Most people passed away in much the same way that they were born – in anonymity. To Patience, a name was a hollow thing. She’d met countless Emilys, Brads and Jacobs. None of them were particularly special, and even once she’d met an Emily who became a Tyler. Names meant nothing. They could change a thousand times over the course of a lifetime, stripped away almost as quickly as the ink on a birth certificate dried.

She’d heard the story of hers once. Overheard from her bedroom when she was just barely old enough to take the memory and hold it, she couldn’t remember the exact occasion. Sometimes if she tried hard, she could remember her parents laughing.

Patience had wanted to be a part of it. Wanting and doing were two different things. There were too many eyes on her, too many faces that she didn’t recognize that asked her too many questions. Still, she hadn’t wanted to leave and so she spent the first part of the evening clinging to Daddy’s legs, her face pressed into the rough denim of his jeans until Mama grew aggravated.

“She don’t need to be up under you like that,” Mama said. “And besides, she don’t need to be in grown folks business like this neither.”

She was so sure of herself that she hadn’t even bothered to detach herself. She hadn’t spoken a single word all evening; how could that warrant being sent away? Instead, she’d squeaked as Daddy had scooped her into his arms as if she didn’t weigh a thing, bobbing her over his head.

“Come on, baby girl. It’s bedtime, don’t give me no fuss now.”

Frustration tightened her throat into a knot and in spite of Daddy’s wishes, her face grew hot. Why wasn’t she allowed to stay just because Mama didn’t want her to? She wasn’t causing any trouble.

Regardless, it wasn’t five minutes before she found herself alone in her room. With nothing else to do, she sat with her back pressed against the door and listened to the story that was told only to fill the holes that silence left between when the laughter died down and the next grown folks topic.

As told by James, whilst Shanice’s belly continued to swell day by day, her parents had argued and argued about everything from which diaper brands to use to avoid diaper rash to where and how soon she would be baptized. The subject of her name was one that didn’t occur to either of them until the weight of her was awkwardly settled into his bulky arms late into the afternoon. Coated in a thin layer of sweat and various other liquids that came with nearly twenty-four consecutive hours of labor, he counted her toes, her fingers, and then her toes again. He pressed his nose into the mass of dark, slick curls that were matted to her forehead. He hadn’t even known that a baby could be born with a full head of hair. He thought it was such a strange thing, how pale and perfect she was. If he hadn’t seen himself in her forehead and the wideness of her nose, he would have questioned if she were his.

“Maybe now that you out, yo’ Mama can have some patience,” His right hand still ached from how tightly Shanice had gripped it in those final hours. He told his guests that he was almost surprised that his wife hadn’t broken anything. His ears still rang from the curses she’d spewed at him. Creative was never a word he would have used to describe his wife, but she’d outdone herself. Ones he’d heard before and ones that made even the attending nurses and doctors balk, all ending with the demand that he hurry up and take the baby out of her faster.

There was no one in the world that could’ve told him that his baby didn’t understand what he was saying when she, and this he swore by, smiled his own smile right back into his face. “Yeah, you right. That woman ain’t gon’ never have no patience.” This elicited a chorus of laughter, and he reveled in it before continuing. The word at the time held no meaning to her, and her cheeks flared with the thought of her name being something to laugh at.

The word bounced between his ears. It was something that they never seemed to have enough of, a resource in constant scarcity. He tested the way it felt in his mouth, said he practiced yelling it under his breath for when it was time to get ready for school right there in the hospital. Within the hour, he presented the name to his own mother and a barely conscious Shanice in much the same way that a child presents a macaroni drawing slathered with glue. Just like that, the bundle in his arms had a name and as far as he was concerned, with a constant reminder, patience would be in abundance from then on.

The name was never a thing that she was attached to. It was something that she just accepted was hers. When it happened that she was given a new one – Jane Doe – on the day that her body was found, she considered it to be the easiest transgression to bear.

