Without Faith

by Leslie J. Sherrod

  And from the way she fussed over his plate and patted his shoulders every time she passed by him, she was making sure that he knew that she knew it.

  Everyone at the table was laughing, smiling, sharing jokes and stories of good humor—including my mother, who I realized had probably sought shelter at Yvette’s for the same reason I had avoided calling her house phone. Too many people were over there waiting to tell us how screwed up our family was.

  I looked at my screwed-up family: my nephews and baby nieces making a mess of their food and bickering back and forth with each other; my mother doing her best to put up a front like she actually was accepting Yvette’s life disasters; Yvette laughing as loud as a chainsaw; the new man at the head of the table who clearly didn’t realize what he was getting himself into. I looked at the family who surrounded me and I never felt more clearly both the absence of Roman and the void left empty by Leon.

  “I have to go,” I whispered. Nobody heard me. Nobody even looked my way as I stood and headed to the kitchen to scrape my uneaten plate. I was opening the front door to leave when my mother called after me.

  “We’re going over Mother Spriggs’s home for dinner this evening.”

  I started to say something back, but she had already returned her attention to the table, laughing at another story, this one being shared by Damari. I stepped out on the porch, pushed through the throng of Skee-Gee’s friends, and was almost at my car when a voice stopped me.

  “Aunt See! Hold up! Wait!”

  It was Skee-Gee. I waited for him to finish high-fiving his boys on the porch before coming to talk with me. I could not get any words together, but I didn’t have to. He was the only one with anything to say.

  “I didn’t tell anyone this, but I thought you should know. I saw a plane ticket to California in Roman’s bags. That’s all.” He turned around before I could explore any more with him. I watched as he fist-pounded a few more friends before disappearing back into the house.

  When I got back in my car, I had only one thought, one destination in mind.

  But I had to make one stop first.

  Chapter 30

  East Biddle Street was closed about a half a block down from the side street where Silver was hiding.

  Fire trucks.

  The smell of smoke permeated the air. Lights from huge red engines and smaller rescue trucks flashed in a dizzying array of red and yellow beams. I drove as close as I could up to the yellow tape that had been draped around what looked like the entire block and parked my car behind a police cruiser.

  “What happened?” I walked up to a uniformed woman who was milling about the perimeter.

  “Stand back,” she shouted as my stomach turned over in knots.

  The equipment and emergency vehicles seemed to be concentrated on the narrow side street off of Biddle where I had been forced to drive down not even twenty-four hours earlier.

  “I need to know what happened.” I tried to remove the panic in my voice as the officer ignored me. I noted small crowds of people standing around, shaking their heads, whispering among themselves. I went up to a group of three women: one older, two younger. A girl of about eight to ten years old twirled on her toes around them.

  “What happened?” I asked quietly.

  The eldest of the group narrowed her eyes and studied me before responding. “Fire ’round on Teamont Street.” The other two ladies looked nervously back and forth between the speaker and me.

  “Do you know which house?” I asked, though I felt like I already knew the answer.

  “The middle one, where Ms. Mona lived. Firebombed.” All three ladies tsked and shook their heads.

  “Daggone shame. Ms. Mona ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody,” the youngest of the group snarled. The others looked at her with slight alarm before looking back at me.

  “Are she and . . . and David okay?” I took a risk to verify that my suspicions were right. The immediate quiet from all three of them told me I had made a mistake. These ladies did not know who I was, didn’t know why I was there. None of the people on the sidewalks around me were talking to any of the police officers or fire fighters around them. What made me think they would talk to me, a complete stranger in their neighborhood?

  As if to confirm my line of thinking, the little girl who had been twirling around the women suddenly stopped and stared at me, her beads clanking together at the pause of her spinning.

  “Lady, we ain’t no snitches. We ain’t getting our house firebombed too!”

  “Hush, Neeka!” The middle woman grabbed her by the ear and all four of them skirted away. I felt like a spotlight had shined down on me as it seemed like nearly everyone standing around the street had their eyes on me.

  Snitches.

  Somebody had told on someone and the result was a firebomb.

  Nobody else was going to be saying anything to anyone. There was no point in me even trying. As I walked back to my car, I tried one last time to get some info from the police officer who still stood at the perimeter.

  “Excuse me, do you know if anyone was hurt, or . . . or killed in the fire?”

  The officer, a short black woman with wide hips but an otherwise lean frame, glanced at me. For a second, I thought she would shoo me away again, but instead she answered me. “Nobody died. Only sent to the hospital for minor injuries from what I understand.”

  “Oh, good.” I exhaled. “I’m so glad to hear all three of them got out okay.”

  “Three?” The officer turned to face me. “Just two. There were two people who were rescued.”

  “Okay, thank you.” I turned away sharply, wanting to get out of there before I had more people staring at me. I could feel the officer watching me the entire time I walked back to my car. As I drove away, she was still facing my direction.

  I needed to find my son, still had a plan to do so, but right now, I needed to get to that detective. I did not have his card on me, but I remembered seeing written on it that his office was located on Baltimore Street. The only police station I knew on Baltimore Street was the main headquarters, right next to The Block. With what felt like an entire neighborhood watching my every move, I sped away to the police station that sat right next to Baltimore’s infamous red-light district.

