Joplin's Ghost (50 page)

There was only one hole in his theory: He was dead wrong. As wrong as he’d ever been. “Party Patrol” made him a liar.

Phoenix had turned “Party Patrol” into something he had never heard from her. The choreography, the vocals, the solo—all of it had fallen into place, better than the rehearsals. Marcus watched, stunned, while his daughter cast a spell over the Osiris Theater, communing with all the hall’s ghosts of performances past. Most of this audience had never even heard of her, and she had seduced them with a single song.

One more song in the set, and Phoenix could leave the stage a triumph.

The silence between the songs felt too long, and Marcus held his breath backstage, waiting. His heart rarely got excited anymore—not since he’d stopped listening to speeches and believing in the revolution—but it was beating at a gallop for the first time in years.

He wished her next song wasn’t “Love the One You’re With.” The addition of an amateur choir seemed like begging for trouble. And how could she match the freshness of “Party Patrol” with a cover of a Stephen Stills rock classic released before most of this hip-hop audience had been born? What could Phoenix do with “Love the One You’re With” that Aretha hadn’t already done?

Still, Marcus discovered he was a believer.

Do it, Peanut. Give them something they’ll never forget.

Phoenix struck the first chord on her synthesizer, a full-bodied organ voice that filled the room. The recorded tracks joined her, gaining volume on the song’s gospel-kissed, two-chord intro. But everyone else on the stage was frozen, stock-still.
Where are those damn kids?

Suddenly, they were there. The kids filed onto the stage, marching double time, clapping on the beat as they swayed, their robes billowing. The sight of the kids excited the crowd, who erupted as if they’d fallen asleep and woken up on Sunday morning.

Phoenix tugged off her headset. There would be no more dancing for her. Instead, she tilted a microphone on a glistening mike stand to her mouth and sang, her Afro framed against the lights. As soon as Marcus heard the first weathered note from her lips, he realized his daughter
knew
this song. She knew it as well as he did. She knew about disappointment, distraction and impossible love, and her knowledge was stripped naked in her voice. When the choir joined Phoenix to sing about the rose and a fisted glove—exquisitely harmonized, perfectly timed—their music was revelatory.

Between verses, Phoenix motioned to someone on the stage to come forward, something she hadn’t done in rehearsal. Serena glided beside Phoenix center stage, shining with confidence Marcus hadn’t seen his eldest daughter since she was twelve, standing in front of the congregation at First AME Church before he went away. Serena had been somewhere Marcus couldn’t see her—hiding as always, even her voice—but this time Phoenix relinquished the microphone to her sister. Serena’s God-given gift leaped octaves, pealing across the walls, up to the ceiling and probably through the theater door to Lenox Avenue itself.

Cheers rained inside the Osiris.

When the singers joined forces for the last set of
do do do
’s—his twelve young soldiers from the Harlem projects and his two daughters sharing a microphone, their cheeks pressed tight—Marcus felt a dike inside himself break and carry him away to a place he had never been.

Marcus Smalls only stopped shouting when his throat was blocked by a sob.

W
as it okay?”

Phoenix hooked her arm around Serena’s slippery neck, trying to catch her breath. She didn’t know why she was breathing only in short bursts, unless it was because of the adrenaline flooding her bloodstream, making her feel as if she were floating and falling simultaneously. Sometimes Phoenix could hear the cascade of clapping hands, and sometimes she couldn’t hear anything except her heartbeat. She no longer trusted her ears or her eyes. The cheering crowd looked like a dream she’d had when she first saw Janet Jackson at the Miami Arena.

“Was it
okay
?” Serena said, laughing as she clung to Phoenix. Serena was so excited, her breasts danced in her black dress and she nearly pulled Phoenix from her feet. “Phee,
listen
.”

But listening was hard, because Phoenix’s mind kept rejecting the pattering sound rolling across the theater like high tide, the camera strobes twinkling from the darkness. She had never performed before an audience this big, so she hadn’t known how it would sound and look. What if Scott was trying to confuse her? What if she was only dreaming again?

