Dodging and Burning

by John Copenhaver

  Later I understood that the shot had been meant for Papa. Letitia was trying to stop him from attacking Jay. Jay had hurled himself between the buckshot and its intended target on purpose.

  Jay was losing a lot of blood. His shirt was soaked through, and his breathing was just a faint gurgle in his throat. He mumbled something, and I ran to him, putting my arm around him. Get up! I screamed inside my head. Just stand up! I tugged on him. He nodded like he understood what I was trying to do. But I couldn’t do it alone. My twelve-year-old muscles weren’t strong enough. “Papa!” I called out, but he was preoccupied with Letitia. He had ahold of one of her arms, the way you would hang onto a bad child, and she was struggling and clawing at him with her free hand. Mama was coming toward us from the porch.

  “Mama!” I cried. “Help! Help me!”

  Jay put his arm across my shoulder, and with all my strength and a surge of adrenaline, I had him standing. The station wagon was only a few yards away, and the driver’s door was open. The key was still in the ignition. If I could get him in the car, I could drive. He had taught me how. It’s all about balance.

  We headed for it, moving slow, hobbling, Jay’s fingers digging into my shoulder for support. “Help us, Mama!” I cried, over and over. Blood was streaming through the grooves in Jay’s leather boot, leaving a trail through the dusty grass. I would need those boots to drive.

  He tripped and nearly fell on me. I braced myself against the force of his weight, but I couldn’t hold him. We both stumbled and slammed into the side of the station wagon. Jay cried out with awful pain and slid to the ground, leaving a smear of blood across the side of the car. As quick as I could, I opened both the back doors, hopped in, grabbed his shirt collar, wedged my feet against the doorframe for leverage, and dragged him across the smooth leather upholstery until I was out the opposite door. He pushed with his good leg, screaming something horrible. His hair was a tangled mat over his eyes, and his face was a mess of tears, blood, and spittle.

  Pain had altered him. First the war, then this. The boy in him was gone.

  Mama was near us. “Help me!” I shrieked at her. “Help me take off his boots.” She stepped back a hair instead, like she wanted to think about it a little while. “I need his boots to drive. Please, Mama.”

  I didn’t ask her to drive because she didn’t know how; she was afraid of automobiles. Regardless, she didn’t move, as if she’d just been struck dumb. I didn’t have time for it. Once I had Jay in place, I ran around the car and began unlacing his boots. The right boot came off easy as you please, but the left, suctioned to his ankle by the blood, was stubborn.

  “Mama!” I yelled again. She didn’t budge. I yanked on the boot, and Jay screamed and writhed, but it didn’t come off. I couldn’t do that to him again. My heart was breaking.

  I heard him mumble something through the blood. As I leaned in, he took my arm and said, “I did this. Let me go.”

  The photograph he had first shown us that day in the sun porch was a picture of three different people in one—Lily and Foxy and Terry. So many layers. Nesting dolls. But was it a photo of all those people—or none of them? Jay had asked us to see what he wanted us to see, and we had continued to oblige him. Now, in the middle of all his blood and agony, what was he asking me to do?

  I would drive with one foot, I decided. I removed Jay’s sock and stuffed it into the boot, then tossed my right Mary Jane into the grass and wedged my foot into the wide engineer’s boot. I stood up, lopsided and bloodstained.

  Mama had moved. She stood in front of the driver’s door, holding the key in her hand. For a second, I thought she was offering to drive, that maybe she had overcome her fear in a state of emergency. I took a step toward her.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she said, cold as ice. “This stops here. Now.” She slid the key into a pocket on her dress.

  “Mama, he’s hurt!”

  “It stops here.”

  “If I don’t get help, if we don’t get to a doctor, he’ll—”

  “Go into the house, and go to your room. Do you hear me?”

  “Mama! Mama!”

  She crossed her arms tight over her stomach.

