One hundred percent. A woman in a white T-shirt walked near the back of the march. Bela.
She stood by another woman. Jezebel. She was sobbing and carrying a large photo.
Enlarged at two hundred percent, even through the grainy dots of distance and light and utter disbelief, I recognized instantly the photo she held:
Charlie and Jez: just engaged
Part
3
Chapter
26
My father is dead.
I looked at the photo again, enlarging it even more and dragging the photo around the screen until I saw a close-up of every familiar face.
Jerome. The man who brought me here.
Jezebel. My father’s fiancŽe.
Castle. Was his sister really dying in D.C.?
My father is dead.
Tater and Hamp. One was more talkative than the other. Was the other not part of the lie?
Joe and Cherie. Reluctant?
Bela.
My heart broke.
Footsteps on the first floor. Quiet conversation. I’d just spent three days in the city looking for a man they already knew was dead. They had deceived me, all of them. Was Frank Rostron part of it, too?
With haste I packed my duffel and zipped up my camera and laptop bags. I walked into the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I rubbed my hand through my week-old beard. I’d forgotten how much I looked like my father when I didn’t shave.
I’ve spent three days as a fool.
I debated punishing or trapping them. I picked up my bags and stood at the top of the stairs. I could tell them my girlfriend called. “Great news,” I might say. “They found my father alive in San Antonio! I’m leaving right this second to go find him. Who wants to come!”
Then I’d rush out the door straight for New York City.
The idea floated away as quickly as I’d thought it.
My father was dead.
I was crying.
If I ever married, he wouldn’t be there. If I had children, he wouldn’t be sitting there anxiously in the waiting room, waiting for me to present him with his grandchild and tell him the baby’s name. He’d never promise to spoil the baby he’d never meet.
Was Mom waiting for him?
I cried harder.
What if he had changed and wanted me back in his life? What if we were willing to love each other again? Now I’d never know.
If he was dead, I could never look into his clear eyes and ask him to love me, if he could.
I placed my head against the wall and muffled my cries in the crook of my arm. I missed a man I’d all but given up on. I’d prepared for this. Numbed myself. Conjured up memories of a drunken father ruining my graduation, wrecking my car, begging for my money.
I missed my father.
I went back to the bathroom and washed my face again. Show them the photo. I pulled out my laptop once again. It was still on. I opened it and walked down the stairs. My hands were shaking.
“Hey, sweetheart.” Jez was pulling Red Cross meals from a box and handing them out. “You hungry?”
She didn’t notice or care that I hadn’t answered because she asked Bela the same question just a few seconds later.
The increasingly attentive Bela must have noticed I’d been crying. She walked up to me. The laptop was still open in my arms, the image of Jez and her fountain photo enlarged to nearly life-size.
“You all right, Luke?”
“Absolutely.”
I set the laptop down on the end of the bar, pointed the photo at Jez, and walked back up the stairs for my bags.
“Where you goin’?” Jerome’s voice boomed. “You must be dyin’ of hunger.”
I collected my things, made a quick pass through the couch cushions, hallway, and bathroom for anything I might have left or dropped. Then I stopped at the top of the stairs for a few minutes and listened.
It didn’t take long for the front door to open. I saw Tater, Hamp, Joe, and Cherie slinking out. It looked like Cherie had both hands over her mouth. Joe had his arm around her.
I inhaled and took the steps deliberately, like each one mattered. I thought of Jordan.
I wish she was here.
The second my foot hit the bottom step Jezebel swarmed me and pulled me in tight. I didn’t set down my bags. I just stood there.
Next to the laptop, Jerome held a shaking, sobbing Bela. Jerome comforted her, or tried, but she couldn’t have heard him over her own cries.
Jezebel was still holding me. “I’m so sorry, Luke.”
I’d already decided to leave without saying anything more than the photo had already revealed. I’d be strong. I’d be like my dad would have been. I waited to move until Jezebel finally dropped her arms. She backed off and looked at me. Her cheeks were shiny, soaked, and a little dirty.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “We’ll explain.”
Bela couldn’t have explained anything. She was inconsolable.
I pulled my laptop from the bar, shut it down, and put it in my bag. I took the three steps to the front door.
“Luke,” Jerome bellowed like never before. “Don’t walk out that door without knowing. Don’t walk out.”
“Stop,” Jezebel plead. “Just a minute. Listen, please. Please turn around.”
I did, but only because I knew my dad wouldn’t ever walk away from someone talking to him. Not even a screaming, berating, belittling wife.
But I remained silent.
“This was your dad’s wish,” Jezebel said.
For you to lie?
I looked at Bela. She’d calmed a bit and was sitting on the same barstool I’d been occupying for three days.
“It was for you to see his city, to discover him.”
How could you possibly know that?
“Luke, I bet you didn’t know your father completed A.A.,” Jerome said from behind the bar. He opened a bottle of water for Bela.
“He knew,” Bela whispered.
Jez took the pulpit again. “That’s right, Luke. It took trying and failing every place he’d ever been. But right here, here in the Crescent City, Charlie did it.”
