by Tayari Jones
“Everybody is so calm, like this is only a little speed bump.” He panted. “This is my life, motherfucker. My life. I was married to her.”
Have you ever stared fury in its eyes? There is no saving yourself from a man in its throes. Roy’s face was haunted and wild. The cords of his neck muscles were like cables; his lips made a hard gash. The unceasing blows were fueled by a need to hurt me that was greater than his own need for oxygen or even freedom. His need to hurt me was greater even than my own desire to survive. My efforts to protect myself were ritualistic, mannered, and symbolic, while his fists, feet, and needs were operating from a brutal code.
Had he learned this in prison, this way of beating a person? There was none of the stick-and-move than I remembered from school-yard brawls. This was the nasty scrapping of a man with nothing to lose. If I remained on the grass, he would stomp my head. I raised myself, but my legs failed me. I fell first to my knees, like a building being demolished, and then I was on the lawn, the odor of dry grass and wet blood in my nose.
“Say you’re sorry,” he said, his foot poised to kick.
This was an opportunity. A chance to wave the white flag. I would be easy enough, to spit out the words along with the blood in my mouth. Surely I could give him that, only I could not. “Sorry for what?”
“You know what for.”
I looked into his eyes narrowed against the sun, but I didn’t see anyone that I recognized. Would I have surrendered if I thought it would have saved me, if I believed that he was intent on anything other than killing me? I don’t know. But if I were going to die on my front yard, I would die with the taste of pride in my mouth. “I am not sorry.”
But I was sorry. Not for what was between Celestial and me, I would never regret that. I was sorry for a lot of things. I was sorry for Evie, suffering from lupus for so many years. I was sorry for elephants killed for their ivory. I was sorry for Carlos, who traded one family for another. I was sorry for everyone in the world because we all had to die and nobody knew what happened after that. I was sorry for Celestial, who was probably watching from the window. Most of all, I was sorry for Roy. The last time I saw him on that morning before his mother’s wake, he said, “I never had a chance, did I? I only thought I did.”
There was pain, yes, but I figured out how not to feel it. Instead, I thought about Celestial and me and how maybe we just thought we could weather this calamity. We believed we could talk this out, reasoning our way through this. But someone was going to pay for what happened to Roy, just as Roy paid for what happened to that woman. Someone always pays. Bullet don’t have nobody’s name on it, that’s what people say. I think the same is true for vengeance. Maybe even for love. It’s out there, random and deadly, like a tornado.
Celestial
I wonder about myself sometimes. Roy and Andre circled each other, radiating locker-room energy: violence and competition. They told me to leave, and I did. Why? Was I afraid to bear witness? I’m not an obedient person, but on that Christmas Eve, I did as I was told.
They must have grabbed each other as soon as I shut the door. By the time I made it to a window—peeking through a curtain like a silly southern belle—Roy and Andre were rolling around on the dry lawn, a tangle of arms and legs. I watched for what must have been only several seconds, but whatever the duration, it was too long. When Roy gained the upper hand and pinned Andre to the ground, straddling and punishing him with wind-milling fists and rage, I pulled open the window. The lace curtain floated from the thin rod, covering my eyes like a veil. I yelled their names to the wind, but they either wouldn’t or couldn’t hear me. The grunts of exertion and satisfaction both layered over the gasps of pain and humiliation. All these noises floated up to my window, moving me to run outside with the intention of saving them both.
Stumbling and quaking, I reached the lawn. “November 17!” I yelled, hoping the memory would reach him.
He did pause but only long enough to shake his head in disgust. “It’s too late for all of that, Georgia. No magic words for us anymore.”
Now I had no choice. I pulled the phone from my pocket and aimed it like a gun. With whatever air I could gather, I screamed, “I’m calling the police!”
Roy froze, pulled up short by the threat. “You would do that? You would, wouldn’t you?”
“You’re making me,” I said, fighting to steady my shaking. “Get off him.”
“I don’t care,” Roy said. “Call the law. Fuck you, fuck Andre, and fuck the police.” Andre struggled to free himself, but Roy, as if to underscore his point, delivered a close-fisted blow. Andre shut his eyes but didn’t cry out.
“Please, Roy,” I said. “Please, please don’t make me call the police.”
“Do it,” Roy said. “Do I look like I care? Call them. Send me back. There’s nothing for me here. Send me back.”
“No,” Andre managed to say. His pupils, dark and wide, edged out light irises. “Celestial, you can’t send him back. Not after everything.”
“Do it,” Roy said.
“Celestial.” Andre’s voice was resolute but distant as an overseas call. “Put the phone down. Right now.”
Kneeling, I set it carefully on the lawn like I was surrendering a weapon. Roy released Andre, who rose only to his knees, his body at half-mast. I rushed over to him, but he sent me away. “I’m fine, Celestial,” he said, although he wasn’t. Wood chips clung to his clothes like mites.
“Let me look at your eye.”
“Stand down, Celestial,” he said softly, his teeth streaked pink.
Only a few yards away, Roy flexed his hands in time with his steps. “I didn’t kick him. When he was on the ground, I didn’t kick him. I could have. But I didn’t.”
