'Round Midnight

by Laura McBride

  That trip to Alabama was a long time ago now—a dozen years at least—and mostly June did not let herself think about it. She had learned how to let go, she had learned what she could not control. It had been that or die, and in the end, she had loved Marshall enough to live.

  17

  It was the second house on the cul-de-sac. Coral chose it because it was on the east side of town, not far from Augusta and near Rowe Elementary. Out back was a pool, which she hadn’t wanted, but Althea brought her kids over to swim the first day.

  “Auntie Coral, I’m going to the basketball game!”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah. Rob got me a ticket. It’s been sold out since last summer, but I get to go.”

  “That’s so cool.” Coral high-fived her nephew, who then raced to join his sister at the pool. She looked at Althea. “Rob?”

  “Don’t say anything. He’s just a friend from work.”

  “Who gave your ten-year-old son the hottest ticket in town?”

  “Malcolm was in the office with me. And he was going on and on about how the Rebels are the best college team in the country. How they’re going to win the whole tournament. So Rob just invited him. They’re going together. It’s an exhibition game, Friday night.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, Keisha’s whining, of course.”

  “Is there anything interesting about Rob?”

  “You mean other than he’s the accountant?”

  Coral laughed.

  “How about you? Mama said you went on a date with Paul Ormsby. Didn’t he take you to prom?”

  “No, he didn’t. We went out Saturday, but it wasn’t a date. He teaches at the high school, and, you know, we just had a drink.”

  “Okay. Well, Mama’s very interested in your dates. You better be careful.”

  “Should I tell her you’re dating Rob?”

  “I’m not dating Rob. This fine woman’s done with men, whether Mama believes me or not.”

  “She doesn’t believe you.”

  “Well, I’m counting on you to distract her. I need some relief.”

  Augusta walked in from the backyard. “That child is mad for those Rebels!” She reached for the beach towel Keisha had left on the counter. “You’d think a college basketball team made the world the way he talks about them. Larry Johnson. Stacey Augmon.”

  “Yeah, isn’t that ridiculous, Mom? Almost like someone who had to be taken to the ER after a certain team lost to Indiana?”

  “That was a different group, Althea. My Freddie scored thirty-eight points that game.”

  “Remember the Oklahoma game? Mama called me and would not stop talking about that two-point shot.”

  “His foot was behind the line. It was a three.”

  Coral and Althea laughed at the same instant.

  “Well, I’m not doing that anymore. The Rebels are a great team, but I’m not having a heart attack for them. They’re so good this year, they oughta win. That’s not the same.”

  “Right, Mama. We don’t care if this team wins or not.”

  “Well, we care. We can care.”

  Coral wrapped her arm around her mother, and the three of them went out back to watch the kids swim. She was glad she’d picked the house with a pool. Glad to live in Vegas with Mama and Althea and her kids.

  Coral didn’t want her mother or her sister to know some things about the life she’d lived in California. About Gerald, for example. The sort of boyfriend he’d been.

  Gerald was the one person Coral had told about her birth. The only time she had ever choked the words out of her mouth, the only time she’d ever repeated the story her mama had told her, was to Gerald one night, very late. And, of course, he’d made it worse. He had focused on Augusta. Why had she kept it a secret? How much money had Odell Dibb given her? (That was a big one. He brought that one up a lot.) Was any of it even true? Perhaps Coral was Augusta’s child—and the story a way of keeping secret whatever had happened that had made her pregnant. After all, that’s what Coral’s birth certificate said.

  Coral had started to cry as Gerald was spinning these scenarios, one after another, as if it were a movie plot and not her life—not her own most personal truth, something she had shared only with him. Finally, she had reached a kind of wail, screaming “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” But he didn’t stop, so she kicked at him in her rage, and he just laughed to see her so out of control. Yet even then, even after that, she continued to live with Gerald.

  This was a private shame, one of many things Althea and Augusta didn’t know.

