Malawi's Sisters Read online

  She touched the milky-white skin right below his hairline, skin that gradually darkened to a golden brown along his shoulders and down his back. For a white boy, during the summer, he got as dark as she was. “Baby.” She nudged his shoulder. “Wake up!”

  He made a grunting noise, rolled onto his side and reached out for her, wrapping his arms around her waist and snuggling his face into her thigh. “Come back to bed,” he said, his words muffled. She pushed him back so she could see his face.

  “Malawi’s been . . .” She paused thinking maybe she was dreaming. Malawi’s been shot. The phrase seemed absurd to say out loud.

  Ryan’s eyes flickered open; he squinted at her, his face soft and sleepy. “Huh?”

  Clutching his forearm, her mind began to race, a barrage of questions filling her head: Should she fly down there, too? Was it a drive-by shooting? Could a shoulder injury be fatal? Was she overreacting? Daddy would be there soon to make sure Malawi was okay. And they’d call. Everything would be okay.

  Ryan’s eyelids slowly closed and his face fell into the pillow. She stared at him, feeling her throat tight, her pulse throbbing in her head. His arm made one more attempt to pull her back to bed; she shoved him away and went to the bathroom to shower. Maybe she would fly down there.

  Waiting for the water to warm, she thought about calling Kenya to see if she knew anything more, but decided against it. Ghana hadn’t talked to her older sister in months. Not since Christmas when everyone was home.

  “You’re not living up to your potential,” Kenya had said. The family was gathered, as always, at their parents’ home in Crestwood. Kenya loved that they grew up in the bourgie neighborhood, nicknamed the Gold Coast. That her daddy was a prominent judge, that she’d married a successful businessman, and that she went to law school and lived in a swanky house in Potomac, Maryland.

  “Is that what you’re doing?” Ghana had asked. “Living up to your potential with your two perfect kids and your big house and Louboutin shoes.”

  “I don’t wear Louboutins.” Kenya had looked at her feet, and with a straight face said, “These are Fendi.”

  Ghana looked to the ceiling. “Whatever.”

  “I’m serious, Ghana. Look at your life. You do massage. You do graphic design. You’re all over the place. You live in a pitiful apartment in Anacostia.”

  “Yeah, and you wouldn’t set foot on that side of town, right?”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “You don’t know anything about the people who live there, so shut up.”

  “I’m not talking about the people who live there. I’m talking about you and your lack of focus. You need to go back to school. Finish your degree.”

  “Go to hell, Kenya. My business is my business. Besides, I’m moving in with my boyfriend next month.”

  Before Kenya could say anything more, Li’l Sis had stepped in, as she often did. “Jesus, you two. Knock it off.”

  Malawi was the peacemaker. The one who wanted everyone to get along. And Ghana loved her desperately. They had talked yesterday evening. Malawi seemed happy to be in Florida, though she had confessed she missed everyone. She had met a guy and said they’d been dating for a few months. Last night, she was headed to a colleague’s house for dinner, a woman who also taught Math at the same high school. Ghana couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but she had become somewhat of a mentor to Malawi. At least that’s how Li’l Sis had described her. Malawi had called from her car, on her way to the woman’s house. She’d been in good spirits and they’d laughed about her maybe stopping by her guy’s house after dinner for a booty call on her way home. Ghana wondered if her sister had visited him and he’d gotten angry and hurt her somehow.

  She turned off the water and stepped out of the shower, wrapping a large green towel around her. In the steamy bathroom, the blood left her head and she sat on the edge of the tub.

  “Good god, I hope not.”

  4

  It was just after eleven in the morning and the air was muggy and hot. Malcolm drove the rental straight to Palm Beach Hospital. The Taurus handled well enough but the GPS seemed to lack an accurate image of the terrain and they made several wrong turns causing Bet to fuss about taking too long. Malcolm kept quiet—anything he said would result in an argument. The flight had lasted just over two and a half hours, but had seemed to take forever. He hated flying, but Bet was worse so he feigned indifference to keep her calm. As the plane’s wheels hit the tarmac, she gripped his hand so tightly the tips of his fingers turned white.

