The Matchmaker's Medium (11 page)

Chapter Nine

It was a punishingly cold December in northern Virginia, almost a year since I met Jamal in that club on K Street, and six months since my divorce from Don was final. At first, he had acted like he was ready for some big, messy showdown—the new lawyer trying out his litigation skills, maybe—but in the end, he just signed the papers and gave me what I asked for.

Not that I had asked for much, anyway. All I really wanted was the furniture, the paid-off car, and my name back. The rest he took with him: the overpriced electronics I didn’t want or even know how to work, the artwork I hated, the real china dish set he had inherited from his grandmother, and his life-size John Wayne dummy.

That thing always creeped me out, standing in the living room with its fake hands planted on its fake hips, a fake smile under a big cowboy hat. I always hated westerns, and he thought they were the greatest thing to hit the silver screen. No wonder our marriage never worked.
Some opposites just shouldn’t attract,
I thought, slamming the door to my car as I rushed through the frigid air and hard-packed snow.

It hadn’t dropped fresh powder in a week, so the snow I was crunching through in my huge mukluk boots was that gross kind of snow: dirty, ugly, and concrete-like, with all the moisture sucked out of it.
Nothing uglier than dirty, old snow in the middle of the city.

I unlocked my door, fumbling the keys a little and almost dropping them, when Jamal said, “Somebody’s here, foxy lady.” He had appeared out of nowhere, with no warning,
yet again
, nearly scaring me to death.

“I told you to knock that off!” I whisper-yelled, looking around to see who was there. The parking lot of my crappy apartment complex was empty, as always. Some days I swore I was the only one who lived there, and all the other cars and porch junk of the 100-plus apartments around me was just part of some elaborate movie set, tended by hundreds of invisible people, who changed things just a little now and then so it would be more realistic.

“He ain’t right
here
, but he’s here.”

“Ugh. Like
that’s
not cryptic, Jamal.” I growled a little, as I pushed against the door and forced it open. It tended to stick in the winter, with the difference between the warmth inside her apartment and the almost-zero temperature outside. Yet one
more
annoying thing to call the maintenance line about, leaving a message on some ancient machine that—based upon the arrival of exactly
no one
to fix any of my stuff—was checked all of
never
.

“Whatever. Just gimme a break, would ya? I need to get out of these clothes, I feel like I’m suffocating in all this wool—“

“Excuse me?”

I snapped around, startled by the sound of the not-Jamal voice. It came from a very young-looking black guy, his ebony skin shining with moisture, under a ridiculous-looking ski hat with multi-colored points all over it, like a jester’s hat. Completing the ensemble was a poufy navy down-feather winter coat, a Georgetown bull dog emblazoned on it, which made him look like he was about 6 foot 70 and weighed at least 1,100 pounds.

“Uh, yes? Can I help you with—“

“One of my friends gave me your number, but I left a bunch of messages and you never called back. So I asked him for your address, and he finally coughed it up, so here I am.”

“I see. Here you are.”

Jamal walked around in front of the guy, checking him out and sizing him up, like he either wanted fight him or try on his clothes. I waved my hand at him, like I was telling the leader of the band,
That’s enough music! Stop playing!

“Look, lady, I’m not gonna try anything funny, I need your help. My little brother’s missing.”

Aw, crap. Not another one.

“Come in, sorry about my manners, it’s been a crappy day.”

“Well, no offense, but I don’t think your day could be worse than mine.”

I shuffled him in, shoved the warped door closed behind him, and started peeling my own layers off. “You’re right, I’m sorry. Again.”

“Okay.”

I yanked my scarf, gloves, hat, and coat off, then plopped down on the couch for my daily struggle with the mukluks. I had bought them in Alaska one summer, when Don and I went on one of our ‘discover the world’ trips.
What a sad, pathetic joke that turned out to be.

Finally freed of the boots, I dumped them over by the front door, turning on a small space heater I kept nearby, so the boots and winter gear would actually dry instead of just stink up the place.

“Can I take your stuff?” I asked, motioning to his hat and coat.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, removing his coat to reveal the truth: it wasn’t the
coat
that made him look like a small giant. It was him.

“Do you play football or something?” I asked absentmindedly, as I tried to figure out where to hang his Shaquille-O’Neal-worthy monstrosity.

“Yeah. Offensive line. Who’s your team?”

“Oh, um, the bulldogs, like you,” I said, feeling rather proud of myself for figuring out who his favorite team was.

He laughed, a booming thunderous sound, and clutched his stomach. In my peripheral vision, I could see Jamal literally rolling on the floor, barely making any sounds because he was laughing so hard.

“What?” I looked back and forth from Jamal to this gigantic kid, completely confused.

“You really—you really don’t know?” still laughing so hard that tears were shining in his eyes.

“Know what?”

After a few minutes, the kid wiped his face and took a few deep breaths, reigning the laughter in so it was just a few hiccups and snorts.

“They’re the Georgetown
Hoyas
not the bulldogs. And their football team
sucks
. Just so ya know.” He pulled his hat off, handing it to me, with a little smirk on his face.

