Recovering Charles (19 page)

Alive?
I thought.

Some were too tragic to share. One or two were so distasteful I was ashamed for having taking them at all and deleted them from both my laptop and my camera.

I pulled up the funeral picture I’d brushed past when Bela had been sitting next to me. Viewing it full-size overwhelmed my screen. I reduced it to fifty percent, still large enough to see more detail than I had on the camera itself or in the iPhoto preview window.

There were more people on the street that day than I’d noticed at the time. I blew the photo up to sixty percent and dragged the image up to see the men at the front of the march.

The one who played the trombone looked like my new friend, Tater.

Odd.

I dragged the picture down slightly. One of the two men on trumpet looked like Hamp. I felt like a fool for not discovering those two had been at a funeral that day, just an hour or two before I’d first arrived.

I blew the photo up to seventy percent. One man stood taller than the rest.

Castle?

I tried eighty-five percent. Jerome and two other men I didn’t know were also playing instruments. A white man and a black man carried the casket.

One hundred percent. A woman in a white T-shirt walked near the back of the march.
Bela.

She stood by another woman.
Jezebel.
She was sobbing and carrying a large photo.

Enlarged at two hundred percent, even through the grainy dots of distance and light and utter disbelief, I recognized instantly the photo she held:

Charlie and Jez: just engaged

Part
3

Chapter
26

My father is dead.

           I looked at the photo again, enlarging it even more and dragging the photo around the screen until I saw a close-up of every familiar face.

Jerome. The man who brought me here.

Jezebel. My father’s fiancŽe.

Castle. Was his sister really dying in D.C.?

My father is dead.

Tater and Hamp. One was more talkative than the other. Was the other not part of the lie?

Joe and Cherie. Reluctant?

Bela.

My heart broke.

Footsteps on the first floor. Quiet conversation. I’d just spent three days in the city looking for a man they already knew was dead. They had deceived me, all of them. Was Frank Rostron part of it, too?

With haste I packed my duffel and zipped up my camera and laptop bags. I walked into the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I rubbed my hand through my week-old beard. I’d forgotten how much I looked like my father when I didn’t shave.

I’ve spent three days as a fool.

I debated punishing or trapping them. I picked up my bags and stood at the top of the stairs. I could tell them my girlfriend called. “Great news,” I might say. “They found my father alive in San Antonio! I’m leaving right this second to go find him. Who wants to come!”

Then I’d rush out the door straight for New York City.

The idea floated away as quickly as I’d thought it.

My father was dead.

I was crying.

If I ever married, he wouldn’t be there. If I had children, he wouldn’t be sitting there anxiously in the waiting room, waiting for me to present him with his grandchild and tell him the baby’s name. He’d never promise to spoil the baby he’d never meet.

Was Mom waiting for him?

I cried harder.

What if he had changed and wanted me back in his life? What if we were willing to love each other again? Now I’d never know.

If he was dead, I could never look into his clear eyes and ask him to love me, if he could.

I placed my head against the wall and muffled my cries in the crook of my arm. I missed a man I’d all but given up on. I’d prepared for this. Numbed myself. Conjured up memories of a drunken father ruining my graduation, wrecking my car, begging for my money.

I missed my father.

I went back to the bathroom and washed my face again.
Show them the photo.
I pulled out my laptop once again. It was still on. I opened it and walked down the stairs. My hands were shaking.

“Hey, sweetheart.” Jez was pulling Red Cross meals from a box and handing them out. “You hungry?”

She didn’t notice or care that I hadn’t answered because she asked Bela the same question just a few seconds later.

The increasingly attentive Bela must have noticed I’d been crying. She walked up to me. The laptop was still open in my arms, the image of Jez and her fountain photo enlarged to nearly life-size.

“You all right, Luke?”

“Absolutely.”

I set the laptop down on the end of the bar, pointed the photo at Jez, and walked back up the stairs for my bags.

“Where you goin’?” Jerome’s voice boomed. “You must be dyin’ of hunger.”

I collected my things, made a quick pass through the couch cushions, hallway, and bathroom for anything I might have left or dropped. Then I stopped at the top of the stairs for a few minutes and listened.

It didn’t take long for the front door to open. I saw Tater, Hamp, Joe, and Cherie slinking out. It looked like Cherie had both hands over her mouth. Joe had his arm around her.

I inhaled and took the steps deliberately, like each one mattered. I thought of Jordan.

I wish she was here.

The second my foot hit the bottom step Jezebel swarmed me and pulled me in tight. I didn’t set down my bags. I just stood there.

Next to the laptop, Jerome held a shaking, sobbing Bela. Jerome comforted her, or tried, but she couldn’t have heard him over her own cries.

Jezebel was still holding me. “I’m so sorry, Luke.”

I’d already decided to leave without saying anything more than the photo had already revealed. I’d be strong. I’d be like my dad would have been. I waited to move until Jezebel finally dropped her arms. She backed off and looked at me. Her cheeks were shiny, soaked, and a little dirty.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “We’ll explain.”

