The sun is shining on Sheepshead Bay this afternoon. Oran settles on a bus stop bench across from Holy Father High School, where Christina Myers is a sophomore. School doesn’t let out for another ten minutes.
He’d left work early, telling Carla he’d received an emergency phone call from his daughter’s school nurse while he was manning the phones during her lunch break.
“I hope everything is all right,” she said as he hurried toward the door.
“She hurt her leg in PE. They think it might be broken. I’m going to take her to the doctor for an X-ray.”
The windows are open at the school across the street. When the bell rings, he hears it loud and clear.
It doesn’t take long for the sidewalks to fill with students. From a distance, dressed in their uniforms—green sweaters, plaid skirts, knee socks, and loafers—the girls look identical to him. Even at a closer glance, they’re similarly pretty, with long hair. Some wear it teased at the top, or flipped at the ends, or tied up in ribbons.
He thinks of his Gypsy, trimming her hair every two months with kitchen shears.
“You can’t even support me,” she’d said once when he’d asked her if she ever wished for siblings. “How would you support other kids? And if I had brothers and sisters, they’d have a mother. I don’t want a mother living here. Do you?”
“No! No way, man!”
It was the truth, but he could tell she hadn’t believed him, and didn’t bother to tell her that she had it all wrong. In time, his reasoning will become clear.
Just when he’s certain he’ll never find Christina in the crowd, he spots her. It’s her slumped posture that gives her away, and the fact that she’s alone, while the other girls congregate in pairs or groups.
Oran pulls on his white doctor’s coat, crosses the street, and walks toward her with a purposeful stride. Walking slowly with her head down, she doesn’t see him coming. He manages to graze her arm just as she passes.
“Sorry,” he says and then, turning around, “Christina?”
She whirls, blank, and then . . . “Doctor!”
So, she remembers who he is, but doesn’t seem to have connected him to what happened on that February night. He hadn’t expected her to. He’d worn a ski mask, and she’d been unconscious after the first few seconds of her ordeal. According to the newspaper accounts of the crimes, she’d told police that the man who’d murdered her family and raped her had been a stranger, and she had little memory of the attack.
“Nice to see you. How have you been?”
“I . . . I’ve . . . I . . .” She trails off with a forlorn little shake of her head.
All around them, students are chattering and scattering. None give Christina and Oran a second glance, but he sees her glancing around as if to make sure.
“Are you all right, Christina?”
Her mouth opens and closes.
“Did something happen?”
“You don’t know?”
Ah, there it is. He manages to contain his glee. “Know what?”
“I . . . my family . . . I lost my family, and . . .”
“Oh, Christina, I’m so sorry to hear that. Was there an accident?”
“No. Not an accident. I can’t—I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s hard.”
“I’m sure it is. Are you taking care of yourself? You look so pale, almost as if . . . well, if I didn’t know better, I’d think . . .”
“What?”
“No, nothing. You’re taking the medication I prescribed, aren’t you?”
She looks at the ground. “Why do you ask?”
“If you weren’t taking it, I’d suspect you might be . . .”
“What?”
She knows. He can see it on her face. Knows what he’s going to say.
He, in turn, knows that it’s the truth. He leans forward and whispers, “Pregnant.”
Her head jerks up as if he’d held a lit match to her chin, and her startled eyes meet his.
“Of course . . .” He rubs his chin. “The Pill isn’t foolproof.”
She stares at him. He can see her trembling.
“Christina, do you think you’re pregnant?”
She hesitates. “I don’t know.”
“Come to the clinic and I’ll do a test for you. Tomorrow night at seven—we’ll do an after-hours appointment, like before. If you’d like to bring your boyfriend . . .”
“We broke up.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. This must be hard for you, trying to get through this without him, or your parents, your sister . . .”
“It is. It’s really . . . it’s hard.”
“Do you have a guardian who can help you?”
“My aunt, but she’s not . . . she won’t understand about this.”
