When Sky tapped on the door, I was already in my dress, my face patted with white flour gum. She smiled. She said, “You look like a haint.”
“Was anyone about?” Sarah asked.
“Nobody but Hector. He say to tell you Goodis gon bring the carriage now.”
I did up the back of Sky’s dress and helped her paint her face, and nobody spoke a word. Sarah’s brow was furrowed tight. She walked to and fro cross the room, a drawstring purse swinging on her arm.
We tugged on our gloves. We fixed on our hats. We drew the veils down to our waists. The tiny bottles of oleander juice, we tucked inside our sleeves—Sarah didn’t need to know about that.
From behind the veil, the room looked faint like the haze before daybreak.
I heard the horse clop along the side of the house, coming from the work yard, and my stomach tipped. I’d tried not to set my heart too high, tried not to think about the free black women up north wanting to take us in, the attic in their house with the chimney running through it, but I couldn’t hold back anymore. We could help them with their school and with making their hats. I could sew quilts to sell. Sky could make a garden.
Sarah handed me her mauma’s gold-tip cane. Then she looked us over and said, “I wouldn’t know you on the street.”
We went swift down the staircase. If little missus happened by, then she happened by. Keep going was all. Don’t stop for nobody. Reaching the bottom rung, I saw the empty place where the steamer trunk sat earlier, and then Hector by the door, boring two holes in us with his eyes.
Sarah spoke to him. “Mother asked me to provide her visitors with a ride to their home. You may go. Goodis will assist us from here.”
Hector eased off down the passageway. That way he looked at us—did he know? Little missus was nowhere to be seen.
We stepped through the front door and the world rushed up. I looked back at Sky and saw a trace of whiteness float behind her veil.
When Goodis drew the carriage up to the Steamboat Company sign, the heat had gathered thick under our veils. Sweat rivered down our necks. Sky lifted the gullies of her skirt for some air and the smell of lavender and body stench drifted out.
Helping me from the carriage, Goodis whispered, “Lord, Handful, what you doing?”
We hadn’t fooled him, and for what I knew, Hector might’ve figured it out, too. I peered back to see if he was charging down East Bay in the Sulky with little missus.
I said, “Goodis, I’m sorry, but we’re leaving. Don’t give us away.”
He pressed his lips together and I felt the places on me they’d touched. He was the best man I knew. Without meaning for it, my heart had got tangled with his.
He squeezed my hand, his face dim through the dark curtain. He said, “You take care yourself, girl.”
We waited for the tickets, waited to board the ship, waited for somebody to say, Who’re you?
When we walked cross the gangplank, the breeze lifted and the boat rocked. I thought about missus and her devotions. We’d been through the Bible and back with that woman. Now we were Jesus walking on water.
We climbed past the trunks, barrels, bales, and crates, past the boiler to the second deck, and sat down on a bench in the salon to wait for the Guard to pass through. The room was painted white with tables alongside the windows, all of them nailed to the floor. People stood in twos and threes, in their best clothes, in clouds of pipe smoke, and now and then they glanced our way, curious about the black grief we wore. Sarah sat a short space apart from us and kept her head tucked low inside her bonnet.