The Girl Who Fell from the Sky Read online

  I see people two different ways now: people who look like me and people who don’t look like me.

  “Rachel Morse?”

  “Present.”

  “Where are you from?”

  I answer: “4725 Northeast Cleveland Avenue, Portland, Oregon, 97217.” I hear laughter behind me.

  DAY 2 BECOMES Day 3. And the next day and the next. I count each day in my diary. Each day gets a new page.

  Grandma thinks I am adjusting well. She says, “I think you adjustin just fine.” I want her to put s’s on the ends of her words and not say “fixin to” when she’s about to do something. The kids in school say that, and I know they’re not as smart as me.

  There is a girl who wants to beat me up. She says, “You think you so cute.” Her name is Tamika Washington. She says, “I’m fixin to kick your ass.” Sometimes she pulls my hair. In gym class she grabbed my two braids. I said “ouch” really loud even though I didn’t mean to and Mrs. Karr heard. She said, “Tamika,” and blew the whistle real loud. And Tamika said, “Miss K. I’m just playin with her. Dang.” When Mrs. Karr turned away again that’s when Tamika said it. “I’m fixin to kick your ass after school. You think you so cute with that hair.”

  I am light-skinned-ed. That’s what the other kids say. And I talk white. I think new things when they say this. There are a lot of important things I didn’t know about. I think Mor didn’t know either. They tell me it is bad to have ashy knees. They say stay out of the rain so my hair doesn’t go back. They say white people don’t use washrags, and I realize now, at Grandma’s, I do. They have a language I don’t know but I understand. I learn that black people don’t have blue eyes. I learn that I am black. I have blue eyes. I put all these new facts into the new girl.

  And I am getting better at covering up the middle parts. When Anthony Miller kicks the back of my chair in class, I focus on the bump bump bump until he stops. I can focus on the bump bump bump and not say anything. I hear the smile on his face as he bumps my chair. Is he counting the number of times he can bump before I tell on him? I don’t tell on him. And when Antoine mocks me in a baby voice when I answer the questions right, I don’t have to cry anymore or be so tender. When something starts to feel like hurt, I put it in this imaginary bottle inside me. It’s blue glass with a cork stopper. My stomach tightens and my eyeballs get hot. I put all of that inside the bottle.

  AUNT LORETTA BRUSHES my hair each morning and only sometimes makes pancakes. She’s bought a special brush for me that’s pink with white bristles. She holds my hair in her hands the same way as Mor did. Aunt Loretta’s hands get lost in my hair. She has small wrists, tiny enough for me to wrap my fingers around. She has perfect red nails. She uses the nail on her right index finger to make the middle part. It doesn’t scratch. She parts my hair from the front to the back to make the line. I feel the line she makes on my scalp. Grandma uses a sharp comb and it feels like she’s dividing me in half.

  TODAY IS SCHOOL picture day. Aunt Loretta wants to brush my hair special. I sit between her legs on her bedroom floor still in my favorite pajamas. Aunt Loretta smells of toothpaste and fresh white soap. I bunch my legs against my chest and wrap my arms around my knees. I feel like a boxer getting ready to fight in the ring. Not tender, just taken care of.

  “Why do the other kids talk about my eyes?”

  “Why?” Aunt Loretta says as if I should already know. “Because they’re such a pretty blue.”

  I giggle when Aunt Loretta says this. A giggle can mean thank you or please stop looking at me. This time it means the first thing because it’s school picture day and it’s important to be pretty.

  “Yeah, they’re just like Mor’s,” I say, and I feel something like happy. I have said “Mor” out loud and made some of the inside sounds outside. I have said “Mor” and the glass inside me didn’t shake.

  I try the sounds again. “When Mor was little she had two braids in her hair too. Hestehaler. That means horsetails. I saw a picture.” In the picture Mor is nine or ten or maybe eleven years old like me. She sits at a desk that opens up like a box.

  “Well, today we’re going to do something a little different,” Aunt Loretta says. “Okay?”

