The Cost of Knowing, page 24
“Aunt Mackie,” says Talia, stepping back from me and looking up at her.
Aunt Mackie’s arms are folded around herself and her shoulders are hunched as she approaches my bed. Her eyes have lost their light completely, and her face looks dull and ashen, like she’s been crying, or like she’s sick, or a little of both.
“I’ll leave you to talk,” says Talia, heading back to the door and taking one last glance at me before disappearing into the hallway and clicking the door shut.
Aunt Mackie sits on the edge of the bed and stares straight ahead toward the windows. I can hear the ticking of the clock on the wall across the room, and the steady hum of the machine to my left with the big green 6-0 on it and the EKG that’s connected to the sensor gently clipped to the tip of my left index finger. Soon, after the silence becomes too much for even her, she clears her throat and rests her hand on my ankle behind her. I swallow the lump in my throat. Aunt Mackie is an unscalable fortress on any day of the week. She’s the strongest person I know. And she’s sitting in front of me looking like she could crumble into dust at any moment.
I can’t take it.
“I remember what happened,” I say. “You… you don’t have to tell me.”
I meant for it to sound less flippant than it did. I wanted to spare her the misery of delivering the news herself, but now I’m afraid I just came across as an asshole.
“Alex,” says Aunt Mackie, her voice a croak in her throat. For a minute I think she’ll be angry at me about the concert. I wouldn’t fault her if she blamed me for this. In her mind, if I’d been an obedient kid and done as she said, Isaiah and I would’ve never been at that concert. We would’ve never been out late enough to tip off the neighborhood watch—
And then I remember.
Mr. Zaccari.
All the fear and paralyzing, aching sadness that rippled through my body a moment ago like an uneasy tide goes up in smoke in the presence of rage.
“It was Mr. Zaccari’s truck, wasn’t it?” I ask. My heart is racing. I’m mad as hell. So help me, if that man is in this fucking building, I’ll kill him myself. I ball my hands into fists and push myself up straighter against the back of this bed.
“Mr. Zaccari hit him, didn’t he?” I demand.
Aunt Mackie is still staring off into nowhere, and this somehow makes the rage race through my blood even faster. I remember the look in Talia’s eyes as she stood there and told me to my face that Mrs. Zaccari’s husband had shot a man—a kid—point-blank, in broad daylight, in the name of protecting the neighborhood. I should’ve known then what else he’d do for the neighborhood. I should’ve put the pieces together. They were all there.
The concert.
The “types of people” to be at the concert.
The “types of people” who aren’t welcome in Santiam.
I guess as two Black kids fleeing a mass shooting, we looked enough like the “types of people.” We had our hoodies on. Our hoods were up. I should’ve known. I should’ve fucking known. And I think I’m mad most of all, not because they turned on me, but because I feel wronged. I feel betrayed. And they say that for there to be betrayal, there has to be trust first.
So I guess I trusted Mr. and Mrs. Zaccari.
That’s what pisses me off.
I trusted them enough to live next to them.
I trusted them enough to mow their lawn and eat their cookies and let them hug me.
“Alex,” says Aunt Mackie again. “You passed out in the Davises’ yard. Mr. Zaccari called the police as soon as it happened. He turned himself in.”
I know she’s not trying to make it sound like Mr. Zaccari didn’t just murder my brother.
“Are you serious?” I ask. “You’re defending him?”
She’s still staring off into space. I can’t take this silence, so I keep going.
“Mr. Zaccari is a murderer!” I scream. “His prejudiced ass got into that truck, his prejudiced ass followed us for three blocks, and his prejudiced ass ran over Isaiah!”
“Alex,” she snaps. At first I think she’s going to launch into something that would be the straw that’ll break my back.
Something like You two were never supposed to be at that concert!
What did I tell you about being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
If y’all had just listened…
She has every right.
But she just looks at me. She looks into my eyes, and the hardness in her face melts away. She purses her lips, her face contorts into a grimace, and she pulls me against her in the tightest hug she’s ever given me. I rest my hands against the soft black silk of her robe.
