Freshwater Page 7
I continued to sleep with Itohan’s brother, and one morning back at their mother’s house in the suburbs, the sun was breaking like thin water through the window when Itohan’s mother walked into the room and caught Ada lying inside the curve of the boy’s long body. They were both wearing clothes—it was actually innocent, not like the night when Ada had been sleeping on the sofa in the upstairs parlor, when he held his penis to her face, thick and partial, bumping into her nose and nudging her lips apart. I had overtaken her before she woke up fully, moving quickly so I could push back the first wave of terror and disgust that was breaking in her. This was mine. He was mine. I had promised her, never again.
When his mother opened the door, Ada and the boy startled awake just in time to catch her firm gaze sweeping over them.
“Come to my room,” she told her son, and shut the door with a sharp click.
Ada’s stomach dropped. I stretched inside her and looked around lazily.
“Oh fuck,” she said, sitting up. “Should I go also?”
“Shit.” Itohan’s brother leaped off the bed and pulled on a T-shirt. His face was twisted with worry. “Just stay here. I’m coming.”
He left the room, carefully closing the door behind him as if someone else might walk past and see Ada in his sheets. I sat with her, excitement thudding through me. It was so bad, being caught. I loved it.
“What’s going to happen?” Ada asked me, chewing on the corner of her thumb. “What if she finds out?”
I thought about it. “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “You know what will happen.”
She was right. If Itohan’s mother found out I had been fucking her third child under her roof, Ada wouldn’t be welcome there anymore. Their family had wrapped her up as if she had a right to feel safe with them, and if this secret was discovered, she would lose them all.
“Don’t worry,” I told Ada. “She didn’t see anything.”
Ada wrapped her arm over her stomach. She was wearing an old oversized T-shirt, green with large colorful butterflies all over, a souvenir from the Philippines that Saachi had given her. She also wasn’t really listening to me, not anymore; she was too afraid. I sat with her anyway, until the boy came back into the room looking chastened.
“She wants to talk to you,” he said.
“What?!” Ada clambered off the bed. “For what? What did she say to you?”
He shrugged uncomfortably, not wanting to explain more. “Just go,” he said. “She’s waiting for you.”
By then, even I had become cautious, although the thrill of being bad still hummed quietly in me. Ada walked down the short hallway and knocked on his mother’s bedroom door, pushing it open when the woman’s voice told her to come in. She had never been inside that room before. It was shadowed and Itohan’s mother was sitting on the edge of her bed with a Bible lying next to her on the duvet. When she spoke, her voice was firm but not angry.
“I’ve seen you two cuddling on the couch before, and that one is fine,” she said. “I know you weren’t doing anything, but you should never share a bed with a man unless you are wearing his ring. Not even your own brother.”
Ada kept a scared and straight face, but I caught her relief and broke out in rib-tearing laughter inside her.
“She doesn’t know! I can’t believe she doesn’t know,” I gasped. “Fuck!”
“Shut up,” hissed Ada, her mouth closed.
The woman continued talking and my laughter turned bitter at how blind she was. So much had changed. So much had changed, and if this had happened six months before … but that wasn’t even possible. Six months before, Ada would never have been in Soren’s bed, I wouldn’t have been born, and Ada would still be the sweet and good girl who this mother thought she was talking to. But I was here now and I was the world, lying in ugly entrails. I envied his mother the cleanliness she lived in, where everything was still innocent and no one had ever touched Ada. It was such a fucking lie.
After she released Ada from her room, Ada went back to the boy’s bedroom, but she made sure to leave his door open. He was leaning against his wardrobe, looking beautiful and stressed out.
“I hate lying to my mother,” he said.
Ada made a face and put her hand on his arm. “I know,” she replied, and she meant it. She hated dishonesty and she knew what loving a mother felt like. Me, I rolled my eyes at the both of them.
“He can hate what he wants,” I told her. “You know he loves fucking us. It’s not as if he’s going to stop. They never stop.”