“Oh, what
ever
,” I said, smiling in spite of myself.
At least I got the giant kid-man to laugh. Maybe now he won’t break me in half and throw me around like a puppet. Ha-ha.

“You want me to put my boots by the door?”

“Yeah, just sit them next to mine.”

He shuffled over to the growing pile of clothes and boots, unceremoniously dumping his on the floor. His stocking feet made a ‘swish-swish’ sound as he scooted back across the room, trying to decide where to sit.

“Try the recliner, it might hold you.”

He turned and looked at me funny, like he couldn’t tell if I was serious or not, then somehow folded himself into the leather seat. I settled back into the couch, trying to relax, narrowing my eyes a little as Jamal finally stopped laughing and walked over toward the kid again.

“So you said something about your brother missing, um, what was your name again?”

He instantly got serious. “Marcus. Yeah, my brother’s been missing for a couple of days, now. He’s only seven, and I’m worried about him.”

“Seven? Wow; that is young.”

“I know. He’s never gone missing before, never even wandered off at the store or
anything
. Trevor’s one of those good kids, almost a mama’s boy, but not a punk or anything. If he gets hurt he doesn’t act like a pussy—I mean, uh, a sissy.”

I tilted my head to the side, like I was trying to figure him out, but I was really waiting for Jamal to lean over and say something. He had back up, away from the recliner, tilting his head back one way, then the other, looking at Marcus with his eyebrows furrowed.

Not getting any help from Jamal, I asked, “Where was he the last time you saw him?”

“Mama saw him two days ago; he was watchin’ cartoons on Nickelodeon while she went to the shower. She wasn’t gone but ten, fifteen minutes, same as damn near every day. She hates to take a shower at night cuz then her hair stays wet in the pillow, and—“

“Okay, I got it. So, what time of day was it?”

“Let’s see, I just left for school, I’m a senior this year, so I have a late start class three days a week. Would’ve been around 10.”

“And there was no sign of anyone coming in? Nothing knocked over?”

“Nope. Like he just disappeared right out of the living room, vanished. Didn’t even take his boots or coat or anything.”

“And what did your mother do when she got out of the shower?”

“She
freaked
. I mean, I guess she looked around for a few minutes and all, but she said when she saw his coat was still there and the TV was on and the door was unlocked—“

“The door was unlocked?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. We taught him to keep it locked and chained from the inside, and not to answer the door unless a grown up is around,” he put his head down, started fidgeting with his hands. “Guess that didn’t sink in too good, huh.”

“So she saw the TV still on, the winter clothes still there, and the door was unlocked. Anything else?” I snuck a peek at Jamal, who had his eyes closed, his hands up to his temples, like one of those commercials where the guy has a “really bad migraine, right across
here
”.

“That’s about it. The phone never rang, she didn’t hear any loud noises, nothing was knocked over or stolen, Trevor just—up and disappeared.”

He raised his head, looking at me with big, shining, brown eyes, looking like an overgrown, scared little kid, instead of the almost-man colossus he really was.

“That’s not a lot of information to go on,” I said, turning to Jamal and clearing my throat. Finally, he seemed to snap out of it, rushing over to my side and whispering frantically into my ear. As he spoke, I repeated what he said, nearly word for word:

‘
Your brother is still alive. But someone took him out of the house. Someone stronger than him. A stranger to you.’

I stopped, pulled my head back and asked Jamal, “Are you sure? That’s what you want me to say? ‘A stranger to you’?”

Jamal didn’t even answer, just pointed at Marcus, as if to say,
Tell him!

“All right, all right,” I said, shaking my head at his strangely cryptic words.

“Who are you talking to?” Marcus asked, looking at me like I was an escaped mental patient.

“Didn’t your friend tell you how things work?” I asked, feeling annoyed.

“Sort of. He said you know stuff that other people don’t know. Like, how to find missing things and people.”

“That’s part of it. The other part is
where
I get the information from. To put it bluntly: I get it from a ghost. My ghost. Marcus, meet Jamal.” I gestured from Marcus to Jamal, like they were finally being properly introduced. Marcus lifted his eyebrows and looked like he might want to run outside without bothering to find his boots and coat. Jamal did a formal little bow, smiled, and turned to see how I would handle this one.

“Just trust me. Jamal here is from D.C. and he’s pretty good at figuring things out for people.”

“Oh, well, okay, then. As long as he’s one of them good ghosts, not the kind that want to steal your soul or anything.”

Jamal grimaced, shrugged, and threw his hands up in disgust, “Too many of those stupid horror flicks! They
never
get it right!”

Well, they
almost
never get right,
I thought, eyeing my pimp-ghost friend as he paced around the living room, totally annoyed by the inability of ‘the living’ to understand ‘the dead’. Actually, from what I had seen, a lot of the ‘horror flicks’ had gotten it right on the money, in a lot of different ways. I mean, here I was, watching a pretty ticked-off ghost who couldn’t be seen by anyone else—so far—ranting about how stupid ‘living’ people were. I giggled at that, trying to cover it up with a little cough.