Kings of B'more, page 28
The road they usually took to get back from Aparna’s was closed off, the discovery of which only seemed to further encase his mother’s car in ice. She sighed and made a U-turn, taking them the long way around and then down.
They came to a point where the large, expensive houses gave way to more squat homes and apartment buildings. The streets were teeming with people. The sky was only hinting at the fact that it would at some point get dark; this was one of the longest days of the year. It seemed that all of Baltimore was just heading out, just perking up, just getting started. Here and there, he saw people in rainbow clothes or bright wigs or branded company Pride shirts, the flotsam and jetsam of the dissolving day. His mother’s car idled at a light. A group of college students was sitting outside a restaurant, talking loudly. One of them brandished a plastic sword triumphantly.
Sheree drew a breath. Here it was. She turned to Harrison.
“So, it sounds like you had big fun all over Baltimore,” she said sternly.
Harrison burst into tears.
Sheree’s face said she had not been expecting this. The light turned green, and she inched forward. “Oh my Lord, why are you crying?”
Harrison tried to speak but only snuffled louder.
“Okay, well, I had a whole thing prepared, but I have to admit this is throwing me off a little bit. Are you okay?”
Harrison nodded pitifully.
Sheree inhaled and started again, a few degrees warmer.
“One of my coworkers texted me and said she’d seen my son at Pride. I said, ‘Not my son.’ She’s white, and in my mind I thought, ‘Here she goes thinking we all look alike.’ ” Sheree chuckled; Harrison let out a sob.
Sheree reached down to give his hand a squeeze at a stop sign and then returned her hands to the wheel.
“Harrison, baby, it’s doesn’t need to be all this.” She screwed up her lips in thought and then continued. “The thing with Katya, my coworker, it just reminded me of the thing I always worry about: that people won’t see you in your specificity. How many Black boys, Black men just ‘match the description’? That’s why I need to know where you are; that’s why we use Check In. If I don’t know what you’re up to, I can’t keep you safe.”
Harrison felt himself getting hysterical. It was all too much. The world at large, the bubble that his parents put around him, the tether that connected him and Linus—a universe of connections drawing close and flying apart. He felt himself splinter. He could not hold it together, literally, figuratively, and any other way that he didn’t know about. He buried his face in his hands.
“Harrison! What is it?!” His mother’s eyes darted from his face to the mirror beyond his window as she swerved out of the lane and pulled over to the curb without signaling. This was how Harrison knew it was serious. A new thought entered his head—he was suddenly self-conscious. Embarrassed by this display. He was afraid that perhaps he was doing too much, but he couldn’t stop himself. The feeling was overwhelming; it was bottomless. His mother shifted into park and wrenched her body around to face him. He couldn’t look at her. He just felt her full attention like something physical. Another tether, this one between them, pulled taut suddenly.
Up ahead, there was a group of people sitting on the white marble steps of a house. A woman with cornrows had turned from the group to face the car as it pulled up to the curb. She met Harrison’s gaze. What must he have looked like, his face pulled at odd angles like the sad side of the comedy/drama theater mask? Sitting in the car with his mom, sobbing like he’d just been eliminated from a TV dating show. The woman with the cornrows held him in her sights for longer, frankly, than Harrison would have liked. It wasn’t hostile or even particularly judgy. She was just watching. Wouldn’t you? Finally, she turned back to the group. Her face changed as she slipped back into the stream of their conversation. She cracked a smile as the rest of them threw their heads back in laughter. She tapped the person next to her on the shoulder, pointed at someone across the group from them, and said something that was inaudible to Harrison. The group laughed harder.
“Baby, you have to talk to me,” Sheree was saying. “You have to say something.” On one hand, Harrison knew this was true. But on the other, he thought, wasn’t it Linus who always had the words to put inside thoughts outside without sounding foolish? Saying something without him was a risk. But wasn’t everything true a risk?