For the most part, all that would be recalled of that day by those that mattered most to her would be the discarded matches, shells, and partially exploded launch tubes from fireworks that were scattered haphazardly about the street and sidewalks, swallowed by the continually following snow. They would remain there until they were crushed into the concrete or stolen away by the wind. As tradition, a few front doors still sported festive wreaths that, respectively, had already seen one too many Christmases. The porches and roofs of every other house were sheathed in spluttering leftover lights that would hang until late February, when the grip of the holidays had finally slackened. The morning was mostly still, the vast majority of the block’s inhabitants under the lull of an alcohol induced sleep.

Her mouth set into a thin line against the relentless cold, Miss Keyshia was the first to greet a sun that provided no warmth.

Patience had liked her. Her late husband had loved Werther’s Original candies, and though he was long gone, she kept the candy stocked in a glass dish on her kitchen table. Some years before her fingers locked up tight with arthritis, the woman had been employed by her mother to straighten her hair. Whenever she was there, Miss Keyshia made a point to press a few into Patience’s palm before she left.

“For being such a big girl,” Behind her thick, grease smudged glasses she would wink. Only then would she open the door to let her mother in.

All that morning, Miss Keyshia fingered a stray wrapper in her pocket. The gold paper crinkled at the edge of her consciousness while she went through the empty house, cutting off all the lights. Tucking her purse under one arm and her bible under the other, she went down a checklist; keys, pocketbook, stove, bible. Stove? Stove.

“Lord, give me the strength.” Each breath plumed out in front of her as she hurriedly stepped out of the broiling warmth of her home, tugging the zipper of her heavy brown jacket as far as it would go without biting into the loose skin of her neck.

Grasping the splintered wood rail with two gloved hands, she began descending the stairs of her porch with extra care so as not to jostle the sensitive bones in her knees. The fresh snow crackled, sinking nearly two feet deep before she could feel the solidity of the wood beneath her. A few moments later, the sound of her car door slamming momentarily shattered the silence of the street. Someone had already scraped the ice from her windshield. She paused just long enough to give the engine a chance to heat up before she was gone, leaving behind two thick trails of sludge in the otherwise pristine blanket of white that covered the street.

Across the street, James was startled out of a troubled sleep, banging his knees on the low kitchen table. “Patience?” The name fell from his lips and flat onto the table without his daughter there to pick it up.

In spite of the constant explosions and dropping temperature, he had left the kitchen window open hours earlier. Just in case. 

Just in case of what exactly, he didn’t really know. It had been over a week since he’d last seen Patience, but he’d dug his nails deep into the hope that maybe he’d hear her crunching along up the stairs to the front door underneath the booming of fireworks. He’d hear her keys jingle inside the lock. He’d wait for her as she snuck through the door, and he’d be happy to humor whatever excuses she had at the ready for not having called. Fireworks sat in four brown paper bags near the front door, overflowing. It didn’t matter when she came back; that same night, he’d go to the store, pick up a couple of grill lighters and they’d pop them off in the alley up the street.

Patience watched him stand from somewhere far away. His bones creaked as he stretched his arms high above his head, his joints aching from the cold and his back sore. He shut the window, his gaze lingering on the thawed block of space left by Miss Keyshia’s Toyota. It was Tuesday morning and she was on her way to church and he should have been going with her. His shoes were too far away.

She’d be back soon after the morning service. After that she’d find herself on his porch, inviting herself in to drop him off a plate of food. She could provide enough prayers for the both of them over breakfast, though he was sure he would get an earful the moment they were both within the confined space of his own kitchen where he had nowhere to run. They would dance around the subject of his daughter before she would wordlessly ask if Patience had called him yet. He would say it, and Miss Keyshia would gently reassure him that his daughter would do so as soon as she got the chance.

He was barely there as he moved about the room, shutting the window above the sink so hard the snow that had collected on the windowpane fell into the bushes below. He poured himself a bowl of Isaiah’s cereal, dousing it with too much milk. He tasted wet cardboard when he lifted the first spoonful to his mouth. He chewed each flake individually, mulling over the possibilities of where his child could be again. 

She could have broken her phone while out. She could have dropped it in the toilet and it was sitting somewhere in a bowl of rice. Maybe she’d gotten sick after Christmas and was recuperating. But none of those things had ever stopped her from calling before. She’d always used a friend’s phone, so much so that he’d saved it as a secondary number underneath her contact information. It did nothing but ring when he called now.