  At twenty-nine, the story of her birth didn’t loom quite as large for Coral as it had at sixteen. It was true that her heart could still skitter unevenly if she thought of the instant before Augusta said yes to keeping her. It was true that it still nipped at her not to know how she had come to be, how her hair and face and feet had formed. And sometimes, the thought that this was a mystery to her but not to someone else galled her; didn’t she have the most at stake in knowing this particular truth? But the empty space at the core, the blankness she had spent years not thinking about—even the way she had felt when she first moved back home with Mama last year—it surprised her that these feelings were starting to fade. Or fading wasn’t the right word. She felt them still. They just didn’t hurt as deeply as they once had.

  Maybe it was getting older. Maybe it was teaching: seeing a lot of children in ruinous situations. Maybe it was having nieces and nephews, watching her brother and sisters raise their kids, seeing all the different ways a childhood might play out. She had been lucky to be a Jackson.

  Still, she wondered about the woman who bore her. She felt loyal to that unknown person—who might have been afraid, who might have been treated badly, for whom her birth might have been tragic.

  Who was her mother?

  Had Odell Dibb loved her? Had she loved him? Had he forced her to give up their child? Could he have raped her? Where was she now?

  Augusta thought Coral should let go of these questions. There wasn’t any way to find her mother, there wasn’t anyone alive who knew anything, and why did she have to imagine such terrible things? Why would Mr. Dibb have asked Augusta to take the baby if he hadn’t cared about her mother? Why would she have been dressed in a pink silk gown? Why would he have been so upset? That was Augusta’s hole card: the way Odell Dibb had cried the night he brought Coral to her. “A man doesn’t fall apart if he doesn’t care; if you aren’t a love child. He doesn’t ask someone to take a baby, to keep a secret, if you aren’t important, Coral. A man like Mr. Dibb doesn’t risk me knowing this about him, me having this over his head, unless you are someone very special. That’s what you should think about your birth.”

  Coral saw the sense in Augusta’s words, but she felt things too. Felt her mother deep down, in her skin, in her bones. These were things she couldn’t explain to anyone else, but it was as if she owed her birth mother something, or her birth mother exacted something from her; she really didn’t know which.

  And what about Odell Dibb?

  A long time ago, Coral had done what research she could. She’d sat in the Clark County Library on Flamingo, squinting at microfiche that listed where he had given his money, how much he had paid in personal taxes, who was listed on his private trust. Once she had seen a photo of him standing outside a bar called Le Bistro. He wasn’t identified, but Coral recognized him from all the other pictures she’d seen.

  And it caught her eye, that photo, because of the way her father was standing. He was smiling, maybe just about to laugh, and he held a cigarette a few inches from his mouth—about to take a puff or just having taken one, there was no way to tell—and his long frame was relaxed; his arm rested slightly on a smaller man to his left. That photo stayed in Coral’s mind. You wanted to look at Odell Dibb in that photo: something about his stance, that hint of a smile, even his fingers in the air. It was arresting.

  There were lots of records to find, articles about El Capitan, donat
ions to various charities, things he had said in response to one local issue or another. People thought highly of Del Dibb. He had been influential. He had treated his employees well. And yet Coral never felt much in these records; never got a sense of him from all the photos wearing black tie at galas, nothing like the way he leaped out of the photo in which he was not even identified.

  Now that she was older, now that she’d had her own experiences of love and sex and the wrong choices one could make, Coral sometimes imagined Odell Dibb differently than Augusta had described him. What sort of man had he been? Why did his face leap out from that one photo? How had he ended up with a baby in a pink silk gown?

  Still, the questions about her father didn’t burn in her as the questions about her mother did. She knew who he was, and years ago, she’d figured out that what really mattered to her about him was that he’d given her to Augusta Jackson. To Mama, who had allowed the rest of the world to believe whatever it would about her: to believe she had given birth to a mixed race child while married to a dark black man; to believe she had a secret life, a lover; to believe she was raped; to believe she had sold her body; to believe anything it wanted—any possibility at all—for how Coral had come to exist.

