Chapter 2
Diane
Diane Campbell was twenty-three when Marcus was born and twenty-four when she understood, properly, what she had taken on.
She worked at a garment factory on Spanish Town Road, ironing finished pieces and folding them into clear plastic wrapping from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, five days a week, sometimes six. The work was hot and repetitive and the factory floor smelled of machine oil and sizing spray. But the pay was steady, and steady was what mattered. Steady meant Marcus could eat. Steady meant the rent was never more than one week late.
She was not a woman who complained. This was something people noticed about her quietness in the face of difficulty, the way she absorbed hardship without making theater of it. Her coworkers sometimes found this unsettling. People preferred, on the whole, to know when others were suffering. It helped them feel generous. Diane didn't give them that opening.
But at night, after Marcus was asleep on the cot they shared in the back corner of their room, she would sit at the small table by the window and write in a notebook she kept wrapped in a piece of printed cloth. She had been keeping journals since she was fourteen. Not diaries in the girlish sense not pages full of crushes and grievances More like inventory Records ,She wrote down what happened and what she thought about what happened and sometimes, rarely, what she hoped for.
She wrote about Marcus constantly, The way he had smiled at three weeks old people said it was just gas but she knew better. The words he surprised her with, The questions he asked that she didn't have answers to, She wrote He asked me today why the sky is one color in the morning and a different color at night. I told him God paints it fresh every day, He thought about it for a while and then said, that must be a lot of work I laughed for ten minutes.
She also wrote about fear. Not in the big, theatrical sense Quiet fear, The fear of not being enough the fear that the yard, the neighborhood the world pressing in from every direction was shaping her son in ways she could not see and could not control. Arnett Gardens was not a bad place it was a place full of good people doing their best under difficult circumstances, the same as everywhere, But it was also a place where a boy could get turned around she had seen it happen she had watched boys she knew from childhood narrow themselves into futures that felt inevitable, that felt like the only available path.
She did not want that for Marcus.
She prayed for him every night after she closed the notebook, Not the rote prayers she had learned in church as a child, but direct, specific conversations with God in which she outlined exactly what her son needed and exactly why she believed he deserved it, She was not shy with God she treated prayer the way she treated everything practically, honestly, without excess decoration.
Marcus's father, Winston, had been gone since before Marcus could form memories of him he had gone to England first, then Canada, following work the way many men from the yard followed work northward, toward cold and wages, leaving gaps in families that the women remaining had to stretch themselves to fill. Winston sent money occasionally not often Diane accepted it without warmth and without bitterness it was money she needed money, She was not going to make it smaller than it was by attaching feelings to it.
When Marcus was six, he asked about his father for the first time with real directness not the sideways asking of very young children, who approach difficult subjects the way they approach dogs they don't know cautiously, obliquely, ready to retreat this was a straight-on question, delivered over breakfast.
"Where my daddy?"
Diane set down her cup she had been preparing for this she had practiced versions of the answer in her head while ironing at the factory, She had decided on honesty without damage on truth without poison.
"Your daddy is far away," she said. He working he thinks about you.
Marcus ate his porridge he seemed to be considering something.
"Does he know I can climb the mango tree?"
Diane looked at her son. Something turned over slowly in her chest not quite pain, More like tenderness pressed too hard.
"I'll make sure he knows," she said.