A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series Book 3) (28 page)

“Busted,” I said to her when she reached safely, after she sent the senior on her way.

“That’s not fair!” she said, startled because she was so focused on the woman she did not know her cover was blown.

“How was your day and how was your night? Tell me everything,” Chiasa now said, jumping down from the railing and seating herself in her window. She wanted details. I wanted her.

“Everything is smooth,” I said.

“So fucking cool,” she said under her breath, not resisting or confronting me for ignoring her question. I sat on the floor of the deck, my back leaning against the railing, looking up at her.

“Your phone call?” I asked.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said in almost a whisper. “He wants . . .” I was calm and cool in my demeanor, but anxiously waiting to hear what her father
wants now.

“Two things,” she said. “Daddy wants me to instead of doing the pilot’s license program like I planned, which takes much less than a year, he wants me to get a bachelor of science degree in Aeronautical Science, which takes four years. He’s convinced that I can earn it in three years since I completed four years of high school in three
years. Daddy says the degree will give me much better business options.” She paused and looked at me.

“And you?” I asked her.

“I just want to fly,” she said, extending her arms like the wings of a small jet soaring through the sky. Since the day I met her, sixteen-year-young Chiasa had always made it clear that she planned to become a pilot. When I arrived in Japan, it was just weeks before she was set to begin her flight school training. We fell in love, married, and moved. Now she had spent all day today in the New York Public Library collecting information on flight schools here, so she could compare programs and schools, then select the best one and register and pursue the license here.

“And the second thing?” I asked her.

“I mentioned it before,” she said softly. “We’ve all been so busy . . . But Daddy insists that I go to Harlem this weekend for dinner with Aunt Tasha.”

We sat quietly for some time, her in the window, seated, facing out towards the backyard, me still leaning on the railing, facing her. I pulled off my T-shirt. I didn’t have to call her over to me. I wanted to touch her. She wanted to be touched. She stepped down from her window seat and sat between my legs, her back leaning against my chest. She removed her
hijab
, her hair brushing against my skin. I touched her up gently, stroking her hair, touching her face and neck and easing my hand lightly over her breasts while her blouse was still on. She caught fever, and turned and began kissing my bare chest with her thick, pretty lips. I touched her chin lightly and her lips parted. Kissing her gently with my lips only at first, I could feel her body warming and her heart beginning to race.

I didn’t know what exactly her father was pushing his daughter to do or to be for him. I do know that Chiasa is my wife and I’m about to go in her. If there is not a baby already in her womb, I’m about to give her one.

*  *  *

A malt-colored Jaguar with a deep chocolate-brown leather interior, the customized license plates said
DR. TASHA
. The vehicle matched the private brownstone she lived in.

“You didn’t tell me your aunt is a doctor,” I said to Chiasa.

“She’s a psychiatrist,” Chiasa answered, casually.

My eyes surveyed the impressive four-story fortress. It was the only home on the Harlem block that featured an American flag flying high on the rooftop. It was clean, untattered, properly mounted, and tilted on an iron flagpole.

Peeping a front and two side entrances, one on the east, the other on the west side of the building, I was figuring there was probably one in the rear as well. In my tradition, a man should approach the front door of the neighbor’s house and greet the men of the house first. These were relatives I’d gained through marriage. So, I knew there would be serious differences in our culture. However, I planned to give them the gifts that my Umma and wives prepared, and that I carried in a shopping bag, and after greetings and gifts, I’d be laid-back and easy.
She is already my wife
, so this is not about gaining their approval. Yet, since Chiasa cares so much about Aunt Tasha, who she had been mentioning since the second day we met, I wanted our first meeting to go well, and for my wife to be content and at peace about it.

“She will probably be down in her office,” Chiasa said. “That’s the side door on the left.” We walked around the building. Chiasa’s fingers grazed mine and she folded them into my hand. I held her warmly. Our feelings were magnetic. Chiasa rang the bell with her left hand and leaned back into my body as we waited. Maybe she knew or maybe she didn’t how her touches, even the lightest or most innocent ones, heated me up so crazy. She must not. Why would she want to get my mood moving in that direction as we stood underneath an arched and secluded deep brown brick entryway, alone? I kissed her neck on impulse. She looked up at me, smiling her beautiful smile. I kissed her lips. The door opened. We straightened up, but neither of us dropped hands.