  The massive parking garage had no open spaces until the fifth level, and all the while Bet fussed. “It’s too hot. Why are so many people at the hospital already? Are these spaces for both staff and visitors? Shouldn’t they separate them and have them marked? Visitors should get priority.”

  He knew she was anxious but he needed her to stop talking. He couldn’t think. “Bet, just give it a rest for a minute. Please!”

  He backed the car into the space, exited and walked around the front to open her door. He took her hand and she huffed, but fell quiet. He looked for directions to the emergency room. After an agonizingly slow ride down on the elevator and a short walk, they found the ER crowded with a long line leading to the intake desk. Bet exclaimed, “Oh, Jesus Lord.”

  Of course, he thought, the chaos and madness of a Saturday night spilling into the emergency room on a Sunday morning. Malcolm told Bet to wait in line while he skipped to the front. “I need to see my daughter. She’s been shot.”

  The heavyset woman behind the desk didn’t look up. “Sir, you’ll have to wait in line.”

  Ready to do battle if need be to get in immediately to see his daughter, he raised his voice fully aware of the effect his baritone could have in a courtroom. “I’m not here for service. My daughter is already here. In surgery.”

  The woman had blotchy pink skin and small blue eyes. She glanced at him and insisted, “You have to wait your turn.”

  “I am not waiting in line,” he said. He didn’t like to use his authority outside court, to throw his weight around, as Kenya liked to say. But he did when it was warranted. “My daughter has been shot and I need to speak to a doctor. Now!”

  An orderly approached, a young Indian man maybe twenty-five at most, tall and skinny meeting Malcolm eye-to-eye, and asked the name of his daughter. This was a good man, Malcolm thought. Helpful with kind eyes. The young man disappeared behind sliding glass doors but only a few moments passed before he reappeared.

  “Let me take you up to surgery,” he said.

  Malcolm waved to Bet who was already rushing to him. They followed the young man to an elevator. The doors slid closed, sealing them in, shutting out the cacophony of the waiting room, and Malcolm took a breath. He would see his daughter. He would take her hand and tell her he loved her. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken those words or held her hand. Perhaps when she was little. They exited on a floor marked Surgery and the orderly took them down a short corridor with pale pink walls to the nursing station and explained that these were Malawi Walker’s parents. The nurse behind the desk had blonde hair tied back and looked young enough to be just out of high school. A momentary frown crossed her brow, making the hair rise on the back of Malcolm’s neck.

  She looked at Malcolm. “I’m so sorry,” she said then closed her eyes as if she’d said something she shouldn’t have.

  Bet began to moan, “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  So sorry. These words were not enough for Malcolm. He needed to hear why she was sorry. He needed to know what had happened, though didn’t want to think of the possibilities. But he asked anyway.

  “You should talk to Dr. Kosi. He can explain.” The nurse beckoned the orderly who had been standing a few feet away, at the ready if needed. Malcolm heard a child heaving rasping coughs and a flash of Malawi as a baby, wheezing and coughing, making painful noises only babies can make, noises that grasp the heart and squeeze. Malcolm was ready to search for
his daughter in the recovery room leading off to the right of the nurse’s station, glass partitions and modest curtains giving little privacy to the afflicted. He wanted to find Malawi behind one, sitting up in the bed, giggling and rolling her eyes at her stupidity for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not shot at all, but merely scraped from a fall requiring a few stitches. Not surgery.

  Dr. Kosi strode up to the counter with a calm sense of urgency, clipboard in hand, passing it to the nurse with the confidence that she knew what to do with it, ready to rush to the next in line with a medical complaint.

  “Dr. Kosi, this is um . . .” The nurse paused, as if trying to remember Malawi’s name. “These are the girl’s parents, the girl who was . . .”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Walker.” Dr. Kosi made eye contact with Malcolm. “Please, follow me.”

  He led them into a small office, walls lined with certificates, and offered them a seat but everyone remained standing, an awkward silence freezing the air. The doctor said, “I’m sorry . . .” And there it was again, that phrase, I’m sorry. For what? Malcolm wanted to yell, but he held the doctor’s gaze and waited.

