The Between

by Tananarive Due

  Hilton shakes his head. He pats the ice-cold hood of the hearse and walks around it until he finds the path again.

  Loose stones hurt his feet, but he presses on. He isn’t sure where he is going, but he knows he will be there soon.

  “Happy birthday, Hilton,” Charles Ray calls after him, and Hilton hears his voice chuckling over the struggling motor as the hearse drives into the dead night.

  CHAPTER 36

  “Well, my goodness gracious, if this isn’t the biggest surprise,” Auntie said, beaming, as she opened the screen door to the painted porch where Hilton had spent hours reading Superman comics when he was young, Richard Wright when he was older.

  “Who’s that? Lucius and them?” C.J.’s voice called from inside.

  “No, Carl, it’s Hilton.”

  C.J. chuckled sarcastically. “Hilton? Hilton who?”

  Auntie extended her cheek for the customary peck, but Hilton instead reached to hug her warmly in the doorway, holding her close to him. Auntie was startled at first, but then her frame shuddered as she relaxed and rubbed his back, laughing. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”

  Home. Exiled in his hotel room for all of those days, Hilton had kept his thoughts anchored to home, to Kaya and Jamil and Dede, nourishing himself with memories of before. Before the threats. Before the return of the dreams. But after he was welcomed back and resumed his cleaning routine while Dede worked and Kaya and Jamil were in school, Hilton still felt in himself an overpowering longing to go home, somewhere else.

  He thought of the two-bedroom house in Richmond Heights, with its old Florida-style jalousie windows and painted aluminum shutters, where he’d lived with Auntie and C.J. until he was eighteen. He’d never moved back, even for a night, after he left home for college. C.J. had lost part of his roof to Hurricane Andrew, but Hilton barely noticed the difference now, except that the house was repainted white instead of the bright aqua blue it had been for as long as Hilton could remember.

  “Well, shut the screen before you let all the mosquitoes in,” C.J. said crankily.

  “There are hardly any durn mosquitoes out here in March,” said Auntie, giving Hilton a last pat before she pulled him inside.

  C.J. sat in his old blue recliner, watching a soap opera Hilton didn’t recognize on their color console TV. “You just missed a big lunch Lorraine fixed an hour ago, baked chicken and—”

  Hilton leaned over to kiss C.J. s bald forehead, an unusual gesture for him with his adoptive father. “I ate already. Sorry to just barge in without calling.”

  “Shoot, we aren’t doing anything here except watching the stories,” Auntie said, clearing newspapers from a chair for him.

  “Foolishness,” C.J. muttered.

  “Oh, just listen to him. And he’s the worst one at twelve-thirty, talking about where’s ‘The Young and the Restless’?”

  “Just keep on fibbing. It’ll come back to haunt you one day.”

  Hilton smiled, listening to them. They were both older now than Nana must have been when she died. They’d never seemed old to him, but they were. Auntie was thinner than ever, with drawn cheeks, and she walked delicately, bracing for pains. Because of a heart condition, C.J. had long ago given up golf and jogging in favor of his recliner, and he was more humorless than ever. Hilton didn’t visit them often enough, but each visit since they’d retired was much the same. Food, habitual quarrels, and television. And a pointed reminder that both of them might not live much longer, and then he would lose what little grounding he still had in his past.

  “I’ve got some pound cake in the back, Hilton.”

  Hilton knew there was no point in trying to turn down Auntie’s offering. “That sounds great. Homemade, I hope.”

  Auntie scowled at him. “As opposed to what? What other kind of cake do I ever have in this house?”

  With Auntie in the kitchen, C.J.’s attention returned to the television’s argument between a blond woman and a man with a moustache. Hilton wandered the cluttered living room, surveying the watercolor paintings of black family scenes and framed photographs on the walls. Unlike Dede, Auntie was a pack rat who crammed every space in her house with some object or another, and she was constantly rearranging. She had a large collection of mammy dolls and darkie memorabilia from the 1930s and 1940s, watermelon-eating and big-lipped reminders of the times she’d grown up in. Better for me to collect it than those other folks, she always said.

