“WHO IS THIS Lorraine Fell?” Freya asked Ronnie as they rode the elevator up to the twenty-third floor of the fancy condo building. She had been waiting for him outside when he got back from the parole meeting.
The doorman, Travis Jeffers, challenged the couple, saying that Ms. Fell had said that only Ronnie was allowed access to the condo. But when Ronnie asked to speak to the building manager, Jeffers stood down and allowed the two to pass.
“She’s my roommate,” Ronnie said in the elevator.
“Girlfriend?”
“No. You think I’m stupid enough to take another woman to my girlfriend’s apartment?”
Freya looked doubtfully at Ronnie, and he laughed out loud.
* * *
“THIS IS NICE,” Freya said.
They were sitting on a blue sofa and looking out on the evening lights of Manhattan, eating pizza and drinking red wine from Lorraine’s built-in wine cooler.
The teacher’s assistant was surprised that Ronnie had only kissed her a few times. And he’d had only one slice of the plain cheese pie. His reserve was somehow kindling her passions.
“Yeah,” he said.
“How come she let you live here?”
“I found her almost dead and helped her get better. Now she needs me around because she’s scared of her nightmares.” Ronnie had to lie, but he wanted to lay the truth in with fabrication.
“And she not your girlfriend?”
“Not at all.”
“An’ you don’t even sleep with her?”
“I have held her at night after she had bad dreams, but I’m not attracted to her in a sex way.”
“What kinda infection you say you had?” Freya asked.
“Bad.”
“It musta been. There you are cryin’ with Miss Peters and here I am in a room alone with you and you ain’t pullin’ on my clothes. Now you say a woman bring you to her bed an’ you don’t feel in the sex way. Damn.”
Ronnie stood up then and lifted the small rounded woman like she was a doll. He wrapped his arms under her rump and kissed her—long and slow. The weightlessness and unexpected strength frightened her at first, but then the kiss took over her senses.
The minutes passed and Ronnie felt good kissing the teaching assistant’s lips and eyes, cheeks and neck. She actually moaned from the tender osculations. Ronnie was surprised and happy that he could make a woman feel this way with just a kiss.
“Baby,” she said.
“What?” he slurred while pressing the tip of his tongue lightly into her ear.
“Ain’t your arms gettin’ tired?”
“I could hold you and kiss you like this all night long.”
“But don’t you wanna lie down on the couch?”
“Is that you want?”
“Uh-huh.”
He tipped forward slightly, causing her to lean back from him. Staring into her gaze, he was motionless for a moment.
“Please put me down and lie there with me,” she said, almost breathless.
Shifting with no apparent exertion, he laid her down on the wide blue sofa. He kissed her and she groaned impatiently. He smiled at her and touched her face.
The front door came open just then.
“Hi, Ronnie.”
Freya sat up and saw a slender young white woman with a tan and dirty blond hair followed by an even skinnier white youth coming after her like a dog that just can’t get enough of its master.
“Lore,” Ronnie said, his voice deep and husky.
“Who’s this?”
“Freya. She gonna stay here wit’ me tonight.”
“This is Alton Brown. Say hello, Alton.”
“Hey.”
“You’re welcome in my home, Freya,” Lorraine said. “I’m going to turn my study into Ronnie’s bedroom before too long. That way you two can have some privacy.”
“Um … Thank you,” the teacher’s assistant said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Lorraine took Alton by the hand and walked him into her bedroom.
After a minute or two, the young white couple were making enough noise to be heard beyond the door.
But Ronnie and Freya didn’t hear them.
* * *
“RONNIE!”
Freya was the first to awaken. Sinewy and naked, Lorraine Fell—her eyes unfocused, her hands shaking—was standing over her.
Ronnie grunted and sat up.
Lorraine yelped from some inner fear and Ronnie took her by the hand.
“It’s okay, Lore,” he said. “It’s all right.”
Groaning he stood up, cradled and lifted his landlady, victim, best friend, and fellow conspirator. She fell instantly asleep in his arms.
The big man then lowered next to Freya with the sleeping Lorraine on his other side, her head on his lap.
“What’s wrong with her?” Freya asked. She sat up and wrapped Ronnie’s shirt around her shoulders.
“It’s the nightmares I told you about. She get ’em and I have to be there or she’ll never fall asleep. It’s how she, um, she bonded with me after I saved her.”
“And she always come out naked like that?”
