A red-faced girl in a pinafore yelled that she didn’t want to. Her mother, a woman in her twenties who seemed prematurely aged, yanked the girl by the wrist. The girl yelped. I wanted to reach out and say something. But even though I had stopped walking, I ludicrously continued to float away thanks to the conveyor belt. The mother looked right at me, as if to say, What do you think you’re looking at?
We got off the belt at a four-way intersection. I smelled sugar, butter. Hope transmitted on an air current. Cakery Royale was close.
Just as we arrived, someone called my name. A woman with light brown skin and sleepy eyes. Zora Suhla Smits. I’d only seen her a couple of times since the first meeting I crashed at the Musée. She wore a skirt suit. I introduced her to Nigel and Araminta. “Nice to meet you,” she said. Nigel said that the pleasure was all his without moving his lips. I explained the sign thing to Zora. She signed something back.
“You have lovely children,” she said out loud.
“This one isn’t mine,” I said. “She’s on loan from the pound.”
Araminta growled.
“Lovely.” Zora grimaced. “Can we talk for a few moments?”
“Sure,” I said.
Nigel signed that they were going to the arcade in the third branch. I was about to tell him we didn’t have time, but Araminta poked out her tongue. Then she grabbed the back of her own collar and led herself away. Nigel grabbed his collar and did the same.
Zora lobbed small talk at me. “Aren’t we having fine weather?”
“More or less,” I bunted. I was still trying to decide where Zora fit on the leadership scale. Was she an indomitable firebrand like her grandmother or the kind of malleable black figurehead that history preferred? She was tallish but young and somewhat ill at ease, as if she’d only just grown into her shell. I realized then that she was probably only in her early thirties, but an old soul. Yet I knew enough about history to recognize that the descendants of great people are rarely great themselves. Despite having some of the visual and verbal tics of their forebears, many people in Zora’s position simply swam in their ancestors’ wake, often for profit or D-list notoriety.
We walked into the bakery. A lanky man in a baker’s coat offered free samples of bread pudding in disposable cups. I wished Penny were with me. She loved free nosh in disposable cups. The sweet shop had made my and Penny’s wedding cake. We’d been hooked ever since.
“Riley tells me you’re soaking up the philosophy well.” I had been working out of the satellite office several evenings a week, after my firm hours, distributing pamphlets or writing drafts of manifestos for Jan, Marie, and Riley to pick apart. My job was simple: Draft position papers that argued for a nation without divisions. Instead of “out of many, one,” BEG thought of America as a big bowl of milk into which tiny drops of chocolate, caramel, dulce de leche, coconut, or tamarind could be diluted out of existence. “Out of many, only one.” Try as I might, I wasn’t good at adhering to their fiction as I would have liked. I kept inadvertently mentioning multiculturalism, diversity, facts, history, reality. Once I mistakenly inserted the phrase “white supremacy” into a pamphlet. I thought Riley would rap me on the knuckles with a ruler.
“Funny,” I said. “I thought Riley might tell you to lock me out.”
She forced a smile. “Do you know how movements change the world? Through coalitions and a belief that we can make progress, if we use all the tools at our disposal. My grandmother was an agent of change through her persistence and eloquence. When she spoke, everyone heard her. She made a difference through sheer force of will.”
“Those were different times,” I said. “Seems like you’re doing well under the circumstances.”
“That’s kind of you,” she said, “but not true. I’ve run BEG for years, and I have to admit we’re in park. Maybe it’s because I was educated up north. Or maybe it’s because I’m too light-skinned.” She seemed to be staring at my cheek when she said this. “The point is I don’t care about your personal motivations. We need you.”
“Me?” I asked.
“You’re a talented speaker, and people in the right places are aware of you, comfortable with you. We haven’t had an official spokesman in years. However, I would understand if you can’t do it, with all your obligations. You have a job, and this is only a volunteer position. Plus, the glare of the spotlight can be taxing. I’m sure also you’d have to clear channels with your—”
“I’ll do it.” I hadn’t imagined that my plan would work so well. But here I was. My path to winning over Eckstein was opening before me.
“Really?” Zora asked.
“I’m happy to help.”
“What a pleasure to hear. Show up for this on Thursday morning.” She handed me a glossy push card. For all of BEG’s shortcomings, they could print the piss out of propaganda. The card featured the organization’s pastel color scheme as well as their emblem, a stylized, palm-up hand. Ribbon cutting at the Trueblood School. Eleven-thirty A.M. Truce Garden dedication. What on earth was a Truce Garden?
A tremendous thud rocked the building, and I grabbed a post for balance. Several of the megavideo panels flashed pure white light, which died down after a moment. The people on the panels—the people by the main entrance—seemed to be attacking each other.
No. They were running for their lives.
Far down the hall, shoppers stormed through the entrance doors. They ran toward me. I began to turn tail, but—Nigel and Araminta. Where had they gone?
Someone shouted my name. “Sir, your cake.” The tall baker held a black cake box by its pink ribbons. I grabbed it and ran.