Harrison wiped his nose and held his hand there, wrist pressed into his cheekbone hard to staunch the flow. Harrison thought then of the water in the museum that never stopped. He thought of the way it could be tears but also something that cleansed you, renewed you, like a baptism. It could also be the thing that moved you along.
When he spoke, at last, his voice was thick and muddled. “Why did I do it?” He looked at his mother. “What did it get me? I thought that Ferris Day could fix this. And I was so nervous all day that I’d mess up, or that Linus didn’t actually want to be fixed, or . . . everything would go wrong. But then everything did go wrong, over and over again. I got caught! By everybody in the family. I’m caught right now! But somewhere in the day, I stopped being nervous. I got comfortable, Mom, and it was wonderful. I knew that I couldn’t fix this. I couldn’t stop Mr. Munro from moving them. I just wanna hang out with Linus every day. I wanna go on dumb adventures. I want to talk to him. In person. All the time. He is my best friend. And I did all this to remind him, to remind us both, of that. Even though things will change. Even if he goes off and has a new life. I will, too. I know. That’s what happens. But he’ll remember this and know that I cared. That he mattered to me. I did it for him, but I also did it for me. For me. For me.” He paused, realizing that another inside thought, one he hadn’t even fully understood, was about to come sailing past his lips. Sheree was quiet, listening. Harrison thought, Why stop now? He looked her in the face. “I know I didn’t do things the way you wanted me to do them, but I’m so proud of myself.” Suddenly he was crying again, out of nowhere. He pressed his hands to his face and then started laughing that he was crying, which only made him cry harder. Chaotic. “I’m so proud of myself. I worked so hard. And I did it. I did all the things that scared me. And I’m so frustrated! I’m proud and I’m frustrated. And I’m disappointed, actually.”
“Disappointed?” Sheree said.
Harrison spoke through tears. “I’m disappointed in myself for crying, because I’m so proud.” He let out a sob.
“Oh my goodness.”
“This is so much!” And then, suddenly serious. “I think my heart is breaking.”
Sheree nodded like she could hear the myriad sentences running through Harrison’s head. She didn’t look away. She reached over and grabbed his hand. “Harrison, I know your heart is broken, and I wish there was a way I could take it and put it back together, hold it in my hands until it heals. I wish . . . I’ll tell you what I told Corrine one of those many long nights while she was away. Your heart will break in this life, but when it does break, I hope every crack makes more space inside for love.”
Tears streamed down his face. He thought about how strange it was that tears kind of just did their own thing. You could work yourself up to starting, sure, but they really had their own independent agenda. Just falling out of his face, pulling sadness out of the heart and putting it into the world. Evaporating. Off to do some other sad business somewhere.
Sheree took the keys out of the ignition and looked out through the windshield at the people on the steps, at the world beyond.
“So what now?” Harrison asked.
6:51 p.m.
Linus and his father had been talking over each other since they left the Evergreens, and neither showed any intention of relenting. They’d gotten caught up in traffic that was detoured from Pride street closures and were now at a standstill, boxed in, arguing.
“And what did you think I was going to do?” Linus was saying. “What did you think I did? You’re acting brand-new, like you don’t know me.”
Meanwhile, his father, Wally, was saying, “A tea dance! Like you’re the first person to try to slide by with some made-up words for a house party. Man, come on!”
Then Linus: “Why can’t I just have this? What’s so wrong? It’s Harrison! You know Harrison! And you still—even after all this—need to embarrass me. For what? For who?”
And Wally: “I’ve seen this game before! I lived this before. People crammed in there, shoulder to shoulder. DJ pumping so loud, you can hear it on the street. And you talking about somebody’s tea party? Linus, why do you always treat me like I’m dumb?” He banged his hand on the steering wheel and let out an exasperated grunt. He looked away. For the first time in twenty minutes, Linus stopped talking. This was weird, he thought, and then he revised it, imagining the voice of Mr. Mirepoix in his head, encouraging him to be more specific. He didn’t just think it was weird; he was stunned. He didn’t think his father was dumb. If he had thought that, Harrison wouldn’t have had to go through all the trouble that he did and the two boys could’ve been living it up all over the city for months. Dumb? Where was this coming from? Why was he always at crossed purposes with his parents? Why couldn’t they ever see each other in reality?
