What Simon Didn’t Say

by Joy Copeland

  “I didn’t know that Nikki liked dolls.”

  “Neither did I. Do you remember that I wasn’t into dolls? Maybe Wonder Woman and action figures but not dolls. I don’t even think Nikki knows who Wonder Woman is. But Elliot mentioned something about American Girl dolls when he was here and promised to buy her one for her birthday. I think the real reason she’s interested in those dolls is because he brought it up. She loves her daddy.”

  “Now, Zoie, Nikki’s making up for lost time. And so is he.”

  Zoie shrugged. “I guess.”

  Zoie’s relationship with Elliot had changed a lot from a year ago. She could now speak his name without going apoplectic. The two had achieved a détente of sorts. Elliot had wiggled his way back into her life, for Nikki’s sake. He’d made several visits to DC, ostensibly for business, but he had actually come to see Nikki. Nikki even had a picture of her baby sister, Bridget, stuck to her mirror. There was such a resemblance that it could have been a picture of Nikki at the same age. And Nikki was excited about the baby and ready for the role of big sister, even though she was just learning what it was like to be a daddy’s girl.

  With leads from her former colleague in New York, Zoie landed a position at a small law firm in which the atmosphere was both congenial and family friendly. Dylan Ross was now a frequent visitor to the Brandywine house. He was still on Crayton Foundation’s Board, but Zoie told him that she’d rather not be kept apprised of the happenings at her former employer.

  Biscuit, an almost full-grown retriever, entered the room and settled on the floor, next to Zoie’s leg. “She only comes to me when Nikki and Queen aren’t around,” Zoie said, stroking the dog’s dark coat. After the previous year’s upheaval over the dog, she’d actually grown fond of the animal. As for Frances Woods, Biscuit feared her walker, which worked out since it kept the dog from underfoot.

  “What’s in the envelope?” Frances Woods asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Zoie answered, remembering what she was holding. “I was moving things in the upstairs closet, and I pulled on a box on the top shelf. Its contents spilled out…old pictures.”

  “Huh,” Frances Woods said. “I forgot about that box. I probably haven’t touched that stuff in twenty years.”

  “Yeah, and I brought down twenty years of dust. There are pictures of me, Mom, you, and Grandpa. There were even a few with my father. I thought he didn’t take pictures.”

  “There are a few around.”

  Zoie pressed the envelope to her chest as she thought about her mother, a woman who didn’t get to see her forty-seventh year. “You’ve got pictures of my cousin Harriet and my great-aunt Sylvia.”

  “Yeah, all those folks are gone,” said Frances Woods with a sigh.

  “Grandma, if you want, I’ll bring the whole box down. But I really wanted to ask you about this one.” Zoie removed an old picture from the envelope. “I don’t know this person. He doesn’t look like family.” Zoie handed the picture to her grandmother.

  It was a picture of a young man dressed as if for church. With a hat in hand, he was standing in a formal pose, one arm resting on a Greek column pedestal. He was dark skinned and had a tall thin build. The black-and-white photo was yellow and cracked where it had been folded, before being pressed flat between the cardboard in the envelope.

  “Folks always said he looked like Nate King Cole,” Frances Woods said as she stared at the photo, almost dreamy eyed.

  Zoie was confused by her grandmother’s reaction. “You mean Natalie Cole’s father?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I remember Nat King Cole from that video Natalie Cole did with him. The two sang together. But he was dead when they made that video. Brought back to life through the wonders of technology…okay, but who’s this?”

  Frances Wood put a hand to her mouth as she looked at the photo. Then she said, “His name was Gabriel. Gabriel Simon. He was my very first love.”

  “Wow, Grandma. Let me see him again.” Zoie took the picture from her grandmother. “Was he someone here in DC before you met Grandpa?”

  “Well, I guess you should know the story. It doesn’t make much difference now. I think all the main characters are dead. May they rest in peace. My telling you can’t hurt anybody. The truth has its way of coming to light, as painful as it may be.”

  “Grandma! What are you talking about?”