“You mean he loves fucking you,” she whispered back, and I made a rough sound. She was right. I was staying behind her face like a good little spirit, sha, like a small beast on a leash. When the boy drove us to church, Ada stood up in the car to stick her head out of the sunroof and feel the wind rocketing against her face.
“Come inside the car,” he scolded.
She looked down at his face and sat back in her seat. “What’s the problem?”
He stared straight ahead, through the windshield, his face set. “My girlfriend won’t do things like that.”
Ada raised her eyebrows and I snorted inside her head, but neither of us said anything. After the service, Ada headed toward the other car to return to the house with the rest of the family—the boy had to run some errands.
“You people, take care of my wife,” he called out to his mother and his sister and his older brother. His voice carried over the green lawn and he was smiling like the sun, and everyone laughed fondly as Ada blushed.
After I had Ada cut off her hair, the boy was disapproving, but he still prayed with Ada when he dropped her off at the airport because he had somehow become her boyfriend. When he prayed, Ada held his hands, closed her eyes, and pretended as if she could feel Yshwa anywhere close to her. She couldn’t, of course, not anymore, but I was helping her get better at lying.
After her visit with Saachi, Ada flew back to Virginia for her final year at the university. On her first day back, she walked through the cafeteria and set her tray down on a table. One of her friends on the track team slid in next to her, flipping a ponytail over her shoulder.
“Hey, Ada. How was your summer?”
Ada shrugged. “It was cool. Went to Georgia, visited my mother, had sex. You know, the usual.”
Her friend shrieked. Everyone knew Ada had never been touched like that before. “Girl, what?! You got laid?”
Ada smiled and they both dissolved into laughter.
Her friend was nodding and proud. “Yo, when I saw you walking across the room, I could tell, you know? I said, ‘Yeah, she’s walking different.’”
I wondered if that was true. Was I showing that much on the outside? Had I entered Ada’s walk, the way she moved her head, her smile? She kept stretching her mouth and laughing with them, but I knew she was just relieved that they were treating her as if she was normal, now that she wasn’t the uptight virgin anymore. But inside, I could smell it: she still felt ashamed, dirty with sin. She hadn’t gone back to her christ, Yshwa. Instead she went to see that other boy she’d been talking to over the summer, that other brother of a friend, the one who was there when she left Soren. Ada thought she might love this new boy. If she could love Soren, then why not this one? But while I was kissing him on the blue mattress of Ada’s dorm room, I drifted her hand down between his legs and recoiled at the thinness of his penis.
“I can’t work with that,” I told Ada, and I ended the crush.
She didn’t argue with me. I had her call Itohan’s younger brother, and she broke up with him.
“I was feeling single already,” he said. He sounded petulant.
“Good,” I told Ada. “It’s better this way.”
“If you say so,” she said, and she let him go.
The next summer, we went back to Georgia, and I set my sights on Itohan’s older brother. Ada never forgave me for what I did to him.
She wasn’t d
oing a lot of forgiving, to be fair. Not of me, not of herself. Before Soren, Ada had been obsessed with her christ, that Yshwa. She loved him, or to be more accurate, she adored and worshipped him, which is exactly how he likes it. She lived for him. I don’t even know why—he was never there for her, not like me, not even close. He couldn’t even be bothered to materialize when she was just a little girl, when she really, really needed him. How can you leave a child alone like that? But whatever—it’s stupid to think that gods actually care about you. Ada stopped talking to him after I was born, all because of that promise she’d made to be abstinent, which is another thing I don’t understand. Her body meant more to me than it ever did to her. Promising abstinence was like promising not to play with a weapon that she didn’t even like in the first place. After Soren was done with her, Ada walked away from Yshwa and straight into my arms, where she belonged. Yshwa’s teachings included a lot about repentance and forgiveness and being white as the snow of a bleached lamb, the general gist being that you could fuck up and start over, and Ada believed in it until I was born and then she didn’t.
