“I know.”
“So.” Deziree leaned forward. “I have a date tonight. I can definitely cancel it.”
“What? Really? The same guy?”
“Yes. Miguel.” Deziree smiled as she said his name. “He’s very nice.”
“You should go.” Lena knew she sounded polite to the point of being passive-aggressive, but her mother didn’t—or didn’t want to—notice.
“But.”
“No, no, go.”
“Okay.” Deziree looked at her phone. “I’ve gotta get ready for physical therapy.”
Lena nodded. “I’m exhausted.”
She stood up, took the top box, and went to her room. Her side ached. She already felt the effort of pretending everything was fine. They hadn’t said how long she was going to stay here.
In the box was a picture of Deziree from before her accident. She was 22. Cupping her belly, though there was barely anything there to cup. First picture with baby was written on the back.
Her grandma didn’t have handwriting like other people’s grandmas. She was too forceful for flowery cursive. Every letter could be a sword. She wrote with a heavy, excited hand, as if everything she thought needed to be engraved on the page. Pick up coats for the charity drive. Talk to insurance. Milk, bananas, chicken thighs, spinach. Lena’s English paper is due.
The next page was filled front and back: My daddy called them nights and I always thought I could come up with a better name than that. But I’ve been sitting in this bed for at least 10 minutes and everything I think up is worse than the last.
Nights were creatures he warned me about. In the daylight, they could disappear into the world around them. Make themselves invisible. Some would sleep. Their snores sounded like machinery in the distance. Others would take things from your house, especially if you were messy, careless. They could make themselves seem ordinary. And some seemed to fall in love with people. They couldn’t stop watching them, following them around. They wanted to know everything there was about people.
When the sky started to turn navy, the nights couldn’t hide themselves. Their eyes shined in darkness. White, yellow, or green. And their eyes seemed bigger. If they crouched low, they could be confused with a large cat or possum. But most were man-tall. Imagine seeing a pair of shining green eyes walking toward you in the night. My daddy would make his eyes wide when he said that part, spread his long fingers to make them look like claws. Somehow, doing this made me truly see them.
“Miss Shaunté is here,” Deziree called through the door. “Be back in a few hours.”
“Have fun,” Lena replied, too distracted to remember that her mother was going to physical therapy. She was trying to remember if her grandma had ever told her this story. Lena could remember being in her bed, her grandma’s arm around her, a stuffed toy snuggled between them—a floppy brown dog named Eddie. Her grandmother’s voice was slower at bedtime than it was during the day. But it was all the times merged together.
Nights became endangered. Men were killing them. Children were throwing stones. One bold woman figured out how to set one ablaze. Daddy said they learned the only way to stay alive was to learn people’s secrets. “You’re a sinner: I see you gambling, drinking, chasing women. I saw you pretend not to hear your child fall.” There were still some who attacked a disembodied voice and eyes that spilled out their ugliness to the world. But most people learned to ignore them. Some took it further and left out gifts, food.
My daddy said when he was a boy, the nights would still come into towns, sniffing out secrets, offerings. One day, the biggest night anyone ever saw walked into his town. It said they were gonna learn everything there was to learn in the entire world. And then they disappeared. No more offerings, no more voices whispering secrets. The only times people saw them anymore was in the evenings, when they were places they weren’t supposed to be. The nights are still gathering secrets.
When I was a little girl, I took this as a truth. Every time I did something wrong, I would imagine a large pair of eyes opening wide, sucking in my badness. I would take long blades of grass, braid them into rings, and leave those by my bed as gifts for the nights. When I was older and understood a little more about the world, I thought maybe my daddy was trying to tell me something about the way people treated each other. I might be giving him too much credit now, though. He was a direct man, someone who didn’t like talking about things sideways.
Lena read it again. It was like having her grandma sit next to her, cups of tea for both of them steaming in their hands.
If you hadn’t been sick, if you hadn’t died, Lena thought. She didn’t let herself finish. That path was filled with the thorns and snakes and loose gravel of life’s deep unfairness.
She touched her grandma’s handwriting. It was nice to get a glimpse of her great-grandfather. He had been a character, Miss Toni often said about him. He was one of the biggest, strongest men she had ever seen. He worked his farm, taught himself how to make the best butter around. The secret was the sweet grass he grew. It had a smell when it was wet, she used to say, like a mix of warm strawberries in the sun and freshly cut lawn.
Lena’s grandparents had divorced when she was young; her grandfather was still alive but had not come to Miss Toni’s funeral. What Lena knew of her father was his people were from the East. It was a phrase she loved. It made her sound as if she came from a long line of fairy-tale witches. Deziree’s people were mostly from Michigan. Although with her grandmother now gone, stories about them could only be found in these boxes.
Lena put the boxes down by her bed and tucked the story carefully back in. She slid between her covers, looking up at the ceiling. A dark spider was centimetering its way across the ceiling. Outside, the neighborhood was completely awake. Cars backing out of garages. Miss Claire and Miss Cassandra loudly talking and probably power walking up and down the street. Miss Claire in her old pink tracksuit, Miss Cassandra dressed as if heading to church, in a long, conservative floral skirt. They had been doing the same rotation for the last six years. Up and down Lena’s street for four blocks, one block up and over, then turn. Three blocks to the left and three blocks to the right, they knew, it was unsafe now for two older ladies on their own. In Lakewood, everyone bragged about how safe it was. People kept their doors and windows unlocked. There hadn’t been a murder in 30 years.
“Are you okay?” Deziree whispered. Lena opened her eyes, rubbed them. Her mom was wearing bright-red lipstick. Her skin looked dewy.
“How long have I been sleeping?”
“All day.”
“Oh shit, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You needed the rest.”
“You look great,” Lena said. She sat up. Her mother was wearing black jeans and a navy-and-white-striped T-shirt that was Lena’s. Her grandmother would’ve hated Deziree’s lipstick color.
“I want to wear heels, but I know if something happens, I’ll probably get hurt worse if I fall.”
“Does he know?”
“He knows about almost everything. He knows that sometimes I have to use a wheelchair. But there’s a difference between me saying the wrong word or having to ask him to repeat himself and, you know.”