The thing about landsickness is that it only leaves you when you’re underground so deep that your feet aren’t trying to be parallel and running anymore. It’s a particularly tough affliction for me because I was born with my feet twisting outward. The kid doctors at Bellevue always joked that I’d make a good ballerina, but mom took one look at my duck ankles and shot the statement down. Not with those flat things, she said. 

I got on the subway and told my brother I felt landsick. He said okay, sit down, sit down as if he weren’t swinging back and forth on the six train too. The seat next to mine stayed empty while Jake stood in front of me. We had just gotten to that age difference where he looked like my too young but well-meaning father. Stop kicking your feet, Jake whispered. I knocked my knees together like a humble girl at church and kept pushing my toes into his shins. I probably had that funny nauseous tint about me–a comic book character on the verge of throwing up. Seven more stops, I told him. He nodded without adding anything but a rehearsed glance up at the map.  

“Do I look tomato green?” I asked.

“Nah, more grape.” He often joked he never knew a black girl could even turn that color. I pushed myself onto his calves again and mimicked puking onto his feet.

We got off seven stations later as I knew we would and my brother wrapped his arms around my shoulders to keep me in place. As we walked up the stairs back to the city, the balls of my feet grew thornier. I hopped and skipped to avoid the painful pokes and Jake let me go. An old woman smiled down at me like I was a puppy playing in a concrete park—a pretty golden dog with its tongue out.

Our mother always used to cross the street at just the sight of a dog getting closer. They see in black and white, she explained. You can’t trust someone who doesn’t know the world in color. I wanted to say that our grandmother was born blind and she certainly only sees in black, but I didn’t. Instead, I crossed the street quietly and grew indifferent if not annoyed by dogs; especially the small white ones that always look a little dirty. And if they don’t look dirty, then they look too clean–like the animal belongs in a glass house with the queen of England. Jake started moving faster. I had to take big steps in my Sunday shoes just to keep up.

“I promise we won’t visit for long today. Okay?” Abuela always sends us out at exactly 1:30 pm on Saturday and Sunday to see mom after we’ve had our coffee and lunch. Well, hot chocolate for me. Jake also tries to drag me out there on Tuesdays. If I’m lucky, I can get myself out of the weekday trip. Too much homework, I yelled a few nights ago when Jake knocked on our bedroom door. I don’t care how long we stay at that place. The hospital kept mom on the ground floor, and I felt sick just thinking about it. Mom so close to the dirt and us–there, with her.

“Try to tell her a few nice things this time, Maya.” I stopped and thought about saying fuck you, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I had nothing nice I wanted to tell her. I like the nice things I feel to be mine. Once they’re hers, they always grow ugly with sadness. “Oh come on,” my brother said, “I’m not trying to attack you. It helps her to hear good things from you.” He looked down at me this time, “She thinks you don’t even like her.”

“What if I tell her I got my period? Is that a nice thing?”

“You didn’t get your period,” Jake slapped me on the shoulder. Still, there was something in the way he glanced at my body that screamed, did I miss it?

“Yeah, but a girl in my class got hers.”

“That’s lying,” Jake said. I thought about chiming back about how he lied to mom all the time. About his girlfriend who is his boyfriend and our grandmother getting better when she doesn’t remember how to cook rice and peas anymore. Bile rose up into my throat as I felt the sidewalk shift. Jake slowed down and I latched onto his hand. He was warm and clammy, but he was also mine. I decided his lies were fair and maybe, if you see the world in black and white, they weren’t even lies at all.

*

We got to the hospital and the same security guard that’s always there and pretends not to remember me and my brother greeted us with something between a belch and a grunt. Jake says there are a lot of families with sick people in New York, but I think there just can’t be so many that you’d forget the same two people showing up three times a week during your shift. When we come on a weekday we bring dinner for mom, Jake, and me; so I noted to myself this time never to offer our security guard any of my food. Especially not now that Jake was cooking–he always burns half the rice.

We checked in and headed to mom’s room which wasn’t only her room. There was another woman in there who squealed and cried in circles. Jake taught me how not to stare. He said, just keep your eyes on the little squares that make up the floor and count how many times you can land your foot in the center of a tile. Usually, I was pretty good, but sometimes we’d walk past the lady’s bed to get to my mother, and I just couldn’t help it, so I’d take a look. She sat wide-legged with no undies on. I wondered if that would cause any trouble during her woman time, but I figured she had a handle on it. We walked past her every week, and I never saw any blood.

“Hi mami,” Jake started as we turned towards mom’s side of the room. “We brought you some clothes from the house. A little ssazón, too.” She waved at us, small and tired. The grin on her face was so tight it seemed to rock us back and forth like a seesaw. My chest locked across her lips, and I bit my tongue. I felt the tingles gear up, stabilize, and stop me from asking what I really wanted to know–why do you look so wide-eyed and dopey, ma? My tongue burst a little and started to bleed.

