by P J Parrish
—Phillip
Louis stared at the letter, rereading the middle paragraph, then the final line. If you have other plans . . .
It was the first time Phillip had ever asked anything from him. Except the night when he was eleven, caught again going out through the bedroom window.
Where you going, Louis?
I don’t know. Just away.
If you keep running off like this, they’ll take you away from me. Do you want that?
I don’t care.
But I do. Promise me you won’t run away again.
All right.
And he hadn’t.
Louis folded the letter and sat there for a moment, listening to the whisper of the surf. He picked up the phone and dialed Joe’s number in Miami. He got the machine and left her a message asking her to call back. Then he called American Airlines and made a reservation to fly to Detroit in the morning.
CHAPTER 2
Phillip Lawrence turned the Impala into the driveway and cut the engine. Louis looked up at the yellow brick tri-level.
The first image that usually came to him when other people started talking about their childhoods was a house. Other things came, too—smells, emotions, mental snapshots of events. But those kinds of memories were fluid, changing for good or bad, depending on how, and when, a person chose to look back on them.
But a house was different. It was solid and permanent, and it allowed people to say I existed here. My memories are real.
His image of home had always been a wood frame shack in Mississippi. It was an ugly picture, but one he had held on to for a long time, convinced it symbolized some kind of truth about who he was or what he should be.
But all during the flight up to Michigan, it wasn’t the shack he was remembering. It was this house. And now, here it was before him—unchanged, real.
Almost. The shutters were brown this year, and the silver maple in the front yard had grown taller, its stark, black branches stretching high against the gray sky. A short row of flat evergreens lined the cracked sidewalk, and the birdbath was still there out front.
Louis smiled.
“What’s so funny?” Phillip asked.
Louis looked at Phillip. “Nothing. It’s just nice to be home.”
He pushed open the car door and climbed out. Phillip brought his suitcase to him, and they walked to the front porch, Louis automatically slowing in deference to Phillip’s limp.
Christmas lights were strung around the eaves, and a wreath hung on the door. He recognized the wreath. Old newspapers stuffed into an oval of chicken wire, spray-painted red and green, and covered with gobs of shellac. He knew the back read: Louis, Age 11.
“It scares me what else Frances kept,” Louis said, nodding toward the wreath.
Phillip unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Don’t look in the attic then.”
Louis paused in the front hall, the assault to his senses almost bringing a sting to his eyes. Pot roast and lavender air freshener. Three steps leading down to the living room and kitchen were just to his left. To the right, more steps leading up to the five bedrooms. The pale yellow walls of the hallway were covered with a montage of framed photographs.
Phillip asked for his coat and Louis shrugged out of it, his gaze moving slowly over all the photographs. Boys. Dozens of different faces, at all ages. Some in Little League uniforms, some Boy Scouts, some standing outside a camper-trailer, some around the big blue DoughBoy pool that once dominated the backyard. Boys . . . all the foster kids who had passed through this home for more than twenty years.
“Leave your suitcase here, Louis,” Phillip said. “Frances is anxious to see you.”
Louis followed Phillip, the pot roast aroma growing stronger. She was standing at the stove, her hands clasped in front of her apron. She had put on a few more pounds, her face round and flushed from the heat of the oven. Her hairstyle was the same, a halo of light brown hair, a few curls sweat-plastered to her forehead.
“Louis,” she said, coming to him. She crushed him to her soft chest. “Oh, it’s so good to see you.”
Another sensory flood. The feel of her cheek, soft as wilted rose petals, the smell of the Johnson’s Baby Powder she always used and that he, as a boy, assumed was peculiar to all white women. A memory rushed up to him, of Frances’s face coming close in the dark as she tucked him in bed and kissed him good night.
Louis finally pushed from her embrace.
“You look too thin,” she said. “You’re not eating.”
He smiled. “I make do.”
She gave a snort and turned to the counter, coming back with a tray. “Here,” she said.
