For six years running I've had the dream, and in the dream my brother always dies. He is cowering in a bathroom stall in the basement of some downtown club, the place lit horror blue by a fluorescent light pulsing overhead. There's sweat glistening on his chocolate brown forehead. It drips from the springy curls of his short black natural. He holds his shaking hands close to his mouth with fingers laced and from his throat seeps a mournful high-pitched utterance that pierces my heart when I realize what it is. My brother is whimpering.

Then the drug dealer throws open the main door, the sound of the metal slab exploding through the room as it slams against the wall. His face is an expressionless rock beneath dark sunglasses, his body a long trunk of black leather. His steely arm totes an Uzi like the gun was built into the appendage. He moves purposefully; he doesn't even look under the doors to see which stall Linc is in. He makes it to the right one in three long strides, kicking the door in with the fourth. And there is Linc, that stupid look on his face a mix of fear and surprise, like a startled squirrel caught in the middle of the road. It’s eerily familiar somehow, perhaps because it's the look he wears in so many of the family photos hanging in our house, as though he didn’t know how to prepare his face for the onslaught of light. But this time his eyes grow even wider as the man raises his weapon and without a word from his silent thick lips he fires. Fires way too many times. It doesn't take that many bullets to rip a body of its poor shredded soul. My brother gasps, an inhale the force of which I feel as I awaken with the breath caught in my throat. There’s no blood, no corpse to set the finality of the act in my brain. So I dream it again and again.

I bolt up from the pillows, gasping to catch my breath. I can’t see. My blinds are shut tight, the curtains drawn. If there’s daylight outside, it’s completely hidden. The dream slips away, as it has so many times, but this time it’s left something behind. Inside me. It’s like a darkness, or a little gray cloud placed quietly within my being. I have felt it coming on for days, like a storm on the horizon, but I couldn’t tell where it would come from or when it would strike. Now I am floating in the space between sleeping and being awake, and I’m closer than I’ve ever been to understanding what might come of this darkness. I can feel a knot forming, a kind of twisting of the flesh below my ribs and just above my abdomen. My hand rises to the spot and pulls at the flesh as though it could rip out the cloud and its premonition.

The phone rings.

"Jesus!" I swallow. I pick up the phone. My clock reads 6 a.m.

"Hi, Mama."

"Hello Crita, this is Mama."

Of course it’s Mama. At 6 a.m. it’s always Mama. Only she calls this early. She says that way she knows I'd be home and she won’t waste a long distance phone call. It doesn’t make for coherent conversation, especially when I’m just minutes recovered from a dream.

"How you doing?"

About as fine as I would be at six, I think to myself, when I'm not supposed to be up for another 90 minutes. She starts every call the exact same way. The meat she drops in later, like beef into soup, with the answer to my question.

"I'm fine, Mama, how are you?"

"Crita, honey, I'm worried." She speaks in hushed whispers and sounds like a child hiding in the closet under a blanket with a flashlight. I wonder if that is indeed what she is doing. It isn’t easy to make a call in our house without Daddy hearing it.

"I think there's something wrong with your Daddy."

"What is it, Mama?"

"Well, he's had this cough. It's been going on a long time now. We just thought it was a cold he couldn't shake, you know?"

"It's not?"

Her voice drops even lower. "Honey, he started coughing up blood yesterday. I'm trying to get him to see a doctor, but he won't go. He'll listen to you..."

Of course he will. Daddy still thinks I’m Marcus Welby, M.D., based on the pronouncements I made years ago when I was a child and thought I wanted to be a physician. And those only came of my fascination with watching Medical Center on television, thinking Chad Everett was the living end, and some vague notion that I could handle a surgical instrument tolerably well. I brought home good grades in science, which fed my father’s idea that we would have a doctor in the family. But those dreams had faded with college, when my interests moved more towards math and accounting than science. Still, Daddy has this idea in his head that I know a lot about medicine.

"Mama, put him on the phone." This time I’m glad I have such influence. We can’t hesitate, no way. My father is a black man in his seventies with a history of smoking that stretches back to his youth as a sharecropper in Mississippi, picking cotton with a breaktime cigarette tucked behind his ear. I’m certain that such blood seeping up through his lungs isn’t benign.

"Yeah, Crita," Daddy's voice sounds strained and more gravelly than usual. "How you doin’?"

"I'm doing fine, Daddy, but Mama tells me you've been coughing up blood?"

"Yeah. Sure have."

"Daddy, you have to go to the doctor. You should make an appointment with Doctor Joyce right after you hang up with me."

