It was on a Thursday I saw my mom for the first time in three years. When I answered the door, she stood holding a small tote bag. Ma looked taller than what I remembered. She wore her natural hair, a short afro, no longer relaxed and pulled back like she had kept it all the years I was growing up. Her long dress was flowy, unstructured, and she was wearing a chunky yellow necklace. She smiled when she saw me, and at first, I thought she wouldn’t recognize me after my transition. But then she said, “I didn’t think you’d be home.”
She sat down at my kitchen table looking at the walls of the house I was renting. It was bare, the walls still painted the original white. I hadn’t decided how to make the place mine yet, not used to living in such a big space alone. All my things from New York only fit in one of the four rooms.
“You have no pictures,” she said as she started to get up again.
“I got it Ma.” She sat back down, seeing as how I was already pouring the hot water over the mugs of tea and brought them over to the table. I had so many questions for her. About her time in New Mexico, about the house I spent eight years of my life in that’s no longer in her possession, about why she came back to see me in North Carolina. “You kept all of the family photos, remember?”
“I can’t take them to New Mexico, they belong here.” Ma gave a look like she’d had enough of being the sole carrier of our family’s history throughout the 20th century, and those three photo albums was not going to fit in her luggage.
I hadn’t seen any of our family photos since I was a teenager. I used to rummage through each album, searching for all the pictures of me and Windell. There was one photo she had of us that always stuck out from under the plastic. It was one of those JC Penny Christmas shoots, I think we were barely one year old; we were both in red, one twin in a dress the other in a little suit. Both giving a gummy smile. I used to imagine Ma standing just behind the photographer, holding up our favorite stuffed animal and making a funny face.
“Why’d you leave New York?” she asked.
“I missed home and Uncle Wayne and smelling honeysuckle when I walk through the neighborhood.”
“You were more you up North.”
I told her about my apartment in Brooklyn and how I’d met two teenage brothers who lived with their family in my building. They would be outside playing basketball on the courts just about every day in warm weather after school, and in Summers. I’d shuffle past them to catch the train to work or to meet up with friends. For what felt like months I said nothing to these kids, and they didn’t speak to me. One day as I passed them to go to work, the eldest kid looked my way and said, “Hola.” Enthusiastically, I replied with a “hey, what’s up,” in the most awful high-pitched voice. After a while I felt a synthetic adhesion to this adopted neighborhood of mine. Some days, we’d greet each other as I passed, or I’d play a pickup game with them on the courts, in the early evenings before dinner. The kids were curious about who I was. One of them had asked, early on when I lost a game against two of them, no older than twelve, “are you a man or a woman?” No adult had asked me that yet. I’d only get the burning stares on the subway or hear someone yelling obscenities at me from across the street as I walked to work. I told them I was neither, both. And waited for the awkward burst of laughter to pass along with a joke or two, before they’d toss me the ball and say, “best of three.”
I felt the most myself then and began to use different pronouns and changed my named to Windell, and began to walk into barber shops, asking for a fade, not let the silent stares scare me away.
Ma’s face got serious when she reached into her bag.
“I came to give you this, and ask why?” It was an old gift box with my old inhaler in it, still inscribed with the prescription for Alisha Stone.
“You know I haven’t needed this since I was sixteen.”
“But you see, it has your name on it. That’s your name. Let the dead be dead.”
“I changed my name, Ma, please respect that.”
“You’re not Windell.” Before she started to say something else, a motorbike zipped by. Its loud engine caught both our attention. She shifted and took a sip of tea.
I had been going by Windell for a year at that point. New Windell. My dead brother’s name.
Let the dead be dead. Ma held on to Windell all these years, causing me to walk on a tight rope not wanting to step out of bound. She even brought the dead with her when she left.
Out West, when she was on a road trip, Ma sent me pictures of dead armadillos smushed on the side of the road. Some were split perfectly in half, guts spilled out of the hard armored shell of their bodies. She seemed fascinated, even captioning a photo with “we’ve only see these at the Zoo, remember?” I began to answer her back, through those texts. Asking her if she was getting enough water, or if they had found them a nice hotel to sleep in for the night, or if they had arrived at the pacific coast safely. And the dead armadillos were how she checked up on me. First, roadkill, then, how’s New York?
After a moment of sitting at the kitchen in silence, I said, “let’s go outside.”
