Atlanta Noir

by Tayari Jones

  A small sound made her look up at the atrium skylight, and for the first time she noticed the snow flurries. The flakes were coming down fast, bringing debris from the trees down with them. The snow was quickly collecting, obscuring her view with a growing curtain of whiteness.

  Only then did she listen to the newscaster: “. . . traffic is building up on all of the major roadways and most businesses are sending their employees home . . . And it’s a parents’ nightmare, as we’ve been reporting: county public schools were open this morning, but parents, in case you’re just tuning in, you’re being asked to come pick up your children . . .”

  What kind of dumb-ass shit was that? Monique imagined her sister-in-law rushing to get her third-grader, Jason, to school only to then have to turn right back around and pick him up. She was so annoyed on behalf of Denise and Michael that she wheeled herself into the open-air living room that reminded her of one of the sets from Miami Vice, sparsely furnished with the décor they had brought from LA, their L-shaped leather sofa and classic black art prints she’d seen as a child on The Cosby Show—Ellis Wilson’s Funeral Procession and Varnette Honeywood’s Generations of Creative Genius.

  The TV screen showed a sea of red brake lights against gray skies. It was only midday, but the roads were clogged like it was rush hour, dusted with ice and snow. Not like the clumps in Chicago when she was at Northwestern, but enough.

  “Now, lemme get this straight . . .” Monique said aloud, her voice tiny and mouse-like in the expansive room, “y’all keep the schools open, then wait till the snow is falling to tell people to come get their kids?”

  She had not missed Nate all morning—hadn’t even thought about him because sometimes they went a day and a half without checking in during long stretches apart—but she missed him now. When it was time to trash talk, there was no better partner than Nate. She longed to call him, but he was probably just arriving on set in LA, since it was right after nine Pacific time. He’d told her it was best to call before nine or after seven.

  Instead, she Facebooked with Denise and was glad to learn that she and Michael had kept Jason home from school in Smyrna, and they had canceled their classes at Spelman and Morehouse. But Denise wrote that she’d gotten texts from several friends who had been stuck in their cars for more than an hour. And school buses full of children were trapped in the gridlock.

  My people, my people, Monique typed, and got a frowning emoji in response. This was their running gag in any complaint about Atlanta’s leadership, echoing Zora Neale Hurston in Dust Tracks on a Road—where Monique had been surprised to learn that My people! My people! long predated her generation. Mom used to say it too, and the shoe still fit. Hadn’t the school board and mayor seen the same weather forecasts she and Denise had?

  Between the white heat of creativity and feeling scandalized by the news, it was nearly three o’clock before Monique realized she hadn’t seen her cat all day. Not since the middle of the night. Not since I heard the crash.

  True, Midnight was a shelter cat who had clearly been through some serious shit back in the day, so sometimes he found places to hide in the house and disappeared for hours. But to miss breakfast? As long as Monique could remember, Midnight had never failed to follow her to the kitchen each morning. The disappearance suddenly felt sinister, so for the first time, Monique wheeled herself to the basement door.

  The door was not quite pushed firmly into place. Unlocked.

  With her foot in a cast, Monique hadn’t been down to the basement in a month. And Nate, who worked out in the basement gym religiously, had been gone nearly a week. Her housekeeper Sharmanita only cleaned the basement once a month. Had the door been ajar all this time?

  A frigid breeze tickled her sock feet. Cold air was sheeting out from under the door, as if her nightmare basement of cool dripping walls were real, no longer her true-life basement with a thermostat set at seventy degrees. She opened the door. Fourteen steps in brown industrial carpet led down. She flipped on the light: bright fluorescent, no flickering.

  “Midnight?” she called.

  Except for the TV newscast, her house was all silence.

  But now the cold was unmistakable—biting and hard. It was about fifteen degrees outside, and maybe only thirty in her basement stairwell. She exhaled and saw her breath as mist. Of course! The hall was cooler too. How hadn’t she noticed it before?

