My Soul to Keep (13 page)

“Sure is a Gremlin. A Gremlin named Kira Alexis Wolde.”

“Is that me?” Kira asked, pointing to the grainy photograph of a baby whose face was buried beneath a straw cowboy hat.

“Yes. You were about eighteen months old there,” Jessica said, flipping to the next page in the photo album. “And here, you had just turned two. This is at Grandma’s.”

“The sailor dress!” Kira said. She dug through the pile of photos at the foot of Jessica’s bed and found one that matched.

“Good work, Kira,” Jessica said. Her daughter’s eyes followed her fingers as she lifted the page’s plastic sheet to fit the new photograph beside the one already there. The pictures were similar and had been taken the same day, with Kira in a navy sailor dress, which Bea had just bought her, playing on a rocking horse.

The photo albums had been a two-day project, and this was the last one. She’d filled five large albums so far. The piles of photographs in shoe boxes she and David kept under the bed were dwindling. David was the main photo junkie; he rarely went anywhere without a camera, and he had the walls of the house papered with framed photographs of family trips and backyard barbecues—him, Jessica, Kira, Teacake, and poor Princess.

The immersion in photographs and memories was a welcome sanctuary for Jessica. The photos showed her Kira’s remarkable development from a wrinkled newborn to the thin, cinnamon-skinned child she was now. She had a round face, and her forehead sloped like David’s. Working on the photographs with Kira was a simple pleasure Jessica had come to bask in.

“Are we almost done, Mommy?”

“Yep. Soon.”

“Then you’ll get up?” she asked, trying to crawl against Jessica’s abdomen to snuggle beside her.

“Not-uh. Don’t do that when I’m trying to work,” Jessica said crossly. Kira’s sudden movement had made the plastic crinkle; Jessica lifted the sheet back up, straightened the photographs on the page, and smoothed it carefully with her palm. The photos weren’t quite right, angling toward one another. She’d wanted them to be just right, damn it.

“They’re straight,” Kira said.

“No, they’re not. You call that straight?”

“Uh-huh. Will you get up when we’re done, Mommy?”

At two in the afternoon on a Saturday, Kira was dressed in denim overalls, her hair combed for the day. But Jessica was still in the faded Jacksons’ Victory Tour T-shirt she’d slept in, propped up in bed with crumpled sheets, and two or three paperback books lying facedown around her—James Baldwin, Jane Austen, Susan Taylor. David had found the battery-operated black-and-white TV, the one she’d bought after Hurricane Andrew knocked their power out for four days, and set it up for her on top of the bureau. She had no plans to get up. “I’m still tired, Kira,” she said.

“You’re always tired,” Kira whined. “I want to see the movie about the big dog. Daddy said.”

“Well…” Jessica said, squeezing her hand, “ … either you can wait until I’m not tired anymore or you and Daddy can go. And I’ll stay here.”

“
That’s
not going to work,” Kira said with exasperation, a grown-up-sounding phrase Jessica figured Kira must have picked up from David.

David’s voice came from the doorway. “Kira? Let Mommy rest. She said she’s tired.” He was changing the washers in the bathroom faucet. He’d stuck his head in and was gone just as quickly.

David’s words silenced Kira, but her face was in full pout.

“I’ve told you about that. Don’t make that ugly face,” Jessica said. “It’s okay if you and Daddy go. I’ll be here.”

The truth was, Jessica wanted to see the movie. She really did. She wanted a tub of popcorn, and she wouldn’t mind sitting in a darkened theater all day. But she wanted to do it alone. It would take too much energy to go on an outing with David and Kira at this moment. Her mind was frayed, in retreat. Lately, half the time she adhered to her family, cleansing herself with them. Then, just as suddenly, she’d had enough. She would prefer silence now. Small silence. And she would genuinely miss them, an ache, until they came back.

Maybe it was because the tears always followed a step behind her solitude. Any solitude. In the shower. On the toilet. Sitting alone in the backyard, watching the herons fuss over the water. The pain was still raw and the tears were always there; usually, they were only in hiding.

Nothing in her life, even the death of her father, had prepared Jessica for the murder of Peter Donovitch.