  Hilton was surprised to see on the wall a framed, fading black-and-white picture he’d left on his bureau when he moved, a photograph of Nana with black hair streaked with white hanging past her shoulders. It must have been taken when she was middle-aged. She looked very different in the photo from when Hilton had known her because she was so heavy, and her dark face so smooth, but Hilton felt a familiar quiver as he gazed at her eyes. Nana.

  “When did you put this up?” Hilton asked Auntie when she handed him a plate with a huge slice of yellow cake.

  “Months ago, Hilton. You just never saw it. I got tired of letting it sit up in the room. Take it with you if you want.”

  Yes, he wanted to, more badly than he’d realized before Auntie offered. It was a crime he’d left it here all of these years with so little thought. This photograph was the only memento he’d taken with him from her little house in Belle Glade when CJ. and Auntie drove him up to gather his clothes after she died. He’d left behind her hymns, her books, everything. He’d thoughtlessly abandoned any chance he might have had to know her.

  Carefully, Hilton lifted the photo’s frame from the nail on the wall, admiring his grandmother’s face. Her nose was African, broad and flat, and the Seminole jutted in her sharp cheekbones. She was a warrior, to the last.

  “I miss her,” Hilton said unexpectedly.

  “‘Course you do,” Auntie said.

  Hilton sat and ate, the photo in his lap, while C.J. and Auntie watched television and threw out bits of news from the neighborhood—whose children had married, whose children were on drugs or had AIDS. Neither said a word about Hilton’s separation from Dede, nor did they ask him why he wasn’t at work in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. That was their way. They’d treated him like a man since the day he first walked through their door, and they believed a man’s business was his own.

  But Hilton wanted them to know everything. He told them about Goode’s sudden disappearance, and they expressed their relief. Hilton wanted to tell them about his marriage problems, what Raul had told him, and why he wouldn’t be back to work for at least a few more weeks. But the story was so long, and the silence had become so ingrained, Hilton had no idea where to begin.

  And though they were both educated, could they really understand the idea of his schizophrenia without fastening ignorant stereotypes to the illness? C.J.’s sister was certifi-ably senile, and C.J. had a tendency to talk about her mercilessly. Hilton didn’t know if it was a defense mechanism because of his own fears of aging or a genuine lack of empathy. Guess what, C.J., Hilton could say, I’m crazy too.

  Without prompting, C.J. raised the remote control and zapped the television set mute as the soap opera’s ending credits rolled across the screen. “That woman was something else,” he said.

  “Who?” Auntie and Hilton asked in unison.

  “Hilton’s Grandma Kelly. I don’t know if I ever met her outright. I can’t recall. The Belle Glade Kellys could be standoffish and didn’t always come to the reunions.”

  “No more standoffish than the Miami Jameses,” Auntie said.

  C.J. ignored her, shifting in his seat until he was facing Hilton. “I met her for sure the time she brought you to Virginia Key, but only in passing. She was setting up a table of desserts, and she was introduced with a whole bunch of other folks I hadn’t seen. She must have been, say, in her sixties, close to seventy.”

  “Sure didn’t look it,” Auntie said, coaxing her Siamese cat to jump into her lap. She scratched the cat’s chin.

  C.J. was chuckling suddenly, hiding h
is mouth behind his palm. “I don’t know what you’re laughing at, Carl,” Auntie said. “There’s not a thing funny I can remember about that day.”

  C.J. nodded his agreement, swallowing the last of his chuckles. Hilton left his half-eaten cake on the coffee table beside his chair, listening. He remembered Nana had brought cake with coconut icing that day, but little else. His memories of the beach were vague, more recollections of emotions rather than of occurrences. C.J. was about to tell a story, perhaps a story Hilton hadn’t heard before. C.J. wasn’t a storyteller, so this would be a rare moment. This, Hilton realized, was why he had come.

  “I’m sorry to laugh,” C.J. said, “but Hilton, I was just remembering the sight of your Grandma Kelly running across the beach that day.”

  “That’s enough, Carl,” Auntie warned.

  “No, go on, C.J.,” Hilton said. “I want to hear.”

