She didn’t say anything, felt her lips against the receiver.
“Spring? Didn’t you?”
The next morning the sky was too gray for the beach. April had made more coffee and was about to call the club in Tampa when the phone rang. It was Jean. She spoke in almost a whisper, “Some men from the FBI are coming up to talk to you.” April could already hear them outside her door. They began knocking. She thanked her and asked if she could send Franny down and she hung up and let them in.
They were older than she was, their shirts ironed crisply, their ties just the right length. They all wore wedding rings and each had a handgun clipped snugly to his belt. Franny stared at one of them as April held the door open for her and told her she’d be down soon. At the bottom of the stairs, Jean waited, her eyes on April’s, the dark light of distrust back in them.
April offered the agents coffee but they politely said no. Two of the men stood at the peninsula. The oldest-looking one sat in the chair across from her on the couch, a pad and pen on his lap. His hair was combed back over his bald spot and there were laugh lines etched around his mouth, but his eyes were a cool gray.
He asked her how long she’d worked at the Puma Club, the shifts of her average workweek, then that Friday night and the approximate time when she went into the Champagne Room.
She told him, thought of Franny in Tina’s office as she said it.
“What did you do for him?”
“What do you mean?”
“What services did you perform?”
“I danced.”
“That’s all you did?”
“Yes, that’s all I ever do.”
“Did he ask for sex?”
“No. And he wouldn’t have gotten any.” A wave of heat rose into her face.
“But I understand you spent over two hours with him.”
“That’s right, we talked too.”
“What about?”
“I don’t know. He was drunk. He didn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Were you drinking as well?”
“Yes, you’re supposed to in the Champagne. But I wasn’t drunk.”
He nodded, wrote something on his pad.
She was barefoot and wearing shorts and she could feel one of the agents staring at her.
“I understand that was a rough night for you.”
April nodded. His tone was patronizing, and she didn’t like it. She looked away from him. There was Tina’s empty office, the bright empty dressing room, the empty darkness under the stage, her screams lost in it. She made herself look back at him.
“But you’re all right now.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He wrote more, as if something had just been verified for him. “What did he say that didn’t make any sense?”
“I don’t know, he talked about truth and lies. He said none of what we did was allowed.”
“He was instructing you.”
“No, he wasn’t instructing me.”
“But how did he say it?”
Now they were all looking at her, the oldest one’s eyes on her eyes, like she knew something she wasn’t telling and should, but more, it was as if she had no right to know what she knew, that she’d gotten this knowledge wrongly.
“He said it like he hated us. You know, you could tell he hated us.”
“Who? You dancers? Or Americans?”
“No, all of us.” She waved her arm in the air to encompass the men in her house, but her last word hung between them and she felt outside of it, not that she wasn’t hated too, but that she had somehow been banished from the rest.
There were more questions about him, about anything else he may have said or done, but soon it felt to her as if they were talking in a wide floating circle. As they were leaving, the oldest one placed his card faceup on her kitchen counter like an unpaid bill. They thanked her for her time and stepped out into a soft rain. She waited for them to drive away, then she went down to Jean’s, the steps warm and wet. The television was on, Franny sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of it, a plate of cheese and crackers on her lap.
Jean was pulling a bowl from the dishwasher. April wiped her feet on the mat. The television’s bright colors spilled over her daughter and Jean’s cat lying beside her, and Jean straightened and pushed a strand of hair from her face. She was flushed in the cheeks and when she looked over at April she no longer looked distrustful but sad and slightly impatient, as if whatever she was here to tell her, then please, let’s get it over with.
They sat on the edge of Jean’s bed. The cat had followed them, and he stretched out behind them on the bedspread, his tail lightly flicking April’s back. There were vacuum tracks in Jean’s carpet. It felt thick and soft under her feet.
“I danced for one of them.”
“Who?”
The rain tapped the window. From down the hall came Franny’s laughter. April turned to Jean, could see in her eyes that she knew but wasn’t saying so. “The hijackers.”
Jean nodded. She looked away. “I read that some of them had been seen there, April. I was hoping—”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, Jean, what?”
“I hoped you’d had nothing to do with that.”
“I didn’t. I just danced for one of them.” There was the small smoky Champagne Room, his eyes on her face and breasts, his money scattered across the sticky cocktail table.
“What did they ask you?”
“What he was like.”
“What was he like?”
“Like a boy. Just some drunk and lonely boy.”
“Are you in any kind of trouble?”
“No, why would I be in trouble?”
“My show’s over.” Franny stood in the doorway. There were cracker crumbs on her shirt, and she’d been smiling, but now she wasn’t, her eyes moving from April to Jean, then back to April. She looked close to making some kind of important decision.
The next day the sun was back, and before they drove to the beach April told Jean she had a quick phone call to make. Would she mind waiting for her with Franny down in the garden? In the kitchen she opened the yellow pages and found the club in Tampa. She pressed the numbers and waited, her eyes on the number in the ad box, a silhouette of a naked woman lying across it as if it were a bed.