He nods. “I’m sorry. You can count on me, though, Christina. I’ll do whatever I can to help you. I’ll see you at the clinic tomorrow night, all right?”
“All right. Thank you.”
He touches her arm. “It’s going to be just fine. I promise.”
She turns to go, then swivels back. “Doctor? How did you know I have—I had—a sister?”
“You mentioned it, when we met at the clinic,” he manages without missing a beat.
“Did I?”
“Yes, but you’ve been through so much . . . it’s no wonder you’re having trouble remembering. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He walks away, resisting the urge to look back.
Rodney Lee Midget’s previous trips to Barrow Island had often been made in broad daylight, and always in the turquoise Impala accompanied by Buddy and Clive, two of his oldest friends, and fellow knights in the brotherhood.
They’d never cared who saw them; in fact, they wanted to be seen. Send a message, loud and clear.
We’re here, and all y’all had best watch your step, know your place.
Tonight, they arrive from the mainland by boat, trolling along the Intracoastal under cover of darkness. Thunder rumbles in the distance as they tie up to a forgotten piling and wade in through the muck, but it’ll hold off. Doesn’t smell like rain, and there’s none in the forecast.
By the time his feet hit solid ground, Rodney Lee has been devoured by mosquitos, though no one else seems bothered by them.
“Guess I’m just naturally sweeter than the rest of y’all,” he comments, scratching furiously, and is even more irritated when Clive shushes him. “Ain’t no one out here but skeeters and gators.”
“Maybe, maybe not. No tellin’ what goes on out here when they think no one’s keepin’ an eye on ’em.”
“The gators?” Buddy asks.
“Not the gators! The Negroes!” Clive hisses.
“I’ll tell you what one of ’em’s been doin’,” Rodney Lee says. “But not no more. Not after we’re finished with him.”
He thinks about the letter he’ll be mailing tomorrow morning, letting Travis know that it’s done, just like he promised. That man deserves peace of mind.
So do I.
Like Buddy, Rodney Lee has been ordered to report to basic training on Monday. This is their last chance to take care of business on Barrow before shipping out.
“Come on, let’s move.” Rodney Lee trains a flashlight’s beam low on the tangled path leading away from the water. They follow it a quarter of a mile, to the one sandy, rutted road that runs the length of the island, parallel to the Intracoastal and the ocean.
Rodney Lee turns off the flashlight and shifts the can of kerosene to his right hand. Clive carries the lighter. It’s a fancy antique one he inherited from his grandpappy, shaped like a pistol. When you press the trigger, a flame pops out of the barrel.
Buddy has a real pistol, and a coil of rope.
They’re still not sure how it’s going to go down. All depends on how much he fights back, though Rodney Lee can’t imagine he would.
The place is dark when they get there, but the junker car is parked in the driveway. They’d spotted it parked at Morrison’s Meat Marke
t on the mainland last week, and known he was back from wherever he’d gone off to. Probably looting up in Washington, or maybe even Kansas City, he was gone so long. The riots there had started up almost a week after the assassination, with more than a hundred arrests and a handful of people dead. Or maybe he’d joined the masses of Vietnam protestors.
Shameful, all this public carrying-on and home front violence in a nation at war overseas.
They pull on their robes and hoods and Rodney Lee leads the way toward the house, footsteps softly crushing dry pine needles and magnolia leaves along the path, punctuated by rumbles of a far-off thunderstorm.
Behind him, Clive trips over a jutting live oak root and falls forward into Buddy, who lets out a grunt.
Inside the house, a dog starts yapping.
They freeze.
A deep voice carries through the open window. “Cut that out, Otis! It’s just armadillos prowling around out there.”
The barking continues.
Rodney Lee hates dogs, having been attacked by a mean one when he was a toddler. He falters, imagining a snarling monster bursting at him out of the darkness.
“We still goin’ or what?” Clive whispers behind him. He’s the kind of guy who’s always itching for a confrontation, despite his small, wiry build. His parents scraped up enough money to send him to college, but he’s planning to enlist in the Marine Corps right after he gets his degree and sheds his student exemption next month.
