“What? No!”
“You can’t save me, baby,” she said, her voice paper-thin. “You’ve been good to me, a fine man, like a son. But you’ve got to go on now. My time has come. Please, leave me here.”
I shook my head fervently. “But I’m supposed to save you.”
“No, no, sugar,” she said. “You’re supposed to leave me here and go on with your life.”
Like a swift bird, the meaning of the words that she had spoken flitted through my thoughts, but, distracted by my growing fear of a fiery doom, I could not focus upon her message.
“No way,” I said. “You’re coming with me, even if I have to carry you.” I reached to get a better hold on her.
As if by spontaneous combustion, Grandma burst into flames. Her face split open like some kind of bizarre, fiery flower, skin charring, lips peeling back to reveal disintegrating teeth, eyes sinking into her blackening skull. Her arm that I had clutched ignited like a piece of dry wood, fingers curling up, shriveling, bones popping.
I screamed, and let her go. Then reached for her. But there was nothing left of her to grab. Hungry flames devoured her body as if she had been made of straw.
I howled. I had been given a second chance to save her. And I had failed.
The bedsheet on top of us had caught fire, too. Frantic, I cast it off into the fire that had devoured Grandma.
Those flames that attacked Grandma had erupted from nowhere, I thought vaguely. As if she was destined to die here. As if I was meant to learn that nothing I could have done would have saved her.
The meaning of everything that I had witnessed hit me like a jackhammer. Anguished by the hard truth, I felt a sudden urge to throw myself into the inferno, to give up and perish with Grandma and this house that held so many memories. But I couldn’t. An invisible force seemed to hold me back and drive me to save myself.
I scrambled into the nearest room. My old bedroom. A double bed, a dresser, a nightstand, not much else. I didn’t stop to examine anything. I flung open the only window in the room and stuck my head out through the gap.
It was about a twenty-foot plunge to the grass below. The height of the drop mattered little. I would have taken my chances with a fifty-foot fall rather than accept dying in the blaze.
I climbed onto the windowsill, focused my gaze on a soft-looking spot on the lawn, and drew a deep breath.
Then, I jumped.
I wasn’t sure how long I was unconscious. When I awoke, I was lying on grass. Night still reigned.
I looked around. I saw that I was on the front lawn of the residence at 2118 Common Avenue; my car was parked in the driveway. But something was different.
It was not Grandma’s house.
The address above the mailbox read 2118, but it was a completely different house. It was a beige, two-story, contemporary-style home that fit in well with the rest of the neighborhood. A FOR SALE sign stood in the yard, creaking softly in the night breeze.
Staring, I got to my feet.
The house was dark, silent ... and clearly vacant.
I took note of my clothes. They should have reeked of smoke. But they smelled as if they had been laundered yesterday, which, in fact, they had. I did not find any stains, or rips in the fabric.
Countless questions spun through my thoughts. But it was futile to ponder them, because few of the questions had answers. I knew only one thing for sure: I could not change the past. I could only accept it and move on. A tough and unsparing—but, ultimately—liberating truth.
Sighing, I walked to my car. I slid my hand into my pocket.
I pulled out the car keys—and found a shiny gold key that was unattached to the key ring. I recognized the key. For years, I had used it to unlock the door to Grandma’s house. Before I had moved away, I had given it back to her.
Now, it had been given back to me.
“Thank you,” I said. I pressed the key against my lips, softly. I dropped it into my pocket.
I would keep the key with me for the rest of my life, just as I would keep all my memories of Grandma—with no more guilt to plague my dreams.
I got in the car and drove away.
A Walk Through Darkness
Lee Wright’s car broke down one night when he was driving through Tennessee. A late-model Chevy Impala that he’d bought only two months ago, the car coughed, sputtered, and died while he was on the highway, snaking through the Appalachian Mountains.
Rolling with the little momentum he had remaining, Lee steered to the shoulder of the road and slowed to a stop.
“Shit.” He mashed his fist against the steering wheel. “Ain’t this a bitch?”
It was a few minutes past two o’clock in the morning. A helluva time to get stranded in the rural South. Especially for a black man.
Lee tried to restart the car. The engine made a pathetic clicking noise; it was nowhere near turning over.
He smacked the steering wheel again, popped the hood, and got out of the car.
It was a warm, clear June night. The moon was full, casting a pale glow that made the Chevy’s red paint shimmer like fresh blood. Winding through the mountains like a ribbon of black oil, the road was deserted at that hour. Lee’s only company were the night creatures, singing their timeless, forlorn songs.
He lifted the hood. Scratching his head, he looked at the mess of cables and boxes and other stuff he couldn’t name. This was no good. He didn’t know a damn thing about cars other than how to put gas in them and change a tire, and wondered why he’d bothered to raise the hood. Cars weren’t his thing. He’d taken an automotive shop class in high school, but that had been years ago—and he’d been too busy chasing girls to pay much attention to his studies, anyway.
Lee decided to call help: Roadside Assistance, a 24/7 emergency service bundled with new cars these days. The toll-free number was printed on a sticker on a window. Peering at the number, he unclipped his cell phone from his belt holster and turned it on.
