1.
Because my siblings and I are new to Columbus, all there is to do is read, go to school, the library, ride bikes, and sleep. Our neighborhood, Eastview Estate, is a picket fence suburb my father and stepmother have shed sweat, blood, and tears to move us into. There are sidewalks and fresh cut grass, and mailboxes with flags positioned upright for when you want to send mail. I make one friend in all of the neighborhood. One is a lonely number, like being 11, and my brothers never let me forget. After school, my friend and I ride down Marbella to Sophie Street with a dense summer sun beating on our necks. She is Chinese and I’m Ghanaian, and we ride in silence, counting the number of white families between her house and mine, focusing on the details of their screen doors and the amount of cars and hoisted American flags in the driveway. We do this everyday until my bicycle chains fall apart, and then I stay home and take up opening the front door to guests as a hobby. When the doorbell rings, I race towards it before anyone else, step aside, and inquire who they are looking for. It is a tough job, but I do it well. Most days, it is the mailman with packages of Our Daily Bread Devotionals for my father. I humbly receive them even though they are never addressed to me.
2.
My brothers Kingsley, Prince, and I go through the months like a spinning top. Time’s passage is marked by how quickly the fat falls off their faces and how quickly our accents change. I learn the words assimilate and immigrant, and peruse around the house with my new vocabulary. Every Friday night, my father leaves bootleg CDs of Happy Feet, Are We There Yet? and Spiderman on the tan living room couch before his double shifts. We rarely see him, but this becomes our secret language, a door quietly pried open between us. We watch the movies on Saturdays after chores while Kingsley makes meatball stews and calls first dibs on the desktop we are only allowed to use on weekends. We are as perfect as the word appease. No one has left and no one is destined to leave yet.
The yet is a doorstop letting the hot air in and all the cool air out. It’s important to note because in two years, when I am thirteen, Kingsley will be a floundering seventeen-year-old who stays out all night and disappears at all hours and comes home past 3 a.m smelling like weed. Through the peephole, he will be all wide-toothed grin and clever jokes as Gucci Mane blasts from whatever vehicle in the driveway has dropped him off. My father will change the locks and warn me not to open the door for him. On the nights I don’t, Kingsley throws stones at my bedroom window. I will turn over in bed to see him standing in wet grass with his white Air Forces and denim capris, his Nike socks covering his skinny calves. The night will halo around him like a grave wound, and I will open the door every time because he looks cold and regretful and exhausted. I will open it every time until my father warns me that I will get in trouble. The trouble is always that I will get my phone taken away or that I will be beaten. I hate lashes and the marks they leave on landing. The next time Kingsley stays out past curfew, I will ignore him and turn over to face my bedroom wall. He will keep calling my name, and my neck will grow hot with guilt. I will imagine horrible things like him sleeping on a sidewalk alone, or neighbors phoning the police. When I turn over to respond, it will be too late. He will be gone, the path of grass indented with his footsteps.
Even now, the guilt still swallows me.
3.
In fifth grade, I shower with the bathroom door wide open because I am afraid of secluded spaces. Everyone in my life makes it their job to tell me about my body and the ways in which it is changing. Hannah Richey, a girl in my fifth grade class, dutifully advises, “You need a bra,” when I run across the gym floor with only my camisole under my uniform. At home, my father’s face flashes with annoyance and then shuts the bathroom door whenever he sees me lathering soap with the door ajar. The truth is, I want to hear what Prince and Kingsley were saying, lounging shirtless in the downstairs living room: Kingsley, like a loan shark, always collecting his borrowed clothes in playful anger while Prince cleverly denies he’s ever had them. Through their arguments, I begin to miss the company of another body sitting tub-side when we were growing up in Taifa, refilling the bucket of water when it flows empty, mouth full of conversation as light pours through the louver windows.
In Columbus, my body will be one of the first things I begin to lose. I learn, to my surprise, that just as I’m watching everyone and everything, I’m also being watched. At Christmas, I receive a pale, hand-me-down blue bralet from my father’s coworker, Gertrude. I misread her name as Gesture, and become convinced that it is from one of Santa’s elves. When I find out that it isn’t, does the gift become less precious? It makes sense to say yes. I remember it doubling as one of the many things the world was trying to tell me without telling me. Like the bathroom door. My step-mother was away working for months as a live-in nurse, so my father had to close the door on five different occasions before I finally got the hint. I know now that I was hindering something in a house full of men. Not everyone could be shirtless. Something about me at that age had to be put away, almost urgently, and the only person who had thought to tell me directly was Hannah Richey.
