She sails out of the room.
Melody lifts the glass. Her hand is shaking. Water sloshes over the rim, running down her fingers. She puts the glass down.
Is it true? Will her baby be white, at least for a while, regardless of whether Cyril is the daddy? It wouldn’t solve her dilemma, but will at least buy her some time to sort things out.
Her gaze settles on a vase of pink tulips. Who brought them? Could Cyril have . . .
But of course not. He wouldn’t know she’s here, she realizes, feeling more alone than she ever has in her life.
Then the nurse is back, placing a bundle into her arms.
A tiny, pale-skinned girl gazes up at her with enormous eyes the shade of a dusky sea, and Melody realizes that she’ll never be alone again.
Marceline awakens to a predawn rain and a familiar, unsettled feeling.
Years ago, when Cyril, Sr., had gone off to war, she’d drift from slumber in sweet anticipation of dayclean, only to open her eyes to the sensation that something was wrong. It always took her a few waking moments to remember that her husband was in danger on overseas battlefields, but once she got used to reality again and the day settled over her, the uneasiness would lift.
“You ain’t gotta do anything but wait for me to come home.”
“You never did, though, did you?” She climbs out of bed and glances at that old red satchel full of his things.
Oldest story in the world.
A man, he goes and he does. A woman just waits.
But the good Lord alone knows what’s going to happen when that buckruh woman’s wait is over.
Maybe that’s why Marceline’s apprehension persists as she stands at the stove, stirring her grits. She can feel her husband’s spirit boddun’ around her.
“I know, Cyril. I been frettin’ about that boy.”
She’d heard about the violence unfolding in Memphis and Atlanta, and across the country. He’d turned up back home a few days ago none the worse for his sojourn if somewhat subdued, as though someone had dimmed a lamp behind his eyes.
It’s to be expected. He’s not the only one mourning the fallen civil rights leader. A tide of grief rolled across Barrow Island when the news broke, and the world beyond is more tumultuous than ever.
“That why you been boddun’ me all the time now?” she asks Cyril, Sr. “Or is it something else?”
No reply, just raindrops pattering on the roof, and one of the cats crying on the porch.
She goes to the door to let it in. But when she peers into the wet morning gloom, there’s no sign of a feline. And when she returns to the kitchen, she sees that the pot has boiled over, though she’d set it on a low flame.
“You tryin’ to tell me something?” she asks her dead husband.
She eats the grits with butter and salt, remembering how Cyril, Sr., used to cover his with a layer of sugar. She never did care for that, and scolded him that their son would pick up the bad habit.
He hadn’t, though. He’s a good boy. A good man.
A better man than Mrs. Melody Hunter deserves.
Marceline had gone over to Amelia Island a time or two back in February and March, to see what she could see.
Fernandina Beach is a small enough town that everyone knows everyone else—the household help included. Through a series of casual conversations, Marceline had found her way to a young Gullah woman who worked for a woman who was in a weekly bridge club with Melody’s mother, Honeybee.
“You ever happen to overhear any she she talk?”
In their shared dialect, she she talk is a certain brand of gossip—the kind she imagined a housekeeper might overhear from a gaggle of buckruh women, and she was right.
Honeybee had told the others how newlywed Melody and her husband had moved into a gray bungalow on Elm Street. He was in Vietnam now, and she was expecting their first child.
“That woman, she’s all aflutter about her grandbaby,” the housekeeper told Marceline.
Her grandbaby . . . and mine.
“Why you want to know all this?”
“I worked for the Abernathys years ago. Just wonderin’ how it all turned out.”
You got to be a trutemout’, you heah me? her dead daddy scolded in her head.
Back in his day, she imagines, it was easy to be someone who always tells the truth. But in hers, when lives are hanging in the balance, sometimes the only way to get at the truth is with a lie.
Marceline had walked along Elm Street looking for the gray bungalow, knowing she’d find it before she crossed Eighth, where the neighborhood transitioned into Southside. There are a few white households in that part of town now, but she’d bet Travis Hunter’s isn’t one of them.
She’d have known the house by its description, but she’d spotted the red Camaro first. She’d heard about a buckruh woman driving it around Barrow a while back. At the time, she hadn’t connected her to Cyril, and why would she?
Oh, son. What have you gotten yourself into?
She hadn’t knocked on the door. She’d returned several times, though, just to walk past. And then one day, she’d crossed paths with a pretty, hugely pregnant blonde woman carrying grocery bags that looked too heavy for someone in her condition.
