21. Rico
Rico
When we’re fifteen minutes from the hotel, I call Snow before I can even think better of it. After Shad and I made it back to the dock, niggas had to play Captain Save-a-Ho to too many big ass niggas.
Reem has a noticeable limp. Why he thought it was a good idea to follow his new girlfriend, I don’t know. Everyone’s a little worse for wear, and Shad’s been dry heaving since we got into the line to cross the border at four in the morning.
I need to hear my Snow’s voice.
The phone rings incessantly–five times until it clicks over.
“Hi, tío Ricky!” Mars chirps, making me grin. I gave Snow a trap phone, but for whatever reason, Mars always has it.
“What you doing?”
“Well, I was playing tag with Wynter Snow, but she’s talking to Dove now.”
Huh? “Give her the phone,” I reply, conscious of these burly niggas half-sleep as Nut drives a caravan we stole. “Dove?”
“No, Ricky, I told you, Wyn’s talking to her friend Love. Wyn, telephone!”
My hand squeezes the phone. How the fuck did YT of all people find them?
“Where you at?”
“I’m in front of Mars’s room, on the beach–”
I glance at Nut, before turning toward my window. “I need to get some berries inside the carafe, but not now.”
When I look behind me, Nut’s narrowing his eyes.
“Are you talking in some sort of code?”
I click in her face before she pisses me off more.
“Just tell me this, because on some real shit, I worry about you,” Nut says as we turn onto the road where my resort is.
“You ain’t breaking no laws right? Got no bitch holed up in the basement asking her to put lotion on her skin?
You ain’t hiding the muthafucka ‘cause it’s a nigga?
You know we don’t give a fuck about that shit. ”
I smirk at my ace. “Besides all the laws we just broke, nah. I ain’t got no basement. And nah, brodie. You still the number one nigga in my life.” I blow him a kiss, ducking when he throws his hand at my face.
The van hits a vicious pothole as Nut swerves to try to hit me again. “Can you chill?” Shad whines from the backseat.
“You bet’ not throw up in this van,” Nut scowls, before cutting his eyes at me. “And you ain’t fuckin’ funny, Dub. I was being serious.”
“Me, too,” I cheese. “Don’t trip, Nut. When the time is right, I’ll let you in on everything.”
“Mysterious ass nigga,” he mumbles, before going back to threatening Shad.
After temperature checking YT, I take big strides back toward my villa. Clearing the lobby and keying in the code to the courtyard, I nearly run into Nan before I catch myself.
My grandmother has always been a smaller woman, but ever since she came back from visiting family, she looks even smaller.
She thinks I don’t know about her health scare, or that she’s been sneaking off to San Pedro to have video calls with doctors.
But I can’t bring myself to ask, so we just stare at each other, like we’re doing now.
That’s when she’s not avoiding me. So I’m curious as to why she seems to have been waiting for me in the hallway.
Her white locs are plaited away from her face, letting me see every wrinkle ripple as she forms a scowl.
“You are too hard on her,” she scolds in English. It’s not as choppy as before, since she’s been speaking English more and more to Mars and Snow.
Nan twirls and begins to shuffle toward our villa. I follow behind her like she expects, and let her continue.
“Everything is not your way or the highway. Snow is not your child, nor is she one of your girls. You need to learn to make decisions with her, not for her.”
“I didn’t do that.”
Nan just sucks her teeth, before spitting into the hydrangeas. “If you were open minded, you would have known that your idea was stupid.”
I open the side door, letting her walk in first. When we get to the new kitchen island, she leans into it before turning to me, softening her face.
“She told me all about what happened before. I know you want to make things right, Ricky. Part of that is not holding on so tight that you suffocate her. Snow is not your mother, Ricky. She’s not a mirror… more like a vase.”
“A vase?” I smirk, though my fingernails cut into the meat of my palms.
“Yes. This one, to be specific.” She points to her favorite vase, the pale blue one that followed her from the Birch, to Belmopan, then settled here.
When I shot at my father, it broke. Nan found every piece in the rubble and repaired it using a technique she found online. Thin lines of gold cover the vase now where the pieces were glued back together. If I’d never seen the original, I would think it was supposed to look like that.
“You held her together when she broke, but now, she’s fixed. Trust in your abilities that she can hold whatever you give her with a steady hand.” With a pat on my hand, she ambles to the back deck, trying like hell to mask the slight limp she’s acquired.
I lean over her favorite vase, now filled with an assortment of flowers from her garden.
And water.
No leaks visible.
With that information, I make my way toward Snow’s room, where I hear soft music filtering from underneath her closed door.
“Come in,” she calls out after my fingers rap against the wood.
Snow’s laying down, her head hanging off the foot of her bed. A crude beat that sounds like Mars made it plays quietly, and when I inch closer, I can hear her mumble rapping getting lost in it.
“What the hell is that?” I chuckle.
She pops up, grilling me before slapping her laptop closed. “Sorry I only have a beat up Macbook and not a whole studio.”
I move her laptop and notebooks up the bed and take a seat. “Rap it right now. I know the beat playing in a loop in your head.”
Snow rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t snatch away when I grab her hand and rub on her fingers.
“You don’t know me, Richard.”
“I know every millimeter of you, Snow. Let me hear it.”
She narrows her eyes, before grabbing the Macbook and opening it. I glance over the screen, noting how many files she has saved. Most of the dates are from before I went to Colombia, but there’s still quite a few that are recent.
She clicks on one from March. The day after my birthday. It’s crude, like the other beat, but when she starts to harmonize, my eyes snap to her.
She’s looking away, but her lips mouth the words she’s singing. It’s lowkey haunting.
I forgot my Snow could carry a tune.
