The Between (8 page)

“I see you getting misty over there,” Dede teased. “We went through the same thing on her birthday. She’s a teenager now.”

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s nauseated and a little shy about you and Jamil, so she’s doing her homework on the patio. She had a little accident at school, but I told her it’s nothing. A spot of blood on her dress, and I’m sure no one noticed except her friend.”

“You womenfolk catch hell coming and going, don’t you?”

Dede laughed ruefully. “Coming and going. That’s right.”

Hilton picked up a newspaper and walked through the kitchens French doors to the east end of the patio. Its paved pebbles glistened in the moonlight, and reflections from the lighted pool swam everywhere in shimmering designs. The screened-in patio was a man-made jungle, with palms lined against the screen and air plants clinging to trellises. The wispy, spiderlike air plants fascinated Hilton with their ability to thrive without soil or real roots. They were so odd, so heroic.

He saw Kaya sitting at the white wrought-iron patio table at the opposite end, furiously at work on an essay. She wore her permed hair in two long ponytails that rested against her shoulders, a hint of Nana’s ancestry, and she still looked quite childlike to him at that moment.

Gingerly, as he always did, Hilton walked to the table at a careful distance from the edge of the pool. Water. He wouldn’t have purposely sought a house with a swimming pool, but he couldn’t bring himself to sour the deal on the house after it had won Dede’s heart. And it was glorious; thirty yards long, eight feet deep at its deepest end, with elaborate, Roman-style steps leading to the shallow end. Black tile spelled out in four-foot letters the name D-E-E at the pool’s bottom, the previous owner’s tribute to his wife; Hilton was amused by the similarity to Dede’s name, and he usually told visitors that workmen had misspelled
Dede
when the pool was built. The coincidence was nearly uncanny.

The few times Hilton had been coaxed into the pool, he felt a gripping lethargy when he held his breath and plunged below the surface. His limbs grew heavy, frozen, and he invariably ended up choking on the chlorinated water. As though something intended to keep him there. Dede told him it was psychological, but Hilton was convinced it was more than that. Like that day on the beach, with the undertow. It was best to keep his distance from the pool.

“Hey,” Hilton said, taking the chair beside Kaya’s.

She didn’t look up or stop writing. “Hey.”

He struggled a moment with words, then exhaled. “So your mom told me about your little adventure at school today.”

Kaya rolled her eyes theatrically. “Great. She’s already called everybody else in the world and told them.”

“I’m not everybody else in the world, you know. I’m your dad. No secrets, remember?”

She looked at him as though she couldn’t imagine a more foolish statement from an adult’s lips. “You’re a guy, Dad. Guys don’t like to hear about this stuff.”

He was silent a moment, acknowledging her point. The less he had to know about menstruation, whether Dede’s or Kaya’s or anyone else’s, the better. “Right. But you didn’t mind me being a guy when we built that treehouse, or when we used to go to ball games. Remember? The only Dolphin Jamil knew about was that damn Flipper. So it was just you and me. No secrets.”

“Yeah,yeah . . .”

They hadn’t attended any ball games lately, and the days of treehouse-building were long past, Hilton thought. He’d been fifteen when he lost his virginity, only two years older than Kaya. Soon she’d be showing up at the door with hormone-crazed young punks with their arms around her waist and their minds inside her pants, just the way he’d been when he charmed his girlfriends’ parents with his smile and erudite conversation. Hilton and Dede had believed in frank sex education from the time their children were old enough to ask questions, but this would be new territory. Yes, the time for secrets had begun now. Secrets were the first wall between parents and children. Children, in the end, were only adults in disguise.

“You feeling okay?” Hilton asked.

“My stomach hurts some. I hope I won’t have PMS like Mom,” she said, and they both laughed.“Don’t tell her I said that.”

“I won’t, princess,” he said. “Listen, Kaya, I know you’ve got a busy schedule with drama workshop and the mall and your friends, but why don’t we do something this weekend?”

Again, that look like he was crazy. “Like what?”

“Well, we could go to a movie. We could go horseback riding . . .” Kaya sighed, so he went on quickly: “Or not. You pick something. Just a couple of hours.”

“You’re not going to talk to me about sex, are you?”

“Not the whole time, no.”

“Dad . . .” she said, turning her attention back to her homework.