  “Midnight—come here, sweetness!”

  She prayed for Midnight’s thin mew and an appearance on the stairs so she could close and lock the basement door. The heat downstairs must be off; the basement was more Nate’s than hers. She and stairs did not get along, and these were steep and awkward. But Monique had no choice. She needed to fight her growing alarm that Midnight had somehow gotten into the basement, or even out of the house. Cats fled when they saw an opening, and she and Nate had agreed Midnight would be an inside cat—less prone to injury or animal attacks. Was Midnight outside freezing in the snow?

  Damn—how could she raise a baby if she couldn’t take care of a cat?

  So Monique tied her terry-cloth robe around her waist—yes, she was still in her robe—and sat on the top stair to begin her slow, careful journey bump, bump, bumping her ass down one step at a time. At least I have plenty of padding, she’d joked with Nate when he saw her scooting from upstairs once. It wasn’t a good look, but it got the job done.

  The stairs descended to the gym and its parquet floor, but beyond the parquet’s border on the far end, more industrial carpet led to the basement door’s decorative glass—and the door’s beveled bottom glass panel was shattered. Glass and snow glittered inside from a gaping hole; the entire bottom third of the door was gone. A few dead leaves had blown inside. No wonder it was so damn cold in the basement.

  “Shit,” Monique said aloud. Had the wind been strong enough to break the glass?

  She hugged the gym wall and hobble-walked until she was close enough to touch the indoor snow that powdered the carpet near the rake and outdoor broom, Nate’s tools. She peered outside, and she almost forgot her worry for the cat, childlike with wonder at the snowscape that had once been her backyard; every hill and tree branch drenched in white. Nate had sat outside for hours after they moved in, hypnotized by their private wilderness. Now she was too.

  She glanced down for paw prints leading from the door and saw none. Not cat paws, anyway—but there were some kind of tracks, almost miniature five-fingered human hands in pairs, as if gnomes had walked inside doing handstands. Walked inside, not out.

  What the hell . . . ?

  Something heavy scurried behind her, nails scrabbling on parquet—

  “Midnight?”

  —but the fur was gray-white instead of black, the two-foot size too thin, too long, and the tail was like a giant rat’s, lashing in sickly, hairy pink across the floor. The tip vanished into the darkness of Nate’s screening room, adjacent to the gym.

  Monique screamed. Only when she closed her mouth did she realize that she had grabbed the broom, wielding it like a Viking’s sword. In her cold, trembling hands, the broom shook as if it weighed fifty pounds. Her body wanted to run, but even her primal terror was practical—Don’t hurt your ankle!—so she stood fixed, still leaning against the wall for balance, panting and nearly dropping the broom. Adrenaline surged in every vein and pore.

  Her clogged mind tried to make sense of it: a possum had broken in to get away from the cold. The old pines and oaks canopying her yard were an ecosystem—the house a late intruder. And this creature was no different than the possums her grandmother had hunted in the woods, stewed for dinner, and tried to coax her to taste. In this way, slowly, Monique talked herself down from the panicked ledge where she was frozen.

  “Midnight?” she called again. Did possums attack cats? Was that what had happened?

  Still breathing hard, Monique waited to see if the animal would come back out, and she heard her mother’s voice: Mo, he’s more afraid of you than you are of him. Mom, raised i
n the country in upstate Florida, had been fearless about snakes, lizards, you-name-it, but Monique, raised in suburban air-conditioning, had not inherited that trait. A possum in her house was a core violation of How Things Should Be.

  She entertained and dismissed plans to find a way to block the door’s hole, or to close the screening room door and trap the possum inside. Instead, keeping her eyes on the screening room doorway, she used the broom as a cane and hopped her way back across the floor until she reached the stairs, where she sat and began her awkward ascent the way she had come down. Going up took far more energy, in part because her heart was racing. Her forearms were sore by the time she reached the top step and reunited with her waiting knee walker to lock the basement door. She checked the lock twice. That done, she stopped holding her breath.