The tray held a container of Win Schuler’s cheese and a plate of carefully fanned crackers and tiny pickles. There were two blue cloth napkins and a silver cheese spreader.
“How long until dinner?” Phillip asked, pulling two beers out of the fridge.
Frances wiped her forehead. “A while. Why don’t you two go downstairs and have one of your visits? I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
Phillip nodded his head toward the basement door and Louis followed, carrying the tray. Louis slowed as he neared the bottom of the stairs. Knotty pine paneling and a bar. Blue-tiled linoleum he had helped Phillip install. Christmas lights twinkled in the mirror behind the bar. On the bar itself was an old radio, a blue rotary dial phone, a bowl of walnuts, and a miniature aluminum tree.
“Is that the same tree that was here when I was a kid?” Louis asked.
Phillip took a seat at the bar. “Yup. Probably twenty years old by now. Every year, she drags it out again.”
Louis slid onto the stool next to him. “Please don’t tell me those are the same walnuts.”
Phillip smiled. “Could very well be. Want one?”
“I’ll pass.”
Phillip reached for a nut and the silver cracker. Louis knew Phillip was fifty-six, and except for the limp from the Korean War, he was lean and healthy. His face was still striking, and as Louis watched him now, he had a memory of one afternoon when he was twelve and was watching TV and happened upon the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. He had looked at Michael Rennie and wondered what his foster father was doing playing a spaceman in some corny old black-and-white movie. It was a full year before he finally worked up the nerve to ask, and Phillip had just laughed and laughed. It was years later that Louis stopped thinking of Phillip Lawrence as some mysterious alien presence in his life.
Louis considered Phillip’s face now. The network of lines had deepened and there was something else in his foster father’s face he had never ever seen before—a deep, aching sadness.
Phillip felt his gaze and looked up. Louis looked away, picking up his beer and swinging his stool around on the pretense of looking around the basement.
“Nothing’s changed. Place looks good,” Louis said.
“Well, there’s a lot of stuff that needs fixing, but one of the benefits of getting old is your eyes start going, so I don’t notice it as much.”
The trickle of memories continued. The basement was musty and outdated, but it was the best room in the house. This was where everything happened. Louis could almost see the heaps of crumpled holiday wrapping paper. See Phillip leading the Cub Scout meetings that he used to watch from under the steps, too shy, too scared, to join in. He could remember the indoor camp-outs in winter, a half dozen boys in ragged sleeping bags, Phil sitting cross-legged whispering ghost stories.
“You seem different, Louis,” Phillip said.
“Different how?”
“Different as in . . . calm. Maybe even happy.”
“Things are good right now.”
“Good. You’ve waited a long time.”
Louis turned back to Phillip. He wanted to tell him that he seemed different, too. But instinct was telling him he had to leave it up to Phillip to bring up his friend and the empty grave.
The furnace kicked on, and hot air puffed down from the ceiling vents. From the kitchen ab
ove came the sound of clattering plates and Frances humming quietly. Louis reached for a cracker and spread some cheese on it. He heard Phillip take a deep breath and he figured he was about to tell him why he had asked him to come up.
But Phillip was quiet, cracking the walnuts.
Louis realized he would have to do the prodding. All those countless times when Phillip had been the one to urge him out of his shell. It felt odd to have the roles reversed.
“Phillip, why did you want me to come here?” Louis asked. “What exactly is going on?”
Phillip glanced at him, then went back to the walnut, carefully picking the bits out of the shell.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said quietly.
“Try the beginning.”
Phillip set the nutcracker down and turned to face Louis. “I’ve been visiting the grave of my friend for sixteen years. Last month, I went out there and there was a sign saying the place had been sold and that families could claim the remains for relocation.”
“You said that in your letter,” Louis said.