Even the word murder, when she thought it, drove into her mind like a hatchet. Her coworkers rarely used that word. They mentioned “losing Peter” or “Peter’s death” when they talked to her; few wanted to call it by its horrible name. It was like processing two calamities; first, the grief over a friend dead so suddenly, then the added shock and anger at the bloody method of a killer who had gotten away without a clue except for a security videotape that was so dark and blurred it was useless.

Jessica did not go into the office the day Peter’s body was discovered. “You don’t need to be here,” Sy kept saying on the phone. “It’s best for you not to come here.”

When the newscast came on—Peter’s murder was the lead story on all three local channels, and even made the network evening news—she understood why. The first shot she saw, before she or David could think to turn off the television set, was the windshield of his car coated with dried blood. Sy had told her the killer cut his throat, but she’d managed the idea by thinking of an act that was somehow clean. She wasn’t ready to see the shower of blood. Her friend’s blood. She’d screamed. An hour later, she was still trembling.

And the old question came again: Why would God do this?

The memorial service three days after Peter’s death, while difficult to face because of its finality, helped a little. Sy and some of the editors who had known Peter for nearly twenty years planned the service at the Unitarian Church, which he’d attended sporadically. At David’s urging, Jessica hadn’t been back to work, so the service helped her quench her need to know that others were as dazed and angry and miserable as she. She wanted to hug even clerks and editors she rarely spoke to.

For the first time, Peter’s life took full shape for her. His doughfaced parents, who lived in Michigan, came to the service with a lanky teenager who kept his head bowed. The boy, it turned out, was Peter’s son from a bitterly dissolved marriage. She heard someone behind her whisper that Peter’s whole family, including his son, practically shut him out when he told them he was gay. Things had been better in recent years, but not much. She also discovered, in a testimony from the bearded man she’d seen with Peter at the festival, that Peter had nursed his lover, who’d had AIDS, until he died ten years before.

Learning these things, Jessica loved Peter more fiercely. But she was also hurt that he’d kept his life’s sorrows from her, making himself a virtual stranger.

Despite the comfort of being with other people who cared about Peter, none of them could think of his death as a journey or a homecoming. It was a theft, plain and simple. A horrible, brutal theft. Jessica thought she felt better after the service, but when she tried to sleep that night, she envisioned Peter’s Mustang and the blood-spattered windshield.

She dreamed she walked to Kira’s bedroom window and saw the Mustang parked below in their driveway, the driver’s side door open. In the dream, she gingerly walked outside to the car, to see what was inside. Someone she couldn’t quite make out, not Peter, was sitting in the driver’s seat.

Once, in her dream, the man sitting there was David.

On Monday, Sy called her to ask if she still planned to take a short leave. Jessica said she didn’t know. Neither of them mentioned the book. She told Sy she’d gotten a good tip on drug dealing in the housing projects, but she stopped midsentence, remembering that she’d met Boo on the night of Peter’s murder. Some crack addict or mob hit man or arbitrary psycho had been killing Peter at that precise moment.

Sy told her to take all the time she needed. He mentioned that the newspaper had decided to bring in some grief and trauma counselors for the employees. Everyone was taking it hard, having anxieties about their stories. Sy said he planned to go to the sessions, and he urged her to come too.

When Jessica asked David what he thought, he looked uncertain. “Do whatever you think will help,” David said, “but I don’t know if that would be good for you. There’s a shadow over that place now. You have to stop thinking of Peter as a victim, Jess. The sum of his life was so much more than the awful way he happened to leave. That was only a split second in time. I think you’re better off here with me.”

She decided that he was right. She didn’t know how she could have functioned without David’s constant pampering and the wordless moments when he nestled beside her and pulled her head toward him until it rested on the familiar cradle of his shoulder. Occasionally she could let go enough to cry in front of him, and the world felt normal again for a time. Then, unexpectedly, the tears would come back later, worse than before.

David stuck his head into the bedroom doorway, drawing Jessica’s attention away from flipping through her newly finished photo album pages. “Last call for the movie train,” he said.

She shook her head, smiling. “I’ll be okay.”

“Want me to bring you some food after?”

She didn’t have much of an appetite, but David would force her to eat. “Whatever you guys get is fine with me.”

“’Bye, Mommy!” Kira called from behind him.

