No Less Days

by Amanda G. Stevens

  Relief poured from him in a long breath, and she gave a soft laugh.

  “Oh, David.”

  “What?”

  “You’re doing fine.”

  They ate quietly, remarking on the food and the ambience and the unexpected pleasantness of the night, that even as near to the door as they sat, no autumn wind gusted in on them when people entered and left. David asked if she wanted dessert, and they split a chocolate éclair crepe with vanilla-bean pudding in the center. Tiana ate two-thirds of it.

  They left the restaurant, and David fed the parking meter a few more quarters. Then they set out.

  For the first block they said nothing. The crisp air filled David’s lungs, and the soft tap of Tiana’s boots was a comfortable sound. She kept pace beside him, her long legs unhurried. They didn’t touch.

  “You know that lone picnic table at the end of Valerian Boulevard, just this side of the private beach, before the lake?” he said as they reached the third intersection.

  “Past the COUNTY ROAD ENDS AT WATER sign.”

  “Aye, that one. We could talk there.”

  “Works for me.”

  “Or we could keep walking.”

  “We can do that after.”

  He led them one more block, and then they turned down Valerian. Passed a few houses, including one that had been for sale when David moved here. He’d favored the house but couldn’t have tolerated tourists parking in front of his home for minutes or an hour, walking down to the water, walking back, leaving to make room for the next influx. During the summer he sometimes wondered what he was doing in a tourist town at all.

  As they reached the dead end, the rhythm of the waves washed over them. Poplar trees rustled in chorus. He and Tiana were the only people there for now. The weathered wooden picnic table sat perhaps fifty feet to the right, its legs sunk a few inches into the sand. For a moment David floundered as he tried to find some way not to leave his back open to the dark beach that stretched perpendicular to Valerian. But that meant facing away from the street, the way they’d come. He opted for the former, and Tiana sat beside him.

  Now to say what needed saying.

  SIXTEEN

  It’s not a risk. What you said before, about not doing this again, it’s …”

  In the dark Tiana watched him.

  “It’s a certainty, do you see? Unless somehow something changes for me, physically.”

  “I’ll die,” she said.

  He saw it. All of it. Her hair lightening to gray, fine lines around her mouth, her posture stooping, limber legs stiffening and slowing. Her body hollowed out by cancer, or her mind hollowed out by dementia. Or tomorrow or a year from now—a car accident, a mugging, a fall, an undiagnosed heart condition, a brain tumor—so many ways to die. He covered his eyes.

  Her arm slipped around his back. “Am I worth saying goodbye to?”

  “What?” He lowered his hand.

  “I mean, assuming for a minute this goes … well, where we think it might. I know it’s not a fair question, because I don’t know what I’m asking, not really. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Since Zac got stabbed, actually—since I knew it was true. And that’s the only way I can find to sort this. Either I’m worth it or I’m not. And it’s really okay if you say I’m not.”

  They sat for long minutes that eroded the thickest wall he had left.

  “I’ve been married twice,” he said.

  Tiana edged closer to him on the bench. “Go on.”

  “I married Virginia—everyone called her Ginny—in 1966. That love was different than the love for Sarah. Ginny was … She woke me up. I’d gone through the motions of living for a few decades by then. Ginny made me really live. And laugh. We laughed a lot.”

  “How did she die?”

  He bowed his head as the wall crumbled for good. “She didn’t.”

  Tiana’s hand rubbed a slow circle over his chest. He had to shut down now, before he said too much. But Tiana. She had to know. Or he had to walk away.

  Should he?

  “Tell me, David.”

  He pressed her hand against his chest. “We owned a farm. I’d been a farmer before, and I missed it. Ginny was a self-proclaimed hippie, and I didn’t even have to persuade her. She loved the idea of living off the land. It wasn’t much of a working farm really, not large anyway, but we … It was home. Life.”

  For a few minutes he couldn’t speak. Nothing left to tell but the pieces he should hide. Tiana didn’t prod again, stayed close and quiet. The waves swished against the shore, gentle in the still night.

  “A farm needs machinery,” he said.

  Her breathing stilled against him. Aye, she could guess.

  “There was an accident. She found me. It was—” He coughed, a reflex from the surging memory. “No cell phones then. To phone for help, she’d have to leave me on the barn floor, bleeding out. And they’d never get there in time. So Ginny, she … she held me.”

  He kept his footing against the wave of the past. It was all still there—blood pulsing from the wound carved in his chest, Ginny’s screaming and then her sobs, her arms rocking him, waiting for him to stop breathing—but he held his own, and it didn’t blur the present.

  “She didn’t realize what was happening. Not for an hour. Or more. I don’t know how long. But she never left me. The bleeding slowed after a time, and … Well, when I didn’t die, she watched over me, still thinking every minute that I would.”

  “Hold on. She didn’t know?”

  “No.”

  “But you married her.”

  “I did.”

  “You let her think she knew you. You let her pledge herself to—to less than half of you.”

  “I did.”

  He waited for condemnation, but she was quiet, open to the rest of the story.