The frown that had been a constant on his face deepened the longer he allowed himself to think, which was all there was to do in the silence of the morning before he had a wife and boy to ignore. Like clockwork, his mind conjured up the Saint Louis City officer’s voice as if he were right there whispering into his ear, flattening and draining it of the already little emotion that carried through the phone a week ago.

“We can’t file a missing person report until 24 hours after the fact. Just give it some time, sir. She probably just celebrated a little too hard and got a hotel room with a boyfriend.” Her body was already vacant by this point. She stood by her father’s side as his fingers weaved themselves into the slick coils packed tightly against his head, tugging so hard she knew it had to hurt.

“My daughter ain’t just celebrate a little too hard,” He tried to keep the bite out of his voice. “She ain’t like that. There’s got to be something ya’ll can do.” He couldn’t describe the panic that was beginning to swell within his chest, taking up so much space that his lungs felt as if they didn’t have enough room to allow him to breathe properly.

“Sir, often times when a child doesn’t re-“

Patience flinched when he ripped the phone away from his ear, abruptly jabbing his finger at the screen so hard she was worried that it would crack. His heart thudded loudly in his ears, and all he could think of was her empty bed just a few feet away. James knew that they could hear the area code in his voice, and that was enough to discredit any of his concern.

Sour milk stuck his tongue to the roof of his mouth. The flavor wheedled into the crevices between his teeth. The full bowl of cereal went down the sink, the cinnamon covered squares sticking in the drain. Once they were sufficiently crushed through, he heaved a sigh and lumbered off to find a shovel, his arms preemptively aching from the long morning of work ahead.

Nearly 300 miles away, the owner of club Havana finally stepped out of the back door into the back alleyway. The unfiltered morning sunlight reflected off the freshly fallen snow, momentarily turning his vision a painful, stark white. Grimacing, he shielded his eyes with his free hand, the other clenching two large bags of empty alcohol bottles for recycling. They clinked noisily as he lugged them over to the evergreen dumpster, hauling them over the lip before he released a pent-up sigh. A familiar pain radiated from the soles of his feet, the epicenter of a tsunami of discomfort that lapped at his ankles in waves, nearly taking his legs out from underneath him. He would be surprised if he was able to walk without hobbling the next morning.

The bag leaned against his leg. Fishing a carton of smokes out of his jeans, he used his thumb to flip the head of his skull lighter off. He cupped his hand around the lighter, striking a flame before dipping his head just enough to allow the tip of the cigarette to catch a light. He breathed in, his cheeks cradling the smoke before he choked it back. One. Two. Three. Four. It had been years, but it still burned going down.

The smoke warmed his face as he absentmindedly rubbed his thumb over the spark wheel of the lighter, hidden once more within his pocket as he drew up a list of what remained to do before he could go home.

At the last minute, Antonio Ocasio’s only available bartender had called out sick just before he opened the doors for business. He couldn’t even remember the excuse; the kid had done it so many times, he simply hung up after telling him not to worry about coming in the next day or the day after that. That left the entire New Year’s Eve crowd up to himself and the bar manager, who wasn’t supposed to be there to begin with. He couldn’t count how many drinks had been spilled on both the dance floor and his shirt. Hours had passed, but the dark fabric still clung to his skin uncomfortably underneath his jacket, mixing with the sweat that his labor yielded. He was sure that even after he washed it, his button up would forever hold the scent of cinnamon and vomit.

He finished the cigarette, crushed it into the snow and immediately lit up another one with shaking hands. He ignored a chill that ran the length of his spine. The wind cut through each layer of clothing as if they didn’t exist to begin with. Had he not had at least another hour of cleaning ahead of him, he would’ve forsaken the smoke break and gone back inside.

His lower half throbbed. Antonio grimaced.