He reached over to take her pen to prevent her from writing. “No, I’m being for real, Kaya. Let’s do something Saturday. We’ll do any movie you want.”

Kaya looked at him questioningly a moment, but he knew she understood. Yeah, I love you too, Dad, she said with her soft brown eyes. I didn’t mean to grow up so fast, it just happened like that. Now leave me alone so I can do my work. “Okay,” she said.

Sorry, the dispatcher apologized for the third time, Sergeant Curt Gillis hadn’t been raised on his radio yet. He was doing a night shift at the projects, and he might not return his messages for several hours. Was it an emergency?

Hilton paused. He wanted to say yes, it was an emergency, but how could he? Curt was in the thick of crack dens and drug busts, and Hilton was calling from the serenity of his bedroom near the City Beautiful. “Just tell him to please call me when he gets a chance,” Hilton sighed.

He’d been about ready to go to bed, even contemplating back rubs with Dede to help them both relieve stress, when she found him in the bathroom and gave him a single piece of paper. “Here it is. I didn’t forget,” she said.

Now, after hanging up the phone, Hilton sat in the bedroom easy chair beneath the light of an upright lamp with the letter in his lap. Once again, he raised the folded paper with its perforated edges to read the words that had ruined his night:

Am I to believe it is mere coincidence they sent an African-coon-tarbaby-niggger-American bitch to persecute me? And you, the child of Ham’s clans, marked by Satan himself, beholding me with contempt and irreverence, your insides raging with unborn seeds of your insidious kind, of monkey-men?

Do you believe I’m only a monkey, too, adept at the art of mimicry? You are wrong, sadly wrong. You and your herd won’t live to mock me further, nor will your offspring ever grow up to taint and murder mine.

“Don’t keep reading that, Hil. You’ll just make yourself crazy,” Dede said from where she lay in bed. “I can’t have you sitting up there with that light on, baby. I have cross-ex with my rapist tomorrow, and it’s late.”

Hilton’s eyes were glued to the neat words on the computer printout. The paper was a high grade, and the printer of superior quality. Those might be the only clues; there would be no hope of lifting fingerprints from this, since so many had touched it before now. “You don’t know how much I wish you’d kept the envelope.”

“It may be on my desk somewhere, but I’m afraid it might have gotten tossed,” Dede said in a small voice. “There was no return address, I remember, because I looked. It was postmarked from central Florida somewhere. Maybe it’s from the Raiford prison.”

Yes, Hilton, thought, he hoped to God it was from the prison. But would they allow an inmate to send a letter like this? Perhaps it was smuggled out. Or perhaps the sender was a free man walking around who had casually slipped it into a streetside mailbox.

“He’s dangerous. He’s sick, and he’s dangerous.”

Dede exhaled slowly. “I just didn’t want to confront it, you know? I think that’s why I made a joke out of it. I have to deal with ugliness fifty hours a week, like that scum now who’s on his way to convincing the jury a sixty-year-old woman is lying about getting raped. I didn’t want to bring it home with me. I didn’t want it to touch you or Kaya or Jamil.”

“It does touch us, Dede,” Hilton said, his eyes traveling across line after line of the hateful words. Each time he read it, he was stunned by the menace presented so calmly, so professionally. The sender had even spelled her name correctly in the greeting: Mrs. Dede James, Attorney-at-Law.

“I know. That’s why we’re not in the book,” Dede said.

“People can find you when they really want to. I don’t have to tell you that. And he knows you have children—that’s what I don’t like.”

Dede chuckled into her pillow. “Shoot, Hil, you know folks figure all of us black women have babies. He doesn’t know. And what makes you so sure it’s a man? Could be a woman.”

No, Hilton thought. It was a man, without a doubt. And as much as he wanted to believe it was from a lifer at Raiford, he also knew the man was free. He was free, and he was close.

“Turn the light off, Hil,” Dede said.

After a moment, Hilton reached up to turn off the floor lamp, leaving the room in darkness. He sat in the chair, the letter still in his hands, and waited for the telephone to ring. He could hear the bathroom sink dripping intermittently, then the click and hum of the central air-conditioning unit. These were sounds he had grown used to in his nightly flight from sleep. Soon he would hear Dede’s breaths slow until they were long and deep, interrupted by occasional snores.