4.
Perhaps I am looking for something more fortified than a door. Something to preserve this interior life. A place outside the immediate world, as Gaston Bachelard says. A place that bears the mark of infinity. The best a door can do is reveal a lifetime’s worth of stories—a lifetime’s worth of goings and comings. I am trying to do much, much more. I am trying to prolong the loss, the clanging funeral dirge that has been calling since Kingsley first threw the slate rocks at my windowsill.
5.
When I’m eleven, Prince twelve, and Kingsley fifteen, my father crams us kids into a rental car during winter break to conduct evangelism and visit my older sister in Toronto, Canada. It is dawn and the neighborhood is a baby half asleep. My brothers and I sit in the back. With my sister, we will be four: girl, boy, boy, girl in that order. Since she lives in Canada, she is a figure floating in and out of the ring of my girlhood. When I’m finally allowed on the computer, I will spend my preteen years talking about bike rides and asking for her hand-me-downs on Facebook messenger. I say “finally” because my brothers hog everything, and my father’s prayer calls take up all the phone lines in the house. This is how I know I am the youngest. I am allowed so little, stuffed in the middle seat of the rented sedan. My head grazes the suitcases when I lean back far enough, and Kingsley yanks me upright. Prince cracks the door open, and because it is cold, he is told to shut it. None of us have issues with authority yet, and so he obeys while Kingsley and I giggle ceremoniously in the shadows. We leave Eastview Estate and my stepmother behind. The roads open up like a gaping mouth. We only stop twice to pee, and then I wake up to an iridescent sky against the mountain peaks. And then we are showing our green cards to enter Canada. And then and then and then.
Toronto is dark when we arrive. We never get to see my father preach. I imagine people falling over while he shouts over them. I imagine his kneeling before an altar as the light dims and worship music resounds through the sanctuary. At home, I snuggle next to my sister who has made space for me on her bed. I want to be so close. I want to try on her clothes, cuff the bottoms to fit my calves, slip into her shoes, and look her eye to eye. There is so much she knows that I don’t know. Like Maybelline makeup and how to do a smokey eye. When she talks, her voice is quiet, like someone who isn’t asking for much. I am asking for a lot: new paint for my bedroom walls, a Camp Rock t-shirt, a Keyshia Cole CD. I hold onto my sister’s perfumes and makeup drawers when she is away. I dab shadows into my creases and forget to close the palette properly. When I hear the front door creak, the palette slips out of my hand and breaks. When my sister sees it, her face droops with dismay. I hear her complain to our father while I hide behind her bedroom door, staring at my toes. The door opens and even though she is upset, she hands me the makeup palette to keep.
6.
After Canada, I spend many days missing my sister. I get my period over the weekend, and on Monday, I peel off a pad in the fifth grade bathroom stall to show my friend as proof. We both screech behind our selective doors. The older I get, the more every event necessitates a witness. In class, the teacher asks: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? I want to tell her that things happen without sound all the time. I want to tell her my family and my body are trees falling soundless in a forest. The fall is in slow motion so not even a leaf rustles. Like when Kingsley walks through the door at dawn and nothing creeks. Or when my father crumples bills and the paper ignites on the stove. Sound is for those who are sleeping, those who are too distracted to see.
7.
A year after leaving Canada, Kingsley’s whereabouts become unpredictable. At first he is part of the soccer team, and then practices go later and later. I spend most nights listening out for the “thud” of a car door, and then the faint chorus of boys, rapping lyrics down Sophie street. All the adults warn that with the way Kingsley is moving at sixteen, we are going to lose him. They mean jail or worse. They mean the best way to save a Black Boy is to keep him indoors. They blame all this freedom in America. The drugs in the inner city schools. They cite articles of students smoking in school bathrooms, and staging classroom walkouts. Some suggest my father quit his day job as a Corrections Officer or that my stepmother revoke her assignment states away. We could all use the supervision. What I gather is that behind every door is a toll of imminent losses. All happening at varying speeds. All striking the body, and the tender heart beating repeatedly behind it.
