The door is slammed so hard it shakes the house. It is the exclamation point on the end of her rebellious sentence. Lebanon threatened to kill her in so many words, but I couldn’t tell her that. She would ask questions. She always asks questions. She wouldn’t cower like Alice. Go into her shell like Ruby. She would ask everything she could and there are answers that I’m not giving her. If she knew them, the risk of having her contempt for me grow into hatred becomes a certainty.
“I don’t know what to do with you both!” Joanna fumes beside me.
Moments of sorrow like this, the weariness in her eyes, the desperation of trying to pull two people together when both haven’t the will or heart to connect, cause me anguish. I see what Joanna gave up for me, what she continues to sacrifice. And I will continue to hold on to my secret. Joanna can be angry with me, be exasperated with me, but she can’t hate me if she doesn’t know. For her to hate me means she’s given up on me. And if she does this, I’m truly lost.
As I reach for her hand, she pulls it away, but I grab it. Not as a sign of aggression or dominance, but simply as an oath I mean to keep to her, though I have broken so many.
“I’ll make this right, Joanna. I will.”
No change in her face, in that beautiful caramel face. She only whispers, “I’m going to pray, Jackson. I’m going to pray and then I’m going to bed.”
The reassurance I seek I’ll not find from her tonight. Dulling thuds of water droplets continue to hit the inside of the cabinet coming from the leaking pipe. The gentle closing of the door and the hard squeak of the floor herald the entrance of J.P. and he just nods at me, goes to his room.
I follow him the few steps and ask, “You got something for dinner?”
A simple, “Mmm-hmm,” is the only response I receive.
“A burger?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
He turns on his music, some rapper whose lyrics I can’t begin to decipher. Keeping the volume low, he then sits and begins laying out the materials to finish his portrait for a member our church, Minister Fitzgerald who commissioned it as a present for his brother’s eightieth birthday. Wilderness, a view of trees and grass and sky.
“Nice composition of the scene,” I say.
“Mmm-hmm.”
Dear God, is everyone in this house against me?
Layla, Joanna and J.P., we are family, but they are a close-knit tribe and I’m an interloper. That’s how it is and that’s my fault, but I want to change. I just don’t know how to talk to them, how to break through that wall.
I don’t know how to be a part of my family.
Effortlessly J.P. weaves the brush on the canvas and what was once bright white is green or blue or red or brown. And I envy him, because I think this is as close as one can possibly get to feeling like God did those first six days of the Earth’s genesis.
The lightest scratching of paint over the canvas is the only conversation inhabiting the room while I ponder another way to get more than one-word answers from my son.
“Your sister and I had a disagreement.”
He stops painting. “Dad, is there something you want?”
“I was wondering if you saw her before she left?”
“Yeah, she was pissed off. Y’all both have that thing where you squint really hard when you’re upset.”
“We do?”
“Mmm-hmm. You’re doing it now,” he points out. His smirk still manages to remain humble. He and Joanna both have that in common.
He continues, “Y’all are so much alike, which is why you’re at each other’s throats all the time.”
“Did she tell you where she was going, what she was doing?”
“Yes.” He continues to paint.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“No.”
Unlike his sister, there is no defiance in his voice, no disdain. There is simply the calm, honest conviction of the answers he will and will not give me.
“J.P., I’m going to figure out what that girl is up to, and she may get herself hurt while trying to find Ruby. We both don’t want that to happen.”
“If you’re talking about Lebanon, he isn’t going to do anything. He’s an old man.”
“We’re the same age, son.”
J.P. looks at me as if my statement failed to change his mind of what he considers old to be.
I’ll see what he says about this in thirty years.
“Lebanon is more dangerous than you think. He might try to hurt your sister to get to Ruby.”
“Isn’t he your friend?”
“Yes, he is.”
“My friends wouldn’t try to hurt someone I love.”
“He wasn’t—”
“Always like this,” J.P. finishes the sentence. “Yeah, I’ve heard you say that a lot. Thing is, me and Layla don’t know him like you used to. We only know him now.”
“He was kind—give you the shirt off his back.”
“You’re missing my point. I’m trying to say this holding on you’re doing, convincing yourself he’s still the same guy somewhere deep down, it isn’t serving anyone. Well, it’s not serving anyone that should really matter to you.”
“You do matter to me. You all do!”
“Mmm-hmm.”
The wood floor sings a creaky ballad as I move toward my son and his painting.
“I just want to protect her. Bring her home and keep her safe.”
“She wants to do the same thing for Ruby. Let her work this out.”
“I can’t do that, son.”
“Why not?”
I can’t provide him with an answer so I have nothing to offer, but silence.
“Tim is going with Layla and I trust he won’t let anything happen to her.”
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“Layla isn’t stupid. She has a plan and she’ll bring Ruby back, make her safe, get her away from Lebanon.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Life for us in this world, especially in this city, is never simple, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try and make it better.”
J.P. looks at me for some response, some affirmation to the truth of his statement, one that was wise beyond his almost twenty-one years, but I have nothing and my only reply before I walk out the door of his room is, “Mmm-hmm.”