Phillip nodded. “When they found out I wasn’t a relative, they wouldn’t tell me anything. But there was this woman there, I guess she felt sorry for me or something. She told me that my friend’s family . . .” Phillip paused. “They didn’t want the remains.”
Phillip brushed his hands together to get rid of the walnut shells. “I asked if I could do it and she said yes. So I signed a paper and made the arrangements for a new plot at Riverside back here in Plymouth. I even bought a new casket. But when they went to transfer the body, that’s when they found out . . .”
Phillip stopped. His hands encircled the beer bottle, but he didn’t move to take a drink.
“You said in your letter the coffin was empty,” Louis prodded.
“No, it wasn’t empty. It was filled with rocks. That’s what they found when they opened it.”
Phillip was sitting there, like if he let go of the bottle it would fall apart in his hands.
“So,” Louis went on, “you think your friend could be alive?”
Phillip shook his head slowly. “No, no. I know that isn’t possible.”
“You said in your letter you didn’t tell Frances. Why not?”
Phillip was very still, his voice low. “Because my friend is a woman I knew before Frances. I don’t think Frances would understand.”
Louis took a drink of his beer, his mind already forming questions, some too personal to ask. “Phil, I can’t lie to Frances.”
“I know, I know.” Phillip looked at Louis. “I just want to find out what happened. Maybe there was just a mix-up at the cemetery, a bookkeeping error or something. Things like that happen, don’t they?”
Louis nodded.
“I just want to see my friend reburied.” Phillip’s expression was beseeching. “Can you maybe just look into things? Can you help with that at least?”
“All right,” Louis said.
There was a sudden noise above and they both looked up to see Frances standing at the top of the stairs, craning her head to look down.
“What are you two up to down here?” she asked.
“Just reminiscing a little, Fran,” Phillip said.
“Well, dinner’s ready and I want to hear everything that is going on in Louis’s life. So get your butts up here now.”
“We’re coming up right now,” Phillip said.
Frances went back to the kitchen. Louis could hear her footsteps above their heads, hear her humming again.
“I need to go to the cemetery,” Louis said.
“We can go first thing in the morning.” Phillip paused. “Thank you, Louis.”
His voice had changed, like he was relieved the hardest part was over. But the sadness did not leave his eyes. Phillip slid off the stool and started up the stairs. He looked back and for an instant Louis had the feeling that Phillip Lawrence was a stranger all over to him again. This was a man with shadows in his soul.
Louis picked up his beer and followed Phillip upstairs.
CHAPTER 3
Louis hadn’t been back to Plymouth in more than six years. After he graduated from University of Michigan in 1981, he had stayed in Ann Arbor to work on the police force there. He felt comfortable in the college town, comfortable in its rich stew of races, religions, and ways of thinking. Every time he had gone back to visit Phillip and Frances during the past few years, it had been while they were up North on vacation, sort of neutral territory. Never here, in Plymouth.
“So how’s the old hometown look to you?”
Louis glanced over at Phillip, who was driving. “About the same,” he answered.
Louis’s eyes drifted back out the cold-fogged window. The Lawrences lived out on the edge of town, and Phillip had to drive through the small downtown to get to the freeway. Louis’s eyes lingered on the square with its white band shell fully exposed by the bare trees. He could see the old columned bank and the marquee of the Penn Theater: FIELD OF DREAMS. And there, on the corner, the old hotel.
“They’ve remodeled the Mayflower,” Louis said absently.
“Yeah. But they kept that old wallpaper in the dining room.”
Louis had a sudden memory of a sixth grade field trip. It was a slate-gray November day, just like today, and he remembered feeling alone and small as the bus let him and the other kids off in front of the Mayflower Hotel for their lunch.
He knew now that the Mayflower wasn’t a fancy place. But it seemed like it then, with its dark green carpeting and shining wood desk and the sour-looking woman in a black uniform who handed them menus in the restaurant. The menu was huge in his hands and he didn’t know anything. What to order. What to do with the heavy white cloth napkin. Where to go if he had to pee.