  Augusta was proud. And she was a religious woman, a churchgoer; she stood for something. And still, to protect Coral, from the first instant—even without knowing anything about her, where she came from, who might have a claim to her—she had sacrificed that. She had given up being known for who she was. She had carried the secret by herself, she had done this for Coral.

  That’s what Coral knew of her own origins. She knew what her existence must have cost Augusta, and she knew what Augusta’s choice had meant to her.

  So if she got frustrated teaching at the school sometimes, if there were parents who thought music class was a waste, if there were children who showed up with bruises, if there was a little boy who kept stealing food from other kids’ lunches, if the local paper ran an editorial railing against the benefits given to teachers, if the principal could not find money for supplies, if some days being the only music teacher in a school with 654 children seemed Sisyphean, then Coral always had her own mother to inspirit her: she could live how she wanted, she could take the actions she believed in. It didn’t matter whether anyone else understood, it didn’t matter that others did not see the value in the choices she made. She was Augusta’s daughter, and this was Augusta’s legacy to her.

  For Christmas, they all came to Coral’s. It took Ray Junior and Lynda fourteen hours to make the ten-hour trip from Fremont because Lynda’s morning sickness was so bad they had to stop every hour, and because four-year-old Trey had an ear infection that made him cry whenever the Tylenol started to wear off.

  “Never again,” said Ray Junior.

  “Do you promise, Daddy?” said Trey.

  Althea wrapped her brother in a hug, while Coral took Lynda to the spare bedroom so she could change. Coral nearly twirled down the hallway; she was so excited to be hosting Christmas this year. They had always gone to Augusta’s, but her mama had asked if they could move it to Coral’s. Augusta said that four adult children, five grandchildren, but just one in-law (this with one eyebrow raised) was getting to be too much. Coral knew this wasn’t true. Moving Christmas to her house was Augusta’s way of anointing Coral’s home.

  Coral had been buying and making gifts for weeks, and she and Althea had picked out one of the biggest trees on the lot. Malcolm insisted on colored bulbs, and Keisha had persuaded her aunt to buy a string of plastic lights in the shape of candles. It had taken seven strings of lights, and dozens of ornaments: all of the ones Coral remembered hanging on her childhood tree—including the green star with her second-grade face on it and the angel Ray Junior had carved one year when he went to Camp Lee Canyon—and some that the younger kids had made. When he was seven, Malcolm had carefully written “Mery Christmes Momy” and “Hapy New Yere Grandnan” on two cards that now hung at eye level.

  In the middle of one night, Coral heard a loud bang and came downstairs to find the whole tree lying on the soaked carpet. She didn’t leave it for morning; she found a screwdriver, a hook, and some wire, and hung the whole thing from a beam in the ceiling. It was the first thing Ray Junior mentioned when he looked around her new house.

  “Nice job with the tree, Coco.”

  Coral laughed. “It fell over. In the middle of the night.”

  “I could have guessed that.”

  “Well, it won’t fall over now.”

  “Nope.”

  “Come on! You never had any trouble getting a tree to stand up?”

  “Oh no, I always have trouble. I’ve tied trees to the wall, piled sandbags on the base; the year Trey was a baby, the tree fell over twice. I threw it away and bought a smaller one.”

  Lynda grinned. “Yeah, and what was Trey’s first word that Christmas, Ray?”

  “Darn. It was darn, right?”

  Everybody laughed.

  On Christmas night, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles strewn the length of the house, and Keisha’s talking bear Teddy Ruxpin put safely to bed—“If that thing tells me his name again, he and I are going to have some words,” said Ada—Coral and her siblings sat around drinking rum brandy punch. Lynda had fallen asleep with Trey, and Augusta had taken the three older kids to see Home Alone.

  “What was it that Ray used to say when he got dressed up?”

