#fvp

Daniel’s out at the cemetary's manmade pond. Sat in the grass, never a care in the fucking world, but it’s not like it can stain their funeral black, so who gives a fuck?

Really, Vic thinks as he approaches, who gives a fuck?

“Not me.” 

Something seizes up in him for the briefest second. Who gives a fuck? Not me. He can’t stand the idea of someone else in his brain, in his thoughts. Mama teased him for being so bare-faced, so easy to crack when he tried to lie. Privacy is one of the last things he’s got, and Vic really would prefer not to lower it into the ground on the same day as their grandmother.

“Damn. Won’t fuckin’ be me.” Dan continues, though, so the universe rewards him with space for a relieved breath. 

Think your brother’s motherfuckin’ telekinetic? Vic could laugh, but there really would be no worse time. He imagines what a sight they make. Grown men — troubled men, Miss Cindy and the church crowd probably chirping about that — just sat in the grass. 

He glances down at Dan’s fingers. There’s a cigarette tucked in his sleeve, like he doesn’t want anybody to know. Like there’s not smoke curling up around them, hanging over them. 

(No breeze today. Stagnant air feels right. Nice weather would be an insult, would mean the earth was turning and everything was going along as-is, like everything hadn’t changed).

“What won’t be you?” He takes the cigarette from Dan before he even offers it. Watches bony knuckles rub against each other, trying to replace the filter’s orphaned weight between fingers. 

Dan gestures broadly. It’s just at the pond, but it’s not just at the pond: the whole acreage, the pokes of trees over the horizon, rolling hills beyond and everything else on the goddamn planet beyond that, the universe, whatever rests just past it.

It’s the crowd, too. She knew a lot of people. Dan doesn’t know a single one, besides family. And even then, barely them.

“Don’t know nobody.” The words squish together like mince in his mouth. Vic feels guilty for looking at him so close. Watch for the clenched jaw, the teeth grind, the tense of the neck, the whites of the eyes, is he sweating a normal amount, are those the anxiety shakes or the shakes shakes?

Vic flicks ashes and turns his chin. “Khalil’s over there with Miss Cindy. You remember him?” 

Dan snorts. He still hasn’t looked away from the pond. “Fuck no. You think I keep up with these clowns?”

“Hey.” 

A shrug. “I’m just sayin’.” The cigarette returns to its owner and is promptly sucked to the marrow. Vic pounds his back when he coughs. “Not gonna be me, Freddie.” 

He hasn’t gone by that name since he was a kid. Then again, they haven’t been around each other much since they were kids. Dan’s a city boy now. Big-time quick, no life faster in Houston. Had a Goliath or two to fight, seems like he might not have kicked them both. 

“That’s David.” 

“What?” 

Dan turns abruptly to look into the crowd. There’s an unreadable look on his face (eyebrows pinched, mouth flat, nostrils flared), but Vic doesn’t know him well enough anymore to gauge expressions like that. 

“David? Next to Khalil.”

Vic scoffs. “Man, that’s Greg. An— Abuela’s live-in, you don’t remember him?” 

The man in question is slim and Miami tan. He wears tailored pants that fit his ass a little too personally for a funeral and is weeping into a jewel-toned purple handkerchief. The cuffs of his suit jacket and rolled pant legs have the same color - bright enough Vic can see it from the hundred or so feet between them and the rest of the mourners.

“She went through them.” 

And she did. One after another. None of them had complained about her, but all of them had bounced on short notice after only a few months of service. Vic had never seen any of them hang around. Some of his friends had family that needed care (supervision, abuela called it all tongue-in-cheek). He’d heard from a few that, on occasion, the nurses and aides were happy to catch up with old clients. Take them out to breakfast, meet up with family for updates, even help with eventual passings. 

Grace, Hector, Yvonne, Sam, Lakeisha, Julian. Anyway, those were the names he could remember over the years. None of them he’d seen since the last time. Nothing for breakfast or updates. 

Except Greg. 

“Greg must be special.” 

Dan sucks his teeth. “He’s something.”

