Nightcrawling, page 27
This is the question Marsha and I hoped he wouldn’t ask, hoped he might skim over.
“They knew.”
“So you told them?”
“Not exactly, but they knew. I’m telling you they knew.”
He smiles, this soft smile that reminds me of these interviews I watched with Marsha when we were preparing where he talks about battered women, how he wants to keep us safe. He looks at me not like I’m the battered woman, though, but like I’m the little girl standing by watching. Like I’m confused. “How would they know, Ms. Johnson?”
The tremors have made their way outward now and every limb is shaking. I’m rocking in my chair, its legs squeaking on the platform.
“Because they saw me. I was lying there and they looked me in my eyes and they knew. They knew and they kept them eyes open the whole time, staring at me while they had sex with me, like that only made it better. Because they looked at me and they saw how small I was. I was a child.”
Creak on the floor, splinter in my tap-tap fingernail, rigid shake, eyes blurred, Oakland sky so bright inside my throat. I might not have been Soraya, too small to stand up on the shallow end of the pool, but I was still small. I felt so small.
“But you never told them your age?” He knows this is it, the last question.
Fingernails deep inside my skin, blood trickle. “I was a child. I was a child.”
And even though Trevor and Marcus and Alé and Mama are out there somewhere, even though there are so many reasons why I gotta say it all, why I gotta let it erupt from my lungs, I’m not thinking about none of them. All I can think about is the way my fingernails stay pressed into the skin even when it breaks, even when I start to bleed. When everything turns to chaos, when I’m sitting in a room full of faces I can’t distinguish, when my body doesn’t feel like mine no more, I still got these nails. Still got a reminder that I can exist broken, like Trevor facedown in his own crusted blood, still finding a way to get air into his body. That these nails are a miracle. Don’t need nobody to make them pretty, to trim them, sharpen them. All they gotta be is what they are: mine.
“Thank you, Ms. Johnson.”
He says something about how I can step down, a juror sneezes somewhere in the corner of my vision. Everything keeps on moving, colliding, a wood room where I set myself free like the sky that one night when stars showed themselves over the freeway, before I went back to the apartment that would never really be mine again.
I was a child.
Every moment passes like water through a clogged drain, barely getting through. Marsha took me home straight from the courthouse, dropped me off without a single word the whole ride, not that I would have heard her if she had spoken.
Somehow, I exited that courtroom with a different body than the one I had when I walked under its ornate wood ceiling, sat on those benches so many before me sweated into. This new body has a chain of holes from the throat to the stomach, where I have tried to bury myself in carvings. This new body got scars more permanent than any tattoo and calls them glorious. This new body got too many memories to hold up inside.
I’m sitting in the center of an apartment that don’t nobody really own and hollering. Like Dee finally infected me, like Mama crawled up inside me to massage my jaw open. And the sun has set—left me in the dark seeing only a glitter of pool out the window—and risen again. Over and over. Maybe three times before the knock. It comes when the sky is just starting to pastel. When my mouth has found its close.
I don’t move, but she doesn’t wait for me to. Alé opens the door like it’s hers, marches in with a large bag that she swings onto the counter and then beelines right for me on the floor, kneeling, pooling me into her until we are a singular body and I can smell every scent she’s ever carried. Every spice. Her mama’s crochet blankets. The skate park.
She loosens her grip a little and I can see her skin, where I get a peek of what must be her newest tattoo, on the back of her neck: a pair of shoes, colored lavender with a K in the sole of one of them.
She fully lets go of me now, so I can finally look at her eyes, which are spilling. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Alé cry like this and I can’t help but lean forward and kiss her cheek, taste the salt, trail up to the corner of her eye with my lips. She is the bottom of the ocean, where all the magic hides beneath too many layers of dark and water and salt. The warmth got hold of my chest, other side of what they say about the heart; when it’s not breaking, you might just get lucky enough to have it feel full, blood pulsing.
Her hands find my waist and a series of thoughts flash across her face, an internal debate surfacing in mouth quivers. When Alé touches me this time, we are on the floor, we are without barriers. My mouth is already so close.
“Kiara.” Her tears have stopped running, but I haven’t moved, and my name is a question.
Hers is an answer and this is the first time I think that this all might have been worth it, that the only way back to Alé was wading right through the shit pool. She is kissing me. I am kissing her. She’s softer than I ever thought she could be and I’ve never been more relieved to be touched, to have her lace her fingers through my hair. Her on top of me. Her pulling back just to stare into me like the stars found their way beneath my eyelids, and I think this might be my universe-halting love, the one that undoes me and keeps me whole all at once.
Alé comes back down to me slow, traces my stomach with her finger like she always does, except this time she doesn’t pull away. This time, she tells me she is sorry, tells me she came the second she got my message. And even though she’s saying all the right things, it is the look she gives me, the way her eyes pull open so big I know she’s seeing me more than anybody has. That she sees me beyond the shit that got stirred up inside me. Sees me beyond this new body or that old body or any body I have ever existed in because she don’t give a shit about how many layers of shea butter I rub into my skin. Alé just wants to hold me. Alé just wants to be mine.