It was hot that September. It was the first day of what would eventually be a shift in season, but no sign of cool air. Just a warm wet breeze wrapped around this ocean-less place. We sat on the porch. The neighborhood oversaw a playground across the street where a few kids played in the mulch. With the tea in hand, she watched the children and laughed along when something funny caught her eye.
“One thing about living away from home is I hardly see any children. Tanya lives in this apartment complex in Albuquerque where you look out and you see this great big old’ city but I never seen a child. Funny, I hear ‘em, but I don’t see ‘em.”
“Did you ever notice how lonely I felt in my childhood?”
“You were lonely?”
“I couldn’t speak to you about what I was feeling about Windell, and my body, and how I’d always felt like I was slipping away too. And then we’d move out of an apartment, and I’d have to pretend all over again to be Alisha with the new kids I met and the different versions of you when you were sad.”
Ma started to hold her breath again, then exhaled. “We moved around a lot. But I had to work. You was always quiet after the accident. I wished you would’ve said something.”
A child wondered in zigzags to cross the street to the playground. Ma watched her carefully, holding her breath as the child crossed and exhaling when she made it onto the mulch, engulfed by the smiles of the other children.
For six years, we’d move from apartment to apartment, before she met my stepdad. I was always being reminded in her silence or the look she’d give me when I did something to upset her, that there was supposed to be two of me. Her twin, not-twin babies.
“If you had children you’d understand. I accept you for who you are, but that name belongs to me.” She’d turned away from me now, watching the playground. Ma found signs of Windell in everything that year he died. I had barely started first grade when the children in the classroom made cards of condolences for me and Ma. They were on construction paper marked with bright crayon colors—rainbows, stick figures, clouds, angels, and misspelled words drooping crookedly on the paper. What these children thought of grief was full of color and whimsy. Those few years afterwards, I remember Ma mostly sitting up in her dark bedroom, curtains drawn because the light was too much.
“You used to wake up, gasping. Holding your chest,” Ma said. That first time I took you to the emergency room, I thought you were gonna die. The nurse said you was having an asthma attack because of the bronchitis, but I didn’t know you was having trouble breathing. I thought it wasn’t possible. To lose another one. I thought I’d go into hiding, or crawl into a cave and just sat myself there. Surrounded by dirt and bugs and dank air, all because I couldn’t think it was possible. And it happened again—a gasp in the middle night, another rush to the hospital, another thought that I’d failed. Every time I see you, especially now, I’m reminded of a child I couldn’t raise.”
“I was a difficult child,” I said. “But you could have tried harder to see me, Ma. Even when you hit, I thought finally. Cause you gave me something after just being in the dark.”
“Alisha—”
“Windell.”
She went back inside the house, leaving the front door wide open. I could see through the window that she was crying. Her flowy dress, now stiff and draped against her body, hanging past her shoes, looked large on her now. I knew opening up that memory would get to her. It would get her to see that I have a right to this name.
When I was eight years old, the two of us returned home from a birthday party after I’d gotten into a fight with one of the other girls. I can’t remember who started but Ma was mad at me for acting out. And I was mad at her for moving us again. These children did not know me. I told everyone I first met that I used to have a twin and he was dead now. I would tell them how it happened. How Ma was the one driving and the car that struck us only hit that one side, where Windell was sleeping because we had spent all day at the water park. How I barely had a scratch, and he was dead. How Ma screamed. How I ran out of the car right after the impact because I thought the loud bang was something else.
We left the birthday early because I started screaming and scratching my face. I kicked the back of Ma’s seat because she refused to let me sit up front. I tried to roll down the window, but it was locked. I tried to climb out of my seatbelt, but she warned me, “Keep acting out and I’ll give you something to cry about.” It was always just a warning like this that would lead to me going silent and us going about the week without speaking as she dressed me for school, cooked dinner, and put me to bed.
That night, I pretended I couldn’t breathe. She came running into the room with my inhaler in hand, having me take pumps until it was empty, and my eyes were all watered. It left a metallic taste in my mouth. My face was puffy and damp from the tears.
She patted my back, began to dress me. I didn’t want to go into that hospital again.
I slowly gave up on gasping and began to inhale before crying from the weight of it all. I thrashed my body against hers and swung my arms and legs, kicking off the heated blanket. She tried to pin me down, but I kept swinging. My knee jerked up and hit her in the stomach and Mama made a sound so primal, I froze.