The phone searched for a carrier signal, the tiny digital dot pulsing ... and finally declared: NO SERVICE.
“Hell, no,” Lee said. He turned off the phone, and then turned it on again.
NO SERVICE.
“Come on, man, shit.” He tried it a few more times, with the same result, and though it infuriated him, he was not surprised: he was in the boonies of Tennessee, after all, in one of those infamous, cellular dead zones. For all the wonders of modern technology, the cell phone providers had an uncanny ability to let you down just when you needed them the most.
He holstered the phone in his belt like a useless gun. He tried to start the car again. No luck.
He was stuck out here.
He stared through the windshield at the hulking mountains and the desolate road ahead. He deserved this, didn’t he? Karma was a bitch.
Shit like this happened to you after you’d murdered someone.
Lee had never planned on committing murder. But like so many incidents in his life, shit happened.
In this case, the shit that happened was named Anita Butler.
Lee met Anita on the Internet, on Blackplanet.com. She was in her midthirties, his age, and if the photos she posted on her Web page could be believed, she looked like Toni Braxton. She had no children, lived in a Chicago suburb—and was married.
But Lee had known from the start that she was looking to fool around. Why else would a married woman offer a provocative picture of herself wearing a thong, for the whole world to see, and then name peaches and cream as one of her favorite dishes?
Lee lived in Atlanta, which crawled with sistas hungry for men, but he liked to broaden his horizons and go out of state, too, when it was worth it.
He believed Anita was worth it. He sent her an e-mail.
Three weeks later, he drove to Illinois, and they went on their first date at Chicago’s Navy Pier. Anita didn’t look exactly like Toni Braxton—everyone knew those stars got cosmetic surgery anyway—but she was still a cutie, with big brown eyes, luscious
lips, and a shapely, petite figure. You could never be too sure about a woman you met online. Lee had been burned before by women who posted high school graduation photos, yet had graduated ten years—and fifty pounds lighter—ago. But Anita was the real deal.
Her husband, Gary, was a salesman and was constantly out of town on business, she said. But Lee and Anita spent that first weekend together at a downtown hotel.
And the next weekend.
And the one after that.
Then, after three months, they got careless and started hanging out at Anita’s house. Lee never knew what they had done that tipped off the husband that they were messing around. But when Lee and Anita came back to her place from a jazz club late one Saturday night, hubby was waiting for them in the living room, stroking the barrel of a 12 gauge shotgun like a favorite pet.
“Enjoy your night on the town?” Gary asked. A crazed grin twisted his face, and Lee, whose bowels had seemed to liquefy, caught a whiff of scotch.
His eyes red and feral, Gary swiveled the gun toward Lee. “How long have you been fucking my wife?”
Lee didn’t respond. He ran.
He ran down the hall, burst through a door, and stumbled into a dark, dank garage. He almost smashed his balls against the corner of a car, staggered away, and crashed into a tool bench, his hands scrabbling for purchase. One of his hands touched a tire iron. He held on to it for dear life. It was a weapon, his only hope.
Lee hid behind the door and caught Gary with a savage blow to the cranium when the guy stepped through the doorway. Gary emitted a strangled scream and crumpled to the floor, but he held on to the shotgun. Through a mouthful of smashed teeth, he cursed Lee and fumbled to raise the gun.
He was a tough bastard. The fight wasn’t over yet.
Panic overwhelmed Lee. He started swinging the tire iron, wildly, thrashing the man on the floor, warm blood spattering his face as hard iron connected with soft flesh.
He might have gone on beating the man if he had not spotted Anita. She stood in the doorway, fist in her mouth, biting down so hard on one knuckle that blood streamed down her finger.
“Shit,” Lee said. He looked at all of the blood around him as if seeing it for the first time. “What the fuck did I do?”
“You killed him,” Anita whispered.
Lee looked at Gary’s pulverized body. He promptly vomited the undigested remains of the Fettuccine Alfredo he’d eaten that night.
Anita put her hand on Lee’s shoulder. Her touch was like ice, and her eyes were cold, too.
“You aren’t going to jail,” she said, in a steady voice. She glanced at Gary’s corpse. “We’ve got to get rid of the body.”
“H-h-how?” Lee asked.
“Listen to me,” she said. “I’ve got a plan ...”
I could use a plan right now, Lee thought, gazing out the windshield at the darkness. He couldn’t sit here like this and wait for someone to rescue him, or wait for his car to magically turn on, or wait for the cell phone company to spin a satellite his way. He had to act.
He thought of hitchhiking, and nixed the idea, for three reasons. Firstly, there were hardly any cars out here—he hadn’t seen one pass since he’d pulled over. Secondly, few drivers would be willing to pick up a six foot three black man who looked like a linebacker for the Atlanta Falcons. Thirdly, any driver who would pick up him could very well be a racist redneck that’d shoot him and drag him from the rear bumper like a soda can on a string. Hadn’t something like that happened to a brother in Texas?
Sitting in the car was equally unthinkable. No one was going to help him out here. The days of Good Samaritans who’d go out of their way to aid you were long past.
There was only one thing to do: he had to walk through the darkness to find a gas station. Simple as that.