“Watch it,” Vic warns, sounding like mama. Not now, of course - she hasn’t said more than a word or two since abuela went on, and when she does decide to speak her voice is gritty and hoarse.

Speak in front of others, that is. Vic’s staying in the guest room. The kids’ old room, where the three of them - Annie Jay, Vic, Dan - would sleep most nights, along with maybe some cousins. Mama’s room is down the hall, between theirs, the little bathroom, and the stairs. 

Every night since he rolled back into town to attend to funeral needs, Vic’s heard mama mumbling to herself late at night. Her bare feet sticking slightly to the old, humid-fat wood floors. 

Sleepwalking. Sometimes: Mama, mama. Sometimes: Y tu también? Y qué hay de mí?

(And sometimes, even this, which Vic will not admit he hears, which he swears to God and whatever else is his own sleep walk, his own dream: Y qué hay con mi alma? Because it echoes sometimes, right down the hall to him: mi alma, mi alma, mi alma.)

“You think she’s still around?”

Another shiver passes over him. Vic pulls his jacket closed a bit more, unbuttons and rebuttons it like that’ll keep the late fall chill away a moment longer. 

“Who?”

“Don’t play stupid.” Dan sounds angry. But when Vic looks at him, his face is blank. “You think we do that?”

“What?”

“Vic, man.” Dan fishes for another cigarette. Instead of pulling a pack out, he takes one. With a mean, hot twist of anger, Vic realizes that’s what he’s been doing all evening: going up to mourners, family, friends, community members. Not offering thanks or appreciation or sharing memories, but asking for fucking smokes.

“Vic, man, what?” He snatches the cigarette away. In his head, it tosses gracefully right into the pond. But Vic won’t start smoking for another three years now, so he doesn’t know how light they are. How hard to throw. It flings about five feet ahead and then settles in the wet grass. 

Dan swears at him colorfully and then jogs to get it. He doesn’t return to the spot next to Vic, to the flattened bit of greenery. 

That’s Daniel, Vic thinks meanly. Always leaving the impression, the afterimage, never fucking staying.

Dan turns then. “You think we ever really go? You believe all that shit, God takin’ us home?”

Vic wants to tell him yes. Wants to say yes more than anything. Let him have some comfort, let him fill the impression of himself with something if it can’t be his own body. That would be a comfort. That’d be a blessing, and isn’t that what God’s all about, anyway? Blessings and faith and comfort and going home?

No.

“Kinda.” Vic says. He looks over the pond, trying to find solace in his lie by way of the mosquitos beginning to descend in a buzzing crowd, the skippers that chase after, the frog song, the brush of green life at his ankles. Nature. More abuela’s style than gospel and devotionals and counting little beads, the way Italians went about God. 

“More every day. You gotta, believe, right? Otherwise what’s all this for?”

Vic’s speaking, not looking at Dan. He doesn’t catch the way his baby brother’s face shutters, the blank look in his eye. He’ll wish he had. 

*

He dreams her most nights. It’s comforting.

It’s terrifying.

In a little house. A parking garage. The alley of the apartment he remembers from kindergarten. The prairie sweep of eastern Texas, where she took him exactly once, at fifteen. And sometimes rising over the marsh mists, her arms spread like Jesus and legs billowed up in fabric - the pink-daisy print nightgown they’d debated burying her in.

She wouldn’t be caught dead in that, in front of everyone, he remembers mama saying. So she’d gone six feet under in a church dress Vic didn’t recognize, bounded and bundled in cloth (by a man of the cloth), sent off with hymns he never heard her sing, not once in all his years. Maybe even all hers, either. There was so much she hid from them.

When he started dreaming her, he selfishly hoped a little of all that would be revealed. When he started dreaming her, he expected answers.

Not more questions.

*

Five years later: 

“You gon’get tired of Miss Butler any day now, Jay.” He says. “What’s that, five-hundredth read?”

“Mind your business.” AJ volleys back. They flip a page in the loved book spread between their fingers, knuckle-twirling a grey-streaked coil. “Just mad your thick skull don’t allow for reading.”  

