Tommy remembered explicitly and vividly that they’d begun by occupying the playground. Initially, many of the mothers had ignored their presence and attempted to utilize the equipment in spite of them. When that became too dangerous—for the women and for their children—community leaders complained, first to the police, and then to their elected officials. Those efforts brought no useful response. So, the people shrugged and turned to prayer. Within a year, the playground was completely destroyed and the location had become a favored recreation area for drug dealers and users. Then the crime began in earnest—the burglarizing of homes, the stealing of cars, the purse snatchings, the armed robberies, the rapes, the murders. People who could afford to leave, left; those who could not leave barricaded themselves inside their homes, becoming simultaneously prisoners and victims.
Tommy had looked into Grayce Gibson’s battered face, into the still defiant but weakening resolve in her eyes; he had studied the way Angelique Arroyo’s quiet bravery was being eroded by fear, and how Roberta Lawson’s ingrained pride was being forced to learn compromise, and he knew that one trip to the playground would make all of them, himself included, feel a world’s worth of better. But he had been ordered to stay away from the playground. He couldn’t even knock on Luisa Nunez’s door and ask her what the hell her problem was.
“Dammit, Jake,” he muttered to himself, “I can’t just sit here!” And then he had a brilliant idea: Jake hadn’t told him he couldn’t go for a walk. At night. Late. In the direction of the playground. Just to see for himself if he shared C.A.’s and her reporter friend’s suspicions about the activities on the playground.
Carole Ann recalled her concern of just over twenty-four hours ago that her mission to Anguilla would prove disruptive and painful to the aged Arthur Jennings, and she marveled anew at what seemed to be a newly discovered facility for misreading cues and misunderstanding the obvious. She opened her eyes to find Arthur Jennings’s age-clouded ones staring at her with concern.
“I hope you’re not angry with me for dumping all this on you, young lady,” he said.
“I’m extremely angry, Mr. Jennings, but not with you. Though I would be had I been in communication with you every day for the past thirty-five years and you’d said nothing of all this,” Carole Ann replied bitterly.
He patted her hand and poured more coffee into her cup. “Then I beg you not to be too angry with your mother. Or with Roberta and the others. You know, our generation is different from yours. You young people discuss everything openly. We old-timers discuss nothing. We keep our own counsel.”
Carole Ann looked out at the Caribbean Sea, well aware of the old man’s implicit direction that she refrain from judging him or her mother. The sea was a color of green that defied description and resisted all attempts at artificial simulation of its unique hue. She knew there were waves, yet the surface appeared as smooth as glass. She could feel the water’s warmth from her vantage point on Arthur Jennings’s terraced villa on a cliff above it, though deceptively close, and she longed to be in it, surrounded by it, soothed by it. She also wished that she liked Arthur Jennings less so that she could ignore his warning and sit in judgement of him and her mother and Bert and Angie. Damn them!
But within seconds after being met by the man at the island airstrip, Carole Ann understood why everything she’d read, heard, and learned of Arthur Jennings had been positive. He was a delight. Still tall, though slightly stooped, he retained the vigor of a man who had earned his living by using his body. What little hair he had remaining was white and wispy, as were his eyebrows, mustache, and a rakish goatee. He hugged Carole Ann as warmly as if she were a cherished friend, and immediately asked how Roberta and Grayce and Angie were. Carole Ann noticed that he did not inquire about Luisa, and assumed she’d learn the reason for the omission later.
Jennings drove an ancient but well-kept International Harvester, and he drove as if he were newly eighteen instead of nearly eighty. He talked the entire hour from the airport to his home, giving Carole Ann a fascinating and informative history of the island, revealing to her during the monologue that he initially moved his family to the island specifically to escape what had become for him an increasingly uncomfortable situation in Los Angeles. It was as easy to listen to the man as it was to like him, and the more she listened, the more she liked him. The anger flowed from her until she no longer felt the need to judge.
“I understand privacy, Mr. Jennings, and I respect it.”
“But what, young lady?” he said, and patted her hand again.
“Secrecy,” she said, and could not complete the sentence or the thought that instigated it.
“Ummm, yes,” he said slowly. “Secrets are different, no doubt about it. That’s why I told you everything right off. I’ve been carrying the burden of these secrets for a long, long time and I guess I just got too old for all that weight. Besides,” he added, a hint of humor in his voice, “you’re the first person to ever ask me about any of that ancient history. So, I guess you had it coming.”
“Thanks a lot,” Carole Ann said dryly, and the old man rewarded her with an equally dry chuckle. Then he quickly sobered. “Do you really think any of this old stuff has anything to do with what’s going on there now?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense, sir,” she said, “to the extent that any of it makes sense.”
And what sense could be made of the things Arthur Jennings told her last night and this morning of Jacaranda Estates, the place she called home: A rape, a murder, and an almost race riot. What sense could be made of the fact that her mother and Roberta and Angelique and Luisa knew everything and had never hinted that there could be an underlying cause of the current mayhem and destruction? Unless, in actuality, there was no current connection to the past evil. And logic refused to allow Carole Ann to believe that. Bizarre as events were, past and present, there were sufficient similarities of theme to warrant a game of connect the dots.