  Frances Woods explained how she’d been forced to leave North Carolina because she was pregnant with Gabriel Simon’s child. “It was bad enough that I was with child without being married. It wasn’t like it is today. My father was a good man, but back in those days, like many folks with lighter skin, he was what we called ‘color struck.’ He wanted to keep his family’s line on the lighter side. Like you’re not white but you’re better than the darker folks. And if you can’t be white, it was better to be the closest thing.” Frances Woods turned to stare out the window but continued to talk. “I’m not saying it was right, but back in the day, a lot of good people felt that way. Some still do today.”

  Zoie sat stunned and speechless. She’d never heard her grandmother talk so frankly about race and color. Zoie knew about being color struck. She heard what her grandmother said, but she didn’t want to believe it. Who could be raised in Washington, DC, without being aware of the not-so-subtle color line? The practices of light-skinned superiority had infected Howard University’s past and had been prevalent on DC’s Gold Coast, where affluent blacks shared education, position, and a lighter skin. And who didn’t know about Spike Lee’s School Daze. Yes, Zoie was well aware of the issue. Although her grandmother and grandfather were lighter than most—her grandmother a creamy-ivory tone, her grandfather Calvin a rose beige—she’d always believed her family had been spared the color-struck curse. She thought that that brand of prejudice was something that happened in other people’s families—not hers. Her mother was the color of peanut butter, and her father was a few shades darker than that. Her own complexion was what folks called a permanent tan, the envy of her milk-white friends at Columbia, who had tried to achieve the desirable tone by baking in the sun. The thought that her grandmother’s family, her family, carried the curse made Zoie cringe. She’d always considered being color struck as nothing short of self-hatred and black-on-black racism. The whole thing disgusted her.

  Deep in thought, Frances Woods turned toward the window. She didn’t notice Zoie’s distress. And distress it truly was.

  Zoie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. But a sickening feeling enveloped her. It was as if she’d just received news of the death of someone close. It was a feeling of shock, loss, and sadness. Loss of what was left of her innocence. She’d been naive about her family. After a long silence, she finally asked, “Grandma, did you feel that way?”

  Frances Woods turned to her granddaughter. “Of course not. I loved him.”

  “Then why didn’t you and Gabriel just run off together?”

  Frances Woods sighed. “In those days I didn’t think that way. It was more complicated…I was an obedient daughter. I was young. I wasn’t brave enough.”

  “So Mom was Gabriel’s child? And you came to DC and had Mom, right?”

  “Yes, and I married Calvin. He knew my situation, and he married me anyway. I couldn’t ask for a better husband. Bless his soul.”

  “Then what about Gabriel? Did you ever see him again? Did he ever get to see his child?”

  Frances Woods frowned. “No, but we corresponded a bit through his sister. I told him that he had a daughter, and I let him know where we lived. His sister told me he’d come to DC to find us. But then…” She shrugged, looking quite pitiful, like a child lost in the woods. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I never heard from him again.” Her old eyes filled with tears. “His sister wrote that he never returned home. He disappeared…just disappeared.”

  “Wow! How weird. Did you go back to North Carolina to see your family?”

&n
bsp; “Yes. And I asked about him. I thought one day I’d run into him. But he disappeared from the face of the earth. I always thought some ill had befallen him.”

  “Did Mom know about him?”

  “No, I never told your mother. I didn’t want her to feel differently about Calvin. It wouldn’t have been fair to him. She was the only child I had and his only child too. He loved her dearly.”

  “Yes, and I know Mom loved him. Maybe she didn’t miss anything,” Zoie said with tears in her eyes. “If it had been me, I’d want to know.” Zoie pondered the picture. “So this is my real grandfather…Gabriel Simon, huh. He reminds me of somebody, but I can’t think who.”

  Frances Woods shrugged and turned back to the window. Zoie left the room and ran upstairs.

  In her room Zoie let her tears flow, tears of sadness, anger, shame, and disgust. She was sad that her mother never had the chance to know her real father. Sad for her grandmother, who had to forgo her true love. Still, she was angry that her grandmother had complied with her family’s wishes. Where had the grandmother she knew been, the one with a backbone? Zoie continued to feel physically ill. She was ashamed. Color racism practiced by her own kin. She’d done nothing wrong, but she felt that somehow her family’s past tainted her.

