“From your looks, I’d say you were about to take your bath when I interrupted you,” David said, like he was about to leave. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he walked behind Uncle Billy and gripped the wheelchair’s handles, slowly pulling in a half circle until he was backing Uncle Billy out of his room, into the hallway.
“That could be,” Uncle Billy said. He had to admit it, he was just the tiniest bit scared now. He didn’t like it when people pulled his wheelchair backward. He always liked to know where he was going, and he wanted to see it before he got there.
“I’m sorry I sidetracked you, Uncle Billy,” David said, just as nice as could be.
“Ain’t no trouble,” Uncle Billy said. His lungs were really fooling with him, likely to burst from the strain of breathing.
They were in the bathroom. Uncle Billy noticed they could hear the tinny-sounding music even here, as faint as could be. Uncle Billy heard the creak and whine of the faucet, and a small cloud of steam began to rise behind him as water drove against the porcelain tub. Just like that. Uncle Billy’s breathing was easier. It was all better, with one small dose of sweet, hot steam.
“If you don’t mind,” David said to him, “I’m going to help you take your bath today. Is that okay, Uncle Billy? May I do that?”
And he stood behind him, out of Uncle Billy’s sight, as though he really were waiting for an answer. Uncle Billy would have smiled for sure this time, but his nerves were holding his face still in the silence while David waited behind him. Just waited.
As if a ghost hadn’t already made up his mind what he was going to do from the moment his shadow touched the door.
18
“It wasn’t his heart or another stroke. From what we can piece together, he must have slipped in the tub and banged his head,” Alex said, speaking in a near whisper.
The family was assembled in the waiting area at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s emergency room, ushered by Alex, who was wearing her white lab coat with a brass nametag reading ALEXIS JACOBS, M.D., HEMATOLOGY. Jessica forced herself to stare at the grooves on the nametag, virtually shutting out the words flowing from her sister’s lips. Jessica wanted to feel pain and shock at the suddenness of Uncle Billy’s hospitalization, but her rational mind wouldn’t allow it, as though it were afraid of shutting down.
What was it her grandmother had always said? Bad luck comes in threes. Princess, Peter, and now Uncle Billy. Was the run over now? Please, Jesus? Was this awful season of sadness finally behind them?
“The result is a brain hemorrage and swelling, complicated by the earlier bleeding and tissue damage from his stroke. He’s in a coma, but I don’t think he’s going to last long,” Alex said. “He can’t breathe unassisted.”
Bea sniffed, wiping her nose with a crumpled Kleenex she’d been turning over in her hand for the past two hours, since they’d all arrived at the hospital with Kira in tow. Bea nodded at every other word from Alex, her face set and impossible to read. Jessica hoped her mother wasn’t blaming herself because Uncle Billy had his accident while she was away.
“It’ll come down to the life support. His primary physician is Dr. Guerra, and he’ll explain it in more detail,” Alex said, squeezing Bea’s elbow. “You may have to make a very hard decision, Mom. You know that, right?”
Bea nodded again, this time with a momentary gaze at the ceiling before closing her eyes. “Doesn’t seem right,” she muttered, “deciding whether people will live or die.”
“Life support isn’t life, Mom. It’s machines.”
“I know.”
Feeling David’s arm draw more closely around her waist, Jessica looked over her shoulder for Kira. She was sitting across the room, giggling with a blonde boy her own age while the boy’s mother sat in a teary, red-faced daze. The other woman apparently had her own unexpected tragedy to sort through.
“Kira,” Jessica called sharply. Kira snapped to look at her, slightly startled. “Come over here.”
“It’s better if she doesn’t hear this,” David said, close to Jessica’s ear, forever Kira’s diplomat.
“I just want her here. I want to hold her hand.”
When Kira came to her side, Jessica hugged her daughter close to her with one arm, stroking her cheek with her fingers. Jessica suddenly felt like crying, but she didn’t think it was because of Uncle Billy. She hadn’t had a chance to get close to him because she’d never met him before he moved to Miami. As bad as it sounded, none of them had expected him to live long, and Bea wanted him to die peacefully, with family.