“Castle sponsored him,” Jerome said. “He did wonders. Led him through everythin’. Castle’s been sober four years himself.”
I looked at Bela. She tried to smile, but could only nod agreement and look down.
How did he die? I wanted to ask, but decided it would wait.
Jez took my bags off my shoulders and set them on the floor.
I don’t know why I didn’t resist.
“Do you have any clue—any clue at all—how badly your father wanted a new life? He left every bit he could of that old self in Texas. He came here and ate up music instead. He came here to a clean slate. He struggled like nobody’s business, but that man did it. We did it together.”
I looked away from her and toward the photos on the wall.
“Luke, you’re not understanding us, sweetheart. Or not listening. Or both. Your father loved you. That’s why he stopped calling. You remember that? You remember asking him not to?”
Don’t.
“He heard you loud and clear and it stung, Luke. Charlie came to New Awlins lonely and afraid and broke. But that saxophone of his brought him to Jackson Square.” She become emotional again. The tears were back and so was the heartbreaking shine on her face. “And Jackson Square led him to Jerome and to Verses and to me. And as sure as our city is crying, as sure as you see me standing here, I knew I loved your dad from the second I saw him. And he felt exactly the same. True love.”
On that we agree.
“Are you going to speak, young man?” Jerome’s voice filled the bar.
I looked at him with more than a little fear in my chest.
“Just know,” Jez rolled on, “this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s about killed sweet Bela. But it was your father’s last wish—his final dream—that you would forgive him and discover his second verse.”
I
picked up my bags and walked to the door. Jezebel hugged me from behind one final time. As I stepped across the threshold, I looked over my shoulder to see Bela standing by the bar.
“Luke,” she managed to whisper. “You were my O.G.T. in all this. My One Good Thing.”
I wanted desperately to tell her the same thing.
Instead I turned and walked out the door.
When I was about a block away, I pulled out my phone and sent Jordan a text message:
Dad gone. Coming home.
I looked at my watch: 6:30 pm. I wondered where Jordan might be for the first time since I’d left.
Then I sent a second message:
Call me
By 6:31 my phone was vibrating.
“I’m so sorry, Luke.” Total devotion in her voice.
“Hey, Jordy.”
“So he’s gone?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“Don’t know exactly. Only that he’s dead and there’s been a funeral.”
“That fast? Were you there?”
“Sort of.”
“Come home and tell me about it.”
“I will, but I need something in the meantime.”
“Of course. Anything.”
I pulled Jerome’s cell phone number from my address book and gave it to Jordan. I gave her a thinned-down version of what I’d experienced the first three days as well as the last sixty minutes.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“You will.”
I asked her to call Jerome’s number as many times as it took for him to answer, and then to politely ask for Jezebel.
“Remember what you told me the other day?” I asked quietly.
“About?”
“About doing something for me? About believing in me?”
“Of course.”
“I need you.”
“Of course, Luke.”
“When Jezebel is on the phone, tell her who you are. Tell her you’re calling for details about my father’s death. Where his remains are. Any circumstances at all. Tell her I need to know so I can put my father to rest. Names, numbers, whatever she can tell you.”
“Shouldn’t you have done this?”
“It’s complicated.” Pride is a complicated animal.
“OK, so get what I can get from this woman.”
“She’s the one I told you about. She was engaged to Dad.”
“Oh.” Jordan was quiet for a moment. “When will you be home?”
“Three days. Hattiesburg tonight, Blacksburg, Virginia, tomorrow, and then New York.”
“Same route?”
“It is.”
“All right.”
“You’ll call her?”
“I will. Drive safe.”
“Don’t worry if I don’t call, all right?”
“All right.”
I thanked her and hung up.
I was surprised at how easily I remembered the route back to my car. On the way, I stopped by the Red Cross tent on Canal Street. When no one was available to help, I simply walked over to a pallet full of empty body bags, grabbed two, swiped a half-empty can of spray paint from a folding table, and continued on my way.
When Igot to the bridge, I was thankful the two sleeping men’s bodies were fragile and dry.
Nothing dramatic. Just two men—brothers, friends, maybe strangers—who fell asleep under a bridge and never woke up. I loaded them each in a bag and dragged them to the center of the road.
I spray-painted a giant circle around the bodies with arrows pointing to them from all directions. Then I said a prayer. Not a Jerome prayer, just a Millward prayer. “God help them.”
My rental car was untouched. A small miracle, I thought, in a city that ran out of miracles for me.
I drove out of town like I knew exactly where I was going.
Chapter
27
The drive home was divinely uneventful.
I slept in my car at the Hattiesburg Holiday Inn Express. I stayed at a very familiar Best Western in Virginia and took a twenty-five-minute shower.
By sundown on the second full day I was fighting traffic in the city.
I’d decided not to talk to Jordan on the way home. We sent a handful of text messages. She sent that she’d had success with the “project” and would fill me in when I got home.
