The Between (18 page)

“Thank you for the dance, Your Honor,” he said spiritlessly, kissing her neck. Dede squeezed his forearm hard, her eyes still closed. He understood. She didn’t want to let go either.

“Step up or move off, you loafers,” came the accented, genteel voice of Dede’s mother, who whirled next to them after grabbing Raul’s hand for a dance.

Kessie was shorter and wore cornrows instead of an Afro, but in her youthful features she could have been Dede’s twin. The most striking difference was the dark lines etched into Kessie’s cheeks, ritualistic scars meant, in Ghana, to make her beautiful. She wore a regal white dress with a head wrap to match. Above the din of conversation her laugh filled the crowded room.

“You call that dancing? Just move natural,” Kessie teased Raul. “There’s plenty of our music in that island music you like, just as a cow’s udder feeds the calf. Isn’t that so?” Raul only laughed, mimicking Kessie’s spirited two-step.

They’d invited sixty people, but it seemed that at least a hundred filled every corner of the house. Dede had been up until three in the morning preparing specialty dishes like goat meat and
fufu,
a mixture of plantains and cassava, and caterers provided the trays of curried chicken, pigeon peas and rice, and pork ribs. It was a combination of African, Caribbean, and good old soul food.

Many of the guests were the people they had seen at the candidates’ reception last fall; politicians, lawyers, educators, artists. But there were more Africans, many from the organized Nigerian Ibo community in Miami, and also Ghanaians Dede’s family knew. Hilton wished he could enjoy the United Nations fellowship assembled in his home, but he was too worried about intruders who might slip inside. Each time headlights lingered too long out front, casting a shifting glare against the curtains, Hilton’s chest tightened with dread.

He felt a tug at his elbow as he glanced through the front picture window. “Hilton, sweetheart, we’ll be going. It’s a long drive back down south.”

“You sure, Auntie?”

Hilton had never grown accustomed to calling the elementary school teacher and high school principal who adopted him Mom and Dad, and they had never insisted on it. He most often referred to the couple that had raised him merely as the Jameses, or C.J. and Auntie when he saw them in person.

The Jameses were at least seventy now, and they complemented each other well in their formal, unflappable demeanor. They’d taken him in without complaint and shown him every kindness, but at forty they hadn’t been sure how to be parents again. Hilton’s adoptive brother, a physician, had moved to New York for college long before Hilton moved in, and Hilton still barely knew him. He sometimes envied the warmth he saw when Dede interacted with her mother, who was younger and much more demonstrative. Hilton had set out, in many ways, to make certain the family he raised would be more close-knit than his own.

“It’s late for us, child. Almost midnight,” Auntie said, bundling herself in a bright red overcoat with a furlike collar. The temperature had dipped to the midfifties outside, a cool night for January in Miami.

Hilton’s adoptive father, who was nearly bald and wore a moustache he enjoyed stroking, patted Hilton’s arm. “Where are the babies? We’re going to say good night.”

“Supposed to be in bed, but I bet they’re watching videos in Kaya’s room. C.J., can you see well enough to drive?”

“You know you can’t say anything to him,” Auntie said, straining upward to kiss Hilton’s bearded cheek. He saw a questioning flicker in her copper-colored eyes, but she would not ask him why he looked so weary or even mention the stalker she’d been told was threatening his family. The Jameses firmly believed in respecting Hilton’s privacy, as they always had. “Good night.”

Hilton made his way aimlessly through all of the crowded rooms, pausing at huddles to overhear conversations about political empowerment or sports or the legal system. He checked to make sure both patio doors leading to the yard were locked, sampled a chicken wing, then weaved a path back to the front of the house.

“Man, these people ain’t never going to leave, are they?” Curt asked him at the door.

“Sure doesn’t look like it.”

“That deejay needs to chill with that music.” Curt whistled to the deejay, snapping him from his trance behind the turntables. He was playing Bob Marley’s “Running Away,” a hypnotic reggae beat. “Yo, man, bust that down. We got people trying to sleep up in Broward County.”

The deejay gave Curt a thumbs-up sign and lowered the volume slightly. The couples on the dance floor groaned their disapproval, Kessie loudest of all.

Hilton sighed, nearly collapsing against the front door. What he would give to stretch out on the couch and close his eyes for just a few minutes, no matter how frustrating or futile. Hilton had been on his feet much of the day and could barely concentrate. The music’s repetitive lyrics were a blur in his brain: “Why you can’t find the place where you belong . . . running away, running away, running away . . .” Marley was singing to him.

