by Samuel Ligon
But trying to believe anyway, promising anything. I’ll do anything. Remembering how her hair grew in dark like mine after her reddish baby hair fell out, thinking that mark on her of Cash would be gone forever, remembering the relief I felt after dropping her at Interlochen—as though I’d gotten away with something—and not needing to make any promises then, because I would deal with Burke alone and Alina would stay safe in Michigan and there would be no way for him to find out about her, but promising now anything—I’ll do anything if you give her back to me. Anything. I will do anything.
But not knowing what to exchange. Anything. And then I think, I’ll take him and You can take me. But just make sure Alina’s okay. Give her to Mark to raise and protect and take care of and love—I’ll believe he can do that, if You make it true. I’ll believe if You make it true, and I’ll take him and You can take me and then give her to Mark and he’ll love her because I’ll believe now and forever. And believing will make it true.
Alina
We walk through town and into the Long Beach Diner, where we order pie and coffee and then lunch, my father telling me about himself and about them together. He’s so different than I thought he would be as he turns into himself, so different than I ever imagined, so handsome and sweet and funny, but also sort of rough, the way he talks and the tattoos on his arms, which he shows me when I ask, telling me the story of each one and finally even telling me he went to prison for drugs, looking at me hard and putting his hand under my chin, saying, “I want you to promise me here and now, Alina, that you won’t ever take drugs—even if you are out of your mind with grief and lovesickness, like I was when your mama ran away with you in her belly.”
I nod and he says, “Say it,” and I say it, because I’ll say anything and it will be true.
And then his chicken fried steak comes, which I’ve never known anyone to order. He has me taste it and tells me how much I’d have loved my granny’s chicken fried steak—that’s the word he uses, “Granny,” my granny—and how there are so many things I have to know, like about my great granddaddy dying in World War II before he got a chance to see his baby daughter, or about my granny Priscilla, what a sweet old lady, and how my dad’s own daddy left him when he was just four years old, so he never knew him, just like I haven’t known him, but how that ain’t the way it’s going to be from now on, because everything’s going to be different now that he’s found me, him and me making up for lost time and being part of each other’s lives from here on out forever.
I ask a bunch of questions and look at him a lot and listen, and he looks at me a lot and listens, and he’s such a good storyteller, giving me a past I never knew I had, so that my whole life, my whole self, seems to become so much larger. He tells me how he found me, how tortured he was by my mother leaving like she did—which I know a hundred percent is true, because she always leaves everyone and everything—her running from him and his desperate search for her, still so in love. He knew in his heart she still loved him too, because you do know that kind of thing, his desperate search for her dragging him into drugs and hating himself and just wanting to be dead, because he felt so empty and incomplete without her. But before all that was their last awful fight, the fight that made her run and lasted for days, when she finally told him she was just going to go on and do it, get rid of me, whether he liked it or not, because it was none of his damn business, my own father, none of his damn business, even though he told her he’d take me and raise me himself if she wanted nothing to do with me.
He tried so hard to convince her, begging her to wait just one more day. He thought if he could stretch it out hour by hour and day by day and week by week she’d surely come to love me as much as he already did—because he could feel me in his heart or soul, even if he couldn’t feel me in his body like maybe she could. But she was just so confused and bullheaded, so set against having me, maybe because of how they were fighting so hard over what she was going to do to me.
That’s what he regretted most, how he fought her and fought her, and how maybe their love got buried in those fights just a little, even though it was still there as strong as ever, but maybe it got hidden a little under so many harsh words about me and my fate, the guiding hand of fate always so mysterious, just another way to talk about the mystery of God or existence or whatever you like, and how he feared that their last fight—the last time they spoke, harsh words lingering over all that was left of them—how he feared those harsh words might have actually pushed her toward doing what he thought she’d done, and how it was all his fault, all of it, tears running down his face in the diner he doesn’t even notice as he tells me it was all his fault.
“No!” I say, reaching out to him and crying myself. “No it wasn’t!”
He takes my hand and we lace our fingers, crying and looking as each other and smiling too. “You tried,” I tell him. “It was her! But then she didn’t even do it.” And I know how lucky I am to be alive. “Maybe because of all the things you said.”
“And because of the love between us,” he says. “Because you were—because you are—a symbol of that eternal love.”
The waitress pours us more coffee without even asking, both of us crying and smiling and laughing, because of how close we’ve become so fast, which feels so perfectly natural. So right.