  I nod and know that it doesn’t matter if I don’t agree. I am a doll.

  “I remember when I was a little girl,” Aunt Loretta says. “I’d have to sit by the stove to get my hair pressed out. If I didn’t smell the hair burning I knew it would be no good.”

  I have heard this story before. I think it’s embarrassing but don’t know why.

  Aunt Loretta puts her nails in my hair and makes one part then another. She uses the big curling iron that goes in her hair even though my hair has curls. I smell hair burning.

  I see a girl in the mirror when she is done, and she is not me. There are so many pieces to my hair. Nothing lays flat. There are stiff curls that don’t wrap around my finger.

  “You look like your grandmother spit you out herself.”

  I don’t want to be spit.

  I AM THE letter M and somewhere in the middle for class pictures. When I sit down, my feet don’t reach the floor. My middle is all jumbled. I do my best cover-up-my-teeth smile, but the corners of my mouth barely move.

  “Such a pretty black girl,” the photographer says. “Why won’t you smile?”

  GRANDMA’S HOUSE IS two blocks away from the Wonder Bread factory, which means that my house is two blocks away from it too. What’s hers is mine, she says. Simple math. Mr. Kimble, my math teacher, says that’s what’s called the transitive property.

  Only I don’t like what’s Grandma’s: an oily pomade she wears that smears my cheek when she kisses me, a green velvet couch with deep brown swirls that no one can sit on unless special company comes by, a porcelain music box decorated with people who look like kings and queens and a servant with a broken arm, a dresser full of fabric she’s saving for the day I learn how to sew. Hers is the sent-for lotion, the rocking chair on the porch, and the pictures on the mantel, and the powder that looks like cornstarch that she puts in my underwear drawer. She has a lot more things but these are the main ones. Grandma is a collector. I think of her collections as junk and scraps. Like the other volunteer sorters at the Salvation Army, Grandma sets aside the good stuff for herself. Good stuff is a silver spoon, or a china teacup with or without a matching plate, or a dress-up purse with four beads missing and a torn strap. Grandma has boxes of mismatched coffee cups and saucers and yards of corduroy, gingham, silk, and lace stuffed into dozens of drawers and boxes in the basement. All these things are worth something but maybe only that Grandma sees.

  Grandma’s things are mine, and I am not allowed to touch them. Only sometimes I do. Because how can you have something without holding it?

  ON TUESDAYS WE go to the Wonder Bread factory store and buy old bread even though it doesn’t make any sense that the bread would be old because it comes from just next door. But maybe that’s one of those things that works differently here in civilian life. That’s what Pop would call it. He’s a tech sergeant in the United States Air Force. He makes maps.

  Civilian life is different than military life. In military life, you buy groceries at the commissary. Civilians buy groceries at “the store” even though that could mean Fred Meyer or the deli. Also in military life, you move a lot. Before we lived in Germany, we lived in Turkey. Pop never wanted to be stationed in the States. I don’t know why. The good part about moving is you get to make new friends. The bad part is you don’t see the old ones. Civilians live in the same house or apartment and know the same people their whole lives.

  “Why would you want to live in the same place your whole life?” I ask my new friend Tracy. She’s white. She looks at me like I’m crazy.

  “You have to live where your parents live. That’s just how it is,” she says, and I make her not my friend anymore.

  “I live with my grandma and my Aunt Loretta.”

  “So, that’s different.”

  “I
lived all over the world.”

  “No you haven’t.”

  I open the blue bottle. Mad goes in there too.

  YOU CAN BUY bread at the Wonder Bread factory store on a good deal. Grandma likes good deals. On Tuesday afternoon there’s an extra discount and sometimes a few crumbled up cupcakes near the counter. They do not have franskbrod, or rugbrod, or wienerbrod, or any pastries with marzipan. They do not have the kind of bread Mor made. I wait for Grandma by the check-out counter. It’s Tuesday but the crumbles at the counter are gone.