  Door locked. On her feet. All was right with the world again—or as right as the world felt anymore, in a new house, in a new life without her mother.

  She had left the basement door open while she was downstairs, and the foyer was so cold that she could still see her breath as she huffed toward the safety of the parts of the house she had mastered. Her trip to the basement seemed silly and dangerous now. What if she had hurt herself? She hadn’t even brought her phone with her.

  She found her cell phone charging in its usual place on the kitchen counter and felt an ache when she saw she hadn’t missed a single call. Not her father. Not Nate. No one. Mom would have called her half a dozen times by now to make sure she was all right.

  So, the tears came. Nine months after Mom being gone, this was her mourning: no wailing or screaming, just tears of fire at unexpected moments—when she heard Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” or any song by Nina Simone; when she saw footage of 1960s freedom marches like the ones her mother had led. Or when she watched any daughter out with her mother, especially if they were laughing.

  Monique did not want to be alone in her house with a possum in a snowstorm. She did not want to be alone, period. Grudgingly, she admitted that Nate had been right to suggest that she go somewhere else. Even Michael’s house, with three dogs and an eight-year-old, would have been better. Her broken ankle did make her a child again, apparently.

  Was it too late? Steady and confident on her knee walker, Monique rolled to the side foyer window to peek out at her driveway, and her hopes of leaving died. The driveway blacktop wasn’t visible beneath the snow except for patches of ice. Her van would never climb the steep grade out to the street without snow chains on the tires, and she had never even seen snow chains because you’re not supposed to need fucking snow chains in Atlanta. Her anger at the snow was so powerful that it throbbed her temples.

  Tears threatened to turn to sobs, but Monique tightened her throat to prevent this.

  Nothing bad had happened. All she’d suffered was the door’s broken glass. Midnight would show up. Midnight probably wasn’t in the basement—the door had been unlocked, not open. The possum had not killed Midnight.

  Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Some smart-ass had left Shakespeare’s words taped inside the ladies’ room at the hospice, and now Monique could never forget the quote, a singsong nursery rhyme when she had trouble going to sleep. Her sleep was more restless now that she’d stopped taking her painkillers, but she’d thrown out the bottle a week ago, when Nate said he thought she was sleeping too much. And she barely noticed her ankle except when she accidentally bumped it, and even then it wasn’t pain, just the oddness of the metal plate and screws buried beneath her skin. Now she longed for the pills, just as she had known she would.

  So she had a Corona instead, then another, and as her mood lightened she decided to throw herself a snow party. She turned off the news to stop worrying about the thousands of people still stuck in their cars at sunset after six hours, and who might have to sleep in the frigid cold overnight. Instead, she stuck the salmon she’d scored on sale at the Publix in the oven and caught up on three episodes of Scandal she’d missed.

  And although she rolled back and forth across the three dried leaves on the kitchen floor for hours, she didn’t notice them until she’d crumpled them to bits and they were starting to look like a mess. And wondering about the mess forced her to see an intact brown leaf beside the refrigerator, near the doorway to the hall.

  On the way to the basement.

  She’d always been a slob deep down, even more so now, so she’d started bringing Sharmanita in twice a week. Sharmanita had come in Monday morning to sweep and mop the floors, before Monique went shopping, so the floor shouldn’t be littered with leaves.

  Monique wheeled herself through the archway to the hall again, where the air was still ten degrees cooler than the kitchen, and flipped on the light to study the floor. The hall chandelier’s speckled light spilled across her shiny wood. Monique was relieved the floor looked the way it should—until her eyes tracked to the basement door, just beyond the threshold, where another dead leaf lay like a waving hand. Daring her to ignore it.

  Monique’s heart understood before her mind caught up. Her heartbeat was quivering her knees before she bent far over to make sure she wasn’t imagining what she saw in the dappled light: beside the leaf, a large crescent of mud—the size of the heel of a footprint. Dried mud. Hours old. Sharmanita had mopped the house, and Monique had driven inside the garage with her groceries—her feet had never touched mud.

