The Sunday after Auntie Alice died, there were so many rumors moving back and forth in Calvary Hope Christian Church. So many people eager to know the details, some feigning concern for Ruby and Lebanon, others asking if they needed someone to help them clean the house or cook a meal. Sister Washington thought her nephew might know someone who saw something. Sister McKay believed she saw someone running from the house “real suspicious-like.” But no one, no one could give the police any facts or actual leads. They brought pies and cakes and looked at the dried blood stain on the living room floor.
I was the one who held Ruby until she cried herself to sleep in my arms, felt her body shake so hard I thought she might fall apart, flesh and bone, in my hands. I told her it was going to be okay, though neither one of us believed it then and still don’t. I made her eat. I call her every two hours, because I know her potential for destruction in a way no one else at this church, save a few, understand.
In this way, Ruby and I are bound together. We are bound by her blood and her survival. Sometimes, I don’t know how I can bear the weight of it, of what I think is one of the truest relationships I’ll ever know.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. A text from Ruby. Beverly Café. 1:30 p.m.
I feel a pang in my chest.
I try to call her. No answer.
I try again. No answer.
I try again and again and again.
No. Answer.
CHAPTER 2
CALVARY HOPE CHRISTIAN CHURCH
In this world, all things have a presence, a subtle realization about life and the humanity around them. Though I don’t possess a traditional body with arms and legs and a brain, I have, over my years in being, come to witness a collective series of events and lives blending in a sometimes gentle, but often garish, rhythmic pattern and hum. It produces what some overly educated philosopher might call a consciousness.
Within my walls and rooms and arched wood roof, I hold the laughter and sorrow, hope and regret, love and hate of a people who escape into services and music and speaking in tongues and dancing and prayer. My form was created fierce and strong by rough, scarred hands long since passed from this earth. The men who built the foundation, placed each of my limestone blocks ever upward, laid the floors and crafted the windows, praising God through their trades and perhaps thought they bartered their way into the pearly gates with their bodily offerings. Maybe they did.
Two nine-foot bloodred wooden doors with creaky, black hinges are set on each end. Open square eyes with no pupils, I stare into the pockmarked street. The winter was not kind to my paint. There are cracks on the steps leading to my entrance. Once small hairline fractures, they are now open crevices, gap-toothed remains of grimy gray concrete puckering up toward a gray sky.
My rear corridor forms an L shape, a rusting blue metal door heralding the third entrance. Though bumped and nicked, it is still somehow sturdy and not falling off the hinges. God’s grace shines in the smallest of things. Constructed during the 1960s, my addition is a lighter shade of brown, but still melds itself perfectly against my older stone in mottled tans, coffees, gingers and hazels.
Some of the church elders still call it “The New Building.” Sunday school, Bible studies and smaller church meetings take place here. During the week, all seven rooms hem and haw with church trustees brainstorming ways to reconcile decreasing offerings with a need to minister to a community of which they are increasingly afraid. Here, children learn their books of the Bible, their young mouths unable to yet form the complicated syllables of the longer books like Leviticus or Deuteronomy. The usher board debates among each other the best tactics with which to welcome new members to the church. So many conflicting agendas, so much to accomplish, but some things remain the same no matter the measured progress.
People enter and pray, think, wrestle with thoughts not shared with others. They are the little balls of radiance, pulsing, illuminating energies sustaining me. Those times of quiet and light are the most precious, filled with grace and uncomplicated honesty. Silently and fervently, I protect the words that tumble off lips or the tears that fall down cheeks. Desired or not, I’m heir to their memories and I pluck out moments, those that are forgotten or want to be forgotten, those that are happy and hopeful, sad and incomplete. Looking inside and out, my time and position fixed on this avenue, I see things are better and worse, people are smarter and more foolish. I don’t have more hope and I don’t have less.
I don’t remember birth. I remember being. My history etched in numbers at my base, my memories are the whispers and gossip and conversations of congregants old and young and dead. But in the very atoms that make stone, stone and wood, wood, you can find me. You will never hear me speak. I have a feeling a few people, Elder Hughes in particular, would ask me only for the numbers to the next lottery jackpot anyway. But I’m not a genie. I’m a collection of decaying bricks and crumbling mortar. I’m not all-powerful and all knowing. I am not God. I just am and people just are.
That is the bulk of it.
LEBANON ELIAS KING
“I didn’t want you to come here. They did.” Sara gestures to the hospital staff milling about outside of her room.
She birthed me, but she doesn’t love me. I don’t think she can love. She can’t hurt me anymore with her words. She can’t beat me with her hands. She can’t touch me. She’s only my mother. That’s all. I repeat this and breathe deep.
“Say what you gotta say,” I fire back.
“I’m sorry ’bout what happened with Alice, son. We know the world is a dangerous place, don’t we?” She tries peeling the orange sitting on the table attached to her bed. Her dark brown fingers shake. “I mean people ain’t even safe in they own houses anymore. But the Bible says, ‘It rains on the just and the unjust.’” She shakes her balding head; a few stray gray hairs cover her white pillow.
“You’re quoting the Bible now?”
“Just sayin’ bad things happen to good people more than it ought to, I guess.”