  “This Roger’s baby?”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” Grandma says to a tall woman wearing an African scarf on her head.

  “No mistakin you in the same family. Roger got some strong genes makin these babies. Except for those eyes.”

  The new girl smiles a no-teeth smile when the African scarf woman takes her face in her hands. The new girl looks something like happy and stuck there. She’s the trophy on Aunt Loretta’s dresser with the perfect tennis swing. Smiling. Frozen. She is still. She is me.

  Grandma grabs my face and wipes away imaginary crumbs from my mouth. I know they are imaginary. Grandma’s just polishing me up.

  “You know Roger’s granddad had blue eyes. Something about like this.” Grandma turns my head toward her when she says this. I am scared the sounds will spill out.

  “They say that’s the only way it can happen. What they call that?”

  “Recessive,” I say and don’t know what other sounds might come out.

  “She a smart girl. That’s good. Just don’t be too smart, young lady. The men don’t go for that.”

  Grandma laughs.

  The African scarf woman laughs and says, “We are a mixed up people alright.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.”

  “Makes you wonder what that boy would look like now,” says the African scarf woman.

  And Grandma says, “Either one of them boys. Or that baby girl.”

  Jamie

  Jamie thought Robbie was a bird flying down below his window. He had been waiting for this bird and ran downstairs without calling to his mother, “Going outside,” which is what his mother had told him to say even if she didn’t hear him above the din of the television that played loudly in her room.

  Jamie knew that his mother was not watching television. She had a new friend in there. Jamie knew the television as something that made sounds to keep the sound out. He was okay with that. The bird he had waited for had come. Of course, it didn’t have to be this one, but it was. There were any number of birds that didn’t belong in the Chicago sky.

  There were two windows in his apartment. One faced the alley and the other the courtyard. Jamie didn’t watch out the alley window. The things that he’d see fly by were never birds, but garbage bags hurled out the window from higher floors. They sometimes struck the air-conditioning units below. Whump. Sometimes catching there and rotting hot during the summer months.

  Jamie, who was really James, was named after his father but not named Junior because he was really the third. Jamie wanted a strong name, like Steve or Brick. He had been Jamie since he was born, even though there was no way to confuse him with his father, James, a man he had met only in dreams. Jamie wanted a name with a different history.

  Jamie who was really James ran downstairs to find the bird, to identify it, to see it. He would remember what he saw; he would write it down; he would record the date on his life list, the name of another bird.

  IN HIS HANDS, Jamie held a book. It was the only gift he had ever asked for, but the book was not a gift. His birthday, July 23, came and went with no celebration and no cake and no gift.

  Jamie got the book from the library. When the metal detector went off, he laid on the table a pocketknife he had found in the pants draped across the bathtub, the pants of his mother’s new friend.

  “Young man,” the stout lady library security guard said, “you know you ain’t supposed to be carrying this kinda thing around.”

  Jamie who was really James nodded. “I’m gonna keep this here until you come back round with your mama and she says it’s okay for you to have it.” His plan worked. He left behind the pocketknife, but took with him the Peterson Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America.

  JAMIE RAN DOWNSTAIRS with the Peterson Field Guide.

  What is its shape? What shape are its wings? What shape is its bill? What shape is its tail? How does it behave? Does it climb trees? How does it fly?

  Jamie had memorized these questions from the field guide. He repeated them so much in his head they seemed to have a melody. He knew the whole topography of a bird. His favorite part of the book was the beginning and the end, not as if the book held a story, but he loved the two sets of pictures of the birds’ silhouettes. Number 13 was the magpie, 25 the meadowlark, 9 well, that was the mockingbird, and 14 was the nighthawk.

  He was certain the silhouette of the great egret had passed his courtyard window.

  He ran downstairs. One day he would leave this city and find more birds, Jamie thought, taking the stairs two by two and then sliding down the sticky banister on the last three-step flight before the door. He would fill up his life list with birds he could name and call.