“I wish you didn’t have to leave so soon. I don’t get many visitors these days, and I don’t mind telling you I’m a little lonely,” Jennings said quietly, looking and sounding very much like an old man. His wife was dead and his children were spread, literally, across the globe—one in Europe, one in Africa, one in New York, and one in L.A. And his grandchildren were equally widely dispersed. “Can’t you stay another day?”
Carole Ann shook her head. She hadn’t told him the full extent of her involvement in current events at Jacaranda, and she told him now and watched his eyes first grow wide in awe, then fill with horror, then narrow, and she couldn’t read what was there, so she waited for him to tell her. It took a while. She watched him think and remember, saw him retreat into the past, and he seemed to age, to become fully all of his years in those few moments.
“I didn’t tell you everything, either. I kept one secret. It was Enrique’s secret, really, and after all this time, I didn’t think anyone needed to know. He never wanted anyone to know. He was ashamed.” The old man’s voice, barely more than a whisper now, trailed off, and he rubbed his hands together as if for warmth, the sound reminding Carole Ann of the rustle of leaves against the sidewalk in winter. As his body slumped in the chair, she began to worry that she’d pushed too hard, too far.
She touched the old man’s hands, stilling them. “I don’t want to cause you any more distress than I already have, Mr. Jennings, and I’m truly sorry.”
He gripped her hands with one of his, the strength of his grasp surprising. “You have nothing to apologize for,” he said almost harshly. “None of this is your fault.”
He continued his grip on her hands but he said no more. She waited and felt his silence grow deeper. She imagined that he was remembering. Finally he released her hands and spoke so quietly that she had to lean closer to hear him. “I can’t see how it can make a difference after all this time. It can’t make a difference.” That last was more a plea than a declaration of fact.
&nbs
p; “It would help if I knew what it was, sir.”
He shook his head. “Help who? Help what?” He shook his head again. “It’s too late to help.”
“All the secrets but one. You’ve told me all the secrets but one, Mr. Jennings.” Don’t stop talking now!
“Will you have to tell anybody? Who else will have to know these things?”
She thought for a moment, understanding that he meant would she need to tell her mother or Angie or Bert or Luisa. “My attorney will need to know everything that I know, and if it can be proven that a current crime is a direct result of a past event, then perhaps the police.”
He sighed. “Is it true what you see in the movies, that there’s no time limit on murder?”
She frowned at him. “Are you referring to the statute of limitations?”
He nodded. “That’s it! A murderer’s never safe, is he?”
Carole Ann shivered in the heat and shook her head. What in the world was this old man harboring? “Please, Mr. Jennings. Tell me.”
“Don’t tell your mother,” he said. “I don’t care if you tell the lawyer or the police but don’t tell your mother and Roberta and Angelique. Promise me that!” He made it a demand.
She nodded. “I promise.”
“Hector Nunez was his brother. Enrique’s brother. That’s why he was living at Jacaranda. A loud-mouthed, mean drunk with no job who beat his wife and kids. He’s the one who did the rape. Him and a couple of his no-account drunk buddies.” He was breathing hard and fast, too hard and too fast, Carole Ann thought, and she tried to stop him from talking for a moment so he could regain his breath, but he refused to be stopped. The words spilled from his mouth in torrents, freed after too long a confinement behind a wall of secrets. “They raped her because she was Black, and because she was...she was...they weren’t just friends or roommates, you know what I mean!”
Carole Ann did not know but when she asked him what he meant, it seemed to confuse him. “Who were roommates, Mr. Jennings?”
“No!” he shouted at her. “Not roommates. More than that. More than that. Don’t you understand?” he begged, now sounding more embarrassed than angry.
“Lovers?” Carole Ann asked. “You’re speaking of two women who lived together as lovers?”
He sighed, caught his breath, nodded. “That kind of thing, back then—” He sighed again. “But we didn’t care about that, Enrique and me. They were good women. They were the kind of people we wanted in Jacaranda. Better than that damn Hector and Luisa! And one was Black and one was Mexican. They were perfect. And so good. And so beautiful.” He sighed again, and wiped away a tear from the corner of his eye before it could drip down his face. “I’ll bet she’s still beautiful and still good, isn’t she?” he asked, his tone of voice making it a wish more than a question.
And when Carole Ann didn’t respond immediately he turned to her, fear and worry competing for control of his features. “What’s happened to her?”
Carole Ann consciously suppressed the wish that the old man had no more secrets to reveal; of course she wanted to know everything and for him to tell more than that, but she was becoming increasingly concerned about the effect on his health. She took his hands again and spoke gently. “I don’t know who you mean, Mr. Jennings.”
“Yes, you do!” he snapped. “Angelique, her name is. Angelique Arroyo.”