“Alex, my baby,” she says. She plants a firm kiss on my temple and rocks gently side to side as if I really am a baby again, and I wonder if she’s thinking back to that day she held me in the hospital, the day she must’ve looked over at me as she signed the document saying she’d be our caretaker, if.
“Didn’t he recognize us?” I ask, although I don’t know who I’m asking. It’s a rhetorical question, really. No, he didn’t recognize us. He recognized our hoodies. He recognized two boys sprinting through a neighborhood that had just been hit with a robbery earlier the same day. “Didn’t he look close first? Didn’t he think for a second that it might be us?”
“Baby,” she says, kissing my head again and letting out a deep sigh. “Sometimes these things just happen.”
“I’m sick of these things ‘just happening.’ I’m sick of people assuming things before they know the whole picture.”
She pauses at that before responding.
“People make assumptions, Alex. That’s what humans do. They shouldn’t. But they do.”
I’ve seen this a million times. It’s always the same story. Black kids can’t sell water on the sidewalk on a hot day without someone calling the cops. We can’t play our music too loud. We can’t wear hoodies. We can’t be out past a certain time in the wrong neighborhood or the right one.
We can’t run.
And Mrs. Zaccari wonders why I’m scared of the cops.
“People like the Zaccaris make way too many assumptions,” I say. “They assumed Isaiah and I were some thugs from somewhere else, who somehow got into the neighborhood, running from the law.”
Mrs. Zaccari’s words repeat in my head.
Does keeping convicted felons out of our homes sound unreasonable to you?
She didn’t mean convicted felons. She meant people who look like convicted felons. People, apparently, like twelve-year-old and sixteen-year-old Black kids. Never mind her own fucking son, who at least knew about a plan to open fire on thousands of concertgoers just a mile from her house. I wonder how many lives she could’ve saved if she’d opened her eyes to the real danger.
“They do,” says Aunt Mackie. She lets me go and reaches down for my hands. For a moment I panic, thinking she’s going to take hold of them, forgetting that my visions are gone. She rests one hand over mine. I get to go another thirty seconds without being reminded of what the future looks like for me. “They make assumptions when they shouldn’t. They may not ever get it.”
“We have to make them get it,” I say, “or this’ll keep happening.”
All this time, I’ve been wondering what kind of man I’d be if this, what kind of man I’d be if that. What kind of man would I be if I let these two—the Zaccaris—go on living the way they’ve been? Ignorant of just how much power they have? A call to the cops. A turning of a truck key. A he looked at me complaint got Emmett Till killed almost seventy years ago. Have we really made so little progress since then?
“We have to make them get it,” I say, the determination in my voice surprising even me.
Aunt Mackie shakes her head.
“That’s gon’ be hard to do, until they live it.”
It crushes me, the knowledge that she’s right. But I still feel compelled to try. How do I explain to Mrs. Zaccari that apart from the cops, white women are just as scary to me now? How do I explain that just by existing, I’m guilty until proven innocent? That Isaiah was guilty until proven innocent?
Aunt Mackie rubs her hand over mine.
“That’s the curse of knowledge,” she says. “You can’t make her understand, baby. You live this every day. I live this every day. When I wake up in the morning and walk to the garage and get into my Benz and drive down the street, I know I’m an anomaly. I’ve been pulled over by officers who had nothing better to do than make sure I didn’t steal that car. I’ve had cops assume I’m a sex worker, a drug dealer, the wife of one of those.”
I realize my mouth is hanging open.
Aunt Mackie?
Strong, formidable, iron-fortress Aunt Mackie? A drug dealer? The wife of a drug dealer?
“This isn’t right,” I say. “This has to stop.”
But I don’t even know where to begin in making it stop. If I can’t explain to Mrs. Zaccari what we deal with on a daily basis, just because of our skin color, and I can’t physically put her in my shoes, then who’s to say this will ever stop? How do I put this into terms she can understand? Like, really understand?
“Maybe one day it will,” says Aunt Mackie. “Maybe. But this is far too big a burden for just one brave teenager.”