The clip is less than a minute. She scrolls the folder once more before closing her laptop and rearranging herself on the bed until we’re facing each other.
“I’m going to say something, and I need you to listen, and not speak until I’m done.”
My head jerks as I brace myself. Clearly, she and Nan have planned this–
“I love you.”
My eyes stretch as my brain registers what the fuck my ears just heard. I haven’t heard those words come from that mouth in… far too long. My heart seizes, making tingles shiver through my body as the rest of it catches up.
“I do. I’m in love with you. I have always loved you. I will love you until the day I die, Rico. And because you’ve known me for so long… you know what comes with me loving someone.”
I rub my tongue ring across my bottom lip, holding her gaze. While I cherish the benefits of having Snow’s heart, everyone else who holds a part doesn’t understand the treasure that it is.
“It would be so easy to stay here forever with you,” she continues, voice weakening.
“Take care of Mars and Nan during the day, and fuck you at night. Go on whole adventures every day in paradise. Even pop out some twins, get married by the water… I can see that life so clearly, it’s scary, Rico. But… it’s not the life I want.”
Snow grabs my hand and massages her thumbs into the top of it, grounding me. I fight against shutting down to not feel the pain of her words.
“Stay here,” she whispers, tilting my head back up. “Please, keep listening to me. I need you to listen to me.”
She bites the upper corner of her lip as her first tear breaches her left eyelid.
“Okay,” I croak, before clearing my throat and licking my lips. “I’m listening, Snow.”
She wipes her eyes, but more tears come.
“My parents washed their hands of raising me and Auty when Summer died, and I became her everything, even when she treated me like nothing. Every move I’ve made has been for her; you know that.
Every single one… except music. Music was for me.
And then I gave that up… for you. I chose you, even when you didn’t choose me.
And even after all that, I locked my dream up and threw away the key.
And by the time I was able to get back to my dream, I was so fucked up, baby.
You have no idea how fucked up I really was.
How much I thought I wanted to die, but was too chickenshit, so I would take any and everything hoping I wouldn’t wake up the next day.
“Turns out I’m Ford tough,” she chuckles, her thumbs rubbing my knuckles now. “A car accident couldn’t kill me. Neither could a stint in rehab and relapsing. And now, the same person I felt broke me, has put me back together again.”
Snow raises my hand to her lips, kissing each one of my knuckles. I focus on how soft her lips are, my dick growing in my pants.
“Staying here with you would be a cop out, Rico. I’ve been clean for ten months. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve went ten months without a drink or a hit of something? Not since before I met you.”
“Snow, that was–”
“I was thirteen. Yeah. And the best part is, I don’t have an urge.
The only urge I have is to create. I wanna lock myself in the studio for days on end and write and put down verses and stack my vocals and bug Shad about which button does what.
I wanna put out songs and music videos and have shows where people are screaming my lyrics back to me.
I wanna cash my first six-figure check and go crazy and not think about how much I gotta give Pops to give to Auty, or Turkey, or my parents.
I wanna put out an album, bae. A whole cohesive album.
I’ve been working on it for years, half-assing it.
But I feel like I’m finally ready. You made that possible, and I love you even more for it.
So much I could see myself choosing you again.
But there’s a part of me that knows that choosing you would be the easy choice, and I’d always wonder if it was easy because I love you, or easy because I was afraid of failing. ”
Snow wipes her face again and licks her lips.
“It’s easy to blame my life imploding on tequila and coke.
Or even us beefing. But we’re not beefing anymore.
And I’m not drunk or high anymore. This is my shot, Rico.
I have a real shot, and I need to know if all that shit was hindering me, or if I’m fucked up regardless.
I need to know I can do it on my own, if I can be someone standing on my own two… like you did.”
My eyebrows pull as I snatch my hand away from her. Knots form in my belly, but Snow presses on.
“Look at all you did… without Fredo,” she presses.
“You’ve built something so amazing here.
You’ve come so far from Luney from the Birch, and can’t no one say they gave you anything.
You did this. You kept going, when the Luney I knew didn’t move without Tune.
Tell me you understand, Rico. Tell me you see where I’m coming from. ”
The lie tastes like acid on my tongue. Her eyes round, begging me to say what she wants me to say. She wants me to be okay with letting her go chase her dreams.
She and Nan definitely planned this.
I stand to my feet. Bring my hand down over my face. When I focus back on Snow, her head is down, more tears falling into her lap.
It would be easy to lie to her. To really make her believe the bullshit notion that I would be okay with her living out her dreams and living life without me. I’ve lied to her about more important things and she believed me, or lied to herself enough to accept it.
But I can’t do that. Not about this. Nan’s wrong. She’s not her favorite vase. And I didn’t fix her to show her off for others.
You’re wrong, Rick.
My head snaps to the other side of the room, where Fredo leans casually against the wall.
I shout at him in my head, all the things I want to say to him.
How he’s wrong. How he’s fucked up for leaving me here.
How, despite Snow finally telling me how proud she is of me, the words mean nothing because my twin, my brother, isn’t here with me, raising his son instead of me.
But he just smiles, like he always does. Combs his fingers through his hair, his neck tattoo peeking through the curtain of curls.
Snow choosing herself doesn’t mean she’s abandoning you. Let her become who she’s destined to be. Be there at the finish line.
They’re both asking for too much. I turn away from him, about to walk out, but a broken sob stops me.
So instead, I cup Snow’s chin and lean down at the same time. She turns her head, and I let her, placing my lips on her cheek instead, and resting my forehead on her temple.
After a long moment, I straighten my back and walk out, closing the door gently behind me.
To her credit, she waits until I’m on the other side of the door to break down.