. “You’ve been through a lot. I want you to know, I’ll go with you to get test—”

  “They don’t have nothing on me!” she said, swatting him away with her hand. “They don’t have their dirt on me, their babies on me! Nothing.”

  “I’m not saying—”

  She turned and stuck her finger in his chest. “I take care of my business. I cleanse my blood. I don’t need no one telling me about test.”

  You can’t be clean. I saw you.

  He regretted thinking it, even for that second, for it was as if she could see the reflected image in his eyes of herself lying naked. She struck out at him with her fist, wild and off-balance, but he anticipated it and caught her balled hand before it made impact. She regained her footing and pushed him with both hands.

  “You think I’m filth? I am disease? Then go! Get. Leave me. I don’t need you. Leave me. Just leave me alone!” And she said more in Creole.

  “I don’t think that. I only meant…” And he gave up trying to explain what he himself didn’t understand.

  “Just leave me alone.”

  “I can’t.”

  She pushed him.

  There was never any peace around her. Instead he felt sick and brave at the same time, ready to jump into the unknown only to be hit.

  “I’m walking you home.”

  “That’s what I don’t like. You don’t ask. You just follow me.�
�

  “Can I ask you now?”

  “Ask me what? I don’t even know you. You’re a stranger. A strange boy.”

  “Can I walk you through the park?”

  “If I say no?”

  “Then that’s that: I’ll stand right here while you go.”

  “And you won’t follow me?”

  He shook his head no.

  “And you will stay out of my business?”

  He nodded.

  “Say it.”

  “I’ll stay out of your business.”

  “And you will leave me alone?”

  “You’ll never see me again.”

  “You promise? Your word?”

  “My word.”

  There. He lied to her. His most solemn word he gave her, and he lied. It wasn’t as hard a thing to do as he thought. He would always hope to find her and hope she would want to be found.

  “My name is Thulani.”

  She said “Tulani,” low enough so he could hear she did not pronounce the h. And they finished their walk in silence.

  Once beyond the park and back in the world with everyone else, they watched out for cars and dodged people. The bankbook still in his pocket jabbed him. He knew he’d have to face Truman and Shakira when he put the undeposited money on the table. Their ranting would be endless, but it didn’t matter. He was going to walk her, the girl, as long as she let him.

  When they got to her house on Franklin Avenue, she said, “Now go,” but he waited at the curb while she put the key in the door. As she opened the door and the window curtains parted, then closed from inside, she turned to him and said, “I am Ysa.”

  SEVEN

  Every morning after he set his birds free, Thulani walked to the corner of Franklin and waited across the street from her house, hoping to catch Ysa on her way to school. His heart would say, Go to the buzzer, call out her name. After all, he told himself, they were hardly strangers. They had talked. They had argued. She had given him her name—something she wouldn’t have done unless she intended him to use it. Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to her door to press the buzzer. For a month he stood in the same spot from seven o’clock until eight watching the window curtains part occasionally. Then he’d leave for school.