“It’s not about being busy, Mother. It’s about doing something that I love to do. My music made me happy. Why did I have to give it up?”
“For Travis! And because it was time to grow up. Other things are more important now. You’ll see.” She heads for the door. “I’ll let you get your rest, but I’m just a hop, skip, and jump away if you need me, you hear?”
“Loud and clear.”
“I’ll come on back with supper. Raelene is making chicken à la King.”
“Well, all right. But not until at least seven o’clock.”
“How about five—”
“Seven! And not a moment sooner!”
Melody closes the door after her and waits a few minutes to make sure Honeybee doesn’t boomerang. Then she hurries into the bedroom and changes from her dungarees and smock top to a turquoise maternity dress with a white Peter Pan collar and bow.
“You look purty as a picture in that color,” Cyril had said when she’d worn it to visit him a few weeks back, the compliment like a rainbow illuminating the gray March day.
His eyes are perpetually glad to see her, yet he never wants her to stay long. Too dangerous for her there, he says. No married, pregnant white woman would have any business visiting a Black man on Barrow.
He’s been increasingly grim lately, brooding about the war, wrapped up in the looming presidential election and his crusade to educate and register Black voters, all the while working and saving money for their escape.
It won’t be long now, but there are so many details to work out. Cyril hasn’t yet told his own mother they’re going, or written to ask his cousin if they can stay.
“I don’t want word to get out,” he told Melody recently. “If it ever got back to Travis Hunter . . .”
“For all we know, he’s dead.”
Melody grabs her car keys and heads out the door, not wanting to remember what Cyril had said in response.
“Or he’s one step ahead of us, plotting revenge.”
The Bronx
“Miss Matthews? Can you tell us?”
Gypsy looks up from the notebook page where she’d been doodling peace signs to see the teacher, Mr. Dixon, wearing the same expression as Wile E. Coyote when he’s about to catch the Road Runner.
On the blackboard behind him, a chalk-scrawled timeline depicts genetic milestones leading up to the present day. She notes a series of dusty white dots alongside December 1967, where Dixon had staccato tapped in an effort to rouse an answer from this drowsy last period classroom.
“Stanford professor Arthur Kornberg synthesized deoxyribonucleic acid in a test tube,” she says, “and President Johnson congratulated him for unlocking a fundamental secret of life.”
She resists the urge to punctuate that with a smug “beep, beep.”
Her competent reply crushes Dixon’s expectant smile like a cartoon anvil. “Uh . . . that’s right. Take notes. This will be on Monday’s test.”
He turns back to the board, droning on about DNA and genetics as Gypsy jots the Kornberg information in her notebook.
Beneath it, for her own amusement, she writes, “April, 1968: Science teacher Alfred Dixon transforms a fascinating subject into diethyl ether.”
She stares at the word ether.
Something weighty and frightening nudges her brain, even as the girl behind her taps her shoulder.
She swivels to see a folded piece of notebook paper with her own name on it.
Opening it, she sees a pencil-written note.
Can I walk you home after school? G.M.
She folds the note, shoves it into her textbook, and rests her chin on her fist.
Greg Martinez has been going steady with Carol-Ann Ellis since February. He had, indeed, presented her with a red rose in class on Valentine’s Day and asked her to the dance. Gypsy hadn’t been there to witness it.
That was the day after her father had surprised her with a heart-shaped box of chocolates. The day she’d slept through her alarm clock. She remembers dragging herself out of bed late that morning to try to get ready for school, feeling as though she was sleepwalking, her head pounding, stomach queasy, mouth dry. She’d crawled back into bed, thinking she must be coming down with something. But when she awakened again midafternoon, the stupor and symptoms had lifted, and she’d forgotten all about it until—
The girl behind her pokes her again, and gestures at Greg when Gypsy glances back. He’s sprawled in his usual seat in the back of the room, alongside a couple of his buddies.
He catches her eye, raises his brows and opens his hands palms up in a silent Well?
Gypsy shrugs and faces forward again.
One Saturday last month, her father had come home with chocolate cream eggs.
“Easter’s almost a month away,” she’d protested, “and we don’t celebrate it.”
Once, she’d asked him why not. Oran’s long-winded response about shunning the so-called resurrection of a false prophet had meant little to a child coveting other little girls’ frilly dresses and baskets filled with candy.
“These aren’t Easter eggs,” he’d told her last month, offering her the package. “They’re for your birthday.”
“That was yesterday.” He doesn’t believe in celebrating mortal birthdays, either. She’d peered inside. “Where’d you get these? They’re all smushed.”
“I’ll take them back if you don’t want them.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She’d eaten them all and fallen into bed soon after. Had it been a school night, she’d probably have slept right through her alarm clock as she had in February.
The girl behind her delivers another note from the back row.
I broke up with Carol-Ann. G.M.
Good for him.
She has other things to ponder right now, like that March Sunday when she’d awakened to find that it was midafternoon, and she felt shrouded in a strange fog once again. Again, she had a headache, upset stomach, parched throat. Again, she wondered if she’d caught some kind of flu bug.
The bell rings.
Gypsy grabs her things and is halfway out the door when Greg catches up to her, touching her arm. “Hey, I thought we could—”
“Sorry, I have to go.”
She pulls away and pushes through the throng of students in the corridor, lost in the past and those damned chocolates that were Easter eggs no matter what Oran wanted to say about celebrating her birthday.
Ether eggs . . .
Barrow Island
Cyril is in the bedroom stripping off his Morrison’s Meat Market uniform when he hears Otis yap out on the porch. He figures a squirrel must have ventured into the yard, or a female dog is out there in the night. He’d long-ago learned to differentiate between wary barks and excited barks. But commotion escalates into canine jubilation that can only mean one thing.
He rebuttons his trousers and looks around for a clean shirt. Finding none, he goes shirtless into the front room.
Beyond the screen door, Melody is climbing out of her red convertible wearing a short A-line dress the same shade as a summer sea, and he reckons she smells even sweeter than the wisteria blooms tumbling from the gnarled porch vine.
She pauses to steady herself on her feet, resting a hand on the small of her back. Face without a hint of makeup, blond hair unteased and hanging loose, a few inches shorter than usual in white patent leather flats with buckles, she looks younger than her years, and more vulnerable than she is.