‘Yup, a place where a woman called Mother Hale took in babies whose moms were addicts or had AIDS,’ I recited from what I’d read earlier.
‘And how do you feel about that?’
‘I don’t know right now. And stop sounding like a therapist!’ I said, only half joking.
‘Sorry. I’m just worried about you. It’s a lot for you to deal with. Want me to swing by and we can talk?’
‘No, I’m fine, but thanks for the offer.’
‘You’re sure, Electra?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Then why don’t I pick you up at around eleven a.m. tomorrow?’
‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Do you need my address?’
‘Your ever-efficient PA has already given me that, just in case I—’
‘Had to dash across town to save me when I was so wasted I couldn’t remember where I lived?’ I smiled.
‘Something like that, I guess, yeah. But you sound like you’re doing great, Electra. Really great. And as I said, I’m here if you need me, whatever time it is. I’ll keep my cell right by me.’
‘Thanks, Miles. I’ll see you tomorrow then.’
‘You sure will. Try and get some sleep. Bye now.’
‘Bye.’
The smile that had formed on my lips was still there as I switched off my cell. I got the feeling that Miles really cared about me, and that made me feel warm inside.
The question was, I thought, as I decided I didn’t need the ginger tea anymore, would I also go and visit the place where Pa had found me tomorrow?
I just didn’t know.
I slept right through until eight and staggered blearily to the bathroom. I gave a small shriek as I saw my reflection in the mirror, having forgotten about my hair transformation.
‘Christ, Electra.’ (I’d decided it was okay to occasionally swear under the privacy of my own breath, although the purists would say that Jesus was always listening . . .) ‘What on earth is Miles gonna say? My hair is shorter than his!’
As I went to make myself some coffee, then padded back through the living room to the terrace to enjoy the glorious early June morning, I wondered why I cared.
After a very speedy run round the park, I jogged back inside, had a shower and towel-dried the centimetre of wiry fuzz on my head. Then I went to my closet, wondering what on earth to wear that would be suitable for my date – no, ‘meeting’ – with Miles. I’d only been to Harlem a handful of times, and that had just been passing through for a shoot on my way uptown to Washington Heights or Marble Hill.
Having tried on most things in my wardrobe that were vaguely suitable, I went back to my original choice of jeans, sneakers and one of the hoodies with my signature gold lightning bolt zigzagging across the front. It hadn’t taken a lot of imagination to come up with a design for XX, but whenever I wore it – and I had one in four different colours – I felt empowered.
I added some mascara and a dab of Vaseline to my lips, then sat down on the couch, waiting for the concierge phone to beep and tell me I had someone waiting for me downstairs.
My cell rang and I caught a flash of an ‘M’ briefly as I put it to my ear. I felt my stomach plunge as I braced myself for a cancellation from Miles.
‘Hi.’
‘Electra, it’s Maia!’
‘Oh.’
‘What?’
‘I just thought you were someone else – I have you both under M and you’re “Mi” for short, and . . . Oh, never mind,’ I gibbered.
‘Right. Anyway, sorry I missed your call last night. How are you?’
‘Oh, I’m really good, thanks. You?’
‘Up very early to drive out to the fazenda. Remember I told you about the project I’d started? We run weekends there for kids in the favelas who’ve never been out to the countryside.’
‘Of course I remember.’ I looked at the clock and saw it was five past eleven. ‘Hey, that’s a coincidence, because I’m heading to Harlem right now with a friend, to look at a drop-in centre for teen addicts that he advises at. I want to do something to help.’
‘Electra! That sounds fantastic. I’m just so proud of you, I can’t even tell you! And yes, of course I still have the quote I translated for you from the armillary sphere. Want me to tell you what it says?’
‘Yeah, go for it.’
‘It’s by a very famous Danish philosopher called Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” I think it’s beautiful.’
I paused as I took in the words, and thought that Pa could not have found anything more perfect for me. Tears pricked my eyes.
The concierge phone beeped at me from across the room. I breathed an involuntary sigh of relief.