“But I have to beg your forgiveness, Alina,” he says. “With all my heart,” and I squeeze his fingers and say, “No, you don’t!” and he says, “Please listen, sugar; then you can decide,” and he tells me how he thought—after she disappeared and left him so broken and heartsick and wanting to die and falling into drugs—that she actually had done it, because of how he couldn’t feel me anymore—I was completely gone from him—and how he even thought he knew the moment she done it, this tearing inside, and how I was gone from him then for years, buried under the fog of drugs, but how in prison he became haunted by me, having dreams of me, which he suddenly knew he’d been having all along, also buried under the fog of drugs. He understood then that he’d been trying to bury me all along, to deny my existence, which he hated himself for more and more as the feeling of me became more vivid in his dreams—“And I know that might sound foolish,” he says, “some kind of hippy dippy bullcrap, which is why I didn’t tell no one about it, even as the dreams and feelings became stronger as the years wore on and I came to know for a certainty that you were out in the world alive, and so angry with myself for turning my back on you like I did.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “Because I did that, too. Because I knew you were alive, but sometimes believed her—that you were dead.”
That’s when I know that part of her is probably still in love with him, which is probably why she didn’t love Kyle enough, because she was still so in love with my real dad, even if her pride keeps her from admitting that he was right all along and she was wrong, even if she can’t admit to her love, hiding her feelings for him under her pride, all of it explaining so much about her.
“Does my mom know,” I ask him, “that you know about me now?”
“I couldn’t risk it,” he says.
“But maybe—”
“No, Alina,” he says. “Let’s not go too fast. I couldn’t bear to lose you again.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him, and he smiles his big bright smile at me, and says, “Neither am I, baby. Never again.”
I am completely full with him, the guiding hand of fate uniting us, my father.
27
Mark
I called Liz again, got her voicemail again, and felt the old rush running through me, like I was finally waking—groggy but clearing—from a two-year nap. I made a pot of coffee and sat at Nikki’s table, then walked from room to room. Upstairs in the hallway I looked at a nude of Nikki, something disturbing in it I couldn’t figure out, until I realized Kyle had painted it, and then, weirder and worse, that he’d given her Cynthia’s eyes—blazing from Nik
ki’s face, attached to Nikki’s body. I heard a car pull to the curb and ran down to the kitchen to hide, thinking I could creep out the back door if the front door opened. But there was nothing.
I called Liz again, got her voicemail again. I’d give her what she wanted and she’d set me up with money for Nikki. And if she couldn’t do it—but she would do it. I’d give her what she wanted, and she’d get me what I needed. I knew Nikki should go to the cops, had tried to convince her, but she wouldn’t hear it. She thought her only chance of keeping Alina safe was not going to the cops. I almost called them myself, thought maybe I still would. I heard the screen door open and ducked into the kitchen, but it was Nikki, looking worse than when she’d left an hour ago, washed out and dead in her eyes. She rummaged through a kitchen drawer. “You have to start looking,” she said.
She handed me a school picture of Alina. “She could be anywhere,” she said. “You have to keep your eyes open.”
I took the picture.
“What about the money?” she said, and I said, “I’m working on it,” and she said, “You don’t have it?” and I said, “I’m waiting for a call.”
“It probably doesn’t even matter,” Nikki said.
I tried to sit her at the table, but she couldn’t stay still. She stood in kitchen, running her hands up and down her arms like she wanted to rub the skin off.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Listen,” she said. “If something happens to me.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“But if something does.”
The telephone rang.
She looked at me and then at the phone on the wall.
“Answer it,” I said.
She touched the phone and it rang again and she jerked her hand away.
“Go ahead, Nikki,” I said.
Her hands were shaking.
“Come on now,” I said. “Pick it up.”
She took a step back.
I lifted the phone from the cradle and handed it to her.
Burke
I call from a payphone in a little hall back by the bathrooms, Alina sitting in the dining room composing herself after all the tears we’ve shed. I don’t know how much longer I can keep her from home, and while that might not matter much in the long run, it seems best if I get the money before Nikki starts lying to her about who I really am. I half wish I could hold onto her forever and never undo what I’ve told her, most of which is exactly true, everything about her granny and great granny and everyone else up the line, stories about growing up in Waco, and practically being her father anyway, taking on that guiding responsibility Nikki tried so hard to destroy when she murdered Cash. But knowing, as part of that responsibility, that I have to get the money first and foremost. Even the stories about Nikki and Cash probably 97 percent true, given all his crazy lovesickness and the way she treated him and her name tattooed on his arm.
She answers on the third ring and I say, “Hey, Nikki,” and she says, “Where are you?” in this broken voice, and I say, “It don’t matter where I am. Do you have the money?”
“I’m working on it,” she says. “Where are you?” and I say, “That’s not very encouraging—working on it,” and she says, “No, I am,” and I say, “How much?” and she says, “All of it. Where are you?”
