“The key weakness,” he said, looking out over the auditorium bulging with school faculty, staff, alumni, and local community leaders, “is in the area of public awareness. We estimate that nearly forty percent of the alumni we have successfully contacted about the school’s crisis are supporting the movement to save it. The problem is, as of now, we have only reached thirty percent of all living alumni on the phone, and that’s not to mention the other potential allies throughout the Miami Valley and beyond who simply aren’t aware of our needs.”
Maxwell stepped to the edge of the stage, pointing toward the two far back corners of the auditorium. “On your way out, please see the volunteers manning the tables in the back. We need anything you can donate —a monthly financial pledge, the provision of key services or supplies at reduced or zero cost, or just your time —to ensure this school system can survive the next year’s loss of our central source of funding. Thank you for your time this evening. With that, I’ll hand back off to Dr. Turner.”
Turning and heading back toward his seat behind the podium, Maxwell exchanged calming glances with Julia as she strode to address the audience. Settling into his seat, he diligently kept his eyes on the back of Julia’s head as she spoke. He had already taken notice of the tastefully snug fit of her dress, and knew he’d be unfairly testing his flesh if he let his gaze wander down toward her shapely, muscled hips and long legs. The sister had taken good care of herself through the years, and her investment had allowed Julia Turner to blossom into a beautiful woman.
Maxwell realized that there was a time, back when he had walked these school halls as a student, that he was incapable of valuing the beauty of black women on the same level as those of their white counterparts. He wasn’t sure which came first, though, the chicken or the egg. On the one hand, the kids who determined the Christian Light social order overlooked Julia and her friends, and it was always understood that no self-respecting boy would date any of them. On the other hand, it wasn’t until Julia’s clumsy flirtation senior year that any black girl had shown a real interest in Maxwell. In general they had always made him feel nerdy and “white-acting.” From what he could tell, girls like Toya and Terry spent most of their days fantasizing about the gangbangers and hoods their mothers vainly tried to steer them past.
By the time Julia reached out to him, Maxwell had become too accustomed to the exclusive attention of the feathery-haired, pink-skinned girls around him to know what to make of her. He had been unsettled by his uneasy reaction to Julia, enough that he had figuratively stuck his head in the sand for another five years. If he hadn’t spent a few spring breaks during medical school on the campuses of several legendary historically black colleges and universities —including Hampton, FAMU, Howard, and Fisk —he might never have appreciated just how fine God could make his “sisters.”
Maxwell continued his self-imposed exercise in discipline for another fifteen minutes, his eyes studiously avoiding Julia’s backside and legs as she opened the floor for questions. Despite the inspirational nature of the evening’s program and presentations, which had included selections from the junior high and high-school bands, the elementary-school choir, and a sermonette from a faculty member, it was clear that many remained skeptical about whether Christian Light’s future was worth fighting for. Lacking detailed knowledge of its finances or of the political environment surrounding Christian Light, Maxwell could do nothing more than watch as Julia fielded questions revealing the racial rifts, mistrust, and apathy that threatened to doom Julia and the board’s efforts.
“I don’t know how you keep your cool,” Maxwell said when he stopped by her office as the school’s hallways still teemed with students, parents, alumni, and press. He leaned against her doorway, arms crossed, with a slight grin on his face. “I thought my patients knew how to test my salvation with ridiculous questions, but some of those tonight took the cake.”
Julia sighed, rising from her seat and arranging some folders on her desk. “Everyone has some stake in what happens with a school system, Maxwell. I pretty much understand where everyone who’s against this effort is coming from. Parents want to ensure we’re not getting distracted from the day-to-day education of their children, and figure if necessary they’ll just pull their kids out and get a voucher to put them in another private school. If nothing else, they’ll toss them into a charter school. Some of the remaining white parents are concerned that if Julia Turner saves Christian Light, I’ll turn it into an all-black institution where their kids are no longer really welcome. And then there are the hard-core fundamentalists who think the school’s not worth saving if we don’t bring back the days where we only admit kids whose parents live perfectly holy lives.”