"Well, what do you think this is, Crita?" He sounds so unconcerned, so matter of fact, as though he’s asking me, "Does that sky look like it's gonna rain or snow to you?" My response has to be pitch perfect, with enough force to make him see a doctor but not enough to alarm him. Fear in someone so massive could be dangerous, like a lion with a thorn in his paw raging through the jungle. There is no telling how he would strike out or where. And it’s too soon. If there’s something truly wrong with Daddy, there would be time enough for all that fear-- time and a whole wide world to inflict it on.

"I don't know, Daddy," I say. "I just know that it can't be a good sign. You should go to the doctor. Mama says you’ve had that cough for a while and he can check you out and give you some medicine for that at least. A check-up can’t hurt."

“Nettie!” I hear him calling my mother, “Find that number for Dr. Joyce. Crita here says I should see him and I’m gonna go down there today.”

“Thank you, Daddy.” I say when I know I have his attention again. “You’ll call and tell me what he said when you get back?”

"All right, girl, I'm out the door already."

I sigh and close my eyes as I hang up the phone. Once upon a time, my mother didn’t have to call someone else to get our father to do her bidding. I still remember the story, can see the image of her, standing on the corner in all her 1950s girlish glory with her cats-eye glasses, silky straight hair, wide red poodle skirt with the frills underneath. Daddy had been in her sights, tall and powerful, his cigar-shaped fingers wrapped around the handle of his lunch box. He was crossing the railroad tracks after putting in an eight-hour shift at the steel mill. She had put on her best doe-eyed pout. "Mister, will you buy me a bottle of pop?" And he, who could resist neither her eyes nor the pout, had taken her into the air-cooled establishment where she, tugging him by the rough green canvas of his workshirt, led him to the display. "Oh look," she had said, running a finger over the metal teeth of the bottle caps, "here's a whole case of pop on sale." And he had flashed her the look I'd seen so many times in my childhood-- the look that showed he was wise to the scheme but willing to play along. He heaved the wooden case upon his shoulder and took it to the cash register. A wife for a case of cherry pop. My Daddy, Henry Carter, had thought it was the best bargain he'd ever had.

The jackhammering has not yet begun. The men from Con Edison have been pounding away at the pavement outside my window for the past week, but now my room is filled with a soft silence. Lying in my bed in the quiet I slowly become aware that I’m fully awake, and the weird dark twisting of my gut is still there.
“It is nothing,” I say to myself.

And, as if to stress the point, I make myself get up. I put on a robe and go downstairs. As I pull the pink terry cloth around my waist my fingers lightly touch the scars on my belly. There are four of them in all—three are raised asterisks, each about the size of a fifty-cent piece. The last is a long scrawl angrily bisecting my torso. I cover them, as I have every morning for the past five years.

I rent a sunny two-bedroom duplex—-quaint, the broker had called it in the ad—- in a Harlem brownstone stuffed with original details like the carved wood mantelpiece. I draw back the curtains to let in the morning light, then I fill a pitcher and water my six house plants. They are placed throughout the living room according to their need for sun, starting with the ivy and ending with the African violet my assistant had given me last Christmas. The violet is finally beginning to bloom, its fat purple buds curling out among the velvety green leaves. I would have loved more plants, but I have decided it is enough to care for these six, and to do it well. I pluck a yellowing leaf off the abutilon and check the fertilizer stick inserted in its soil.

At my front door I kick aside the pile of mail, about a week’s worth, accumulating on the floor. Then I go out to retrieve my copy of The New York Times from the stack left by the superintendent on the hall shelf.
I hear a door close and Mr. Pittinsky appears in the hall. He is so hunched over with age that he could almost be a paper clip with legs. I like to think that he has been living here ever since the brownstone was built some hundred years ago. It makes me feel comfortable somehow. Stable. He eyes me as he reaches for his paper.

 "Early," he says.

"Yes," I reply, hugging the Times to my chest and hoping my carelessly tied robe won’t fall open. "I'm up early. I hope I didn't disturb you?"

"You don't disturb me," he says, already disappearing behind his door. His voice is flat, dismissive. I stand there wondering what could disturb him when he has probably lived long enough to see it all, hear it all. What was this year, 1992, to him when there had been so many others before it?

As I come in, the bright blinking red light of my answering machine insists on catching my eye, but I ignore it as I head into my tiny kitchen and pour myself a glass of orange juice. The messages must be at least three days old by now, maybe more. I’m thinking Mama’s right to call me at the goddamn crack of dawn. All right, then.

I hit the play button.

