began, which was good because movement led to solutions, meaning she was at least headed in the right direction.
White Wash White Wash
My hospital room seemed to have been bleached around me. My body, sprawled across the middle of the railed bed, was the only splotch of color in the room. Sedated and cloaked by a plastic curtain, I resembled a sleeping doll in cellophane. The first few days, I barely moved. Fed through IVs, my thin frame grew portly. Creases trapped between rolls of infant chub appeared faster than they had on the evaporated milk Momma fed me. Watching was all Momma could do. She couldnât feed me, couldnât hold me with all the tubes and needles hanging from my body. There were times when the nurses werenât looking that sheâd climb behind the tent with me, lower her head to my chest, and feel my breath against her cheek. Some days, she conducted her own examinations, starting with my fingers, plucking imaginary dirt from my nails, nipping at the frayed edges with her teeth. Then she tended my feet, where she rubbed each pinprick seated in a blue blemish, and marveled at the patchwork of congealed blood on my heels. Then my head, where she used fingers to part hair, massaging each line as she twined clumps of strands into plaits along the landscape of my scalp. Throughout her tending, I remained motionless on her round stomach, oblivious to the care I was given.
All was quiet with Momma and me in that hospital room. Not even a history existed behind the plastic wall. There, she was not my fatherâs wife, his punching bag, nor his cash register. She was not eighteen and soon to be the mother of four minus one. She was a nurse, a nurturer, things so easy to be when all is quiet.
That is why I think my sister died. Too much noise. She might have made it if sheâd have lived behind a tent like I did. I sometimes dream of her, the one who is dead, and I see her inside Momma, rushed to the hospital, doctors barking orders, white all around swallowing her existence. Momma must have cried the same tears,averted the same discerning eyes, but with a profoundly different outcome. I am here. She is not. That baby, my big sister, a casualty before birth. Momma reminds me I would not have been conceived if she had lived. I owe her my life, this girl I do not know.
I was seven when I first learned of my sisterâs death and I felt immense guilt, as if my living had stolen life from her. I feared my spirit had celebrated from the Heavens, knowing her death meant life for me. Once I learned of her passing, I set out to right the wrong I was certain Iâd caused. My job was to give her life even though sheâd never had breath. I gave her an identity; she was my twin. And a name; she was LaTanya. I worked to see her running with me through grass, heading to the bus stop on chilly mornings, but she was never there. I tried to imagine us, together, playing house and combing the hair of the one doll we shared, but only my hands tangled through the dollâs hair.
No matter how I tried, no amount of rewinding could undo LaTanyaâs brief existence; one in which Mommaâs insides churned with hunger while she sat quietly, pressing the side of her belly. My brother, Champ, barely one-year-old, sat next to Momma on the floor. Hungry too, he rocked side to side, gumming his lips as if they were something to be savored.
There was no food for Momma, which meant there was no milk for him. When water mixed with the last of the sugar didnât satisfy, Momma let him gnaw on her nipples even though they were dry. She sat in a chair, one of the only furnishings left in their sparse apartment, waiting for my father to come home. He had not been at work, nor had he been running errands. Rather heâd been riding life from one woman, one party, one drink to the next. Mommaâs home, his family, was the pit stop he slammed into only after his wheels had worn off and his body was dented