1
My cousin had Onions to thank for the name “Chevy”. I was six years old when Onions first regaled me with the Legend of Chevy, and by the time I was eight and ready to leave Macaria myself, that humble street of my home in Trinidad, I had heard the story so many times that I could repeat each minute detail as if I had been there – the standstill of the clear, blue sky, the precisely five watchful birds on the electrical lines, the smell of exhaust fumes. There must have been something about seeing our small, vacant faces – my older sister and I, and whichever miscellaneous cousin was meandering around – that made Onions want to sit us down, neatly cross-legged next to each other like Russian nesting dolls, and ask, “You girls know how your cousin get he name? Is a real funny story. Come. I go tell you.”
Every time he told the story, Onions described his younger self as a lanky, dark-skinned Indian as if these features had changed over time. He was eleven years old when the Legend of Chevy was born (“eh, that was a million years ago …” he would say) with hair so thin the boys played bets he’d be bald by twenty-five, and feet so consistently dirty that we questioned the purpose of his sandals. Onions had gotten his own name on account of his epiphora, a condition that made his eyes water endlessly since he was a little boy. Unprovoked tears often leaked down his face, and the other boys, some girls, too, taunted him.
“Eh, Onions! You crying again?” They could barely stifle their giggles, but young Onions could not stifle his tears when they replied on his behalf, “Then stop chopping onions, Onions …!”
And then they were gone, their falsetto cackles and hurried footsteps fading into the echoes of fugitives through unmarked alleys. At some point, real tears mixed with fake ones, but when the others eventually earned nicknames through their own flaws (like Stinkmouth, Jumbie, and Long Foot), sticking to them so hard throughout the entirety of their lives that even to their own ears their given names sounded like that of a stranger, Onions was glad not to be called by his first name like Sunil, whom they excluded from everything.
Onions told us that on the day the Legend of Chevy came to fruition, he had declared to everyone in the front yard of a snacket that my cousin, officially known as Patrick from birth, had won a race running against a brand-new Chevy Nova II.
A true storyteller, patient and passionate, Onions would lean forward in his seat and segue into the weather and other orbiting elements he thought cataclysmic to his plot, seeing his life in third person as if already dead.
“It was a day in June 1982 – a Friday. The high-noon sun beam a gold spotlight onto the yard,” he would say, as if the Legend of Chevy couldn’t have been conceived on any other day but one with sun. The divine role of weather was lost on our young minds, and it was only when I grew older and began documenting the story of my family that I wondered how triumphant the Legend of Chevy would have been had the skies been grey.
We listened eagerly every time though, trusting each word as a pearl of truth, for stories were our only family heirlooms. We reimagined the very Macaria we sat in through Onions’ sepia filter of time: the one- and two-storey houses erected decades earlier by our great-great-grandfathers painted the hues one found on summer nail polish palettes – Coral Crush, Water Orchid, Blue La La. Roughly cut sheets of galvanized metal laying on rooftops that pelted the heat back to the sun, and when it was rained on sounded like gunfire. Dozing guard dogs beneath the sills of open windows and billowing cream curtains. Fuchsia and cotton bougainvillea petals spiraling down to front yards like the wings of butterflies. And stray dogs sniffing the streets’ open drains for scraps, their skin sliding along their ribcages, heads bowed low. All this Onions said to us, his open palm moving across the room in panoramic scope as if from the center of it he wished to project the sights of his story onto the walls, even though we were sitting right there on the island, and none of those things had really changed.
The only time the story stopped was when the smile dropped from his face and he suddenly turned somber. “Listen, eh, you have to remember that Chevy wasn’t some ordinary boy. I ain’t only saying that because he’s my friend, but because of what happen to him. By the time he was twelve years old, he live three lives already: first, being born into this world, second, as a suddenly only child, and finally, as an orphan.”
Later on, when I would be in my twenties in a country much further north, and when I sensed it was my turn to tell a story, I told the greatest one I knew. I channeled my inner Onions and suppressed the accent that for years pleaded to be flung free from beneath my tongue. Often, Ines would be there. “Listen, you guys, listen,” I would say. “It was a day in June 1982 – a Friday. The high-noon sun beamed a gold spotlight in the front yard of a snacket – that’s what we call little convenience stores back home …” For the most part, eyes would smile and bodies would relax, and if they didn’t, I gave the abridged version. Ines would be smiling having heard the story countless times since the fifth grade. She never listened less with each retelling.
