by Julie Smith
He didn’t know about the headaches, but it occurred to him his heart was going to be the next to go, and pretty soon, if this kept up. He felt as if he were splitting apart.
He could have argued with her. He could have ignored her. He could have walked past her to bed and dropped into unconsciousness.
Instead, he held out his arms and said the thing on his mind: “Audrey. Ya think you can ever forgive me?”
To his surprise, she moved a step back, something she’d never done in the history of their marriage. She said, “I can forgive ya. I just don’t know how long it’s gonna take.” Her voice chilled him.
“Audrey, I love ya.” Again, it was all that came to mind.
“Ya better sleep in the guest room.” She turned and left him there, staring after her like an idiot.
What he had done was so monstrous that he had every idea she was right— it probably was what was giving him the headaches. Probably it was some feeble attempt of his brain to purge itself of the information it held— to explode and destroy it forever.
Sometimes in dreams, Eddie could hear his own smarmy voice saying the things he had said, and he would wake up clammy, unbelieving. He had to believe he hadn’t said them. Because if he had said them, there was no hope for him as a husband and a father and a human being. Therefore, he couldn’t have said them.
He’d almost convinced himself of it. Could a thing like that give you headaches? he wondered.
“Your mother doesn’t ever want to see you again as long as she lives. After ya left, she cried for a week and couldn’t eat, and then she was sick in the hospital. She’s so ashamed of ya she won’t even let me say ya name. You ever call here again and I’ll track ya down and get ya knees broken for ya.”
It was worse, what he told Audrey— that he’d fought with his son because he found him with a young cousin— “hurting” her, Eddie said, refusing to say more so she’d draw her own conclusions.
For Angie he had only had to make up a fight in which Anthony had said hurtful things about every member of the family, especially her. He cringed now at the phrase, “my fat-assed ugly sister,” coupled with Anthony’s supposed abuse of his parents. Angie was a beautiful girl, but she thought she wasn’t; she was thin, but she worried about her weight; and she couldn’t tolerate injustice. He knew all that about her, and he used it against her.
And for what? Why? How in God’s name could he have gotten angry enough to sink so low?
In his heart of hearts, he knew how— out of stupid pride. He wanted to control his son’s future, and if he couldn’t, he wanted to destroy it. But only for a moment! Only for a millisecond, it seemed now, looking back. Yet by the time he came to himself the damage was done— Eddie was something less than a man, and he’d been living with it ever since.
He heard Audrey sobbing into the night, and after a long time getting his nerve up, he went to comfort her. She jammed a chair under the doorknob.
* * *
Talba had drunk enough wine to cloud her judgment and enough coffee to keep her awake. Her mind was hopping around like a kid with a sugar high. There was Eddie, there were the Bergerons, there was Cassandra. And there was her father.
Eddie, with his off-the-wall question, with his improbable tale of reconciliation (precipitated by her— she couldn’t forget that) had stirred it all up again.
No question it was a riveting subject, but there was so much else. Just now, it wasn’t appropriate to obsess over it. But she had been warned off, and that had to mean something. That was the part that had started to gnaw at her.
She couldn’t work on the case. In all probability, she’d already done too much. Eddie had told her to go home and rest.
Fat chance, she thought. Wired like this, I’d pace all night and keep Miz Clara up.
She wanted to see Darryl. Badly.
Mentally thanking Eddie for her cell phone, she called, but got his voice mail. Maybe he was home, but in the shower. She could try back in a few minutes.
She looked at her watch. It seemed like midnight, but it was only nine-thirty. I could go see Corey, she realized. Even he doesn’t go to bed at this hour.
She thought about it. Corey and Michelle were overscheduled and didn’t enjoy Talba’s company a whole lot, anyway. If she tried to set something up, they’d just put her off.
Because of the wine, perhaps, or because it was time (she thought that later), she took the unprecedented step of driving out to Eastover to see her brother.
Eastover was not the kind of place you went unannounced. Aaron Neville lived there. Several Saints lived there— the football kind, not the martyred kind— and a few well-known politicians. It was said to be nearly equally divided among wealthy blacks, whites, and Asians, but Talba had been there only once, and most people she saw were African-American. It was a gated community in New Orleans East, an area not otherwise known for its affluence.
The guard asked if Dr. Wallis was expecting her. For a wild, panicky moment, she thought simply of turning around and pretending it never happened, but she said no, tell him his sister was there. Admission approval came so fast she realized why— it was going to be an instant replay of the scene with Aunt Carrie. Quickly, as she picked her way to her brother’s house, she called on the cell phone: “Nobody’s sick. Everything’s fine. I just need to see you.”
“Sandra! It’s the middle of the night.”
“Omigod. Are you in bed? I didn’t think it was that late.” She thought, This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. “Listen, this can wait. Really. I’ll call you later in the week.”
Corey said, “You’re here. You might as well come on,” and she could hear the tiredness in his voice.
He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, hastily thrown on perhaps. He wasn’t even wearing his glasses. Michelle, standing in a half-dark kitchen in silhouette, wore a satin robe that showed Talba something she hadn’t known. She was so taken aback she gasped instead of making her manners.
