A Hope in the Unseen (54 page)

“Where is he, the warden?” Cedric asks as she turns to leave. “Retired two weeks ago,” she says from the side of her mouth, not
turning. So, Cedric waits and tries to prepare himself. It’s been three days since the near eviction, three days of jumbled emotions in which he hasn’t spoken to his mother. Not a word. “We beefin’,” he told Neddy yesterday on the phone. “‘Cause we ought to be beefin’.”

He’s not sure exactly why he’s so angry at her, and he’d rather not think about it. All he knows is that Monday’s trauma has left him feeling raw but cleansed, like he’s shed a layer of skin. He’s decided that, deep down, he had been feeling guilty for months now about not belonging in Southeast anymore, about leaving everyone behind. But watching through the venetian blinds as the mob picked over the couch he sat on and the table he ate on cured him of that. Burned that guilt right off. It made him angry, sure, but also clear that he needs to find his own way from here on.

The first big thing he decided was to come out here. He and his father haven’t talked since last summer, and Cedric hasn’t seen the old man in more than two years. It’s something that has gnawed at him, that a whole side of his past is dark and indiscernible. Being nearly nineteen, maybe he ought to try to be more forgiving of the man’s flaws, try to develop some sort of relationship. For so long, his father intimidated him. He seemed to toy with Cedric’s exposed yearnings. A phone call or brief encounter would leave Cedric feeling wobbly and eruptive and kind of wild. But nothing seems to knock him reeling like that anymore. Now, it’s different. Now he can finally get a few things off his chest, ask a few questions that have been bugging him, in some cases for years.

He gets up from the chair and noses around the barren office. He sees his reflection in a locked glass case with dusty trophies and starts doing jumping jacks to loosen up. Like he’s preparing to engage an opponent.

When there’s a knock on the white iron door frame, he turns, already standing. A black guard, wide as a Buick, pokes his head in. “Listen, you have twenty minutes with him,” he says, and he steps back as Cedric Gilliam slips past him through the doorway.

Finally, it’s just the two of them. “Well, well, Lavar,” Cedric Sr. says with a head shuck and a “howdyado” wave. He angles across the room toward a smallish couch, avoiding a hug. “Damn, it’s a surprise,
you coming,” he says, then sinks into a crease between brown vinyl cushions. “I didn’t expect it. But, you know, it’s real good to see you.” Cedric, smiling broadly at his father, nods and returns to his folding chair.

“So, any girls up there at Brown yet?”

“Couple, maybe,” Cedric says without skipping a beat. “Oh, I knew you’d ask that.”

They both shake their heads and smirk. Gilliam, after all, has long demanded that manhood be proven through sexual conquest, and his son has always resisted, but the exchange, Cedric notices, carries no charge. He’s starting to date now, he knows where he stands, and the challenge seems to bounce off him.

They chat amiably across a shin-high magazine table. His father’s questions and comments carry more insight than he expected, well beyond the must-be-cold-up-there comments he gets from most family members.

“So, you know your grades yet?”

“No. Not yet. A few weeks still.”

“How do you think you’ll do? Good, I bet.”

“Yeah, I think I might do all right this time.”

“They got much grade inflation? I read about that somewhere, being a problem at colleges.”

“Ummm, I guess. Haven’t really thought about it, but, for my sake, I certainly hope so.”

As they both laugh at this, Cedric studies his dad. He’s certainly aged in the past two years. He’s missing a few teeth, his hair is going a little gray. He seems shorter and heavier—got to be 220—and the blue two-piecer splits a little at his gut. He asks more about Cedric’s classes, and then they talk about English and the humanities versus science and math. “That English training, you see, you can use in anything,” Cedric Gilliam says, and goes on to explain how.

Cedric nods along to this, happy for a moment’s cover in the conversation to collect his thoughts. This congenial tone bespeaks a change, no doubt about it. They’re talking like peers, like man to man for the first time.

“Well then, there’s something that I was wondering,” Cedric
proceeds, betraying a little hesitancy. “Something I been wanting to ask you.”

“Really? What.”

“Yeah, ummm. Did you love my mother, or was it just a sex thing?”

His father shifts on the split of couch cushions. “Huh? What kind of question’s that?”

“Something I figure I deserve to know. Well, did you? Did you love her?”

