She lost sight of it momentarily, her thoughts caught up in a familiar eddy, a ritual rehearsal of events that could not make the ending come out right.
They had made it to Poughkeepsie by noon. Pea had lost so much blood. She sometimes knew Tamara, and sometimes mistook her for Gloria, or her mother.
“There’s a reason, you know,” she had gasped at one point near the end, “a reason they gave us the hands. They want us to fight, Mommy! I’m not going to stay up here, just taking it!”
“That you never did, sugar,” Tammy had whispered.
She turned away from that memory and fought to find a better one. For the rest of her life, this would be her charge: to remember how they had been, for the sake of that dreaming child upstairs. Tamara looked at the garden, limned in blue and orange like a kiln fire, and recalled the last night she had spent with Phyllis.
They had slept outside, slept under the stars like Tamara had as a child, and held one another’s hands, and talked, and tended their silences. In the morning Phyllis had got down on her knees and pulled her rusted knives out of the earth. Then she tossed them to the side with the weeds.
Tamara knelt beside her in the dirt.
Up the hill from the river, they could still hear it murmuring, laughing, speaking in the rushed conversation of the dead, who can’t be understood.
Now, Tamara looked down at the garden and was unsurprised to see her: Phyllis sprawled among the watermelon vines like an ellipsis, her great belly shining in another day’s sunlight. Tamara could see her so clearly, she could count the freckles on her shoulders. Her scars. Her stretch marks. Her yellow hands dipped brown in clean earth.
“What are you?” Tammy asked.
Pea looked straight at her. “A light.”
Phyllis went into labor that night. She found no gentleness there. She fought like an angel, like a saint, like a Harlem girl with policy slips in her garter and luck in her hands. She’d make something of herself one day. She knew it.
What good was a dream, they always said, if you didn’t play the numbers?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A novel is always a community effort, for all that only one name appears on the spine. Over the last seven years, I have received help, support, and encouragement from countless friends, colleagues, and institutions that pulled me along and held me up during this journey to complete this novel of my heart.
I am endlessly grateful for my friends who read multiple drafts, helped me talk through knotty philosophical problems, and just let me vent when nothing seemed to come together. Thank you April Anderson for loud-ass conversations about historical philosophy and the legacy of trauma in our community; Amanda Hollander for hours-long venting sessions and charmingly pedantic attention to detail; Tamar Bihari for reading the first and last drafts and all the emotional support in between; Sonali Dev for her expert eye regarding Dev’s perspective; Delia Sherman for an early read and an incisive analysis of the tricky third part; Justine Larbalestier for wading through the earliest draft and encouraging me to the end; and my decade-plus all-star writer’s group, Altered Fluid, in particular Sam Miller, Eugene Myers, David Mercurio Rivera, Kris Dikeman, Rick Bowes, N. K. Jemisin, Matthew Kressel, K. Tempest Bradford, Kai Ashante Wilson, Lilah Wild, Devin Poore, Paul Berger, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and Rajan Khanna. I remember the first time I went to a convention with you guys after I joined the group; I felt as though I’d won the lottery.
Although I began this thoroughly New York triptych in New York City, I wrote most of it in Mexico. It was my life-changing experiences here that inspired me to go back to the original story and expand it precisely as I had dreamed of and dismissed before. I’ve spent six years here writing and rewriting this book. I’m indebted to cafés whose names I’ve forgotten in San Cristóbal and Veracruz; Mexico City’s inimitable anarchist bookshop/café and counterculture social hub, Marabunta; Café Negro, with its picture window right along Coyoacán’s main drag, where I would people-watch as I wrestled with my own characters for hours on end.
What came out of those intense years in cafés was a novel that approached my vision but still fell critically short. I kept trying—having my brilliant agent, Jill Grinberg, in my corner gave me the confidence to take the risk. She and her colleagues helped nurture that initial draft into something genuinely good. Even so, it wasn’t until we were able to connect with Miriam Weinberg and Tor that Trouble the Saints truly came into its own. Miriam is that unicorn of an editor who will actually take the time to make a book do what it needs to do—the kind that had martini lunches with their acclaimed-but-temperamental writers in the ’40s, except with more editing and less drinking.
I thank my sister, Lauren, as always, for her company and kindness in untangling the tricky knots of our lives. Thank you for keeping me grounded. I’m indebted to my parents and extended family for their stories. Y muchas gracias, querido Isma, por acompañar una historia que solo podías apreciar por medio de traducción y conversaciones intensas de noches de mezcal.
Why do certain characters stay in your head while others wither? There is certainly some complex psychology at play, but I am fortunate to have all of you in my life; you allowed Phyllis and her friends to flourish and me to tell their story while I’ve been figuring out my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