“Maybe I’ll understand someday when I have school-age children,” Maxwell said, sliding into the chair on the other side of Julia’s desk. He glanced toward the far corner of her office. “Where’s Miss Amber?” he asked. “I thought she’d be parked in her usual spot by now, doing homework.”
“She actually didn’t have any homework tonight, so I let my dad pick her up for the evening,” Julia replied. She searched his eyes quizzically. “What’s on your mind?”
Maxwell crossed his legs and rubbed at a bleary eye. “I don’t get it. Why don’t people appreciate the value of keeping Christian Light viable as an option for parents who want their kids raised with Christian principles? Am I just naïve?”
“You’re not naïve, so much as guilty,” Julia replied, smiling. “Guilty of thinking like a medical doctor instead of a student of human psychology and behavior. You may understand how all our body parts work together, Doctor, but we’re much more complex than the synthesis of all those organs, veins, and cells.”
“You are clearly correct,” Maxwell said. “I better get going. I have to catch up on some paperwork at the office before seeing my first patient at six tomorrow.” Standing, he turned back toward Julia. “I did want to thank you for helping me organize my presentation. It had been forever since I’d put together a speech that didn’t involve the practice of medicine.”
“You hardly needed me,” Julia replied, shooing him away. “A few minutes of training and you figured out how to speak plain English all over again.”
“Well, again, I appreciated it. I’ll, uh, see you at the next volunteer meeting.”
“Maxwell?” One foot poised over the threshold of Julia’s office, Maxwell was embarrassed at the hope that leapt into his chest. Weeks had passed since she had shot him down, and while his confrontation with Jake and Lyle had almost made him rethink his curiosity about her, the burning in his chest told him he wasn’t quite ready to give up.
“I should have apologized to you a while ago,” Julia said as he turned to face her. “I was pretty rude when you invited me out that time. I know you were just being a friendly gentleman.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Maxwell replied, shifting unwillingly as he tried to find his footing, literally and verbally.
“I’m not communicating clearly,” Julia continued, leaning forward and clasping her hands as she smiled up at Maxwell. “What I mean to say is, I misread your invitation as if you were asking me out on a date, and I panicked. As superintendent of schools, and now as your colleague on the board, I didn’t feel it would be appropriate for us to see each other socially.”
Maxwell crossed his arms, eyes quizzing her, though he said nothing.
“What I realized afterward, Maxwell, is that I was being silly. I’m embarrassed to say I mentioned all this to my girlfriend Cassandra Gillette, Cassie from the old days? She helped me see that you were probably just encouraging me to network with some influential alumni who could really help the school’s cause. The more I think about it, if it takes having dinner with Lyle and Jake to get their help and donations to the cause, that’s a sacrifice I should make.”
Maxwell finally dared open his mouth. “So . . . you’d like me to set up a dinner with those two and their wives then?”
“Yes,” J
ulia said, her hands open as she shrugged. “Whatever you think will make them most comfortable in meeting me.”
“And you want me there also?”
She smiled, a flash of her gleaming white teeth accentuating the light in her eyes. “You better believe it. How else am I supposed to be comfortable?”
Glancing into his rearview mirror, Maxwell was embarrassed by the ear-to-ear grin on his face as he slid into his car a few minutes later. “What are you, twelve?” he said to his reflection. “Stop it. She said it’s a business dinner, nothing more.” Questioning his sanity for a second, he started his engine and dialed up Lyle, then Jake, to coordinate a few good dates for a potential dinner with Julia.
Once he’d left a voice mail for Jake, Maxwell took a moment to relish what would be his first date since arriving in Dayton. He had certainly earned the right to stop and smell the occasional rose. For while he could now look forward to taking Julia out in another week or two, he had to turn his attention to a much-less-anticipated meeting.