My mouth waters, like it does right before I take my first drink of the evening, happy to let my problems melt away with a little liquor, but I don’t have a drink in my hand. I want one. My body wants it, but I’m not at home. And Alice isn’t at home.
“Are you sorry, I mean really sorry something bad happened to Alice?” I ask.
“Course I am! You wasn’t the only one who felt some sort of responsibility to that girl! When Naomi told me Alice was coming to Chicago for college, I promised to look after her. Couldn’t even do that right.”
Sara takes her mask and breathes in the oxygen once, twice, three times. Her collarbone rattles around, sharply jutting out from her skin. Her eyes hard set and drilling into mine. Naomi was one of Sara’s few friends she’d do anything for. I still don’t know how she got Sara’s love. What do you have to do for that? What do you have to sacrifice?
“Well, I don’t know what you promised Naomi you’d do for Alice. None of my concern anyway. I wasn’t even there.”
“Yeah, ’cause your ass was in prison for killin’ that boy... What was his name?” she asks, clumsily clawing at the fruit.
I snatch it from her hands, making short work of skinning it and placing the wedges in front of her. “Syrus. Syrus Myllstone,” I reply.
It was January. Before I met Alice. Before I had a business and a family. Before I became a good Christian man, I was sent to prison for killing a boy no older than me. The few times I’ve seen Sara in these last years, she always brings up my time downstate. Trying to hurt me, she dangles my past sins in front of my face as if she doesn’t have to answer for an abundance of her own.
“Considering the job you did raising me, it’s a wonder I didn’t kill someone sooner.” My stomach tightens. I swear I can smell the stale musty air of our old apartment, remember my stiff fingers cutting around the moldy bread to the edible parts.
“I did the best I could,” Sara retorts.
“Your best? Damn, Sara, I’d hate to see your worst.”
“Did you better than my daddy did me.”
“Least you knew your daddy.”
“Shut up, boy. Just...you don’t know so shut up talking about the past. Don’t do us no good, and I ain’t got enough of a future left to relive it.”
Next to her bed is a vase of dying roses and the picture of her and two girls. I can’t see the other faces all that clearly. It’s black-and-white, kinda blurry in a dirty silver frame. I saw it only one other time on her dresser next to some raggedy doll named Louisa. I snuck in her room trying to find a toy Sara took in one of her fits. She hit me when I touched the picture. She didn’t have any pictures of me.
“Why your fists clenched?” Sara asks.
I shrug. Often, I don’t notice one way or the other what my hands tend to do.
“Alice brought my picture to cheer me up. Make the place feel a little like home is what she said. She was a good wife. Not that good of a cook from what I remember, but a good wife to you at least.”
Sara chuckles empty and cruel. “Anyway, seeing as how they figure my old ass is gonna die from this cancer, they want some kin they can talk to and make arrangements. All I got is you, my son.” She coughs, a hard, phlegmy sound from her lungs. She grabs for her oxygen and takes big, deep gulps of air.
“I can see about talking to someone, but I got somewhere to be, Sara.”
She puts the mask down and sits up. “You disrespectful as hell, boy. I’m your momma.”
“If you acted like one, I might call you one.”
“If you was worth a damn, I might’ve claimed you more. Only thing you ever was good at was whining. If they gave out awards for that, you’d have at least been good at something, might have these hospital bills paid.”
“I provide for my family well enough.”
“No the hell you don’t. You don’t provide for me!”
“I don’t owe you a damn thing! Plus, I do better than you ever did.”
A wheeze and a smile cut across her face. “Tried to tell Alice about you before y’all got married but she had stars in her eyes and a baby in her belly. Still thought she could find a way to make her dreams come true. Dreams just childish. Thinking she could make people good. You can’t make people nothing. They are what they are.”
Her eyes are unfocused while she talks to me or more precisely at me; I could be air and she’d still ramble on. It’s probably the drugs they’re giving her. They make you loopy, like you’re talking to the past and present. I don’t know if she’s berating me or a ghost.
“Lotta good you did for her in the end. She prayed. She went to church and pretended things was fine and you stood by and acted like you was a good person, a holy person and people in church pretended right along with y’all.”
“So, you asked me to come here to fill out paperwork and talk shit about me and Alice?”
“Umm. I—I’m just saying you ain’t important. I ain’t either. You’re money in the collection plate. If you honest with yo’self, the real reason you even go is to make people think you a good person. It’s the only reason anyone goes. You go and dress up nice and pretty to cover up all the ugly things you do. Like God even hear us anyway. Remember, he the bully holding the magnifying glass—”
“And we’re the ants. Yep. You know everything.”
“Hmph. You just mad about what happened to Alice.”
“What do you know about any of it?”
“Just what I saw on the news. Caught Jackson on the TV talkin’ to a reporter. He looked nice, downright regal. They say they ain’t ruled out any suspects yet.” Her eyes hold mine searching for something deeper, an answer she won’t get from me. Not today. Not ever. “You don’t gotta say nothin’ to me about it. What goes on in your house, stays in your house. What goes on in my house, stays in mine. Am I right?”
