Blackout: Act 3

We make our way to a freshly vacated bench near the park entrance.

I can wring out my dress, it’s so soaked with sweat.

“It ain’t that fancy electrolyte water but it’s the best I could do, and it was three dollars since we by the park with all these tourist, so you better like it.”

A tremor has been building in my chest, threatening to erupt since the lights went out, and I’ve been too shook to say anything.

We learned about the 1970s blackout in our New York History elective.

Lasted only around twenty-four hours, but enough time to do some major damage in the city, setting off a massive crime spree.

He glances at his phone for the billionth time, brow furrowed.

But tonight, every billboard, every light and marquee, is off and you could almost feel the whole world spinning slow.

Feet dangling, I glance up at him, then down at his arms, feeling something like vertigo.

Kareem scoffs. “You’ve gotta be a tourist, talking like that.”

I try to ignore the gnawing at my stomach, the resentment. I should have been there for him while all this was going on. Not Imani.

When I was a little girl, Gran would take me here and we’d greet each one, and she’d whisper that the pair of lions—Patience and Fortitude—protected all the library books from harm.

I’d stare up at my smug grandmother, always asking her why anyone would want to hurt books, and she’d wink, then remind me that the stories we tell can be dangerous.

Your memory is so bad. Not episodic like mine. Will you remember everything the way I do? Will you replay it like I do?

There is a flurry of notifications, some from Twig and some from different girls sending heart and smiley face emojis.

After Mami died last year, they couldn’t keep up with the bodegas and needed to be closer to his aunties and grandma so they could help with little Paloma.

I clutch the old scrapbook to my chest again, the edges slick from my clammy hands.

I’ve wondered what this type of real love feels like. Another person’s hand entwined with yours. Another person’s mouth pressed to yours. Another person who wants to be all tangled up with you.

But it all feels so different. Like there will be a before and an after I’ve said the thing. Like there’s no going back after the words come out. Like this will be the fissure in the permanent memory of us—a what we were and what we will be.

He grimaces and whispers hard to me. “I told you this was gonna happen.”

He jams his hands to his hips as if exasperated by us.

I rattle off an incomprehensible description.

When we were twelve, Tristán bet me that he could conjure his grandmother through a Ouija board we found at one of those botánica Santería shops.

We’d lit all the candles from his mother’s prayer altar and sprinkled ourselves with Florida water and sage.

His presence, even when we were small, warded off everything on our way from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side.

I sprawl out on the floor.

“It was the best letter she ever got,” he says.
“You wish.”
“I’m eloquent.”

We’d wandered every gallery, looked at every painting or sketch or sculpture, and collected tiny postcards of as many art pieces as we could. He asked so many questions that a docent asked if he planned to be a Renaissance man—a person who wanted to know all the things and have all the talents.

That there are those who move like water over rocks, cresting, sliding, veering left and right.

Then there are those who move like mud, full of sediment and rocks and sometimes bugs, and the mud needs added water to unstick itself before moving.

Their meet-cute in a bookstore, their whirlwind travels across the world, and the surrogate they hired to happily have my brother and me.

“It was funny. Good color palette. I’ve never forgotten the words to this.”

Movie tickets, menus, photo booth strips, checklists of what we’d planned to do before I left, transcripts of his podcast.

His phone pings, announcing the Ryde’s imminent arrival.

I wanted to look back on this night and remember how brave I’d been, how clear and confident I’d spoken, how I’d been more like him and less like me in articulating my thoughts and feelings.