“Curt, you can book if you want to. I know it’s late.”

“Forget it, man. I said I’d stay, so I’m here.”

Hilton rubbed his face with his hands. “You got anything on Charles Ray Goode yet?”

“I’m working on it. Dede nailed him on aggravated battery, a domestic thing, but he never went to jail. He’s ex-military, dishonorable discharge. My old girlfriend in D.C. is running his record for me. Takes me a few days to sweet-talk her.”

“Ex-military. That’s great goddamn news . . .”

“Bet he was a grunt, if he’s like the guys I knew in the service. He can probably salute and peel potatoes, and that’s it.”

“He doesn’t write like a grunt.”

“Maybe Goode ain’t the guy,” Curt said. “I can’t figure why he’d be so pissed off and he never did time.”

“He’s the guy,” Hilton said, his voice muffled behind his hands. He fumbled to stand up straight.

“Why don’t you go lie down somewhere?”

“Can’t. There’s a world-peace discussion group in my bedroom,” Hilton said. “Lemme go mingle awhile.”

Hilton’s dazed wanderings through the house took him to the bar on the patio, where he grabbed another beer. Even with the patio door closed, he could hear vibrations from the music inside. Two dozen people were gathered around the pool, lost in conversation and washed in the patio light’s green radiance that made them all look surreal to Hilton, as if they moved in slow motion. Standing near the screen, feet from the water, Hilton kept his eyes on the hibiscus hedges that grew against his back fence. A spy might be hiding there.

“Palm wine,” said a deep voice close to his ear, startling him. A tall, heavy man draped in an African dress tunic and matching baggy pants stood behind him. He held his wine glass to Hilton’s face in a toast. “I’m impressed. Authentic even down to the palm wine. I haven’t had this since I went on holiday in London last fall.”

His accent was a hybrid of English and Ghanaian. Hilton recognized him as one of Dede’s cousins he had met before, a banker named Kofi with an unpronounceable surname. Hilton greeted him, trying to smile.

“I had no idea Dede was so traditional,” Kofi said.

“Neither did I,” Hilton muttered, wishing to be left alone.

“I met your daughter tonight. What a gracious child. Was she born early?”

Hilton scowled at him. “You mean premature? No. Why?”

Kofi sipped his wine. “I wondered why Dede chose to give her a born-to-die name.”

dad-deeeeeee

Hilton nearly swooned in a rush of his senses, his eyes locked on the man’s raven, sharp-featured face. He leaned against the patio’s aluminum frame as his knees threatened to fold beneath him.

“A what?” he whispered.

A shadow flickered across Kofi’s face as he sensed he may have tread somewhere he should not have. “Old superstitions,” he said in a dismissive voice. “Rubbish. It doesn’t matter.”

In a mind-flash, Hilton remembered the confusion over naming his new daughter, how the Kiswahili name they’d originally chosen—Imani, meaning “faith”—was discarded when Dede voiced an unexpected objection. She’d crossed the name Imani from her birth certificate a day later and chosen Kaya, a name from Ghana. Kessie had insisted, Dede told him sheepishly. Kessie’d had a fit.

“No,” Hilton said. “I’d like to know.”

“Infant mortality is a problem in Africa,” Kofi said. “That’s where it’s rooted. Many cultures have superstitions about children dying. You’d be surprised how prevalent they are. They have to do with spirits inhabiting the child and leaving the child to die, so we have traditional names meant to trick or implore the spirits, to keep the child alive. Symbolic names.”

Hilton swallowed hard. Kessie had tried to name Jamil— he couldn’t remember the name now—but Hilton had held fast with his son. He’d set his heart on an Arabic name for him, and his middle name was Hilton, naturally. He and Dede couldn’t understand why Kessie fretted so, and the episode caused a two-month family rift.

What had Kessie known?

Perspiration tickled Hilton’s scalp and armpits. “What,” he asked in a frail voice, “does Kaya mean?”

Kofi rubbed his chin. “It’s also pronounced Ka-YA, in my language. It roughly means ‘Stay and don’t go back.’”