‘Listen, I gotta go, but it’s so good to talk to you.’
‘And you, Electra. Let’s both speak next week in a calmer moment. We might be able to pool some ideas on our different projects.’
‘Yup. Bye, Maia,’ I said, cancelling the call as I lifted the concierge receiver. ‘I’m on my way down.’
‘Hi.’
Miles was sitting in the waiting area and rose as I emerged from the elevator.
‘Hi,’ I said, feeling ridiculously shy.
‘Your hair—’
‘I know,’ I said as my hand went protectively towards my head.
‘I really dig it,’ he said, giving me a wide smile. ‘It suits you.’
‘I feel, like, very exposed,’ I said as we walked out of the entrance.
‘With cheekbones like yours, I don’t think you’ve got any need to worry.’
‘Thanks. So, where’s the car?’
‘I don’t own one – who wants to drive anywhere in this city?’
‘So how do you get around? By limo?’
‘Nope,’ Miles said as he put out an arm to flag down a yellow cab. One screeched to a halt and he opened the passenger door for me. ‘Your carriage awaits, m’lady,’ he said as I climbed in and did my best to fold my legs into the cramped space. ‘Welcome to my world.’
Miles shouted out an address through the glass partition and the cab set off.
‘I guess it’s a while since you’ve been in one of these, and you’re honoured, honey, because I only take these on special occasions; most of the time I’m on the subway.’
I turned my head away from him and stared out the window so he couldn’t see the shame on my face. To be fair, I’d only been sixteen when Susie had whisked me off to New York. One of the original stipulations Pa had insisted on was that I would always have a car to take me to any meeting across town. Things had carried on from there, with the occasional yellow cab taken with the other models I’d lived with in an apartment in Chelsea. The subway remained a subterranean world that I’d never entered.
‘You know, Electra, I’ve been using the subway for years and I’m still here to tell the tale,’ Miles commented.
I hated that he seemed to be able to guess everything I was thinking. But I supposed I kind of liked it as well.
‘So, tell me more about the drop-in centre,’ I said as we sped uptown.
‘A lot of the volunteers are either parents who have lost kids to drug addiction, or ex-addicts themselves. Problem is, since we lost our funding last year, the centre is struggling to pay its bills.’
‘Is it, um, safe here?’ I asked nervously as we arrived twenty minutes later in a street full of walk-ups and brownstones.
‘Better than it was, yeah,’ Miles said. ‘There’s still some no-go areas, but a lot of it was re-zoned by Bloomberg and gentrified. Harlem’s becoming a cool and expensive address these days. Times were when you could buy a brownstone for no more than a dollar round here. I only wish I’d had that dollar,’ Miles grinned. ‘So, we’re here.’
We stepped out of the cab and I tried to dust the smell of stale coffee and fried food from me. Miles walked up to a battered blue door sandwiched between a bodega and a building that was boarded up and covered in graffiti tags. Above the blue door
was a small hand-painted sign, indicating it was the ‘Hands of Hope Drop-in Center’.
Miles pressed buttons on a keypad and pushed the door open. He led me along a dark corridor, then into a long narrow room lit only by skylights. A number of worn melamine tables and plastic chairs were dotted around it.
‘This is it,’ Miles said. ‘A cousin of a cousin of mine let us build this extension in his backyard for no more than the concrete it took. It’s nothing special, but it’s made a difference. You want a coffee?’ Miles indicated the stainless-steel contraption that sat on a counter at the back of the room. ‘The refrigerator’s broken and we’ve got no more money to repair it, so it’s that or a warm soda.’
‘I’m good, thanks,’ I said, suddenly feeling as privileged as the spoilt little rich girl I was.
‘On top of that, we got an eviction notice a couple months back – some developer has bought this brownstone, along with five others on the street,’ sighed Miles. ‘I know it doesn’t look much, but it was a safe place for the local kids to come and get support, advice and a real bad but free cup of coffee. It’s a tiny project, but even if it’s saved one life, then for me, it’s been worth it.’