  A screech, short and high-pitched escaped Bet and Malcolm felt her fingers clawing at him, her weight growing heavy on his arm as she interpreted the doctor’s apology. A step ahead of Malcolm, already accepting what he was not willing to accept. He needed to hear the words to believe what had, so far, been unsaid. “What do you mean?”

  Dr. Kosi wavered but only for a second, a slight flicker in the eyes, then he said, “She died during surgery. We did all we could and worked on her for several hours, but she lost too much blood.”

  “I don’t understand. The sheriff said she was shot in the shoulder. Just a shoulder injury.”

  “She was shot twice, Mr. Walker.” He looked at Bet who was almost doubled over now moaning into Malcolm’s forearm. “She was taken downstairs. Nurse Templeton can show you.”

  Malcolm looked at the blinds covering the window. He knew what was downstairs. The word “downstairs” was better than the word “basement,” which was where most hospitals housed the morgue. He and Bet were here now to identify their baby girl, not to console her and pay the hospital bill, though that would come later in the mail. Malcolm wasn’t sure his daughter had health insurance. He should know these things. As her father, he should know whether or not his daughter had health insurance.

  “Why don’t you take a moment and sit down,” said Dr. Kosi, extending his arm to the chairs behind them.

  Malcolm gripped Bet by the shoulders, almost dragging her to a standing position. He thought the words, let’s sit, but nothing came out of his mouth. He tried to take a step but his feet were weighted with invisible blocks and his knees began to shake. He almost dropped Bet in an effort to grab the desk to stop himself from falling. “Please, Bet,” he said, feebly. This was not the judge’s voice. It was the voice of a tiny man afraid of having to identify his daughter’s body.

  They stared at her. Her skin was a sickly pale brown. Taupe, Bet thought. She wanted to say it wasn’t her. Not her baby girl, her Mowie. The floor seemed to buckle and the walls bent and the entire room swayed. Like a carnival ride that shook you up and left you nauseous and upset, unable to stand straight for several moments afterward. Bet placed her hands on her knees and stared at the floor expecting her entire insides to be expelled all over the linoleum. She closed her eyes and, as if whispering a mantra, said, “Don’t make this be real,” several times, then she felt Malcolm’s hand on her sacrum. Everything stopped swaying, and it was real. She looked again at her baby’s face, so serious and composed. The doctor had said she was shot in the chest and right shoulder; her body was covered with a pale green cloth that showed only her neck and face. With the back of her hand, Bet touched Mowie’s cheek and inhaled sharply at the chill of it. She leaned forward and kissed where her hand had been. Though cool, the skin shifted slightly under her touch. Real, yet not real, like a clone made without Mowie’s vibrancy. Without life. She placed her head next to Mowie’s cheek and began to cry, tears that trickled quietly across Bet’s nose.

  She shouldn’t have gone to Florida. Bet knew it had been a mistake. All that talk of needing real independence. Ghana and Kenya had real independence and they hadn’t moved out of the area.

  “You’re being ridiculous, Mowie,” Bet had said during one of her daughter’s Sunday visits. Before moving to Florida, Malawi often came to visit on the weekends, bringing laundry because she disliked being in the dirty laundry room of her Baltimore apartment building; the machines were slow and unreliable. Bet would miss those visits, though sometimes they had annoyed her. An irritation she couldn’t quite express. Malawi had been overly attached to her parents, or rather to her father. In three more years, the girl would have been thirty; she should have been making more of an effort to find a husband.

  “Times have changed Mommy,” she’d said, rolling her eyes at Bet. “I don’t need to have a man to get along in this life.” Perhaps not, Bet thought, but it wouldn’t have hurt.

  Her daughter had sat on the settee in the studio while Bet worked on a painting; the smell of a roast in the oven filled the house. Her legs curled under her, Malawi pulled the ear buds out and announced she had accepted a job offer. No warning. No lead-in. Just, “I’ve gotten a job in Florida. At a high school in Palm Beach.”