8.
When I’m thirteen and Prince fourteen, there are whole days when Kingsley is gone and the house is cloaked in silence. He’s out doing whatever seventeen-year-old boys do. I imagine parties after Friday night football. Teams of athletes hanging out in parking lots at the skate rink. Wherever he is, his soccer trophies attend family meetings in his stead. My father phones every afternoon from work to ask if Kingsley has returned. His tone is pained. Sometimes I catch Kingsley at 6:00 a.m., just as he’s leading a girl out of his downstairs bedroom. Other times he’s down the street playing basketball in balmy heat while I walk my bike around in the shadow of the corrugated roofs. He fakes a throw at me and I stick out my tongue.
“He’s around,” I say.
At thirteen, I am not allowed to sleepover anywhere, but the girls that Kingsley brings home lead me to question this rule. Whenever the girls come over, I trail the top of the staircase and watch them disappear downstairs. Kingsley presses his hands to his lips to shush me. I don’t care enough to tell on him, because the girls give me their attention. Sometimes, when they are on the phone with Kingsley, I sing Keyshia Cole loudly until they tell him to pass on that I have a beautiful voice. Other times, Kingsley and I lay out in the hallway right in front of the bathroom door, while they trade I love yous and shut ups through speakerphone. None of it beats the mornings after the sleepovers, when the girls wave me goodbye as they slink through the front door. As I watch, I understand that there are corners I can cut, gaps I can disappear and reappear into. But first, my body has to become a secret. I am learning how to be a girl from them. Leave a scent behind. Swoop delicate hair out of the eyes. Mimicry is how I get my body back, how I renegotiate the lines.
Later, when Kingsley returns after escorting the girls home—later could be that same night or a day or two days—he brings me two shirts from Aeropostale and a pair of shoes. This is one thing Kingsley does well: apologizing. The next morning, he mows the lawn, scrubs the bathroom clean, and vacuums the living room while Prince and I watch. When my father returns from work, they sit out on the porch or go on a long drive somewhere across the city, where they both agree Kingsley will turn a new leaf. I imagine them at the mouth of some soupy water, arms looped, shedding the cross that makes a father-and-son relationship difficult. The cross sinks to the bottom of the water, anchoring the forked tongues of their two boyhoods. It is a strange purpling color. They come home and eat roasted potatoes and lasagna in a soundless house. I hear their low voices downstairs and start to believe again. But a week or a month or so later, it begins all over:
My father cooks dinner and sets out plates for all of us. Kingsley is out with friends or on a quick errand so his plate is covered on the blue marble kitchen counter. Because I am greedy and maybe even a little selfish, I pick away at his food after finishing mine. An hour passes and I take a cut of fried yam. Then a piece of corned beef. Another hour, and he loses a chicken wing, and then the corn beef thins. The clock strikes dawn, and his food is half-gone. At 3:00 a.m., I creep downstairs to find the plate still there. Half-eaten, just as I had left it. Soon, my dad will get ready for work. Soon, after waiting for Kingsley that morning, and then a whole summer’s worth of mornings, my father will give Kingsley’s room up for rent. The man who moves in is a middle-aged Elder at a local church going through a divorce. Sometimes, I circle the top of the stairs waiting for Kingsley. Sometimes I look out towards the window, hoping to see the faint shadow of his Air Forces. I know I can’t salvage what’s left. I can only pretend like it isn’t missing.
9.
When I am fourteen, we return to Canada. My dad’s ministry has expanded to two or three churches and home visits, and so his two friends, a pastor in a polo, and a man with a lisp named Frankie Baby, share the front seats of the car. In the back, is only my brother Prince and I. Suitcases fill the space Kingsley would have occupied. I get a window seat and lean against the door. I watch Toronto and its drabby skyline through tinted windows. When we arrive, we go to church with my sister and visit family friends. I watch hands raised in worship, reaching towards the ceiling. I watch fans whirl as voices cry out in tongues. I wonder: if anyone asks about Kingsley, what do we say? We say he is back home or just at home. Which isn’t a lie. It is just better than saying we don’t know, which is always my first response. Though true, I notice the look of alarm, “You don’t know where your own brother is?” and then quickly opt for the half-truth. No one presses for more information. On Facebook, we take pictures where I’m nestled in my sister’s arms in her white lace top, her silver jewelry heavy around my neck and earlobes. My smile is bright, and Prince is awkward and nonchalant in the shadows.