  C.J. mopped his glistening brow with his forearm. Their house wasn’t air-conditioned, and the breeze trickling through the open windows wasn’t quite comfortable on a March midafternoon when Miami’s truer climate was reappearing after a winter respite.

  “She was a giant, maybe six foot tall. She was running like I’d never seen a woman run, like she was possessed, almost. I can see her now, panting, saying, ‘My boy’s going to drown!’ And we all looked at each other, because we couldn’t see anyone in the water at all. Not a soul. Truth be told, we were all chasing after that old coot so she wouldn’t drown herself. We thought maybe she was sanctified, wanted to baptize herself right there.”

  “You ought to be ashamed,” Auntie said, cross.

  “I know it,” C.J. said, laughing. “But I’m just telling the truth, now. That’s what we thought. Next thing we know, she’s ripping at her clothes, pulling her dress off. We just knew she’d lost her mind then.”

  “I wish you would listen to yourself—” Auntie said.

  C.J. held up his hand, his face turning serious. His eyes drifted away from them as he began to remember. “Even with all of us chasing her, and I mean grown men in full pursuit, we couldn’t catch that half-naked woman before she hit the water. And we thought she was fast before? Now, that woman could swim. We still talk about that, don’t we, Lorraine? Like a streak, like an Olympian. I tell you, I’ve never seen a thing like it, and I never will again. It was almost like she was riding on the water instead of swimming.” hillll-ton . . .

  where you goin’, mrs. kelly?

  you get back here, boy do you hear me?

  Listening to C.J., Hilton was almost convinced he could taste the traces of the bitter salt water that had filled his mouth that day. He felt disquieted, as he had felt listening to Andres Puerta at the cafe with the ocean mocking behind him.

  C.J. went on, his gray eyebrows furrowed. “I used to swim in school, so I was the closest behind her. Must have been five, six men in the water. Yeah, it was six, because Matt Coombs was there and had no business there because he could hardly walk up a flight of steps. Somebody had to pull him out of that undertow, too.”

  “What about Nana?” Hilton asked, edging forward in his chair.

  “I was swimming right up behind your Grandma Kelly, and suddenly I could see you, Hilton. You weren’t anything but a brown spot beneath the water—good thing the sun was bright that day, and the water was clear. She was right up on you too, dove down like a fish and brought you back up again before I could get within five feet of her.

  “I’ll never forget the look on her face: she was past tired, so tired she looked like it hurt. That Indian hair of hers was wet and stringy, all wrapped around her face. But to look at her mouth, you could see nothing but contentment. I can’t fix exactly how to put it right, like she was saying, ‘There. That’s done.’ Like it was the answer to everything.”

  nana?

  nana won’t leave you, hilton. go back now.

  it’s not time for vou yet

  As C.J. described Nana’s face, Hilton was sure he could see it, blurred through the water that stung his eyes mercilessly when Nana’s strong arms lifted him back into the air. He could almost remember hearing shouts all around him. He could almost remember talking to Nana. Had he talked to her? What had she said? Hilton sat rigid as C.J. continued.

  “Now, I could feel that current stirring when she handed you over to me—and you were heavy, boy—but before I could open my mouth to warn her, she was gone. Somebody said they saw her head sink below the water, as serene as could be, but I was close enough to touch her and I never saw a thing. Not a damn thing. Somebody started yelling about the undertow then—I think it was Matt Coombs, if I remember right—and we all had to swim like hell to get clear. That current was something else that day.”

  “He still won’t go to the beach,” Auntie said.

  “Damn right. Me or anyone else who was there, just ask them. Matt’s dead now, but when I see your Uncle Rick or Lucius to this day, all I have to say is, ‘You remember that day at Virginia Key?’ And they all groan like they’re still fighting it. Grown men.” His expression grew distant, and he turned his eyes back to Hilton, looking pensive. “This is going to sound funny, but it’s like it wanted you, boy. The water wanted you. That’s the only way I can put it. It was like we were fighting all of nature to bring you back.”

  Hilton blinked rapidly and cleared his throat. He’d heard enough, he decided. “That’s something else . . .” he muttered, ready to change the subject.

