Like a Sister(4)

And now she was gone too, leaving me nothing but questions.

Research depends on the five w’s. I had the who, what, and when of Desiree’s death since I’d figured out we had very different definitions of casual drug use. It was the where that had me so shocked.

The Bronx was my home. Not hers. She hadn’t liked coming here even when Gram was still alive. And yet she’d come up here in the middle of the night.

Why?

I needed to find out. Like my mother had said, there was work to do.

I left the playground with Stuart’s question banging around in my head. My neighborhood is deceptively hilly so I walked home, pulling my bike next to me like a cranky toddler. I’d been well past drinking age before I knew this area had a name. Highbridge. Washington Heights was just across the Harlem River, and the Yankees played less than a mile south. Cushioned in between was everything I loved—bodegas and buildings and brown people.

Gram had left me the house when she died, but I still thought of it as hers, especially since Aunt E kept on living there. It actually was the first place I’d called home as a baby, before Mel left my mom when I was four and she moved us to the Jersey suburbs. But I didn’t move back into Highbridge until I realized it was just a hop, skip, and a bridge away from Columbia, way closer than my place in Jersey City and my childhood home in South Orange, which my mom had left to me free and clear. I’d been renting it out since she died. Between that and what I’d saved from the three years I worked for an engineering company in Newark, I was able to go back to school full-time. It helped I was cheap. Another way I was more Scott than Pierce.

I’d been playing with starting a nonprofit to help Black families cope with cancer since my mom died but had only decided to get my master’s in Nonprofit Management two years ago. I didn’t want anyone to have to go through what we did.

So I’d come to Highbridge for the convenience and instead found a community. When I’d first moved back to the Bronx, it was hard to distinguish one building from the next. On the surface they all looked the same. Six-ish stories. Beige paint. Fire escapes and NO LOITERING signs that everyone ignored. But those were the things nonresidents noticed when they raced through, protected by locked car doors and a sense of entitlement. Now I saw the details that made this neighborhood so beautiful.

Like how one building had its fire escape painted a hot pink. Or how another’s super was meticulous in placing their city-issued trash bins. Or the apartments with the Superman mural. According to urban legend, the landlord paid a graffiti artist to spray-paint it after getting fed up with his tagging.

The side streets were mostly one-ways. Just narrow enough that if someone double-parked—and someone always double-parked—you’d have to hold your breath and maneuver your car like a Cirque du Soleil performer.

I’d just passed Plimpton Avenue when my phone rang. An unsaved number. I was tempted to ignore it like I had the previous four times. But instead, I hit the red phone icon and brought it to my ear.

“Hey, Tam,” I said.

There was a pause. “It’s me.”

Me was definitely not Tam yet still a voice that registered as automatically as the number. I’d heard it all through my childhood—in music videos and radio interviews and award acceptance speeches way more than I’d ever heard it in my house.

I didn’t respond, which caused him to speak again. “Your father.”

As if I didn’t know. I finally exhaled the breath I’d been cradling like a baby. Which is how I felt, like I was still the kid waiting for Daddy to come back home. Luckily for me, we didn’t talk often. “Hi, Mel.”

“You heard?” His voice was rich, as he was. And he had a standing reservation on Forbes’s wealthiest in hip-hop list.

“Yeah…”

Another awkward pause. This one even longer. He was the first family member I’d heard from since finding out about Desiree—the fact he’d called proof it was already a different world without her in it. I broke the silence nervously. “How’s Veronika?”

His wife. Desiree’s mother. My mother’s mortal enemy.

My parents had been childhood sweethearts, but according to my mom, Mel had always claimed he wasn’t the “marrying type.” Until Veronika had proved that wrong. My mom had never forgiven him—or them, since Veronika had been her friend. My mom’d even gotten her the receptionist job at Mel’s first record label.

After my parents split, I saw Gram often. Mel technically had custody every other weekend and for a month in the summer, but you couldn’t take a six-year-old to a video set. And there was no way in hell my mother would let me stay with “that heifer” Veronika. So my time was usually spent at Gram’s.

If my mother’s parenting philosophy was Tough Love, then Mel’s was No Love. Over the years, his visits became phone calls. Phone calls became nothing at all. I extended an olive branch when I invited him to my high school graduation. He didn’t show up. So I didn’t invite him to my University of Pennsylvania one. It wasn’t until after my mom died that he made any effort to come back into my life, throwing money at me like a rapper at his first album-release party. But by then I had no interest in being bought back.

“She’s been in bed since we got the call this morning.”

Despite what my mother would want me to believe, Veronika had always been more fun aunt than evil stepmother. I liked her—often more than both my birth parents, which made me feel guilty. So I always tried to steer clear. That didn’t stop Veronika from trying, more for Mel’s sake than mine, because that’s what Veronika always did.