by Gwen Florio
She faced her mother across coffee gone cold.
‘He didn’t do it!’
Penelope’s expression was impossible to read. ‘But he did.’
‘Yes, yes. He shot him. But he didn’t have a choice. He’s not what they say he is.’
‘Isn’t he? Is anyone?’
Penelope followed her question with her tinkling laugh, this time with a bitter undertone that lingered in the air long after she’d taken up her walker and step-thumped her way back to her room, where she closeted herself for the rest of the day.
TWENTY-TWO
1967
I don’t care what you say. I’m going anyway.
Grace rehearsed her speech as she marched toward the editor’s office at the Afro. She was twenty-one, and full of the assurance that comes with working a job where she was no longer beholden to white people. Her boss was black, her colleagues were black, the person who signed her paycheck was black, and the clientele they served were all black – except for the rare white journalist savvy enough to know that reading Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper would give him (almost always a him) insights in segments of his city that may as well have not existed, as far as most white people were concerned.
Grace worked as a clerk, taking messages, making coffee and smothering the occasional trash can fire when one of the cigarettes puffed incessantly by the reporters failed to be completely stubbed out.
But now Bobby was going back to Chateau with a group of students from Morgan State to stage protests of the town’s stubborn resistance to integration, and she wanted to cover it.
Cecil, the editor, laughed outright when she suggested it. ‘You’ve never written a newspaper story in your life. And you want to start with this?’
‘I write every day. Sir.’ Dealing with men, Grace sometimes thought, was not that much different from dealing with the Smythes when she’d worked at Quail House. She spoke softly to Cecil, hands clasped before her, gaze demurely cast down. ‘I type up the community columns, the briefs, the church notices, the weddings and engagements.’
‘Exactly.’ Cecil leaned back in his chair and patted the considerable expanse of his belly. ‘You type. There’s a big difference between typing and writing. I was actually thinking of sending one of the reporters down. Better yet, a columnist. Walter, probably. But you’re from there, right? Maybe you could recommend someone who’d put him up while he’s there.’
They both knew it was a rare motel on the Eastern Shore that would rent a room to a black person.
Grace forced herself not to turn and look at Walter Call. She didn’t need to. He’d be leaning back in his chair, much like Cecil, although Walter’s trim frame wouldn’t put a strain on even the most delicate chair. The phone would be at his ear, a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, and he’d strolled in that morning in a tan seersucker suit, one of the dozen suits he rotated on workdays. Grace knew, because she’d counted them.
She considered her options. Walter was the Afro’s star columnist, taking on malfeasance by white and black politicians alike, amassing heaps of hate mail that it was Grace’s job to open, along with the rest of the mail. If Cecil was going to send Walter to Chateau, she didn’t stand a chance. But …
‘Walter’s city,’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘They’re country in Chateau,’ she said. ‘Meaning no disrespect – sir – but somebody looking like Walter comes in, people might be, let’s say, standoffish. That’s why they’re sending my brother down to lead the protests. He knows people. They’ll trust him. Be less fearful, maybe.’
‘Wait.’ The front legs of Cecil’s chair hit the floor with a thump and a groan. ‘Your brother’s involved in this? That right there is reason enough why I can’t send you. Conflict of interest and all.’
Grace cursed herself for letting that fact slip. She’d been prepared, if Cecil had gone for her proposal, to seek forgiveness later.
‘I know that.’ She kept her voice smooth, pressing down the vibrating desire to be in the middle of the things happening around the country, to see her name atop a column of print, to never type another engagement announcement again. She dug her fingernails into her palms, stopping just short of splitting skin.
‘But I could go along as his assistant, like. Open doors. Introduce him to people. Folks down there are already afraid of what kind of trouble this could bring.’ Davita still kept up with friends from Chateau, relaying their concerns to her son, who in turn had told his sister.
‘They want to know what will happen when we go back to Baltimore and leave them alone there with a bunch of riled-up white folks,’ Bobby had said. ‘Not to mention what might happen to me. Mama’s afraid I’m going to get myself killed and leave her all alone with you and Kwame and he’ll grow up never remembering’ – he had paused, fighting for control – ‘his big brother.’
He had reached into the playpen and swung Kwame up in his arms, the toddler crowing in delight, then cuddled him close, Kwame’s soft plump hands patting Bobby’s face.
It was, Grace had to admit, a not unreasonable fear.
Now, she held her breath. Cecil hadn’t said anything for a few minutes. He played with a pen on his desk. She felt his eyes on her, looking her up and down, the way he always did when he thought she couldn’t tell. She knew he’d hired her on her looks, not much different from the way Philippa Smythe had. Which reminded her. She played her trump card.
‘You know, I used to work in the Police Chief’s house. No way he’d talk to a reporter from the Afro. But he might, if I was there to introduce them. It’d be quite a coup for Walter. Get a window into the mind of a white cop.’
Cecil dropped the pen. ‘You’ve convinced me.’ His eyes, only slightly less offensive than his hands would have been, lingered on her breasts, her slender waist, the swell of her hips. ‘How about you let me take you to lunch? We can talk strategy.’