We are tangled on the floor of this apartment, this living relic of all the lives I’ve lived. This girl who has held me through it all. We are gasping and laughing and crying and I don’t know if I’ve ever told her I love her, but I can’t stop saying it. Because it has never meant this much. It has never filled my mouth like this. Like the only flood I have ever wanted. She is saying it back, again and again, and there has never been a truth like this one.
Alé is feeding me and I am telling her about the women I have known. All Demond’s girls from that party, Camila, Lexi, the two sitting on the wrong side of the aisle torn up. Mama. Me. I am telling her how these streets open us up and remove the part of us most worth keeping: the child left in us. The rounded jaw that can’t even hold a scream no more because they take that too. They take everything.
Alé nods, doesn’t look away, spoons soup into my mouth when I fade into mutters. Kisses my nose. Tells me about how it feels to look at her mama’s face, numb, tells me about the bruises distorting the cold body of the girl who could’ve been Clara, about her fear, about how she wants more than this for me, for us. I tell her I want more for her too, want her to be a doctor or a doula or whatever will soothe the part of her that needs more than a kitchen.
She brought me all kinds of food, healing me the best way she knows, and we’re sitting on the floor still, nothing but flesh, leaning against the edge of the mattress. The soup is hot and I can feel its path from tongue to stomach, feel every sip absorbed. I tell her about Trevor, his bruised eyes, how I had to pull his arms from my neck and set him in the backseat of a car because his mama don’t know how to love him the way he needs to be loved and I am not enough.
Alé stops me there, says, “Just because you ain’t his mama don’t mean you ain’t given him something can’t nobody take away.” And if it didn’t sound like a load of bullshit, I would believe her. The only thing I have as evidence is his swollen face in the backseat of a car, his tremors, and that isn’t proof of nothing sacred.
I couldn’t tell you when I fell asleep or when Alé woke up and removed me from the place right where her lungs would be, but I know the exact moment the jury decided, miles away like it was happening right inside the apartment. It was the clatter. The not-quite-light-enough-to-call-it-morning glass shatter, Alé leaning over the broken pieces of a lamp I never really used. Then the quiet. That’s when they all must have nodded their heads, signed the papers to send to the judge. Maybe they all did it solemnly, without looking each other in the eyes, like they could sidestep guilt.
The call comes an hour later. Alé sat holding me as I heaved and asked her if it was all over. She didn’t say no, just squeezed me until it felt like I had a body again, until my phone rang.
I answer.
Marsha talks fast on the other end of the line, jumbling the words but not saying much, then slows.
“I’m so sorry, Kiara, but there will be no indictment.”
I knew it was coming, I could feel it, but when Marsha says the words it feels like a punch, like the same sharp pain as when the metal man pushed me up against that brick wall the night it all started.
“What about Marcus?” I don’t want to ask, don’t even want to know, but I have to.
Marsha pauses. Silence. “I’ve arranged to get him a fantastic lawyer, one more fit to his case than I am, but I can’t do much more than that. Not without the pressure from the indictment.” She’s quiet again. “I’m sorry.”
I can tell her ice eyes are flooded because then she goes on some tangent about hope and I let her. It’s always best to let them unravel, makes everything seem a little less cracked. I thought I’d be angry at her, want to rage, but I don’t. When she hangs up the phone, almost two hours after the lamp found itself scattered across the apartment, I look up at Alé, who is back with her arm around me on the floor. She didn’t bother cleaning anything up once she saw the salt streaming down my cheeks, and her hands are spotted in blood and glimmers of glass. Neither of us says nothing.
* * *
A calm hits me that I didn’t think would and I rest my head back against the mattress, so I’m facing the ceiling. What did I expect but this? The sky tried to tell me everything comes in extremes, in blinding stretches of shit I can’t escape. Streetwalking all the way up to the clouds. Oakland contains it all: heartbreak and yearning. Reaching for our young back. I lift my head up and turn to Alé, taking her hand, picking out each grain of glass, and lifting it to my cheek so her blood is mine. Iron for ink. Her lips move, murmur, but nothing emerges distinguishable.
She pulls me close to her chest and wraps me so tight I can cocoon in the squeeze. We both know that pretty soon we will have to contend with what it means to have lost it all and still have each other. To have lost a roof and found a home. For now, though, Alé holds me close, I wash her hands, wrap them in Marsha’s black dress, and she begins to clean up the fragments of light.
I’m pulling on one of Marcus’s big shirts when I hear it. I think I’m hallucinating at first, but the sound is so distinct, so visceral that I don’t think my mind could make it up.
I’m walking toward the door, past Alé. “You hear that?”
She shrugs, bent over sweeping the glass up.
I open the door and step out onto the patio strip, lean over the railing, and there he is. I know from the moment I look down because he’s got that same circular birthmark on the top of his head. Trevor is sitting with his feet dipped into the pool, splashing.
The sky is a soft blue and I begin the walk toward the spiral staircase, winding down to the center of my everything, that shit pool that don’t never seem to stop pulling us in. I think about Soraya’s first steps and some part of me that hasn’t had any room to breathe misses her, wants to watch her run, watch her speak, watch her say my name, all three syllables, and learn how to shoot a hoop like Trevor.