Vic snorts. Starts to throw his coat over one of the rickety kitchen chairs, has vision of mama in his head going una cuadra? una cuadra? and quickly thinks better of that. Her influence lingers, even if the scent of her left. Some comfort in that, he thinks. Scents and dreams.

“Where’d you go?” 

AJ’s abandoned the book (big, rare ask) in favor of catching him on the way into the front room. With loving, tacky palms they cradle his face. 

“Nowhere.”

“Not here,” they tease, although there’s a teeny, tiny serious note to it. Rarer than a book not being in their hands. “C’mon.” 

He swallows. It’s hard to look at AJ. He and Dan got the Pierce tossed earth stare, bit of green if you looked close. But AJ was all mama, aunties, abuela. That cherrybark oak - querus pagoda. Dark-black-cinnamon-brown, mama’d say, in a rush like a spell. All Calderón. 

Dan.

The cool palms on his cheek turn his face, so Vic takes the darkness behind his eyelids instead. 

“Being difficult.”

“S’that skull you whine about.” He says smartly. 

“Where?”

There’s no room to argue. Not when they’re on his ass like this. AJ’s a fucking hound about causing problems, making confrontation - if he wanted to be real nasty, he’d mention that being the source of at least two departed ladies. 

“I was thinking of Dan.” Vic says. He swallows roughly. “Danny, Danny. My Danny.” 

In his head, he sounds neutral and strong. In his head, his voice doesn’t waver at all. But with AJ cradling his face, standing with them in the matriarch’s home on floorboards they used to accidentally scratch and catch groundings on and sneak out past the squeaky ones and stain for abuela every other summer when the constant wet pulled the color off, Vic cries. 

And cries.

And cries.

AJ shushes him as long as they can, broad hands rubbing along his back like it’s just tender skin they’re trying to fend a bruise from. 

“I was thinking of mama.” AJ admits as he sobs into their shoulder. “And daddy. And being Annie, now.”

Vic’s throat hurts when he’s done. And there’s a shadow in the corner he can’t quite name, that the sun can’t quite touch, that stays there even when the ceiling light sways towards it and illuminates the rest of the room. 

“That’s a sign,” Vic decides out loud, burying his privacy six feet deep. AJ doesn’t speak. Or, if they do, Vic can’t - won’t - hear them. “I gotta get right by God. That’s the way? That’s how I live like this? I gotta get right?” 

And maybe then, only then, maybe after I give everything like they say and I’ve got nothing left to give and I’m right by God, God’ll get right by me.

Problem is that Vic won’t learn that peeking under rocks, looking for the answers of life, gives you all sorts of new questions. 

*

Five more: 

It isn’t official the way it oughta be. But if there’s one thing in this life that Vic knows, one question he has been able to answer, it’s about the topic of wayward children. They’re a problem until they’re gone. Then, they’re just gone.

He knows better than to put his faith in an omen, but the baby’s on his doorstep at three in the morning. On the dot. 

He’s not asleep when the knock comes. When the great, tinny chime of the electric doorbell floods the chapel-converted-bachelor pad. 

The big wooden door swings open. Not a soul besides the howling ones outside, weaving between heavy dollops of rain. Thunder cracks overhead, and the little bassinet starts making noise.

“Alright.” Vic says, new to this. Trying to reason. “Alright, I hear it. I hear you. Here we are. Come on in. Get you a drink?” 

Remarkably - predictably, at this point? - there’s not a corner of the baby’s shroud 

“This makes me Moses, huh?” He asks the little bundle, bounchign it gently. His eyes glaze and trail off to the side, and Vic frowns. “Nah, shit. That ain’t right. Moses was the baby. Heh, sorry kid. Know your folks probably thought they were doing right by you, but seems like you used the last of your luck to stay dry. Got saddled with a fraud.” 

Vic taps the white square at his throat with a wink. The baby stares up at him. It’s big, wet eyes are the color of cherrybark. 

“Hm.” Vic hums thoughtfully. His head feels full, fuzzy. There’s a shadow in the corner. Maybe a couple. He needs to re-salt.

Instead, in no rush, he tucks the blanket around soft brown cheeks, thumb passing over a dimple in one. “Querus pagoda.”