“She’s getting Coretta dressed. Can you zip up my jacket, Dad?”
Zack helped both boys put on their hats and coats. He was contemplating whether to go upstairs and talk to Charlene when he heard a knock at his back door.
“Vanessa, what are you doing here?” he asked as soon as he opened it.
“Charlene called and asked if I’d take the kids out for a while. Is she upstairs?” Without waiting for an answer, Vanessa walked past him and up the stairs. A few moments later, she returned carrying Coretta. “See you later, Zack,” she said as she took the children and went out the back door.
Zack rushed out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the master bedroom. Charlene was sitting on the side of the bed holding a picture in her hands. He knew what it was, but decided to play dumb. “Honey, are you okay?”
“I asked Vanessa to take the kids so that we could talk alone. What happened to Mabel Joe?” she asked calmly.
“I don’t know. Like I said, I barely knew her. I heard you and that cop say someone was missing, and I just assumed that’s who you meant. It’s no big deal.”
She turned to look at him, and he could see tears forming at the base of her eyes. “You promised that you’d never lie to me. Just tell me the truth, Zack. Where is she?”
Slowly he walked over to the bed and cautiously sat down. “I swear to you, I have no idea where Mabel Joe is.”
Charlene held the picture up. “What are you doing with this picture?”
“Um . . . Mabel Joe gave it to me.”
“When?” she demanded.
Zack sighed. “I had lunch with her after I saw her that day at the hospital. I . . . I had lunch with her . . . and she gave me that picture. I haven’t seen her since.”
“You said you barely knew her, but you had lunch with her. Now she’s missing, and you have her picture. That sounds fishy to me, Zack.”
“I didn’t recognize her at the hospital, but later I remembered her. So I called and invited her to lunch. You’re not jealous, are you? That woman is old enough to be my mother.”
“Of course not. I just don’t understand why a woman you barely knew would give you a family photo, then suddenly disappear.”
“I . . . I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Why, Zack? Why did Mabel Joe give you this picture?”
“What difference does it make, Charlene? It’s just a picture.”
Charlene stood up. “Fine. If you won’t tell me, then I’ll just have to turn this over to the police. Maybe they can use it to help find Mabel Joe.”
He grabbed her by the arm. “Are you kidding me?”
She snatched her arm away. “No, I’m not. You might have been the last person to see her alive.” Charlene picked up her phone from the dresser.
“Charlene, don’t call the police!” he yelled.
The urgency in his voice frightened her. “Oh my God! Did you do something to her?” Holding tightly to the phone, Charlene rushed to the other side of the room.
“No . . . of course not!” Zack stood up to go to her, and she backed farther away. “Listen to me . . . I did not do anything to Mabel Joe.” He watched her standing in the corner of the room trembling and crying. “Charlene, are you . . . are you afraid of me?”
“I’m afraid of what you’ve done.” She opened the phone to dial, and he suddenly lunged at her, snatching it from her hands.
“Zack, what is wrong with you?” Charlene screamed. She turned to run from the room, and he blocked her exit. Quickly, she backed up into the furthest corner of the room as tears rushed from her eyes. “Please, don’t hurt me,” she whimpered.
Zack held his hands up as if to surrender. “Charlene, I’ve never put my hands on you, and I never would.” He saw fear in her eyes and face, but she did not speak. He sat down on the bed and stared at his hands, realizing that the last thing he wanted was for Charlene to fear him. He heard his grandmother’s voice. You are who you are Zack Morton. Just be who you are.
Without looking at Charlene, he spoke. “I have this picture because . . . Mabel Joe thought that I’d like to have it.” He paused and waited for her to respond. When she didn’t, he continued. “She said that she thought it would mean a lot to me.”
“Why?” Charlene asked.
“The little boy in the blue necktie is Mabel Joe’s son. She told me that he died in Iraq.” Zack paused again and took a deep breath. “The other little boy is . . . he’s me.”