If not now, then when?
“I don’t think you’re dumb,” Linus muttered. “It’s not about you.”
The cars around them inched forward, and Wally shifted into gear and inched along with them.
“We said we were going to be a team,” Wally said. His eyes stayed on the road even though they’d come to a stop again.
“I thought so until you moved us away.”
“What choice? What choice did I have?” Linus’s dad’s voice was coming out raspy and dry. Tired. Linus was tired, too. They were both silent for a while. A space opened up one lane over, and Wally signaled, checked his mirrors again, waved a thank-you in the air, and carefully navigated into it. Linus had always wondered why his dad was so precise in the car, so polite, so careful. It wasn’t that he acted some other way in real life, but there was a delicateness to the way he drove his car that didn’t carry over anywhere else. He’d check and re-check and ask permission and say thank you before changing lanes, but, Linus thought, when it came to uprooting his own son’s entire life, all Linus got was a shrimp and grits after all the decisions were made and it was too late. Linus knew that the driving habits had come from Brother Aldo at church, who had taught his dad to drive years ago. He had no idea where the life habits came from. Maybe Brother Aldo, too. Linus had only taken one lesson from him and gotten so terrified by the talk about preparing for police stops that he’d never gone back.
Wally turned a corner, heading north and away from the traffic. The road was clearing up now. They swooped around the Baltimore version of the Washington Monument—shorter and rounder than DC’s, but still imposing.
“What do you want from me?” Linus’s dad asked finally.
Linus felt his anger flash up all over again. He wasn’t going to waste his time having the same old conversation, especially if his dad didn’t care or didn’t listen. He threw his hands up and shrugged.
“No. Don’t do that. Tell me what you want.”
“I want to stay in Baltimore, obviously!” Linus snapped.
“That’s not possible right now. You know it’s not possible. Maybe it will be. I’m working hard to figure it out, but right now, I got no choice, and you know this. So, son, tell me: What do you want?”
The notecard on which Linus had written what he thought was going to be his day’s schedule fluttered on the dashboard under the cool air from the vents. WORK, LUNCH, LIBRARY, HARRISON’S HOUSE AS USUAL. That was what he wanted. Well, no. That was fine. But what he wanted was . . . whatever that ridiculous list that Harrison had shown him on the train said. Or, no, not even that. Because that had been a plan that quickly went awry. He thought back through the day as if scrubbing a video in reverse—dancing on the rooftop with Mazz and Harrison and all of Baltimore, sailing down the waterslide in tandem, getting a goodbye gift from Mr. Mirepoix, the cat who did not want to give them change at the ATM, and the self-portraits—the sight of himself, a version of himself, a dream of himself, on the walls of the museum. It all seemed to belong to some other person, some other life, but it was his. He’d lived it. Harrison had given it to him. His eyes started to burn with tears, and that, too, stunned him. Linus felt like he was losing control. But of what? What did he really control?
“Let me put it this way,” Wally was saying. “What do you need? To make this okay? You need to say what you need.”
“I need to stay in his life. And I need to keep a part of my life, this life. Even at a distance. I don’t want to lose my friend.” Now Linus was crying, and he didn’t do anything to stop it. Wally reached over and popped open the glove compartment; an avalanche of tissue packets came tumbling out, each with a sticker that read please rate me 5 stars! He picked one up and handed it to Linus.
7:09 p.m.
“Thank you for being honest with me,” Sheree said finally. “I really appreciate it. I . . .” She paused like she was choosing her words carefully. “I am very grateful and I know this is hard. I also have a lot of questions about some very minor things. But mostly I’m grateful.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Well, I guess the first is: What’s Ferris Day?”