“Hey, hon, this is Lisa.” She draws out the first syllable just a bit, so it sounds like she’s saying LEEE-sa. “I know you’re busy, ‘cause I haven’t heard from you in a while, but let’s get together, okay, ‘cause I miss you. So here’s what my calendar looks like: I have production meetings on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Those are downtown and I could meet you for coffee or something before or after. Then on Monday…”

I hit the skip button, knowing she could spend up to three or four minutes reciting the details of her schedule in her casually nasal Seattle accent. I’ll listen to the whole thing later.

BEEP! The next voice is masculine. “Hi, um, Crita? This is Warren. I really enjoyed having that drink with you the other night. I didn’t want to seem pushy, but I thought maybe I’d made a mistake. The way we left it, you were gonna call me, right? I was just wondering—no pressure! I just didn’t know because you didn’t—you didn’t call—and I had a good time.”

Of course you did. You spent the whole time talking about yourself. Delete.

“Girlfriend! It’s Mari! You got my invitation, right? This party will be kickin’! The birthday of all birthdays, at least until I turn 35! So are you coming? And are you gonna help me set up?”

BEEP! Mari again. “Okay, since when don’t you return MY calls? What’s the deal sugar?”

BEEP! “Hey sis, it’s Hazel. I just wanted to give you a heads up—Mama’s gonna call you. Daddy hasn’t been feeling well. I’ve got a class this afternoon, but give me a call if you want the low down. Fudge, forget that, call me anyway. By the way, did you read that article in the new Essence? It’s called “The Ten New Trials of Loving a Black Man”. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t figured out the old ones! At least Ella doesn’t have to worry about that, huh?”

BEEP! “Five days and counting!” Mari again. “Now you’ve done it! I’m coming after your butt! WHERE ARE YOU?”
I am in my kitchen, eating breakfast. I have the newspaper spread out on the round black metal patio table that I dine on. I am drinking tea and I have made myself some toast and eggs, soft-scrambled, with cheddar cheese melted and blended within. The sharp taste fills my mouth and I chew slowly. I count each chew the way they teach you to count breaths in meditation classes. I only want to think about the food, the process of getting a perfectly even combination of eggs and toast into my mouth at the same time. I want to stay perfectly present, right here with my breakfast. I don’t want to think about Daddy’s cough or Hazel’s message or the office or anything that may come to me today.

And yet the twisting is still there—the tiny bit of tightness below my solar plexus that nudges me to be alert. I cannot ignore it. Something is coming, it tells me. Something is about to happen. I whisper back to it after a long, thoughtful sip of my Ceylon tea.

“I am not ready.”

She is sitting on my front steps. Her hair falls down her back in a thick drape of silky blackness, reflecting the morning sun.

“Mari! What are you doing here? I can’t believe you’re hounding me like this.”

“No, no, no, my dear. Hounding is when you go out of your way. Fortunately, you are conveniently located between my place and the train. Therefore, no effort whatsoever!”

I kiss her cheek and she stands, wriggling her toes further into red leather mules with two-inch heels. I met Mari a couple of years ago at the gym after an aerobics class. The exertion had been a little too much for her, and she left the room early. I, recognizing the flushed face of a first-timer, went after her and took her arm just before her body made it clear that the majority of her blood was in her legs and not her head. I kept her from falling over into a dead faint. She’s hung onto me ever since.

“So listen…” Mari takes my arm now so I have to walk, well, this isn’t a walk, it’s a more of a stroll, at her pace. The rhythm of walking in New York City had come easily to me: 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, 1-2, step, step, step. Move forward, not back, don’t think about the past. Mari still walks with the gait of her native Trinidad: one…two…one……two……one……two. It is a walk of scented evenings and soft warm air, of smoke from clove cigarettes beneath tropical trees and love that aches in slow, exquisite ways. I trip over a raised lip in the sidewalk. This pace is foreign to me. “Oh, watch it dear. I hear tell that someone is throwing a birthday party for me. Oh wait! It’s me!” She laughs and the sight of her large white teeth make me smile. “But I have yet to get an RSVP—no matter how hard I’ve tried!—from one Crita Carter.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Uh huh, and why is that?”

“I’ve been busy—distracted.”

“Too busy for a two-minute call?”

“Calls with you are never two minutes!”

“Well, maybe not, but I’m not the only one you’ve been avoiding.”

“Mari, I could kick your butt for siccing that sorry excuse for a man on me! I’ll call him back when I want an update on the Federal Reserve. What were you thinking?”

“Maybe I was trying to kick you in the butt. Ever think of that my dear? I thought experiencing a Warren would inspire you to seek greener pastures.”

“Greener pastures?”

“Yes, maybe even find another guy like the one you used to talk about. What was his name?”

