Breece grabbed my arm and shook his head. “It won’t do any good. He is what he is. Now watch.”
The boy’s cheek had a smear of dirt on it, but for that, and the calculating brown of his eye, he could have been on his way to school. He looked around, paused his gaze at our bush, and suddenly stepped away from the man; a quick stab of shame slapping his face as he met my eyes through the leaves. His patron began to move off immediately, his own senses alert to the boy’s instant apprehension.
With a quick look of obstinate determination, the boy shot out his hand with a light touch on the man’s forearm. He turned, a childish look of trust and yearning on his face, and nuzzled against the man’s hand in a coquettish move of assurance.
The trick was helpless against him; against the soft, low, breathless kiss he put on his fingers. He rubbed the silk of the boy’s lower lip with his thumb and allowed himself to be led into the lair.
In fifteen minutes the man returned to the mouth of the alley, his face slightly disheveled and his hand quaking as he realigned his clothing and hurried off.
“Quick,” Breece said as he motioned me up. He set off at a brisk pace in a direction opposite the trick and suddenly whirled and began walking casually back toward the alley, chiding me with a look as I straggled along behind him in perplexion.
Breece’s motive was still unknown to me when the boy stepped from the alley, the paper daisy clutched tightly in his hand; his eyes searching the bushes we’d just left. His expression had changed from a sensuous ache into a countenance of desolate need. He glanced at us, a quick sneering dismissal churning his features, and let his eyes fall back to the paper daisy in his hand.
He opened it slowly, so as not to tear its careful fabrication, and read it.
As we passed I looked into his eyes and saw, not the bane of cynical indifference, but a debilitating sorrow built on self-reproach. I could have screamed at Breece. I’d seen this a thousand times over at Sanctuary, and that thought only solidified when I watched a tear slip from this child’s eye, mix with the dirt on his cheek, and fall thick and brown beside my foot.
Breece saw it too and immediately grabbed my arm and propelled me along until we rounded the nearest corner.
I stopped and jerked my arm free. “God damn you to hell!” I screamed at him.
Breece put a finger to his lips, tapped at it and studied me.
“Love isn’t an object in a window, Charles. It’s something hidden in a shadow, discovered in a damp corner where you’d least expect it.”
“Christ! Then why not tell him that?” I demanded.
“Anything you put in front of that boy would be rejected. And if not rejected, then it would be misconstrued as an advance.”
“He’s too young…” I began.
“Is he?” Breece interrupted, unflustered by my determination to make it true. “He’s a thief of emotions, Charles. You’ve seen them before. He will take and take and take and never give. And never apologize for it, not even to himself. His tears are his only tribute to the pointless guilt he racks himself with, and for that reason he cannot give.”
He put a gentle hand on my shoulder and looked at me earnestly. “He’s a hostage to his own humiliations, Charles. He fears anything better.” He looked deep into me, pushing his message into my very soul. “Our perception comes from inside. We see the world as we see ourselves.”
“What about your notes?”
He shook his head sadly, dropped his hand and looked off into the distance. “He’s gotten used to his disappointments, Charles; draws them on himself. Unhappy if he is happy, satisfied with being sad. He has yet to learn not to cling. He’s afraid of being alone and yet also afraid that companionship equates with failure and more pain.”
He took me into his gaze again. “And so he returns to the same trough of desolation again and again; drinking the same bitter cocktail that has comforted him this long time.”
“Like me,” I answered, dropping my gaze to the sidewalk.
“Like you,” Breece answered quietly.
Chapter Sixteen
February 1991
He came in slowly, his street rags gone and replaced by a crisp jeans and a white shirt; his hair and beard were trimmed down to professional perfection. If not for the weathering on his hands and face, I wouldn’t have recognized him.
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me as he helped me to my feet. “I see you’ve settled right back in,” he said with a shake of his head.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, blotting my lip with the handkerchief.
“Ending this,” he said, looking directly at Charlotte. It was a challenge, nothing more, nothing less. Charlotte recognized it as such and raised a single amused eyebrow, a small grin on her face.
Jarrel snorted. “It’ll end when this bitch dies,” he said in an explosion of bitterness. But there was an abyss of unvoiced emotion behind those words and we all saw it written in large letters in his face; a hungering for belief, a deep yearning for conclusion, and when he looked at Breece, a surge of the cruel resentment of abandonment.
Sylvia stepped from the doorway and somehow enfolded the big man protectively in her embrace. She glared at all of us, daring us to toss even a hint of cruelty his way.
“Will it?” Breece asked him gently. “Will it, when you don’t even know why?”
Jarrel’s face grew dark and hard. “There is no forgiveness,” he said, encompassing all of us.
Breece nodded and let out a long sigh, he would not be forgiven his childhood mistakes either. He looked at me for a long moment and turned to Jarrel.
“No forgiveness; maybe just the same understanding; the same “why” you offered Charles.”
Sylvia looked up at her husband, saw the hesitation there and nodded to him. “Okay,” he answered after a space of silence.
The movement beyond the door caught my attention, as it did Penny’s. We were all in the room now, or so we thought until Breece called out over his shoulder.