To his relief, Edna had not immediately followed up with him about her ominous comments at the soccer game. For the past two weeks, she had been as consumed as Maxwell and Bruce with stabilizing the medical clinic. The two partners had landed two new crucial sources of funding —a grant from the state, which Bruce had sought since before opening the clinic, and an even larger contribution from Southwest Ohio Health Care Corporation, the hospital conglomerate run by Maxwell’s parents. With new money in place, they were now scrambling to build the types of processes needed to maintain the flow of grant money —more closely documenting every detail of patient interactions and tightly managing every detail of daily expenditures.
As a result, it had been only two nights ago, as they sat reviewing the month’s financial performance while Bruce tended to an emergency walk-in patient, that Edna had elaborated on her concerns about her older son, Pete. “He’s convinced he can prove what happened to Eddie was no accident,” she said, her words a whisper as she wiped a bead of sweat from just above her lips.
Unsure how to respond, Maxwell had patiently quizzed Edna about her concerns and the behavior causing them. Pete’s growing emotional distance from her and from her grandson, his sudden increase in work hours, and his increased references to what they had lost when Eddie was incapacitated, accompanied by fantasies of the type of man Eddie might have grown into —it was easy to see why Edna had confronted him.
Maxwell had finally asked a question tied to his own teenage attempts to process the tragedy. “Tell me, Edna. Are you more worried that Pete’s paranoid, or that he could actually be right, that there’s another explanation for what happened?”
“I wish I knew,” she had replied, tears sprouting as she bit her bottom lip. “Dr. Simon, I nearly lost my life over what happened to my boy. I lost three jobs, one right after the other, because I couldn’t concentrate and I’d slipped back into drinking. Lloyd almost left me because I was such a terror toward him. We lost our house when I had to choose between mortgage payments and the cost of Eddie’s care.”
Maxwell had looked down at that moment, overcome momentarily by the remembrance of what the Eddie Walker tragedy had meant to him as a fourteen-year-old. He and Eddie’s classmates had prayed every morning for the comatose boy; a moment of silent prayer had been incorporated into the morning announcements that came over the public-address system. At least once a month, if not more often, a Christian Light faculty member would deliver an impassioned, Scripture-based sermonette about the reasons to hope for Eddie’s eventual healing and recovery. Without it ever being stated, Eddie Walker had become a spiritual symbol for the children of Christian Light, a crucible into which they could pour their belief that God still performed miracles.
On the day his own class graduated from Christian Light High, though, such a miracle had still not come for Eddie and his family. Maxwell still wondered what role, if any, that played in his and other classmates’ subsequent faith struggles.
“I came to peace with it,” Edna had finally said after Maxwell wrapped her in a hug. “I chose to believe that Eddie’s fate was something God allowed, something that was not, necessarily, for me to understand. If Petey’s right, Doctor, I don’t know what that means. I just don’t know.”
“He is a policeman,” Maxwell replied, releasing Edna from his hug. “Does he have evidence?”
“He won’t talk to me about it, that’s what hurts so much.” Edna let her arms hang at her sides, her small hands forming knotty fists. “I got him to admit why he’s upset, but he wouldn’t tell me any details. Said he didn’t want me to worry.”
“What about Lloyd?” Maxwell asked, referencing her husband. “Can he talk to Pete?” He was pretty sure Pete’s biological father was no longer living.
“Lloyd does not get involved in Pete’s personal business,” Edna said, her hands raised as if fending Maxwell off. “That’s dangerous ground, trust me. I don’t know which of them flies off the handle quicker. I can really only think of one man who might be able to talk to him, Doctor. You.”
“What?” Maxwell took a step back, collecting himself. “Edna, I don’t think —”
“Let me explain,” Edna replied. “Pete can be a hothead, Dr. Simon, but he’s gotten as far as he has with the police department because he’s very fact-based. So as a doctor, you and Petey have that in common. Plus, you have an emotional connection to all this too, at least sort of.”