A half hour after the deejay packed and left, a trickle of guests remained in impassioned conversations. Hilton’s shirt was unbuttoned to midchest, and his loosened tie dangled from his collar. He helped Dede and one of her girlfriends wrap the food in the kitchen, then he looked for Kessie. He found her in the family room in the midst of a debate about politics in Ghana. Without a word, he took her hand firmly and led her back to the deserted living room, where he sat down on the couch beneath the dim lamp. He gently tugged her until she was sitting on his lap and wrapped his arms around her middle. “Hilton, why are you kidnapping me? Let me up. I’m too heavy for you.”

“No, Mama Kessie,” he said, using his own nickname for her with his chin against her shoulder. “You’re just the right size.”

“Why do you look so bad?”

“Tired,” he said.

“Go to sleep, then. Morning washes everything fresh.”

He felt a fragile spell in this room, with the two of them alone. Many times Hilton had considered his mother-in-law as meddlesome and opinionated as any, if not more so, but now she seemed like an extension of himself. He felt like a blood relation to this African woman whose deep-scarred face suddenly looked exquisite framed between the masks hanging on the wall.

“Tell me what you need to say, Hilton. I’ll answer you.”

Slowly, he repeated his chance conversation with Kofi on the patio. She listened, nodding slightly, her face never changing except for the hint of a small, embarrassed smile. He stroked her hand. “You know what I want to ask you,” he said.

She nodded yes, looking thoughtful. Her buttonlike brown eyes glistened in the lamplight. “And we have to talk about this thing from years ago right now? At two o’clock in the morning?”

“It’ll help me sleep.”

Kessie sighed, leaning more of her weight against him, letting go a bit. Her brow became furrowed, troubled. “Thirteen years. Who can believe it’s been thirteen years since Kaya was born? A fat little girl-child.”

“Fat and healthy.”

“Oh, yes . . . and healthy.”

“So why the name?” he asked. “Why Ka-YA?”

“I’ll tell you this one time, but we won’t speak of it again. And Dede is my daughter, but she mustn’t hear this. All right?”

“All right.”

Kessie took a deep breath and began in a soft, birdlike voice. “I’ve been a city girl most of my life, but not in the beginning. I still have many relatives in the village, far from Accra. You rarely hear English there. My five aunts, all of them are still there, my mother, and the rest. The bush, some would call it. I don’t like that name. It’s home to me.

“The village stays with you, even in the city. You are shaped by things you have seen and heard. I had a smaller brother once, for a short time. When he died, they said the spirits took him. My mother said she saw a spirit dance above his head an hour before his breathing stopped. A death spirit. She described its eyes, its stench, its touch. It took my brother before he lived at all. I, of course, was contrary and educated and Christian, and I never believed in spirits. I thought her mad with grief.”

“But you believe now?”

“I believe in things I see.”

Hilton closed his eyes, feeling an unexplained, intense pang of sadness, as though something he’d known forever was being translated for him in simple terms he couldn’t ignore. He dreaded the sound of Kessie’s voice. She seemed to sense it, touching his face. “I don’t have to go on. Do you want the rest?”

With effort, he nodded yes.

“When Kaya was born, I befriended a nurse who agreed to let me hold her in the nursery. I stood a few feet before the glass window, and I could see my reflection there, and the reflection of the bundle in my arms. A movement in the glass caught my eye, so I looked up high. And I saw a colorless thing, an indescribable thing, dancing above her empty crib. I blinked my eyes and looked and looked, and I was sure of what I saw. A death spirit. So I told Dede she must change the child’s name. I told her it was to honor my heritage, but it really was to help the baby flee.”

“And Jamil?” Hilton asked, breathing painfully.

“I prayed I wouldn’t ever see that thing again, and I never did. But I felt it, Hilton, from the first instant the second child was in my arms. Just like the first. I felt like mourning if I only touched them, as though what I held was less than a corpse. It was . . . nothing.” Her voice was a guttural whisper.

those seedlings will choke soon enough

Abruptly, Kessie patted Hilton’s knee. “But Mama Kessie was wrong, you see? So much for my superstitions. Kaya and Jamil both lived. We’ve managed to trick the spirits. Through prayer? Through resolve? I don’t know how or why, but they are both still here, and here they’ll stay. We won’t speak of this again, as I said, because you’ll think I’m a mad old bush woman.”

“I could never think that about you,” Hilton said, the image of the dancing spirit haunting his thoughts. Was that what he saw in his sleep? “Do you ever have dreams about them, Kessie?”