Rose

Rose was tired, skin-deep tired so that just a finger rubbing against the flesh of her lower arm or bare shoulder had her closing her eyes and leaning to the side, head light and easy and floating away. Mama sipping her tea and checking on her pie in the oven every ten minutes and trying not to listen to Violet ask Jerome where he been and when he coming back and why, and no answers. Nothing to hang a hope or a promise on, and Mama's eyes flinching each time Violet's voice weakened or faded out altogether.

Violet leaning against the kitchen counter, head in hands and phone cradled between shoulder and ear, dark skin washed pale and lean limbs pliant. "Jerome, I don't want to do this with you now. Let me go . . . No, no I don't understand . . . You know you not right . . ."

Violet struggling and holding in tears as Rose watched the flinching of Mama's eyes and heard Lilly slowly making her way to the kitchen and listened to the hesitation in Violet's voice and felt her heart, the red of her insides boiling, heat radiating from her fingertips. Mama and sisters all tangled and bruised while upstairs in Rose's old bedroom her child, Imani, slept like there was nothing that she didn't need, nothing that she didn't have.

Late afternoon and Mama's kitchen filled with soft light and the kitchen floor spotless and shining and apple pie smelling like any second it was coming out the oven, and Rose wanted to go upstairs and get her child and go home.

Mama got up to pour herself another cup of tea. "Want some more, Rose?"

She ran her hands over the mess of her hair, soft and loose and reaching for the sky. "No, Mama. I'm okay. This peppermint tea?"

"I been mixing and dabbling. It's peppermint and just a little ginger." Rose took another sip. "I can hardly taste the ginger."

Violet hung up the phone, dazed, and her face absolutely closed. Her dark slacks wrinkled and her cotton blouse clinging to skin damp with sweat and anxiety. She just made it to the table and Rose reached over to pull out her chair.

Violet tried to look up but her head dropped and rolled about on her shoulders. "We're going to talk when I get home."

Violet looking so fragile, the slenderness of her neck unable to support her head, the curve of her spine bowed from the weight of her body.

Violet showed her teeth, almost a smile but not quite because she looked like she could do real harm with those teeth if someone got too close. "I don't know. I just don't know."

Rose ran callused fingers over Violet's clenched fists. "You can't do nothing more than you doing, Violet."

Violet just stared at her, and Rose wanted to grab her and shake her hard because Violet always the meanest, always able to handle or take anything.

Mama went to get the apple pie out of the oven and Lilly came wandering in and everything and everyone stopped in mid-motion. Lilly, high yellow and so slim that she didn't look like a woman, resembled some underfed third-world brown child with huge eyes. Eyes shining from the high and feet always floating above the ground and locked hair hanging down the back and past the shoulders and long-sleeved shirt hiding the purple and red and blue bruises on her yellow skin. Her skirt moving around her body like some alive thing and Lilly looking almost dead except for the shining eyes and floating feet.

"Hey you all," she said and sat, unconcerned, and even the room was afraid to breathe, she looked that gone, and no one knew how to bring her back and all of them had tried. Rose was the first to exhale because Violet still wondering and worrying over Jerome and Mama wondering if this was really her child and Rose knew that it was Lilly. Lilly was best loved for a long time and she may be fucked up out of her head but her scent was still familiar, gardens in full bloom, and Rose knew that scent always, in absolute darkness or bullshit.

Lilly's forehead resting on the coolness of the kitchen table, her hair heavy and swinging all around her, and Rose reached out and placed her hands upon Lilly's head, feeling the warmth of the scalp through her locks. Hands moving over Lilly's hair and Lilly absolutely still and Mama finding the strength to bend down and take the apple pie out the oven and place it on the stove top to cool. Rose tried to think of Lilly like she was before she started staying out for days at a time, sucking in death through her body, stumbling home with arms tender and bruised.

Trying to find her sister in this woman that she really didn't know and whispering down to her to ask, "Baby, you doing all right?"

A long wait for the answer and during the wait Mama came back to the table and Violet's head stopped wobbling on her neck and Rose continued to stroke hair, separating heavy locks, gently twisting until the hair at the root coiled and then moving on to another lock. All of them waiting for Lilly to say something or not say something, just waiting.

Lilly turned her face toward Rose, cheek resting against the kitchen table and hair forming a veil across her mouth and nose and cheeks, only her eyes visible. "I'm fine, Rose of my heart. I'm fine." Eyes closing peacefully like sleep and face smooth like a child's and Rose and Mama and Violet all staring at her and staring at each other because there were no words.

Finally Violet said, "Lilly. Lilly, what the fuck-excuse my language, Mama-but what the fuck are you doing to yourself?" Rose hearing all of Violet's anger, anger at Jerome and herself and their life with two almost-grown sons falling away, all the time falling away because Jerome liked young girls, nibbled at necks still smelling of mother's milk, sucked at breasts that were mostly flat, spread thighs free of excess fat and smooth like stone.

Lilly stayed quiet, head still and eyes closed, and Rose wondered what she was thinking or feeling or if she had simply let herself go, letting go of the self and only the body remaining like Mama in church talking about what belongs to Earth and what belongs to Heaven and Rose all the time knowing that there was no relationship to spirit without the flesh. Lilly losing herself in flesh and needle sinking into skin and men who paid her to suck or fuck or feel.

Mama said, "Leave her alone, Violet."

