C H A P T E R • 18
The alarm went off at six o’clock on Thursday, and the next sound that landed was the rain. It took a minute before I could manage to sit up, and my mind was storming while I dialed the patient information number at Harlem Hospital.
“Critical but stable.”
The same. Like last night. The nurse who answered the phone on Obie’s floor found my name on some list and told me he was asleep.
I ignored the blinking message lights—lots of them—and sat down on the cushion in front of the window. November had taken the leaves off the ailanthus tree branches so they were no longer blocking the light or blocking my view of the tops of the stately Stanford White-designed yellow brick houses across the street, some with terra cotta detail.
The first bell on my meditation timer landed in my chest and the last three bells landed in my belly. In between, I was aware of my body breathing.
I sat a minute longer and allowed the sadness to drop out of my mind where it was a story and into my heart where I felt it with some tenderness. I took another breath. Letting go.
The first two blinking phone messages were from friends I shared with Cecelia. But I decided I didn’t want to make our sad connection yet, and, instead, I got up and started taming my personal space. Since anywhere I live resembles the inside of my head, the act of making the bed was the act of going sane.
I took a bath in the big claw-foot tub and left the bathroom clean and the window open to the cool wet air. And I dressed quickly, pulling my hair behind my neck, putting on flat shoes and the pants to one of my business suits. But I left the fitted jacket in the closet and chose a roomier one. Then I turned at the mirror to make sure it was as loose as I needed it to be.
I sat down at my mother’s vanity in front of a small tray of shiny things I had hidden from the women who descended in those desolate days when she was first dead, and the perfume bottles and her teacup. The little black funeral hat with the veil was perched on the top edge of the mirror.
One of the pictures caught her at an age I had long since passed with her husband and her new fat baby. She wore a flower in her hair. In another, my father was a boy, standing with his rifle and a dead doe and his proud father in a Kentucky woods.
By the time I took the stairs, the upstairs space and I were both at least presentable.
My father’s floor was still piled with newspapers and magazines and precarious towers of books. The hat rack displayed kangols and baseball caps and cowboy hats. I was going to ask the men who cared for him to come and help me tackle his space when I got back to town. Perhaps they might answer the questions I didn’t get a chance to ask him.
The parlor floor looked like I left it the night before—the antiques and finds restored and upholstered by Scotty, the piano, the sideboard, the African art and the gun rack.
That’s important. I needed to find my stuff where I put it. For one thing, sometimes I heard sounds and thought some ax murderer or some vampire was in the house with me. And even on a good day, it annoyed me to find the messy remains of anybody else in my space, even if it was some friend or some lover. Being lonely when it’s late is the small and occasional price I pay for having my spaces to myself.
Actually, if the truth be told, the price of the space I was going to buy in California was neither small nor occasional. It would take every nickel of the money I’d already made for Last Stop, Harlem, which enough people saw to do me some good.
I unlocked and stood in front of the gun rack and picked up the .380 that I practiced with the most because my father said it would best fit in my handbag. It would, but I was thinking I’d carry it in the holster under my jacket.
Whoa. And do what?
It was a personality I could put in the space where safety needed to be. Safety had felt like Daddy and Obsidian, each of them, and both of them even at a distance, now neither of them. Facing the truth as it appeared in that moment gave me pause to think.
Okay. Was I really going to shoot somebody? Lt. Knight wasn’t even real. But neither was I, actually. It gave me a minute to consider that the permit for the gun wasn’t a carry permit, besides being expired. And then there was the matter of my primary residence being California. I put the holster and gun back.
I went to the kitchen and sat down with my coffee and a legal pad and one of the good pens. The way my memory works is it takes a picture. I retrieved from my memory some of what was stolen from the office the night before, including details I had lingered over but we didn’t print.
What came to me were the names of the people and companies who made withdrawals. Not so many addresses. There was something troubling there, but I didn’t focus. Too bad. I also sketched a grid of interlocking relationships to ask somebody about.
When I had gathered from my memory all I could, I emptied a red, black and green Harlem Week plastic tote to take with me so the newspapers I would pick up at Jocelyn’s newsstand wouldn’t get wet. And I put a small clutch in it rather than a big purse. It felt like I needed to be traveling light.
The phone rang before I could get out the door. It was Viola.
“I called the hospital. He’s stable. Tell me how you feel,” she asked.
“Like you would expect me to feel,” I said, impatient with her tell-me-all-about-it tone.
“I want you to come by this morning for some breakfast,” she said. “And Virginia wants to say goodbye in case she doesn’t get to see you before you leave. I’m doing her hair. Don’t make too much of Obsidian and Cecelia. I’m trying to keep from scaring her.”
“I’m going to see Elizabeth Miller now. But I can be there if we call it brunch in probably two hours. I have some things I want to ask you.”
“And I you. I’m going to Chicago, but I can catch a later flight.”