My Soul to Keep (18 page)

“Ain’t nothing to say,” Uncle Billy said.

“Well, you can’t possibly believe this is me.”

“Didn’t say a word about you, now did I?” Uncle Billy answered. He had him there.

David waited a moment before speaking again. “You just seem disturbed,” he said. “That’s what led me to think perhaps something was bothering you.”

Lord, sometimes this boy strung sentences together in ways that made no kind of sense, like he had to search for the longest way around to the end of his thoughts. Keeping company with white folks, that was where it came from, and all those universities besides.

“I ain’t disturbed about a thing,” Uncle Billy said.

There. Uncle Billy saw it that time, a flinching in David’s jaw. His teeth must be grinding hard, ready to crack.

“You see,” David said, speaking syrup-slow, “this photograph was taken in nineteen twenty-six. That was seventy-one years ago. Do you see now why that can’t be me? That would have to be my grandfather, wouldn’t it? Can we come to that understanding, Uncle Billy? And I’ll just take this home.”

Understanding? What did he mean by that? Some trickery?

“All I know is what I see; what I see is what I know,” Uncle Billy said. Suddenly, he felt bold. “Tell the truth, I knew there was something funny with you the first time I laid eyes on you. I sure did. Just ask Bea. I even told her, I said, ‘That sure is a strange one got your youngest daughter, ain’t it, Bea?’ And she said, ‘What you mean?’ And I said, ‘It’s just what I see. I ain’t got much else, but I got eyes.’”

Uncle Billy felt good to say it, to bring it out in the open. “So I guess you got to do what you got to do,” he said as clear as he could muster.

The ghost wrung his hands between his knees and sat staring down at the colorful carpet Bea bought Uncle Billy, a Moroccan woven rug she’d found on sale. Uncle Billy had never before had a rug—or anything else, for that matter—from Morocco. He’d had nothing but the most special treatment since he’d moved in with her. He couldn’t complain about a thing.

David sat, not moving, for what seemed like a long time. Something was working hard in his mind, knitting his brow. Hell, the man looked like he was about to cry.

Without saying anything, David stood and picked up the Jazz Brigade record from the stack in front of Uncle Billy’s wheelchair. He ran his finger across the hard vinyl edge, then he made his way to the Victrola on top of the bureau. When he put the record on, the music was nearly covered over by the noise from age. The music sounded far, far away, like this ghost’s sullen brown eyes.

Uncle Billy didn’t know the name of the song that was playing, but he’d heard it many times before, in Chicago, when his father used to play it. His father was never so proud as when that record came out, and he played it every night when he came home from bellhopping at the hotels. These boys are like family, his father used to say. I remember them when they was nothing. Now, look. And he’d put it on again.

Uncle Billy hadn’t remembered a conversation with his father for a long, long time. Maybe the remembering was all a part of it.

“From your looks, I’d say you were about to take your bath when I interrupted you,” David said, like he was about to leave. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he walked behind Uncle Billy and gripped the wheelchair’s handles, slowly pulling in a half circle until he was backing Uncle Billy out of his room, into the hallway.

“That could be,” Uncle Billy said. He had to admit it, he was just the tiniest bit scared now. He didn’t like it when people pulled his wheelchair backward. He always liked to know where he was going, and he wanted to see it before he got there.

“I’m sorry I sidetracked you, Uncle Billy,” David said, just as nice as could be.

“Ain’t no trouble,” Uncle Billy said. His lungs were really fooling with him, likely to burst from the strain of breathing.

They were in the bathroom. Uncle Billy noticed they could hear the tinny-sounding music even here, as faint as could be. Uncle Billy heard the creak and whine of the faucet, and a small cloud of steam began to rise behind him as water drove against the porcelain tub. Just like that. Uncle Billy’s breathing was easier. It was all better, with one small dose of sweet, hot steam.

“If you don’t mind,” David said to him, “I’m going to help you take your bath today. Is that okay, Uncle Billy? May I do that?”

And he stood behind him, out of Uncle Billy’s sight, as though he really were waiting for an answer. Uncle Billy would have smiled for sure this time, but his nerves were holding his face still in the silence while David waited behind him. Just waited.

As if a ghost hadn’t already made up his mind what he was going to do from the moment his shadow touched the door.

“It wasn’t his heart or another stroke. From what we can piece together, he must have slipped in the tub and banged his head,” Alex said, speaking in a near whisper.

The family was assembled in the waiting area at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s emergency room, ushered by Alex, who was wearing her white lab coat with a brass nametag reading ALEXIS JACOBS, M.D., HEMATOLOGY. Jessica forced herself to stare at the grooves on the nametag, virtually shutting out the words flowing from her sister’s lips. Jessica wanted to feel pain and shock at the suddenness of Uncle Billy’s hospitalization, but her rational mind wouldn’t allow it, as though it were afraid of shutting down.