Charlene took another look at the picture. “These are two little black boys in this picture.” She took a closer look. “Well, one of them is definitely black, the other one could be Hispanic maybe, but he’s not white. So there’s no way he could be you.”
Zack took another deep breath and blew it out slowly. “My mother was African American, and that racially ambiguous little boy in the picture is me.” He leaned forward and placed his middle finger on his eyeball. Slowly, he removed his contact lenses and laid them on the nightstand. He blinked several times, and then looked into Charlene’s eyes. “Does he look like me now?” he asked.
Charlene’s jaw dropped. “You wear blue contact lenses? For the past twelve years, you’ve been wearing blue contact lenses?”
Zack nodded his head. “I’ve worn them since I was about sixteen. I also dye my hair. The natural color is dark brown.”
Charlene carefully sat down on the bed beside Zack, still staring at the picture, and noticing for the first time that the boy had a striking resemblance to her own sons. “I don’t understand. Who are those people in Asheville that you claim as family? I know that Roscoe is not your real dad. But your mom, brother, and sister are as white as you are.”
“Nancy is not my mother. She’s my stepmother. My mother died when I was six months old. My dad married Nancy before my first birthday. When I was three, Kyle was born, and when I was five, Meagan was born.”
Charlene shook her head. “None of this is making sense. Are you telling me that all these years you’ve been passing for white, but you’re not white?”
Zack stared at the floor, as he finally told Charlene his life story. “Yes . . . you see, my father died when I was nine years old. Up until that point, I had been raised as a white kid and I believed that Nancy was my mother. After my dad died, she had trouble making ends meet and felt that she couldn’t afford to raise three kids. Of course, she chose to keep her own, but she sent me to Atlanta to live with my maternal grandmother. All Nancy told me was that my real mother was dead, and that I was going to live with her mother. I can’t even describe what it was like. I stepped off that Greyhound bus expecting someone who looked like me to be waiting, and instead, I saw a woman as big around as a potbellied stove, and just as black.”
“Zack, is that you?” she asked.
“Yes, I am. Who are you? Are you my granny’s maid?” I must have hurt her feelings, because she suddenly got a disturbed look on her face.
“No, boy. I’m your granny. Now get your bag and let’s go,” she said.
Charlene used tissues to dab at her tears as Zack kept talking.
“Living in Atlanta was a major culture shock for me. My grandmother’s house had belonged to her family for many years. Downstairs she had a beauty salon where she worked to make money, and we lived upstairs. Mabel Joe lived next door, and her son was my only friend. The kids used to called me Vanilla Chocolate, and I got beat up almost every single day, until he showed me how to defend myself. It was also the best time in my life. Nancy had never hugged me, or told me she loved me, or that she was proud of me. Basically, she just tolerated me. But I thought that was how all mothers acted. It wasn’t until my grandmother showed me what it was like to be truly loved that I realized what I’d been missing.”
Zack looked over at Charlene and noticed that she’d stopped crying. He stopped staring at the floor and looked over at her as he continued. “Shortly after I turned fifteen, my grandmother suffered a debilitating stroke and had to enter a nursing home. Because she cou
ldn’t take care of me anymore, I ended up back in Asheville with Nancy, Kyle, Meagan, and Nancy’s new husband, Roscoe.” Zack shuddered at the thought of his stepfather. “He used to torture me.”
“What do you mean?”
“He gave me spoiled food, on purpose, just to see me throw up. Then he’d hide things in his hand and beg me to shake it. I never wanted to because I knew he was up to something, but he made me.”
“You mean like a joy buzzer?”
“No. I mean like baby snakes, snails, or fire ants. He got a kick out of watching me scream and try to get the things off me. If I refused to touch his hand, he’d hide them in my underwear drawer or my bed. At night, I would hear Roscoe and Kyle talking about me and plotting the next horrible thing they were going to do to me. The whole experience made me distrustful of people, food, and just life in general. I know it’s irrational now, but it’s who I am.”
“He did all of that just because you were a stepchild?”