I walk down the stairs like I’m descending straight into a fantasy, like I’m about to meet a ghost. When my bare feet hit the pavement and I’m staring at the back of his head, I know it ain’t no dream. He’s wearing his blue-and-yellow backpack, same one I handed Mrs. Randall. Same one I gave him for his birthday so many months ago. I walk closer, until I am standing right above him and, then, with only an oversized T-shirt draped over my body, I sit beside him, slip my own feet into the pool. My legs submerge to mid-calf.
I’m staring straight at him, but he’s still looking right into the pool, like he hasn’t even registered my presence beside him. His eyes are fully open now, face still discolored along the cheekbones, but the parts of him that make his face his are repaired. Perfectly rounded. The bulging eyes. Pouted lips.
“What you doin’ here, Trev?” I touch him lightly with my shoulder, so even if he doesn’t look at me, he’ll be able to feel me.
He keeps his eyes on the pool, on his feet as they come up from underneath its surface and splash back under again. Then, like some timer went off in his head, he whips his head toward me, locks eyes with mine, and flashes me a smile.
“Had to come get my ball.”
I can’t help but beam at that, my whole body spreading into a grin ’cause both of us know it’s so much more than that, but also, maybe in some ways, it’s just that simple. How we grew together in the bounce of a ball, how the beginning of our collapse started with a basketball court and a beating. How we don’t get to return to none of it again, but maybe we can steal this moment. Maybe this excuse is just enough to spin us into a pickup game where we’ll laugh because we can, until the sun disintegrates and nighttime threatens to set us free just to capture us again, back into the things we can’t escape. When I have to send him back onto whatever bus he snuck here on. Don’t even matter, though, because I will send him off with a kiss to the forehead and that ball in hand, that momentum can’t nobody take away.
It seems both obvious and ridiculous when Trevor stands up, takes off his backpack, and lifts his shirt up over his head, then removes his shorts, standing there an inch taller in the same baggy boxers like he did before the shoes showed up poolside.
I don’t even realize I’m doing it: undressing, slipping out of the shirt; not until I am skin rimmed in markings, accented in scabs still healing from my nails. Just like that, in the bright of a morning that is deceptively calm, both of us in our underwear, Trevor grabs hold of my hand, clasps on tight. We don’t even need to count down because, somehow, we can both feel when it’s time to dive in. Keep diving. Shit pool turning to ocean it’s so deep. Beneath the water, I open my eyes, let the chlorine stain them red, and turn my head toward Trevor. He’s looking at me. His mouth is open. I open mine and we both begin to laugh, connected by the fingers, bubbles coming out our mouths and meeting in the middle of the water. Trevor and I finding our laughter just like Dee somewhere in the beyond, screeching out this moment of delirious joy, letting the water swallow us.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 2015, when I was a young teenager in Oakland, a story broke describing how members of the Oakland Police Department, and several other police departments in the Bay Area, had participated in the sexual exploitation of a young woman and attempted to cover it up. This case developed over months and years and, even as the news cycle moved on, I continued to wonder about this event, about this girl, and about the other girls who did not receive headlines, but nonetheless experienced the cruelty of what policing can do to a person’s body, mind, and spirit. For this one case that entered the media, there were and are dozens of other cases of sex workers and young women who experience violence at the hands of police and do not have their stories told, do not see court, and do not escape these situations at all. Yet the cases we know about are few.
When I began writing Nightcrawling, I was seventeen and contemplating what it meant to be vulnerable, unprotected, and unseen. Like many black girls, I was often told growing up to tend to and shield my brother, my dad, the black men around me: their safety, their bodies, their dreams. In this, I learned that my own safety, body, and dreams were secondary, that there was no one and nothing that could or would protect me. Kiara is an entirely fictional character but what happens to her is a reflection of the types of violence that black and brown women face regularly: a 2010 study found that police sexual violence is the second most reported instance of police misconduct and disproportionately impacts women of color.
As I wrote and researched this book, I drew inspiration from the Oakland case and others like it, as I wanted to write a story of my city, but I also wanted to explore what it would mean for this to happen to a young black woman, for this case to be put in the narrative control of a survivor, for there to be a world beyond the headline, and for readers to have access to this world. The stories of black women, and queer and trans folks, are not often represented in the narratives of violence we see protested, written about, and amplified in most movements, but that does not erase their existence. I wanted to write a story that would reflect the fear and danger that comes with black womanhood and the adultification of black girls, while also recognizing that Kiara—like so many of us who find ourselves in circumstances that feel impossible to survive—is still capable of joy and love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, I am abundantly grateful for Lucy Carson and Molly Friedrich and the rest of The Friedrich Agency for being my best advocates and cheering me on every step of the way. Thank you to Ruth Ozeki for your peerless wisdom and for introducing me to the lovely Molly and Lucy. Thank you to my editor, Diana Miller, for your constant insight and thoughtful notes through unforeseen circumstances. Thank you to the entire team at Knopf for championing Kiara’s story. Thank you to Niesha for giving me insight to ground Nightcrawling in an authentic sex-work experience.