“Was it okay?” she asked Arturo, stumbling past the bank of microphones. Instead of answering, Arturo let out a whoop and swung her in a circle in his strong, sure arms.

“Was it okay?” she tried to ask her teenagers, but the kids were too busy high-fiving, exchanging stories and tripping over cords.

Phoenix left the stage in a slow daze, sleepwalking again. She’d seen Beyoncé say in an interview that performing onstage was like having an alter ego, as if she became possessed by someone else, and Phoenix understood now. This was no different than “Live at Night.” The set had been over so fast, and she’d been trying so hard to fight Scott away, she might not have been there at all. How had it
sounded
? Had her voice been in key? Had her keyboard solo worked?

When Phoenix saw her father silhouetted beyond a footlight, near the curtain, she was relieved. Sarge wouldn’t lie to her. “Daddy…was it okay?”

Sarge’s face emerged from the shadows, and Phoenix saw moisture in his eyes that made her heart catch in place. “What happened?” she whispered, prepared for tragedy. The set couldn’t have been
that
bad. She had never seen her father cry, not even after she got hurt.

When Sarge grinned at her through his tears, Phoenix breathed.

Someone tackled Phoenix from behind, his arms locked around her waist. “Baby girl, you tore it
up,
” Ronn said, kissing the side of her neck, and her skin shivered even though she wanted him to be Carlos instead. “Oh,
shit
. Imani says she wants you to open on her tour. That’s my
girl
!” Phoenix had heard Imani was touring thirty cities later this summer, with her last shows in London and Munich. Maybe the set had been better than okay.

Sarge whispered four words in Phoenix’s ear: “You did it, Peanut.” When Serena joined them, still laughing, Sarge hugged her sister against him and rocked, his arms and elbows wound around Serena’s head as if he meant to keep her from blowing away. His eyes were part joy, part pain. “Just like the old days, Reenie. Like the old days.”

Activity flurried around them as the stomping bass of the background music came blaring back on and theater techs prepared the stage for the next act, either the Bing Boyz or Kamikaze. Backstage became a beehive intruding on their private party, and Phoenix’s huddle drifted back to the white rear wall to make room, everyone in a babble of excitement. With Ronn still hugging her from behind, faces came toward Phoenix in a rush of exclamations and grins.

“Off the
chain,
” Manny said.

“Sky’s the limit now, lil’ mama. Keep God close,” Kai said, kissing her cheek.

“You got a vision, Phee,” said D’Real. She hadn’t even known her producer was here.

While Phoenix smiled and accepted their praises, her eyes roamed the darkened backstage space, beyond the giant amps, old card tables and stacked metal chairs. Where was Carlos? Why wasn’t he here? Just when Phoenix felt something in her chest about to prick and deflate, she saw Carlos nudging his way past Kai to get closer to her, his hand reaching for hers.

Phoenix grabbed his warm palm and held tight. No one was going to keep Carlos away.

“Ronn, this is Carlos. I couldn’t have made it today without him,” Phoenix said, finding her breath. The hands hugging her waist fell away as Ronn leaned over to shake Carlos’s hand.

“Hey, man. Ronn Jenkins.” Ronn’s smile had changed, plastic.

“Carlos Harris,” Carlos said. “Congratulations on your success, man.”

“Naw, congrats to
you
. Take good care of our girl,” Ronn said, and stepped away so Carlos could take his place beside her.
Changing of the guard,
Phoenix thought.

“If he doesn’t, you’ll see him on the evening news,” Sarge said, and people laughed because they thought Sarge was joking.

“Ooh, I gotta go get my camera out of the dressing room,” Serena said, flustered, part of the new cacophony. Kai told Phoenix he’d be looking for her at the after-party. D’Real asked her when she would be ready to go back into the studio. If not for Carlos’s hand in hers, squeezing periodically, Phoenix would have felt as lost backstage as she had when she had dreamed she was in Scott’s cornfield.