“Manuel,” I whispered as he entered. He was almost a decade older, like I was, but he still looked the same. Loose white New Orleans clothes, a hard brown body, and the deep dark gypsy features of his Latin heritage. He must have been freezing in this weather.
“Charles?” he asked as he looked at my vagrant’s attire.
“Oh Christ,” Charlotte snorted. “Did you bring Penny a nigger boy too?”
My rage found its focus again as I turned on her. “I know your pathetic little secret, bitch. So shut the fuck up.”
Charlotte’s eyes twinkled, but she said nothing.
I turned back to Breece, nodding at Manuel as I asked him my questions. “How? Why?”
“There was no place else to go after Mrs. Massey’s, Charles. I knew you’d come back here.” He glanced toward Manuel. “Finding him was the easy part. Now, the hard part, letting go, is up to you.”
Chapter Seventeen
February 1991
(One week prior)
I met Breece and Cleat by the railroad tracks, a small breath of winter wind rustling the dry grass as we walked the rails. We watched the sky, commenting on the winter storm we saw coming in, when Breece suddenly proclaimed that he saw the virtue of forgiveness within me.
I stopped and looked at him, dumbfounded that he could voice such hypocrisy after nearly five years together on the streets. He knew everything about me, and yet he stood here about to give me the same lecture that had made me walk away from so many others.
“Loss is a lot like truth, Charles. Eventually it clears all obstructions. It has to. Loss is inevitable. We all lose someone at some time. If we think otherwise, we’re just inventing someone to blame.”
“I have someone to blame.”
He looked at me for a full moment. Then turned and started walking down the tracks without another word.
Two days later, when I walked through the gates of the cemetery for our morning chat, Breece stood in front of Lisa�
�s stone with a full bouquet of real roses. I was shocked, even more so when I approached and saw the tears streaming down his face.
“Nor’easterner coming in,” I said awkwardly, staring up at the still dark clouds.
“We’re leaving,” Breece said, his voice as small and flat as the crisp air around us.
“We are?”
He nodded remotely and turned his eyes to me. “It’s time to end this, Charles. It’s time to move on. I know being with me and tossing all these petty taunts at your family has made the harshness of life less real somehow, but it’s time for you to go.”
“Where?”
He looked at me with such tenderness that my defiance nearly crumbled; until he spoke. “Go back to New Orleans, Charles. Go back to Manuel.”
“Have you lost your fucking mind? That was ten years ago. He’s probably had hundreds of fags run through his bedroom by now. How could you possibly suggest that?”
He looked at me. “Because I know you, Charles. I know the draw you put on people. But it’s time to stop being afraid of being loved and understand that you’re worthy of being loved.”
“This is such a load of shit. I’m tired of hearing these bullshit soliloquies and postulations. This is my life, not some fucking drama.” He was dismissing me; nothing more than that, nothing less.
“The life you turned into a drama,” he answered back. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
“I don’t think so.”
He touched my arm lightly. “Please.”
I followed him, stopped, followed him again, then stopped again, determined to go nowhere. Eventually he got me to the destination I had avoided more than sought in all the years we’d travelled the streets together. Robert’s grave.
“Why?” I asked him. “Why’d you bring me here?”
“It’s time, Charles. Charlotte’s dying.”
“How the fuck could you know that?”
He sighed and sat down beside Robert’s grave caressing it with as much tenderness as he’d showed for Lisa’s.
“I’ve been watching Charlotte for years, Charles. She’s my step sister. Jarrel is my brother.”
His face shadowed but he didn’t look up at me. He kept rubbing his hands along the cold contours of Robert’s stone.
“Charlotte was the person that called Lisa’s husband and told him about us. It exploded into a fiasco that led to Lisa’s racing home to her parent’s house to explain. She never made it,” he added quietly.
“But, why would Charlotte….”
He looked up at me but didn’t answer. Instead he explained how he had tried to stop my confinement, how he had talked to the doctors, Mrs. Massey, even his brother Jarrel. Robert’s suicide had halted all of it.
“I talked to Dr. Smith at the last place,” he told me.
“Caufield?”
He shrugged. “I guess. I gave him Henry’s name and the details of your past. I also found out that Charlotte had told him that I had molested you. That’s why I couldn’t get in to see you myself.”
“I thought Caufield convinced Henry to meet me.”
“He probably did,” Breece said. “I just put them together.”
“So you’re the one that found him, not Caufield?”
“Yes.”
“So you did all this, let me follow you around like a puppy for the last five years, and now you want me to go?”
“No. I want you to let go. I want you to grow the fuck up, move on with your life, and stop killing yourself over some adolescent puppy- love.”
“Is that what you’re doing with Lisa?”
He didn’t answer me. His eyes were weary and half lidded, and his face sagged with the weight of all he’d divulged. He would never leave Lisa. No matter what he said; no matter what he did. He’d never leave her. He couldn’t. The dead don’t break your heart but once.
I left him caressing Robert’s gravestone; its stark naked shape muted by the winter clouds. My determination was now an impenetrable fire of revenge. Before she died, they would pay, all of them.