*
The story of my family is one of potholes and cracks that I have tried to fill over the years for no reason other than my own need to neatly pen a narrative – a beginning, middle, and an end, a sequential flow of things happening to my relatives over the course of time – so I cannot deny how I came to be. Why I am the way that I am.
When I am sitting in a chair with an unturned book in my hand, gazing out of my London flat; when I am in the late-night grocery store and a group of people bustle in and out in comfortable jester; when a good man asks why I cannot talk to them, why can’t I just open up, and when I plead with a bad one to let me in; or, when finally in the company of someone I should be enjoying but my only wish is to be alone, I look to my past that first provided me these early, solitary linings: my home within that house, and my home within my mother.
I thumb through old family photographs and try to decipher the sideways glances in them, the three people out of ten not smiling. Fine-tune my hearing to the after-dark whispers, long after the lights have been turned off. Read into the swollen silence after someone enters a room, and another soon exits. Forget about what happened the night before – it never happened. This is how my family talks.
My attempts to fill in the gaps are forced and eager, overreaching into the past and present, blurring fact and fiction. Like Onions, now I am the storyteller. I, too, narrate life in third person as if already dead. I am outside of my body all the time; I travel atop the shoulders of everyone who has lived in the Florence Street house. I see the bones of their feet and the arcs of their backs wear brittle as I walk alongside them, years and years and years before I was born, in an effort to decode us: what my Auntie Rani is really doing, and thinking, cooped up in her room. Why my sister, Cecelia, can only be in the presence of our family for thirty minutes at a time before quietly slipping away. Why my Auntie Sangeetha uses the corridors as confessionals at night, pulling us into breathless, near-silent words, as if she were running out of time. Why a grainy picture of the little cousin I never knew, the glint in his eye immortalized at eight years old, sits atop our mantel, but his name, like his mother’s, is said only in whispers. Why Briony, my older sister who lives at home at thirty-six, adorns herself with expensive things, sometimes with the price tags still attached, but never bothers to dye her greys or conceal her blemishes. Why my mother, Leela, is a levitating orb of influence, the tenacity of her single motherhood trespassing into other realms of life where there is no need for it, and if she knows the power she exerts over us all.
Why we couldn’t help Chevy.
Of these things I know, yet cannot confirm, I try to put to shape the mass of my family’s stories, a bibliography of reference and reason, genetics and geography, so that I may run my fingers across its structure – our Great Disperse – and know this palpable thing that has settled and taken its form in me, long before I was born.
2
I take my time rolling my luggage up the pathway. Under a cloudy sky where the sun comes and goes in weak beacons, I see my breath in gaseous bursts in the remnants of a relentless Toronto winter. I see the frosted relics of weeds and forlorn tulips in the hard March soil I walk along, and when I look up, I am further devastated to see not much has really changed of our house on Florence Street since I left for England five years ago. The brass metal of the numbers 4 and 8 are bolted into the beige-bricked wall, lusterless and permanent. The mailbox, once a presidential red and gold, is coarse and stained with rust. The royal blue paint of the porch has almost completed its slow descent into disintegration; flake by flake, the front steps are entirely stripped of their colour, and its ashen planks laying warped and unaligned like decaying teeth. A single table that looks entirely made of cork, put out for recycling by someone down the street and picked up by Auntie Sangeetha years ago, still remains planted on the far end of the porch, junk mail shoved under one of its legs, a full ashtray its centerpiece. A brutalist porch swing, all edges and dull iron that has drawn blood from me and my sisters over the years, sits motionless and frozen.
I make my way up the steps and look down the line of front porches to seek out a familiar face when I realize that I’m squinting through that brown reed screen and there – a synapse sparks. It’s the same screen the neighbors put up years ago to obscure the view of our house from their peripheral line of – I want to say – not vision, but living. The man of the house had put it up right after their daughter was born. He was a burly, kind-looking man whose cheeks were rosy and eyes always soft. One day – it must have been at night when everyone was asleep – this soft-spoken man had put up the screen, and in the morning when we saw it, none of us said anything, not even to each other.
We knew. We knew that when their daughter got older, old enough to know that something wasn’t quite right with the family next door, the screen would quell her questions. “Why do they swear so much? Why are they so loud, then so quiet? What kind of name is ‘Chevy’? Why doesn’t he say anything back when you talk to him?”