There’s silence in the room again, and she pulls me into another warm, much-needed hug. She’s right. This is too much. It’s been too much. For once, I don’t feel like I have to hold that burden on my shoulders anymore. I take a deep breath, hold her tight, and run through the steps.
Hold my breath and count to ten.
I don’t have time to count to a hundred.
I can’t lie in corpse pose.
Priya is supposed to be getting me a glass of water.
I can’t open the window. I’m sure they’re locked to prevent patients from jumping out.
I can’t stare at the ceiling from this angle, but I open my eyes and look across the room at the pile of folded clothes on the chair next to Aunt Mackie’s empty one—at my jeans, my socks rolled into a neat little ball next to them, my jacket with the photo inside the pocket, and the bloodred Cobra Katjee sweatshirt folded up on top.
Knowing there’s a piece of him that I’ll always have with me, breathing in all the weight of giving him his last experience on this planet, and breathing out knowing that I was there for him, that he knew he wasn’t alone…
It helps. A lot.
14 The Reunion
THE MORE I THINK about how it went down—the drive to the graveyard, the drive home, the pizza bites in my room, and the BeatBall, the concert, and the run for our lives—the more I realize that I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I don’t think I could have. Looking back, it’s so easy to make up a million different scenarios in a million different timelines based on other choices I could’ve made. I could’ve gone to Isaiah as soon as I saw the vision of the picture, and we might’ve had a few hours longer to get to know each other.
The photo is in my pocket.
My fingers find it and take hold of the edge, and no vision begins. But when I pull it out and look at it, the memories do.
Mom. Dad. Isaiah. Me. Mom holding her backpack strap with one hand and glancing over her shoulder, as if the photo caught her off guard. Dad’s impromptu photography always annoyed her, but she was always a good sport about it. I’m glad he took it. His crooked smile, with one of his front teeth grayer than the others, indicates he was happy to take it. I look at his favorite black hat with the Chicago Bulls logo on the front, and his dark eyes, full of warmth, staring out at me. I shut my eyes and remember his kiss on my forehead after I went to bed angry that one time, pretending to be asleep. If I could go back, I’d sit up in bed, throw my arms around him, and apologize. I don’t even remember what I was mad about, but it wasn’t worth missing a moment like that.
But I didn’t really miss it, did I? He still kissed me. He still told me he loved me. We still woke up the next morning and moved on, and we still got years of moments after that we didn’t miss.
I look at Isaiah’s face, and at mine.
We’re in the background of the photo. Mom has her arm around me, pulling me close, and I’m smiling like I’m smiling now, even through my tears. My mouth hangs open mid-laugh with those hideous braces, and I look like I’m excited about what’s going to happen. My eyes are alight with anticipation of our first live game ever. I look at Isaiah’s face and smile. I look at his grin, at his sparkling eyes. There’s something in the curve of his mouth that indicates this photo caught him by surprise just like Mom. But he looks happy. He looks curious. He looks hopeful.
I’m grateful for so many things about the last two days, but most of all, I’m grateful I got to see that life in his face again.
The breeze picks up and I look at the sky and soak in the warmth of the sun on my face. I breathe in the hot afternoon air and look down at the ground. The rectangular hole at my feet is gaping up at me like it did in my vision, and the big white casket at the bottom, covered in bright red flowers—red, for Izzy Rufus, the Red Dragon.
I dry my eyes with my fingers and look around at the solemn faces watching as the undertakers shovel one scoop of dirt after another into the hole, sprinkling it gently, ceremoniously, as if the sound of the granules against the casket would disturb him. I recognize most of these people. The Davises. The Sandersons. There are two kids from Isaiah’s class that I don’t know by name, and their parents. And there’s Talia, whose makeup keeps running, in her black dress with her hair bumped into waves that touch her shoulders. Aunt Mackie, who keeps dabbing a tissue against her eyes, in a black dress suit.
I can’t look at her for too long or I might lose it completely.