Cedric watches his father’s left eye twitch and feels an unexpected surge—power or control, something—that he realizes he can sustain by not dropping his gaze, not looking away from hard things he must know.

“Ummm. Well, Lavar, you see I’m not much for talking about … for saying that sort of thing, using that word and all.”

Cedric leans forward on his chair. “You mean
love
. The word
love.”
With that, he pins the man to the couch.

There’s silence. “That’s right,” Gilliam says, trying to muster some balance. “I’m just not the kind of man who can say those things.”

“I suppose the key to being able to say it,” Cedric presses, “is being able to feel it.” He pauses and nods solemnly. “Just a sex thing, then. I guess I got my answer.” Gilliam seems unable to find a place for his eyes and eventually gazes up at the white-cork drop ceiling.

Cedric, feeling smart and a little sad, mops up the mess. “Trouble saying it to me, too.”

All Gilliam can muster is a shrug, still looking up at the white cork like someone underwater, searching for the surface. They sit for a while, not saying anything, while Cedric tries to decide where he’ll fit pity into his mix of feelings about this aging, shrunken man.

After a bit, Gilliam perks up, like something’s just come to him, like he’s forgotten what they were just talking about. “I can’t believe I didn’t say nothing. I’m getting out tomorrow! I just got word last night.”

Cedric smiles, happy for the silence to pass. “That’s great,” he says, and really means it. “Seems like about time you got out of here.”

“I tell you Lavar, it’s been a bad year—the worst. But they found
me a spot in a real good drug treatment program.” He talks on eagerly, reviewing how he was switched here to minimum security a few months ago from the miserable, dangerous Occoquan facility and how he’s scheduled to live at least six months at the program’s halfway house near Union Station.

The guard pokes his head back in. They both rise. He leads them through the labyrinth of buzzing doors toward the complex’s entrance foyer and gives them some space for a last moment.

“Hey Lavar, thanks a lot for coming.” His voice is raspy and grasping. Now, standing close, Gilliam looks Cedric up and down. “You got big, happened fast,” his father mutters.

“Yeah, I guess,” Cedric says, a little uncertain. “It’s been good, I think, for us to talk, to, you know, really talk,” he says, and it’s unavoidably clear, there in the foyer’s harsh light, that Cedric is now leading.

Gilliam glances over his shoulder at the guard, then back. “You know, I’ll call you and all,” he says, backpedaling inward and raising a farewell palm. “When I’m out, I’ll call. If that’s okay. I mean, I’d like to. We can get together.”

Cedric, too, is treading backward, toward the exit. “That’d be fine,” he says, chuckling. “Yeah, whatever. See you whenever.”

And with that he backs through the double glass doors, catching a final glimpse of his father disappearing into the gray steel.

A few steps onto the sun-sparkled blacktop, Cedric already feels himself trying to place some long volatile emotions, temporarily stabilized, in cold storage. Not such an awful guy, he thinks, turning his back on the prison. He squints at the bright green sweep of the Virginia hillside. “Not such an awful guy, really,” he murmurs, and he’s surprised at how good it feels to say it.

Cedric can’t help but glance over at Barbara as he passes a few feet from the white couch. He detects that her eyes aren’t making those little flecked, jerky movements that eyes do whenever someone’s watching TV. She must be just staring at the screen to avoid looking at him.

He turns away quickly, before she changes her mind, grabs the
Billboard
from the chair, and takes it back to his room.

It has been more than two weeks since they’ve talked. And life has moved on. Besides visiting his father, Cedric started his summer job, an office gig with Fannie Mae, the federally backed mortgage banker, that’s all ease and air-conditioning at $7.50 an hour. Not that the silence has been easy. He almost broke late last week after he got the envelope from Brown. Actually, she got it, with the rest of the mail, then left it—purposely, he’s sure—on top of a pile on the dining room table and then went to her room. It was kind of late when he came out of his room to fix his dinner, from food he bought because they’re each buying their own at this point. On the way back in, with a plate of day-old fried chicken balancing on top of a water glass, he saw the letter and snatched it with his free hand. How sweet it was to look at the unfolded, computerized grade sheet. An A in Calculus, B in Fieldwork and Seminar in High School Education, which means he must have gotten an A on the final paper. An S, for satisfactory, in Spanish and, praise God, an S in Psychology. Couldn’t have passed that final exam by much, but a pass is a pass. Full membership in the Brown community, won fair and square.