“No. He hated me because he knew I was black. When I returned to Asheville, I was a different person. My grandmother had introduced me to new foods, new music, and the love of God. So I listened to Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston, and Donnie McClurkin, while my siblings were playing The Judds and Reba McEntire. I wanted to eat fried chicken, corn bread, and collard greens with sweet tea. But Nancy cooked things like tuna casserole and veal parmesan. I also started to feel the call to ministry, so I began attending a black church like the one I attended in Atlanta, where they sang upbeat gospel music and I could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. Nancy thought I was being a rebellious teenager, and maybe in some ways, I was. But all I really wanted to do was be who I was.”
“Being black is not about the kind of music you listen to or what you eat or even how you worship God. You should know that, Zack.”
“I know that now. But at fifteen, all I wanted to do was embrace being black in the only ways that I knew how. For five years in Atlanta, I had been the black kid who looked white, and then I moved back to Asheville and became the white kid who acted black. Nancy and Roscoe didn’t like my behavior at all, and they refused to allow it. They said that I embarrassed them and that people were beginning to talk. So they gave me an ultimatum. I either had to stop acting black or move out.”
Zack stopped talking to look over at Charlene. He was unable to read the look on her face. He desperately hoped that she understood, so he kept talking. “So I conformed to who they wanted me to be. Nancy suggested that I dye my hair, since she, Kyle, and Meagan are all blonds, so I agreed. The contacts were her idea too. I became the white son that she and Roscoe wanted. The Zack Morton they created finished high school and attended college. The funny thing is, they still hated me. If I didn’t have my faith, I never would have made it through. That’s the one thing they couldn’t take from me, my love for God. They were not happy when I decided to enter the seminary. But I went through the motions for them, and whenever I could, I would travel to Atlanta to visit my grandmother at the nursing home.”
“So they made you pass as a child, but that doesn’t explain why you continued to live a lie for all these years.” Charlene shook her head with disapproval.
“Honestly, I don’t even remember when I made the conscious decision to pass. Maybe I never did. I just grew weary of always having to explain who I was. Roscoe and Nancy made me look white, but when I wasn’t around them, I didn’t act like it. They never knew that I was dating black girls or that all of my friends were black. The last time that I visited my grandmother, she told me to just be the person that I was inside, because the outside didn’t matter. Honestly, I was so confused at that point that I really didn’t understand what she meant. She died a few weeks after that, and I inherited the house that she had run her beauty salon out of. I moved back here and started my first church in that building. By that time, all of the old neighborhood people like Mabel Joe who knew me as a kid had moved away. Everyone assumed I was a blue-eyed soul brother, and I never bothered to correct them.”
“What about Mabel Joe? What happened to her?”
“I honestly don’t know. We had lunch, and she gave me the picture . . . And I told her that you didn’t know about my grandmother or my past, and I begged her not to tell you.”
“Is that all?” Charlene could sense that Zack was still holding back information.
“I gave her $10,000 to keep my secret. She probably took the money and left town, but I swear I don’t know where she is.”
“Oh my God, Zack, you didn’t?”
“I’m sorry, Charlene. I was just so afraid of what would happen if you found out. But I’m telling you everything now. No more secrets.”
Charlene turned to look at him. “What are you hiding in the basement?”
“Nothing . . . everything . . . Sometimes I just go down there to look at my photo album with the pictures of my mother and grandmother. I never knew my mom, but I miss my grandmother so much. I do have a gym and a shower in the basement. Um, but after sleeping in contacts all night, I go down there to rinse them out and put clean ones in. I also keep my hair dye down there too, so I can touch it up and make sure the roots don’t show. I didn’t want to let you or the boys see me doing that. But I was just being vain. I don’t have to do any of that.”
“I wear weave, braids, and sometimes wigs, Zack, and you’ve seen me au natural many times. You did that to keep us from knowing that you were passing for white. Don’t try to sugarcoat it now.” Charlene stood up and went to the closet. She pulled out a suitcase. “I want you to leave. I don’t know who you are anymore.”
