Yet she'd carried it all without breaking. She survived it and was coming out the other side. Moved to a new place to give her kid a normal childhood, away from the whispers and the true-crime enthusiasts who treated her pain like a hobby.
I could see her again on that field standing there with fire in her eyes. I'd thought it was audacity. Now I realized it was something else entirely. That wasn't a simple attitude. That was armor forged by fire.
I picked up my phone again and pulled up my thread with my assistant.
I need a list of available rentals in the area. Family-friendly. Secure. Safe area. Reach out to Cheryl over at LF Realty
Then I opened my contacts and found a lawyer I knew.
Any firms you know of in the area hiring? Civil rights, public interest, family law.
She hadn't asked for any of this. But knowing what she’d been through, and the way she'd carried herself, got to me.
Years of cameras in her face and gossip and not one comment. She’d buried her husband, gathered her son, and kept her head up, never letting any vulture put words in her mouth about what she had survived.
Some people lose what she lost and never come back from it. I have seen it. Watched a man go under the surface of a kitchen floor and never come back up. Seen grief and loss eat a person from the inside until there was nothing left but an empty shell.
But she buried what she had to bury and she kept going. I recognized the shape of that. Respected that. The decision you make in the midst of the worst thing that has ever happened to you: that the only thing youowe it is your survival. I’d been walking that line since I was nineteen years old.
I closed my eyes. I had not let myself think about it in a long time. Tonight it came up anyway, and memories began to surface.
5/
find the melody
Trigger warning:this chapter depicts a pregnancy complication, maternal death witnessed by children, and intense grief. Reader discretion advised.
julian
eighteen years ago
I pickedZion and Tre up from the high school, then Simone from the middle school. Pops had asked me to get them because he was working and Mama had been feeling tired that day. He made her promise to rest and put her feet up. It was a regular Tuesday afternoon.
We pulled into the driveway and the bass was thumping out of the basement the way it often did when Pops and Uncle Reggie were in our home studio working on music. It was a sound we'd grown up under.
Simone hit the door first, with Tre behind her, while Zion held the screen door as I came in last with Simone’s book bag and a bag of groceries Mama had asked me to pick up in my arms.
I don't know which of us saw her first. I think Tre. He stopped in the living room staring at the kitchen threshold, frozen in place. Then, Simone screamed.
Mama was on the floor, on her hands and knees, trying to drag herself toward the basement door. Toward Pops, the sound of music, and the only life in the house that meant help. A trail of blood followed her from the kitchen sink, and her dress was soaked through from below the waist, dark red all the way down the back of it. She was clutching her stomach, heavy with seven months of our baby brother or sister, the ‘surprise blessing’ Mama and Pops announced a few months prior.
Tre grabbed Simone by both shoulders, spun her around and pressed her face into his chest. “Don't look. Don't look, Simi. Don't look.”
She'd already looked. Zion and I dropped at the same time, run-sliding across the room to her. We were both pulling our shirts off ourbacks without speaking. Pops had taught us to do it once: that if someone is bleeding, press hard, and that part of our brains was working.
“Mama!” Her name cracked out of me.
She turned her head toward the sound of the four of us, our shouting and crying, her eyes looking up at me and Zion, then drifting past us toward the basement door. I took her hand and pressed my balled-up shirt against the front of her dress where I thought the bleeding was, but there was no wound. There was no place to press.
“Where is the bleeding from, Mama! Where are you hurt!” I cried.
Her voice was faint and weak as her lips were trying to move around something. “Find…the…melody…” she barely got out.
The blood was coming from inside her and there was nothing in our kitchen that was going to stop it. Zion was on the other side, hands flat against her, asking where she was hurt.
“Tre! Call 911! Zion! Get Pops! Mama, stay with me. Stay with me.”
“Find…the…melody…”