  Change comes in two ways. For me, right then and there, it was sudden. Veils lifted, curtains drew back, and I saw our mother for who she really was—a sick woman who’d been disguising her guilt in the shabby clothes of grief, who had been so frightened by who you were that she’d sent you away. In the darkest regions of her heart, she’d hoped you wouldn’t return so you could be reimagined in retrospect. You could be the son she’d wanted you to be, as long as she had control of your memory—Jay threatened that. He had to go too. I couldn’t put this into words at the time, but I understood it in my heart, and I began hating her.

  I lunged at her, forced forward by Jay’s boot, and hit her in the stomach with my small fists. She fell against the inside of the car door and crumpled to the ground. “Give me the key!” I yelled, steadying myself against the station wagon. “The key, Mama!” She shook her head. Her eyes were like the hollows in a skull. If she could’ve breathed fire, she would have. She hoisted her body up by the car door and found her footing. I backed away.

  Mama caught her breath, reached into her pocket, and took out the key. She held it out like she was going to sling it into the tall grass at the edge of the yard, and I stumbled toward her, tugging on her arm with all my weight. She gritted her teeth and dropped the key. I snatched it from the dirt, shoved her away from the open door, and jumped into the driver’s seat. She grabbed my dress. I looked back, into the black panic of her eyes, and said, “You killed Robbie! It was your fault!” My words hit her harder than my fists. She let go of me the way you let go of someone hanging off a cliff. I whipped the door closed, pressed the clutch, and started the car.

  The wagon rolled across a few of Papa’s newly planted saplings, and we were on our way down the drive. It was difficult to work the pedals with the boot twisting from one side to the other, but I steered the car onto the gravel and pressed the gas. We sped toward the road. I glanced in the rearview mirror, hoping to see Jay awake and hanging on, but I only saw my home receding in the distance, windows flashing in the sunlight, and Papa running after me, yelling, waving his arms in the air.

  When I looked forward again, there was someone smack-dab in front of the car, right where the gravel ends and asphalt of the main road begins. For a second—no, a fraction of a second—it was Lily, and then it was Foxy, and then Terry, and even you, Robbie, returning to me in that golden mist.

  I slammed Jay’s boot into the gas mistaking it for the brake, and the car exploded forward. I tried to twist the steering wheel, screaming, gasping, my sweaty hands slipping on the smooth wood. I smashed into the mailbox, and shot across the main road and into a ditch.

  As I came to, dust was still settling on the hood of the car. I heard a voice off in the distance, but I couldn’t make it out. The engine was hissing and popping. The passenger-side window was smeared with purple stains. Blackberries. Half the bush was in the car. Something cool and wet ran down my cheek. I touched it with my finger. Blood. I began to panic. Jay’s boot was wedged between the pedals, but my foot was out of it. I tried to pull myself out from under the bent steering wheel, but I cried out and stopped. I didn’t know it, but I had broken five ribs and whacked my head pretty good. The entire frame of the wagon groaned and shifted like a ship going down. I attempted to pull myself up again, but the pain was too much. I whimpered and slumped over in the seat.

  That’s when I heard her voice: “Ceola, sit still. I’ll get help.” She was at the driver’s window. The morning sun softened her face. Her dark curls were messy, but her lips were still a perfect and glossy red. Bunny. I had swerved for her? She gripped the edge of the door and pulled on it, but it didn’t budge.

  I said, “Jay is—”

  “We’ll get help for both of you.”

  “He’s shot. His grand—”

  “Not now. Help i
s coming.”

  “You’re a murderer. You did it to him … to me.”

  “Not now.”

  And the door burst open. There was light, and the fresh smell of ripped and split vines, and the sound of irate insects buzzing, and birds crying for the loss of their nests. And then I was up in the air, hands underneath me—Papa’s? Bunny’s? And there was terrible, terrible pain. I blacked out.

  And then I was in a car, the Olds, and I was lying across the back seat, holding my side, trying not to think about the pain, watching the trees pass by and the blue sky flickering between them and the clouds, so thin and high—and I knew, before Bunny hinted, before Papa told me, even before we reached the clinic, Jay was dead, that he had died before he was taken from the wreck, that what I had tried to do had been for nothing. I knew this.