Something else, deep inside Jessica, was tugging at her tears. Maybe it was the collection of misery in this room, where so much bad news had come for so many.
“I’m hungry, Mommy,” Kira said.
“We’ll get something to eat in a little bit,” she promised.
Bea had called them as soon as she came home and found Uncle Billy sprawled across the bathtub’s porcelain rim, with a bleeding gash at his temple. Water had been running over the sides of the tub, soaking the hallway. It was pure chance he hadn’t drowned. That might have been better, more merciful, Jessica thought. A quick death had to be preferable to an artificially prolonged life.
In the hospital cafeteria, where they waited while Alex took Bea to the intensive-care unit, David read Jessica’s thoughts. “It would be better for Uncle Billy, and your mom too, if it was over,” he said. Kira was too mesmerized by dipping her steak-cut french fries in her mound of ketchup, covering all possible angles, to pay any attention to their more subdued adult preoccupations.
“I was thinking the same thing, but I feel sort of guilty.”
“I don’t understand how he survived at all,” David mused. “He should have died right away, from hitting his head. Or he should have drowned right after. It’s inconceivable.”
“David,” Jessica scolded softly, indicating Kira with a nod of her head, “please.”
He half smiled, embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said, playing with the wilting lettuce in his chef’s salad.
Of all ironies, David had planned to visit Uncle Billy that afternoon. She’d heard David on the phone with him, and he’d been anxious to see some records Uncle Billy found. Uncle Billy called when the three of them were walking out of the house to pick up school supplies at the mall for Kira—they’d promised her a new bookbag, since her plastic strap was broken. After Uncle Billy’s call, Jessica told David she’d take Kira herself. Go on and enjoy your music, she said.
If only he’d gone as he planned.
But David was still at home at his computer when they got back less than two hours later. As they walked through the door, the frantic phone call came from her mother.
“What made you change your mind about going to Uncle Billy’s before?” Jessica asked David in the cafeteria. She felt penned in by the white lab coats and the incessant announcements, a sheen of sterility covering a building brimming with suffering. No wonder David hated hospitals. She wanted to leave this place, and soon.
David shrugged absently. “Goddamn copyeditors in France. They had questions on a piece I sent them three weeks ago. Wouldn’t let me get off of the phone.”
“Daddy, you cussed,” Kira pointed out.
It was so weird how the mind could play tricks. When she first came home, Jessica was convinced that David had visited Uncle Billy because of the music. Finally, she thought she was redeemed for breaking David’s record; as she and Kira walked down into the yard, she believed she heard vintage music floating through the open living room window, a Jazz Brigade song called “Forever Man” she recognized from her early days with David. She’d been so sure of it, she imagined she could make out the energetic clarinet solo.
But by the time she opened the front door, the music was gone. And there was David, sitting at his desk, hard at work, amid utter and sudden silence.
19
MR. PERFECT IS A TRIP. (P. DONOVITCH)
It wasn’t until after noon that Jessica finished making her rounds in t
he newsroom, greeting colleagues she hadn’t seen in weeks. Surprisingly, she’d missed them. She’d even missed the comfort of the sameness, the clutter, and the routine tasks being performed around her. She was glad to be back.
She purposely tried not to notice Peter’s desk, which was cleared of papers and already robbed of its chair. She instead spent a half hour talking about good news with Emily, a young GA reporter who’d just found out she was pregnant after doctors had told her she would never conceive. That was the way God worked. One life gone, one miraculously created. Mysterious and wonderful.
So Jessica was in a good mood. She thought she was ready when she sat at her desk, turned on her computer, and pressed the keys to retrieve her e-mail messages. She braced herself for the possibility of finding old messages from Peter that she’d never erased; to avoid that, her fingers were poised to clear her screen as soon as she read the new ones. She found one message from Sy that morning, asking her to stop by his office when she had some free time; a system-wide announcement about the grief counseling, which had ended by now; and older messages from coworkers, mostly condolences and disbelief.