  “There’s no one here by that name,” a man in blue told me. I’d waved him down at the entrance of the headquarters, and after he consulted with another uniformed officer, he came back to me to break the news.

  “Detective Sam Fields?” I asked again. “He’s kind of short, has a lot of bumps on his face.”

  “Sorry, ma’am, nobody I know of with that name works here, and believe me, I’ve been working here for over ten years. I know everyone in this building.” He gave me a smile.

  “Okay, thank you.” I gave up, not sure what else to say to anyone. I wanted to speak directly to the detective so that I would not have to give any back story. I decided to wait until I got back home to pull the correct phone number off of the business card he’d given me. I obviously had the wrong address in mind.

  As I walked back outside, I looked to the right of me, where The Block began. It was now late Saturday morning. I didn’t know the “prime time” hours of strip clubs and adult toy stores, and wasn’t sure that I wanted to find out; but I wanted to get more info about Silver. I walked to the edge of the street, stopping on the corner, trying to decide what to do, where to go.

  “Looking for a job, doll?” A skinny, middle-aged white man with stringy blond hair and coarse stubble on his face was leaning against the brick exterior of the club closest to me, puffing on a cigarette and looking at everything but my face. He smelled at a minimum of alcohol and marijuana and his eyes were glazed red.

  I thought about where I’d just come from, where I’d scared an entire neighborhood into silence by simply asking the wrong questions. I could not afford to lose an audience here.

  “You know where I can find one?” I wanted to laugh. The man had to know I wasn’t serious. I
was certain nothing about my black slacks and Mary Jane shoes screamed exotic dancer, but maybe he was too stoned to notice.

  “Heard they need a couple new girls down there.” He pointed to one of the places.

  I kept thinking on my feet, kept playing along. “Yeah, I guess they do, after what happened to that young girl . . . What was her name? Silver or something.”

  “That’s right, both of them. Silver and Gold.” He shook his head and took another drag of his cigarette.

  “Yeah, Silver and Gold.” I shook my head, my heart beating faster. Silver and Gold?

  “Tragic what happened to Gold, but now Silver? Too many animals out here.” The man shook his head along with me.

  “Yeah, tragic,” I replied, though I had absolutely no idea what we were talking about. I was beginning to feel more uncomfortable. “Oh my, look at the time. I’m gonna have to come back later.” It was such a weak getaway line, but the only one I could think of. The man did not seem to notice my pathetic ploy to leave.

  “All right, doll, be careful out there.” He threw his cigarette on the ground, crushed it with the tip of his boot, and turned toward an open, darkened doorway.

  I hightailed it out of there, wanting no more than to get home, follow up on my plans to find Roman, and jump in the shower.

  I wanted to get the slime and sleaze I felt off of me.

  Chapter 31

  It was a little past noon when I finally walked into my front door. I did not bother to take off my coat, or drop my keys or purse down into a chair. Instead, I marched straight to my room, straight to my nightstand drawer.

  I had already rummaged through it when I’d searched for the letter from Portugal, which I later found under Roman’s blanket.

  Now I was looking for something else.

  The plane ticket.

  I’d never told Roman about the cross-country trip we made to California when he was a newborn nestled in my lap. I had discovered some activity back then on a joint account I shared with RiChard and tracked him down at a commune near San Diego. Although he had not called or written following the birth of our child, I guess a part of me naively believed that if he simply saw Roman, saw both of us in person, he would see how much beauty we held, how much help we needed, and that he would decide to come home with us.

  It took me fourteen years to realize that was what I had been hoping would result from our trip.

  RiChard didn’t even hold Roman, a fact I never told my son.

  I’d held on to the plane ticket as a testament to our fruitless journey and wrapped it up in a copy of the account statement that had triggered the whole search. I’d buried both in my nightstand drawer years ago. For the second time that week, I dumped the entire contents of the drawer onto my bed. I flipped through papers, dug through boxes, checked and double-checked odds and ends.

  There was no sign of either the ticket or the account statement.

  “Roman, what are you doing?” I went to his room and plopped down on the side of his bed, accepting that my son had gone on a wild goose chase based on incorrect and incomplete information. He had a fake ID with his father’s name, his paternal grandmother’s home city, and Kisu’s picture on it. He had an old plane ticket and a bank account number that were both over sixteen years old. Who knew what else he had?

  The thought scared me.

  My son, my sixteen-year-old son, was somewhere across the country seeking answers without me. I didn’t know what scared me more: what he was doing to find him, or what he would do once, or even if, he found the answers he sought.

  My continual check-ins with the Las Vegas police department assured me that the authorities were doing what they could to help locate him. I considered flying out there myself, but my heart told me that Nevada wasn’t his planned destination. Vegas had been a means to an end, I was certain.

  It was hard to find someone who did not want to be found. The fact that Roman had not called me said that loud and clear. Like father, like son; the thought stung. I was not worried that something would happen to him. I just wanted him home. I wanted him to want to be home.