The rings were long with little space between them. She could feel her pulse in her palm. She looked out the kitchen window down into the garden. Near the cedar boxes of hibiscus and allamanda, Jean and Franny were hopscotching over the terra-cotta brick work. First Jean, heavy on her feet, then Franny, the sun on her hair.
“The Golden Stage, a Gentlemen’s Club.” It was a woman’s voice. April pictured her standing in a pink entryway. Behind her was the hum of a machine, maybe a vacuum cleaner, a man shouting something, and she imagned a big windowless room that would soon darken and fill with more men.
“Hello?” The woman’s voice sounded so young and hungry to please. Outside, Jean sat in one of the Adirondacks breathing hard and Franny was hopping on one leg, trying to hit each brick with her foot.
“Hello?”
It was as if April had just woken a long venomous snake and now it was slithering past her and Franny and Jean. She opened her mouth to speak but there came a click in her ear, then the dial tone.
She hung up.
She closed the phone book and placed it back into its drawer and slowly pushed it shut. Maybe she would try again later. Maybe tomorrow.
She picked up her beach bag and walked outside. The day was early and bright. From the landing she could smell the mango leaves, could see Jean’s garden spread out before her. And she hurried down the stairs to join them, her friend and her daughter, waiting for her down there under the sun.
FOR TWO YEARS Deena had done her best, one weekend a month packing up Cole and driving the eight hours north and west to the farthest end of the panhandle here to Santa Rosa. She had to stay in a motel in Milton, or Pen
sacola. Pay for a room she couldn’t afford. And that did something to him. Her going to all that trouble. Those first visits she held the phone to her ear and stared at him through inch-thick glass, her hair finally her own, her eyes sometimes welling up. She’d sit Cole on her lap and let him talk though Cole never understood that the voice he heard was his daddy on the other side of the glass, and he’d look away from him and talk to the man on the phone instead.
After seven years he’s in Open Population, him and seventy-nine other men on bunks in the barracks just off the rec yard. He’s got a locker and pictures on the wall of his son, and his job assignments are no longer in food service scraping slop after slop from plastic trays, or in the laundry room washing out the sweat and piss and dried semen of lowlifes.
For a while he worked in the law library cataloguing books. Then the trustee there saw his head for numbers and for two years he’s been a math tutor in the ED helping men learn what nobody ever taught them before, or they were too damned smart to listen to. Some of them call him Teach. Sometimes they come up to him in the rec yard or when he’s just lying on his bunk and ask him to help them with their GED or to send a budget back home to their wife or girlfriend or to give them the probability of getting an ace in a deck when three have already been played. Some of them just come up and ask him things because others call him Teach, and they think he knows more than the others.
One asked him about God, if he believed in him, and AJ shrugged and said, “Man, I just hope he believes in us.”
Once or twice a year now Deena will drive Cole to see him. Her husband stays back at the motel, and for a while AJ preferred it that way, didn’t want to lay eyes on him. But it’s different now. He no longer pictures her fucking him in their bed in their house she sold anyway. He no longer pictures him reading Cole a book at night, helping him with his homework, throwing a ball to him under the sun, this man Deena met at the Walgreen’s where she got her old job back. She wrote to him how it felt good to be working again, that she’d lost weight and one afternoon a computer salesman came in for ballpoint pens and they got to talking.
After the divorce papers she stopped writing letters about herself, just sent along pictures of Cole, the latest of his team photo from Little League. AJ’s son was the skinny one in the back row, his uniform shirt tucked tightly into his pants, his ears sticking out beneath his cap.
But he looked happy. That was the thing. His son looked happy, and cared for.
On Wednesdays, after the two-thirty head count, AJ sits in a corner of the mess with two dozen short-timers and they talk about how they’re going to live when they get out, how they’re going to avoid coming back. Ray Brown, the leader, a man who for years stuck a gun in people’s faces and took everything from them, said he wrote letters to all his victims, even if they were dead. He wrote letters and asked forgiveness.
The letters help with parole too, but for so long AJ couldn’t even imagine writing anything. He shouldn’t’ve done what he did, he knew that. But who brought her there in the first place? And then when he’d seen and read who else was there that night, that she may have danced for one of them—well, it was too much.
It’s three o’clock on a Friday in September, job assignments done for the day. AJ’s sitting against the wall in the rec yard. Tomorrow he’ll get a new student, a young con in a wheelchair. He sees him at the edge of the basketball court now, a dark-skinned kid with dead legs lighting a cigarette, a bunch of short-timers playing a loud game of full-court in front of him. At the exercise station some of the younger ones do push-ups and chin-ups, the free weights hauled out of here last winter after somebody smashed an iron plate into another’s face. All this rage all the time. AJ just doesn’t feel it anymore. He doesn’t feel much at all really. But he looks forward to the small things, sleep after lights-out, a good piss, hot coffee, then teaching, sitting down with another man beside him and laying out the rules of numbers for him, how to create a problem and how to work it out.
