Black and White

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  After a quick shower in the old clawfoot tub, Jennifer decided she was hungry. She found one of the aluminum TV trays in the mud room, and she took it with her into the living room. She ate a late dinner of peanut butter and jelly and a glass of Ovaltine, watching Mission: Impossible. She missed most of it. The rain hammering the tin roof made it hard to hear, but she didn’t feel like getting up to raise the volume. She ended up turning it off before it was over, and went to bed.

  “What time does Daniel get off work?” Inez asked.

  Jennifer looked up at her as she struggled to shove her wet foot into her sneaker. “He said eight-thirty.”

  Inez smoothed her shiny, chin-length, black hair, which either she or Mama Tyne usually ironed. Inez’s skin was a smooth, beautiful, light-brown, her eyes almost exotic in their almond shape. She smiled widely over at Jennifer.

  “Well, we don’t want to get you back late, do we? You guys have been apart a whole day,” she said, teasing.

  “Quit it,” Jennifer said, grinning. “You and Jonah are just as bad.”

  “Now, you know that’s not true. We don’t get to spend half the time together that you two do.”

  Both of the girls’ smiles dimmed a bit.

  “Well. One day,” Jennifer said. She purposely brightened. “But today was great, right?”

  Inez smiled back, as she buckled the thin blue belt around the waist of her light green shirtdress. “It was. I wish we could go to the drive-in with you, though.”

  “So do I.” Jennifer got her other shoe on, and picked up her wet bathing suit from a nearby rock. Hers was navy blue, with white polka dots. Next to it was Inez’s suit, the green one she’d ordered from Montgomery Ward back in the summer. It was hard to believe it was October already. Pretty soon it would be too cool for swimming in the lake.

  Inez finished buckling her sandals, and straightened up. At 5’7, she was just an inch taller than Jennifer, but she always seemed taller. Maybe it was the long legs, or her unforced dignity.

  A horn blew back over by the lake. Both girls turned to look, even though several hundred feet of woods kept them from being able to see Ned’s Galaxie.

  “The boys are getting impatient,” Jennifer said. “Probably getting eaten up alive.”

  “Jonah’s not impatient; he’s still dead to the world. We’re gonna have to sit up front with Ned.”

  They started walking along the pine needle-covered path, back toward the car. “I told him he was getting too much sun,” Jennifer said.

  Inez knuckled Jennifer in the shoulder. “‘You’re my twin sister, not my mom’,” she parodied, dropping her voice a couple registers.

  “You can have him,” Jennifer said.

  “I do.” Inez laughed.

  “Oh, hold on,” Jennifer said. “I need to pee.”

  “Can’t you hold it?” her best friend asked, slapping at her shin.

  “No. Too much soda.” Jennifer waved her on. “I’ll hurry. Tell them I’ll be right there.”

  “Okay, but be quick,” Inez said, continuing along the path.

  Sudden panic made Jennifer’s heart pound, and she knew she was dreaming. She hadn’t panicked then.

  “Inez, wait!” she yelled in her dream, but Inez was gone from the path.

  For whatever reason, because dreams sometimes don’t make sense, Jennifer went ahead and squatted by a tree, pulling down her panties and lifting her yellow sundress. She had just finished patting herself dry with her handkerchief when the shots rang out. Three. Four. Six.

  Suddenly, Jennifer was already back by the lake, staring at Ned’s father’s 1959 Galaxie. Jennifer heard the roar of an engine, and tires on gravel, but this time she didn’t look up to see the taillights disappearing around the bend, or hear the whoops and hollers of the men who were driving it.

  First, she saw the back of Ned’s head, leaning against the window frame. Blood that made no sense in Jennifer’s world was running down the side of the driver’s door. Then she realized that Inez was yelling over the car radio, which Ned had been blasting. That week’s hottest song, “The Locomotion”, which seemed so inappropriate, already.

  “Jonah!” Inez was screaming, as she scrambled from the front passenger seat to the back.

  Jennifer ran to the driver’s side and yanked open the back door. Inez was on all fours over Jonah, who was lying on his side. His eyes were wide open, his cheeks a flaming, painful-looking pink. There was blood on the back of his neck, and on the seat beneath him. Blood dripped, too, from Inez’s shoulder onto the side of Jonah’s white T-shirt.

  “No,” Jennifer said. “No,” she kept saying. She was almost grunting the word. The sound reminded some part of her brain of a mama bear, warning away some danger.

  She dropped to her knees, barely feeling the gravel cutting into her skin.

  Jonah’s eyes were wide open, and for the first time in her life, Jennifer could not feel some part of her twin living inside her.

  Struggling to awaken, 1973 Jennifer felt a terrible sadness for 1962 Jennifer. She wanted to warn her somehow, prepare her for the fact that in just two weeks, her mother would be dead, too.

  She sat straight up in bed, panting for air, the front of her thin T-shirt sticky with sweat, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Jonah?” she managed to croak.

  But he was never there.

  Grandma had kept a clean house, even up into her eighties, but the place had been empty for a few months. Dust had collected and the damp had gotten in, so Jennifer spent most of the day cleaning. Then she’d had some lunch and gone out to the yard.