He opened the glove compartment and removed the .38 revolver. It was fully loaded. Black bears roamed the wilderness in this part of the state. It was good to be prepared.
Holstering the gun, he climbed out of the car and locked the doors.
The night had fallen silent, as if a deadly wind had swept through the land and obliterated every living creature. A ragged cloud passed across the moon, and during that minute or so when the moonlight was gone, Lee encountered the deepest night he had ever known. It was like being abandoned in a bottomless pit. His insides shrank.
Thankfully, the cloud moved, and the moon smiled on him again.
“Fuck this,” he said. He opened the trunk, and found a utility flashlight sitting in a red metal toolbox. He’d gone to his mom’s house last week to install a drainage system in her basement—although he didn’t know jack shit about cars, he was handy around the house—and he’d forgotten about the tools and left them in the trunk. Lucky for him.
Holding the flashlight, Lee began to walk along the gravel shoulder of the road.
He’d driven this route several times when traveling back home after visiting Anita in Chicago. He tried to remember where the next rest area or gas station was. But most times when he was driving, he put on a CD of his favorite smooth jazz songs and cruised, paying little attention to road markers unless he needed to get gas or grab a bite to eat.
He might pay for his ignorance tonight. The closest gas station could be ten miles ahead, for all he knew.
There might be houses, up in the hills. But he didn’t dare approach one and ask to use a telephone. Would a redneck respond positively to a black man banging on his door at two o’clock in the morning? Lee would probably catch a load of buckshot the instant he stepped on the front porch.
Ain’t this a bitch?
He kicked pebbles ahead of him. In the moonlight, the rocks looked like loose teeth knocked out of a dead man’s mouth.
He turned on his cell phone again, as if having walked a few hundred feet would make a difference. It didn’t. The infuriating NO SERVICE message blinked back at him.
Cursing, he clicked off the phone.
That was when he looked up in the mountains and saw someone following him.
“We’ll drive to Wisconsin,” Anita said. “We’ll make it look like someone robbed him and dump the car in a lake.”
Anita had lit a Newport. Leaning against the car—Gary’s Jaguar XK8—smoking, she regarded Gary’s bloody corpse with no visible emotion. She’d offered Lee a cigarette, and though he never smoked— other than weed every now and then—he was puffing away.
“You sure about this?” he asked. “I don’t know.”
“You want to go to prison, Lee?” she asked. “You know what happens to brothers in prison, don’t you? You’ll be somebody’s bitch.”
“Fuck that,” Lee said, summoning some bravado. “I ain’t doing time.”
“Then get with the program,” she said. “Let’s do this. Grab his legs and I’ll pop the trunk.”
Lee bent to snag the dead man by the ankles. He stopped, peered at Anita.
“One question,” he said. “Did you ever love this dude?”
She shrugged. “I married him for his money. A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do.”
As Lee bent to work, he thought about what she’d just said. She was looking out for number one. That meant she would sell him out in a heartbeat if the heat came down.
As he lugged the dead body to the trunk, he started to think that if he was left with no choice and his neck was on the line, he might also have to kill Anita.
When Lee looked at the mountains and spotted someone following him, his first thought was that the interplay of moonlight and darkness had fooled him. There couldn’t possibly be anyone up there, at this hour of the night. He’d most likely seen a tree or large shrub quivering in the wind, and his imagination had turned it into something threatening.
Except that trees were not shaped like men, and they didn’t travel on two legs.
Lee stopped walking. He put his hand on the butt of the gun and stared up into the hills.
At that moment, a cloud cloaked the moon, dipping the mount
ains in darkness. The blackness was so complete that Lee could barely see his own hand in front of his face.
He switched on the flashlight. He played the beam across the rocky outcroppings and trees and bushes. He saw nothing to alarm him, but the vegetation was thick, and the flashlight didn’t do a good job of illuminating the mountainside from this distance. There could be something hidden in those trees.
He sure felt as if something was lurking up there. Watching him from the darkness.
Lee lowered the flashlight and began walking—briskly.
He was thinking about black bears. He’d once taken a trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with another woman he’d met on the Internet, and when they toured the Smoky Mountains, they had spotted a bear. The animal was six feet tall and must have weighed four hundred pounds. When it stood on its hind legs, it looked like something out of a fright film.
The bears supposedly were not interested in people ... But there had been cases of attacks. Maulings. Killings.
He quickened his pace. As he pumped his legs, he tried to remain peripherally aware of the surrounding mountains. He didn’t sense any movement. But he still had the uncanny feeling that something was keeping pace with him, following his every footstep.
Finally, he halted, and whirled, bringing up the flashlight like a weapon.
He didn’t see anything. But he felt it.
“Who’s up there?” he shouted.
A cool wind whistled through the mountains, rattling the underbrush.
“Come on out, motherfucker!” Lee said.
Something clattered down the mountainside. Something small. Lee chased it with the flashlight, but it was too tiny for him to make out what it was. A rock, maybe?
The thing skipped down the shelf of the mountains and bounced onto the shoulder of the road. Lee stepped forward, panning the light beam across the ground.
When he found the object, a gasp escaped him.
It was a gold hoop earring, covered in fresh blood.
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