Then, she scrolled to the messages from her last day at work. There it was. The time displayed alongside the message was 10:22 P.M., so close to the coroner’s estimated time of death. One of the last things Peter had done before he died was to send her a message.
MR. PERFECT IS A TRIP.
She didn’t even know what it meant.
Before she realized it, a sob had risen in Jessica’s throat. Matt, the black courts reporter who sat in front of her, glanced around. “Sis? You okay back there?” he asked.
Jessica nodded, forcing her lips into a smile, but she stumbled to her feet and made her way to the ladies’ room, where she sat on the toilet seat, fully clothed, and waited for the spell to pass. Her knees were trembling. Goddamnit. Goddamnit. Forgive me, Lord, but I’m using your name in vain today. Will this ever be over?
The message was so cryptic.
MR. PERFECT IS A TRIP.
Why would he send her that message so late at night? What could have prompted it? Had he taken a last glance at her roses from David, which were now shriveled and completely brown?
“Peter sent me one of his crazy messages the night he was killed. I just now saw it, and it makes no kind of sense,” she told her boss later. “You know how he was with messages.”
“Stop thinking about it, kiddo. You’ll drive yourself nuts with wondering,” Sy told her. His office was cramped, but he had a tranquil view of Biscayne Bay and the causeways stretching eastward to Miami Beach. At one time, Sy had been a sports reporter, and on his wall he’d framed photographs of himself posing with Muhammad Ali, Bob Greise, O.J. Simpson.
Sy, who was nearly fifty, seemed to have aged several years in her absence. His skin looked pale and dry, and he had dark marks under his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t been getting much sleep. It probably didn’t help that her disappearance, and Peter’s death, cut his I-Team in half.
“Do the police know anything else?” Jessica asked him softly.
Sy looked at her, one eyebrow arched. “You sure you’re up to hearing it?”
She nodded. “Not knowing is killing me.”
“You and me both.” He swung around in his swivel chair, resting his folded hands on his desktop. “Well … they know for sure the guy was waiting in the backseat. There’s a flash on the surveillance tape where you can see someone climbing into the car five or ten minutes before the guard says he saw Peter leave. Unfortunately, the fucking street lamp was out. If not for that, the whole thing would be on tape. As it is, all we can see is a light-colored shirt, and that’s about it. Dumb luck. They’re not thinking robbery, because nothing was taken. That’s one weird thing. And the wound was real clean. Professional. From the wound, they’re saying the blade was a strange shape. Curved. The M.E. said he thought it was a hook-bill knife.”
“What’s that?” Jessica asked, her insides sinking.
“You know, like a flooring knife. For linoleum.”
How bizarre, Jessica thought. She pictured the monstrous wide blade and hook curling at the tip. “I’ve seen one of those, from when we redid the floors in the kitchen. Damn,” Jessica said, swallowing hard, struggling not to imagine the knife at her friend’s throat. “That’s a weird weapon for a hit man, isn’t it?”
“It’s a weird weapon for anybody.”
“So, basically, we don’t know anything.”
Sy sighed, smiling sadly. “Right,” he said. “By the way, I heard about your uncle. My condolences. Feel free to take off early if you need to.”
Jessica gazed at him, puzzled. “Uncle Billy? My great-uncle, really. How did you hear about that?”
“Let’s just say you have a thoughtful husband. He called to tell me he died, that you might be upset about it.”
Jessica shook her head. “He’s amazing,” she muttered. “Thanks, Sy, but I’m fine. It’s horrible the way he hit his head on the tub. But I’m okay. Nothing surprises me anymore.”
“I know the feeling, kiddo.”