She tried to, since it seemed like a betrayal to lose faith so deeply, to be that lost, but she just couldn’t believe that she would ever be clean again. Now that I was there, with my sleek skin and wet hair, she was probably right. I couldn’t be excised. Life moves in only one direction and things couldn’t go back to what they used to be: bright and untouched, with Ada being ignorant of what our shared body now meant and what it could be used for. All that mattered was this, and I told her—I had to use the body first, before they did.
Yshwa didn’t give up on Ada, which was touching, I suppose. He started to materialize inside her mind, as if he was one of us, as if he belonged there. He was trying to reach her but I never liked him, so I blocked him at every chance. He had too much light inside him, it was always reflecting off the marble and glaring into my eyes. I would have to pull in shadows just to soak it all up. But it wasn’t difficult to keep him away from Ada; she didn’t believe him anyway, that he would take her back. Yshwa kept trying to tell her what it would take her three years to hear, that she hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was so hurt and broken that she heard nothing. The only one who was listening to him was me, and he could tell I didn’t care. Yshwa had this way of looking at me, with this half-loving, half-sad face, his head tilted to one side and darkness drifting off his shoulders from the shadows I tried to throw on him.
“I’m just trying to help her, you know.” His voice was tucked and soft. I didn’t care.
“I don’t care,” I told him. “Just go away.”
“I want to help you too. I can help you too.”
“I don’t need your help. Go away.”
“Asụghara,” he said, and my name sounded like a spring bubbling in his mouth.
I glimmered in and out impatiently. He was sitting cross-legged on the marble, wearing bone-colored linens, his hair short and curled this time. I stood by her eyes, looking out, dressed in matte black. The shadows were good at sticking to me.
“Do you really think what you’re doing with Ada is helping?” he asked, and I could feel my temper growing my nails out, long and pointed, dark red like his blood an hour after they pierced his side. I folded my arms and stared at him. I wanted him to leave.
“Are you angry with me?” he asked.
“I don’t want you here,” I told him. “You make her sad. You remind her of too much shit. You know I don’t give a fuck about you, but you still matter to her, and this”—I gestured at his presence on my marble—“all this does is make it harder. For her.”
He looked at me as if I was a wound. “You’re so far away from home,” he said, so quietly that I thought he was talking to himself. Then he added, “I’m not leaving her. You understand?”
“Then you’re an idiot,” I snapped. “It doesn’t matter whether you say you’re leaving her or not. You don’t want to hear word—Ada is not talking to you anymore.”
“She talks to me all the time,” Yshwa shot back. “She’s crying, she’s screaming, the girl is sorry all the time. There’s so much guilt over her eyes, it covers everything else.”
I scoffed at him. Gods always think everything is about them. “Biko, that’s not talking. That’s basically her telling you good-bye. As in, you’re behind her while I’m in front. In fact, I’m around her. I’m everywhere. She tells me what she’s too ashamed to tell you.”
“You are the thing she’s ashamed of,” he reminded me. “And I hear everything anyway.”
I was amazed at how well I was keeping my temper. “Clap for yourself. She’s still not talking to you. So go away.”
He stood up, towering above me. “I’ll be here, Asụghara. Ada knows that.”
“She has me.” I couldn’t help snarling at him when I said it. “It’s enough.”
Yshwa touched my cheek and his palm felt like wet silk. “I’m not ashamed of you,” he said, as if it was nothing. “You know I love you.”
I jerked my head away. “Fuck you.”
He gave me that damn look again as he left, the fucking resurrected bastard, but I didn’t care, I was just glad that he was gone. He wasn’t getting her back. Ada was mine, I told myself, standing in the empty marble.
She was mine.
Chapter Eight
The back of your brain is open.