  Now.

  I looked around his room. All the trophies, the tidied and folded piles of clothes, the “number ones” all over the place.

  Number one.

  I recalled that the e-mail from the Portuguese journalist had also been e-mailed to a user with the name “RomanNumeralOne.”

  It was a stretch, a long shot, I knew, but I went ahead and entered the words into a search engine box. My son was out there and I could not control his whereabouts; but if he had some kind of presence in cyberspace, maybe I could find it and somehow pin him down.

  “Please, Jesus,” I pleaded, and then pressed search.

  Pages—hundreds, thousands, over a million Web site results—came back.

  “No.” I collapsed my head into my hands, rubbed my temples, and started scrolling through the list of sites. I clicked on some that looked promising, and avoided others that looked like they were waiting to spring out a computer virus on an unsuspecting user. I kept clicking on results, hoping, praying that something, anything about my son would surface from those search words, Roman Numeral One.

  An hour and a half later I’d made it through the sixty-third page of results with no luck. My anxiety level was beyond a ten, and I knew that I needed to find another way to search for him.

  I did not feel like I was moving anywhere sitting in front of a computer screen. I shut it down and called Laz. He answered on the first ring, but not with a hello.

  “Hey, babe, I haven’t forgotten you, but I’m covering a firebombing in the city. I’ll call you back when I can.”

  And that was it.

  I stared at the phone in my hands, trying to figure out why I had not been given the decency of a hello or good-bye or even a chance to say a word. And what was up with the “babe”? I was about to get myself worked up over the entire non-conversation, but the word “firebombing” jumped out at me.

  I’d meant to find that detective’s card to call him and fill him in about my encounter with Silver and her mother, Jenellis Walker.

  If I could not save my son at the moment, maybe I could save someone else.

  Chapter 32

  The card was where I remembered it to be, on the granite countertop that made up my kitchen island/ breakfast bar.

  “See, I knew I wasn’t crazy.” I shook my head, studying the address. It was the same one I’d gone to, the address for the police headquarters on Baltimore Street. “I guess you don’t know everyone,” I murmured out loud as if the officer who’d directed me away from there could hear me.

  As I dialed the number, I thought about what I wanted to say to Detective Sam Fields, where to begin, how to explain why I had not called him earlier. Someone’s life was possibly in danger, and even I knew I had been dragging my feet.

  My reasons for not making this call sooner were simple. My son had run away. I was confused by Jenellis. And Silver had begged me not to.

  In the chaos that had become my life, the only thing that felt clear to me was trusting Silver. Something about her vulnerability made me want to believe her.

  And she had begged me not to talk to the police.

  I planned to do so anyway, but wanted more information first. Now, with the firebombing happening at the very house where I had talked to her, I knew I could not delay reaching out to the detective. I felt like an irresponsible citizen, an uncaring person.

  I did care.

  I’d just had a lot going on.

  As the phone began ringing, it occurred to me that I had not followed up on a lot concerning this Silver business. I had a vague recollection of Leon saying that the detective and his crew had turned their attention off of me to chase another lead. What was it? And the number 1502? Both Jenellis and Silver looked terrified when I brought it up. What was its significance?

  And Silver and Gold?

  Maybe the biggest reason I had been avoiding the situation
was because I did not like the helplessness I felt trying to understand details that made no sense.

  The phone was still ringing. Maybe the detective didn’t have voice mail, I considered, as I was about to hang up. My finger inched toward the “end call” button when someone finally picked up.

  “Vito’s Pizza. Delivery or pick-up?”

  “Huh?”

  “Vito’s Pizza. Delivery or pick-up?” the pleasant-sounding young male voice asked again.

  “I’m sorry, I dialed the wrong number.” I hung up, checked the number and dialed again, and the same person answered again.

  “Vito’s Pizza. Delivery or pick-up?”

  “Okay, I was trying to reach someone but this clearly isn’t the right number. I’m sorry. Thank you.” I hung up again.

  I was still holding the phone in my hand when it rang. The number I’d just dialed was on my screen. Confused, I wrinkled up my face, but I answered.

  “Hello?” I asked into the receiver and then held my breath.

  “Ma’am, your pizza is ready for pick-up,” the same voice informed me.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your pizza is ready for immediate pick-up. You can come get it at 600 Elrush Way, suite 29.” The phone went dead and I was left dumbfounded.

  “Pizza? Elrush Way? What?” I dialed the number again, ready to demand an explanation for the bizarre call, but this time there was no answer.

  “Elrush Way?” I repeated. Aside from not knowing what that phone call was about, I had no idea where Elrush Way was.

  Who was this Detective Sam Fields? I looked down at his card again. He wasn’t known at his stated address and his phone number led to a pizza shop? No, that’s not right. My gut told me that as crazy as it seemed, these were the correct ways to get in touch with him. What kind of detective was he? I started to call Leon to see if he knew anything about him, but then thought better of it.

  It wasn’t right for me to think I could keep coming at Leon with a million and one questions without being able to answer any of his. He’d made it pretty clear and I could not pretend that our conversation yesterday did not happen.