Fine, she thought. If that’s what it took. Because she had her own strategies – every woman did – for putting off a man with power without enraging him.
She turned and left his office and let him think the swing in her hips was meant for him, rather than the confident sashay of a woman who’d gotten what she wanted.
TWENTY-THREE
Nora laced on her running shoes determined to take advantage of the relief that came with reading the newspaper story, which countered the heavy, ominous feeling that had clung to her since the visit with Grace and the vandalism against Electra.
The night before, she’d even made some progress on her manuscript, enough to justify a reassuring email to her agent, whose voicemails had become increasingly caustic.
So, a celebratory run in what passed for the cool of morning, a way to get the blood moving, clear her head, hit the reset button. She amused herself in the first half-mile by coming up with still more clichés, finally finding the rhythm that emptied her mind of everything but one footfall after the next. Senses expanded – the sun, still slanting low and mellow; the Queen Anne’s lace swaying by the side of the road, but, above all, the smell that at first whiff said home – the loamy, skunky mix of contrasts, things growing green and others decomposing, the metallic scent of the river, the dank mud that lined its banks.
She breathed deep and lengthened her stride, despite knowing from previous lapses that she’d pay the next day, waking with muscles kinked and protesting, the lingering bruises – now mostly faded – from her ordeal in Wyoming throbbing anew. She briefly put a hand to her side, touching the scar like a survival talisman. For the moment, the exertion felt good. The back road to town stretched deserted before her, and she luxuriated in the solitude, no need to be alert for Penelope’s queries, to tense against the judgment of old acquaintances, to figure out how to respond to new online onslaughts.
Trees lined the road for the next mile, underbrush thick beneath them, no houses in sight, a stretch she’d always known as McKay’s Woods, though no sign designated it as such and Nora k
new of no McKays in present-day Chateau. But by some obscure edict, no doubt written in feather pen dipped in ink and applied to parchment, the property had been preserved unchanged from colonial times. The woods were thick with whitetail deer and raccoons. Owls and hawks hunched on high branches, waiting to swoop down on prey. Black snakes slithered across the forest floor, vying with the raptors for the same rodents. Nora had always liked its untouched mystery, but especially appreciated it now because of the welcome shade it cast across the road.
A flash of orange caught her eye, bright amid the deep green of leaves, the black of bark. She slowed and peered into the woods. Just a few yards away, a red fox emerged from a mound of earth and perched atop it. She wondered if it was the same one she’d seen the night she drove into town. It yipped at her, flipped its tail and dove back into its den.
Annoyance flashed hot at the sound of a car behind her. She moved farther on to the road’s shoulder, slowing to accommodate the uncertain footing there, irritation flaring into anger as she heard the car slow behind her. Anger, and a wriggle of fear. Town lay three miles ahead, the nearest houses not yet in view. She’d been harassed before while running – what woman hadn’t? – catcalls and the occasional car crowding close, as this one appeared about to do, and, of course, there were the stories, so many stories, of women abducted, their bodies tossed away like trash, stories she’d determinedly slotted away with statistics about their relative rarity.
Until she herself had been kidnapped, not while on a run, but from the safety of her trailer, and the fact that she’d escaped alive was wholly inadequate to counter the panic now bubbling hard and fast within her, breath coming fast, gaze slewing about, seeking safety, seeing none.
She fumbled with the zipper of her waistpack, feeling for her phone, knowing that in the seconds it took her to extract it, hold down its buttons for the emergency signal, someone could set upon her; that by the time a black-and-white arrived, sirens wailing, she could be far away, screaming uselessly in the trunk of a car, clawing her fingers bloody on its metal surfaces …
‘Nora. Here you are again.’
Nora fell to her knees by the side of the road, gasping in near sobs, trying to decide whether she wanted to kill Alden Tydings for nearly scaring her to death, or whether his face – as opposed to that of the degenerate she’d expected – was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her life.
First his boat, now his truck.
‘Hop in,’ he said. ‘Wherever you’re headed, I’ll get you there faster.’
‘Like hell.’ She backed away. ‘The last thing I need is to be seen with you. My picture’s already all over the internet. They’re making out like I’m your—’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the words ‘side piece,’ such a crude characterization of her relationship to the man who so many decades ago had been the love of her life.
He winced. ‘I was hoping you hadn’t seen that.’
For a moment, she was surprised that he had. But of course the cops would be monitoring every bit of information about the situation.
‘I’m sorry. Given everything you’ve already been through, it seems unfair that your name is out there again. Especially when it’s such complete bullshit.’
‘Bullshit or not, people believe it.’ She jogged in place. ‘I’d better get going. Don’t want to cramp up.’
She turned away and took a few steps down the road, not bothering to wave.
Sound floated toward her. Madonna?
Sure enough. ‘Like a Virgin’ – lyrics they’d teased each other with when the words were true.
She laughed and turned back to the truck. Alden raised the radio’s volume and crooked a come-hither finger.
‘Swear to God I didn’t do this on purpose,’ he said when she stood again beside the open passenger window. ‘It’s an oldies station. I turned it down when I spotted you. But then this came on. Talk about memories.’
‘No kidding. We used to love this stuff.’