  She wanted to look at Gabriel Simon’s picture again, but in her rush to get away from her grandmother, she’d left the photo. In her reverie it was doubtful that her grandmother would have let the picture go. Something kept telling Zoie that she’d seen the man in the picture before. He did look a little like Simon, the mysterious homeless man, who’d provided counsel that summer. Maynard’s soft-spoken friend. But it couldn’t be Gabriel Simon. That made no sense. Gabriel Simon would be ancient—well, at least as old as her grandmother.

  She kept the fortune-cookie strips that Simon had given her that summer. She had collected the dozen or so prophecies, some more significant than others, and kept them in a plastic sandwich bag. Zoie wiped her tears and went to the drawer where the plastic bag was stuffed next to a jewelry box. She hadn’t looked at those fortune-cookie slips since the incident at the Shelter. Her fingers sifted through the papers and pulled one out. The message was no longer handwritten. She pulled out another and then another. They all looked the same—run-of-the-mill paper strips found in fortune cookies, complete with lucky lottery numbers on the back.

  “Huh,” she said after checking them all. “What? How?” Had she been dreaming? Had Simon, the mystery man, wiped out the evidence of his existence? Or had she been hallucinating when she had read the strips of paper? She didn’t know what to believe.

  She sank back on her bed and stared into the distance. Who could she even talk to about this? She’d only mentioned it to Tina in the very beginning but no one else. She didn’t talk about the prophecies, because she didn’t want anyone to think she was crazy. Maynard would understand. One day she’d have to find Maynard again. Yes, he would understand.

  Chapter 55

  Choices

  Hugging her knees, Zoie sat on the landing bench, waiting for Dylan. The bench was the very one she’d hid under as a child. She’d always felt her hiding place to be the safest place in the world. Safe from the loud, ugly squabbles between her mother and father. Safe from her mother’s call to do chores, when she’d rather daydream. After they moved into the Brandywine house, Nikki quickly claimed that spot as her own, squeezing into its tight space with the dog. Zoie no longer fit in that space under the bench, but she no longer needed to hide. It was time to face life and all it had to offer.

  From her staircase perch, Zoie watched the front door, pondering the mystery of the morphed fortune-cookie strips and the bombshell about her family. She wondered whether deep down her mother knew that Grandpa Calvin wasn’t her real father. Her mother must have questioned why she’d turned out darker than both of her parents. Her grandmother was courageous. After all, she and Grandpa moved into the house when there were few if any other blacks in the upscale neighborhood. What would she have done if she’d been in her grandmother’s shoes? Back then societal expectations were different. Could she have bucked a stern father? She had to give her grandmother some slack. She couldn’t judge her based on today’s norms.

  Zoie’s thoughts shifted to Dylan, the new man in her life. He was fun and really sweet and good with Nikki. After the Jahi debacle, she was hesitant to reengage. Who or what was she getting involved with? So she had Dylan investigated. The investigation was Tina’s suggestion. Leave it to Tina to walk the line between spiritual enlightenment and practicality.

  “I wish I’d checked out Yoga Bert before going to Florida,” Tina confessed. “Bert, isn’t he the Sesame Street character? All I know is that anybody named Bert should be checked out as a matter of course.”

  “And he would have been revealed as kinky. Then you might have gone your whole life without discovering yoga porn,” Zoie said. Mentioning yoga porn tickled their funny bones. They had a good laugh.

  For a meager sum, Zoie got a pretty good idea of just whom she was hooking up with. The PI’s report confirmed that Dylan was indeed single, a graduate of Virginia Tech and MIT. He owned a small tech firm in Northern Virginia and lived alone in a modest, modest by McLean standards, two-million-dollar townhouse. He had a hefty net worth and no police record. Not even a traffic violation. He’d grown up in Virginia Beach in a middle-class family, not unlike her own, except his family were white and weren’t churchgoers. The PI’s report even provided a serious picture of Dylan in his senior year at First Colonial High. Yes, Dylan checked out squeaky clean. Zoie hoped that Dylan would never find out that she’d vetted him. There’d be no more crapshoots when it came to her heart. Her already-short supply of trust was exhausted.

