'Round Midnight

by Laura McBride

  “Oh no. That was later. She was three, and she said she wanted to sing something, so she stood on the dining table, and she belted out . . .”

  All four siblings started to sing: “So won’t you plee-eze . . . Be my, be my, be my little baby? Say you’ll be my darling. Be my baby now-ow-ow. A-whoa oh oh oh!”

  They could sing. Lynda tapped her foot to the beat.

  “I mean, she belted it. We’d never heard her sound like that.”

  “She could have been a Ronette. Remember the way she was swishing her hips?”

  They all started singing again. Ray stood up and camped his way toward his wife, and Ada took Althea’s hand and pulled her from the sofa to dance a few steps. When they stopped, Ada spoke.

  “Yeah, I think that’s the first time I figured out Coral was different from the rest of us.”

  Coral shrugged her shoulders. “Come on, stop it. I hate that.”

  “I know, but I mean, Coral, your voice was unbelievable.”

  Althea wrapped her arms around her sister. “It’s okay, Coral. Ada has wanted to be the baby of the family her whole life.”

  “It’s true. I did want to be the baby of the family.”

  Coral blurted it out: “Someone gave me to Mama. When I was four days old.”

  There was silence. Althea squeezed Coral a little tighter, but nobody said anything, not even Lynda.

  She realized they already knew. It had been so hard not to tell them, not to talk about it, all these years. And they knew.

  “Mama told you? She told me she didn’t.”

  Nobody said anything for a minute.

  “Mama never told us anything. She didn’t have to.”

  “But . . .”

  “Mama wasn’t pregnant.” Ada’s voice went up a notch. “Althea was seven. She would’ve known if Mama was pregnant.”

  Coral was crying now. Althea was wiping away the tears with her hand, and Ray had let go of Lynda to sit down by Coral’s feet.

  “You’re a one-hundred-percent Jackson,” he said. “That’s what we always knew.”

  “But when did you know? Did you all talk about me?”

  Her voice cracked. Of course they had talked about her. She talked about them. Still, she couldn’t stand it. Althea was crying now too, Ray looked sick, and even Ada was bouncing on her toes and shaking her fingers the way she did when she was upset. Only Lynda sat quietly, watching.

  “Coco, we didn’t talk about you. It wasn’t like that.”

  “I mean, we all knew that there was something. We always knew.”

  “Always?”

  “Well, for a long time. And we didn’t talk about it. Ever. You know how Mama is. She told Althea not to talk about it, and Althea told us, and that was it.”

  “And then Ray was here a few years ago, and he was telling us what you were like singing in that club, and we were all so proud of you.”

  “And Ada just brought it up.”

  “Hey, I’m not the bad guy here!”

  Coral looked at Ada, who had tears in her eyes now.

  “Coral, it wasn’t like that. It just came out. I just asked Althea if she knew about you, where you came from.”

  Tears spurted from Coral’s eyes at these last words.

  “Honey.” Ada was piled up on the other side of her now. “Honey, that doesn’t sound right. I just thought Althea would know.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I asked Mama when I was younger.”

  “I heard you.”

  “You heard us?”

  “Yeah. For years, I thought someone was going to kidnap me—take me back.”

  Ray laid his head on Coral’s knees. It was all she could do to ask, “Did you talk to Mama?”

  “We wanted to talk to her, we always say we’re going to ask her, but—”

  “We don’t.” Ray Junior and Althea spoke in unison.

  This made everyone laugh, as they sat huddled around their youngest sister.

  Coral spoke: “My father brought me to her in a basket. He was Daddy’s friend. But he wouldn’t tell her anything about my mother.”

  She could feel the question in the air, feel how they wanted to ask about her father, but she didn’t want to say his name. She had carried the secret so long. It was too much. They all sat there, wrapped up together like one unit: Althea petting her cheek, and Ada holding her hand, and Ray’s head on her knee. Nobody asked Coral for anything more, not tonight, and Coral didn’t say anything more. And then Trey called out in his sleep, and Lynda leaned over to kiss Coral’s head before checking on him, and Ray said again, “You’re a one-hundred-percent Jackson, Coco,” and they sat like this, quiet and entwined, for a long time.

