Nana Mama gasped, reached for her heart, and toppled against me. Her frail ninety-pound body almost bowled me off my own liquid feet. I had to take my eyes off Drummond to regain my balance and hold her up.
“Is it true?” my grandmother whispered into my chest, as if she couldn’t bear to look Drummond’s way.
“That’s impossible,” Bell said, craning his neck to look at Drummond. “Jason Cross took a bullet, went into the gorge. He never came out.”
“Yes, he did,” said Pinkie, who’d also gotten to his feet. “My uncle Clifford found him down on the river that night. Nursed him back to health.”
“Is Clifford here in Starksville?” Drummond called to Pinkie. “I would sure like to see the second best friend I’ve ever had. Maybe take him to Bourbon Street like we always talked about.”
“Oh my God.” My aunt Hattie gasped.
“It’s a miracle,” my aunt Connie cried.
I looked down at Nana Mama, saw my grandmother dissolving through sheets of tears.
“It’s him,” I whispered. “I don’t know how, but it’s him.”
When I looked up, Drummond had left Bell in the witness stand, handed the shotgun to Detective Frost, and was coming toward us with tears streaming down his blank face and his arms cast open.
“You don’t know how much I missed the both of you,” he said. “You have no idea of the loneliness without you.”
I slid into my father’s arms and he slid into his mother’s as if they were the most natural and familiar acts possible.
We bowed our heads into one another, suddenly apart from everyone else in that courtroom, like a miniature universe unto ourselves. I don’t think any of us managed to utter an intelligible word in those first few moments of reunion. But I know we were communicating deeply in a whole other language, like people embraced by holy spirits and speaking in tongues of fire.