  Zoie did a mental inventory of her past relationships. Elliot was a mistake, except that mistake brought her Nikki. She’d had a few fleeting relationships since Elliot. Nothing serious. Then there was Jahi.

  Even though her relationship with Jahi had been short lived, it was entirely different. There was a mystery about him. A danger. He didn’t fit the mold of her usual picks: the starchy business types, the preppy graduates who’d attended the best schools, or the metrosexuals schooled in proper wine-and-cheese pairings and who knew all the best restaurants. Nor was Jahi like the ambitious workaholics she’d dated—the ones intent on setting the world on fire and racing for the bucks on the multimillionaire track.

  Being with Jahi had been scary and, at the same time, exhilarating. He had undeniable magnetism, sexual or otherwise. He was strong willed but still very needy. Perhaps that was it. Was it his neediness that attracted her? Whatever it had been, she’d fallen for him pretty hard. And what had she reaped for opening her heart? Betrayal. Indifference. Damn near killed.

  She never received a real explanation of Jahi’s part in the Mahali debacle. Over a year ago, she asked Charles, who was still with Lena and still sniffing around, “What’s the deal with Jahi?”

  All Charles said was, “They don’t have enough to pin on the brother. The US attorney’s not interested in wasting time on a weak case.”

  A weak case? So Jahi was never charged. She’d run into him a few times during Tarik’s trial. Tarik was convicted of murder in Maryland and of assault and battery and drug-trafficking charges in DC’s federal court. The details of the kickback scheme remained the unsettled piece. With Ray Gaddis dead and Tarik in prison, to conclude that piece seemed less important. Certainly the Crayton Foundation wasn’t pushing for more bad press. For them Ray’s involvement was an embarrassment. They just wanted it all to go away. But pursuing that case would either exonerate Jahi or set the stage for bringing him up on charges for bribery, financial malfeasance, or a possible civil suit for negligence.

  Lena’s theory was that Jahi’s head had been in the “do-gooders cloud” and that he’d believed the stories about himself and had gotten caught up in the self-importance trap. And because he hadn’t been paying attention, he let Tarik get away with murder—l
iteral murder.

  Whether Jahi was innocent or not, Zoie figured that Jahi had left her “out to dry.” He’d turned out to be just another self-absorbed man-child, a more down-home version of Elliot, who shirked responsibility when it came to relationships. She shook her head and tried to push thoughts of Jahi away.

  Dylan, on the other hand, embodied all the qualities any sane woman would include on her guy-related wish list. His hefty bank account, though not a priority, was a definite plus. He was intelligent, funny, and a decent cook. Geeky but not really. And the sex wasn’t bad either. He wasn’t as skilled as other lovers she’d had but trainable. Most importantly, though, he’d made it clear that he cared about her. Having a man who treated her well was a top requirement.

  From the safety of her bench, Zoie tightened the grip on her knees and rocked. Still, with all of Dylan’s good qualities, something was missing. She couldn’t quite put her finger on the thing that was supposed to fill that vacant space. Perhaps she was being gun shy about the relationship and overthinking things. Despite her liking Dylan as much as she did, perhaps the passion on her side just wasn’t that strong. She remembered what her grandmother had said about Grandpa Calvin: “At first I didn’t love him, but over time the love came.” If things continued the way they’d been going, maybe that would be the way things would go with Dylan. She tried to convince herself that a life with Dylan wouldn’t be just settling. But a part of her kept asking, or would it?

  Zoie spotted movement out on the porch. She knew her grandmother was expecting Ida Bascom. Through the front door’s side panel, she spotted Dylan. He was a little early. She bolted down the stairs to greet him. Biscuit came running from somewhere, wagging his tail and waiting for her to open the door.

  Dylan was dressed in his track gear. “Ready for brunch?” he asked, kissing her on the forehead. Normally he would have embraced her, but his arms held two brown bags marked Whole Foods. Zoie’s head reached to his upper chest. It had been that way with all the men she dated.