My Soul to Keep (16 page)

It wasn’t until her senior year in college, finally grown, that Jessica had felt enough like her mother’s friend to finally ask her what she’d gone through when she was widowed.

“There’s a lot of hurt in life, Jessica,” Bea had said, almost matter-of-factly. “My mother had a hard life. A very hard life. You remember the story.”

Jessica nodded. After her grandmother’s funeral two months before, Jessica had been shocked when Bea told her that Grammy had been raped by her white employer in Quincy. She’d gotten pregnant, and Grandpa, a pastor, wouldn’t hear of an abortion, even if it had been legal. So, she had a son—Bea’s brother, Jessica’s Uncle Joe. Grammy and Bea were so light themselves that no one paid any attention to how fair-skinned the new child was, and Grandpa always claimed Joe was his. As far as Jessica knew, only the women in the family ever told the story, passing on a painful heirloom.

Bea went on: “For the longest time, after my mother told me that, I looked at her differently. The way you look at someone who’s lived through something you can’t imagine. The most severe test of all. But see, my mother never saw it like that. She treated Joe exactly the way she did me, like he was a blessing. So there is light, but only if you can see past the pain.”

“Did you ever see a light, Mom? After Daddy?”

Bea had given Jessica a fragile, wounded smile. Then, she sighed. “Seemed like I spent whole days cursing the Lord out, just asking why. Raymond was the kind of man who, after you met him, made any other man ruined in your eyes. He was that to me. What did I learn? I learned I could lose even that and still survive. One day I looked in the mirror and thought, hardly believing it,
I’m all right.
Doesn’t sound like much, does it? I wouldn’t have minded living my whole life without knowing it, but I guess it’s something. My mother used to say to me that she collected sorrows and put them in her pocket. Walking around with them that way, by and by, you just learn to carry them all a bit better, to stand up a bit straighter. That’s all life is, on this earth anyway. You’ll see it, too, when your trials come. I wish I could tell you they won’t come, Jessica, but they always do.”

That’s exactly what Jessica was afraid of. Losing her father had ended her childhood, but the rest of her life had been so easy. She’d met David before she began to worry about becoming an Unmarried Black Woman statistic, and he had never failed her. She got the first job she applied for, the only one she’d ever wanted. Kira was healthy except for the asthma that seemed to improve each year.

Why, then, did it all feel so temporal? Their life was like a dream, and she’d learned young that dreams always end.

Would she be strong enough for her trials? Was Peter’s death meant, in some way, to help her learn to carry her sorrows?

When Jessica reached the gravel path at the top of their driveway, Teacake complained and wriggled to spring out of her arms. As usual, he trotted straight for the darkness of the cave and vanished inside. After watching the cave’s mouth for a half-minute, her mind drifting, Jessica found herself walking on the thin dirt path through her yard’s incline of rocks and plants, following Teacake. The cave was at the highest point in their yard, shielded from the street by a cluster of palms, a tangle of staghorns and elephantear plants, and the broad trunk of the oak tree that displayed their address to passers-by on the other side.

Holding the wall with her fingertips for balance, Jessica climbed down the cave’s steep, narrow steps, three of them, until she entered the wider space below. At first, all she could see of Teacake was a red flash from the reflection of his eyes. Teacake, not in the mood for company, meowed in protest and darted past her back outside. Jessica let him go. She hadn’t come to the cave for Teacake.

She’d come because of the feeling.

When anybody asked Jessica if she believed in visits from ghosts, she laughed the way she did when she watched those television programs about folks claiming they’d been kidnapped by UFOs. And she didn’t count her believing in Night Song and the spirits from the burial ground, because a few unexplained whistles from the trees wasn’t the same as having a face-to-face conversation with Aunt Josephina.

But alone, during reflective moments, she felt it. The cave had been built to store arrowroot, David told her, but all of the Tequesta neighborhood stories made her think of it as a burial cave instead. Now, she knew why. She could feel it as she crouched, balancing herself with one knee touching the rough floor. She could admit it to herself at this moment, but not again anytime soon—not to herself, not to Bea, not to Alex, and, most of all, not to David:

Jessica believed her father was in this cave.

