DANIELLE JAMES
He’d never met him, never learned what his voice sounded like, didn’t know what he looked like. Sometimes, when Mom wasn’t home, Frankie crept inside her room. It smelled like her, the familiar faded scent of powder and coconut. He closed the door, but not all the way, until just before the lock clicked. Ran his hand along the wall, touching flakes of paint that had hardened to a crisp sometimes falling after years of exposure to the island sun. He moved slowly, keeping one hand on the wall, as if to steady himself, until he reached her dresser. Once there, he inhaled, looked at the door, and ruffled through her stuff. He lifted up her bras (but never touched her panties), flipped through pages of the bible (making sure he left it in the same position he found it), and looked deep inside her wooden drawers. He hoped he’d find a photo he could hold up next to his face in the mirror. A photo in which the person pictured would look like a grown, more handsome version of himself, perhaps with a full mustache, or thick sideburns.
The only photos in Mom’s room were the ones tucked in the rim of her vanity mirror. A photo of her when she was young, chin tilted to the side, hair ironed straight, thin wrists crossed in front of her chest. And a photo of Frankie and Max, taken when they were still fat and babylike. Frankie didn’t like that photo. In it, the two of them were dressed completely in white, with frilly socks, the same kind of socks that all the girls his age wore to school. Sometimes Mom picked up that photo and brought it to the wooden kitchen table where they ate their meals together. She would gaze at that photo for a long time, caressing Frankie and Max’s hair and saying her boys looked like angels. But no matter how hard Frankie stared at the photo, he couldn’t see any angels, just two dark, rotund pickneys, dressed in strange clothes.
Frankie would obsessively check the mail, when it arrived. If the name on the back of an envelope was one he didn’t recognize, he’d wonder if the letter was written by his father. He would try to guess what type of person the sender was by analyzing the handwriting. Loopy letters meant someone who liked to laugh but wasn’t so strong, blocky letters meant stern, maybe someone who wore glasses, slanted letters meant someone who worked in an office, someone who wore a clean suit every day, maybe even on weekends. Frankie would then practice saying the sender’s name: Nadley Richardson. Naad-ley Rich-ad-sen. Frankie Richardson. Nadley and Frankie. When he thought the name fit him and might be his father’s, he would watch his mother closely when she came home and opened the letter. He would try to read over her shoulder until she called him nosy and pushed him away. When Mom finished reading the letter and tucked it away, Frankie would circle her purse and pluck it out when she wasn’t looking. This is how he learned about his great grand uncle being sick, Mom’s cousin needing money, and other things that sounded important, but never revealed who his father was.
It was rumored that Frankie’s middle name, Charles, was his father’s first name. But he didn’t know that for sure, and he didn’t know if the cousin he’d heard it from was telling the truth. He’d asked him how he knew, and his cousin, who was older, would spit out the skin of the mango he’d just bitten into, saying that was grown folk’s business. Then, he would shove Frankie to the ground.
One day, on one of the forced visits to Frankie’s grandmother Nana, she cursed at him for tipping over a glass with his elbow. Frankie ducked to clean up the pieces (and to avoid Nana’s swift, hard hand) while she called him all the things he was not allowed to say. Frankie stayed under the table, holding the shards of glass in his palms. Wh’appen? Yuh scared now? Nana said. She sucked her teeth and walked into the next room, muttering loudly that she should’ve never given birth to a daughter who’d have a baby by a man up the street.
Up the street? Frankie said. My father lives up our street?
Yuh nuh have a father, Nana said. She smiled.
You know where him live? Frankie asked.
Nana turned her head to the side and closed her eyes. Cyaan stop running your mouth, she said, let me rest. She pouted her lips and licked them, her mouth falling flat.
Every day, after the walk home from school, Frankie rode his bike around the neighborhood, scanning the faces of the men who passed, wondering which one of them was the one who’d given him life, then decided to disappear. Slow and steady, he rode past small houses separated by sunburned dirt and trees heavy with breadfruit. He circled up and down his street, then the next, then the next, then the next.