  “I don’t know why she didn’t put me in the car and take me to the hospital. Shock, fear I’d die in the back seat while she drove—I don’t know. But in a day I woke up. Two days after that …”

  “No scar,” Tiana whispered. “What did she do?”

  “She …” Ach, he’d thought he was past this, but his eyes were burning.

  “She left you, didn’t she?”

  “Packed her things while I slept. Left a note.”

  “That day? After you should have died?”

  “She was terrified. I ought to be glad she didn’t try to burn me for a demon while I was unconscious. She believed in them, but her ideas were rather outside biblical doctrine.”

  “You were the same person as before. And you were her husband.”

  David hunched a little on the bench, head bowing. “I reaped what I’d sown, nothing less than that.”

  Tiana closed the gap between them and wrapped her arm around his back. He leaned into her as she placed her other hand on his chest.

  “You woke up all alone.” Her hand fisted his shirt.

  “I did,” he said, uncurling her fingers. “But it’s years in the past. Many years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m telling you because, if we’re going to attempt this … well, a second wife would be a bit of an unfair omission.”

  Tiana sat back but stayed within the circle of his arms. “Did the two of you have any children?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see her again? Hear from her?”

  “Divorce papers, of course. But not face-to-face.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Six years.”

  “And she didn’t notice”—she trailed her fingers down the side of his face—“this?”

  “She groused about it sometimes, especially when her hair began to look salted. I was supposed to be midforties by then.” He held her gaze, a tightness in his chest. She had to understand. “Tiana, I wanted her to know. From the first. But I never knew how to tell her, and then it rooted so deep, the secret. I couldn’t find the way to dig it up.”

  “You should have. Before you marri
ed her.”

  “You think she’d have believed me? If Zac hadn’t been stabbed, would you believe I’ve seen the turn of two centuries? However sane I appear, without proof the commonsense explanation is that I’m mad.”

  Tiana looked away, shaking her head.

  “I’m not making an excuse for myself. Only trying to show you what was in my head at the time. It was wrong, I know that—I knew it then.”

  “Yeah, it was.” She met his eyes. “Listen to me now, okay?”

  When she didn’t continue, he nodded.

  “What she saw—her fear wasn’t unreasonable. Maybe even her leaving wasn’t unreasonable. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be sad for you—for the day you woke up to that note.”

  He cleared his throat, but the constriction stayed. He tightened his arm around her, and she took his other hand and seemed to study it.

  “Your hands were the first thing,” she said. “So … guy. I told Jayde the first week I worked for you, ‘My new boss has such masculine hand gestures,’ and she was like, ‘You’re crazy, woman.’”

  A soft laugh, and then her eyes welled up.

  “She never even texted me after she left. Anything could be happening to her right now.”

  No words would assuage the truth.

  “I don’t know why I get blessed with a good man and she gets trapped with a guy like Chris.”

  A good man. Even after what he’d just told her? He fidgeted on the bench, looking out over the street.

  “David, I want to pray for her.”

  “We can do that.”

  “You first?” Tiana bowed her head.

  A lump filled his throat as he bowed his head over hers. She knew who he was, so yes, he could pray with her. With a fellow believer, interacting in sacred community. One more thing he’d never thought to have again.

  “Father,” he said, the words falling quiet but easy, without forethought, “we’re two gathered in prayer to ask Your protection over Jayde this night. Grant her wisdom and courage. Surround her in safety. Hold her heart. If she be not Yours, pursue her with truth. In the name of Your only begotten Son.”

  A tear fell on his hand. He looked up, but Tiana kept her head bowed.

  “Jesus, wake her up. Open her eyes to the harm that man’s doing to her. Please keep his hands off her tonight. Thank You for loving Jayde, and I hope she knows I love her too. Give me the words to say to her, and help me not to get angry and push her away. Amen.”

  “Amen,” he said.

  Tiana swiped at her cheeks. “Thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  “You pray like … like a hymn.”

  A chuckle filled his chest and banished the last old ache of Ginny’s memory. A lightness filled him too. Spoken prayer in the presence of another follower of his Lord, and of all people, it was this woman who mattered more to him than he’d known before tonight. Before this minute.

  Her importance to him did not feel dangerous. Strange, that. He leaned close and kissed her forehead.

  “We should walk,” he said. This dead-end street was too dark. Too secluded. Too easy to court dishonor. “And it’s now your turn to talk.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything, eventually.”

  She laughed. He tugged her to her feet. This time, as they set out, their hands remained linked.

  Two hours of talk followed, and none of it about him. He asked few questions, instead let Tiana tell him whatever came to her. At first she kept mostly to her college years—the books she’d read, the classes she’d taken, how she missed it and hoped to go to grad school at some point, though she hadn’t decided on a degree program. She trailed off several times, shrugging and asking what more there was to know about her. Those times, he ventured questions.

  “I think I’m avoiding a topic,” she finally said. “Namely, my family.”

  “We don’t have to talk about it now.”

  “I guess you know most of it.”

  For a long time, she was quiet. David kept his fingers laced through hers as they walked. He saw the infant Tiana, his imagination placing her in a rough crib, wrapping her in rags that she kicked aside to scream out her hunger, her loneliness. He gripped her hand hard.