She’s breathing hard through the phone, scared.
“Why’d you kill my brother?” I say, “when he loved you so much.”
“I didn’t kill your brother,” she says.
“Yes, you did.”
“Where are you?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m working on getting the money.”
“You’re a killer,” I say. “And a liar. A whore.”
“I’m working on it right now,” she says.
“Why’d you want to kill my brother’s baby?”
An old lady pushes through the dining room’s swinging door and back into the little hallway, smiling at me. I smile back and press myself against the wall so she can get to the restroom, Nikki saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Cash and me—I never hurt your brother.”
I cup my hand around the phone’s mouthpiece up against my face and whisper: “Is that what you told Alina all these years gone by?”
It’s a perfect moment where everything changes just like I thought it would, all the air sucking out of Nikki’s lungs as she finally recognizes the guiding hand of fate she thought all these years to avoid.
She gets her breath back as I wait, fast shallow things, and says, “Where is she?”
“Safe with me,” I say.
“Where are you?”
“Did you love my brother as much as he loved you?”
“Yes,” she says. “Where’s Alina?”
“Safe with her daddy,” I say.
“With her—no. No, she’s not.”
Her trying to breathe.
“What did you—”
Her suffocating.
“Who she thinks is her daddy,” I say. “She thinks I’m him.”
“Is she—”
“She’s finally got a daddy,” I say. “Killing him wasn’t enough, was it Nikki? You had to take from him even after that, killing him every single day, never letting his baby know his name. Never giving his baby a name to remember him by.”
“I’m getting the money,” she says. “Just—where is she?”
The sound of her strangling. These fast, shallow, hiccup breaths.
“Where—”
“Maybe I’ll keep her,” I say. “How would that be? Teach her who she is. Where she comes from.”
“No,” she says. “I can’t—”
“Shut up, Nikki,” I say. “Just shut the fuck up.”
She moans, the sound of angels celebrating this deliverance of justice, the sound of redemption and righteousness and my brother’s liberation, after all these years suffering.
“What do you—”
“I said shut up, Nikki, and I mean it. I’ll wait all day, if that’s what you want.”
“No, I’m just—”
“There it is again. I say shut up and you keep talking. As if you don’t care a thing about her.”
She struggles to breathe the poison all around her, taking sips and practically squeaking, and I wonder if I can kill her like this, just by making her try to quiet herself as she struggles to breathe the air she’s poisoned with her lies and killing and smearing of my brother and our name.
“That’s right, Nikki,” I say. “Take a nice deep breath. That’s right. And again.”
The bathroom door opens, and I say into the phone, “Just a minute, baby,” and make myself small by the wall so the old lady can get past me, her smiling and me smiling right back. And then she’s gone, back in the dining room, the door swinging behind her.
“Don’t say a word now, Nikki. Not one fucking word,” and I tell her about the guiding hand of fate you can’t ever escape, how destiny makes blood hungry to find itself, and what a goddamn fool she’s been all these years to think she escaped the guiding hand that would come back and punish her for murdering my brother in cold blood, and then making everything so much worse—what a goddamn fool she is—by denying him to his child, denying his child to him, denying the blood, like trying to stop a river’s floodwaters with piles of sand, but the sand turned to poison now, infecting everything as it fans out with the water. Taking my time to listen to her ragged, killing breaths.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Nikki?”
Just those raggedy breaths.
“You can talk now.”
“What do you want?” she says.
“I asked you a question.”
The squeaking sound.
“Do. You. Under. Stand?”
“I—”
“About. The guiding. Hand?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Alina thinks you’re in love with him,” I say. “With me. Is that true?”
“Yes,” she says. “I never stopped loving him.”
“Don’t lie to me, Nikki. I hate a liar like I hate a killer. Like I hate a whore.”
“It is true,” she says. “I never stopped loving him.”
“Say it now. What I called you.”
“I don’t—”
“You’re a killer,” I say. “Say that. And a liar. A whore.”
“I’m a killer,” she says. “And a liar. And a whore.”
The door swings open from the dining room, and there’s Alina herself, sort of putting her hand to her mouth in surprise at interrupting me on the phone in this narrow hallway, then pointing to the bathroom behind me.
I hold up a finger, smiling with my whole face, and it’s a whole true smile, her so beautiful and kind and sweet and deprived all these years. The door swings shut behind her and she stands looking at me, glowing.
“I wish you’d go on and tell her that, Nikki,” I say into the phone. “We’ve been here catching up. I didn’t know how best to go about it, but I couldn’t wait no more.”