She couldn’t pinpoint the first time the feeling had come, but she’d felt such an attachment to David’s house because of the cave. He hadn’t even mentioned it until they’d been dating for two months, but she was hooked the moment she explored it with him. Visiting it by herself, she’d always found that the cave made her feel more alive and yet calm, as if she’d been nestled in someone’s arms. And she’d thought it was only coincidence that when she was inside, she always thought of her father at least once. She’d even caught herself thinking “Goodbye, Daddy” whenever she left.

But something had happened a few months before, when David had been on his music lecture in Chicago and Kira was taking a nap in the house. Jessica had wandered into the cave and allowed herself to believe that her father was in there with her. As soon as she thought it, she felt comforted. And on that day, when she’d realized how late it was and whispered “Goodbye, Daddy,” she thought she’d heard not even a whisper, but an echo in her head:

Goodbye, Baby Girl.

It had startled her, making her pause before she climbed the steps, but then she pushed it out of her head. Just like that. Maybe it was so natural to her that she hadn’t even given it half a thought.

Until now.

As her eyes adjusted to the diminished light in the cave, Jessica studied the pockmarked, flaking limestone. She saw bugs crawling in a line around around tiny roots and moss that had made their way down here. She felt stupid suddenly, like Alice crouching in a miniature room. It’s just a cave, she thought, disappointed.

Jessica waited a long three minutes before she spoke. “Hey, Daddy,” she whispered halfheartedly, hopefully. She was so desperate to hear a response that her brain gave her one: Hey, Baby Girl.

That hadn’t been a voice, not this time, not like before. It was just a thought, a memory. That’s what her father had always called her. To him, Alex had been Big Girl and Jessica had been Baby Girl, as if they didn’t have given names.

“Hot in here today,” Jessica muttered, thinking aloud.

Just thick-blooded, an interior voice of her mind said. Thick-blooded? Oh, yes. She remembered how she used to always complain about being too hot when she was young, so Bea had told her she was “thick-blooded,” the opposite of thin-blooded. “To match your thick head,” Bea used to say.

Yours is the warmest blood, Baby Girl.

A voice. She heard the distinct roll of her father’s timbre in the voice, all seven words spoken with a schoolteacher’s slow deliberateness. She’d nearly forgotten the true sound of that voice. She hadn’t heard it in more than twenty years until this moment when she heard it so perfectly in her mind. Jessica’s breathing slowed. Could it really have come from her head?

No, she decided. No, it hadn’t.

As if in confirmation, there was a low-pitched laugh from somewhere. Below her? Above her? It might have come from across the street, camouflaged in a breeze, but Jessica heard it with her ears, not her mind. A loving laugh. Her father’s laugh.

Staring at the wall, Jessica thought she might be seeing something, so faint that it was like a fleck out the corner of her eye that would be gone if she blinked or looked too hard. Her father could be sitting right across from her, cross-legged, wearing his old Oakland Raiders cap and dusty work boots with the bright red laces, the ones she remembered. And she almost imagined she could see him eating a Whopper with Cheese, still nestled in the wrapper. Smiling at her.

Was it really seeing, or was it just
wanting
to see? She couldn’t tell.

You’re a big girl now, Jessica.

The voice was so unexpected and clear this time that goosebumps bloomed across Jessica’s arms. Her blood didn’t feel warm now.

“I know I’m a big girl,” she whispered, not knowing what else to say.

Big girls have to walk with their eyes open. Wide enough to see.

“I do, Daddy,” Jessica said, again very softly, not wanting to spoil it. She was afraid to move. She winced when she heard a bird squawk outside, wondering if the noise would chase him away. Here she was, a grown woman talking to herself in a cave in the middle of the afternoon, but she couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t hear.

Your strength is the strength of stones.

Suddenly, Jessica wanted to cry. Was he going to leave her now? She didn’t want to be alone again, not yet. “No it’s not, Daddy,” she whispered, blinking away tears.