“Hell, yeah, we’re still goin’,” Rodney Lee snaps, as if there isn’t a reluctant bone in his own body.
Outlaws ain’t afraid of a stupid mongrel mutt.
Rodney Lee gestures to the others to follow him past the porch, around to the back. The property is thick with sabal palmettos and low-hanging live oak boughs, the air with bugs and humidity. Inside, the dog is still barking like crazy. Rodney Lee looks at Buddy, then gives a meaningful nod toward the window.
“Take care of it,” he whispers, “the second we get inside.”
“Take care of what?”
“The damned dog!”
“You mean . . . feed it?”
“I mean, kill it,” Rodney Lee growls. “Better yet, don’t wait till we get inside. If we can get a shot at it through that there window, then—”
“Keep your voice down!” Clive growls, like he’s the one in charge of this wrecking crew.
Rodney Lee glares at him, wishing for the first time that he’d come alone tonight, as if this were a personal matter and not an official mission. But he doesn’t own a pistol; his old man hadn’t hung around long enough to teach him how to shoot one.
He’d taken off so long ago that Rodney Lee can’t even recall what he looked like. Nothing to his memory but stale cigarette smoke, a nightly drunken rage, and a wedding band he’d hurtled at his wife the night he’d stormed out for the last time—headed for his mistress’s bed, Ruth had told her son. A couple of times, she’d sent him to spy on the woman’s house over by the tracks. Rodney Lee never saw his daddy there. But Mama, she’d had a man in her own bed right after he left, and there’s been a parade of them ever since.
Two things that would come back to haunt Rodney Lee had occurred on his eighteenth birthday back in ’62: he’d registered for the draft, and his mother had given him his father’s gold wedding ring.
“You can use it when you get married,” she’d said, like it was a symbol of wedded bliss.
He keeps it on his key chain, a reminder of the kind of man he never wants to be.
That’s why he’s been so torn up about Melody. Ain’t right, what she’s been doing to Travis.
The dog’s barking is getting to him, every yap like a dull knife sawing at his frayed nerves. He creeps toward the window. It’s propped open with a holey, rickety-looking wooden screen that looks like it would topple inward with a slight tap. He doesn’t even have to get up on his tiptoes to look inside. The curtains are parted to let in humid night air, the room beyond shrouded in shadow. The dog is going crazy in there, and he wonders how the hell anyone can sleep through the commotion.
He turns back to tell Clive to take a shot in the dark, just for the hell of it.
There are no longer two men silhouetted behind him. There are three, and the third figure isn’t wearing a hood and robe.
Before he can react, a deep voice says, “Get the hell off this property.”
It can’t be LeBlanc. No Black man in his right mind would confront three cloaked intruders.
But then lightning illuminates the scene, and he sees that he was wrong about that, and right about something else. Cyril LeBlanc isn’t in his right mind. He’s gripping an enormous meat cleaver, raised and ready.
He wouldn’t dare use it, Rodney Lee assures himself. Black man kills a white man in these parts, in these times, and he might as well just slit his own damned throat.
“I said, get the hell off—”
“Yeah, we heard what you said,” Rodney Lee tells him, “and we ain’t goin’ nowhere. We got some business with you.”
The man snickers, shaking his head, not wavering one bit.
“What you got to say about Melody Hunter?”
Still LeBlanc holds the blade steady and utters not a word.
Thunder rumbles closer now, and something shifts in the sultry air, as if the temperature has just dropped a notch, and a storm might be rolling in after all.
“We know all about how you two been carrying on, and so does her husband. You’re in trouble, so you best lay down your weapon and face it like a man.”
LeBlanc doesn’t move, but the next flash of lightning reveals eyes that are twin cauldrons of rage. He’s not going to go down without a fight.
Jacksonville
“Mrs. Hunter?” Someone calls from far away, across a black void.
The hospital. She’s in the hospital, and there’s so much pain . . .
