It was hopeless trying to sift through to the real story with Jamal. Lurking in everything he said was a glimmer of it, but Carla knew that she never got the whole truth. For one thing, he was never to blame. So while it was true that the police were motherfuckers, Jamal was also troubled and she knew this, he was her brother. He was troubled and black and so the last two facts would outweigh the first when push came to shove. She tried to make him understand this, but he just wouldn’t listen. She didn’t want him to end up dead or in prison for life, but God, he was wearing her out. How many times had she said to him, “Jamal you realize that you’re black, right? You know what that means? You can’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And he would answer, “C, you think I’m stupid or something? I wasn’t doing nothing, C. For real.”
This time she had waited for the saga. She had kept quiet on the other end of the phone, and when he’d heard her silence he’d said, “Ah, C, Carla, I was, um, implicated in a crime.” He probably thought this sounded official and formal, and he probably thought it said that he was really not involved and that he knew the “runnings,” as he called them, he knew the system and the lingo, and he wasn’t asking for help just because he was her brother but because he had been falsely accused. Implicated! She’d wanted to scream at him. She’d wanted to tear him to pieces, to say to him, You little punk, you idiot. You couldn’t stay in school long enough to pass grade twelve, but you can say you were “implicated” in a crime. But before she screamed at him all the rage that the word “implicated” made her feel, she’d put the phone down quietly.
The lawyer had called, asking her about bail and saying it was best if Jamal pled guilty because then he would probably get a judge who would only give him a light sentence or maybe probation, even though that was unlikely since he was on probation when he was implicated in the crime—that’s where Jamal must have picked up “implicated.” Would she at any rate visit her brother and convince him to plead, since if he asked for a jury trial and pleaded innocent and wasted the court’s time, then the judge would definitely be annoyed and give him a longer sentence.
She hated talking to these patronizing lawyers. Their tone suggesting they knew something way beyond what she or Jamal knew, something generic, something unavoidable. So she found herself saying to him archly, “What if he isn’t guilty? Should he just plead being black?” There was silence on the other end, to which she said, “I’ll get back to you.”
Her brother was a piece of work for sure, but she would defend him against that kind of presumption any day. Her father would have to bail him out this time. She didn’t have a penny or a pot to piss in. The last time, at least, she had been able to say he could live at her place, but that had brought her only grief—unbearably what she liked about him as a child she couldn’t take now. There was never a way to make a bargain with him—you do this and I’ll do that. When he was younger she had seen it as cute—breaking stupid convention, being honest—but now she saw it as an inability to show loyalty or to see himself as connected to people. To her, really. She had loved him most, and she thought that he would see that and love her back—enough to … to what? Behave? Live quietly? What? She herself had no idea … to be safe, at least. But a carjacking, Christ! To get involved in a carjacking, what the hell would be his story this time? She could tell it herself—C, I didn’t even know it wasn’t the guy’s car, he pulled up and said let’s go for a ride. That would be the story. He was an innocent again, pulled unwittingly into a plot.
When she’d first got news of his charge, she’d called her father and got Nadine. “Oh my God. He’s not here, but I’ll tell him. Tell me where Jamal is, Carla, so I can go see him. My God.”
“Mimico,” Carla answered. “There are certain times you can go.” She didn’t want to prolong the conversation with Nadine. “You should call them.”
“My God, my God, that boy.”
She wanted to get off the phone quickly. She couldn’t take Nadine’s hysterics, nor did she want any assumption of friendship with her. There had always been awkwardness between them, even in her childhood, and Carla preferred that it should stay that way. Loyalty to her dead mother, Angie, dictated that. She never knew what to say to Nadine so she said “goodbye” and “see you” and dropped the phone before Nadine could say more.
Three hours later her father hadn’t called back and she’d left another message, this time on the answering machine. When he still didn’t answer that, she was so furious her head blazed into an ache. Who the fuck did he think he was? Did she ever call him for anything? Did she ever need him for anything? That was when her body had begun to feel this incandescence. Her face glowed at her in store windows for the next two days,