Now, a week later, Cedric teepees the
Billboard
on his chest and looks up at the water-stained ceiling, hands behind his head. Keeping his grades from Barbara was hardest the night he got the letter, and it has gotten easier in the days since. Yes, she’d be happy to be told. And that’s the point, he thinks. She can’t live through him. She’s got to start finding what makes her happy, to start living for herself. He’s angry, and she damn well knows why. They’ve been through this before and now it’s just tired. Her being the martyr. Her not taking care of herself. Her spending so much precious energy to hide her need. It’s one thing to hide it from people at church, but from her own children? What, like we’d think less of her? Talk about not giving a person any credit!

So where does it end up? With a mother who’s in debt up to her eyeballs, about to be put out, for God’s sake. A woman, damn near fifty, who’s under so much stress from not tending to herself and her own well-being that she’s having chest pains. But has she seen a doctor like they told her to? ’Course not. Neddy told him last week that
Barbara said she has prayed over it and God will either take her or he won’t. She loves saying that. Like he’ll take her and put her out of her misery. And where, exactly, does that leave the rest of us?

He gets up, letting the magazine slide onto the parquet with a slap, and flips on the TV, searching for distraction. He’ll watch it, he decides, until dawn if necessary, until every thought is cleaned from his head.

Nearly two weeks later, on a Thursday approaching mid-June, Cedric dresses early to go to church. He took the day off from work and bought some clothes, more office prudent than the flashy ones he bought last summer but still stylish, and he decides that they’re right for today. Services don’t start until 7:30, and he’s scheduled a late afternoon meeting with Bishop Long. Cedric has been going to church irregularly and feels like he’s there mostly out of obligation. Things have changed, and he needs to be straight with Bishop.

An hour later, he’s sitting lightly on a red velour cushioned chair across a little round table from Long, getting past cordialities. They talk for a moment about Barbara. Word has gone around church about her woes. “I’ve had lot of experience with this sort of thing,” Bishop Long says after a bit. “Some people get down and then they must rely on their faith to extricate them. And your mother is a woman of faith, pure faith, which means she’ll eventually triumph over her difficulties.”

Cedric, not sure of a response to such finality, talks for a bit about how ashamed he feels at church, worried that everyone knows, and Bishop Long offers a tsk-tsk smile. “Oh, come on now. You know plenty of people at Scripture have had troubles like your mom’s having.”

Long pauses.

“But, Cedric, I sense there’s something else … ”

“You sure do know me by now,” Cedric laughs, and then starts into a list of his doubts. “I still believe in God, that Jesus is my personal savior, and my friend, and my guide, but I just don’t feel as tied to the church so much anymore. I like coming and all, but, at the same time, I feel like I’m ready to venture out.” With each word, Cedric’s ease seems to grow. These questions have been running through his head all year, he figures, and it feels good to finally let them out. He talks about
how he’s become more comfortable and confident at Brown, little by little, and how he’s thinking lately about all the things he might try, all the avenues that suddenly seem to stretch before him. Bishop nods like he wants a for instance, and Cedric mentions how he’s toyed with the idea of going into the music industry, “the real business side, sales, marketing, producing and whatever, to combine my math skills with my love of music.”

Frustrated with his rambling about music and careers, Cedric feels an urge to be more clear, more succinct, to get to the underlying point. “The basic thing, Bishop Long, is that I feel I’ve outgrown the church.”

Long sits forward, the shoulders of his pinstriped suit bunching up as he clasps his hands on the tabletop. He seems to be plotting out a response when something grabs him. “Most people don’t ask my permission before they leave,” he says with a husky laugh, and then settles into a whispery voice. “As long as you carry God with you, in your heart, you can go out into the world, Cedric, and you’ll be fine. Just don’t be too proud to let Him walk with you, to at least let Him be alongside you for those times when you will need Him.”

Long looks at him hard, his one eye searching Cedric’s face like he’ll want to remember it later. “You’ll always have a home here,” he says, measuring the beat of his words. “And if you ever find yourself in need of love, you know you’ll always be loved here. Loved for who you are rather than who people want you to be.”