“Tree. His name was Tree.” Tall. Leonine features. I used to blush at the sound of his name. And I did talk about him all the time, like an accident victim replaying the scene, trying to see if anything could’ve been different, avoided. When enough time had gone by, I pushed my ex-boyfriend out of mind and refused to be sorry about him another day. “Anyway, it didn’t work. I told you, I’ll date when I’m ready.”

“But you’re never ready!”

“Then that’s my problem!”

Exasperated, she drops my arm. “Fair enough, honey. But why haven’t you called Lisa?”
“I… got her message…I just forgot.”

“I don’t believe you! Dear, don’t you know it’s serious business when a single black woman in New York City isn’t heard from in days? Any number of things could have happened to you, you had me worried!”

“You could have called my office at any time, Mari, and Isabella would have told you I was there.”

“Well, perhaps, but it was much more interesting to believe you had run off somewhere with Warren! That is, until he called me and said you had disappeared on him too.”

“Yeah, well.”

Mari stops and makes me face her. She scans me head to toe, her round black eyes taking in all the information.

“Honey, what’s wrong? You’re pale, like you haven’t been outside in ages. What are you doing to yourself? Why are you shutting yourself off like this?”

I don’t answer. Doesn’t she understand that I am just being cautious, so very, very cautious? I want to live in the present, to be in the present, so I cultivate the present like a gardener would a blue rose. With care. With reverence. Friends, like insects in the garden, destroy my hard work. They ask questions, want to make dates, are constantly throwing me into a future I don’t want to think about. Considering it made me want to know who would be there in the future and who would be dead and how much energy I would have to mine out of a body too tired for its 27 years to carry it and God knows how many others through the day.

The past is even worse. It’s all about how I got here, and blame, my blame, all over the place. No, I don’t call my friends and sit in lunches and parties where I don’t have word one to offer but lies about my well-being and tepid comments on movies, TV shows or clothes I haven’t seen. Instead I tend the plants. They reward me for my diligence. The abutilon blooms in happy pink flowers that look like a child cut them from tissue paper.

“I just don't have time…”

“Crita!”

“Okay, okay.” I start walking again, but this time at my pace, forcing Mari to skip along in her mules as best she can. “My mother called this morning. My dad might be sick.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t know, Mari, I just have this weird feeling that something is about to happen. I feel it in here.” I stab my gut with my fingers. “It’s been coming on for days.”

“You think you might have to go home, don’t you?”

“Well, maybe. So what?”

“So what? You haven’t been home in, what, like five years or something? You didn’t even go to your sister’s wedding!”

“I had my reasons.”

“Yeah, like avoiding your brother.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know you don’t know where he is, hon, and you haven’t for a long time. That’s what happens with junkies. They disappear…”

“My brother is NOT a junkie!” My head feels hot and there’s a throbbing in my right temple, but my tone has turned icy. “Don’t you ever say that to me again.”

Mari doesn’t know and can’t begin to understand what Linc once was—and how I prefer to think of him. When I was in third grade and Linc was a high school senior, he would come over to the elementary school to sell copies of the school newspaper. His classmates were in the halls hawking the paper as well, but my teacher, Mrs. Meade, had stood guard by the door and let them know we would buy only from Linc. We fidgeted madly waiting for him to come, everyone looking at me because I was his sister, a lucky girl, they said. Then, finally, Linc would stroll in to the classroom smiling. He seemed so tall I thought I would never be able to reach up high enough to kiss him on the cheek when he came by my desk. "I understand someone in here wants to buy a paper?" he'd announce in that deep voice. We'd raise our hands and squeal "I do! I do!" even the kids who had no money. But kindly Ms. Meade would pull out her little blue coin purse and fulfill the needs of the penniless. "Bye, bye Linc!" we'd cheer as he waved and moved onto his next customers. "Bye bye!" We would then settle into the sound of rustling paper and the smell of fresh printer's ink. We'd scan the sports page for mentions of Linc—- his latest record broken on the track team, how he flew farther than anyone else in the long jump. Choruses of "Wow" would float through the room and we'd look towards the door where this god had fleetingly appeared. "Wow."

Then later, at home, I would wait in the front yard for Linc's orange Chevy Nova to pull through the gate. As soon as he got out of the car I would jump into his arms and squeal "Linc, everybody loves you!" He'd lift me up, my hands on the polished steel of his biceps, shiny with sweat underneath his track uniform. He would sweep me into the air and I would laugh. The feeling in me, as unfocused as so many childhood notions are, was that my brother was invincible.

“Crita,” Mari is speaking gently to me now. “I’m sorry. You know how I am—always saying the wrong things. But you are upset. You’ll give me that, right?”

“Right.”

“And afraid? Why don't you just admit that too?"