She picked up a shoe from the floor and swung at me before I had a chance to say I’m sorry. I held my hand up to cover my face as the shoe came down on it. I felt a bone crack. She left the room, crying and in fumes, holding her stomach. I sat up in bed, cradling my hand, breathing through the pain.
Sometime during that late night, I stopped crying. The throbbing in my hand became medicinal. Numbing. The next morning, after I had gained the strength needed and couldn’t bare the pain, I held up my hand to her in the bathroom and watched as she saw the swelling. A shard of bone sharp and loose underneath my skin.
We sat in the car outside of the emergency clinic, an ice pack taped to my hand. Mama was shaking a little as she grabbed her purse. She went to reach for me but then held her hand back. The beginning of being afraid to touch glass, something so delicate and breakable.
“It was not your fault, what happened, you hear?”
I nodded, looked at the emergency sign once again. A place I’d seen so much in all my eight years.
“This is hard for you to understand right now, but when we go inside to see the doctor, I need you to not tell them what happened. Look at me, Windell, OK?”
I had my head down. I was looking at my hand, at how good it felt now that the pain had numbed.
“When they ask, I need you to say that you fell. Repeat after me.”
“I fell.”
“You were riding your bike and you fell off.”
“I was riding my bike and I fell off.”
For a moment, we both sat and listened to our own heartbeats. Both afraid to witness what would happen once we stepped out of that car and through those doors. I understood everything then.
When the doctor came in after all my vitals were checked by a young nurse’s aide, his cold white hand pressed the bone in my thumb and asked what happened. I looked at Mama, our eyes meeting. I wanted him to press down even harder. There was a coldness, a ghostly thing, hanging above us, suspended between the lie I had rehearsed and Mama’s eyes.
I wore a bright pink cast on that left hand for eight weeks, brandishing it at school for kids to sign. For years after it healed, that thumb joint would crack randomly, a small joint pop to release air, a slight discomfort I got used to. She never whupped me after that, and slowly as I settled into this new version of us—a mother afraid to touch her own child, a child moving deeply into their silence—and after her marriage, into a new home that felt permanent as I finished junior high and got through high school, I’d forget which thumb it was that had fractured until the sudden pop.
I went inside my house, as Mama was coming out of the bathroom. She had wiped her face, she had made a phone call, and she was waiting for a car to pick her up. It’s a sickening feeling to make her cry, to make her feel like she had done everything wrong. We did the best we could to get through. She had raised us, me, mostly on her own, and its something I can’t let myself forget. It’s impossible to be strong all the time. Damn near impossible.
She pulled out another thing wrapped in plastic from her bag.
“For you,” she said. “It will fit in with this new place.”
It was a small book of photographs I had never seen. Of me and Windell. Of her and my uncle when they were kids. Of the desert and her travels through the West. The first photo was somewhere in a backyard, me and my brother’s hair braided the same way. We both smiled big, exposing rows of baby teeth. I couldn’t really tell who was who.
“Y’all were in your uncle’s garden. I let you get dirty that day because it was the first time y’all played in the dirt. You two were pointing at everything. Saying, that? and that, and that.” She looked out passed me, through the front screen door. “I was thinking of moving back here, that’s what I told your uncle. If you’re not going to stop using his name, just know that losing a child right as he begins to feel the world is the evilest thing death can do. But Windell and you is the most beautiful thing that’s happened to me. I always loved you and I was afraid of you too. Every year you grew, I kept thinking to myself please just keep this one alive. I’m glad you’re back. I’m glad we’re both living. Look at us, wondering around this country like we’re some white students backpacking through Europe trying to find ourselves.”
We both laughed at this.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Windell don’t—” She caught herself. She placed the book on the kitchen table. “He’s about to pull up.”
If I was the one who had died and Windell had continued to live, how much different would she have been? I think Windell and I are both sides of a two headed coin. And I accept being both: Windell and Alisha. What I see now is a mother trying to stay alive for all three of us. Me and her are the same in that way. That photobook on my coffee table is the one proof, for now, that we continued to move forward.
It was already half past noon, an entire day left with no plans. I wanted to get back to work and not think about the past. After she left, saying goodbye in that way you say to a stranger you spent eight hours on a train ride with—good luck with everything.
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Omaria Sanchez Pratt (they/them) is a Black queer writer from High Point, North Carolina. They hold an M.F.A. from the University of Kentucky where they were a recipient of the 2018 Nikky Finney Fellowship. Their work can be found in Story Magazine issue 9, and the Anthology of Appalachian Writers volume XII, where they were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