I didn’t use the conveyor. I probably passed Zora along the way. But I didn’t notice her. I didn’t notice much of anything other than intermittent groups of shoppers pointing up at the video panels along the way and, occasionally, at me. I was a good runner. I could jog a couple miles on a cool day without killing myself. But I didn’t normally create the spectacle that I did now: a black man, balancing an oversize cake box on one hand, running against the tide. I was really asking for it. Security would be on me any moment.
I cleared a stand of kiosks and paused at the glass exit doors, which were veined with cracks and hard to see through. Wedging my foot into the gap, fingers reached in. Together, with the unseen people on the other side of the door, I opened it. A mass of smoke and desperate shoppers pushed in on me. A baby wailed. I was trapped, suspended in a crush of bodies. It was bad outside.
Smoke. Dust. Sirens in the distance. A thud nearby. A pile of something on fire—the LePieu statue, rendered to slag. I felt the heat of it even fifty yards away. Shopping bags and purses everywhere. A plastic Crooked Crown tiara broken in half. A dark pool of liquid. I stumbled away from the scrum and into the clear.
Children scampered like in a panicky game of hide-and-seek. A boy held his arm at a strange angle. That kazoo band! A man lay on the ground, clutching his side. Strangest of all, scraps, like plus-size confetti, green, red, and black, were everywhere.
“Go inside!” a woman in a gray one-piece, mall security, said from just beyond the molten statue. “Terror!”
A thin figure in a hard, brown mask, like something from an African arts and crafts show, shoved the guard to the ground. The figure pointed a revolver at the guard. A black van screeched, hopped the curb, and stopped. The side door slid open. A brown hand beckoned from the van’s interior. The figure leaped inside. The van pulled away.
A news helicopter hovered somewhere overhead. I suddenly became aware of high-pitched voices behind me.
“Dad!” Nigel and Araminta were standing inside the mall doors. I hustled over and drew them into my arms. They both seemed rattled but otherwise okay.
“Are you crazy?” Araminta said. “Why’d you go out there?”
I gathered the children in my arms and squeezed them. “Thank god you�
�re safe,” I said.
Nigel patted my arm and pointed at misshapen letters that were spray-painted on the wall. A massive graffiti tag: ADZE.
21
We agreed not to tell Penny. What I mean to say is that when we got back to the Bug, I made Nigel and Araminta raise their hands and swear to keep their mouths shut. There were a billion police cars at the mall by the time we rolled out. Several more helicopters had arrived. Even the police department dirigible. This would be a thing. It would be on TV and the Internet. People at work would bring it up at the water cooler.
I didn’t want to get into all that. We were fine. But if Penny knew we had been so close to danger, she’d be terrified. This was no way to celebrate One Cent Day.
In the driveway at home, I went over our cover story.
“But—” Nigel said.
I raised my palm to stop him. “No ‘but,’ ” I said. “Now, tell me.”
“We left the mall before it happened,” Nigel said. The sun was setting. A streetlight popped on.
“And?” I asked.
“We heard about it on the radio driving home,” Araminta said.
Penny opened the side door of the house, the one that overlooked the driveway. She held herself. Mama and her childhood friend, Aunt Shirls (no relation) in her horn-rimmed glasses, looked on from behind.
“Break,” I said. We got out of the car. I collected the cake box from the hood trunk.
“Happy One Cent—” I said. Penny motioned for us to hurry.
“They’re back.” Nigel pointed.
Termites, like tiny, possessed snowflakes, swarmed around the streetlight.
“Quick,” I said. “Don’t let those bugs in the house.”
The kids ran up the steps to the door. Penny clutched them to her body. She said she was happy we were safe.
I opened the cake box. “We were long gone,” I said. Without letting go of Nigel and Araminta, she popped the back of my head. I hardly felt it. But the concept hurt. She knew.
“Don’t protect me.” She pressed the children close to her body, covering their ears with her hands. Nigel was so tall now that this technique wasn’t as effective as it used to be. His body-side ear was almost over Penny’s shoulder.
“Look,” I whispered. My head buzzed. My teeth—all of them—were on fire. “They’re not that fragile. Everything is fine. Nobody got hurt.”
“Three died,” Mama said.
“Kids,” Aunt Shirls grabbed Nigel’s arm. “Little ones.” Aunt Shirls had a way of making the most awful facts sound mundane, so it was no surprise that she made awful facts sound like personal condemnations. Or maybe I was just being paranoid. I’d just taken my second Blue Geisha of the day, inadvisably, probably.
“Oh,” I said. “How?”
The women eyed me. They knew. I felt as if my feet had sunk a quarter inch into the hardwood. Like I might continue sinking until I suffocated in clay.
“Don’t tell tales,” Penny said. “You were there when it happened. I saw you on national TV for a moment—”
I leaned against the doorjamb, suddenly too exhausted to argue. “You’re right.”
“You were standing on a message written in—” Penny whispered.
I raised my shoe, the bottom of which was covered in someone’s blood. I removed the shoe and threw it across the neighbor’s fence. “I’m sorry,” I said. I limped to the kitchen table and put down the cake box.
Penny looked afraid. “I was worried about all of you. They say a group called ADZE was behind it.”