We all stand in silence. All the words have been said. The pastor, who I guess knows Aunt Mackie somehow—I’ve never met him before—gave the service. I didn’t hear a word. I can tell you exactly what it smelled like in that chapel. I can tell you exactly what color the carpet was and every inscription on the walls under each donated stained-glass work of art, and every red flower arrangement that lined the front podium. But I don’t remember a word.
And then, right across from me, there’s Mrs. Zaccari, who can’t even look at me. Who has a napkin pressed against her eyes or over her nose, careful not to smudge her makeup. She hasn’t spoken to me since the murder—the one everyone insists on calling the accident.
It makes my blood race through my veins like an angry river.
And I decide, there and then, that not all the words have been said yet.
“Enough,” the word pours from me softly as I stare across the circle at her.
Look at me, I think. This woman’s husband murdered my brother, and not an apology? Not even an acknowledgment of my presence?
“Enough, Karen,” I say.
She looks at me now, and everyone else in the circle looks between her and me. No more “Mrs. Zaccari” from me. If she and her murderous husband want to kill my brother in cold blood without a fair trial, which even adults are supposed to be afforded, the pleasantries afforded to adults shouldn’t be wasted on her.
“Enough,” I say again, my eyes trained on her.
Looks of confusion are exchanged. Mrs. Zaccari glances around the circle in surprise, wondering what I could possibly mean. She sniffs and clears her throat and cradles her arms around herself.
“Alex, I—”
“Let me spell it out for you,” I say, before she can tell me she still doesn’t get it. “You’re just as guilty as Brian.”
Since I’m on a first-name basis with Karen Zaccari, I don’t know why I wouldn’t be on a first-name basis with her piece-of-shit husband.
“Alex,” comes Aunt Mackie’s voice. I tear my shoulder away from her hand, keeping my eyes on Karen. Until now, I’d held back my tears, through the sermon, the hauling of the casket, the standing around this circle as Isaiah was buried, but I’m not holding back anymore. My cheeks burn, and I let the tears come.
“Isaiah is dead because of the fear you foster,” I say, surprised at how strong a dam my voice is, holding back the avalanche of rage that bubbles underneath. “Your petitions, and your 911 calls, and your home security systems and your neighborhood watch patrols are getting people killed. People who go to break into houses like that guy yesterday, yeah. And yeah, people who get a little rowdy at concerts. And,” I continue. I can feel my lip trembling, but I know if I stop now, I might not muster up the courage to keep going. “Kids. Like me. Like Isaiah. You know us. We’re not criminals. But we look enough like criminals to you, don’t we, Mrs. Zaccari? When you imagine someone breaking into your house late at night, you picture us. You picture us.”
I remember Shiv up there onstage. I remember Isaiah up there with him, how happy he looked. How nothing else in the world mattered to him. How just for a moment, he got to be twelve again, without having to live in regret. Without being reminded of the darkness he came from, that he had to live with every single day.
What kid should have to live every day in the shadow of four hundred years of bondage and another hundred of lesser-than-dom? Black kids, apparently. But then, how is a Black kid supposed to be a kid?
Who knows?
Who cares?
Apparently not Mrs. Zaccari.
“But your son gets to live. He probably wouldn’t get run over in the street for looking like he’s robbing a house, but he’s sitting behind bars downtown with his dad, probably being questioned about his involvement in a mass shooting! How the fuck is that fair?”
“Alex,” Aunt Mackie bites.
“I won’t be quiet!” I’m screaming now. Talia takes a frightened step back from the circle and looks at me like I’m a stranger.
Breathe, Alex.
“I won’t,” I continue, calm again. “I won’t be quiet until people like you leave us alone. Brian may have pulled the trigger, Brian may have been behind the wheel. But he needed a scout. Someone to tip him off that something was amiss. Something was cause for alarm. And what was it that got my brother killed? What could’ve possibly scared you into sending your husband to investigate? A kid. A kid. Running past your house through his own neighborhood in the rain, in a hoodie, minding his own business. Just trying to get home. Just trying to get somewhere safe. Somewhere you tried to convince us you were making even safer.”