“Honey, no. I’m the man you fell in love with. I’m the man you married!”
“I married a blond, blue-eyed white man who told me that race didn’t matter. But obviously it mattered so much that you chose to deny your own.” She went to the chest of drawers and dug out Zack’s underwear and threw them in the suitcase. Next she went to the closet and began packing his pants and shirts.
“Please, don’t do this! You always told me that you married a man and not a color. I’m still that man, Charlene. It shouldn’t matter what color I am.”
“You’re right. It shouldn’t matter, but it did to you. It mattered so much that you’ve spent twelve years hiding it from me. It mattered so much that you spent $10,000 to keep me from finding out. I fell in love with a man of God who believed in honesty. You have been lying to me since the day we met!” She continued putting his clothes into the suitcase.
He begged and pleaded with her, but Charlene was through listening. Finally, he realized his words were no good. “Stop! I’ll do it myself,” he said. Zack took the clothes from her and finished packing. Solemnly, he carried his suitcase down the stairs and left the house.
Chapter Twenty
Brandon knelt in front of his living-room sofa and prayed. He was going out of his mind with fear and worry for Tia and their unborn son. That night of the cast party when he arrived home, he searched the entire house for her, but she was nowhere to be found. He tried calling her cell phone, only to find it ringing upstairs in their bedroom. Unable to sleep, he sat up the entire night hoping and praying that she’d walk in any moment. His mind was filled with all sorts of thoughts. A part of him wondered if she’d left him. His love for Tia was unconditional, but in his heart, he knew she didn’t feel the same way.
Throughout their marriage, he’d tried everything he could think of to make her happy, and he felt that at times she experienced pockets of enjoyment. But he knew it wasn’t enough. He’d hoped that things would change after she became pregnant and that having a child would bring them closer together.
He checked their bedroom and nothing had been disturbed in their closets. As unhappy as he suspected she’d been, he was convinced that she’d never leave him without taking her Louis Vuitton purses or her Prada pant suits. Early the next morning he finally decided to call the police but was angered by their refusal to do anything. An officer with no concern in his voice told Br
andon that adults had to be missing for at least forty-eight hours before a report would be filed. Exasperated, he’d called Quincy in hopes that he’d heard from her.
“The Periwinkle Palace, where your dreams become reality and your reality feels like a dream. How may I help you?” he said, as he answered the phone.
“Quincy, this is Brandon Kitts.”
The surprise almost caused Quincy to drop the phone. In all of the years that he’d been friends with Tia, he and Brandon had never held a conversation without her present. “Hey, Brandon, what’s going on?” he asked cautiously.
“Tia is missing. She never came home from the cast party last night. Please tell me that she’s with you.”
Quincy immediately grabbed a chair and sat down. “What happened? Did you two argue or something? Why wouldn’t she come home?”
“No, everything was fine last night. I left the party with one of the other ministers, but no one knows what happened to Tia. Man, I’m worried sick.”
“Oh my stars! That’s not like Tia at all. Have you called the police? I don’t mean to alarm you, but I know my girlfriend. She wouldn’t leave without talking to me.”
“The police won’t do anything for at least forty-eight hours. If you hear from her at all, Quincy, please call me on my private cell phone. I’m going to be sitting right here all day.”
“I will, I promise. Don’t worry. I’m sure she’s fine,” Quincy said before hanging up the phone.
Next, Brandon called Danita Hyatt in hopes that she knew what time Tia left the party.
“I’m sorry, Brandon, I was so busy consoling Yolanda that I didn’t see her leave at all,” she said.
“Thanks, Danita. Could you ask your security guard if he saw her leave in a car or something?”
The mention of her security guard caused a lightbulb to turn on in Danita’s head. “There was a carjacking the night of the party. My security guard found one of the limo drivers beat up and lying in a ditch. Oh my God, I hope Tia wasn’t caught up in that.”
Faking Reality Page 15