“Don’t allow me to interrupt,” Aunt Tasha said, smiling widely. “I’ve been watching anyway and I see it very clearly. It’s really quite powerful.”

“Hi, Aunt Tasha!” Chiasa had an excited outburst. She jumped up and hugged her aunt with her left arm and remained holding hands with me with her right.

“Girl, let go of him for one second and embrace me.” Chiasa, instead of letting go instantly, looked over and up to me. We stared at one another for some seconds. She pulled my hand, still in hers, and placed both our hands in Aunt Tasha’s hand.

“My husband,” Chiasa said. Aunt Tasha laughed heartily. It was a laughter laced with love.

“Husband, come in,” she said, releasing our hands. I stepped forward and walked in first, Chiasa following behind me. I set the gifts down.

Her office was warm, walls painted in warm colors, a cranberry red in the first room we entered into and I could see a cantaloupe-colored room to the left and a sea-blue green room to the right. The feeling was intimate somehow and calming. Her degrees were mounted on the wall, all four of them. Each was set in an expensive frame, and on each frame there was a small spotlight that made the glass glisten and the black calligraphy of the degree stand out. Tasha Samantha Brown had an undergraduate degree from Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University and a Juris Doctor degree from Yale University; Tasha Samantha Moody, a degree in Medicine from Yeshiva University and one in Forensic Psychiatry from University of California at Los Angeles. I did a double take, rereading the wording of each degree again. It seemed unheard of. She was a doctor and a lawyer, a “super fox,” I thought to myself,
a fox and an owl.

She married after becoming an attorney, either during medical school or right before her forensics degree. I noted her name change. American women drop the last name of either their mother
or father and replace it with the last name of their husband. So now I knew her husband’s last name is Moody.

A brighter light suddenly switched on, and I turned towards it. The aunt was standing there looking at me. “Are you going to meet me formally?” Aunt Tasha asked me.

“Excuse me, I was meeting you by your degrees.” I smiled.

“A million-dollar smile,” she said. Then she turned towards Chiasa. “That’s how you got stuck. You were trapped right there in his smile. Weren’t you?”

“Aunt Tasha!” Chiasa shouted joyfully.

“I’m serious,” Aunt Tasha said. “When your father told me that our Chiasa, the beautiful, young, trilingual, brilliant, talented, huge-hearted . . . sixteen-year-old,” Aunt Tasha’s voice grew louder, emphasizing
sixteen-year-old
, “got married! Oh my God, I thought he must be jesting. But now I see it. Step over here please, young man. Stand beneath this light,” she ordered me. I took two side steps, feeling like an interrogated character in a Russian spy novel I had recently read.

“You’re handsome enough to get away with murder,” she said. Her words sent a wave of chill through me. I didn’t know why.

“Aunt Tasha!” Chiasa said. She seemed to be stuck just calling out her favorite aunt’s name over and over again.

“Very disarming . . .” Her aunt continued with her study of me. “Charming and ominously cool,” she said, and her talk was without laughter, as though she was somehow analyzing me. It felt strange. She was speaking about my looks, but it felt like she was attempting to peer into my soul. I wasn’t familiar with the word
ominous.
As soon as she took her attention off from me, I would look it up in the micro-dictionary I sometimes carried in my pocket. I remained calm, wasn’t responding or reacting to her compliments. I was used to being admired by all types of women, although I already had a sense that she was unlike any woman I had ever met before.

“What do you know about this man, Chiasa, other than the fact that he’s pulchritudinous?” she said, adding another word I’d never heard before in any conversation with any human being.

“I know he overtakes me,” Chiasa said. “And whatever I am, he is more,” she added. Aunt Tasha’s jaw dropped and her right arm went up. She rested her hand on her waistline.

“Hmmm,
overtakes
you,” she repeated. “And what else?”

“He makes me feel so good in every way. And . . . I love him . . .” And then Chiasa began speaking in her Japanese tongue, gesturing with her pretty fingers and eyes.