For the first time since I was sixteen I actually chose to drive in the slow lane. I spent miles imagining a heroic death for my father. I suppose I hoped he’d had one of his premonitions about his death before Katrina hit.
What if he had? What if he wasn’t heroic? When have I been this conflicted?
I was angry. Dad had agreed to have me search in the dark. Even suggested it. Would a call or letter from Jez have been any different? Why had Bela lied to me? Had her loyalty to my father been so strong?
Some of the questions lodged in my mind. Others ran through my mind, past my mouth, and into the air.
I wished someone were there to hear them.
My mind, still numb from the images of my stay in New Awlins, conjured up and sorted through a hundred and fifty miles of circumstances for my father’s death.
Drowned in a neighbor’s attic, trying to pull them to safety.
Drowned in Jezebel’s attic, trying to pull her to safety.
Stabbed at the Convention Center, killed while protecting a child.
Electrocuted.
Burned to death, saving a family pet from a burning home in the Garden District.
Crushed by a pickup truck that rushed with the storm surge over the canal breech. Dad swimming furiously to push a woman and her baby in an inner tube from the truck’s path.
Drowned by a woman he was trying to save. Her frantic, panicked motions drowning them both.
Heat exhaustion. Collapsed from an arduous trip to the Convention Center. He delivered a woman in a wheelchair in time to find oxygen. Because of Dad’s speed she was one of the lucky ones who received medical attention in time. Dad stayed with the widow until she boarded a bus for Houston. Alive and thankful.
Some scenarios made me feel better than others. But all were more appealing than imagining my father had been found behind Circus Circus in Las Vegas with a gunshot wound and a gambling debt.
I turned on the radio and listened to classic rock until I rolled through the Lincoln Tunnel.
It was after seven when I returned the rental car in Greenwich Village and got in a cab. I was exhausted, dirty, and ready to bury my father in every appropriate way.
I hoped Jordan would be waiting for me.
“Knock, knock.” I opened the front door to my clean, dry apartment. It looked precisely as it had when I had left.
Except that there was a woman sitting next to Jordan on my futon.
Jezebel.
Chapter
28
Jezebel hugged me.
What else could I expect? She held on to me and sniffled through a “Hello, I’m relieved you made it. So relieved” before stepping back.
“Jordan?”
“Welcome home.” She held me in a long, warm embrace. “I think you know Jezebel,” she said when the hug ended too soon.
“Uh.” I kept looking at Jezebel and wondering if I’d eaten bad Mexican fast food at the place in Blacksburg. “What’s going on?”
“Sit down.”
“OK,” I said dumbly, and I did.
I finally realized that the smell coming from my kitchen was jambalaya. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t ignore it. If it tasted even a fraction as well as it smelled, I knew I was going to sleep very well on a very full stomach.
Jezebel sat on the other end of the futon.
Jordan sat between us.
The three of us were sitting on a futon made for two.
Jordan sat up straight. “Luke, I spoke to Jezebel.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She refused to tell me anything, anything, over the phone.”
Color me surprised. “So
you invited her for dinner?”
Jezebel tried not to laugh but a snort most definitely escaped.
“Not quite. She invited herself.”
I couldn’t avoid noticing Jezebel had taken a shower. Her hair still looked slightly damp.
“How did you get here?” I asked her.
“Airplane. They reopened the airport, just enough flights a day to get a few people in and out.”
“How did you get to my place?”
“Luke,” Jordan cut Jezebel off, “I picked her up at the airport.”
I stood up, not out of anger, but because the sideways conservation on the futon was as awkward as the discussion. “And did I pay for her plane ticket?”
Now Jezebel stood. “What? You think because I’m black and from New Awlins I can’t buy my own plane ticket?” She had the same look in her eyes I’d seen when she nearly gave a beating to Officer Baldy at Jackson Square.
“Relax. I didn’t know if you had your credit cards—”
“Oh, no, Citibank don’t give ’dem credit cards to no Negro women—”
“Stop it you two!” Jordan stood up as well, forcing us into a tighter circle than any of us liked. In unison we all took a step back.
“Jez—” Jordan started.
“‘Jez’? You’re calling her Jez already?” I interrupted. Jordan hated to be interrupted.
“Luke Francis Millward. Stop. This is inappropriate. Just stop. All of it. Both of you.”
She was right. Suddenly I felt like I was twelve again. And I didn’t entirely mind it. Perhaps it was only fair for Jezebel to get what I’d spared her in New Orleans.
“Jezebel.” Jordan was about to negotiate. She looked at me for a nod at using her full first name. I gave it.
“Luke didn’t mean anything you just implied. You know that. He meant that he wasn’t sure you’d have access to your funds, to your credit cards, debit cards.” Then she turned to me.
“Luke, are you paying any attention? First, you didn’t buy her ticket. I did. We’re not married and you didn’t leave me an emergency VISA like I’m some sixteen-year-old kid. I bought it. She can pay me back when she gets home. I’m sure she will.”
“Naturally,” Jez said. Nice and snide.
Recovering Charles Page 17
