Chapter Text
(JANUARY 1st, 2009)
Everything in their small Brooklyn apartment is stuffy and cloying with sage. Miles is 5 when his mother puts him into a deep black suit and unevenly knotted tie, her green eyes are heavy in an emotion he can’t discern and her shoulders seem to carry the weight of the world. She cradles his skinny body as if he’ll disappear and never come back again, “Oh, mi Miles.”
A flower is clipped to his sagging suit, desperately needing alterations, while he hears the shuffling of his tia, abuela, and some other tall cops out the door he scarcely recognizes. His mother holds his hand, pulling him to a long, stretching car. Inside, everyone's faces are pinched in unravelling sorrow greater than the Empire State Building, they huddle around in all black like shades in the underworld and give him pitying stares. Pressing his face to the glass instead, he looks for that sun of a man, warm and engulfing everything dreary and dark in the world, he looks for his father. He wants to become enveloped in one of his hugs and drowned in his rich laughter, he wants to hold him and never let him go, uncaring if he makes some embarrassingly cheesy remark or the other kids tease him.
Yet, Miles is left with his loud absence, screaming at him, buzzing in his ears. So, he searches for his father—-he stares out the rain-smeared car window into the lurid billboards offering overpriced perfume or accident lawyers in cheap suits chasing their next profit, he stares at the insurmountably lanky, gray buildings full of hunched over workers, at the fancy and beat-up restaurants alike, peering into the playground they pass by, looking to the sky or the stormy, crying clouds or high poles where sneakers are tied to, even the crowd pushing out of the metro station, the cab drivers, the sun. It’s a Where’s Waldo or I Spy With My Eye gone wrong, no answer except the uncomfortable silence taking over the car and the way Miles’ heart shakes in fear for all he’s lost.
Then, he follows the faceless crowd into a cemetery, the snow crunches under his polished shoes and rain falls against his face, he isn’t sure if it’s the tears or rain. Miles doesn’t bother to listen to the people at the podium or sympathies from adults who could care less. He just wants to cry, he just wants his father while the cold seeps into him and makes his fingers all brittle. Rain drenches him, a stark reminder. The rain blurs his tears and his suit is ruined.
Miles makes a beeline past the groups of huddling cops, his uncle Aaron with hollow eyes, his silently sobbing mother, and walks to the white coffin in the middle of the earth. He stares at the dead face of his father for what seems like forever, miraculously waiting for him to get up out of that damn coffin and tell everyone it was some cruel joke or wrong nightmare. His father would laugh it off and pull Miles to his side, holding him as if nothing was wrong or cruel in the world. His sun, his shield against every cruelty of the world was gone and never coming back.
He only cries akin to the child he is, wailing and waiting for an embrace that will never come.
~~~
The apartment is empty, only the long stretch of the softly rumbling AC can be heard. It’s the week after Christmas, January 1st. Everything is still the same—nativity setting propped against the peeling wallpaper, photos slightly crooked and dusty on the wall, and cheap, lukewarm lights his mother bought from the mercado are tangled against their poor excuse of a tree shedding pine everywhere. Miles picks at the covering of his Black Panther action figurine, so shiny and new that he doesn’t dare to open. On the TV and too bright screen sure to hurt his eyes, he watches T’Challa standing tall and proud across the screen, any grief and hesitation crumbling away from his eyes as his resolution grew against the Wakandan sun. Alone in the living room of his parents’ cramped apartment, Miles dares to think, to believe he can be like that when he’s old and less gangly limbs with cartoony t-shirts.
He smiles, small and peachy with dimples.
In the kitchen, past the cheap christmas lights and lingering scent of sage, his mother and Uncle Aaron talk in hushes. He can barely make out fragments about “groceries,” “EBT,” and “since Jeff.” Then, he hears the heavy footsteps of his Uncle Aaron on the creaky floorboards. Crouching down to him, his uncle pats his kinky hair and tells him, “Your mom’s gonna go sort some stuff out. So, Miles, how about I take you to see something cool, huh?”
Never one to deny the coolest person in his life, in the world if he’s being completely honest, Miles eagerly nods his head and too squeakily says, “Okay!” T’Challa is dropped to the floor.
Holding his uncle’s warm hand and following him down the unraveling staircases of the apartment complex, they eventually stand atop the building. They stare directly at the mural of his father—spray-painted and captured in eternity with his happiest, cheesiest grin and proud eyes, as if he was gazing at them even now. “REST IN POWER” was painted alongside “CAPTAIN JEFFERSON MORALES: HUSBAND, HERO, FATHER.”
Even a year later, between January unshoveled snow and a mural of his dead father, the world seems to be at a standstill. Miles misses him, misses his smiles brighter than the sun and his warm hugs. Now, he only cries and sniffles, desperately trying to wipe the tears away with his puffy coat sleeve.
Uncle Aaron doesn’t mention the waterworks streaming down Miles’ face, he just grips Miles’ hand tighter—like his mother did earlier—afraid he’d suddenly disappear too. After seconds of silence, he releases a shaky breath, not really talking to him, merely through him or distant from him, not here when he says, “Your father was a good man.”
Continuing, his uncle peers at the mural with a quiet resentment, “He died for a useless nation, or maybe he was the biggest martyr in this whole damn block. They didn’t deserve him.”
“What?”
Aaron smiles down at him, crouching while he speaks, “You’ll understand one day.” His warm hands grab Miles’ and he puts his father’s badge in his palm, “No matter how law-abiding he was, he was still my brother, the Jeff I knew.” The Brooklyn police badge, cool and chilling metal, seemed heavy and volcanic in his hands, he felt wholly unworthy. Still, Aaron stared at him as if he was a burgeoning sunrise, his voice deep,“You though? Maybe you’ll be better than all of us.”
“Shit, look at me getting all sentimental, kid. You’re gonna be the death of me,” he laughed while pulling Miles into a tight hug, afraid to let go.
The badge is too big now, but maybe it’ll fit Miles one day. He holds onto it like a second heart.