“But look what you did do,” I said.
“What about you?” Roy was pacing now, back and forth over a short distance, like he was covering the floor of a narrow cell. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said. “I was just trying to come home. I wanted some time to talk to my wife and figure out what was what. Dre wasn’t supposed to have nothing to do with it.”
I didn’t call the police, but they came anyway, with strobing blue lights but no sirens. The officers, a black woman and a white man, acted put upon to be working on Christmas Eve. I wondered what they were thinking as they regarded us. Both men were bruised and bloody, and I was dressed like holiday cheer, whole and unhurt. I felt like a mother of newborn twins, hurrying from one man to the next, making sure neither was neglected, that both had a piece of me.
“Ma’am,” said the woman cop. “Is everything all right?”
I had not been this close to a police officer since the night at the Piney Woods when I had been pulled from my bed. My body memory smarted as I fingered the scar underneath my chin. Despite the December chill, I felt the spectral heat of that August night. Roy and I had been ordered through crosshairs not to speak and not to move, but my husband reached for me anyway, tangling our fingers for one desperate instant before a cop separated us with his black boot.
“Please don’t hurt him,” I said to the policewoman. “He’s been through a lot.”
“Who are these men?” the white cop asked me. His accent was thick and gooey, all Marietta, turn left at the Big Chicken. I tried to connect with the woman, but she fixed her eyes on the men.
With the voice I used on the telephone, I said, “This is my husband and my neighbor. We had a little bit of an accident, but everything is fine now.”
The woman looked to Andre. “Are you the husband?”
When he didn’t answer, Roy spoke. “I’m the husband. It’s me.”
She nodded at Andre for confirmation. “So you’re the neighbor?”
Rather than say yes, Andre recited his address, pointing at his own front door.
Once the police satisfied themselves, their Merry Christmases resonated like a dark omen. They left without blue lights, just the exhaust souring the air. Once they were gone, Roy sat heavily on the half-moon be
nch. He gestured toward the seat beside him, but I couldn’t go to him, not with Andre standing a few feet away, his face purpling around the eyes and his split lip showing red meat.
“Georgia,” Roy said, and then his body contracted dry heaving, his head between his knees. I went to him and rubbed his twitching back. “I’m hurting,” he said. “I’m hurting all over.”
“You need to go to the hospital?”
“I want to sleep in my own bed.” He stood up, like a man with somewhere to go. But he only turned toward Old Hickey. “It’s too much.” Then quickly—it must have been quickly—but I somehow took notice of each move, Roy tucked his lips against his teeth, gripped the tree like a brother, and then tipped his head back, presenting his face to the sky before driving his forehead against the ancient bark. The sound was muted, like the wet crack of an egg against the kitchen floor. He did it again, harder this time. I found my feet, and without thinking, I positioned myself between my husband and the tree. Roy craned his head back again, cocked and ready, but now if he chose to drive his skull forward, he would strike me instead.
He executed a little twitch of his knotted shoulders. Then he surveyed Old Hickey, the wood chips scattered in the grass, Andre, me, and lastly himself. “How did this happen?” Roy touched his forehead; the small cut leaked blood over his eyebrow.
Then he sat down on the grass, smoothly but with a sense of mission. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. He turned to Dre with the same curious tone. “Seriously. What do you think I should do?”
Andre sat himself gingerly on the round bench, tensing himself against his injuries. “We’ll help you get set up. If you want, you can stay in my house.”
“I’ll stay in your house and you will stay in my house with my wife? What kind of sense does that make?” Then he looked to me. “Celestial, you knew that wasn’t going to work. You know me. How could I go for that? What were you expecting?”
What did I expect? The truth is that before Roy materialized in my living room, I had forgotten that he was real. For the last two years, he was only an idea to me, this husband of mine who didn’t count. He had been away from me longer that we had been together. I’d convinced myself that there were laws limiting responsibility. When I sent Andre to Louisiana, I hoped that maybe Roy would choose not to come to Atlanta at all, that he would send for his things, that I would be a memory to him in the way that he was a memory for me.
“Roy,” I said, wondering aloud. “Tell the truth. Would you have waited on me for five years?”
He twitched that same shrug. “Celestial,” he said, like he was talking to someone very young, “this shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”
Andre made a move as if to join us on the dry grass, but I shook my head. His breath escaped his mouth in exhausted puffs of white.
“How does it feel to make all the decisions?” Roy said. “It’s been up to you for the last five years. When we were dating, it was up to me. You had a finger that needed a ring. You remember that? Remember when I was a fiancé you could be proud of, flashing that rock like a searchlight. I won’t lie and say I didn’t get off on it. But now I don’t have anything to offer you but myself. But it’s better than it was last year, when I couldn’t even give you that. So here I am.” He looked to his left. “Your turn, Dre. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Andre spoke to Roy, but he looked at me. “I don’t have to tell Celestial what I feel. She already knows.”
“But tell me,” Roy said. “Tell me how you ended up with your head on my pillow.”
“Roy, man,” Dre said. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. You know I am. So don’t take this as disrespect, but I’m not going to discuss this with you.” He touched his busted lip with his tongue. “You had a time when we could have talked, but you wanted to fight. Now I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“What about you, Georgia? Do you have anything to say? How did you end up picking Dre over me?”