  18

  A man wearing a jacket that said “El Capitan” met them at the Las Vegas airport. They rode in a limo that was as long as a tourist bus; it reminded Honorata of a black cat. In Manila, she had often fed a cat with a particularly long body. At the El Capitan, the man who greeted them said, “Welcome Mr. Wohlmann, Mrs. Wohlmann. Let me take you to your suite.”

  The suite, on the seventeenth floor, had a living room, a den, a bar, a bedroom, and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Las Vegas Strip. There were fresh flowers, champagne in a bucket, a plate of cheese and grapes. Everything in the room was gold or black or mirrored.

  Jimbo was effusive. He called the man Denny, clapped him on the back, handed him a small roll of bills. Honorata assumed they would have sex. Instead, Jimbo told her to put on the green dress and the gold sandals; he had some things to show her. When she was ready, he pulled out a long white box in which a necklace with a large emerald nestled.

  “The hotel gave this to you to use for the weekend.”

  She put it on.

  Jimbo leaned forward and kissed the stone of the necklace.

  They left the room and took the elevator to the casino. Honorata had never experienced anything like it. Lights twinkled, glowed, flashed, there were machine sounds of dings and whistles and whirrs, coins clanking in trays, voices calling numbers, people talking, the whish of air moving: cacophonous, psychedelic, disorienting, galvanizing. Beside her, Jimbo seemed to expand; she could feel the transformation as he lifted on the balls of his feet, his chest swelling, eyes lifting. He took her to the back of the room and walked casually through an entryway where a woman stood at elegant guard; they nodded to each other slightly. This room was quieter, there was more space between the tables, and the people playing sat in concentrated silence. Jimbo introduced her to someone named Richard, who smiled. Then he pointed to the people playing and said the game was baccarat. There was poker too, behind the curtain. A woman brought him a glass of scotch, which he drained quickly. He told Richard that his wife would have a gin and tonic; the woman brought it immediately along with another scotch for Jimbo.

  Honorata did not react to the word wife, as she had not reacted to Mrs. Wohlmann. Jimbo had said nothing about marriage. It was conceivable that he would surprise her with the once-promised wedding, but she doubted it. The conversation about the letters, the act of having gone directly to the airport hotel when she arrived from Manila, told Jimbo that the wedding itself was no longer necessary. He could call her his wife when he liked, he could present himself as a married man when he wanted, but the marriage itself would not happen.

  This made as much sense to her as it did to him.

  Jimbo had said he would show her around, teach her how to play some games, but he couldn’t resist stepping up to a table when someone left. He told Richard to give Honorata some tokens, so Richard handed her a bucket filled with a hundred or more heavy gold coins marked with the El Capitan logo. It made her almost dizzy. She hadn’t held money since arriving in America.

  “Do you know how to play?” Richard asked.

  He had a lovely voice, slightly accented.

  “No.”

  “I can have someone show you. Perhaps roulette?”

  “No.”

  “As you wish.”

/>   “Can I walk around? Can I go out there?” Honorata gestured to the casino floor.

  Richard looked at her. Honorata saw something flash in his eyes. Then he smiled and said, of course, she could do anything she liked. Mr. and Mrs. Wohlmann were guests of the hotel, and she could go anywhere, she could order anything she liked, she need only say her name.

  My name is Honorata Navarro, she thought.

  “Thank you. I think I’ll just walk around.”

  Honorata kept the bucket of coins with her for three days. She put a few coins in some slot machines, pulling the long handle and staring as the spinning figures spun into lines of color and then slowed . . . and stopped—never giving back even a single coin. She liked the feel of the bucket in her hand, the shake of the coins, so she stopped throwing them away like this. She supposed someone would give her more coins if she ran out; at least they kept giving her other things: drinks, round glasses filled with shrimp, a private table at the buffet. She never had to say who she was. They all seemed to know her, and many of the workers were kind.