  She didn’t have any flowers to plant in the places where Grandma had liked to have flowers. She didn’t have much in her savings, either. The flowers would have to wait until she got a few paychecks from the new job. So, she worked on the front porch instead.

  She swept a pile of leaves, dust and debris into a dustpan, and dumped it into a paper bag, then checked her watch. It was after two. She was due at Uncle Ray’s at six.

  Uncle Ray wasn’t blood; he’d been her mother Claire’s best friend growing up. They’d even touched on the idea of dating, but once they’d gone to the junior prom together, they’d realized they were really just friends. They continued their friendship into adulthood, and it hadn’t seemed to matter to Jennifer’s father early in her parents’ marriage. Later on, her father had used insecurity as part of his justification for his alcoholism. But then, he’d had plenty of other excuses, too.

  Now Ray had grandchildren, and Jennifer’s mother never would.

  It had been good of Ray to offer her the job. Female cops weren’t as popular in Dismal, FL as they were in New Orleans, and they weren’t all that well-liked in New Orleans. The fact that Uncle Ray had hired her was going to anger most of the other officers. Maybe all of them. Not only was she a female, she was also practically family.

  She went inside and grabbed a rag and some vinegar to wipe down the old chairs and the swing, which she’d found in the shed and rehung. When she came back out, she heard a car coming up the drive. When it rounded the bend in the drive, she saw it was a pickup, light blue, with a white roof and a white strip around the bottom. A Chevrolet, she thought.

  She didn’t know what Uncle Ray drove, but she stopped thinking that mattered after the truck stopped behind her car. It was the shape of the face, the jawline, which was in partial profile. The glint of the sun off short, ash-blonde hair.

  She stood there at the porch rail, frozen. He waited in the truck for what felt like forever then, all of a sudden, he jerked the door open and got out.

  She watched him as he walked across the driveway and started up the path to the house.

  He’d been really handsome in high school, but he was even more so now. His hairline was just a bit higher, but he was still as trim as he’d ever been. A bit more muscular, perhaps. H
e was wearing faded jeans that were not bellbottoms, and a red plaid shirt with the tails out. When he stopped about ten feet shy of the porch and looked her in the face, she saw that his eyes were still just as blue. He had about two days’ growth on his face, which she knew from memory only took him one day to grow.

  She had to remember to take a breath before she finally spoke. “Hi,” she said quietly.

  He shoved his hands in his front pockets. “Hi.” His tone was curt.

  They stared at each other just long enough for her to really need something to say. “You look good.”

  “So do you,” he said, after a moment.

  She was standing there in her bare, dirty feet. Her hair was piled on top of her head, held there mainly by cobwebs, and her shorts and T-shirt were covered with dirt and dust. She looked like Carol Burnett’s janitor lady, and she knew it.

  “How did you know I was here?” she asked him.

  “My cousin Cindy’s the manager at Pantry Pride.”

  There was no warmth at all in his voice, not that she’d expected any. Maybe. But not with any real hope.

  “Well, that figures,” she said. “I’ve been to one place in town, and it would have to be someplace where somebody in your family worked.”

  “Why?” He raised his eyebrows. “Are you hiding out?”

  “No. I just…I was just getting settled in before I saw anybody.”

  “Like me?” he asked shortly.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, afraid of the answer.

  “Were you going to see me?”

  “Of course. I would have to, eventually.” Her voice wound down. “Of course.”

  They stared at each other for a minute.

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked.

  “No.” He was pretty matter-of-fact about that. “In fact, this was a mistake.”

  He turned and took a few steps, then spun back around, pointing at her.

  “Not one phone call!” he snapped. “Not even one!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She had no defense for that.

  He took a couple of steps closer and put his hands on his hips. “I went looking for you in Fort Lauderdale, did you know that?”

  That punched her in the chest. She swallowed. “No. I didn’t know that.”

  “I thought maybe since we talked about going there for our honeymoon, maybe you were there. If you were, I didn’t find you.”

  “I was in New Orleans,” she replied quietly.

  “That’s nice,” he said, nodding. “I looked for you in Fort Lauderdale for two months.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “Screw you,” he said back.

  He turned and started walking away again. She wanted him to go. She wanted him to stay. He didn’t seem to know, either, because he turned back around again.

  “I begged you to stay!”

  “I couldn’t!”

  “I know you were scared!” He was yelling now. “I knew you might be in danger, but I would have taken care of you!”

  “You were just a kid, Daniel,” she replied. “I was just a kid!”

  “You would have been okay,” he snapped. “I would have made sure of it!”

  Jennifer swallowed, and felt her eyes heat up. She’d always cried so easily; at romantic movies, sad books, roadkill, even sappy commercials. He might have forgotten that. The last thing she needed was to cry in front of him now.

  He came a little closer to the porch. He was still a good ten feet away, but she couldn’t help studying his face, remembering in better detail all of the features she thought she’d remembered perfectly.

  “I knew you were scared,” he said again, toning it down. “I told you if you had to leave, I would go with you, and you were just gone.”

  “Daniel, you still needed to finish your senior year—”

  “So did you!”