“What have we always told you about speaking Japanese in our house when you know so well that no one who lives here communicates in that language?”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Tasha, but I couldn’t describe in English words that feeling I wanted you to feel and understand so well. I thought maybe if you listened to the Japanese expressions, even if you did not understand them literally, you could feel their meaning. That’s what we do at home,” Chiasa explained.

“At home?” her aunt repeated.

“Yes, where my husband and our family live.”

“And where is that, because three months ago you lived in Tokyo!”

“Queens, New York,” Chiasa shared.

“Your light is getting hot,” I interjected.

“Pardon me?” Aunt Tasha asked.

“The lamp you have me standing under, the heat is intensifying,” I said. She reached up and switched it off.

“And what do you know about our Chiasa?” she asked me. I smiled.

“Don’t smile at Aunt Tasha!” Chiasa said playfully. “She’s going to think that your smile is the only reason I wanted to marry you.”

“Please take a seat,” Aunt Tasha told me. I sat down in a majestic maroon chair made of thick leather and upholstered expertly.
A few thousand was dropped on that chair easy, maybe even ten
, I thought
to myself as I tried to become comfortable being examined by a forensic psychiatrist in her office, on her turf, playing by her terms.

“Chiasa, you will know best what your husband likes. Please go upstairs and get him something cool to drink.”

“Yes, Aunty,” Chiasa complied. But first, she stooped to remove my Gucci loafers from my feet. “They don’t, but we do,” she whispered to me. I noted that she had already removed her shoes. She set mine at the side entrance. Then she dashed up the stairs and into the house. Now I was left alone with her aunt. She stepped to her doctor’s desk, opened a drawer, and handed me some pages. I didn’t look at what it was, just looked at her, a silent inquiry.

“It’s like a Rubik’s Cube,” she said to me. “See what you can do with it.” She handed me a pen. I looked it over, didn’t feel pressed, and filled it out. Just a bunch of diagrams, math problems, and trick questions, but it didn’t ask me for any of my personal information so I was cool with it. Soon as I was done I stood up and laid it on her desk, where she was seated looking at a magazine.

“Do you know how Chiasa likes her beef prepared?” her aunt asked me strangely, looking up and closing her magazine.

“Chiasa does not eat beef,” I answered, and sat back down in her hot seat.

“Do you know Chiasa’s favorite fruit?”

“An onion, which she eats like it’s an apple,” I said truthfully. Her aunt clapped.

“Do you know Chiasa’s best friend?” She kept quizzing me.

“A horse, called Koinichi,” I answered.

“Do you know Chiasa’s best skill?”

“The sword,” I said easily.

“Do you know what Chiasa hates the most?” she asked me. I leaned forward.

“Anyone who tries to stick their hand in someone’s else love story and change the direction of her fate.” I was quoting my wife. Aunt Tasha was taken aback by that point. I could see how her eyes widened a bit and she leaned forward.

“Even you did not know that one, did you?” I asked her calmly. She cleared her throat and did not answer my question. Yet, she continued questioning me.

“What does Chiasa fear the most?” she asked, growing more serious.

“Boredom,” I said.

“Who does Chiasa love the most?” she asked.

“Her father,” I said.

“What does Chiasa like the most?”

“It wouldn’t be right for me to answer you truthfully about that,” I said solemnly. And just the thought about the answer caused movement in me. Aunt Tasha gave me a half smile and said, “Is that so?” Her eyebrow lifted the same way my second wife’s eyebrow lifts when she is thinking too hard about a complicated matter or surprised about something.

“One thing I see that is different from what I suspected is . . .” Aunt Tasha began, “Is that you are more deeply in love with our Chiasa than any of us would have imagined. It is not anything that you said to me right here and now. It’s not even your responses to my inquiries. I could see it in your eyes even through my upstairs window and immediately thereafter, through my side-door peephole. We thought you had stolen only her heart, and that perhaps she had lost her mind and her way because of it. But I see that the two of you are thoroughly and deeply invested into each other. That’s one huge plus on your side. And believe me, our family does not hand out stars easily.” I didn’t know what she meant by that.