  She saw Jimbo only when someone from the casino came to get her, politely indicating that Mr. Wohlmann was looking, and would she mind returning to her room? When she did, he undressed her or bathed her or offered up various parts of his body to her. His moods varied. One time he talked rapidly, the next time he was distracted—sullen, even. Honorata lost her sense of time quickly. She came back to the room thinking that it was time to go to bed, and was startled to see from the windows that the sun was just setting. Jimbo seemed hardly to sleep at all. From time to time, she wandered by the exclusive area of the casino where he played. She would see him sitting there, oblivious to anything but the cards, or once, laughing with a woman bringing him chips. The woman wore a skirt of gold metal that barely skimmed her bottom, and she had the largest breasts Honorata had ever seen.

  During the fourth night, Honorata could not sleep. Her body had begun to rebel, and she turned restlessly in the king-sized bed. She thought that Jimbo would come in; she hadn’t seen him in hours, and when she had, he’d said they might be going back to Chicago in the morning; she should be ready to go if he decided to leave.

  Honorata didn’t want to be alone in the suite. If she opened the blinds, then the lights of the Strip made the room bright as day, but sitting with them shut made her feel claustrophobic. She had not been outside once. She thought about going down to the casino. At night, the play was more serious. People stayed longer at the same machines, they were less likely to look up when a leggy woman brought them another drink. There was almost always a group of loud young men.

  She turned from one side to the other, bunching up a pillow against her stomach, and then throwing the pillows aside, lying spread eagle without a sheet over her. Honorata checked the clock beside her bed: 2:18. She got up, drank some water, picked up one of the chocolate coins left every night on their bed, set it down again. She tried sitting on the chaise near the window. She had already examined everything in the room. Finally, as if it were a talisman, she picked up the bucket of El Capitan coins and shook them slightly. They weren’t money; they’d be useless in Chicago. She might as well play them now.

  Downstairs, she turned away from the side of the casino where she thought Jimbo was. She walked toward an older area of the floor, marked by a lower roof and a general sense of abandonment. The space was nearly empty, and Honorata wondered why the El Capitan had not updated it; why it didn’t look like the rest of the gleaming, throbbing casino. Maybe some people liked this sort of thing, but Honorata could almost smell the sadness in the place. In the corner, a man wearing a black shirt played a poker machine. Nearby, an older woman played another; she was smoking a cigarette and a half empty pack of Camels teetered at the edge of her seat.

  There was a showroom over here, which Honorata had not noticed before. A sign read “Psychedelic Sixties Revue, Playing Nightly in the Midnight Room.” She wandered over, and pulled on the door to see if it was open. It was, but when she peeked inside, the room was dark, and the air smelled of dust and smoke. Behind her, the luminous face of a Megabucks, one of the giant slot machines that was almost always in use, stared blankly. Honorata had watched hordes of people play these, feeding their coins in quickly or slowly, kissing their fingers or their wives, rubbing a button, a penny, a rosary before pulling the handle.

  She knew Megabucks was for fools. But Honorata didn’t much care. She would play out the coins. It would take awhile, and perhaps she would get tired. She was far from Jimbo. It was quiet, and she didn’t feel like talking to anyone. No one had even come to bring the smoker a drink.

  She hit on the fourteenth pull.

  Forty-two tokens in.

  The machine exploded. A round light on the top spun like a police car flasher. There were bells, horns, dings, the whooping sound of a siren. Honorata cracked her knee as she jumped up; her first impulse was to flee.

  Within seconds, people started running toward her: a cocktail waitress, a valet attendant, the woman with the cigarette, two young men—the collars of their pastel shirts turned up, one with a cigar, the other with flushed cheeks—all running at her. She heard excited yells and then someone clapping. She looked at the machine: “Jackpot! $1,414,153.00! Winner!” flashed across the top. She heard someone say “Get Mr. Wohlmann, in the VIP room,” and time stopped, sound stopped, the room went pale.