  11

  A DATE WITH

  DEATH

  The Date

  After locking the bedroom door, Sheila felt safer. She thought about her mother and father, about the potato farm in Parsippany, but even in the midst of her panic, she didn’t yearn to be there. The future held too many possibilities, her fate was still her own. After all, magic was a sleight of hand, a trick of light, a con. She wouldn’t be denied her freedom. But she held that thought for just a moment before the reality of her situation returned to her.

  The curtains in her aunt’s bedroom window were open, and moonlight poured in. The storm had broken. Aunt Majestica peered across the room from her place above the mantle, her eyes bright and devilish, her face whiter than ever. She seemed to be laughing at Sheila. By the window, her crystal ball glowed as if it were lit from inside. It made Sheila think of the note on the diagram: “The eye of God sees everything, but not clearly, not with permanence. This is permanence. This is proof!”

  “Golly, like a photograph!” she said aloud—and an idea, a connection, occurred to her. She went to the crystal ball and picked it up. Its ornate brass stand fell away, revealing a circular two-inch section of crystal missing from the bottom, cut, she imagined, by a diamond saw. Could a lens be made from this? Had her aunt made a camera from her crystal ball? Did the album downstairs contain the photos taken by that camera?

  There was a burst of light in the room, and it wasn’t lightning. She dropped the ball, and it rolled heavily toward the corner of the room, stopping at a pair of shiny black oxfords.

  Thomas stepped forward. In the moonlight, his handsome face was as pale as a drowned corpse, holding none of the charm it had earlier that evening. He grinned at her, his teeth white, canine. His uncanny appearance grew darker, more wolflike the nearer he came. As he loomed over her, she felt as though she were already being devoured.

  She backed away, tripping a little on the edge of a rug. “I thought you liked me. I really did. We had such a good time. You were so easy to talk to, so gracious.”

  “What can I say, I’m a charming guy.”

  “We were going to go on a date. We made plans. You kissed me! It was real, that kiss. I could feel it.”

  “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

  “I’ll pay you. I have the dough. Just look at this place. It will be mine. It is mine!”

  “It’s time to say night-night.”

  “Please don’t hurt me! We can work this out.”

  “I have a job to do. I can see the bigger picture.”

  “How could I have been so blind?”

  “You saw what you wanted to see. All the sad girls do.”

  He lunged forward with a snarl, and she stabbed him with the letter opener. It entered his forearm near the crook of the elbow. He yelped and gnashed his teeth and backed away. Its pearl handle flashed in the moonlight. She made for the phone, but as soon as the receiver was in her hands, as soon as she heard the buzz of the line, his good arm swept around her, closing tight on her throat. His muscles tensed, the bulge of his biceps squeezing her windpipe, the rough fabric of his coat burning her flesh. She struggled, kicking her feet and beating him every which way with her small fists, but it was useless. After a few moments, she stopped. She saw his face in a mirror above the phone—it was cruel and cold, a mask of thin skin stretched over the demon underneath—and then she saw bright flashes of light like shooting stars, like fireworks over the Hudson, like diamonds against black velvet—and then darkness closed in.

  When Thomas had finished the job, he released her. From a bag he had stowed in the corner of the room, he retrieved his camera. He found a good angle and took a picture of her. She looked pretty, he thought, but she was no dish. Just the usual sort of dame. He didn’t mind killing her. There were thousands of girls just like her. It was good money after all.

  He picked up the phone: “Operator. New York City. 111 East 65th. Yes, I’ll wait … Mr. Addison. It’s done … Yes, I have the proof. Just bring the money, and I’ll bring the photograph.”

  PART II

  February 18, 2000

  Washington, DC

  Ceola dear,

  I’m shocked and, I must admit, relieved you received a photo of Lily as well. It does seem as though someone wants us to talk.

  Where do we begin? In both of your letters, you’ve been kind enough to share a bit of your personal history, so if you will indulge me, I would like to do the same, to bring us closer again. That Shakespearean quotation keeps occurring to me: “What fates impose, that men must needs abide; it boots not to resist both wind and tide.”