  She had not brought these leaves into the house. This was not her footprint. This was a boot.

  That truth toppled her lies to herself: a possum had not broken the glass. Her mother could have told her that no possum, no matter how cold, could have broken through those thick glass panes on the back door, or any of the house’s glass. The possum had come in after the glass was broken. Which meant . . .

  Monique stared up at the spiral staircase that spun its way to the second floor, as impenetrable to her as Rapunzel’s castle. At least two thousand square feet lay above her—a master bedroom, the hobby room, the guest room, the junk room. The linen closet. The walk-in closets. Her house had a thousand places to hide.

  Monique tried to make her mind a calm, blank slate as she slowly, silently wheeled her knee walker out of the hall. She wheeled across the kitchen to the living room, close to the noise of the TV’s Verizon commercial, fumbling in her robe pocket for her cell phone, which she’d kept with her since she’d come back from the basement.

  She dialed 9-1-2 and had to backspace with her shaking finger to dial 9-1-1.

  Someone is in my house. The words were ready, but instead of a 911 operator, she got a busy signal. She tried a second time, jabbing the numbers. Busy again. She dialed Nate next, and a tiny sob broke free when the same busy signal taunted. How? How could this be?

  The thin ice holding her mind steady fractured, and she crashed through layers of impossibilities. This could not be happening. Like the six-week sonograms when not once, not twice, but three times her babies had not had beating hearts (This can’t be happening), or when the neurologist clamped his lips like he’d eaten something sour and handed Mom the gray-black slides of her brain, pointing out four “masses” (This can’t be happening), or when her mother’s chest stopped rising with breath. This can’t be happening.

  But it was happening. The city was snowbound, thousands of people shivering in cars, children camped at schools, and she was trapped in her house. She could not drive out. She could not walk out. Since the only landline phone was upstairs in the bedroom, she could not call out. Her hurricane days in Miami had taught her that sometimes you couldn’t call 911, not just in South Fulton and Bankhead and Lakewood Heights, but in gilded Buckhead too—911 was a joke, like Public Enemy preached—because everyone was stuck in their private hell, and no help was coming.

  A thunk came from upstairs. She might not have heard it if it hadn’t been directly above her head. Something heavy hitting the plush carpeting. Something dropped.

  She imagined the two of them as mirror images, her holding her br
eath downstairs while he held his above her—yes, that had been a big boot heel by the door, a man’s boot, so he was up there calculating, just as she was. Did he know her ankle was broken and she couldn’t go upstairs? Had he stood over her on the sofa and watched her as she slept?

  Monique had turned a bend past scared, past numb, to a whole new feeling—the feeling her mother had described when she was driving civil rights workers to a meeting in McComb, Mississippi, and they saw a procession of cars without headlights following them in the dark. The new feeling made Monique’s mind work fast. She picked up the TV remote and inched the volume down ever so slightly. She didn’t dare silence it—oh, he’d be sure she’d heard him then—but she needed more quiet. Could it have been the cat? Could it all be her imagination—

  Footsteps. Striding. One. And the next. And the next. Just when she hoped no more footsteps would come, another. No longer on carpet, but on the upstairs hall floor. He had been in the master bedroom, but now he was moving toward the stairs. He had been so quiet before, but he was not quiet now. The footsteps carried the tenor of oh fuck it, because he had dropped something heavy and knew she had heard him. He knew.

  Monique gazed wildly around her, looking for a place to hide. The open floor plan spread before her like a great, unnavigable sea. She looked toward the atrium first, where her pillow and blanket waited, but only children believed in hiding under blankets.

  The library! Her desk was too small for her to hide under, too exposed, though the previous owners had considered building a bar nook, so in the corner was a marble counter with three cabinets beneath it. She hadn’t unpacked her books, and a few boxes obscured the cabinets from easy sight—but she knew they were there. And empty.