“Why do I have to do that?”

"Because it's showing honey! It's on your skin, in your hair..."

"What's wrong with my hair?" I run a hand over the short, dark brown puff of kinkiness that covers my head.
Three weeks before there had been a luxurious mane of dreadlocks, shoulder length and thin like pipe cleaners.
"Crita, why did you cut your hair?"

"It was too long."

"Crita..."

"It was! It was, it was, it was! You don't understand..." I stick my fingers into the cloudlike tufts of afro and I force my voice down to keep it from screaming. "It was so long. So much longer than when I last saw Linc. It was like a clock, always reminding me, always numbering the days..." Tears well up in my eyes. "I'm just tired of waiting..." Suddenly I can see the face of one Dr. Leeper, pale and ghostly in his white lab coat, floating in front of me and around me, whispering the words "terminal addiction" in my ear so only I can hear it. He never lets me forget how short the time is, nor how tenuous Linc's existence. I try to get away from him by walking faster.

“Crita!” I suddenly feel Mari’s fingers around my upper arm, tugging me to her just as I am about to step off a curb against a red light. “I asked you what you think you’re doing! Obviously not paying attention!”

I smell the fumes of the cars idling at the light. The day is already too warm for the little red jacket I had thrown on over my white tank top. I take it off now and wonder if Mari can see the perspiration staining my shirt. At the same time I ignore the thought that I could have been mowed down by a minivan just moments ago.

“Mari, I’m just tired, okay? I’m tired and worried about my father. Can we just leave it at that for now?”

“All right, dear.” She is still evaluating me, her eyes skeptical. “And what about my party, hmm?” She nudges me. I know she wants me to smile, but at the moment I can’t stretch one out of my berry-tinted lips.

“You know I’d love to help you, but at this point I don’t even know if I’ll be here for the party. Let me see what happens when I hear from my parents again.”

“But you will let me know, what ever happens?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll call me?”

“I promise.”

“Cause if you don’t, I know where you live!” Her solemn look doesn’t match the playful notes of her voice. She kisses me on the cheek.

“I know.”

*******

It’s almost 10 a.m. when I get to my office. I’ve never liked the idea of working for other people so that’s why I’m here, in this little two-room office with a plain sign that says, simply, "Crystal Carter CPA" on the door outside. A tidy salary in the accounting department of some midtown corporation would've been easy to snag, with benefits to boot. Instead I let myself get seduced by an empty storefront on St. Nicholas Avenue. Actually it wasn't so much the space that had attracted me as much as the little girls who scampered around outside every day. Their hair freshly greased and braided, foreheads shiny, they wore little bright dresses or too long T-shirts out of which hung their coltish limbs. Running down the street in the sun, they reminded me of my sisters and me when we were children, never out of each other's company, always on our way to some mischief, always stuffed with laughter. Now each day as I wait for those girls I pick through shopping bags of receipts from professors at the nearby City College and, with my poorer clients, hand hold their way through 1040 EZs, the main gratification coming from their lit up faces when they see how much of a refund they're getting.

Isabella has opened the office and is just settling down with her second cup of coffee. She moves slowly for a young woman, like she’s in her own weird time warp or something. But she is good at set, mechanical tasks.
She can open the office, answer phones, and put someone off if I don't want to talk to them.

"Isabella, I might have to go out of town for a few days," I tell her, pointing to a stack of folders. "I need you to go over the files, make sure there's nothing outstanding, start with that pile there."

"Okay, but what am I looking for?" a reasonable question, she asks as she flips back her mane of blue-black hair. She stands and slides the stack of manila folders to the center of her desk.

"Make sure all the returns are signed, that all supporting documents are there, that the pages are in the correct sequence. Stuff like that."

She opens the first folder with the tip of a long magenta-painted fingernail and eyes the top page, looking it up and down casually, as if she’s perusing a fashion magazine. She flips to the next page. Right.

I frown and close the folder, just missing her hand, and I pick up the stack.

"Never mind, Isabella, maybe I should do this myself" I whisk the folders into my inner office and drop them with a thump on my desk. I can still feel the oppression on my chest from the morning’s efforts. I need air. "I'm going to pick up a muffin," I tell Isabella as I go out again. "Want anything?" She shakes her head.

Outside, three women are herding a group of children down the sidewalk. I step back to let them pass but a little girl, a toddler, brushes against me. I jump and gasp, feeling like I have been touched by the sun. She is so hot. I can feel her blood pulsing underneath her skin. She runs off, a teeming ball of energy, light glowing from her hair, a newborn supernova. I look at the spot on my arm where she has been and I feel her heat dissipate into the air. I didn't know I had grown so cold.