For a long time after that, there was silence. Jessica felt as though she were waiting for something, so she was still, breathing patiently. He wasn’t gone. She knew that. She could feel him here, loving her. For a moment, the cave seemed to breathe around her, as though it were sighing.

And then the fluid feeling left, as abruptly as the end of an embrace. She didn’t feel like crying anymore. A contentment spread through her chest, making her feel flushed.

The apparition, or whatever it had been, was gone. All she could see was the cave wall.

Hold tight to Kira for me, Baby Girl. Until it splits your heart and soul.

The voice—or at least it still seemed like a voice—was fading. Now, Jessica could only hear a distant rambling, spoken unhurriedly, just within her hearing.

There are no good monsters. Tell her.

Then, nothing. Jessica suddenly felt uneasy, not comforted. The last words had confused her. Even scared her.

Quickly, Jessica stood up and practically stumbled back up toward the light outside. Emerging from the cave and gazing around her yard as though she were seeing it for the first time, Jessica realized her heart was thrashing from her chest to her throat. She felt a headache coming on. Served her right. Irritated with herself, Jessica wiped gray dust and mulch from her knees. Already, her rational mind was telling her she’d been in there making it all up, like the nonsensical thoughts that buzzed through her mind right before she fell asleep at night.

Guess you can believe in anything if you want it badly enough, Jessica thought.

She stood at the top of the hill, gazing at the shadowed, empty windows of her house until a feeling of solitude began to stifle her. Why did she feel like someone was watching her? Not her father or a friendly spirit, but someone who didn’t belong?

She’d hold tight to Kira, all right, Jessica decided. As soon as David and Kira got back, she was going to hug them both like they’d been out at sea.

“Come on,
Teacake,
” she said, scooping the cat into her arms from a bed of dry leaves near the mouth of the cave.

Jessica was walking at an unhurried pace as she began to make her way down the driveway, but by the time she reached the front porch she was in full sprint, clinging tightly to Teacake. There are no good monsters, she kept thinking, that cryptic phrase she thought she’d heard in the cave swimming around in her head.

All afternoon, while she waited, it wouldn’t go away.

M
AY
1926

“No, it’s like this: one-two, one-two. You have to listen. I told you, it’s up-tempo.”

“What you wanna go change the tempo for, Spider? Thought this was a ballad. It’s late, nigger. I gotta split. It’s a wonder your neighbors don’t lynch you.”

“Let’s run through this new intro real fast, see how it sounds. Let’s go. One-two …”

“Daddy?”

“… One-two, one-two, ready, play—”

“Daddy …” A voice, an interruption.

Dawit freezes, his clarinet reed a half inch from his waiting lips. The oxygen seeps unaccompanied from his lungs, and the inspiration vanishes from his head. The Joplin-style chords and syncopation that had been tumbling inside his imagination, waiting for release, fall silent. Lester sighs and plinks a few sour keys on the Baldwin. The piano needs tuning, and Dawit keeps forgetting to make the time to do it. The flat sound will soon grate on Lester’s nerves and give him another excuse to insist he has to go, Dawit knows. Lester is so damn temperamental. It’s nine-thirty. They’ll only be able to play for another half-hour before the landlord comes knocking about the noise. They’re scheduled in the recording studio by midmorning, and he won’t be able to pull in Al, Tommy, and Cleve before eight to rehearse.

That’s only three hours to make it work. At the most.

“Daddy.”

For the first time, Dawit notices Rosalie standing at his elbow. She’s wearing a plaid nightgown that reaches her ankles, her jet-black hair hanging loose to her shoulders. She’s tall for eight, looking just like her mother. Damn. That’s right. Christina is spending the night at her parents’ house because her father is sick, which explains why Rosalie is standing here talking to him at this precise moment. She’s going on about something Dawit can’t understand because she’s talking so fast.

“… Right, Daddy? Remember how you were telling me and Mama about how you saw him in New York last week?”

“Who?” Dawit asks, confused.

“Langston Hughes. The poet. You said he came up and—”

“He always sees the show when we’re in Harlem,” Dawit says, still not comprehending. “What does that have to do with anything?”