The House You Pass on the Way (6 page)

“And anyway, Ida never even met us before.”

“I know. But we’ve seen lots of pictures. You know—in newspapers and magazines and stuff.”

“Didn’t reporters bother you all?” Staggerlee asked.

“Shoot,” Trout said. “Once in a blue. They don’t care anything about our boring lives. Ida married a college professor. Hallique started a couple of fund-raising organizations for black people—for a while, reporters were into that. But the organizations ran out of money and she went back to her regular life being a secretary. They wanted you guys for the dirt. Look at you—you could pass for white. The press loves that kind of stuff.”

Staggerlee looked away. At school she had been called “Light-bright.” She hated it, the way the word sounded so much like a swear, how girls’ mouths curved so nastily when they screamed it. When she was younger, she hated how light she was, how people stared and called her beautiful or ugly just because of it. Some mornings, she wanted to pull her skin back and walk outside with just her blood and veins and bone showing. What would people say then? What names would they come up with? She looked at Trout. Her skin was dark brown like Daddy’s. Staggerlee wanted to touch it, to run her hands along Trout’s arm. She wanted to ask her what it was like to walk inside that skin every day.

“Why would I want to pass?” Her voice came out sounding cold. “I know what I am.”

Trout narrowed her eyes, smirking. “What are you?”

It was a test, Staggerlee knew. One she had had to take a thousand times. Choose a side, Trout was saying. Black or white.

“I’m me. That’s all.”

Trout’s eyes softened. Staggerlee stared into them. They were brown and clear as water.

“Yeah,” Trout said. “I hear that.” She turned away from Staggerlee and watched the passing land for a while, squinting against the dust. “That’s all anybody is—themselves. People all the time wanting to change that.”

She looked old sitting there, all huddled into her jacket.

“Are you glad you came here?”

Trout looked thoughtful a moment. “I don’t know yet.” She sighed. “I miss Hallique.” For a minute she looked like she’d start crying. But then she blinked and her eyes were distant again.

Staggerlee leaned back and stared out over the land. The pictures they had of her father’s people had been taken a long time ago. In most of them, Hallique and Ida were little girls, and there were a few of them as teenagers. Hallique never smiled in any of the pictures. When Staggerlee had asked her father why, he’d said, “That’s how she was—straight-faced.”

“What do you miss about her?” Staggerlee asked Trout now.

Trout shrugged. “I look over at her chair at the table and it’s empty and I know it’ll always be empty now. And her pictures. I look at them and . . . I don’t know. She’s there in them but she’s not, too.” She reached into her knapsack and pulled out a small stack of pictures with a rubber band around it.

“We went to the shore last year.” She handed the picture to Staggerlee. “This is me and Hallique.”

Staggerlee stared at the picture a long time. The woman in it was tall and dark like Daddy. Her hair was braided and pinned to the top of her head. She wore tiny wire-frame glasses and had an arm across Trout’s shoulder. They were both laughing into the camera.

“That’s Hallique?” Staggerlee asked softly.

“Yeah.”

“I never saw a picture with her smiling.” She stared at the picture again. They were both wearing shorts. Trout was wearing an orange bathing suit beneath hers. Hallique wore a T-shirt with something written across it Staggerlee couldn’t read.

“She said when she was young, she was too busy worrying about what her life was gonna be like when she grew up. But after the bombing, she said she was going to live—that tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed.” Trout frowned. “Or something like that.”

“Then why’d she stop talking to Daddy, if she was going to
live
?”

Trout shrugged. “She never talked about that. Neither one of them did. It was like your daddy was dead and buried. Hardly any pictures either—except what they clipped from the newspaper.”

“They hated us.”

“They didn’t hate you. They just didn’t think about you all. I guess that’s just as bad, huh?”

Staggerlee nodded. “Somebody dies and then everyone scrambles to make things right.”

Trout raised her eyebrow. “What’re you talking about?”

“Like Ida Mae letting us finally meet you. Finally writing to us. It took somebody dying.”

“Yeah,” Trout said, looking away from her. “Somebody dying.” She got quiet, and Staggerlee wondered what she had said wrong.

“Anyway, Hallique smiled all the time,” Trout said. “I think that’s what I’ll miss the most. The way she laughed at Jonathan’s silly jokes. I think I was closest to Hallique. I could tell her anything.” Trout looked down at the stack. “Ida Mae’s not like that. Ida Mae’s got big plans for me.”

She held out another picture. “That’s them. Ida and Jonathan.”

Staggerlee stared at the picture a moment. Ida Mae was short and round. She was waving the camera away the way Mama did sometimes when she had had enough picture taking. But Jonathan was holding her by the shoulders, playfully, as though he was making her stand still for one more. He was handsome, younger than Staggerlee had expected him to be.

“They’re good-looking,” Staggerlee said finally, handing the picture back.

Trout nodded. “I know, and I know I don’t look like them either.”

“You’re good-looking,” Staggerlee said quickly.

Trout smiled and winked at her. Something about the wink made Staggerlee’s stomach flutter.

They were driving through Calmuth. The land stretched out green and gold in the sun. Trout leaned back against the cab. “It’s pretty here.”

“Baltimore pretty?”

Trout sat up. “You know why Ida is sending me here?”

Staggerlee frowned. “You wanted to come!”

“Is that what she said in her letters?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you want to come? To meet us?”

Trout leaned back again, looking relieved and pent up at the same time. “It’s bigger than that,” she sighed.

Trout looked at her a moment, as though she was trying to figure out if Staggerlee would understand something. Then she shook her head.

“Bigger than what?” Staggerlee asked.

“Nothing,” Trout said.

