“You’ve walked the path, haven’t you?”

Ayanna let herself feel for five, ten, fifteen, twenty. Took in a deep breath, released it slow. Again.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and walked away.

11

For six weeks, Ayanna had gone to the door every day. She’d taken off her shoes, let her toes push into the warm dirt and sharp pebbles, and asked it to give Olivia back. She’d begged and pleaded with it. Sometimes knocked and slammed herself against it when no one was around to stop her. The knob changed sometimes: once a mouth with long, straight teeth, sometimes patterns with spirals and flowers and dots, and a swirl of clouds around the knob’s full moon.

Where were her parents? Drinking, fighting, talking in her father’s garden. Drinking, fighting, talking on her mother’s front porch. Drinking, fighting, talking at night in the road, on the phone in their separate houses, walking together in the park. Only the grandmothers rolled their eyes at this behavior. Other adults spoke to Ayanna about grief; it was normal for them to behave this way. They had lost a child. Bourbon, beers, red wine, bottom-shelf gin, top-shelf tequila. Tears, arguments, walking into a room and feeling like she had almost caught them embracing. Sometimes her dad said today would be the last one like this and then Ayanna would come home crusty and tired from sun and pleading, and he would be asleep in the backyard next to the packed tomato plants.

“I’m still here,” Ayanna said to her mom, to her dad, to the adults at church who tried to get her to understand her parents’ perspective, to the door, but was met with silence.

Her mom did not respond to texts from her. When Ayanna brought her food and water, she ignored it. Only when she was drunk was she willing to look at Ayanna. Once, she spoke to her like she was Olivia.

“I love you,” her mother had said. She’d hugged Ayanna close, let her smell sweat and alcohol and lavender soap. Ayanna had accepted it. She was too tired to be angry.

The next morning, her mother was gone.