The Garden of Lost and Found (38 page)

The outstretched mallets were only a foot or two away from Nellydean on one side, Claudia and Divine on the other, but I was still halfway across the shop. Still too far away to do any good when Reggie feinted toward Nellydean with his mallet. In the dusty light with his arms stretched out he looked like the skeleton of a giant bat, crudely animated, and when he feinted a second time Nellydean parried, her broomstick striking Reggie’s mallet with a
crk!
loud enough to produce a sound from the bundle in Claudia’s arms. Reggie’s head jerked around at the noise, then jerked back toward Nellydean. Toward Claudia and Divine. Toward Nellydean. He lunged then, at Nellydean, but even as her broomstick struck the mallet in his right hand he let go of both mallets and switched directions in midair, he threw himself at Claudia and Divine and I launched myself too and Claudia screamed, but whether she screamed at me or Reggie I couldn’t tell. I was on the opposite side of a long table from Reggie and even though I had a vision of myself leaping over it the truth is I more or less clambered over and fell against him. But I caught his knees in my arms and grabbed on tight, twisted his legs out from under him, heard a
snp!
as his head struck the floor. A golden cloud of dust flew up at the impact and I sneezed wildly but Reggie didn’t make any sound at all. When I could focus again I saw the long shaft of Nellydean’s broomstick. It pressed down on Reggie’s throat and he lay beneath it with his arms flung out to either side, his heaving chest bouncing my head up and down like a float attached to a trotline. I thought it was just exertion that made his chest strain like that, but then I realized he was, like his son, crying.

I inched my way off him. I moved warily, not wanting him to get up but not wanting to hurt him either, but beyond his inflating and deflating chest he didn’t move. Nellydean didn’t move either. I could hear her breath too, I realized, thinner than Reggie’s, more labored. I saw that she held the broomstick with both hands and that she wasn’t pressing it into Reggie’s neck as much as she was holding onto it to hold herself up. Claudia’s eyes were wide in an expression of horror. I started toward her, and she clutched Divine to her chest and backed away so rapidly she almost tripped over a box. I jumped forward to help her but she jumped back and that’s when I realized her expression of horror was directed at
me
, and I looked down at myself.

After seven months of daily wear, Johnson Montgomery Croft’s clothes were threadbare, practically see-through, and the body they barely contained—my body—was nearly as insubstantial, wraithlike with neglect. Then, when I looked up, I saw Claudia as clearly as I’d seen myself, saw what an effort it was for her just to hold herself up. I reached up to my neck and grabbed the key I’d taken from John. I snapped it from its chain and brandished it at Claudia.

“What does this
open?
”

Claudia blinked.

“That?” Her voice was dull, abstracted. “We’ve had that since chapter one, Jamie. You should know by now it’s not important.” She took a faltering step toward me, extracted one arm from the bundle of Divine and held her hand out to me, palm up. “Let it go, Jamie.”

I looked down at the toothy shard, looked back up at Claudia.

“Jamie, please. It’s time to let it go.”

My eyes darted desperately around the shop, but there was nothing left to open. Everything was empty. Nothing would hold back the truth any longer.

“Jamie.”

Claudia took another step toward me, and all at once I dragged the pointed tip of the key through a whisper of fabric and an echo of skin. What I did made no more sense than what I’d done with K., but I’d run out of options. I drew the key the length of my forearm because if it opened nothing else it would open me, seam of seams, split skin and spilt blood flooding the room. I waved my arm at Claudia like a gun.

“Keep away from me. I have AIDS.”

And Claudia laughed.

“Oh, Jamie.” Her voice was tired, defeated, honest, relieved. “You do not.”

She took the wet red key from my hand, dropped it in her pocket, sagged against the corner of the table I’d climbed over to get to Reggie. And then, finally, she came clean.

“I do.”

IT TOOK THIRTY-FOUR STITCHES to close the wound in my arm. It took six hours for my test results to come back, and wouldn’t you know it: Claudia was right. They kept me in for three days though: suicide watch, and because I was suffering—surprise, surprise—from malnutrition. I waited for someone to say it, but no one did, so I said it myself: “Like the deer.”