Staggerlee took her harmonica out of her back pocket and started blowing into it. The music surrounded them. She felt scared suddenly that Trout had brought something deep with her, something that concerned both of them. Trout made her feel small and shaky. And her lips were scary, the way they curved into a smile.

Staggerlee started playing “Moonlight in Vermont.” Over and over she had watched the film clip of her grandmother singing it with Ella Fitzgerald. Their voices together were beautiful. Later in the song, a man came out and started playing the trumpet. Staggerlee played that part now. She felt herself disappearing inside the music.

“‘Moonlight in Vermont ...,’ ” Trout began to sing.

Staggerlee frowned, unsure whether or not she had heard right. She had never heard anyone but her grandmother and Ella sing the song, and now here was Trout. She began to play more softly. Trout smiled and continued singing, her voice sweet and low. She sang with her eyes closed, her head thrown back. Staggerlee stared at her mouth, the way it moved to form the words. She felt her throat closing up, felt tears beginning to form behind her eyes. She stopped playing suddenly and stared down at her harmonica.

“Why’d you stop?”

“How do you know that song?”

Trout frowned. “The same way you do, silly. Grandma sang it. We have it on video.”

They had the same grandmother. Georgia Canan. Somehow that seemed strange to Staggerlee, that this Trout shared her grandmother.

“We have it on video too,” Staggerlee said.

Trout stared out at the passing road, smiling. “I like when she and Ella do that little step,” she said, moving her shoulders. “And then they go ‘Oooh oooh oooh. Ooooh.’ I love that.”

Staggerlee smiled. She loved that part too.

“You ever been there—to Vermont?”

Trout shook her head. “I dreamed it, though—when I was real little, I used to have all these ideas about—about what it was like. The way Grandma sings it—that part about the falling leaves and the sycamores.”

“And the snowlight,” Staggerlee said softly. “Sometimes I sit in my window and imagine what that’s like—snowlight and ski trails.” All her life, she had felt like she was the only one who dreamed about places. The only one who watched those film clips and imagined herself in the places they sang about. And now, here was a girl—sitting close enough to touch, talking about the same things.

“And I know why you call yourself Staggerlee too.”

Staggerlee started picking at a cuticle. It was almost too much—like Trout could look right through her and see everything. “Why do you think?”

“’Cause of Grandpa’s song,” she said, matter-of-fact.

“Yeah,” she said. But it was more than that. Nothing she could explain to a near stranger. “How come you call yourself Trout?”

They passed a farm where about a dozen cows were out grazing. Trout watched them, her eyes on the farm until it was long out of sight. “You ever been fishing?” she said, finally.

“No. I watch people do it. We have a river near us.”

“When I was little, Jonathan used to take me fishing all the time. We don’t do it much anymore, though. Ida says he should take my boy cousins fishing and leave me to do girl stuff. Thing is—we used to fish for trout. You ever see a trout getting pulled out of water?”

Staggerlee shook her head. Once she had seen a man hit a fish against the ground so hard, it brought tears to her eyes. It was a bluefish about as long as her arm. Since then, she always looked away when a person had a fish on their line.

“A trout will fight you real hard,” Trout said. “Trying to get itself free. I’d get one on the line and it’d be leaping all high out of the water.” She sighed. “Sometimes I’d keep it. Sometimes I’d let it go. But even when I let it go, I’d think about its mouth, the way it had this big cut in there—the way I’d hurt it even if I did throw it back.”

“How come you liked fishing if you didn’t like hurting them?”

Trout looked at her, her eyes dark and intense. “Something about the way they fought. I guess, without even knowing it, I wanted to learn how to fight like that. I wanted to see this little fish that thought he had so much to live for. That’s why I changed my name. Be a fighter like a trout. You give yourself a name, you have to live up to it, though.”

“You feel like you have to fight all the time?”

Trout looked away. “Yeah,” she said. “All the time.”

She was quiet, her eyes steady on the land they passed. Staggerlee sat holding her ponytail, trying to keep the wind from whipping it into her face. She watched Trout. Her jaw was narrow and strong. It looked like someone had chiseled it out of a piece of dark brown stone. But her chin kept quivering as though she was trying hard not to cry. They drove for a long time before the first tear fell. Trout wiped it away quickly.

“Don’t stare at me, please,” she said hoarsely.

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

AT THE HOUSE TROUT SLOWLY CLIMBED DOWN FROM the truck and moved toward the porch where Mama was standing with Battle. She walked like someone older, someone sure of herself. Staggerlee watched them embrace awkwardly, then pull away from each other and smile. Her mother’s smile was small and uncertain.

“I hope you have a good time here,” Mama said. But her words sounded as though she had practiced saying them.

“I’ll show her a good time,” Staggerlee said quickly.

Trout turned and looked at her, a half smile beginning. Staggerlee frowned. She didn’t have words for this—the way Trout . . . the way Trout . . . unsteadied her.

She took Trout’s duffel from her father. “I—I’ll show you where you’re sleeping,” she stammered.

TROUT’S ROOM WAS next to Staggerlee’s, and even though it was called a guest room, there had never been a guest in it. Staggerlee looked around. Her mother had slept here. When she had returned from the hospital after having Battle, she had moved into this room and closed the door. And for the next few weeks, they tiptoed around the house, only disturbing her when it was time for Battle to nurse or on the few occasions when she herself was hungry. The room was painted blue, with a high ceiling and windows facing the river. There was a queen-sized iron bed in one corner, a desk with a lamp on it in the other, and a small blue-and-yellow rug on the floor.

“This is it,” Staggerlee said, setting Trout’s duffel on the bed.

Trout whistled under her breath and walked over to the window. She stood there, staring out, her hands in the back pockets of her shorts.