Corey was trying to calm an overexcited dog. He looked up, alarmed. “What is it?”
Michelle took a step forward into the light, and the curve Talba had seen straightened a bit. She was smiling. “I think she thinks I’ve put on weight.”
“Oh, that.” Corey smiled back at her, a caressing, intimate smile that made Talba feel as if she were peeking in their bedroom. He strode forward and took her hand, his shaved head shining. “Well, you have.”
“And there’s a lot more to come.”
They turned away from each other and toward Talba, as brides and grooms do when the ceremony is over. They were grinning like hyenas. “Congratulations,” she said. “This is a little bemusing.”
Michelle frowned. “How’s that?”
“I just wondered when you were planning to tell us. When the kid goes to first grade?” She sounded so petty she hated herself, but she spoke on her mother’s account.
They weren’t even slightly daunted. “Matter of fact,” Michelle said, “we called Miz Clara tonight, but there was no answer. We wanted to have you all over this weekend.”
Corey said, “Don’t tell her till we do, okay?”
“Of course not.”
Michelle said, “Well, why don’t we all sit down?”
“Actually, if you don’t mind… ”
“Oh, you need to see Corey alone? Sure. I’m dead tired anyhow.” Michelle was so damned cooperative, even that was irritating. Talba never had liked her, and she didn’t want to start now.
She didn’t like her because Michelle was so patently a trophy— the perfect figure, the show-stopping face, the near-white skin (this part embarrassed Talba); most of all, the fact that Michelle didn’t work, did nothing all day but arrange flowers, it seemed to Talba. And now this Stepford-wife routine.
She’d have liked for Corey to marry someone with a little more edge, some bite, maybe. A brain or two. Someone more like the women in her own family. And now there was going to be a mini-Michelle. She wasn’t exactly jumping
up and down.
Talba said no, thanks, she didn’t need anything, and when Michelle was out of earshot, Corey said, “You been drinking?”
“Wine with dinner. Why?”
“You smell like you bathed in it.”
He was making her mad. It was obvious this whole damn thing was a mistake. Here she was in her brother’s “great room” with its cathedral ceilings and its sleek Italian furniture, and that alone made her uncomfortable. Then he had to come at her like that. She stood up. “Maybe I better just go.”
The dog wagged its tail, as if it liked her, anyhow.
Corey looked at her a different way, a gentler way, like he was beginning to see her distress. He said, “What’s wrong, little bird?” and that did her in.
She sat back down as if struck. “You did call me that.”
“Well, yeah. I did. That supposed to mean something?”
“I don’t mean now. You did when we were kids, didn’t you?”
He looked a little hurt. “You don’t remember?”
“I just did. You dressed up like Big Bird, didn’t you?”
“Best performance of my life. You mean you don’t treasure it every day of your life?”
She laughed, suddenly delighted with him, seeing a side of him she’d almost forgotten about. Maybe the baby had softened him up. “I remembered today.”
“And you just had to come over and shout a belated ‘bravo.’ Well, now, I appreciate that.”
“Corey, something strange is happening to me. I think I’ve forgotten a lot of stuff.”
“What’s strange about that? You’re getting old is all. We’re all losing brain cells.”
It wasn’t like him to kid around like that and yet… it used to be. He really was more like his old self than he’d been in years.
“Listen, I want to know something. Do you remember…” She stopped, unable to get the word out.
“Do I remember what?”
“Our father.” It came out in a dull monotone, barely audible.
He sank back on the white leather. “Woo. What are you thinking about? Why would you bring up something like that?”
Suddenly she was angry. “Corey, you should hear yourself. Since when is a person’s father ‘something like that?’ Since you’re about to be a father yourself seems like you’d have a little more understanding.”
His forehead was rumpled up like a bed. “I hear you.” He seemed to be trying to stave something off, keep it out of his own mind. “I shouldn’t have said it that way. But I can remember things you can’t… and you should count your blessings.”
“But, Corey, I want to know” Whiny, she thought. Ever the whiny little sister.
“You were two when he left. For practical purposes, he wasn’t your father at all. You’ve got no reason to do this.”
“He did something really bad, didn’t he?”
Her brother stretched, putting his feet on a glass coffee table. He looked exhausted. “I don’t know. I don’t know that he did. He drank and helled, I guess. He led Miz Clara a merry chase. Maybe there wasn’t much more to it than that.”
“Then why doesn’t anyone talk about him? You just said you could remember things. What things, Corey? I need to know. Do you realize I didn’t even know his name before yesterday? Isn’t that a little weird? Having a father so bad you don’t even mention his name in the family?”
“If you didn’t know his name, it’s your own fault. It’s on your birth certificate.” He was back to his old supercilious self, the Corey she knew so well.
“Corey, if I mention him, Miz Clara goes through the roof.”
“Well? She was married to him— what do you expect?”
“Aunt Carrie too.”
“Look, all I can remember is being miserable. All of us being miserable. I can’t really remember details.” He shrugged and looked very sincere. She knew he was lying. “I can’t help you, Sandra.”
“Corey, please. Please.” She hadn’t dreamed she was going to beg. “I really need you to try.”