The true answer was that Olive had settled it by lying in her coffin as Big Roy showed me what real communion looked like, what it sounded like, even what it smelled like—fresh earth and sadness. I could never tell Roy that by his parents’ measure, what we had wasn’t a connection for the ages. Our marriage was a sapling graft that didn’t have time to take.
As if he could hear the murmur of my thoughts, he said, “Was Dre just at the right place at the right time? Is this a crime of passion or a crime of opportunity? I need to know.”
How could I tell him that desire didn’t work the way I thought it did when I was younger, my head turned by the electricity of attraction. Andre and I had an everyday thing. We moved each other like we had done it forever, because we had.
When I didn’t answer, Roy pressed on. “How did we end up here? My key works, but you won’t let me in.”
He gathered his body up and plunked down on the bench, blank-eyed and miserable. I turned to Andre, who didn’t meet my gaze. Instead, he studied Roy, broken and shivering.
“You didn’t do this to him,” Andre said. “Don’t let him set that at your feet.”
And he was right. All around Roy were the shards of a broken life, not merely a broken heart. Yet who could deny that I was the only one who could mend him, if he could be healed at all? Women’s work is never easy, never clean.
“You know where I’ll be.” Andre turned toward his own house.
Andre went his way; Roy and I went ours, me leading Roy the way you would provide assistance to a man who has been shot or has lost his sight. As we climbed the stairs to the front walk, I heard Andre’s calm words. “He hit his head pretty bad. He might be concussed. Don’t let him go to sleep right away.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank me for what?” said Andre.
In the bathroom, Roy let me clean his wound, but he refused to go to the emergency room. “I know you can take care of me.”
But there was little to do besides apply antiseptic. As the night stretched on, we asked one another questions to keep sleep at bay, even though both our eyelids hung low, as though weighted down by coins.
“What were you looking for?” I asked him. “When you were going through all the boxes?”
Roy smiled and snugged the tip of his pinky in the gap in his mouth. “My tooth. It wasn’t trash. Why did you throw it out?”
“No,” I said. “I have it.”
“It’s because you love me,” he slurred.
“Stay awake,” I said, shaking him. “People with concussions can die in their sleep.”
“Wouldn’t that be some shit,” he said. “I get out of prison. Come home, find my wife with another man, win her back, and then get in a fight with a tree and wake up dead.” He must have sensed a change in me, even in the dim light. “Did I speak too soon? I didn’t win you back?”
Each time his eyes drooped, I shook him back to life. “Please don’t,” I whispered, opening myself to him, undoing a rusted latch. “I can’t lose you like this.”
Andre
This is how I am lonely.
When Celestial opened my front door with her key and walked into the family room, she had changed her clothes, but I was still wearing the fight-filthy jeans from that terrible afternoon. Even before she got close enough for me to see her swollen eyes, I sensed the salt on her like you can on the beach. It wasn’t quite 1 a.m., night but also the next day.
“Hey,” she said, lifting my legs and sitting on the sofa. Setting my calves back on her lap, she added, “Merry Christmas.”
“I guess,” I said, handing her the square glass containing the last of my father’s scotch. As she swallowed it, I smelled Carlos in the fumes.
I inched closer to the back of the sofa and made room. “Lie down,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about this when I can’t feel you next to me.”
She shook her head and stood up. “I need to walk around.” She traveled the room like a ghost, aimless and trapped.
With effort, I pulled myself to a seated position. I’d taped my ribs, but it hurt with every breath. “So I take it that Roy is still alive?”
“Dre,” she said. Finding the place in the room farthest from me, she sat on the white carpet and crossed her legs. Her bare feet looked naked and cold. “He’s wrecked.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
“There’s so much that you don’t know. Things people like us can’t even imagine.”
“Is that why you’re hiding in the corner? Celestial, what are you doing?” I beckoned to her. “Come here, girl. Talk to me.”
She returned to the sofa and we lay down. Celestial fitted herself against me, her forehead against mine.
“I married him for a reason,” she said. “You can never really unlove somebody. Maybe it changes shape, but it’s there.”
“You really believe that?”
“Dre, we have so much,” she said, “and he has nothing. Not even his mother. The whole time he was talking, my face was on fire, just like at Olive’s funeral. Her handprint stinging on my cheek, making sure I didn’t forget. It’s hot right now.” She reached for my hand. “Touch it.”
I nudged her away from me, suddenly irritated by her touch, by the scotch on her breath, even the scent of lavender on her neck. I didn’t want to cradle her talk about ghost slaps, dead mothers, and the right thing to do.
“Just go,” I said. “If you want leave me, just do it. Don’t try to make it supernatural. You are the one making this choice, Celestial. You.”
“You know what I mean, Dre. We’ve been lucky. We were born lucky. Roy’s starting from scratch. Less than scratch. You saw him trying to kill himself up under that tree. He wanted to crack his own skull.”
“Actually, I was the one he was trying to kill.”
“Dre,” she said. “You and me, we are just heartbroken. That’s it. Only heartbroken.”