He couldn’t even use the bathroom in his own club. Half an hour earlier, he’d discovered someone had managed to clog the toilet so thoroughly that Antonio had ended up flooding it from all of his failed attempts to unplug it. His hand was forced and he had to call an emergency plumber, the foul-smelling water soaking into the canvas material of his shoes as he did so. It truly had been a hell of an entrance into the new year. There wasn’t a single part of him that wanted to even think about looking for someone that was open, let alone locating a public restroom at such an early hour with the luck that he’d been having.

Once the last of the cigarette smoke had dissipated, he glanced up and down the alley to make sure that there were no wayward souls just coming to. When he felt sufficiently confident that he was alone, Antonio went to stand in the narrow fissure between the recycling dumpster and the regular one. He crouched slightly so that he couldn’t be seen over the lids and did his best not to breathe in too deeply.

He fiddled with the zipper of his jeans, his movements becoming increasingly frustrated as the thing refused to slide down. He jerked the piece of metal up and down until his fingers grew too numb to even feel it in his grasp.

He yelled a string of curses at the cheap pants from Walmart until his throat began to hurt. That was when he took notice of the oddly shaped mountain of snow piled up against the small, exposed square of wall between the two dumpsters. His brows furrowed and without pause, he directed a fresh surge of expletives at his neighbor.

The employees of Eddie’s Pizza were so lazy, Antonio was almost sure that it was a job requirement. Since it had opened, Antonio had gotten used to finding both full and burst trash bags that his subordinates had deemed too heavy to lift. He shifted from his left foot to his right, pursing his lips as he tried to decide whether or not to simply throw the thing on the back stoop of Eddie’s. 

He didn’t have to argue with himself for long. You could only yell about one thing so many times, he decided. He hadn’t been the one to take out the trash in nearly a week, so there was no telling how long the bag had been there; if the roaches had gotten to it, he vowed to leave it for some other sucker.

His fingers burned faintly as he brushed aside a bit of the snow, hoping to find the nib of the bag. At first, it almost didn’t register that Patience’s skin, though no longer soft, was decidedly a different texture and color altogether than the plastic trash bags Eddie preferred to use. His hand touched the frigid flesh of her shoulder, his own breaking out in goosebumps.

His brain remained silent within his skull. Before sense could be made of what he was seeing, he was already clearing away the snow, already gripping the unresponsive body in a vain attempt to prove to himself that it was just a prank. Maybe Eddie had finally switched from the Hefty bags like Antonio had hoped; they split way too easily. He shook the rest of the powdery snow away, and her head fell forward. His walnut colored eyes met insipid, cloudy ones that, upon further inspection, were frozen open. 

He recoiled as if he had been shot.

She wouldn’t - couldn’t - look at the her that was no longer her. Instead, she leaned against the dumpster. taking in this unfortunate man’s features as he would come to do for her. 

His face was all lines, his almond eyes deep-set underneath thick, archless eyebrows. His beard was only in the beginning stages, but even so she could tell that it would grow in a few shades darker than the russet brown that was his hair. Beneath the scruff, the apples of his cheeks were sharp, turning a rosy pink to match the tip of his nose. She watched his jaw work, his teeth grinding so hard within his mouth that she was sure he would chip at least one. She wondered if he had a nice smile.

He shivered. This time he let it take hold of him, his bones rattling within the sinewy cage that was their prison.

For some time, she would return to that moment. She’d go back and forth with herself on if the action occurred because of the weather, or because the cold that had finally encapsulated her being had grown strong enough to infect the living.

What followed next was a flurry of red and blue flashing lights, yellow police tape that left Havana as more of a morbid, abstract tapestry than a business, and questions that Antonio just couldn’t answer. When asked if he had seen the young woman in question the night before, he would tell the police that he had served hundreds of drinks to faces that he barely glanced at, just trying to get through the night. Their eyes would turn accusatory when they asked him what he was still doing around if the club had closed three hours earlier. It would take a forensic report to clear his name, to prove that she had died long before the club had even opened its doors the previous night.

He would try to return to work as if nothing had happened. That was all he’d ever done, all he knew how to do, had been since he’d learned to sweep without hitting himself in the face with the stick when he was shorter than it. He’d try and fail to go through the back exit, and so he would send someone in his place to take out the trash while he smoked around the front. 

Next Chapter: 3