When we get back, I start high school and tell everyone I am Kingsley’s younger sister. Only the current seniors remember him. In high school, time matters. A month or more and you are already forgotten. Kingsley has been gone for much, much longer.
10.
Rewind and I am nine-and-a-half , sitting next to my brothers on an overflowing flight to America. We are shiny-faced preteens seeing a plane for the first time, whirling with imagination about what lies across the waters. As we skirt over the Atlantic, I feel my way through the dark to the restroom. I enter the door with ease, but when I try to unlock it, I become trapped. The knob won’t unlatch and I think it is the end. I shake the door aggressively while the flight attendants stand on the other end, shouting directions. When the door finally unlatches, I emerge in the umber light against the dark cabin with tears streaming down my face. One of the flight attendants rubs my back and apologizes, even though it’s not her fault. The door snaps shut behind me, and I wobble through the aisle to sit sandwiched between my two brothers. It is the first time I feel separated from them, the first time I know there are things we will each go through alone that the others will never see.
11.
After our second Canada trip, the doorbell rings incessantly, followed by a disruptive knock and then it begins all over again. I am still fourteen. The doorbell is all I hear because I am paying attention. I wait in order to give someone else a chance, but no one comes running down the stairs. It is evening, not early or late, but just getting to the time when everyone draws in and reclines on their beds. My father is either going to leave for work in four hours or he has the day off—in which he will do tasks that he has been putting off for weeks. My stepmother has changed her schedule to the morning shifts in town, and so she is all we have most nights. The doorbell trills again. Soon, a knock. I peel the door open and there is my father’s pastor friend, standing in his blue polo, his face a revolting sky. He asks for my father, and then they are in the living room, not sitting but standing, arguing over money and what my father owes him. My stepmother descends the stairs and stands behind her husband. The pastor is irate and they mention Canada in parts and money in parts and overdue balances. It is an hour, and then two, and then I worry my dad is going to be late for work. The pastor doesn’t leave until he says everything he came to say or until my father placates him with a deadline. When he is gone, and not a second after, I am warned to never open the door again. Just like that.
Did I cry? I don’t remember. What I remember is the feeling of having done something wrong. The fine line of my father’s pained expression—how he mounted the stairs, entered his room, and shut the door.
12.
In adulthood, I visit my father’s house. I crouch into the window of my childhood and think of the neighbor’s greyhound, Atlas, who as a child, snuggles close to the fence whenever I plant my face on the window’s ledge. In the memory, he laps at the blow up pool in the summertime and darts around as I whistle with nothing in my hand. Sometimes I watch as Kingsley leads a mower through the neighbor’s lawn while Atlas leaps with excitement despite his leash. We got to know the neighbors through Kingsley. Sometimes when he hadn’t come home, I would knock and ask the neighbors if they’d seen him. The white couple, the wife I remember in nursing scrubs and the husband a bodybuilder (he was so buff what else could he do for a living?), always shook their heads no, and sometimes passed me whatever leftover payment they had saved for Kingsley. I remember watching their faint shadows through my bedroom window—how perfect and innocent they looked: a father, mother, and their two children, tending to their yard.
13.
When speaking of loss, Lucille Clifton says, I began with everything. I think, Yes! How true! Like I had been waiting for someone else to notice. Sometimes I pour over the details of the beginning with insatiable greed. Me, flat-chested and boney, hedged between my two brothers. Because it matters. It matters. It matters.
14.