Violet shook her head and the meanness that was all the time there beneath coy smiles and flirting eyes showed on her face. "Mama, we been leaving her alone all this time and look what's happened. I will not sit here and say that she is okay when she isn't. I can't do that because look at her. Look at her."

Rose shook Lilly lightly, no response, and she shook a little harder until Lilly lifted her head again. Thin face and huge eyes and wide mouth all familiar but the whole a person that she didn't quite recognize, and when and how did that familiar face become someone else even if the scent didn't change and what was she to do? Scent the same but everything else different. Body pounds lighter and tiny wrinkles from living too hard and losing too much weight around the mouth and skin no longer soft and warm but dry and cool to the touch. Lilly's face, stranger's face, looking blankly at her and she said, "Lilly, why don't you just go upstairs and sleep it off?"

Lilly pushing back her chair and rising to her feet and standing absolutely still and Rose and Violet and Mama trying to ignore bruises. Lilly floated through the kitchen and up the stairs and Mama asked, "Anyone want some pie?"

Rose shook her head. "No, I'm fine. I'm going to check on Imani and think about getting out of here, Mama."

She picked up Lilly's scent as soon as she hit the dining room, beyond the reach of kitchen and pie, gardens in full bloom, and Rose followed the trail of flowers through the dining and living rooms, up the stairs and to the door of Lilly's room. She hesitantly knocked and went inside and Lilly was lying on the hardwood floor directly in the sunlight coming in through the window, skirt around thighs and shirt lifted. Nothing but smooth leg and thigh and round breasts and Rose stared and wished that she had pencil and paper to sketch or that she was in her studio and Lilly like this burned in her mind to sculpt from wood and stone. Lilly always like some spirit woman, floating through the air and making of her own warm flesh ritual sacrifice. Rose closed the door and sat next to her on the floor, crossed her legs and pulled her wrap skirt around her knees so that their skin was touching. Imani slept hard and deep on Lilly's bed, curled into herself.

"I was hoping that you'd come up. That's the only reason I came through the kitchen really, to see you. Then all you staring at me and Mama looking like any minute she'd cry and Violet looking like she wanted to cuss me out and you looking like you wanted to pick me up and rock me and I couldn't think. Couldn't do anything else but put my head on the table and keep it there and not say a word."

"Okay. I'm up. What were you hoping on me for?" Rose needing this time to be different, Lilly not miles and years away from her. Lilly's room the same room that they shared as girls, walls still covered in flowered wallpaper, floor still bare and hardwood gleaming, tops of dressers covered by baby dolls and stuffed animals. Little-girl room, nothing at all to hint at woman.

"Just hoping, that's all. Lay with me?"

Lying with Lilly in the sun, the wood of the floor cool against the exposed skin of leg and thigh, turning toward Lilly and curling into her, curling into the warmth despite the smell of some random man's sex and something dying slowly, skin falling from bone and bone bare and defenseless, and flowers, always flowers. Face protected between Lilly's head and the long, thick length of falling locks.

Watching Lilly drift into little-girl dreams. "I used to love sleeping with you. Remember? Skin to skin and safe," Lily said.

"Baby, what are you doing?"

"Rose, oh Rose. Taking names and keeping score . . . My whole body nothing more than a historical map or a historical past and nothing I can do but follow the roads already engraved beneath the skin."

Lilly's breasts in her line of vision, the smallness, and the pale yellow skin and the exposed childlike nipples. Wanting to grab a blanket and cover her and wash the stink of sweat off her skin and Lilly's love of words and playing with words and destroying words keeping her fragmented and swallowed by pen and paper, nothing worth saving, and paper filled with words and words and more words in the trash. "Lilly. Lilly, listen to me, poetry is killing you."

Lilly closing her eyes and long lashes resting against pale yellow skin, the skin about the forehead absolutely smooth and even. Rose watched Lilly's chest rise and fall and fall and rise slowly, almost holding her breath and letting it out in a great rush of words. "Not that, it's not that, and I know that you don't believe me and haven't even listened to me for some time. I know the kind of picture I present. In my head I hear all the time you all talking and wondering why I don't stop getting high, stop walking the streets, stop fucking up. I know what you all are thinking Rose, really. I think I must be telepathic or something. It's not poetry. It's not. I don't write anymore so it can't be, and if I don't write there's nothing to keep or constantly carry around and I carry enough with all this history beneath the skin without words always distorting my vision."

Rose trying to untangle and cut through and get to the heart of Lilly, hidden for so long behind nothing that made sense. "What are you talking about? Lilly, I have no idea of what you just said let alone what it meant."

Lilly turning away from her, smell of flowers and stale sex fading, and staring at the long length of back and the roundness of hip. "Where does that leave us?"

Staring at the length of her sister's back, the dark spots never quite faded from childhood chicken pox, the thin scar from a fall off the swings when they were both in elementary school. An entire life that included her written on the back of a sister that she didn't really know anymore. She kissed the exposed skin of Lilly's neck, finding warm flesh through cool hair, and left her there, sprawled out on the floor. Looking down on her and Lilly looked helpless, her body a light and insubstantial thing but she already had one child sleeping on the bed and she didn't know how to be a mother to one more, not one more.

"Lilly, I'm gone. Hear me, I'm gone."

Lilly not moving at all. "I hear you. Always."
 

Excerpted from Getting Our Breath Back © Copyright 2002 by Shawne Johnson. Reprinted with permission by Plume, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. All rights reserved.