Hilton wondered why it was so dark until he remembered no one had turned on the floodlights outside to brighten the patio. He stood and fumbled for the switch beside the Venetian blinds, glancing through the sliding glass door. There, outside, he saw a light above the pool. Not the electric lights controlled by the panel; he saw a murky, phosphorescent gray-green mist that appeared to be rising from the pool like steam.

Hilton’s hand froze above the light switch as he pressed his nose to the door, not breathing. What the hell—

A woman. She seemed to be hovering above the pool. But no. She was standing ankle-deep on the surface of the glowing water, hands at her sides, returning his gaze. The dim light made the lines of her face look harsh, etched in charcoal. She wore a patterned dress, flowers. Her straight hair was silver, fine, whipping gently around her face in an unseen breeze. Hilton felt his head and chest swelling. Nana.

Instinctively, he flicked on all three light switches and flooded the patio with beams from all sides. Now, the pool blazed with a white light beneath the still surface, the man-made light he recognized. The mist, the woman, were gone.

Jesus. He was hallucinating. He’d spooked himself thinking about that letter, sitting in the dark. His limbs feeling weak, Hilton retreated to the chair and sat listening to his amplified heartbeat. He would still be in the chair two hours later, wide awake, when Curt finally called and Hilton recited the letter to him from memory.

“Damn,” was all Curt could say. He offered none of his usual jokes, and he sounded tired from his shift. “Yeah, man, bring that to me at the station tomorrow. I’m on at four. I’ll have one of the plainclothes look at it.”

“This scares the shit out of me, Curt,” Hilton said, his voice low so Dede could drift back to sleep. And seeing my dead grandmother stroll across the swimming pool, he thought.

“Don’t sweat it, man. It might not be anything.” “But be honest: It sounds like something, doesn’t it?” “I’ll tell you what, I’ve never heard nothing like that,” Curt said. “But, hey, it’s probably a whole lot of bullshit, some crazy cracker blowing steam. Now get your ass to sleep. Some of us have work to do.”

The child’s desk he sits in is too small for him, and his knees feel cramped. Afternoon light pours through all the classroom’s rows of open jalousie windows, so everything around him is sharp and focused. He can read every state on the
This Is Our U.S.A.
map hanging above the teacher’s pinewood desk, he can see his classmates’ names from the week’s best drawings posted on the walls. Mrs. Robertson’s bouncy, feminine script covers the chalkboard with words spelled in syllables:
di-no-saur, hur-ri-cane, cre-ma-tion.
The date, she has written, is May 1963.

Mrs. Robertson is not in the classroom. He thinks everyone is gone until he notices a little pigtailed girl three rows ahead of him, who raises her hand and stands up although there is no one to call on her. She begins to recite the state capitals breathlessly, one after the other, facing the chalkboard.

He sees a spot of blood the size of a nickel on the back of the girl’s beautiful taffeta dress, so he tries to whisper to her. “Pssssst,” he says. “Hey, little girl.”

She ignores him. She has reached Tallahassee, Florida, and Atlanta, Georgia, in her recitation.

“Hey, girl, you’re bleeding,” he says, more loudly this time, and she stops and whirls around. Kaya is wearing lilac ribbons in her hair that match her dress, and she looks lovely.

“You’re bleeding, honey,”he says.

Surprised and embarrassed, Kaya presses her palm to her chest. “Daddy?” she says, as though she can’t see him. When she moves her hand away from her chest, blood has seeped through the fabric to leave a perfect palm print in bright red.

“Jesus, Kaya, you’re bleeding,” he says, alarmed now.

She gazes down the front of her dress, where blood is soaking from her chest in spots that grow and darken, creeping down to the belt tied around her abdomen, the fabric sagging beneath the liquid weight. He can smell the hot, coppery scent now; the air in the room is heavy with it. The front of her dress is drenched in red-black, dripping from the hem to a small puddle on the floor. Kaya watches her dress with wide, unblinking eyes. She screams and stamps her feet in panic, then screams again and shakes her foot when she steps in the sticky puddle. “Dad-deeee
. . .”
she sobs.

He stands and tries to hold her, to touch her, but he cannot. He can only watch her frantically try to brush the blood away, clawing at her dress in a dazed wonderment. “Daddy, help me,” she sobs, choking. “Dad-deeeee!”