  When he finally reached the courtyard, he saw that his bird was not a bird at all. His bird was a boy and a girl and a mother and a child.

  The mother, the girl, the child. They looked liked they were sleeping, eyes closed, listless. The baby was still in her mother’s arms, a gray sticky porridge pouring from the underside of her head. The girl was heaped on top of the boy’s body, a bloody helpless pillow. And yet there was an old mattress, doughy from rain, just ten feet from the bird-boy’s right arm, which was folded like a wing beneath him.

  Pain moved the boy’s body. His bones jutted from his wrists. His eyes were wide open. He can see me, Jamie thought.

  The boy seemed to have landed feet first on the sodden cement courtyard filled with garbage bags bursting with scent and refuse. The bones from the bottom of the boy’s leg poked through his jeans at his thigh. He lay on the ground on his back as if he had fallen from a large, comfortable nest.

  It was not until the policemen came and raked through the courtyard’s waste that Jamie could turn away. The policemen collected matchbooks, soda bottles, and empty brown paper bags, scraps of paper, and other possible clues: a jack of clubs playing card lying on a brown-stained sheet, and a ticket from Saturday’s Quick Pick Lotto. Jamie was still holding his Peterson Field Guide. He had no names for what he saw.

  Laronne

  These white girls, Laronne thought despite herself. These white girls think all they need is love.

  When Laronne heard what happened, she made herself family. Laronne convinced the building super to let her up. “She’s my sister-in-law,” she said. “They were my babies too.” But she hadn’t had to lie. Laronne’s was the only contact name on Nella’s rental application, under “employer.”

  “Maybe you can find something they couldn’t,” the super said.

  In the four weeks since Laronne had hired her, Nella had always been on time. When she didn’t show up that Tuesday morning, Laronne called to find out what was wrong. Nella did not answer the phone.

  Nella had seemed distracted the last few days. The baby — just six months old — wasn’t sleeping. And the boy, he wasn’t feeling too well. And Nella’s daughter — such a little lady — she was beside herself because there was no money to visit the amusement park before the summer’s end as Nella had promised. Laronne couldn’t make everything better, but she had fifty dollars to lend for the kids to enjoy the park’s big rides.

  “I know you worry about them — new to the city and all — but kids can’t be cooped up watching TV all summer,” Laronne had said. “Go on, take this. And don’t worry none about when you get this back neither. Go and you and the kids have some fun.”

  Laronne was happy to help. Over the years, she’d become quite the hen-mother to her employees in the communi
ty college library. When they had no place to go on holidays, she insisted they crowd her dinner table. A couple of times an employee had come to live with her just to get through a tight month. And her son had grown used to seeing piles of presents under the Christmas tree — all meant for his mother’s employees and their families.

  Laronne’s husband sometimes chided her for getting too involved. “You’re the boss, not the mom.” But Laronne knew that her employees — mostly young mothers newly divorced working outside the home for the first time — were all working on a second chance. If she could do any small thing to help, she would.

  Nella took the money and smiled. It was the same wide smile Laronne remembered when she told Nella she had the job.

  “I am new in the city,” Nella said “I was thinking … I thought — Roger always said it would be hard. America was not what I thought it was. Thank you. Thank you.”

  Laronne laughed.

  “Oh, child. It isn’t easy. Especially not this town. Can’t imagine picking it over where you’re from.”

  In her first days at the job, Laronne learned that Nella had left Germany and her husband for a man, an American contractor she’d met at an AA meeting near base.

  She fell in love the night he drove her home in his beat-up Benz after a group potluck, but got lost with the directions she gave. It was the kind of thing that could have set Roger into a rage. Why couldn’t she just learn to read a map? But Doug said they’d have to figure out a different way to get her home. He stopped the car, walked over to open her door, and said: “We’ll just navigate by the stars.”

  Oh, these white girls, Laronne thought.

  Two weeks ago Laronne had found Nella in the bathroom curled into a ball, crying. She shook with every breath like a fist was opening up inside her.