Harrison laughed. “It’s just what I called our day of activities. Just, like, a day of adventures.” He thought and then blurted the next part. “That you’re not supposed to do.”
“ ‘Ferris’ as in Ferris Bueller?” Sheree asked.
“Yes. I got the idea from movie night. Dad’s a bad influence on me.”
“Apparently.” She squinted at him for a second and then shook her head, amused. “All right. Ferris Day.” She handed him the car keys and unbuckled her seat belt.
“What do you want me to do with these?”
“Drive us home. You have your learner’s on you, right?”
“Yes, but, Mom, I don’t think I can handle this right now. I’ve had a long day.”
“Me too! Good, but long. We’ll take the scenic route home. No need to rush. I’ll tell you where to go.” She looked at Harrison, who hadn’t moved. “Come on. Unbuckle your seat belt.”
Harrison had no idea what was going on with his mother or why she suddenly wanted to circle back to their driving lessons. At such a time as this? His parents were mysteries. Was this part of the punishment? He couldn’t drive! Everybody knew that. At least, he thought he couldn’t drive. It hadn’t gone well when he’d tried, let’s leave it at that. Harrison realized his mother was still looking at him expectantly, and she hadn’t taken back the keys. Okay, so this was punishment. Fine.
“This isn’t a punishment,” Sheree said. Was his face that readable? “We keep you so close because we don’t want the worst of the world to get you. But in so doing, we may have been keeping some of the best of the world from you, too. So. Let’s start to fix that. Let’s see the world.”
Harrison unbuckled his seat belt. Sheree moved to open her door and then stopped.
“Wait a minute. You said everybody in the family caught you today? I know about you crashing Dad’s pool party, but—”
“Corrine is at the tea dance, where you picked me up.”
“Oh! She is? Why didn’t—? Who all is she with?”
“Just some people,” Harrison said.
Sheree looked at him askance. “You two . . . Come on, out of the car.” She opened her door.
7:10 p.m.
Wally and Linus waited at the light next to the train station where Linus and Harrison had begun their day. Linus blew his nose into one of his father’s complimentary rideshare tissues.
Then Wally spoke out of the blue. “Linus, are you two in love with each other? Is that it?”
Linus caught his father’s eyes. There was nothing reflected back in them but the surface of the question. Maybe he was willing his expression to commit to neutrality, or maybe the question was all it was. Maybe he just wanted information. And what is love but information about the soul and the future and the place in the universe where you feel complete? Love is information like the address of your home is information. Like the color of the sky is information.
Linus studied the information he was getting from his own heart. It was insufficient to say he loved Harrison like a friend, because that made it seem less than another kind of love, when really, it felt huge. Dazzling. Extraordinary. This was the destination, wasn’t it? That was the place that resisted a clean break. The center of joy. This friendship that made the whole city seem a welcome adventure. How was it possible that love could feel so many different ways? How was it possible that a friend felt like an appendage? No, even more than that. Was it too much to say that a friend, this friend, felt like a part of his heart? A chamber that he was losing.
Linus cried harder, his head lolling against the window. “I’ve been so lonely. And he’s been my friend.”
Linus’s father reached over and squeezed his shoulder, leaving his hand there. It was such a deep comfort. Linus hadn’t understood how much he’d wanted to just stop and be held safe and feel seen. The light changed, and Wally crept forward, never moving his hand.
“We’re going do whatever we need to do to keep y’all two in each other’s lives, okay?” Wally said. “Why don’t—Why don’t you call him? If I know Sheree and Obed, he’s probably in big trouble, but . . . I think it’ll be okay to call.”
Linus picked up his phone. Of course it was dead after a day of riding around doing nothing in the back of Aparna R.’s car. And of course his dad didn’t have a charger for Linus’s type of phone in the car.