“It can’t be them,” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why not?” Penny asked.
“They used to give out fruits and veggies to all the kids in the Tiko,” Mama said. “They didn’t attack folk.”
“They all got locked up anyway,” Aunt Shirls said. “Or blown up.” She was right, of course.
Depending on who you asked, ADZE were community heroes or bigoted terrorists. They were a big deal until they organized a protest and tried to tear down the LePieu statue with a stolen backhoe. It was a federal crime to damage monuments that had been erected before the turn of the millennium, and the FBI arrived on the scene to arrest the whole crew.
But things got out of hand when armed statue supporters threw a grenade at the protesters. ADZE believed in armed self-defense. There was a shootout. People, including a federal agent, died. The feds chased the surviving ADZE members back to an inner-city house and dropped a gas bomb on the neighborhood not long after. The fire from the explosion spread to nearby houses recently bought by young white professionals. Over 170 people died in the incidents, including a white family fresh from Idaho. The City, state, and feds did investigations. Congress held hearings. Ultimately, ADZE was blamed for the whole mess, and the City put fences and checkpoints all around the Tiko, even though only a couple of the ADZE protesters lived there.
Police harassment made other black neighborhoods practically unlivable. With the national media pushing the story that sleeper cells of black revolutionaries were lying in wait all across the country, it was only a matter of time before other towns enacted similar measures. None of the original statue supporters were charged with any crimes.
“We tried to let you know what was going on,” Araminta said. I made a face that must have registered my confusion. She held up her device. The news channel, 444, played a loop of a masked, dreaded man in a white suit firing a weapon over the crowd. The news item must have appeared before we were even out of the parking lot.
“How about some cake, Dad?” Nigel said.
“I’m not feeling well,” I said. “I think I’ll lie down.”
“What’s that buzzing?” Aunt Shirls asked.
“They coming inside the house,” Mama said. We’d had the doorframes and windows weatherproofed to keep out the termites. But a line of them were streaming in from a gap in the doorjamb.
“Quick. Turn off the lights,” Penny said. Termites loved lights, craved them. Making the house dark was one way to make them change their minds, to convince them that life was better somewhere else. Araminta hit the switch, and suddenly only the planes of my loved one’s faces were visible, odd facets like Mama’s eye whites, Aunt Shirls’s glass lenses, Penny’s chin, and the clean side of Nigel’s face. A termite flew past my nose.
The candles on Penny’s white cake hadn’t been lit, but it was still the brightest thing in the room.
“We’ve got to cover it up!” I yelled.
But it was too late. The swarm descended.
22
Displays of affection do not necessarily come easy to me. Yes, when Nigel was still in his crib, perhaps it was easy to press his soft feet to my mouth and kiss them. Or lift him up by the underarms and nuzzle my nose against his belly as he giggled. But as he grew and began to look more like me in cant of body and cadence of walk, I found myself withdrawing. One day when Nigel was about seven, I picked him up from school—St. Moritz, a truly wonderful school—on Brighton Lane.
Nigel climbed into the passenger seat, his eyes reddened.
“Well, spit it out.” I leaned across to clip his seatbelt on.
“This kid said I was a cow.” It was farm day in class. The students had taken a virtual tour of a farm. At one point, the class came upon a field of amber-colored grain. A spotted cow grazed. Some genius child made a connection between Bessie and the mark on Nigel’s face. I didn’t want to scar Nigel with an overreaction on my part or act as if the teasing would hurt any less in the future. He would need a tougher skin to survive.
“That’s silly.” I started the car. “Ignore that kid, okay?”
“Yes,” Nigel said.
“We’re having cheese ravioli tonight.”
He smiled weakly. We drove off. Having settled the issue, I placed it in a box at the back of my mi
nd, closed the lid, and removed the skeleton key. I had a federal court brief to write, and if it didn’t go over well, I’d take the blame. We’d lose the account.
We were nearly home, stopped at a red light. Vehicles flowed through the intersection. A scooter. A sedan. A tour bus. Maybe if I applied third circuit state court precedent, I could create a procedural pathway that would—
Nigel hiccupped. Not a hiccup. His head was ducked between his shoulders. He had been crying the whole time, silently. He covered his face when he noticed me watching him. Such grace. Suddenly, Nigel seemed so small, as if the Bug’s bucket seat might snap shut on him like a Venus flytrap.
I swerved the car into a gas station at the last major intersection, just three or so turns from the house. I reached out but found I couldn’t touch him. How had I become one of those fathers who were deathly afraid of showing any sign of tenderness? What was I doing to us?
I had been ignoring my son’s predicament. Instead of engaging with his pain, I did everything to minimize it. The kid who called Nigel a cow wasn’t unusual. Other kids cast similar aspersions, bullied him like it was their jobs. More would in the days to come. But I’d heard of a way to help people like Nigel. I knew what I had to do.
I put the car in drive and took us home to Penny.
* * *
—
Several nights after One Cent Day, Zora sent a message reminding me that I was to represent at City Hall. This was the first thing she said about the event since our brief encounter at the Myrtles, so of course I forgot all about it. We were eating dinner.
We Cast a Shadow Page 16