In a year, I’m fourteen-and-a-half, or a-quarter-to-fifteen—blurred only because it is muddied by the kind of silence that besets grief. Kingsley spends nights in jail. He returns home and crashes on the living room couch for a few weeks, where he leaves letters of apology or departure to our father. I skim through the letters at dawn because I am the first to wake up. This, too, is a responsibility I take seriously. Before then, I had never known anyone to go to jail or to even write letters for that matter. I crouch at the door of my brother Prince’s room and relay the contents of the letter. I never feel like I am intruding because it is my business, and my heart breaks for Kingsley. I learn from friends at school that they also have older brothers who leave home—older brothers who are seen on occasion and return bearing gifts and apologies for their absence. I wonder about this plague, and start to think of it as a thread that stitches our grief. Every time a brother steps over the threshold of a house or an apartment, the thread trills and a younger sister stirs in her sleep.
15.
On the front door, my father tapes a note: DOOR SECURITY: PLEASE MAKE SURE BOTH DOORS ARE SECURED AND LOCKED UPON ENTRY/EXIT.
Self-portrait, because I once saw a door and knew not to open. Because behind every door is a mouth, and the tongue, a road. Because sometimes the mouth is trying to rewrite the story, to alleviate the guilt, which presses to be remembered. It’s kind to retell a story with mercy, but how much? And for whom? I didn’t break my sister’s makeup. I open the door for my brother on each and every request. I never open the door for the pastor. I get to open the door every day because it is a privilege. My smile makes walking up the front steps to our house worth it. The dog Atlas is a friend and my secret pet, though I have never in a million years nor will I ever pet it. When I sing to Atlas, I am singing to myself and to the trees onwards to Toronto, and to the front door that creaks, and to the way someone is at once on the other side of the knocking and then gone.
I’m saying that I will lose/ love Kingsley in a different way than I will lose/love myself. I’m saying the tale is too lofty for the page. I’m saying the only way to make something real is to write it down. I’m working in parts, because this is a story I carry with me everywhere. This is one addressed to me.
I am hesitant to ask my father for those letters Kingsley wrote. There are few things stronger than the passing of time, the way it congeals and masks the guilt. If I read those letters, not skimming, but lifting each word, what will it do? Will it pervade the absence? Make real the body and gait and tone of my brother? The sloshing of his oversized tee shirts, the sagging skinny jeans and his clever jokes? By looking at the door, what am I trying to undo?
16.
In the year that is neither the first or second or third or fourth or fifth, but something nebulous, dewy as a blade of grass, there are two rings at the door—the rings happens two weeks apart:
The first is Kingsley himself at the end of the year. I am fifteen, and he is nineteen. He sports a clean goatee and cradles a daughter in his arms. He is all wide-toothed grin and enters to find our father ironing downstairs. Kingsley stays for all of thirty minutes, but it feels like forever in that a wave of joy brushes over all of us and it feels like time is endless.
The second bell rings in the new year. It is the year I am turning sixteen. I open it to see the Columbus Police. I fold in surprise at the sight of them, or they glance at each other in surprise at the sight of me, a sleek film of snow building on the grass behind them. They ask me to find an adult. I imagine Kingsley cold in another jail cell. I imagine another apology letter already working its way through the mail system. I knock at my father’s bedroom door without caution for his sleep. When he comes downstairs, it takes only a breath for them to sit on the couch. The second they do, I am at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping. The air is solemn, and I hear the mention of death, to which I run into Prince’s room. There is no word from anyone for a good ten minutes.
The news calls it the first homicide of the year.
The news says something about a party, just a seven-minute drive from our house.
I began with everything. My brothers and I, circling a snow-cloaked neighborhood in February, fresh off the airplane. My brothers and I, clamoring around the new house, stripping duvets from the bedrooms to the living room at night to watch movies.
After the police are gone, I stalk the neighborhood and look at the designs of each house, safeguarded by their elaborate doors. I ruminate between the secret rooms of each house, become a family member or a guest. What happens in a house happens everywhere else, I say to myself when people stop by to visit and pay their respects. When my sister travels from Toronto for the funeral. I am in my bedroom and can hear them. I find excuses to go to the bathroom. I shut the door behind me and forget the years of being scared. When people ask what happened, the story that levels the shock, perhaps because of the odds, is that Kingsley might have been saved, had a friend unlocked a car door.
Brother, at every door, I’m making room for you—opening and waiting to see you on the other end. It is a girlish enthusiasm, the way I protested my fear of bathrooms because I had to survive where no other girl was—because I had to first create the space and then enter it.