David told Kira to go find her jacket, since the temperature had dipped over the weekend. Kira came back wearing a heavy winter coat, and David sent her back to her room to find a lighter denim jacket. When she whined that she couldn’t find it, he went after her. Jessica could hear them speaking in French through the wall of the adjoining bedroom.

David was trying to teach Kira languages early, and she was already doing well with rudimentary Spanish, which she was taking in school. Apparently, her French was improving too. Struck by Kira’s stumbling grasp of the language, Jessica thought of how strange it was that her own daughter could speak words she herself didn’t understand.

“
Marché,
Daddy,” Kira said.

The two of them paraded one last time in front of Jessica’s open doorway, waving as they passed. Jessica’s face froze before she could smile. Seeing them walking away, David first and Kira trailing after, eagerly grasping her father’s pant leg, Jessica’s insides clenched with a cold dread that held her immobile.

She felt overpowered by a need to call out for Kira to stay home with her. Then she heard the door downstairs fall shut, and the uneasy feeling, after a moment, let her go.

Her tears came, right on time.

1710

In the shadows, five figures stumble noisily in the stairwell, exchanging fondles and muffled laughter as they approach a rented room on the top-floor landing. The air is heavy with the salty perfume of the Mediterranean through the open windows.

“Wait. Be silent,” Dawit whispers as they reach a closed door, annoyed with the three whores’ noisemaking. “I’ll bring Chinja out first.”

“Chinja?” Mahmoud cries sloppily, louder than necessary. Dawit cannot see Mahmoud’s face in the darkness, but he can smell his wine-laden breath. “Let that cur watch!”

“Who is Chinja?” asks one of the whores.

Dawit ignores her, unwilling to be burdened by inquiries. He continues to speak to Mahmoud in Spanish, the musical language they have assumed with ease since their arrival. “And have his eyes staring on? It’s unappetizing, Mahmoud.”

“I’ve appetite enough to carry on without you, but do as you like. Send him out, then.” Before Dawit can open their door, they hear a loud creaking below them, at the bottom of the stairs, and a swinging lamp fills the stairwell with a rocking glow. “Who’s there?” calls an old man’s voice, the innkeeper.

“Your tenants, sir,” Mahmoud says mockingly, exaggerating his Spanish lisp, “and our new raven-haired friends.”

The old man curses, climbing closer to them. Dawit can make out the grizzled white of his beard behind the light. “You come at this hour, closer to dawn than dusk, waking my wife? With whores?”

“Dawit…” Mahmoud says, just within the innkeeper’s hearing, “his wife, the poor creature, is young and well favored. Would he allow us to borrow her for the night?”

“For a coin, he might,” Dawit says, joining Mahmoud’s game. “Or, she might be so grateful she’ll offer payment to
us.
”

The whores join them in laughing at their ridicule of the old man. One of the women shrieks as Mahmoud’s hand roves beneath her bodice.

The innkeeper’s voice rises to a bellow. “What did you say?”

“Dawit, he is so loud. He makes my head hurt,” Mahmoud says.

“We have only said that we apologize, sir,” Dawit responds respectfully to the man. “And we wish your wife a good night.”

Contemplating this for a moment, the innkeeper does not speak further. Perhaps, Dawit hopes, he will return to his quarters so that he and Mahmoud can relish these females’ talents; one of them has crushed her soft haunches against him, and his rigid anticipation has grown uncomfortable in his breeches.

“Well said, Dawit,” Mahmoud says, again too loudly. “You’re so graceful a liar, you could convince a buzzard he is a peacock.”

“Devils! Your tongues are vile!” the innkeeper shouts.

“How my head aches,” Mahmoud moans. “Please persuade him to be silent, Dawit, or I swear I’ll tumble him down the stairs and send him to his mortal God.”

“Sir, you misunderstand—” Dawit begins.

“Moorish devils!”

“Moorish devils?” At this, Mahmoud takes a step down toward the innkeeper despite impatient pats on the shoulder from Dawit. Why does Mahmoud insist on engaging in silly political debates at every turn? “The black Moors were Spain’s salvation, with all your ignorance here, you old fool. If you’re fortunate, you’ll be conquered again.”