Hush Read Free

Cameron’s forehead and tried to smile. You know I don’t mean that. But she packed the literature into her bag.
    This morning, I tried to remember my grandmother’s face. I tried to remember the evening she came by to say she couldn’t come with us, that Denver was the place she’d always known and she couldn’t see herself at seventy-five going to start a new life somewhere.
    “Look at these hands,” she said, holding out her hands to show us the way the veins pushed up against her dark skin. “These hands belong to an old lady. At night, my teeth go in a glass and the arthritis feels like it wants to get the best of me. Denver’s the only place I’ve ever lived. And I never planned on not dying here.”
    Mama’s eyes started tearing, but Grandma put a finger to her lips. “Hush now,” Grandma said. “Don’t start that. You’ll see me again,” she said. “You will.”
    The afternoon before the men came, we kissed my grandmother good-bye as she sat rocking slowly in her blue chair. I’ve never seen my grandmother cry, but that day, her chin quivered just the tiniest bit before she sniffed and said This isn’t how I want you all to remember me.
    I stood a little bit away from all of them—Mama, Daddy and Cameron—remembering how Grandma used to say This rocker will belong to you one day, Toswiah. I watched everyone doing what they could not to cry, thinking That day’s never gonna come. Even then, though, it wasn’t a hundred percent real to me. As I stood there in the middle of my grandma’s living room with the Denver sun coming in through the thin yellow curtains, I thought This is all just a game, a stupid game. Tomorrow Daddy will say, “I changed my mind. This is all too much to leave behind.”
    But what I know now is this: Look at your grandmother’s face. Remember the lines. Touch her cheekbones. Hold the memory of her in your fingers, in your eyes, in your mind. It might be all you get to keep.
    Left behind is that rocker and one Toswiah Green, standing with her arms folded, on a tree-lined street in Colorado. If one of my old classmates shows a group picture around, someone might ask Who’s that? And the classmate will answer That was Toswiah. She just disappeared one day. Weird, huh?
     
     
     
    MAMA SAYS THE LIES WE’RE FORCED TO TELL are God’s will. She believes God sent His Witnesses to our door that morning for a reason. He knew I’d need them, she says.
    Mama’s wrapped her arms around God’s legs, Anna says. I guess she figures He’ll drag her to a better place.
    These days, Mama prays and prays. One day the end is going to come, she says.
    I don’t tell her it came a long time ago.
     
     
     
    PUT YOUR FEET DOWN ON MY OLD FLOORS IN Denver and keep walking. See the pictures of the four of us—Mama, Daddy, me and Cameron, smiling. Those are cool names, you say. Cameron and Toswiah. If you want, you can have them. They don’t belong to us anymore. Take the gray-carpeted stairs two at a time, the way me and my sister used to do. See the spot at the top of the stair that’s flattened? Matt Cat used to sleep there because the sun came through the skylight and shined right on him. Listen. Can you hear him purring? Go to the right and you’re in my room. Pretty. Plain. The room smells of pencil shavings. The stack of journals that I’ve kept since I was old enough to write haven’t yet been destroyed. Open the top one to the last page:
    They don’t know I hear them talking late at night when they think me and Cameron are asleep. Daddy says Mr. Dennis and Mr. Randall killed that boy. He wants to be a witness to it—break the Blue Wall of Silence. That’s what he calls it. I never thought of silence that way—blue. A whole wall of it. Like a swimming pool gone wrong. Like blue gelato ices that me and Lulu scrape with wooden spoons. Eat till our lips and tongues are dark blue-black as aliens’. Or dead people’s.
    The letters and birthday cards, monogrammed towels and