  “I did!”

  He looked like he was biting something back. He put his hands on his hips and looked down at the path. She had forgotten how she used to think he looked a little like Paul Newman.

  “Why are you here? She died months ago,” he said to his feet.

  “Three months ago.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I wanted…I wanted to see…everything again,” she said. “And I want to know what happened.”

  She didn’t need to tell him what she meant. He jerked his head up.

  “Nobody knows, Jen! Nobody knew then and nobody knows now.”

  “Somebody knows,” she said firmly.

  “So why not hire a detective or something? Because as far as the police are concerned, it’s a dead end. It was a dead end eleven years ago.”

  “I want to see for myself. That’s one of the reasons I—”

  “So hire a PI! You could have done that from New Orleans!”

  He turned around yet again, and started walking away, yet again.

  She had also forgotten how he interrupted her when he was mad, and how much that pissed her off.

  “Well, I didn’t!” she snapped. “I apologize for ruining your life by coming back here to do it!”

  He stopped and turned around. “No, lady,” he snapped, pointing at the ground, “This is not how you ruined my life.”

  He started for the driveway again.

  “Daniel, wait!” she called. “I need to talk to you about—”

  “Should have done that eleven years ago,” he said without turning.

  “Please,” she called.

  He waved her off. She watched him yank his door open and climb into his truck. He didn’t look her way again. His tires ground at the rocks and dirt as he turned the truck around and sped back down the driveway.

  Jennifer felt like she’d been hollowed out with a grapefruit spoon. What had eventually become a dull ache was now a raw, inflamed wound. He’d been the very best part of her life, the most important thing. She would have followed him anywhere, done anything for him. Anything but stay. She bit her lip and blinked her eyes, refusing to give in to tears. If that floodgate ever opened again, she’d be useless to herself.

  She stood there watching until most of the dust had settled back down on the ground. Then she turned around and pulled the screen door open. She stubbed her big toe horrifically on the threshold and gave herself something else to be upset about. As she stood there on one foot, the other one dripping blood all over the porch floor, she was exceptionally grateful for that.

  “Why, you kids are always having such spats,” Grandma said.

  “Yeah,” Jennifer managed.

  She looked over her shoulder. Grandma was sitting on the swing, an embroidery basket by her feet, the hoop in her lap. It was the sampler that had been hanging on the bathroom wall since Jennifer was in tenth grade. Jennifer had hung it herself.

  “He doesn’t understand,” she said, wiping at her toe with the rag.

  “Of course, he doesn’t understand,” Grandma said. “He’s a hurt, angry young man. But he loves you so much. He’ll come around, like he always does.”

  Grandma could have been talking about the fight they’d had right before prom, or the time Daniel had seen Tommy Weathers kiss her behind the concession stand, or the time she’d broken up with Daniel for three days because somebody told her he’d been seeing Liz Ballard on the side. It had been a lie. Come to think of it, Grandma had been wearing that same blue dress for that one.

  “Go get a Band-Aid and some sweet tea. Eventually, he’ll call,” Grandma said. “But please do not stretch that cord all the way into the laundry room. I am not eavesdropping.”

  “Well, not anymore,” Jennifer mumbled. She hopped over to the swing, grabbed her dustpan and trash bag, and hopped back into the house.

  Daniel turned onto 90 from Jennifer’s driveway and went about twenty
feet before he slammed on the brakes, only thinking to look in his rear-view after the fact.

  Both hands gripping the wheel, he leaned forward and blew out a breath. He should go back. He should go back and yell at her some more. He should go back and tell her what a child she had been, how thoughtless and cruel. He should go back and grab onto her and tell her he understood, and that it was okay now.

  But it wasn’t okay. He did understand, but that didn’t make it okay. It didn’t make him okay.

  He shouldn’t have come here. He shouldn’t have come here ten minutes after hearing she was back. He should have taken some time to think about it, to sort it out. Instead, he’d come flying over here to see her, all twisted up with anger and hurt and wonder and gratitude and pride and righteous indignation. All of that. More.

  “Damn it,” he said quietly, tapping his forehead against the wheel. “Damn it.”

  A horn blew behind him and he jerked upright and looked in the rear-view. Old Tom Woods, in his old Ford truck.

  Daniel stuck a hand out the window and stepped on the gas.

  Uncle Ray had moved from the little brown house on Elmwood to a newer house over on Patterson. It was a nice house; simple, but nice. The front yard was neatly trimmed, and they had two cars; Ray drove a green, four-year-old Riviera, and Peggy an almost new brown Buick Estate Wagon.

  There was a nice patio with a barbecue grill in the back, and the big back yard was definitely geared for the grandkids, with a trampoline, a tetherball pole, and a sandbox. Somebody’s bright green Inchworm was sitting next to a red hibiscus, waiting for its next rider.

  Jennifer, Ray, Peggy, and their family were squeezed into a modest dining room. Their daughter Carrie, who was about five years younger than Jennifer, was there with her husband Paul, a dark-haired man in black-rimmed glasses, whom Carrie had met at Florida State. Between them were their three kids, Annie, Jason and Rickie, five, four and two respectively.