But he was on the phone. Lazily throwing pieces of Val’s wardrobe into a plastic bag with one hand and holding his phone with the other.
Ras had called to thank him for his support. To say he knew he’d had a brother in Jamison and he was happy to call him his friend. It was the kind of ego massaging few people could resist. And though Jamison tried twice to get off the line, Ras kept coming back with his future plans and stories about women showing up at his house.
Meanwhile, downstairs (because Mrs. Taylor was downstairs then), heads were about to butt. The son couldn’t miss out on a kind word and mother couldn’t miss out on the chance to deliver a mean one, so when Val demanded that she come downstairs to say what she’d had to say at the top of the stairs to her face, Mrs. Taylor rushed down the stairs like a six-year-old girl going to fight behind a school building.
“I know you stupid, but you ain’t deaf!” Mrs. Taylor said, meeting Val toe to toe on a small landing between the living room and staircase.
“Whatever. You can save all of that. I just want to hear you say what you said, so we can get this all out in the open,” Val said.
“I said, I’m happy you’re getting your ghetto ass out of my son’s house!”
“No, that’s not what you said. You admitted it! You just admitted it. In your own evil way, you admitted it.”
/> “Admitted what?” Mrs. Taylor asked, feeling a tingling in her right arm that went quickly to her shoulder.
“That you killed my baby!” Val charged and in a voice so low and hateful, Mrs. Taylor felt her resentment and vengeance vibrating through her eardrums. Suddenly, she was taller than her aggressor. Her eyes caught hold of Mrs. Taylor’s pupils and any other word she had leveled against this woman shot right through to her mother-in-law’s conscience. And guilt at being accused or maybe having acted sent that tingling quickly throughout the entire left side of Mrs. Taylor’s body.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Mrs. Jackson retorted, feeling her body jolt backward.
“Yes, you did! And you’re going to jail,” Val lied to scare the old woman and she was surely successful, looking over Mrs. Taylor’s body as she fell to her knees.
“Jail? No! I didn’t!” Mrs. Taylor wanted to call for her son, but she knew her body couldn’t handle the strength she’d need to complete a sound that he’d hear.
“Yes, you did and the doctors found what you put in my food in my blood work and they’re coming to get your old evil ass right now!” Val went on. “Remember, you said you were leaving here as soon as you got things right? Well, now you can go.”
“No!”
The tingling made ice of every blood vessel and the freeze spread to her heart, where Mrs. Taylor’s hands went to somehow catch the final kick that was tugging her to the floor. But it was no use.
She fell backward and her eyes rolled up at the ceiling. Her brain cut loose from her body and she thought she was calling for help, crying, laughing, singing, looking for her little boy who had always loved her. But she was just seeing shadows and half in and out of the world. She saw Mama Fee in her red wig, smiling in Val’s face over her body. She tried to get away, but couldn’t move.
And if she could’ve, Val wouldn’t have stopped her. The freeze had come upon Val, as well. She couldn’t move herself for a hold that went past fear or anger. She was under a shroud of sadness that had been born with her, in her, and that had grown into an iceberg that stood between her and the reality of a woman dying at her feet.
“You could’ve shown me kindness,” she said in a low, creepy tone that would stay in the walls of that house.
“Jamison,” Mrs. Taylor called out breathily. “Jamison, I loved you.”
Upstairs, Jamison was off the phone and had gotten an inclination to drop what he was doing and run, run, run. It wasn’t due to the noise. It was the silence. A nagging silence of doom, like the voiceless cries of fish flipped out of water onto a side of the strand where the waves would no longer roll.
He saw his mother’s contorted body seizing at the bottom of the steps. Val standing against a wall a foot away.
“Mama!”
He was at her side, on his knees watching her eyes rolling fast, her hands still clinching her heart.
“Mama! Hold on! Hold on!”
He shouted to Val for her to call the police, but she was still against the wall calling for kindness.
“Mama, stay with me! Come on! Stay with me!”
He reached into his pocket and called for an ambulance. When the dispatcher asked for the matter, he said that his mother was dying. It was her heart.
He held this woman’s head in his lap and felt the powerlessness men knew only in the face of God. The face that nature had imprinted in his mind as the safest place in the world—for he knew every line and gash and mole and the way it could say whatever it wanted—was leaving him. And this full man wanted to yell out to the world that he was not yet grown.
“Why couldn’t you love me? Tell me!” Val whispered to Jamison’s back from the wall.
“What are you talking about?”