Bela couldn’t have explained anything. She was inconsolable.

I pulled my laptop from the bar, shut it down, and put it in my bag. I took the three steps to the front door.

“Luke,” Jerome bellowed like never before. “Don’t walk out that door without knowing. Don’t walk out.”

“Stop,”
Jezebel plead. “Just a minute. Listen,
please.
Please
turn around.”

I did, but only because I knew my dad wouldn’t ever walk away from someone talking to him. Not even a screaming, berating, belittling wife.

But I remained silent.

“This was your dad’s wish,” Jezebel said.

For you to lie?

I looked at Bela. She’d calmed a bit and was sitting on the same barstool I’d been occupying for three days.

“It was for you to see his city, to discover him.”

How could you possibly know that?

“Luke, I bet you didn’t know your father completed A.A.,” Jerome said from behind the bar. He opened a bottle of water for Bela.

“He knew,” Bela whispered.

Jez took the pulpit again. “That’s right, Luke. It took trying and failing every place he’d ever been. But right here, here in the Crescent City, Charlie did it.”

“Castle sponsored him,” Jerome said. “He did wonders. Led him through everythin’. Castle’s been sober four years himself.”

I looked at Bela. She tried to smile, but could only nod agreement and look down.

How did he die?
I wanted to ask, but decided it would wait.

Jez took my bags off my shoulders and set them on the floor.

I don’t know why I didn’t resist.

“Do you have any clue—any clue at all—how badly your father wanted a new life? He left every bit he could of that old self in Texas. He came here and ate up music instead. He came here to a clean slate. He struggled like nobody’s business, but that man did it. We did it
together
.”

I looked away from her and toward the photos on the wall.

“Luke, you’re not understanding us, sweetheart. Or not listening. Or both. Your father loved you. That’s why he stopped calling. You remember that? You remember asking him not to?”

Don’t.

“He heard you loud and clear and it stung, Luke. Charlie came to New Awlins lonely and afraid and broke. But that saxophone of his brought him to Jackson Square.” She become emotional again. The tears were back and so was the heartbreaking shine on her face. “And Jackson Square led him to Jerome and to Verses and to me. And as sure as our city is crying, as sure as you see me standing here, I knew I loved your dad from the second I saw him. And he felt exactly the same. True love.”

On that we agree.

“Are you going to speak, young man?” Jerome’s voice filled the bar.

I looked at him with more than a little fear in my chest.

“Just know,” Jez rolled on, “this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s about killed sweet Bela. But it was your father’s
last wish
—his final dream—that you would forgive him and discover his second verse.”

I picked up my bags and walked to the door. Jezebel hugged me from behind one final time. As I stepped across the threshold, I looked over my shoulder to see Bela standing by the bar.

“Luke,” she managed to whisper. “You were my O.G.T. in all this. My One Good Thing.”

I wanted desperately to tell her the same thing.

Instead I turned and walked out the door.

When I was about a block away, I pulled out my phone and sent Jordan a text message:

Dad gone. Coming home.

I looked at my watch: 6:30
pm.
I wondered where Jordan might be for the first time since I’d left.

Then I sent a second message:

Call me

By 6:31 my phone was vibrating.

“I’m so sorry, Luke.” Total devotion in her voice.

“Hey, Jordy.”

“So he’s gone?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Don’t know exactly. Only that he’s dead and there’s been a funeral.”

“That fast? Were you there?”

“Sort of.”

“Come home and tell me about it.”

“I will, but I need something in the meantime.”

“Of course. Anything.”

I pulled Jerome’s cell phone number from my address book and gave it to Jordan. I gave her a thinned-down version of what I’d experienced the first three days as well as the last sixty minutes.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“You will.”

I asked her to call Jerome’s number as many times as it took for him to answer, and then to politely ask for Jezebel.

“Remember what you told me the other day?” I asked quietly.

“About?”

“About doing something for me? About believing in me?”

“Of course.”

“I need you.”

“Of course, Luke.”

“When Jezebel is on the phone, tell her who you are. Tell her you’re calling for details about my father’s death. Where his remains are. Any circumstances at all. Tell her I need to know so I can put my father to rest. Names, numbers, whatever she can tell you.”

“Shouldn’t you have done this?”

“It’s complicated.”
Pride is a complicated animal.

“OK, so get what I can get from this woman.”

“She’s the one I told you about. She was engaged to Dad.”

“Oh.” Jordan was quiet for a moment. “When will you be home?”

“Three days. Hattiesburg tonight, Blacksburg, Virginia, tomorrow, and then New York.”

“Same route?”

“It is.”

“All right.”

“You’ll call her?”

“I will. Drive safe.”

“Don’t worry if I don’t call, all right?”

“All right.”

I thanked her and hung up.

I was surprised at how easily I remembered the route back to my car. On the way, I stopped by the Red Cross tent on Canal Street. When no one was available to help, I simply walked over to a pallet full of empty body bags, grabbed two, swiped a half-empty can of spray paint from a folding table, and continued on my way.