Images of Angie danced through Carole Anne’s mind and memory—beautiful, gentle, and, yes, good Angie. This woman she’d known for all but two years of her life. This woman she’d loved like a mother. This woman had survived a tragedy as horrendous as her own. She recalled Angie’s words to her upon hearing of Al’s murder: “I can’t come to you, my little girl, because I would be no help to you. It’s too much.” And Carole Ann had hung up the phone too immersed in her own grief to wonder at the meaning of Angie’s words. Now she understood. And with a start, Carole Ann recognized Angie’s tragedy as worse than her own, for A1 had been murdered, yes, but he had not been violated. Carole Ann tried to imagine the feeling of knowing that one’s lover had been tormented in such a fashion, and her heart broke for Angie.
“Did she know, Mr. Jennings? Did Angie know what happened to her—what was her name, Mr. Jennings? The woman Angie loved, what was her name?”
“Dorothy was her name, but everyone called her Dottie. And yes, she knew what happened to her. Everyone knew. But she didn’t know who did it. Enrique felt it was his duty to protect his brother.” He paused and allowed Carole Ann’s brief explosion of anger, then continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “He knew it was wrong. I knew it was wrong. But we didn’t think we had a choice. Everybody thought we were crazy anyway, building a community for middle-class Negroes and Mexicans. If word had gotten out that a woman was raped and murdered ...”
He shuddered and pressed his temples with his fingers and gave Carole Ann a history lesson that made modern-day intolerance pale by comparison. Difficulties obtaining permits, permits lost, records of tax payments lost or destroyed, a racist attack on the ground-breaking ceremony that was thwarted at the last minute only by the threat that the Blacks and Mexicans were armed and would retaliate.
“You know why Angie lives next door to your mother? Because I asked your folks if they minded living next door to...to...”
“Lesbians,” Carole Ann said, and the old man blushed and ducked his head.
“It was a different world back then. People like your folks were not the norm, I’m sorry to say.”
“So my parents, my mother, knew—knows—that Angie is gay?” Recognition was dawning on Carole Ann in degrees. “Did she know that Luisa’s husband—”
Arthur Jennings was shaking his head back and forth, faster and faster. “No, no, no. I told you. Nobody knew what he did but his wife, and even that wasn’t enough to make her hate him, and God knows she had reason without that. The woman was a zombie then and I’ll bet you good money she’s still a zombie, walking around like she’s in some kind of daze. Am I right?”
She couldn’t reply. For the second time in less than a week someone had referred to Luisa in such negative terms, and what bothered Carole Ann was that both times the reference had caught her by surprise. How could she not have seen? Who was Luisa that she would accept the abuse of husband and son and conceal a horrible truth from a cherished friend? Carole Ann had perceived Luisa as a little silly, perhaps—over religious and unsophisticated—but not a zombie or a doormat. And not as cruel. But she must be to have withheld the secret of Dottie’s murder for almost forty years.
“Do you know that Langston Hughes poem? All we were trying to do was build a temple for tomorrow. We wanted to leave something good and strong and true, something that reflected who we really are, not who they say we are. And now look what’s happened. After all this time they’ve been proved correct.”
He sagged, body and spirit. His eyes closed and his chin dropped to his chest and he took several deep breaths. Carole Ann opened her mouth to speak and he raised a hand to silence her; and with what she hoped wasn’t obvious relief, she accepted Arthur Jennings’s pronouncement that he was “finished talking about Jacaranda Estates and people and things and memories that hurt too much.” She felt torn between wanting to hear and learn every scrap of every detail, and wanting to stop her ears, to stop hearing things that were destroying this place she’d called home.
The Caribbean Sea rescued her from herself. She spent her remaining hours in Anguilla on the beach, absorbing the sun and floating in water warm and gentle enough to make her wonder how the Pacific ever earned its name, given its wild and raucous nature. Her host served her lunch at an umbrella-covered table on the sand—fresh bananas and mangoes and coconut and crispy conch fritters and fragrant yam muffins and sweet ginger beer. And Carole Ann promised to return for an extended visit once matters were resolved at home. The old man’s pleasure was so great that Carole Ann found herself wishing that she’d known him for a long time and he was so moved when sh
e told him how she felt that tears filled his eyes.
Carole Ann wanted nothing more than sleep on the plane ride from Miami to Los Angeles. Her body simply collapsed, and her brain could register nothing but how deceived she felt by the place she called home and the people she called family. And of how foolish she felt when she recalled that she’d escaped to Los Angeles and home seeking a definition of herself from the only place she felt qualified to offer it. Then irony raised up and pointed a gnarly finger at her consciousness and reminded that she had, in fact, achieved a new definition of herself: She was a killer. But finding herself unable to enjoy, even perversely, the dark humor of the situation, she retreated again to drowsiness and unrestful sleep and the promise, made too many times to herself and to Al, to learn how to meditate. If she could meditate, she knew, she would be relaxed right now, and not the helpless victim of painful thoughts and memories.
Where to Choose Page 12