  “More like a miracle,” Auntie said.

  C.J. shook his head. “And it’s a good thing Lucius got his medic training in Korea,” he said.

  “How so?” Hilton asked.

  “He’s the one who got you breathing again.”

  go back, hilton

  At once, Hilton’s lungs felt empty. No sound came from his mouth when he tried to speak at first, so he had to breathe deeply to form his words. “What do you mean?”

  Auntie began to fret. “Well, we didn’t think we ought to . . .”

  “Guess we never told you about that part,” C.J. said mat-ter-of-factly. “When I laid you down on the beach, Lucius leaned over your chest and said you weren’t breathing. No heartbeat, either. Lord, you should have seen our faces fall. We were still in a fit over losing your Grandma Kelly in the water, but nobody expected to lose the little boy.”

  a tiny coffin like that

  you never know what the boy could’a been, could’a donego back, hilton

  “A miracle, like I said,” Auntie sighed, shaking her head.

  “But Lucius knew what to do. He sat you up and pumped the water out, breathed some air into you, and the next thing we knew you were coughing and coughing, asking for your grandma. ‘Don’t leave me here, Nana,’ you said.”

  “Broke our hearts.”

  “We decided right then and there you’d be coming home with us. We didn’t even talk it over. And with our boy grown and off to college, neither of us ever thought we’d ever have another child in the house. We just—”

  “We just knew,” Auntie finished, smiling at Hilton. “We knew there was a plan for you.”

  CHAPTER 37

  To keep the peace with Dede, Hilton dutifully showed up for his appointments with Raul and met with Laura Ming, a Chinese-American doctor Raul was bent on sending him to. But as he met with them with his legs crossed, answering their questions about his moods and thoughts in a cooperative drone, his mind was unanchored.

  He no longer looked forward to seeing Raul the way he had before, and he rarely joked with him now. Raul had been right; he couldn’t be his therapist as well as his friend. Raul, as a trained healer determined to find a treatment, had lost his blithe edge with Hilton. The idea of asking Raul to schedule a Heat game with him seemed out of the question, out of line. Hilton always left Raul’s office feeling empty and dissatisfied. And sad.

  “So we can expect to see you Monday, the thirteenth?” Raul asked at the close of their third meeting Friday, as Hilton stood to find the door. Hilton’s eyes had rarely
left his watch, which had passed the hour into languid increments.

  “Fine,” Hilton said, sighing.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Hilton shook his head. What could he say? That the treatment was useless? That he’d decided his condition, even the whispers of voices he’d occasionally begun to hear just within his consciousness, had nothing to do with schizophrenia?

  “It gets better, Hilton. It takes time,” Raul said.

  Hilton nodded and waved a silent good-bye to Raul, closing the door behind him. But once he was in the reception area and he saw his car parked at the meter through the glass doors, he paused. That wasn’t a proper way to say good-bye.

  Hilton knocked twice and opened the door again, finding Raul finishing his notes. “Back for more?”

  Hilton realized he didn’t know what he had come back to say. In his discomfort, he had to force himself to keep his eyes focused on Raul instead of glancing purposelessly around his office. “I just . . . uh . . .” He wanted to hug his friend. He fumbled, then shrugged. “I just wanted to say thanks.”

  Raul rested his pen, puzzled at first, then he smiled. “Not necessary. You’d do the same for me.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Hilton joked, although he felt anything but jovial. Again, an interminable pause. “Okay. Well. I’ll see you on Monday.”

  “And by the way, Hilton,” Raul said as Hilton turned tp leave. “Isn’t Sunday the big day? Feliz cumpleanos.”

  The phrase sounded familiar. “What does that mean?”

  “Happy birthday.”

  Hilton stared back at Raul over his shoulder. The words barely registered, as though Raul had uttered them in a different language again. He hadn’t forgotten about his birthday, not with Kaya and Jamil so excited about the supposedly surprise family dinner they were planning, along with gifts and a skit show. Yet the wish from Raul’s lips sounded ironic. Why was the day’s approach something he should be happy about?