Why are they the way that they are?
We understood, then. So that even when Chevy met the little girl’s father at the edge of the lawn to roll out the garbage bins in the early hours of the morning, when dewdrops were still teeter-tottering on blades of grass and the sky slashed a synthetic pink against a pale lavender dawn, each would give a cordial nod to the other, understanding that life was hard, and neither meant offence nor judgement, they just had to do what they had to do, before walking the path back to their own house where the screen divided them once more. We were the last house on the block, and like a limb rendered useless, we were surgically removed from the rest of a healthy, functioning body when that reed screen dropped. Amputated, in one clean cut, and cast into the wicked shadows of otherness.
I remember this feeling. I remember home.
*
Yesterday, my younger sister called.
“Cas,” she said. “Cas, oh … uh …”
It went on like this for some time.
“Cece,” I said. “Cece, what’s wrong? Why are you whispering?”
“Cas, you have to come home. You have to come home now.”
From my London bedroom, inches beneath ground level where my window ran parallel to the sidewalk outside, I stepped into the slant of a shadow as if seeking privacy from the sun. Coils of fine dust like decorative tinsel collected in the corners of my room, and stones dangling from threads of gold necklaces chimed against my ceramic teacups as I bumped into the bookshelf from where they hung. A few pages of my manuscript fluttered about, and a book slammed to the ground.
“What happened?” I said. I felt the air drop from my throat to my stomach. In my head, I scanned a list of everyone in the house. Sangeetha, Rani, our mother. Ma? Ma!
“Chevy,” she said. A long pause on the other end, then, “Chevy, he’s gone. Come home, Cassandra. He’s …” Then a gasp, as if realizing what she had just said.
“How, Cece? What happened? Cece, how?”
“In his sleep …” She began to sound distant, as if she were falling away. “In his sleep …”
She told me to pack my grip sole boots, there was still slush on the ground, and I began to cry.
I knocked on Ines’ bedroom door, and seeing my face in my hands, she rushed me in. Black water swarmed my eyes. Blindly I followed her to the bed. I was thankful when she didn’t ask me what was wrong; old friends know these things. She helped me pack, and then I ran and I flew, and on the plane I did what people in movies do; red-eyed and stunned, I stared blankly down the aisles, indifferent to hurried stewards, crying babies, crinkling bags. I closed my eyes and saw Chevy’s empty room. I saw my huddled family watch the medics take him from the second floor to the ground floor, struggling down the steep, curling staircase, the very one that Chevy had climbed the night before. I saw him wheeled through the front door into the blast of daylight, away from his second home.
I saw that I was not there.
“Don’t worry about writing,” Ines had said before I left. She had both her hands on my shoulders. “Don’t worry about the book. Your editor can wait, I’m sure. Drop her an email on the plane and put an out-of-office on for everyone else.”
I nodded my head.
She snapped her fingers in my face, loud like cracking wood. “Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Message me when you land.”
A light turbulence jolted me out of the memory. I took my notebook from my bag and felt the safety of the pen in my hand. It wasn’t long before I drifted back to the past, and when I brought pen to paper what should have come out was some sentiment of melancholy, a deep, nonsensical dive into how I felt, or the dead weight of my hand dribbling a long mark down the page, which it was wont to do. But in my grief, in seeing Chevy’s face turn away from mine when I closed my eyes, the only word that my pen could sputter out in long cursive tail was:
Why?
*
And now I find myself standing outside the second house I grew up in, decades after the Legend of Chevy, Chevy who is now dead. I am thirty-one years old.
I have a key, but I think about knocking. It feels strange under the circumstances to let myself into a house I have not stepped foot in for years. I put my ear to the door and hear nothing. I poke my finger through the mail slot and like an intruder peer through it, my eyeballs rolling from left to right like those of a thief in the night. I take in a waft of cigarette smoke and old dust and close my eyes. When I open them, there is another familiar scene: a dark hallway void of life. It occurs to me that one does not knock on their own door. I slide the key in, and instead of finding my family sitting on the living room couch, clustered together for warmth at a time like this, or roaming around the kitchen awaiting my arrival, there is no one. I hear no one and nothing except a low electric hum. The lights are out, and the blanched daylight barely filters through the tawn...