Chapter Eighteen
February 1991
(3 days prior)
So many things that had not made sense over the last five years on the street with Breece now became clear. Clear, but no less troubling.
At some obscure point between bread crusts to rats and Breece’s final revelations at Robert’s grave, I had decided that my need to find and punish Robert’s mother was just as necessary to me as punishing my own mother. Debra Massey’s complicity was just as genuine as Charlotte’s, and there seemed no reason that she should be allowed to escape my vendetta any more than Charlotte should.
She wasn’t hard to find. Three days after my conversation with Breece I returned to Potsham Park and retraced my steps back to Robert’s house, all the while wondering why I had not done this sooner. But I didn’t expect to be so rudely and quickly placed on the spinning edge of reality just by the mere glimpse of it.
It wasn’t the white picket fence, or the iced over columns; nor was it the smiling old lady who huddled on the front step flapping her arms against the cold.
It was the boy. A boy so much like Robert, though a few years younger, that I fell against the snow dusted fence and held on for life as I stared.
My stumble did not go unnoticed. Both their smiles faded and were replaced by masks of trepidation as the boy turned to me, a silent silhouette of youth and innocence shining bright against the snow that fell around him.
Mrs. Massey stood up immediately. “Robert, come away from there,” she called to the boy as she started toward the gate.
The boy’s fear hooked onto the edge of his grandmother’s warning and drew him away from me. He slipped behind her and then went to stand next to one of the columns, as if seeking refuge from my harsh and unbelieving stare.
“What do you want?” Mrs. Massey barked at me as she stopped and hovered beyond the fence line.
I tore my eyes from this younger version of Robert and glared at her, my breath frosting in the chill air.
“You’re Robert’s mother?” I demanded. “Debra?”
She looked surprised, cautious and concerned. “His grandmother. Now go away before I call the police.”
“Not him!” I screamed, leaning across the fence and pointing at the boy. “The son you murdered!”
She flinched as my words struck her and recoiled a step, her arms pin wheeling slightly for balance. Even from a distance I could see the haunted look of vacancy creep in her eyes. But I could not accept it.
“Grandma,” the boy whined uneasily.
“Go in the house, Robert. I’ll be there in a minute,” she said without turning to him.
Her posture did not relax when she heard the door close behind her, but I stood and folded my arms across my chest.
“Yes. It wouldn’t be good for your grandson to know how you murdered your own son, now would it?” I sneered at her.
“I…” Her mouth gaped open and silent tears began coursing down her cheeks.
“Was it so bad, Debra? So disgusting to know that someone loved your son more than anything on this planet? Maybe even more than his own mother? But you knew that, didn’t you, Debra?”
Her hand came across her mouth, shaking its liver spots across her lips. She wavered a bit then crumpled into the snow her grandson had packed down in his play. I put my hands back on the fence and leaned over it as I watched her tears make small holes in the snow.
“Of course you knew,” I taunted her. “You looked right into my eyes. You saw how much I loved him and you threw it away anyway. All because it didn’t fit with your pathetic values,” I spat at her. “Were they worth it, Debra? Worth the life of your one and only son?”
She only cried, a violent shudder of a response.
“Nobody told me how he did it, Debra, only that he was gone. Tell me, what method did you drive him to, huh? What method does someone who feels absolutely unloved use in their own house?”
&nb
sp; The silence grew with each of Debra’s sobs.
“He hung himself,” a voice finally answered from the porch.
I looked up, recognizing one of Robert’s sisters, but not remembering her name. She was a younger version of her mother, with eyes just as pained.
“He hung himself,” she said again, “and we’ve lived with that every single day of our lives. Is that what you want to hear, Charles? How we suffered?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I want to hear.” I looked directly at Mrs. Massey. “He was the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met, and you killed him.”
Robert’s sister shifted her gaze behind me and I turned to see Breece approaching rapidly. He took one hard look at me and pushed through the gate to help Mrs. Massey to her feet.
“I’m sorry, Debra. Are you okay?” he asked her. “Patty, take her in and have her lie down a while,” he added as Robert’s sister, whose name I now recognized, came down the steps and took her mother’s arm.
We watched them walk up the steps together and disappear inside the house, Mrs. Massey’s grief seeming to grow with each step before a wail of despondency was finally choked off behind the oak door of her entryway.
“Do you feel better now?” Breece demanded as he whipped around and slammed his way out the gate. “Do you?” he screamed in my face, the muscles on his neck flaring with rage.
I said nothing; the smirk of contentment I wore said all I needed to say.
He turned away from me in disgust and stomped off.
“Who is she to you Breece? Who is she really?” I asked, my voice filled with its own contempt.
I thought he was about to come back and beat me with whatever he could lay his hands on when he turned around, but he took one long look at me and sighed; his anger suddenly deflating down to silent weariness.
He glanced toward the house before he answered. “She’s Lisa’s sister, Charles; her only sibling. Lisa was Robert’s aunt. Does it all make sense to you now?” he asked before he turned and walked off into the increasing snowfall.
The Value Of Rain Page 13