What was it her grandmother had always said? Bad luck comes in threes. Princess, Peter, and now Uncle Billy. Was the run over now? Please, Jesus? Was this awful season of sadness finally behind them?

“The result is a brain hemorrage and swelling, complicated by the earlier bleeding and tissue damage from his stroke. He’s in a coma, but I don’t think he’s going to last long,” Alex said. “He can’t breathe unassisted.”

Bea sniffed, wiping her nose with a crumpled Kleenex she’d been turning over in her hand for the past two hours, since they’d all arrived at the hospital with Kira in tow. Bea nodded at every other word from Alex, her face set and impossible to read. Jessica hoped her mother wasn’t blaming herself because Uncle Billy had his accident while she was away.

“It’ll come down to the life support. His primary physician is Dr. Guerra, and he’ll explain it in more detail,” Alex said, squeezing Bea’s elbow. “You may have to make a very hard decision, Mom. You know that, right?”

Bea nodded again, this time with a momentary gaze at the ceiling before closing her eyes. “Doesn’t seem right,” she muttered, “deciding whether people will live or die.”

“Life support isn’t life, Mom. It’s machines.”

“I know.”

Feeling David’s arm draw more closely around her waist, Jessica looked over her shoulder for Kira. She was sitting across the room, giggling with a blonde boy her own age while the boy’s mother sat in a teary, red-faced daze. The other woman apparently had her own unexpected tragedy to sort through.

“Kira,” Jessica called sharply. Kira snapped to look at her, slightly startled. “Come over here.”

“It’s better if she doesn’t hear this,” David said, close to Jessica’s ear, forever Kira’s diplomat.

“I just want her here. I want to hold her hand.”

When Kira came to her side, Jessica hugged her daughter close to her with one arm, stroking her cheek with her fingers. Jessica suddenly felt like crying, but she didn’t think it was because of Uncle Billy. She hadn’t had a chance to get close to him because she’d never met him before he moved to Miami. As bad as it sounded, none of them had expected him to live long, and Bea wanted him to die peacefully, with family.

Something else, deep inside Jessica, was tugging at her tears. Maybe it was the collection of misery in this room, where so much bad news had come for so many.

“I’m hungry, Mommy,” Kira said.

“We’ll get something to eat in a little bit,” she promised.

Bea had called them as soon as she came home and found Uncle Billy sprawled across the bathtub’s porcelain rim, with a bleeding gash at his temple. Water had been running over the sides of the tub, soaking the hallway. It was pure chance he hadn’t drowned. That might have been better, more merciful, Jessica thought. A quick death had to be preferable to an artificially prolonged life.

In the hospital cafeteria, where they waited while Alex took Bea to the intensive-care unit, David read Jessica’s thoughts. “It would be better for Uncle Billy, and your mom too, if it was over,” he said. Kira was too mesmerized by dipping her steak-cut french fries in her mound of ketchup, covering all possible angles, to pay any attention to their more subdued adult preoccupations.

“I was thinking the same thing, but I feel sort of guilty.”

“I don’t understand how he survived at all,” David mused. “He should have died right away, from hitting his head. Or he should have drowned right after. It’s inconceivable.”

“David,” Jessica scolded softly, indicating Kira with a nod of her head, “please.”

He half smiled, embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said, playing with the wilting lettuce in his chef’s salad.

Of all ironies, David had planned to visit Uncle Billy that afternoon. She’d heard David on the phone with him, and he’d been anxious to see some records Uncle Billy found. Uncle Billy called when the three of them were walking out of the house to pick up school supplies at the mall for Kira—they’d promised her a new bookbag, since her plastic strap was broken. After Uncle Billy’s call, Jessica told David she’d take Kira herself. Go on and enjoy your music, she said.

If only he’d gone as he planned.

But David was still at home at his computer when they got back less than two hours later. As they walked through the door, the frantic phone call came from her mother.

“What made you change your mind about going to Uncle Billy’s before?” Jessica asked David in the cafeteria. She felt penned in by the white lab coats and the incessant announcements, a sheen of sterility covering a building brimming with suffering. No wonder David hated hospitals. She wanted to leave this place, and soon.

David shrugged absently. “Goddamn copyeditors in France. They had questions on a piece I sent them three weeks ago. Wouldn’t let me get off of the phone.”

“Daddy, you cussed,” Kira pointed out.

It was so weird how the mind could play tricks. When she first came home, Jessica was convinced that David had visited Uncle Billy because of the music. Finally, she thought she was redeemed for breaking David’s record; as she and Kira walked down into the yard, she believed she heard vintage music floating through the open living room window, a Jazz Brigade song called “Forever Man” she recognized from her early days with David. She’d been so sure of it, she imagined she could make out the energetic clarinet solo.

But by the time she opened the front door, the music was gone. And there was David, sitting at his desk, hard at work, amid utter and sudden silence.