  “I’m not going to drag you through my adolescent identity crisis.” She stopped walking, turned to face him. The streetlight above them reflected in her eyes. “Summary, I grew up hearing that I ‘talk white’ and ‘walk white’ and … you know. All of that. It’s confusing for a kid. And you know about the falling out with my parents. I think they’re coming around, though. Slowly.”

  “Surely they can see now,” he said, “it didn’t mean you loved them less.”

  “But what if I had found relatives in Burundi? What if the orphanage had had records of some kind, something more than Baby Girl, date of birth unknown? I don’t know if they would forgive me for that.”

  His jaw tightened. He rubbed at the tension there and sighed. “They’re wrong.”

  “I’ve tried putting myself in their place. Sometimes I can.”

  David could not. If one of his children had not been born to him, had desired to know … He shook his head. Even that was too far for him to imagine.

  “Anyway.” She looked away from him, across the street at the emptying shops. “Yeah, we can move on.”

  “In a moment.” He pulled her hand to his side. “Tell me about adolescence.”

  “Oh, really, it’s not worth listening to.”

  “You are worth listening to.”

  Her eyes welled up. “Most of the time it was good. Sometimes it wasn’t.”

  He squeezed her hand.

  “Okay. The fact is—and you need to think about this if you’re serious about dating me—the fact is I’m a black woman in a white town, David. The fact is everyone is color-blind until the black woman is manning the cash register unsupervised.”

  It had happened three times in the two years she’d worked for him. Always a tourist, two female customers and one male, pointing out to David the risk he took in his hiring choices. He’d asked them to leave his store, not out of a conscious desire to combat racism, but because he’d glimpsed the pain in Tiana’s eyes and had wanted to cause those people physical harm.

  “You have to think about it,” Tiana said quietly.

  “I know.”

  “I’m not saying you’re naive.”

  “I know. Go on.”

  She tilted her head. “Go on?”

  “You evaded the past by bringing up the present.”

  She was quiet a long time. They walked. David kept her hand in his.

  “Seventh grade was the first time a classmate called me … you know, the N-word. We were arguing about something stupid. We usually got along. And I guess she didn’t know how else to win the fight, so … well, she won, because I was speechless. I didn’t do the sobbing-my-teenage-heart-out thing until I went to bed that night.”

  He kept his grip tight and kept walking. He thought about manacles on black wrists and ankles, about ropes around black necks, about marches and fire hoses and police dogs and hopelessness and courage. He thought about all the ways humans ripped each other apart. About the casual stupid cruelty of the white seventh grader who left Tiana’s heart with a hole in it.

  “Basically,” she said, “I knew nothing about blackness but what I learned from the people around me: you ignore it, or you degrade it. So I ignored it. Until I was in college.”

  He knew the next part. College was when she had sought her roots. And crushed her parents.

  “There are transracial adoptees whose parents bring them up totally differently. Teach them their heritage and make it something important. I don’t blame my parents for not doing that. But … well, the way it all worked out, I’m pretty much culturally estranged. I’ve pieced ‘me’ together on my own. I’m just myself.”

  “Just yourself?”

  “Yeah. The best self I can be, the self that God created … you k
now, all the clichés.” She smiled.

  He didn’t know how to say what he felt without adding to the clichés, but that risk was worth it. He stopped walking, and Tiana stopped too, her eyebrows arched in question. David lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it.

  “’Tis a beautiful self,” he said.

  Her smile grew. “I’ll take that.”

  “And thank you.”

  She tugged his hand, and they resumed walking. “It’s sort of the journey that never ends, but I know who I am now.”

  “I’ve never doubted that. I see it daily.”

  “Do you?”

  He nodded. It had been the first thing about her, beyond the physical, that attracted him.

  “If my identity hadn’t come from Jesus, from who He says I am in Him, I don’t know what I would have done, David. Who I would have tried to become.”

  “That’s true of all of us.”

  “Yeah.”

  They walked quietly for a time. It seemed she had finished the subject, but he would wait for her to change it.

  “Did you know I play piano?”

  He turned toward her in the dark between streetlights. “What’s this now?”

  “Lessons for five years, and I can also play by ear.”

  “I want to hear you.”

  “What about you, any musical skill?”

  “Piano as well, but it’s been years since I touched the keys.”

  “Sometime we should try a duet.”

  Yes, they should. “Tell me more.”

  “Like what?”

  “Everything, as I said.”

  She grinned. “Let’s see. My favorite form of exercise is kickboxing.”

  “I know that one already.”

  “Hmmm. I keep saying I’m going to buy a real camera, but I just keep using my phone … which you also know.”

  “Aye.”

  “You know I love children’s books…. You know I love chips and hummus.”

  Laughter shook his chest. “Quite the summary.”

  “It’s only the first date. I have to leave you in suspense about some things. Besides, I’ll run out of life experiences long before you will.”

  “Still, not one new thing?”

  “My favorite color is orange.”

  He stopped walking. “That I did not know.”