The first day I was in the hospital, Claudia came to my room. In the harsh fluorescent glare her body seemed to have become evanescent, less ill than transparent: I could see right through her. “When I told you I hid that heroin from Reggie, I didn’t tell you the whole truth.” As she spoke she pushed her sleeve up until it bunched around the soft flesh of her upper arm, and there, dotting the hollow of her elbow like a woodpecker’s bug-hungry beak marks, were a half dozen prickled dots. When she rolled down her sleeve one reddish brown spot in the elbow crease matched up with the track mark underneath, a single umber fleck amid the yellow spots from Divine’s nursery, scattered like buttercups across the white field of her shirt.

THE SECOND DAY i was in the hospital Nellydean came to my room. She carried Divine and a tiny metal apparatus, but only the latter was for me. “She told me I ought-a show this to you.” I’d’ve never recognized it if it hadn’t been for the key sticking out of the variegated slot on one side. “It was the original lock on your momma’s desk. I switched em when I found out you was coming, left the key in the desk for you to find. It was supposed to be the first clue. For the treasure. I had no idea it was gonna lead you here.” I picked up the lock. It felt impossibly light, even as the key felt preposterously heavy. Suddenly I remembered. “You left No. 1? To give me this?” Nellydean’s eyes dropped to Divine’s face on her lap. “I left No. 1 to tell you I’m sorry, else I’d’ve just waited till you got home.” She looked up, blinked repeatedly in the light of the fluorescents. “Some things can’t wait.”

ON THE THIRD DAY, on my way out, I went looking for John. This was easier than you might think: the ambulance had taken me to the same hospital I’d taken him. When he saw me he smiled a gap-toothed smile. “It’s not so bad,” he said, touching his cheek. “Not half as bad as what I did to him.” Then he saw the bandage wrapping my arm. He frowned. “She said you’d come by but I didn’t realize this was what she meant.” “Who?” I said, and in answer he opened the drawer of his bedside table and pulled out two tattered maps and…and
those shoes
. “Hey, I get out of here in a few days. Can I borrow a pair?” I pointed to Divine’s rubbers with one hand, with the other indicated Johnson Montgomery Croft’s sandals on my feet. “This is all I have left.” John pointed at the sandals. “Not those.” He frowned. “One other thing.” He was still holding something. An envelope. “To the Son of Ginny Ramsay.” For the first time I lifted the flap, and the edge of a computer disk appeared along with a sheaf of papers. “For Jamie” was what was written on the disk’s label. I almost ran from the room, but John said, “She said to tell you not to hurry. She said by the time you got it it would be too late.”

six

DEAR JAMES,

I’ve been working on this for a long time. In some ways, longer than I’ve known you. I figured you deserved more than “the explanation.” You already got that anyway, at the hospital. So for the past six months I’ve been sneaking into your office when you were out. Luckily for me, you fuck around more than anyone I’ve ever met, and on a regular schedule too.

Laundry day.

When I started writing this I wasn’t sure what I was doing, really, or on what occasion I’d give it you. My primary motivation was guilt. I knew I was misleading you, that I was in your house under false pretenses—and it is yours, Jamie, no matter what Endean tells you, or Sonny. But, as is often the case with these things, I thought I was fooling you, but I was really fooling myself. I thought I didn’t really like you, and I was only too happy to play you for Endean’s sake, keep you sniffing after your mother’s buried treasure until…until Endean died, I guess, or at least till the baby came and I could decide what to do about that.

But I did like you, Jamie. I do. You’re one cracked cookie but you’re a good kid. You’ve got a little catching up to do in some areas, a little back-tracking in others, but you’ve got a good heart. You feel things. Maybe you feel things a little too much, but better too much than too little. Here’s a bit of Endean wisdom, for what it’s worth: you can’t build a road in front of you. You can only build it behind you, and if you want to walk on it you have to go all the way back to where you started.

I couldn’t tell you how far back I’d have to go to find a time in my life when I wasn’t playing people, but it would be a long time before Parker and Ellis. I didn’t play people because I didn’t care about them, but because I couldn’t bear to get too close to them. You remember that day in the car Upstate, you asked me what it had been like to lose my mother and I smacked you? I smacked you because that’s what it felt like and because you were out of your head a little, but also because you reminded me for the first time in years of everything I’d lost. I lost my mother, Jamie, both of my brothers, and in many ways my father. And I lost Reggie too—lost him, even though I can’t get quit of him.