Maxwell had stumbled back into the conference table, where he perched and stroked his beard anxiously. He was pretty sure Edna was unaware of the position she was putting him in. For one, he had never been a fan of Eddie —before the incident, most of their interactions consisted of the kid glaring angrily at him anytime they crossed paths. It didn’t help that Maxwell was usually with his white girlfriend of the moment, while Eddie was chronically alone.
Then there was the time Eddie walked up to him, just after school let out, shortly after a group of black kids from the older freshman class had beaten him up in response to his jeering use of the “N word.”
“Maybe I can’t get them,” he had said to Maxwell, “but if you or your buddies try to come at me like they did, I’ll be ready for y’all. My brother showed me how to use my stepdad’s gun. Like to see you try me now.”
The young boy’s snarling, angry glare lived on in Maxwell’s memory, but it was irrelevant now. Maxwell had visited Eddie at his nursing home once already, at Edna’s invitation, and it had been a surreal experience. Standing beside Edna, Maxwell had peered in confusion at the slack-jawed, immobile man with a pasty face and shaggy beard. As a physician, Maxwell had the fortitude to observe the nurses as they fed Eddie, changed his diaper, and allowed Edna to try and coax a reaction —any reaction —out of him. Eventually Maxwell had slipped into the hallway to quiz a doctor on staff, who had explained that although his postcoma development had stalled nearly a decade earlier, Eddie had proven to be unexpectedly hearty. “Never seen anything like it,” Maxwell’s colleague had said. “He can’t possibly be conscious of it, but the guy fights every day for survival as if he expects to regain consciousness. He could outlive all of us.”
Pulling into the parking garage of his condo building, Maxwell ran down the list of things to do before his meeting with Peter Whitlock. Pray, fast, and place a call to his pastor. If he was going to emerge whole from a face-to-face with a paranoid racist, he could use as much Holy Spirit bolstering as possible. Nia’s beautiful face locked into his thoughts, and he reminded himself that as challenged as life was, he had too much to live for.
18
In the nearly three weeks it had taken to try and gather an unadulterated version of that fateful night’s true events, Cassie had bought a few extra days from Peter Whitlock by promising to bring him additional witnesses. This, of course, had not stopped the detective’s reminders of his presence —daily hang-up calls to Cassie’s cell and home phones, the occasional indulgence in parking and loitering outside her home, a ha
ndwritten note here and there. Cassie considered it a miracle that even as she and Julia had spent the past days processing the disjointed memories of their old friends, she had managed to keep Marcus from getting wind of these harassments. She knew time was growing short, that it was a matter of days before her home life and Whitlock were due for a nasty clash.
That fear made Julia’s insistence about meeting Whitlock even more painful to Cassie. As they drove toward the Greene shopping development, where Whitlock had agreed on a rendezvous, she tried again to dissuade her friend. “You don’t have to reveal yourself, Julia,” she said, her hands gripping her steering wheel. “He doesn’t know you were involved. Why don’t you keep yourself and, more important, Amber out of this?”
“Cassie,” Julia replied impatiently, “we’re not certain exactly what Whitlock knows. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if he already has an idea I was in the middle of this. I mean, if Toya’s brother was his main source, why would Lenny have mentioned you, but not the rest of us? Wouldn’t make sense.”
“Still,” Cassie said, “I don’t understand why you want to ask for trouble. Just let me meet with him. I’ll buy us more time.”
“Cassie,” Julia replied, a hand to her friend’s shoulder, “don’t take this the wrong way, but, truthfully, you need to show Whitlock that you have sister-friends who have got your back. You know how he came at you last time,” she said, reminding her friend of the policeman’s suggestion that Cassie prostitute herself. “He needs to see you’re not some isolated target he can toy with.”
Julia held up a hand when Cassie opened her mouth. “Just stop. Would you prefer if I had sent Marcus over here with you?”
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