Three years ago, mom was admitted for the first time–she opened her eyes and latched onto Jake by the wrist. My brother’s skin was cracked and dry from the carpentry work did after school. She tried hard to rub the splinters in his palms away. Mom pushed at his fingers, caring and hoping Jake wouldn’t notice that her pills sat beneath her tongue, ready to be spat out as soon as we were gone. But Jake knew. He shoved his hand beneath her chin and tilted her head back until she promised to swallow our hope whole. She cried as Jake stared at her and called him something like a monster. Mom said he made her numb. Numb sounded like such a terrible thing, so I sobbed for her too.

Since then, I never stand, talk, or breathe without tasting that copper tingle in my mouth. The dots of blood comfort me–I’m nothing like her at all.

“You’re not going to say hi to your mom?”

“Hi.”

“What’s new with you?”

“Jake said he’d throw me a first moon party. It’s a party for when you get your period.”

“I did not say that,” Jake rolled his eyes up to the ceiling and left them there.

“You definitely don’t have to throw a party. Anyway, you’ll just start your period when I did and when your grandmother did. We’re late bloomers you know–14.” I squeezed my tongue between my molars to make sure there was still some red left to stain my teeth.

My stomach started to pop as it always did when we were here. The hot chocolate from lunch bloated me up and my knees could barely hold the water weight. I squatted just enough that Jake would notice my plea to hop back on the train and leave the ground. I saw his eyes flicker away from the ceiling that was keeping us locked out of the sky and stuck to the floor as I shortened myself, but his attention soon moved away from me and back to mom.

“So how’s your girlfriend, Jakey,” mom asked while playing with his hands. The seesaw on her face seemed to swing a little, “or did you break up with this one already?” Jake told mom stories of many girlfriends who didn’t exist. There was only one and he was a boy–Manny. He’s fine. Mostly they just hang out without me and come get me from school when I have Art Club until late and can’t take the school bus. One time, Manny argued with Jake about picking me up. He claims I’m old enough to walk by myself or take the city bus. It’s true, plenty of my friends go home alone, but Jake cried and said he didn’t want that, and if Manny wouldn’t let him come and get me, then Manny could fuck right off. When Jake finished telling me the story he added, don’t say fuck off, okay?

I bet Manny just wants my brother to have his own life, but what he doesn’t get is that even then, I’d be there, swaying, green, and nauseous.

Jake smiled at mom like you open your mouth at a happy dog, “No, I’m still with this one. Maybe you’ll meet her when we get you out of here.” She tried to laugh but her throat sounded shattered. I moved away from the TV that hung across from her and stepped towards the bed to touch her elbow and tap it like a piano. Her skin was at least an entire shade lighter than before she was admitted–LEDs are not a good replacement for sunlight. I kept playing her elbow, switching between black and white keys alongside elaborate wrist motions as I clamped chords down on her skin. I felt the hospital room turning into Carnegie Hall–mom’s body a luxurious Baby Grand piano. I tried to remember the first section of Fur Elise and made the mistake of looking away from mom’s elbow and up at her nose. I remembered the dark freckles mom had under her eyes. I used to poke them and run away like she couldn’t possibly have seen me come up and stab her in the cheek with my index finger. I’d never seen any other black woman with freckles, and I told all the kids at school just what their moms’ were missing. They simply were not as beautiful as mine. I searched mom’s face now for any of the brown dots that made me love her and saw nothing. In 4th grade, my friend Javonda said that freckles aren’t anything to be proud of. That’s how you know white folks messed with your family. Your mom’s got white people blotches all over her head. Mom got sicker soon after that, and I still sometimes wonder if it was the freckles that did her in.

I went back to my imaginary keys to distract myself, building a minor scale down mom’s wrist as Jake went on and on about me, the classes he hates, and his new busboy job. She must have gotten sick of hearing news about me in the third person because she moved away from him mid-sentence and grabbed my neck with all the strength she could. Her hand moved up to my hair,

“Wild and free, huh?” Abuela had felt around my head this morning and sighed; wild worries your mother, she said. I didn’t care much then, and I don’t know how to flat iron anyway. Jake always does it for me, and he wasn’t home until lunch. She’ll just have to see me the way I am. But I was feeling guilty now and I thought of what Jake had mentioned on the walk over about telling mom something nice,

“We went to Orchard Beach last week with Jake’s girlfriend, and I felt like a model with my hair all wet and curly.” Mom laughed for real at that story–it was a mostly true one too.

“Yeah, there was lots of posing.” Jake pipped in. His shoulders relaxed as he watched mom and I lean into each other.

After I started, I couldn’t stop. I told her about Art Club and all the friends I made but also this girl I didn’t like, Clara. Her paintings were messy and way too bright. Clara got her period a few weeks ago and started keeping her hair pin-straight just the way abuela suggested I style it today. “Well,” I told mom, “Jake says if I don’t want paper-thin hair I don’t have to; but he’ll help me out if I do.” My brother stiffened when I added the last part, and I knew I had slipped. 