  There was a huge bouquet of flowers, champagne, the hotel photographer. The owner of the hotel hurried in, his hair sticking up and his tie slightly crooked, as if he had not stopped to shower when he got the call. He was young. He knew Jimbo. He kept saying things like “No problem, man. We’ll have this worked out.” And then he would look at her, give her another hug, ask her how she was feeling, again, again, again.

  The shock of the initial excitement was wearing off.

  She had been dizzy with the chaos of it. With the intensity of everyone’s interest: the people who worked at the casino, the ones who were gambling, the boss who had clearly been home asleep. Jimbo had gotten to her side within minutes. And right away, she realized that something had changed. He hesitated before he gave her a hug. He seemed uncomfortable.

  Everyone was calling her Mrs. Wohlmann. She heard a casino employee spelling out her name for a reporter: “R-i-t-a W-o-h-l-m-a-n-n.” Honorata said nothing. The casino owner called her “Mrs. Wohlmann” too. He said that Mr. Wohlmann had been a special guest for twenty years, that it was exciting that the El Capitan’s first Megabucks hit had been for a patron they valued so highly. His mother would want to say hello too.

  Honorata stayed quiet, but she let them drape a mink coat over her shoulders. “For the photo,” someone said. Honorata was not sure what was going to happen, but she could feel Jimbo’s fear. Like a tide pulling at their feet. The casino’s print department made a large check, five feet long, which said that one million, four hundred and fourteen thousand, one hundred and fifty-three dollars would be paid to Rita Wohlmann. Rita and Jimbo posed with the owner, and the photographer took that shot, and then another just of her.

  At six in the morning, a small woman, only slightly larger than Honorata, entered. She was elegantly dressed, in a pale-pink nubbly suit, with an ivory silk blouse and tall ivory shoes that showed off her narrow heel and the bone at the top of her foot. Her hair was a neat, dark bob, and she did not look like she had just gotten out of bed. Her makeup was perfect; she smelled lightly of perfume.

  “Marshall, did you get up out of bed to come here?”

  “It was three o’clock. Yes, I got out of bed.”

  The elegant woman lifted her face to her son’s, and he kissed her cheek lightly.

  “Thank you, honey. I really appreciated that sleep.” She turned to a man wearing the casino’s black-and-gold uniform.

  “Carmine, get us some breakfast. We can eat at the back of the club. I want to congratulate our winners.”

  She stepped forward then.

  “James. It’s always lovely t
o see you. And this is your wife? Is this your first time in Vegas? Did you have beginner’s luck?”

  Honorata nodded her head, but she felt suddenly overwhelmed. They all knew Jimbo.

  “Please, will you join me for breakfast? You must be very tired, but you can sleep all day.” She turned to Jimbo. “Are you still planning to fly out today?”

  “I don’t know. We’re a little discombobulated, June.”

  “Then stay for breakfast. That will give Marshall time to do all the paperwork. Winning Megabucks does not protect you from Uncle Sam, you know.”

  Honorata felt the fear rise in Jimbo. With every minute, she felt stronger, cleaner. Something had changed. More than the money.

  Marshall was talking to Jimbo.

  “Sir, thank you for the identification cards. The feds are really strict with us. Since your wife is a native of the Philippines, and her name is different on her passport, I will need to see your wedding license. That’s the only way that I can deposit the money.”

  Jimbo explained that they were engaged, but not yet married. “Is that a problem?” he asked.

  “Of course not. Technically, the money is hers. If she wants to take it and go, we can’t stop her. We’ll just need her account information, and she can sign the paperwork.”

  “She doesn’t have a bank account. We’ll set one up now. We can go to a bank here and do it.”

  “Okay. Well, sure. We’ll deposit the money as soon as we have an account with her name on it.”

  Honorata was too far away to hear what the young owner was saying to Jimbo. After breakfast, he had collected their passports from the front desk and given them to the owner. She had not known that her passport was in Las Vegas—had not seen it since that first day in the Chicago airport.

  Jimbo came over.

  “We’ll have to go to a bank, Rita. You’ll need to set up an account. We can open a joint account, which they will do for me very quickly.”

  Honorata said nothing. Her heart beat faster.

  Just then, the other owner, the woman called June, walked up.