“Why?” he said. “Why all of a sudden?”
“Oh. Well, that’s a good question. Something really strange happened to me. I went to a funeral. Now, I’ve never been to a funeral in my life and yet, it felt like I had. I could remember things about a funeral, like I knew I’d been to one. And there was something else— I mean, something really weird.”
He was sitting up straight now, had lost his wary look. Something she’d said had piqued his interest.
“Well. I started crying. I mean crying and crying and crying, like it was my own funeral, the minute they started playing the first hymn.”
He started laughing.
“What?”
He was roaring, out of control.
“Corey, what the hell is wrong with you?”
“I’m sorry.” He was coming around, starting to pull himself together. “I’m sorry, really. It’s just that… that music. It’s happened to me a million times.”
She was offended. “Well, I hope for your sake, you haven’t been to a million funerals.”
“Only four or five. But I cried at every one of them.”
“Cried how much, Corey?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“I mean, a little bit or a lot?”
“Oh, you know. Teared up.”
“Listen, Big Brother, I’m talking buckets. The Mississippi River.”
“Oh, please.”
“Okay, the Atchafalaya.”
To her surprise, he actually cracked a smile. He almost never laughed at her jokes. In fact, it always seemed to her he disapproved of them, considered them somehow a sign of her frivolous nature. “Look, you must have been under pressure.”
“Okay, don’t take me seriously. Nobody else has. But I’m telling you something. Something happened to me at that funeral. I had some kind of flashback. I’m not a baby anymore. I have a right to know what happened.”
He crossed his arms and stared straight ahead, lips together as if honoring a long-ago promise to keep them that way.
I’ll wait him out, she thought. I’m not going to blink first.
And finally, still not looking at her, he spoke to the wall. “I guess you do,” he said. “I guess you do.” He spoke so gently he hardly sounded like her brother.
Fully five minutes had passed by then, so much time she couldn’t remember what he was responding to. “I do what?”
“You’ve got a right to know.”
Her stomach did a somersault. A bullfrog or something leapt into her throat and clogged up her breathing. “Tell me,” she said, and was surprised to hear no sound at all. She knew she had moved her lips.
“I’ve got to get a drink.” He rose, went into the kitchen, and started rattling ice cubes. “You want one, too?”
“No, thanks.” She felt icily calm. Detached. She just sat there while he made himself a tall cold one, not thinking anything, not seeing anything, not moving, suspended in space.
He was drinking scotch, she thought; anyway, something tawny. He took a sip, and she could have sworn he made a face, as if he didn’t really enjoy it. She realized he wasn’t much of a drinker, that she must be putting him through a version of hell if he felt he had to do something he didn’t like in order even to talk. But she rationalized that it had to be done— she couldn’t continue to live like this.
When he could look at her, he said, “Look, he’s dead.”
“Dead?” It was what she was looking for, but it seemed anticlimactic. Was this all there was? “What’s the big deal if he’s dead?”
He gave her a smile that was just on the edge of goofy— the scotch was doing its work. “I guess we still think you’re the baby girl.”
“So you’re trying to protect me?”
He gave her one of those tiny neck shrugs that are meant to be self-deprecating, but, to Talba’s mind, often signal a guilty conscience. “Kind of silly, isn’t it?”
“Corey, it just doesn’t f
ly. I never even knew the man. How’s it going to hurt me to know he’s dead?”
Corey gulped down a big swallow. “Miz Clara’s proud; she didn’t want you to know.”
“To know what? The way he died?”
He was silent.
“What happened? Jealous husband shoot him? Something like that?”
He couldn’t meet her eyes. “Something like that.”
“Well, what, Corey? Tell me the story. You can’t just leave me with one little shred of it. Listen, you want to know something really, really weird? I have this feeling. I’ve got this feeling I know a whole lot about it— I’ve just forgotten it.”
“Oh, Sandra, hell! He died of an overdose, okay? Yeah, you’ve got memories— but you just remember the funeral, that’s all. That’s why you cried when you went in that church— it’s that simple. But know one thing, girl, and know it well— if Mama finds out I told you any of this, she’s going to kill me. I wasn’t even old enough to know what I was saying, and she made me promise I’d never talk about it with you. You know how hard it is to go back on a promise to Mama?”
She thought that once, a long time ago, she might have seen him wear a look of anguish like the one he had on at the moment, but she couldn’t place the time. She could only place the feeling, and it was desolation. She touched him, something she seldom did. “Oh, Corey, I’m sorry. I had to know.”
He nodded, once again looking at the wall. “I know you did.”
“Mama’s some lady, isn’t she? Trying to keep something like that a secret. Half the daddies in our neighborhood probably died of overdoses.”
“A bit of an exaggeration.”
“It’s not exactly stigmatizing. That’s what I’m getting at.”
“Mama’s old-fashioned.”
“Yeah, but something’s wrong here. Mama doesn’t lie. Now, let me think about this.” Miz Clara had some kind of pact with herself— with Jesus, she might have said. She might dance around the truth, but she’d never tell an outright lie.
“She tell you he wasn’t dead?”
“Let me think. No, not exactly. She said something like, ‘wish to God he was.’”