“You done fucked up NOW, huh nigga? Ain’t you?”

Phoenix heard the voice, and didn’t. It was a lone, faraway voice in a symphony of voices, and she took faint notice of it only because its gruffness didn’t match the others. It was the only voice that wasn’t celebrating.

Phoenix didn’t have long to wonder about the voice, because an explosion made her deaf.

Her ears ringing, Phoenix turned around, a primal instinct telling her where to look, and she saw a small-boned man in a black ski mask charging toward them from behind the amps where Carlos had been standing before the set, throwing fire at them. His hand was sparking.

Once. Twice. Three times.

The man was shooting at them from fifteen yards away, closer with every measured stride.

Phoenix was pinned to the wall as Kai fell against her in a wild embrace. He fell too hard, and it hurt, buckling her knees. When Phoenix blinked, she realized the three-hundred pound man had gone limp. Another blink, and she knew what was wrong with him:
Kai’s been shot
.

Sarge shouted something Phoenix didn’t hear, pushing against Kai with so much effort that the veins across his temples bulged like snakes, and the pressure lifted. Phoenix felt such a violent yank on her arm from the opposite direction that she thought it must be severed. Her feet left the floor, and she flew until her jaw crashed against the edge of a tabletop. Then, she was on concrete, her shoulder landing hard on the floor. Pain bolted through Phoenix’s body, not knowing where to rest.

“You like Magnums, motherfucker?” a voice said.

Be still—cuidado,
said another, one she barely heard through the noise. Carlos?

In her strange bubble of deafness beneath the table, Phoenix saw Serena running in one direction—
oh thank you God Reenie’s safe
—and Ronn diving behind boxes in another. Purple choir gowns scattered everywhere, a tangle of panicked retreat.
My poor kids,
Phoenix thought, sorrowful. She couldn’t move to try to see the man in the mask beyond the table. Her limbs were locked in place. Why couldn’t she
move
?

“Phoenix?”

Phoenix’s ears stopped ringing long enough for her to hear her father’s voice.

“Daddy!” she called back.

She heard a gunshot clearly this time, a godless, colossal roar.

Phoenix met her father’s eyes in time to see a patch of his shaved scalp above his left eyebrow snatched away like a divot of grass after a golfer’s chip shot. As his blood sprayed, Sarge knelt to see after her with such care, she knew the gruesome injury must be an optical illusion. It
couldn’t
be as bad as it looked, because it looked like gaping death.

“You OK, Reenie?” Sarge said with an urgent gaze, unblinking, still tall on his knees. Blood ran down his face in twin streams, one across the bridge of his nose and one between his left ear and eye, but he didn’t seem to mind, just as Phoenix didn’t mind being called Reenie.

I’m dreaming this right now I’m dreaming this right now I’m dreaming this right now

Phoenix smelled Carlos’s cologne woven inside the terrible scent of blood—the scent she had smelled in her dream today—and the cologne, at last, told her why she couldn’t move: Carlos was cradling her on the floor, wrapped around her in a vise. The man in the mask was gone, buried beneath a heap of shouting men, and Phoenix saw his smoking gun spin on the floor.

She would tell Sarge she was fine. She would tell him Carlos had saved her just like Sarge had saved Mom during the 1980 riot. But when Phoenix tried to tell him, she only felt a shock of pain from her injured jaw. Phoenix nodded
yes,
she was all right, so Sarge would know.

Sarge smiled a sickly smile—or what looked like one—but the smile left when his eyes emptied. Two full seconds passed before he toppled facedown to the floor, a foot from where Kai lay propped against the blood-spotted wall. Only then did Phoenix hear the screams and pleas with Jesus from the frantic people around her, sounds indistinguishable from her howling heart.

For the rest of her life, Phoenix would wish she hadn’t nodded
yes
. She should have told Sarge she wasn’t the least bit all right, that she needed him forever. Why hadn’t she known what to say
that
night, the night she saw Sarge shot at the Osiris?