‘So, how much does a place like this cost to run?’ I asked.
‘How long is a piece of string? I give my services for free, as does everyone who works here, but in an ideal world, we’d have trained counsellors, a twenty-four-seven helpline so the kids can talk to us anonymously, a health professional and a lawyer who’s here every day to give on-the-spot advice, and enough space to house them all.’
‘Right, well, I want to help if I can,’ I said, ‘but I need to think about how we could raise the funds. I’ve got money, but I guess the kind of place you’re talking about could take, like, millions of dollars.’
‘I’m not asking you to fund us, Electra, but to maybe use your profile to help it happen. You get what I’m saying?’
‘I think so. I’m sorry, Miles, I have zero experience in this kind of stuff, so I need you to guide me.’
‘I was hoping you could get some network coverage for the centre,’ he said. ‘I could ask some of the kids who’ve come through these doors over the years if they’d be prepared to be interviewed alongside you and say how it’s helped them.’
‘That’s a great idea,’ I agreed. ‘I’m up for anything.’
‘Good. Now, come on, let’s go. This place depresses me right now.’
As we walked outside, I could hear the sound of rap being played on a tinny radio in the bodega next door.
‘So,’ he said, looking at me as we stood on the sidewalk, ‘you wanna go take a look at where your pa found you? We can walk it from here.’
I stood in an agony of indecision.
‘Listen, let’s take a stroll towards it; it’s a place you should see anyway while you’re here in Harlem,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ I agreed, my stomach doing one of those weird plungey things and sending my heart rate up at the thought.
As we walked, I tried to stay calm and take in the streets around me. Even though some of the brownstones were crumbling away – windows filled with cardboard and overflowing trash cans – it was obvious from the hipster cafés we were passing and the scaffolding erected around a number of the conversions that this area was being gentrified. We passed a large red-brick building and had to step off the sidewalk and onto the road to pass the crowd that was standing outside. They were all dressed formally, in colourful suits and dresses with matching hats, and as I stepped back onto the sidewalk, I saw a car decorated with flowers pull up outside.
‘That’s Sarah and Michael getting hitched,’ Miles commented. ‘She’s one of my success stories; I helped her fight to get an apartment when she was living in a women’s shelter,’ he added as a young woman dressed in an enormous wedding gown of shiny white satin manoeuvred herself out of the back seat of the old car. The crowd waiting outside what I now realised was a church clapped and cheered her and started to funnel inside.
‘Let me go give her a hug,’ Miles said, and walked back swiftly towards the bride. The woman turned and smiled at him as he embraced her.
‘So you know people around here?’ I asked as he came back.
‘Sure I do. I moved here five years ago, after I got clean. That’s my church,’ he added as we watched a man who had to be the bride’s father take his daughter’s hand and lead her inside. ‘It’s super nice to see a happy ending – it fires me up to keep pushing for help for these kids,’ Miles continued as he began to walk at some pace and I doubled my stride to keep up with him.
‘So, what kind of lawyering do you actually do?’ I asked.
‘After law school, I was recruited by a top firm to join their litigation department – that’s where lawyers bill the most hours – and I made money hand over fist. Which I then spent as fast as I could, putting it up my nose and pouring it down my throat. The pressure was something else. Then I got clean and even though it meant a big salary cut, I decided to transition to a smaller firm, where I get a lot more opportunity to take pro-bono cases.’
‘What are they?’
‘Cases like Vanessa’s. In crude terms, my law firm lets me take on charity cases for free. And yeah, I wish I could do more, but even I gotta pay my bills.’
‘That makes you sound like a very good person, Miles,’ I said as the road led upwards and I reckoned we were heading in the direction of Marble Hill.
‘It makes me someone trying to be a good person, but I fail more often than I succeed,’ Miles shrugged. ‘But that’s okay too. Since I came back to Jesus, I understand that it’s all right to fail as long as you are trying.’
‘What do you mean, you “came back to Jesus”?’ I asked him.