  “Ain’t I trassy!”

  “Yeah, ain’t you trassy, Ray?”

  “I have always been a classy guy.”

  “You is trassy, brother. You is definitely a trassy guy.” Ada and Ray clinked glasses.

  “Remember when Althea said a boy was going to come over to study with her?”

  “And Ray went in her room and pulled all the underwear out of her drawers, and hung her bras from the bedposts?”

  Their brother snorted. “Mama took a belt to me for that. I got one belt for going in her room, one belt for embarrassing her, and one belt because I better not be looking at any girl’s underwear.”

  They all laughed.

  “Hell, I lived with three sisters. How was I supposed to not see any girl’s underwear?”

  Ada stood up. “Remember when Ray murdered my doll for his Halloween house?”

  “Oh yeah, I remember.”

  “I walked in the garage, and LilyBelle was covered in ketchup with a knife stuck in her chest. I had nightmares about that for years. I might still have nightmares about that.”

  “I was nine years old. I didn’t know you’d be so upset.”

  “Yeah, and I never told Mama. Which was lucky for you.”

  “I kept so many secrets for you,” Ray retorted. “If I hadn’t messed up that doll, you’d probably have a whole different life. Mama would have figured you out and set you straight when you were young.”

  “Nobody was ever going to set Ada straight.”

  “That was Coral’s job,” Ada explained. “She was good enough for two of us. Right, Coral?”

  “I spent my whole life hoping you guys weren’t going to get in trouble.”

  “Oh yeah, remember how Coral would cry when any of us got a beating? She’d cry so hard, Mama would stop hitting us.”

  “Can I get a thank-you for that?”

  “Remember when Coral came to breakfast, all upset because she was going to be late for school?”

  “Yeah, and she told Mama, ‘How can I be on time for school if Althea is occuuupeeing the bathroom?’ ” Ray winked at his youngest sister as he mimicked her eight-year-old voice.

  “The best was when Althea decided to teach Coral to drive—”

  “And the cop pulled them over—”

  “And asked Coral if she would drive off a cliff if Althea told her to do it—”

  “And Coral said yes!”

  “You bet she said yes!” Althea poured another shot of brandy. “When I told Coral to do something, I meant it. And I didn’t tell her to turn down the street th
e wrong way. I told her to turn left into the inside lane, and bam, she just drives straight into traffic.”

  “I slammed on the brake when I saw the headlights, and then it was a police car.” Coral took the glass Althea offered. “The officer flipped his siren on. I about passed out.”

  “I was grabbing the wheel and telling you, ‘Move over! Move over!”

  “But I turned the car off!”

  They laughed again. Lynda walked in, her rounded stomach showing through the buttons of some red flannel pajamas, and curled up next to Althea on the couch.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Oh, we were just remembering old times. Kid stuff.”

  “The talent show!”

  “Coral’s talent show!”

  “Coral had a talent show?” Lynda looked at her sister-in-law.

  “No, it was Althea’s game. We used to play it quite a lot. We’d set up a stage in the dining room, or outdoors, and then everyone just performed whatever talent they could think of.”

  “Remember when Greg next door popped his shoulder out of the socket?”

  “Yeah, that was his talent! He could do ‘weird shoulder.’ ”

  “Weird shoulder! That was a great one.”

  Lynda shifted position, trying to get comfortable on the couch. “So why was it Coral’s talent show?”

  “Well, Coral was little. Maybe three?”

  “Yeah, I think she was three.”

  “And her talents were always pretty odd.”

  “Oh yeah. Remember her feet talent?”

  “ ‘My feet have names!’ ” the siblings said in unison. “ ‘This one is Petey, and this one is Noodle-ah.’ ” Ada hooted.

  “I don’t get it.”

  Althea saw Lynda’s skeptical look and explained, “That was her talent. Her feet had names.”

  “But I was really little then.”

  “Oh, yeah, you were small.”

  “And that was Coral’s talent show?”