‘You used to love it,’ he corrected. ‘Remember those black fishnet gloves you wore?’
‘Noooo,’ she groaned. ‘Don’t remind me.’
‘And all those necklaces!’
She blushed, wondering if he was remembering, as she now was, the way he’d remove them one by one, setting them carefully aside so as not to tangle them, before turning his attention to her breasts.
‘Not to mention your hair.’ He was relentless. She’d applied what probably amounted to gallons of product to her hair during that phase, had scrunched and streaked it, aiming for the supremely tousled look that was supposed to make her look like a contradictory combination of waif and badass but – at least according to Penelope – achieved only an unholy mess.
‘I like it better now,’ he said.
She touched her hand to it, conscious of the graying roots daily creeping farther into the expertly lightened blond, of its layers long past time for a cut.
Alden reached across the passenger seat and cracked open the door. ‘Change your mind? I’ll get us some to-go coffee. You can slide down in your seat the way you used to when we’d see your mom’s car while were driving around and you were supposed to be at work. We can drink it someplace where nobody’ll see us.’
Compared to coffee, Nora’s run was fast losing its allure. She got into the truck.
The first houses appeared, a few scattered farms and then a cluster of bungalows that originally allowed their owners to say they’d moved to the country, until the town grew to encompass them.
A soybean field spread out to their left, men moving slowly across its rows, backs bent, staring intently downward. Alden sucked in his breath and touched the brakes. Far ahead, Nora saw the coffee kiosk she’d passed that first night. Realization came slowly. This must be the spot where the shooting occurred. And those men? She looked a question to him.
‘They’re looking for the gun.’ His voice was tight. ‘He threw it away. I remember seeing it fly through the air and all I could think was, “Thank God, now he can’t shoot me.” Didn’t even realize I’d already shot him.’
The truck slowed nearly to a stop as a fox dashed out of the field, some prize clenched in its teeth, and across the road. She wondered if it was the same one she’d just seen. ‘As much as I want coffee, I’ve got a better idea,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
He steered it through a wide U-turn.
‘Where?’
He managed a smile. ‘It’s a surprise. Close your eyes.’
The truck took a turn and headed east. The rising sun caught her full across the face. She finally obeyed his command to close her eyes. ‘Where did you say we were going again?’ she murmured.
‘I said it was a surprise. Keep your eyes shut. Listen to the music.’ And so she did, dozing off in shockingly short order to Pat Benatar reminding her that they belonged together.
Even before she opened her eyes, she knew where they were. Alden lowered the windows so she could feel the air flowing through, lighter and cooler, scented with salt. Gulls screamed overhead.
‘The beach!’ She sat up, bouncing like a child in her seat. ‘You brought me to the beach!’ The actual ocean, not the patch along the river where they’d partied as kids.
‘Hey.’ He raised one hand from the wheel in a half-shrug. ‘What else do I have to do with my time?’
She winced at the ugly reminder of his situation, then put it out of her mind as determinedly as he seemed to be barring it from his.
‘When was the last time you saw the ocean?’ The truck rolled down a wide boulevard, passing old familiar stores advertising saltwater taffy, T-shirts and boogie boards. But a row of tall buildings at the very end of the street blocked the view of the dunes.
‘Too long, apparently,’ she said. ‘What are those?’
He parked the truck in front of one of them. ‘Condos. They’re all up and down the coast now. A couple of towns have banned them, but most caught on too late to what was happening. Or, more likely, di
dn’t care. You can imagine the kind of money these places bring in.’
He parked in a small lot past the condos and they climbed a set of wooden stairs leading up and over the dunes. Nora stopped on the platform at the top. ‘Oh!’
Before her lay a stretch of sand, nearly deserted at this hour. The water beyond it caught and held her eye, stretching endlessly away, sliding toward her and then retreating, inviting her to follow. Decades dropped away as she kicked off her shoes and sprinted for the water, tossing the shoes aside at the last minute, just beyond the reach of the waves, and splashing in up to her ankles, her knees.
She bent and scooped handfuls of it, holding it to her face, breathing in brine, not minding the stickiness it left on her skin. She turned, laughing, to Alden. ‘Too long.’
‘Come again?’
‘You asked me how long it had been. I love the mountains, truly I do. But I’d forgotten about this. It’s been way too many years.’
He stood in the shallows, also barefoot, a little unsteady as the water sucked the sand from beneath his feet, then swept in again, darkening the hem of his jeans.
They were still a couple of hours from the arrival of parents burdened by tote bags and umbrellas and low canvas chairs, their kids running ahead, much as Nora had, bright plastic pails swinging from their hands. Now, only a few older people moved along the waterline, studying the sand before them, seeking shells deposited by the retreating tide.
‘Look.’ Alden pointed. Far beyond the breaking waves, sleek silvery shapes arced from the water, disappeared, curved into the air again. ‘Porpoises.’
Nora nodded remembrance. They headed up the coast in the morning and back in the evening, a reminder that the ocean was the aquatic version of McKay’s Woods, that wildness lived in its depths. Shoals of stinging jellyfish occasionally floated too close to shore, a misery for swimmers, and the rare shark – more often in recent years – chomped an unfortunate bather.