She starts to slip back.
“Come on, now, can you wake up for me?”
She doesn’t recognize the voice. It isn’t Cyril. No, it’s a woman, yet she sounds so very much like him.
“Open your eyes, honey. That’s it . . .”
Melody blinks up into bright light, bracing herself for the delivery room, and unbearable pain.
But the pain is gone, and she’s not in the hospital after all. No bright lights, no Doc Krebbs, no strangers in surgical masks. She sees pale yellow walls, and a framed painting of a white duck floating on a rippling pond with a row of ducklings trailing after her.
“Where . . .” Her throat is too dry to continue.
“In the nursery,” the voice tells her in that Creole dialect, and she turns her head to see sun streaming in a window.
“This . . .” she rasps. “This is the nursery?”
A laugh, and a middle-aged Black woman in a white cap and uniform comes into view. “This,” she says, turning a crank on Melody’s bed, “is your room for the next week, until it’s time for you two to go home.”
She raises the top half of the bed, and Melody can see now that she is, indeed, in a hospital room. She’s vaguely aware of other sounds—footsteps in the corridor, a cart rattling past, a crackly voice on an intercom, a baby wailing in the distance. But the nurse’s words are loud and clear.
You two . . .
She looks down at her midsection, tucked beneath a soft beige blanket. It’s not flat, but the enormous mound of stomach has disappeared.
“I’m Yvonne,” the nurse says. “I’ll be taking care of you today. How are you feeling?”
Groggy. Confused.
She thinks back.
She’d been at home, alone, frantic with pain. Had she been thinking clearly, she’d have summoned Dr. Stevens, but when you’re helpless and hurting, primal instinct takes over and you call the person who’s cared for you all your life.
Honeybee had materialized instantaneously, like Endora on Bewitched, and they’d met Doc Krebbs at the hospital. She remembers writhing in agony as they wheeled her into a del
ivery room, and hearing someone shrieking. Now, with a throat so sore she can barely swallow, she realizes the shrieks may have been her own.
Yvonne leans over the bed. Her eyes are warm and kind. “Mind giving me a wrist so that I can check your pulse?”
She extracts an arm from beneath the blankets, wincing at the effort, and wincing again when Yvonne gently presses her wrist. “T’engky.”
Cyril says it that way, too. The first time she’d asked him what it meant, he’d laughed. “It means ‘thank you,’ and if you think I have an accent, you should hear my mama.”
“All righty. Pulse is good.”
“Are you . . . your accent. It reminds me of . . . a friend. Where are you from?”
“Live here in Jacksonville now, but I grew up on a little island off the coast of Georgia.”
“Barrow?”
“Sapelo.”
There are Gullah Geechee communities up and down the coastal low country. She can’t assume that everyone with a patois might be connected to Cyril.
“Before, you said something about . . . the nursery?”
“Thought you were asking about the baby. That’s where she is.”
“She?”
“Yes, indeed.” She pours water into a glass. “A little girl. Just perfect. Healthiest preemie I ever did see.”
A little girl . . . perfect . . . healthy . . .
Melody’s heart inflates.
I just knew it. I just knew I was having a daughter.
But then the word preemie hits her like a pin in a balloon. She remembers the lies, and Travis, and Rodney Lee.
“Does she look . . .”
“Like you?” Yvonne finishes for her when she falters. “That’s what every new mama is wanting to know before she lays eyes on her child. I surely did with my daughter, and she’s the spitting image of me now that she’s all grown up, but wouldn’t you know that the first time I saw her, she was whiter than this bedsheet!”
Melody raises her eyebrows, and Yvonne grins.
“You see, I was young and I didn’t know back then that it takes some time for Negro babies to get their pigment. Her daddy didn’t know that, either, and oh, my, you should’a heard him!” Yvonne chuckles, shaking her head as she swings a tray over Melody’s bed and sets the glass on it. “Tell you what, you sip some of this water for me while I go fetch your little girl and you can see her for yourself.”
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