‘My whole family – in fact, my whole community in Philly – was centred around the church. It was like one great happy family and I had a whole load of aunties, uncles and cousins who weren’t related to me by blood, but through Jesus. Then I went to Harvard, moved into the world of Big Bucks and felt big with myself – bigger than my family, my church and the Lord himself. I decided I didn’t need any of them, that the church was some human conspiracy to keep the working man down and in his place – I’d read some Karl Marx at Harvard.’ Miles gave a deep throaty chuckle. ‘I was a total asshole back then, Electra. Anyway, you know what happened next – eventually I found my way back to Jesus and my family. You ever sing with a choir?’
‘Are you joking?! I’ve never sung in my life.’
Miles stopped right where he was in the street. ‘You cannot be serious.’
‘I am. As a kid, I used my vocal chords to scream, not sing, so my sisters told me.’
‘Electra’ – Miles lowered his voice – ‘you simply cannot be a black woman who doesn’t sing, even if it’s not in tune. In fact, I can’t think of one single guy or girl I know who doesn’t. It’s, like, part of our culture.’
Miles began to walk again, then a mellow sound came out of his mouth. He was humming just three notes.
‘You try.’
‘What? No way!’
He hummed the three notes again. ‘Come on, Electra, everyone sings. It makes them feel happy. “Oh Happy Day”,’ Miles suddenly sang out very loudly and perfectly in tune. I looked around at the passers-by, and they took no notice as Miles continued with a melody even I recognised.
‘I’m embarrassing you, aren’t I?’ he grinned.
‘Yup. I told you, I didn’t grow up in a household that had your traditions.’
‘It’s never too late to learn, Electra. And one day, I’m gonna take you to church and you’re gonna see what you’ve been missing all these years. Right.’ Miles’s long legs stopped abruptly in front of a brownstone. ‘This is it, Hale House, where your pa found you.’
‘Oh, er, right.’
‘And that there,’ he said, pointing at a statue of a woman with a very kind face holding out a hand towards me, ‘is Mother Clara Hale. She’s the stuff of legend around here. You
were born in 1982, weren’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I was just trying to work out whether Mother Hale would have been here when you were. And yes, she would have been.’
I glanced at this woman who may or may not have held me in her arms, then read the words engraved on the plaque next to the statue. Clara Hale had initially cared for her own three children, then begun taking the neighbourhood children into her care. Eventually, she had started looking after babies whose parents suffered from substance abuse and HIV. Apparently, in 1985, President Ronald Reagan himself had called her a ‘true American hero’.
I turned to Miles. ‘So the fact I was found here . . . does it mean that my mom was an addict or died of AIDS? Like, did she take in regular babies too, or what?’
‘I don’t know, but yes, she was known for nursing babies of addicts – especially heroin – through their inherited addiction. Having said that, no baby was ever refused entry, and I’m sure many desperate new moms beat a path to her door whether or not they were addicts.’
I looked up at Miles, wondering if he was just trying to make me feel better.
‘Wow, right, well . . . Should I take a picture or something? Post it on Facebook and show all my fans the place where I was found?’ I rolled my eyes at the irony, but I was suddenly feeling close to tears.
‘Hey, come here.’ Miles pulled me close to him and gave me a hug. ‘You don’t know anything right now, so stop second-guessing. Maybe it’s time you went off and did some research on your long-lost family.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, not really listening because I was soo enjoying the hug.
‘The good news is, honey, that wherever you came from, you turned out to be a real success story. And that’s the most important thing of all. Now,’ Miles said, pulling away from me and looking at his watch. ‘At the risk of seeming rude, how about I put you in a cab? I have a heap of work to catch up on after my three weeks of being AWOL and it’s pointless going downtown with you only to come back up again.’
‘I . . . okay, fine,’ I shrugged, as one came past and Miles hailed it.
‘Thanks for coming up here, Electra,’ he said as I got inside. ‘I’ll be in touch about Vanessa as soon as I hear anything. Take care now, and remember, call me anytime you need to.’
The Sun Sister (The Seven Sisters) Page 47