We
Allow us to interject; these births are complicated moltings, leaving skins all over the place. But remain assured, Asụghara’s presence was not our absence, never that. We fell back when she burst forward, true, but we are many and she was just one of us, a beastself, a weapon that needed to be put in play. We let her mount the Ada, we let that story ride out—it has as many layers as we do. Here is one of them: the story of the other gods.
We have told you about some of them—Yshwa, for example. Ala, the controller of minor gods, our mother. But there are others, and anyone who knows anything knows this, knows about the godly stowaways that came along when the corrupters stole our people, what the swollen hulls carried over the bellied seas, the masks, the skin on the inside of the drum, the words under the words, the water in the water. The stories that survived, the new names they took, the temper of old gods sweeping through new land, the music taken that is the same as the music left behind. And, of course, the humans who survived, those selected among them, the ones in white, the ones shaking shells and mineral deposits, the ones ridden, the ones chosen, the ones who follow, work, and serve because calls pass through blood no matter how many oceans you drop death into.
Those humans recognized us easily; it was as if they could smell us under the Ada’s skin or feel us in the air that heaved around her. After the Ada left home and got tucked into that little town in the mountains, she met one of them, the Dominican girl with the cigars. Her name was Malena and she was a daughter of Changó, of Santa Bárbara. She met the Ada at a meeting for the community service fraternity they’d both joined, before the Ada met Soren, before Asụghara arrived in the third birth-skinning.
The two of them, Malena and the Ada, used to sit out on the redbrick porches of the old school buildings and smoke cigars together, listening to the sharp breaking calls of Dominican palos pierce the air on the humped backs of drums and seedsounds. On one of those nights, we flung ourselves through the Ada’s body, dancing to the words we could and could not hear, dark air around us. Malena watched us with slitted eyes, a cigar in her red and white mouth, smoke wrapping her face.
On another night, Malena’s body was there but Malena was gone, and a mansaint with a deep voice used the muscles of her mouth. He gave the Ada a message to give to Malena for when she got her body back, something we can’t remember now, but that is expected: the message was for Malena and not for us, after all. When the Ada passed it on, Malena was unfazed; it was normal for her, to be mounted and then left by saints, gods, spirits. The Ada was amazed but we were respectful. We loved Malena because she smelled like us.
“There’s a claim on your head, Ada,” she told us. “Back home. Something wants you back home.”
“Who?” The Ada didn’t know the things we did. None of this sounded like anything to her.
“I don’t know.” Malena pushed her black hair off her face and poured a glass of Johnnie Walker. “These are West African gods, not mine, so I can’t speak to them like that, you know?”
She told us other things, though. “You’re the daughter of Santa Marta,” she said, early on. “La Dominadora.”
The Ada looked her up online and we all gazed at the imported image on the computer screen: a mirrored forest of black hair springing from the scalp, the scaled lengths of our mother’s ambassadors wrapped around Santa Marta’s hands. It was all the same, a million mothers with a million names all flicking their quick tongues over the clear path to our spine.
We wondered—what would Ala have said to Malena’s claim that Santa Marta was the Ada’s mother? An old god to a newer, younger one. Santa Marta, the one who raises the wind and uncovers the bones, while the humans throw up circular pinnacles of clay in Ala’s name, raking five rows in the earth on either side. Ala, the god that gives children with both hands and watches them multiply like leaves creeping over the earth, seven seas roaring under her feet. Perhaps she would call Santa Marta by her other name, Filomena Lubana, and warn her not to send her husband into the Ada’s dreams. San Elias, El Barón del Cementerio, the Baron. Whoever guards the underworld guards Ala’s womb, you see; they are the same place. The Baron stepped over an island and into twenty-one rivers to put his name on the Ada’s tongue, so she called it out. (What do you do when a lwa wants you? No, that is a different story—forget the Baron.) It would be a warning, we decided, Ala to Filomena Lubana, a warning that the child was not hers. Nine Marta bore and nine Marta buried. The Ada has always belonged to Ala, and Ala is not inclined to share. Take away those brown eggs and honey.