  A year after the incident that summer, after I last saw you, I left Royal Oak and headed to DC, against my father’s wishes. I worked in the secretarial pool at the State Department for a year and then went to Georgetown. After I graduated, I met and married a young representative from Minnesota, Kirk Kimble. We settled down and had two fine boys, Rick and Kevin. Also, during this time, I began writing The Black Box and, with a great deal of luck, became the novelist you know as B. B. Prescott.

  In the early ’80s, Kirk and I grew apart and divorced. I never remarried. My father sold the Dixie Dew plant to Pepsi in 1983, retired, and died of cancer a year later. My beautiful mother is still alive, nearly 98, and living in a retirement community in Northern Virginia. My first son and his wife have produced two fine grandchildren, a boy and a girl. Kevin—God’s sense of humor in full form—is gay and lives with his partner, a detective for the DC Metropolitan Police.

  Of course, there is more, but I don’t want to wear you out. Please, call me. You have my number.

  Your friend,

  Bunny

  20

  BUNNY

  The room was quiet and empty, and the afternoon sun fell in bright trapezoids across the floor. Everything around me, the familiar arrangement of furniture, the architecture of my little kitchen, nestled inside the townhouse at the corner of 5th and A Streets that had been mine (and only mine) for the past twenty years, felt undeniably remarkable. I truly hadn’t expected Ceola to call me after receiving my last letter, much less want to trek all the way to DC to see me. I sat down, dropping my hands to my lap, still clutching the telephone receiver.

  We had spoken for only a few minutes, at first in halting exchanges. I allowed her, with her nasal (although not charmless) Appalachian accent, to drive the conversation. After she established the parameters of her visit—she would come up at the first of March, stay downtown, only for a day or two—we warmed to each other and began to discuss the photos.

  She had a theory. She surmised Jay had sent the photos to Lily, that when, all those years ago, he told her the images were safe, he meant they were safe with Lily. And then, to my surprise, she told me she had heard Lily was still living in DC, that I might have walked right past her! Indeed, Jay could’ve sent the photos to her for safekeeping. And of course, she could still be in DC. Why not? She loved it here. But why wait fifty-five years to send the photos to us, and why be so coy about it? Why not just contact us directly?

  My son Kevin and his partner, Parker, took me to lunch at Café Bouvier on 7th Street a few days after Ceola
called.

  Kevin was especially handsome in a blue sport coat, pressed shirt, and cropped haircut. He reminded me of my father, whose sober eyes and strong forehead had concealed a quiet wisdom, a depth I admired.

  After salads and drinks were ordered, he said, “We have news.”

  Parker offered me a tense smile. Out of uniform and in jeans and a gray blazer, Parker looked more like the sweet man he is than a policeman. Although he has curly black hair and weight lifter’s shoulders, he reminds me of Jay, particularly in the eyes, which are deep blue and so expressive. Whispering eyes, my mother calls them.

  “Mom, we’ve made the decision to adopt,” Kevin said. “We want to be fathers.”

  I didn’t respond immediately.

  We’ve come a long way as a society, and indeed, I’ve come a long way since I was a young woman, but the world is still a cruel place. It’s hard enough for children these days, much less a child with two fathers. The possibility of Kevin and Parker adopting had occurred to me—both of them being so good with Kevin’s nephew and niece, eyes brightening at all the childish glee and nonsense at the holidays—but the idea worried me all the same. A child whose biological parents are unknown, whose background is a mystery … well, it’s a genetic grab bag; you never know what you’re going to get, do you? But if they were aware of the risk—which I’m sure they are, both being practical men at heart—I couldn’t stand in their way.

  So I broke the silence: “I’m so pleased you want a child. It’s admirable. Truly. You have my blessing, of course.”

  They smiled with relief.

  We chatted through lunch about the rigmarole of the adoption process. After my son excused himself to go to the bathroom before dessert, I turned to Parker, who for the moment was studying something across the room. He seemed so like Jay then. He had that far-off look—eyes outward, but studying what? The sunlight on the wall? No, his eyes were on the past. I thought, If I could only have a photo of that.