And this isn’t so bad, this concrete against his back, the sun high and in his face. In this heat he can smell the sap on the other side of the chain link and concertina wire, can see the thick stands of slash pine and loblolly and red cedar. He knows the Blackwater River is somewhere beyond that and that it flows twenty miles south of here to the Gulf, fresh water into salt, all that water flowing out to more water, our bodies made of it. He sees him and Cole on a boat fishing together, laughing together. And once again, there’s the little girl, how he held her and sang to her and lay her down asleep. For a moment he doesn’t remember her name, but then it’s there in his head, like a prayer.
The unit will be quieter now. He’ll sign out a pen and get his notebook from his locker. He’ll lie down on his bunk. He does not yet know what he’ll say or if she’ll ever receive it or even read it, but she’s the one he must write to. And he’ll write to his son after that. Tell him more than he has in the past.
The kid in the chair tosses his cigarette. He wheels himself away from the game and stops near the chain link and stares through it to the trees.
IT WAS THE waiting that did it, that crept up on her and pressed against her chest and reached in with a cold hand and squeezed her heart. But then something truly horrible happens and you’re still here. More fortunate than so many others. Blessed by fate.
But, still here.
After April and Franny moved, there was one other tenant, a young man from Haiti who spoke poor English and played his music too loud and had over many friends. They stayed late, speaking in French and drinking, laughing and sometimes yelling, and after two months of this, Jean worked up her nerve and asked Jean-Paul to leave.
She didn’t need the money. Again, it was to fill the awful silence of the house.
April’s face as she sat beside Jean under the mango. She hadn’t worked in weeks and was darker than ever from their mornings at the beach, but she looked tired, her eyes missing something that had been there before, a kind of confidence. Franny was inside watching a movie, its bright blues and reds reflecting off the window.
“Do you miss working, April?”
“I miss the money. But I can’t go back to that.”
“Good.”
“I just can’t separate it anymore.”
“What?”
“Me by day and me by night.”
“What’re you going to do?”
She shrugged and ran her fingers back through her hair, not knowing that in only days her mother would call from New Hampshire, her true mother, the one who’d raised her and was Franny’s grandmother. She would call to say she was moving to a condo. Did April want to buy the house for cheap?
Jean still had the letters and Franny’s drawings, the ones she’d drawn here and the two she sent in the months after April drove her north. As a housewarming gift, Jean had sent flowers from her garden. She clipped hibiscus and frangipani, the red stars of ixora and the orange petals of her bougainvillea. She wrapped all this in damp leaves from her mango and jacaranda trees, and she bought baby’s breath and florist’s paper and bundled it all and boxed it and drove to the post office and mailed it off to New Hampshire, a place she’d never been.
She imagined mountains and farms, snow and pickup trucks.
Over a year ago, the last letter. In it April said she was working in a realtor’s office, that she met someone and was getting married. She included a school picture of Franny, this striking eight-year-old girl with long hair, the curls gone, the blond too. But her eyes were the same, still bright, still warm, still so curious about the world and her place in it.
On the back was April’s handwriting: Franny, 3rd grade, she still talks about you and the garden!
But did she? She’d been only three. Was it possible? Jean didn’t think so, but she hoped it was true.
Her room was as she’d left it. Some nights when Jean couldn’t sleep, when her breathing seemed to come with difficulty and she broke out in a sweat, she’d go into Franny’s room. She
’d lie on her smaller bed and close her eyes and rest. She’d see their mornings together, hear Franny’s voice again as she talked about her dreams from the night before. Jean would see and hear other things—Harry smiling at her from behind his reading glasses, her father’s hand gripping the handles of his medical kit, that conscientious inspector, the way she stood in Jean’s room and studied her, searching for flaws when that’s all she’d ever been, a jumbled bundle of them.
Jean takes her newspaper and a glass of Shiraz, old Matisse following her outside. It’s sundown, early spring. In a week, God willing, she’ll turn seventy-seven. How had this happened? How had she outlived everyone she came from? She didn’t always feel well, but the attacks were over; if something terrible was going to happen, then there was very little you could do about it anyway. This she knew now. Why wait for it?
She sipped her wine. There was a photo in the paper she had to see again. She set her glass down and slipped on her reading glasses. His head was shaved and he wore the white-brimmed hat of the Marine Corps. She’d seen so many of these pictures, all of young men staring resolutely into the camera and their own fates, the Stars and Stripes behind them. But this one’s expression was neutral, as if he were lying in wait and did not want to be seen, not yet. And it was him. It was April’s polite bouncer, and Jean’s heart flattened out in her chest. Was he one of the thousands? There were the words “active duty” and “past ties to the community.” Like so many, he’d enlisted because he wanted to do something, but he was one of those here who’d actually “brushed shoulders” with one of them and could not forget it.
And he had gone back for a third time.
She folded the paper and set it in her lap. Outside the walls a car drove by, one of Jean’s neighbors she didn’t know. She would work on that. She was sure good people lived here, as they did everywhere. If she opened her gate and invited them in, wouldn’t they come?
The wine spread out warmly in Jean’s chest. She breathed deeply. She could smell mango leaves and hibiscus, palmetto and hyacinth and trumpet vine. There was the damp soil of her new plantings, its dark scent indifferent and ancient and enduring.
The Garden of Last Days Page 44