Bea had decided to stop Uncle Billy’s life support the night before, as soon as his doctor determined he was brain-dead. Bea squeezed the old man’s hand and peered once more at his strangely bloated face while machines forced him to breathe. Then Jessica and David led her out so the doctors could do their work.
She couldn’t believe David actually took the initiative to call Sy on his own. He’d tried to convince her to tell her boss that she’d had a death in the family and to take off another day, but she really felt she needed to get back to work. The funeral wasn’t until Wednesday, and it was Monday. She was fine, she’d told David.
But he called Sy anyway.
Mr. Perfect is a trip, Jessica thought. He really was. Jessica understood the probable meaning behind Peter’s last message to her. She just couldn’t figure out why in the world he sent it.
20
Trees, whenever he contemplated them, reminded Dawit of Adele.
While Kira played with Teacake and one of her dolls at the mouth of the cave below, Dawit straddled the V-curve where the trunk of the front yard’s thirty-foot orchid tree diverged upward into sturdy branches. He angled his lopping shears to prune away withering, dead branches above him, slicing with precision above the dark rings at each branch’s base. He was careful not to cut below the rings, or else the tree would not be able to mend its wounds properly. In the fall, the tree would awaken with lavender blooms that would make them the envy of their block.
There was nothing quite so splendid and reliable as nature.
Dawit could not ruminate long on the tree’s beauty, however, because memories interrupted. He was never able to look upon a tree with the same fondness after one had been conscripted as an agent in his eternal separation from Adele.
goddamn nigger bitch scratched my face
gimme that rope, Will
That one had been a sinister tree, devoid of leaves, with thick branches grasping like claws, a lone tree at the bank of the Mississippi. Dawit could remember, as soon as he’d seen it, that the tree’s look unsettled him. It was dead, nearly black, yet it stood upright. The dead tree in the waist-high saw grass was an omen, he knew. Best they shouldn’t rest near that tree.
Seth, I’m thirsty. We ain’t gon’ stop but a minute.
It was Adele’s stubbornness he’d loved. Her stubbornness brought her with him, trailing after him a full six hours before she let on with her birdcall that she’d come too. She wanted to go to freedom, despite his argument that she should not risk her life to escape when he could surely arrange to buy her himself in a short time. Dawit’s heart had stopped when he heard the whistle from the brush behind him. His legs ached from fatigue and his heart ached from missing her, and he’d thought of going back to fetch her. Could that be Adele’s call … ?
Adele?
You sho’ ain’t gon’ leave me that easy, is you?
Dawit had often w
ondered, for more than a century since, how his life might have been different if they had never stopped beneath that wretched tree.
“Daddy, it’s getting dark,” Kira called up. “The ghost will be here soon. You’re in her tree.”
“It’s not dark yet. Just a bit longer and I’ll be finished, Kira. Night Song won’t mind having me here.”
Even Kira’s voice could not pull Dawit away from reliving that horrible day, the day he mourned in vivid dreams, replaying the short sequence of events as though hindsight could alter the past.
It was clear from the surprised faces of the white men—five of them—who emerged from the woods that they were not patrollers. They were random laborers—loggers, he guessed, from the ropes coiled across their shoulders. They were sharing a jug of liquor, on their way to rest at the riverbank. The men walked toward them, nearly jolly in their manner, already perilously close.
Well, lookie here
We got us some runaways?
It would be foolish to try to outrun them. Better to negotiate, Dawit decided. He hadn’t added Adele’s name to his pass, but he could convince them so long as he played his role and didn’t insult them. They probably couldn’t read themselves.
Then, before he could speak, the situation became grave.
The youngest, barely a man yet, sidled behind Adele and wrapped a thick arm around her middle. He playfully planted his hand across her chest, squeezing her breast. “You wanna nurse me, Auntie?”
Dawit knew then, from the expression on Adele’s face, that he would have no opportunity to intervene. Another woman might have simply trembled or tolerated the man’s touch. Adele could not.
My Soul to Keep (African Immortals) Page 15