“Yeah.” It’s the only thing I can say to her. Remembering that night. Ruby holding Alice in her arms as a small pool of blood became a red sea. The sirens and the questions. The bulging eyes and flapping mouths up and down the street.
“How’s Ruby? Not like she even know about me. Don’t know why I’m even asking after her.”
“You think I’d bring Ruby around you the way you act?”
“I’m still her family,” she fumes.
“She ain’t seen you since she was five.”
“Alice and you invited me to her birthday party. Well, Alice did—I know your ass didn’t want me there.”
“You drank too much like you do and damn near ruined the party, slurring your words, falling down everywhere.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do. I remember. I’m happy Ruby never saw you after that.”
My throat burns. I walk up to her bed. She stuffs the last wedge of orange into her mouth, a bit of juice leaks from the left side of her mouth and she smiles. Like we’re having some pleasant conversation. Talking about good ole times.
Sara’s hooked up to all manner of machines, tall and short, skinny and wide. Blood and medicine and oxygen pumping through collapsing vein and deteriorating bone. But no doctor can remove whatever it is that made Sara so angry, so mean. No cure for that. It just is. Malignant.
“Well, Alice still came and saw me. Careful she was, careful about what she said and didn’t say, careful how she moved.”
God, just let her shut the hell up. Please!
“You always was a little shit. A little shit who thought the world owed him—”
I grab her sunken face with my right hand. I tighten my grip ever so slightly and watch her eyes grow wide. “The world didn’t give me anything I didn’t damn near kill myself trying to get. And even when you’re here, even when you’re dying, you can’t even pretend to act like you give a damn about me. So stop talking about shit you don’t know about.”
I let her face go. She massages her jaws staring at me more like an enemy than a son, but we are more foes than family.
She hisses, “I talk about what I goddamn well please! You don’t scare me. I seen monsters like you before. Ain’t nothin’ you can do to me. Nothin’ you can do to Alice anymore either. You tore her away bit by bit. You’re good at that.”
“Like mother, like son.”
“Bastard,” she mumbles.
Sunlight doesn’t shine on this side of the hospital yet, but I make out my reflection in the window to the right of Sara’s bed. Gray pinstripe suit, white dress shirt and a coral tie adding a pop of color. This shirt isn’t as crisply pressed and starched as I like it. Alice always ironed them better than I could. She knew I could be difficult when I didn’t get my way. But we gotta fight for everything we want. Sometimes kill for it. Everything. A nice suit. A friend. A good job after a five-year bid for manslaughter. A life.
Fight and kill. Those are your weapons. That’s how you live.
“Hello, Mr. King?” A doctor comes in the door, chocolate-tinged skin with a white coat. “The nurses told me you were here. I wanted to stop by and introduce myself, Dr. Liza Savoie.” I barely hear the click of high heels on the floor as she extends her hand to shake mine.
Walking over to Sara she gushes, “I also wanted to check on my favorite patient before the end of my shift.”
I’ve never known Sara to be referred to as a “favorite” anything. Ever. Maybe favorite pain in the ass. Favorite drunk. Favorite hell-raiser and child beater.
Dr. Savoie scans her chart; thick lips form a smooth grim line, and then a tight smile.
“Let’s talk about the latest results and our options,” she begins. “First, I’m sorry to say, but the cancer has metastasized to your liver and both kidneys. Now, we can continue with chemotherapy. However, with the current pace...”
“How much time I got?”
“I can look at some other options, Ms. King, if you’ll allow me...”
“How much time?”
“Two months. Probably less.”
Sara takes Dr. Savoie’s hand and, with more care, fake or otherwise, in her eyes than she could ever muster for me, says, “I made my peace with my God. I’ll take whatever comes.”
I’ve never seen Sara in a church. I’ve never seen her touch a Bible. Never heard her mention God’s name except to take it in vain. But it’s something to say to a doctor who thinks this old woman is someone worthy of saving, and if she can’t be saved, someone whose memory is worthy of keeping. And I see how good Sara is getting people to believe she’s vulnerable and sweet and loveable. Human.
We’re both good at pretending.
Sara never gave me much, but she taught me the shit that can help you survive in a world where dark skin and no money are liabilities. How to make people think you are what you’re not. Getting others to give what they wouldn’t willingly if they knew, really knew, who you were.
“I truly wish I had better news, but I’ll be back tomorrow so we can go over some more options including hospice care, if you want to go that route.”
Sunlight streams through the window now and I make out the thin watery film of tears as Dr. Savoie shakes my hand again and hurries out of the room.
“You give niggas a damn degree, they ass get all siddity. Using them ten-cent words to say you gonna die.”
And like that, she’s back. The real Sara. The one that doctor will never see.
“She seems to really like you so why you gotta be like that? You understand what she said. Why you care what words she uses?”
“Shit, my time is short. Don’t use five minutes to tell me what you can in one.”
Sara’s mouth puckers and she draws the thin bedsheet closer to her chest. “Women like that think they got something ’cause they wear a white coat and got a title. Just wasn’t place for that nonsense when I was younger. No place for dreams. I coulda done that. I was smart. Momma always told me I was smart.”
Saving Ruby King Page 3