Like a lot of women, I found out I was positive when I found out I was pregnant. This doesn’t mean it happened at the same time—I’ve been pregnant before, I just never got tested—but they were still all wrapped up together in my head. Until I got pregnant with Divine I never thought I wanted a kid. Let me rephrase that: I always thought the last thing in the world I wanted was a kid. I’ve had four abortions, Jamie. Four, and I never lost a night of sleep over any of them. If you’d asked me in the stirrups what I thought about the life that was being vacuumed out of me, I’d have told you it was better off where it was going. At least this way it wouldn’t lose its mother, its entire family, its future.

I don’t know why this time was different. Maybe it was because the woman at the clinic told me that if I was worried about the baby she could arrange to have that taken care of. Do you know they don’t even have a special form for abortions, Jamie? There’s just a line on a generic questionnaire marked “type of operation.” Hernia repair, liposuction, gall bladder removal, it’s all the same. The whole thing was like, you obviously can’t take care of yourself, what makes you think you can take care of a baby? And the truth is, I probably would have had another abortion if you hadn’t shown up. But I mean, the cover of
New York
magazine? “The man who saves people”? I’m the least superstitious girl I know, but even I took that as a sign. And of course it turned out to be a lie.
Oh, irony!
Actually the ironic thing is that it’s me who’s trying to save you—or maybe it’s just the stupid thing, the
reductio ad absurdum
of this whole sad affair.

Maybe I wouldn’t be writing this if I’d gone to the doctor like I was supposed to, but there we go: we had any number of outs along the way, both of us, you and I, you and me, whatever, but the truth is most people are ignorant because they want to be, and I guess we’re no exceptions. With a single question to any obstetrician in this city I could have learned that fewer than two percent of babies born to HIV-positive women are themselves infected, which when you get right down to it is about the closest thing to a proof of a benevolent God I’ve ever heard of. If I’d known that, maybe I’d have done a little more research, I’d have joined some kind of support group for HIV-positive single black women—I’m sure there is one, if not a dozen, in this city. I’d have been told I wasn’t alone, I’d have been told that my job was going to be hard but not impossible. I’d have been told to stick with it and we’d have joined hands and prayed and sang—because if there’s black ladies involved you know there’s gonna be prayin’ and sangin’ and a whole lotta carryin’ on—and afterward we’d have gone out for coffee and pie and bitched about the men and/or needles that got us into this mess.

Oh, Jamie, I thought I’d made the right deals, thought I’d prayed the right prayers. I used to tell myself or whoever was listening that I’d give him up for adoption if he was born okay. My head would be hanging over that bucket in that foul-smelling moldy basement and you’d be hammering and yammering and I’d be saying, Lord, I know I am not fit to raise this baby, but please don’t visit the sins of the mother on the child. Only let my baby be born healthy and I’ll change my evil ways, or send him so far away he won’t have to bear the taint of a mother like me. That’s the one thing you never thought of, did you, Jamie? “It would have been worse if I stayed.” You thought she was taking off to save herself from you, but how do you know she didn’t think she was saving you from her?

Call it statistics, call it the power of prayer. In either case Divine was born negative. He was born negative and I got handed a bucketful of pill bottles and was told that if I took care of myself there was no reason I shouldn’t live to see my son graduate from high school. I wanted the doctor to say I’d live to see Divine get married, have kids of his own, but all I got was “It’s certainly not impossible.” That’s not a lot to go on, is it? “You just take care of yourself” isn’t exactly a blessing. When you get right down to it, it’s more of a curse. And, Jamie, I’ll tell you: the only way I’ve ever been able to take care of myself is at the expense of the people around me, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that I’ll never be able to take care of myself and also take care of Divine. And that’s not something I want my baby growing up with. A mother with a monkey on her back
and
poison in her blood. A mother who might go at any time, for whatever reason. Better he should lose me now.

That looks a lot like “it would have been worse if I stayed.” My apologies to you and to Ginny, but I’m beginning to understand her now, to sympathize with her I should say, a lot more than I did when she was fucking my fucked-up brother. Because a kid, Jamie—that’s a life.
A life.
It’s not something you can bargain for, or bargain with. At first I just thought I’d leave. But then I thought of you waiting all those years for your momma to call you up and say, “Honey, I’ve come back.” I don’t want that hanging over my baby’s head either. I don’t want it hanging over mine.