“Well, I think your grandmother could do it; you’d be surprised how she manages despite the dark. That or my friend’s salon.” Mom let me go now and her pupils seemed to get smaller for just a minute, “you know you shouldn’t be doing that, Jake”  she added without turning to him. She kept staring at me instead, and I noticed her eyes trying hard not to be so big and empty as she focused on my face.

I wanted to add he doesn’t really anymore, but I started rocking my feet and grabbing at the mom’s bed. A mossy broken fire burnt up from the dirt beneath the hospital floor and rose through me. Tears ate at my cheeks but only got wet on my chest. I thought for sure no one would notice. No one could see me; only the earth knew me. The land was turning so fast that I assumed it would swallow me whole and spit me out onto Coney Island. Maybe a fat baby could use me as a buoy there until I drowned. The baby’s arms were around my neck when Jake came over to hold me. You don’t really anymore, I said into his body. My snot ran down onto his pants, but I couldn’t hear him. The air had swallowed any voice I might have known. I looked at my mother and tried to find the spots on her skin where I thought there had once been freckles. She looked back at me like an unwanted pet. Familiar, expected…bored.

“We’re emotional women, you know?” mom stated without moving toward me. “It’ll pass.” I stared at her and wondered if she was in the passing phase or the ‘it’ phase.

I don’t remember the rest of the time we spent behind mom’s curtain, but I know my brother picked me up like a baby and I wrapped myself around him. I shot a glance at mom’s neighbor on the way out. Her legs were down, closed, and parallel. She seemed content there, and I was glad to see there was no bleeding. Jake carried us out of the hospital and put me down when we reached outside. The security guard yelled with no conviction from his revolving chair about passes and badges we hadn’t returned, but Jake didn’t seem to care much. He wanted out of there too.

“Jesus,” Jake said as we stepped into the front courtyard. Patients were eating ugly soups and walking slowly toward the door with a mom, a sister, or some other kind of woman. I looked down at my brother’s watch and realized we hadn’t spent two hours at the hospital like we promised our grandmother. “Well, we can’t go home yet.” He crossed his arms and started walking with his head down which you’re not supposed to do and he definitely never does. Regardless, I followed him and mimicked his steps: hand in my pockets, leaning forward, and a slightly too wide stride for a girl. I whistled no song in particular thinking about my first moon party. Some girls have quinces, others bat mitzvahs, but not me. I’m having a period party. I smiled, picturing the name tags in burgundy glitter written on an extra heavy Kotex. I’d make Jake buy helium so we could make our voices all funny together as we filled the room with red balloons. My lips grew even wider as I thought about how real my smile was–how it curved like a cake and never swung like a seesaw.

We walked all the way down to Tompkins Square Park to kill time. Three girls were sitting on a bench together and taking turns doing bad catwalks up and down towards an old tree. They walked without a second glance around, gesturing and laughing in each other’s faces like caricatures of pretty girls. A group of boys near the skate pyramid stared at the girls as they strutted. I tugged on Jake’s arm to point and tell him ew, those guys are so gross; until I realized a little drool had fallen from my lips as I stared at the girls too. Their hips poked out of purple, red, and blue tank tops in a way I had only seen on my mother. Jake moved his arm away and ignored me. I didn’t want to tell him about the drool, anyway.

Jake sat us down against a few handlebars that separated the skate park from the dog shit area. I didn’t bother asking why we couldn’t find a bench. He pushed his knees up to his chest and hugged both arms around his body without looking at me. We stayed that way in silence for what felt like forever until I tapped his left shin once, twice, three times. As I started the fourth, he turned his head. He had a soft patchy face like our mother. I realized I hadn’t looked at him in quite some time. Not hours but days, maybe years. Maybe not since that time I asked what numb meant and I became focused on scraping the lining of my tongue. He was wrapped between himself and himself–sick and green with no water to fill his ducts. I looked closer. His skin wasn’t patchy at all; there were rough tears all over his face that had never gotten wet and hit his chest. Bloated sandpaper tears. I wondered how much Jake weighed and if I could carry him out of here on my own if he got too sad. But as I realized I probably couldn’t lift him and that I should ask the pretty girls to help me, Jake stood, put his hand out, and pulled me to my feet.

“Alright, we better get home. We’re gonna be back tomorrow anyway.” We headed to the nearest street and passed a little white dog playing in the grass. The dog’s owner had a stroller for it to get back into once they left the park. There were small blankets waiting in the baby carriage too. My brother spat on the grass with his eyes on the pup and swayed between his feet before he started walking again. For the entire trip home, he never put his hand out for me to hold; he never asked if I was feeling landsick; he never tried to keep me in place.

I picked out a seat on the subway and Jake squeezed in next to me. A tired-looking lady took the spot to my right. She had a big tan baby strapped to her chest who wouldn’t stop hollering and stretching as if he were drowning and the only way to breathe was to kick his feet and land on my thighs. She rocked the baby on her knee but he just wouldn’t let up, so she gave him a bottle and fed him to sleep. His legs quickly relaxed and his head slumped onto her chest. With her baby’s eyes closed peacefully, the mom put an arm around his body, leaned her head against the window, and let herself fall asleep.