  Bet was unsure what to say while her daughter’s large eyes watched, waiting for some overreaction from her mother before continuing. “I just, like, need to be in a place where, you know, no one knows our family. Everybody here knows Daddy.”

  “That’s not true, not everyone. What a silly thing to say.” Bet didn’t know why she had been so contrary. It did seem that everyone knew Malcolm. His father had been a city councilman for a number of years back in the seventies and eighties and his mother had worked with Mary McLeod Bethune and Dorothy Height at the National Council of Negro Women. The family was well known in D.C. But still, she told her daughter, “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Well, it’s a good job opportunity,” Malawi said.

  “Teaching high school math? How many schools do we have here in the D.C. area?” Bet rapidly swirled her paintbrush on the palette, mixing yellow and blue to create a swampy dark green. “You really couldn’t have gotten a job here?”

  “Seriously? Baltimore wasn’t good enough. Now Florida isn’t good enough.”

  “There’s a lot of crime in the city of Baltimore. Even the surrounding county would have been a safer choice.”

  Malawi stood up then, stretched her arms above her head and offered a bored sigh. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “In his office, I suppose.” Bet jabbed the canvas with blotches of almost-black green blobs, spoiling the forest landscape. “He won’t be happy with you leaving.”

  “He’ll just have to get over it,” Malawi said and ambled to the stairs, taking them two at a time up to the main level of the house. Bet listened for her daughter’s feet to cross the landing to Malcolm’s office, but instead she heard the hardwood floor creak in the den and a burst of noise from the television.

  Malawi’s dismissal that day had hurt Bet, but she never spoke of it. They didn’t always talk but Bet had enjoyed those moments when Mowie chose to sit with her over being with her father. Sometimes, Bet would sketch her daughter curled on the settee, bopping her head, listening through earbuds to some kind of music Bet found wretched on the ears, all thud, thud, thud with words she couldn’t understand. Now, she regretted not making more of those times together, not going after her that day to convince her to stay near home, not hugging her more and revealing how much those moments in the studio had meant to Bet.

  With her head resting on her daughter’s cheek, Bet whispered the words now and they fell silent on Malawi’s cold skin. “I always loved you as much as your daddy did. I should have made sure you knew.”

  5

  The sheriff should have come to the hospital, Malcolm thought as he drove throu
gh sunny flat streets of Palm Beach County to the Sheriff’s Office. The A/C blasted cold air on his face but didn’t seem to have much of an effect; his eyeglasses slipped down his nose and sweat ran down his neck. Bet was curled away from him, her head cradled between the headrest and the passenger window. Occasionally, a groan rumbled out of her and rolled to the car floor. Malcolm kept his eyes on the road, glancing at the GPS poised on the dashboard, passing palm trees, low single family homes, and occasional shopping plazas. Finally he saw a squat sign announcing the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. He pulled into a visitor’s parking space and helped Bet out of the car. Her grip was tight in his hand and she stumbled forward as if she’d had one glass of wine too many. Bet giggled like a little girl when she got drunk. Her eyes would sparkle and tiny dimples appeared in her cheeks. He loved her for that. But today she was not drunk. She was injured, stumbling from a blow he wasn’t sure she would ever recover from. A blow that had hit him equally as hard in the gut, yet someone had to be coherent, ask questions, and discover what happened. The coroner would do an autopsy and only after that was completed and a report filed would Malawi be released to go home. Not Malawi, he thought. Her body. Her body would be released for shipment like a package. Malcolm pushed back the nausea with a deep breath.

  Inside they waited at the reception desk until the sheriff came out to greet them. He was a short man with a large belly protruding over his belt and red cheeks. Malcolm thought, with the right beard, the man would make a great Santa Claus. His handshake was firm and his expression serious, a slight frown creased his forehead. He led them down a short hallway to his office. The space was small with piles of folders on the desk and a coffee pot in the corner next to the swivel chair that creaked as the sheriff sat down. He motioned for the Walkers to sit. Two large wooden-framed chairs with vinyl cushioning were positioned at forty-five-degree angles just in front of the desk, cut perhaps from the same wood.