The Body When Buoyant

Because her court-appointed therapist had suggested it, Nichelle began solving crossword puzzles. She liked the ones in the alternative weeklies the best. The average time she would spend on a puzzle was twenty minutes, but her best time had been twelve minutes, seventeen seconds, forty-six words. After she finished that puzzle, her mind began its usual drift. Thinking that she needed more puzzles to distract her, she bought a book of crosswords that she began carrying with her to work and on the bus. She solved puzzles in between her errands for Frank Yee and as she rode the Metro to his house, but she also opened her book each night when she returned to her brother’s home. The letters she penciled into each square were uneven because her hands shook. Today, she had passed an hour on a crossword, a good deal of that time on one tricky homophone. Frank had watched over her shoulder as she parsed through the clues. When she finally figured out the word that had stumped her, she wrote it down in her unsteady hand.

“What’s c-a-r-e-t?” Frank asked.

She pointed to a picture of the noun in her dictionary.

Who had ever heard of caret, c-a-r-e-t, not to be confused with carat: the weight of a gemstone, or carrot: a root vegetable? Nichelle felt let down when she read the definition. Her mystery word was a symbol which meant “insert here.”

“Disappointment is normal,” her therapist liked to say.

What was not normal was standing outside a stranger’s house and pressing your face against her window. This is what Nichelle had done. This is why she went each week to talk to a therapist. Before committing this act, she’d walked past the gingerbread Victorian many times. She’d taken in every detail on those walks—the rock gnomes planted in the herb garden, the olive tree in the front yard, the bougainvillea’s horizontal march across the back fence. But on that day, Nichelle had not been content to just look. Instead, she pressed her face to one of the windows and saw that the new owner, a young white woman, stood near the brick fireplace.

The interior of the house looked exactly as Nichelle had imagined. The glass was cool on her forehead and she pressed into the coolness. Her breath fogged the window allowing her fingertips to slide easily on the glass. She turned her head and placed her cheek against the condensation. She closed her eyes. She moved her fingers in arcs across the window until her pinky finger hit a chink in the glass and she opened her eyes. A crack shaped like a spider had pricked her skin. She applied pressure to the crack and then a little bit more. She remembered the ripping sound and the look on the woman’s face when the window broke.

“You leaving for the day?” Frank asked.

She stuffed her puzzle book and dictionary into her black duffle. “You know it. But I’ll be back on Wednesday.”

She had the easiest homecare client in the world. Better than her friend, Cathy. Cathy had been assigned to a sick man who had bitten her as she bathed him in a tub. Nichelle didn’t have to help Frank get dressed or anything. There was nothing really wrong with Frank. He was just old and his eyes were growing dim.

“I’ll need to get a haircut on Wednesday,” he said.

She stopped at his door, her duffle bag swinging from her shoulder. “Alright then,” she said. “I’ll see you when I return.”

Before her life had become what it was, Nichelle was living with her mother. The two of them shared a walk-up in Orleans Parish. It was right after Nichelle’s divorce. She and her mother were grudging roommates, her mother reminding her each day that her ex-husband “ain’t never been shit.” That Nichelle had been the one taking care of him.

“I’m taking care of you now—what’s the...