“One of us has to call Aunt Lucy and Uncle Orman,” she said.
“You do it,” I told her. Aunt Lucy had given her their telephone number.
Roxy nodded and left. We hailed our own cab and headed home. I could see that Uncle Alain was pretty exhausted, both physically and emotionally, so I told him just to go to sleep and not worry about keeping me company. I said I had homework to do.
“That’s good,” he said. “Bon nuit, ma chère.”
“Bon nuit.”
As I watched him walk off, his shoulders slumped, his head down, I remarked to myself how effective grief was when it came to making you look older. Maybe that was because minutes
and hours, days and weeks, suddenly became so important that you wished they would last forever. He was up ahead of me the following morning. He said it was the jet lag, but he had a nice breakfast prepared for both of us.
“You might as well go to school today,” he said. “I’m here now, so I’ll be at the hospital waiting for you when you are done.”
“Is Roxy meeting you there?”
“I’ll call her.”
“Don’t be surprised if she’s busy. She’s very popular doing what she does,” I said.
He heard the disapproval and anger in my voice but held his soft smile. “It’s never good or right to judge each other, but especially not now,” he told me.
Maybe he was right, but it felt like a reprimand. He should at least have pretended to agree with me. I didn’t care how nice Roxy was being to Mama now and how beautiful, elegant, and refined she was. She had broken Mama’s heart for years. Uncle Alain should at least acknowledge that, at least to me, I thought, and I left for school carrying rage along with my books. For now, it was comforting to be angry.
It kept me from being sad and feeling sorry for myself. I supposed I was being more like Papa. I needed him, needed his firmness, his unemotional military demeanor, and his intolerance of anyone or anything that would break ranks.
I pitied anyone who crossed my path that day, and entered the school as if I were stepping onto a field of battle.
I would take no prisoners.
19
No one, including my teachers, dared to ask anything that might upset me. They even avoided asking me questions about the subject or homework. I supposed that was because of the look on my face, but I became paranoid about it, and when I looked around, I began to wonder if everyone knew even more about my mother than I did. Maybe because of my desperate need to cling to some hope, I was blind to the inevitable. I wouldn’t listen, and I wouldn’t see what others could. I would never accept it.
When I walked toward a group of my classmates, they parted like the Red Sea to let me pass, no one speaking. Of course, I had my gaze on the floor and didn’t pause. Perhaps I was imagining everything, but when I grazed against people or bumped into them, they jumped back as if I had touched them with a Taser. Finally, Chastity came to speak to me at lunch. I was just sitting, staring at nothing and barely eating. I didn’t even realize she was standing there.
“Emmie,” she said.
I blinked and looked at her. She was holding her books against her breasts tightly, like someone anticipating an earthquake or something. I never noticed until that moment that she had cut her hair. I don’t know how many times I had warned her not to, not with a face as round and plump as hers. It made her look even fatter.
“Mistake,” I said.
“What?”
“Your hair.”
“Oh. My mother thought I would look better.”
“Did she?” I looked away, leaving my words out there, drifting, looking for receptive ears.
“Are you all right?” she asked timidly.
I looked at her again for so long that anyone would think I didn’t recognize her and was trying to figure out who she was. I saw that it unnerved her. She looked back at the girls she was hanging with these days, grimaced, and then turned back to me.
“Huh?”
“Huh what?”