I could tell that P.T. and the youth didn’t really want me around, but I was used to keeping quiet and out of the way. They put me at the register because I was the only one who could ring people up without having to use the head-sized calculator we kept under the counter. I would sit at the counter working my way through my huge stack of books while P.T. set off fireworks outside. We weren’t supposed to use the merchandise without paying, so every time P.T. skulked off with a box of Roman candles, I would clear my throat loudly and make sure that he knew that I knew.

Ryan Green was one of the youth volunteers. He was Nana’s age, and he’d been over at our house for a couple of Nana’s parties. I knew him well enough to dislike him, but if I’d known him better, known that he was the biggest dealer at the high school, I probably would have hated him. He was loud, mean, dumb. I never signed up to volunteer if I saw his name on the sheet, but he was P.T.’s protégé, and, as such, he got to come sometimes even when the list was full.

    “Hey, Gifty, when’s your brother gonna get back on the court? We’re getting our asses whooped without him.”

It was two months after Nana’s injury. The doctor said that he was healing up nicely, but he was still being cautious with his right side, favoring his other ankle, scared to get hurt again. Our mother and Nana’s doctor had cut him off from the pain pill refills, but still, we would find him on the couch more often than not, watching television, or simply looking ahead with that dreamy stare. He had started going back to practice, but he still wasn’t putting much weight on that leg and he always came home complaining of pain.

“I don’t know,” I said to Ryan.

“Well, shit. Tell him we need him.”

I made a noncommittal noise and went back to my book. Ryan looked outside to make sure P.T. wasn’t heading back in. He was different in front of P.T., still loud and obnoxious, but with a prayerful edge. He didn’t curse or spit. He raised both hands during worship and closed his eyes tightly, singing loudly and swaying softly. I disliked him, not just because of his duplicitousness, but because he always carried an empty plastic water bottle around so that he could spit his dip into it. And I would see that thin brown liquid sloshing around in the bottle, and I would see the way he looked at me as though I were no better than the sludge he spit from his mouth, and it would force me to remember that there was an imbalance in my world.

“Hey, why you always reading them books?” he asked.

    I shrugged.

“Be better if you tried sports like your brother.” He raised his hands up in mock surrender, though I hadn’t said anything. “Don’t call the NAACP on me or nothing, but them books ain’t gonna get you nowhere and sports just might do it. Too bad Nana don’t play football though. That’s a real game.”

He reached across the counter and shut my book. I opened it and he shut it again. I kept the book closed and looked up at him with all of my fury, and he laughed and laughed.

P.T. finally came in, and Ryan immediately straightened up.

“Anybody come in here yet?” P.T. asked.

I was burning mad, but I knew that telling on Ryan would only make my life worse. He pulled out that water bottle and spit into it, still smiling from the memory of his devilment. In church that Sunday, I saw Ryan up in the first pew standing next to P.T., his arms stretched up toward Heaven and tears streaming down his face as the worship leader asked, “How great is our God?” I tried to focus on the music. I tried to focus on Christ, but I couldn’t stop looking at Ryan. If the Kingdom of Heaven allowed someone like him in, how could there also be a place for me?

31

I miss thinking in terms of the ordinary, the straight line from birth to death that constitutes most people’s lives. The line of those drug-addled years of Nana’s life is not so easy to draw, so direct. It zigs and it zags and it slashes.

Nana got hooked on the OxyContin; that much became clear to my mother about two months in, when he asked to go back to the doctor for a second refill. She said no, and then she found more hidden in his light fixture. She thought the problem would just go away, because what did we know about addiction? What, other than the “just say no” campaigns, was there to guide any of us through the jungle of this?

I didn’t really understand what was going on yet. I just knew that Nana was always sleepy or sleeping. His head was always nodding, chin to chest, before rolling or bouncing violently back up. I would see him on our couch with this dreamy look on his face and wonder how an ankle injury had knocked him so flat. He, who had always been in motion, how could he now be so still? I asked my mother for money, and the few times she gave it to me, I walked to Publix and picked up instant coffee. No one in our house had ever touched coffee, but I had heard the way people talked about it at church, how rapturously they approached the dispensers in the Sunday school classroom. I fixed the coffee in our kitchen, following the instructions on the back of the package. I stirred the powder into the water until it turned a deep, dark brown. I tasted it and found it disgusting and so figured it would be sufficiently medicinal. I’d present it to Nana, push his shoulder, his chest, try to rouse him long enough for him to drink it. He never did.

    “Can you die from sleeping?” I asked my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bell, after school one day.

She was sitting at her desk, shuffling the papers from the homework assignment we had all turned in. She gave me a funny look, but I was used to getting funny looks for the questions I asked. Always too many, too strange, off topic.

“No, sweetie,” Mrs. Bell said. “You can’t die from sleeping.”

I don’t know why I put my faith in her.

* * *

—

Nana sweat so much that his shirts were drenched through mere minutes after he put them on. This was after my mother cleaned out his light fixture, throwing away the last of the prescription pills that he had squirreled away. He had to keep a trash can nearby at all times because he was constantly vomiting. He was constantly shaking. He shit himself more than once. He looked like walking, breathing misery, and I was more scared for him then, sick in his sobriety, than I had been when he was high.

My mother wasn’t scared at all. She was a caregiver by profession, and she did what she had always done when a patient was in distress. She would hoist Nana up, lifting him by the armpits, and lower him into the bathtub. She always closed the door, but I could hear them. Him, embarrassed and angry; her, down-to-business. She washed him the way she had when he was a child, the way I knew she must have washed Mr. Thomas, Mrs. Reynolds, Mrs. Palmer, and everyone else in between.

    “Lift your leg,” I’d hear her command, and then softer, gentler, “Ebeyeyie.” It will be all right.

There must be some Oedipal shame about lying in the bathtub at sixteen, crying as your mother washes the shit and vomit and sweat off your body. I would avoid Nana for several hours after one of these cleanings, because I knew that somehow my being witness made him feel all the worse. He’d skulk off to his room and hide there until the entire event had to be repeated.

But if I saw my mother in the moments after she’d cleaned her firstborn child, I would go stand by her, be buoyed by her and this wellspring of strength she seemed so capable of drawing from. She never had even the faintest hint of shame. She would see me, my worry and fear and embarrassment and anger, and she would say, “There will come a time when you will need someone to wipe your ass for you,” and that would be that.

* * *

—

My mother was accustomed to sickness. She knew what it meant to be close to death, to be around it. She knew that there was a sound to it, that raspy, gurgling noise that comes out and up from whatever part of the body where death hides, lurking, waiting its turn, waiting for life to tag out.

She was with Mrs. Palmer in her final hours. Like my mother, Mrs. Palmer had been a pious, churchgoing woman, and she’d requested that my mother be at her bedside to read her Scripture before she went on to receive her reward.

    “This is what death sounds like,” my mother said, and she imitated that crackling noise. “You shouldn’t be afraid of it, but you should know it. You should know it when you hear it, because it is the last sound and we all make it.”

Mrs. Palmer had been given morphine to ease her pain. She had smoked all her life, even in that final week, and her lungs had become ornamental. Instead of an exhale there was collapse, and every inhale was a whisper. Morphine didn’t reshape her lungs into the air-filled sponges they were meant to be, but it offered a distraction, telling the brain, “Instead of air, I can give you a kind of freedom from need.”

“That’s what drugs are for,” my mother lectured Nana and me the first night she returned home from Mrs. Palmer’s bedside. “To ease pain.”