The teacher was standing up and talking about the Pilgrims, pointing to the wallpaper with its pictures of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. She was saying that they should all be thankful for the sacrifices of their forefathers who came here in ships to make their lives here possible. He had sat there listening to her, thinking, well, they sure the heck weren’t my forefathers.
“The town is changing,” Phillip said.
Louis heard something in Phillip’s voice and turned.
“All these young folks moving out here, looking for some lost idea of a perfect small town,” Phillip said, his eyes steady on the road.
“Plymouth isn’t perfect,” Louis said carefully.
“They closed Cloverdale’s, you know. Some chain came in on Main Street.”
Phillip was shaking his head in disgust. But Louis was remembering soft Sunday evenings, walking to the old ice cream parlor, he and Phillip getting double-dip cones of lush black cherry ice cream and ignoring the stares of all the white faces.
Louis rubbed a sleeve over the fogged window. They were passing the high school now. The press of memories kept coming. Four years of being the only black kid in an all-white school. No one was mean, no one called him names. He was accepted, but almost like some weird mascot. Shared jokes in the john and always a seat in the cafeteria. But never an invitation to the parties at the white kids’ homes.
Phillip was looking at the high school as they waited for the light to change.
“You still run?” he asked.
“Not as much as I should,” Louis said. He was still back in high school, trying to bring a face into focus, the face of some asshole PE coach who told him he should go out for basketball. The man didn’t care that Louis hated basketball, just kept pushing him until Louis started cutting PE. Finally, Phillip had a talk with the coach and then with Louis. Eventually, Louis went out for track just to please Phillip. But to his surprise, he liked cross-country. He liked the rush of the cool air on his face and the sound of his pulse in his ears. He liked the brain-cleansing feel of running. He liked the aloneness of it.
“Frances found your letter sweater the other day in a box in the basement,” Phillip said. “She sent it to the cleaners so it would be ready when you
came home.”
“I don’t want that old thing.”
“Take it anyway,” Phillip said. “Okay?”
The light turned green and they drove on in silence. Phillip reached down and jabbed the lighter, and with a gesture born of decades shook a cigarette from its pack and lit it with one hand, his eyes never leaving the road. He cracked his window and blew the stream out.
“What did you tell Frances about today?” Louis said.
“Just that you wanted to go for a drive.”
“Phillip, I need to know something. How much exactly does she know about this? Does she even know you visited this cemetery?”
Phillip nodded. “She thinks it’s an old army buddy.”
“That’s what you told her?”
Phillip nodded again. “I could never bring myself to tell her the truth.”
Louis let that go. The landscape changed as U.S. 12 stretched into the Michigan countryside. Flat, and tufted with yellow grass, the air swirling with crumbling rust-colored leaves.
“Where are we going?” Louis asked.
“The Irish Hills.”
Louis was trying to remember if Phillip had ever taken him to the Irish Hills. But he didn’t need to think long. Phillip answered for him.
“I never brought you out there,” he said. “I thought about it, but it would have meant taking Frances, too, and I just couldn’t do that.”
Louis formed the question, and then wasn’t sure he wanted to ask it. But he knew he needed to. “The Irish Hills was your place with her?” he asked.
Phillip glanced at him, then turned his gaze back to the road. “Only for one weekend.”
Phillip didn’t say anything else and Louis held the rest of his questions. This wasn’t some passing fling. It was something that had survived Phillip’s thirty-one-year marriage to Frances. Longer than Louis had been alive.
A first love.
It wasn’t something he knew much about. It sure as hell hadn’t happened for him in high school. In the midseventies, many parts of the country were beginning to tolerate interracial relationships, but he never had the sense Plymouth was one of them. He had never gone to a dance or any other school function with a white girl on his arm. His first real girlfriend had been in college, but even she didn’t come with those tender memories that should accompany a first love. Right now he couldn’t even remember her last name.