“Uh-huh, mostly.”
“An’ you don’t try an’ take advantage?”
Ronnie stared again at his lover. She was beautiful and vulnerable but still strong. While appreciating her, he could feel Lorraine’s spirit self—the part of her that was cut free for a time after he killed her—floating somewhere in the atmosphere above her. If he had slept with her, they would have begun their nighttime crawl after the spirit spoor of the Laz escapee. But because he was still awake, she just floated like a cloud riding on an updraft from a deep subterranean cavern.
“Ronnie?” It was Freya.
“Yeah?”
“I asked didn’t you ever take advantage of her?”
He smiled again. “Ain’t nobody gonna take advantage’a this girl here. But if you askin’ if I fucked her, the answer is no. I’m her friend and that’s just like a locked door for me.”
“Since when?”
“I’m a changed man, Frey. You could see that, right?”
“I guess.”
“I ain’t runnin’ after shit no mo’. Damn … enough shit done come after me all these years. All I want is to settle down, maybe learn how to read bettah, and make something right here while I got the time.”
Freya reached out to touch Ronnie’s face.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“It sounds crazy.”
“Crazier than a niggah like you turnin’ away when a fine girl drop her draws in front’a you?”
“It’s like one day,” Ronnie said, “I gave birth to myself.”
“Like a woman?”
“Yeah. Or maybe it was like the snakes Miss Peters used to talk about—the ones that pop right outta their skin an’ come out like new.”
“You remembah that?” Freya asked.
“I remembah everything she said.”
“You are like new,” Freya agreed.
“That’s right,” Ronnie said, and then he held out his hand for her to take. “We all in different dreams, everybody in the whole world. But there’s a place where those dreams come together and, and, and when that happens it’s just so beautiful that it hurts.”
“And that’s how it is with you and this girl?”
“Yeah. She all rich and white and shit, and here I am straight outta the hood. But we come together and there’s like a, a mission or a calling that we both have to do.”
Freya squeezed his hand and said, “You might scare me more now than you did when you was a thug, Ronnie Bottoms.”
“What’s going on out here?” Alton Brown asked. He was clad only in a pair of pale blue boxer shorts.
“Lore had a bad dream and needed to lay her head down,” Ronnie said.
“Why did she have to come out here?”
Ronnie gave the half-true explanation he’d concocted, and Alton sat down on the solid block of a coffee table.
“You guys are real close, huh?” Alton asked.
“In a funny kinda way. I mean, I don’t know hardly nuthin’ about her, nor she me. But we connected like, like two different kindsa rocks rolled up on a beach.” Ronnie was remembering one of the many things he’d learned and heard from Ms. Peters.
“But you’re not her boyfriend?”
“Naw, man. That’s you.”
“How long have you known each other?” Alton asked.
“Me and Lore or me and Frey?”
“Lorraine.”
“’Bout a mont’. We used to watch the same cartoons when we was kids. Once we knew we did that, we found that we had other things the same.”
“I just met Lorraine today,” the skinny intellectual said. “I guess you could say that she swept me off my feet.”
“That’s Lorraine, all right,” Ronnie said. “She like the goddamned wind.”
“What do you do?” Freya asked Alton.
“I study literature at CCNY.”
“Books?” she asked.
“Mostly, but now they have all this what they call theory. Trying to make art into a science kind of.”
“I’ve heard a dude once said that in the beginning there was only science,” Ronnie said, “that machines were the first true intelligence and that flesh and blood life came after.”
“How could that be?” Freya said in a superior tone.
“Right now computers think faster than men,” Ronnie said, defending an uncertain turf. “They learn all kindsa shit. If you can imagine, then you could make it real. Matter’a fact if you imgine sumpin’, it is real, at least in your mind.”
“Do you go to college?” Alton asked his lover’s roommate.
Freya laughed.
“Hey, man, why don’t you grab a sofa an’ get some sleep,” Ronnie offered. “You know Lore ain’t gonna wake up till mornin’.”
“Maybe you should put her down next to me.”
“No, brother. If I let her go, she’ll just get all crazy again. Don’t worry, though—we’ll be right here across from you.”
And so Alton lay down on the opposite blue sofa while Ronnie sat upright with Freya’s head on his shoulder and Lorraine’s head in his lap. He closed his eyes, conjured up his mother’s heartbeat, and fell asleep feeling that she was, once again, alive.