If she were anyone else, Marceline might have stopped and offered her a hand.
When they were close enough, the woman met her gaze with a friendly smile and a pleasant, “Good morning.”
Marceline returned the greeting, surprised by it and by the sweet susceptibility in those big green eyes. She’d turned her head a few times after they’d passed each other, expecting the young woman to walk right on by the gray house, but no, she was unlocking the front door and going inside.
This, then, was Melody Hunter. Not at all crookety, far as Marceline could tell.
She stands and washes her half-finished bowl of grits down the drain. She never leaves dirty dishes in the sink, but she doesn’t want to waste any time getting over to Cyril’s. He’ll be leaving soon for his job at the mainland meat market, if he isn’t already on his way. Her heart races as she pulls on a dress and shoes and hurries out into the rain without an umbrella.
It lets up as she makes her way down to Cyril’s place as fast as her legs can carry her along the mucky road lined with live oaks. With all the dry weather lately, the resurrection ferns had been curled and gray as the Spanish moss, but the rain has transformed them into lush, verdant fronds. A good sign, she tells herself.
At the turnoff, a mare and her foal doze beneath a lush canopy of branches. She spots Cyril’s car out front and is momentarily reassured to hear Otis barking inside. But the dog isn’t offering his usual friendly greeting, nor alerting his master to a visitor. He’s distressed.
Marceline knocks. Cyril doesn’t come, and it’s locked. When she calls for him, Otis lets out a yelp, recognizing her voice.
“Calm down, boy.” She finds the back door unlocked, lets herself in, and the frantic dog hurtles himself at her.
“Shush, now. Shush. Cyril? Cyril! You here?”
The house doesn’t smell of the coffee he boils every morning. She notes the pot sitting dry and empty on the stove, supper dishes in the drainboard, key chain hanging on a hook by the door. She tells herself he’s merely sleeping, and why wouldn’t he be, after all the traveling and such?
But in the bedroom, the bed is unoccupied and unmade. She’d taught him better than that.
“Where’s he gone off to all sudden-like?” she asks her dead husband.
The dog whines, nudging her knees with his wet nose, and she looks down into his sad eyes.
Marceline LeBlanc does not cry. She didn’t when she lost her husband, and she won’t now. She lifts her head and closes her eyes in a quick prayer, then gives Otis a firm pat.
“Bet you need supshun, boy.” Opening the icebox, she finds a paper-wrapped packet of bones Cyril brings from the butcher shop. She puts a large one into a bowl and sets it on the floor.
“You stay here and e
at your breakfast. I’ll be back.”
She steps out the back door and stands surveying the property. The rain has let up, mud puddles pooling around the yard and dense foliage dripping. Must have been some storm, she thinks, spotting a broken bough on the vast live oak bordering the marshland path out back. Then milky sun breaks through the overcast sky, and she sees a flash of blue on a low-hanging branch.
Walking toward it, she tells herself that it’s a house finch egg gleaming in a nest of Spanish moss, or water droplets catching the light just so.
But she knows better even before she’s close enough to see that the branch didn’t get torn off in a storm, and that wild horses didn’t trample the tall grasses beneath.
Humans did that.
Eyes narrowed, hand trembling, Marceline reaches toward the broken chain snagged on a twig, dog tags and baby ring glinting in the morning sun.
Part V
2017
Chapter Thirteen
Friday, January 13, 2017
Savannah, Georgia
After a bumpy flight courtesy of a nor’easter moving up the mid-Atlantic coast, Amelia and Jessie land in Georgia on a sunny Friday. Heading for the baggage claim, they bypass a local information booth with brochures about the charming Southern city neither of them has ever visited before.
“Jess, I’m sorry you flew us all the way here and you don’t even get to—”
“We’ll come back someday to sightsee.” She links her arm in Amelia’s. She’s nearly a foot shorter, a widow’s peak parting her sleek dark hair above a pert, pretty face. “Friday the thirteenth is going to be your luckiest day ever.”
“You’re an amazing friend. How am I ever going to repay you?”
“By getting us to Marshboro. I’m still stressed from last night,” Jessie says around a yawn. Driving to New York last night, she’d swerved into a ditch after nearly hitting a deer on the winding, snowy highway through the Catskills.
“That was so dangerous, Jessie. I really wish you’d just taken a connecting flight from Ithaca instead of risking your life so that we could fly together.”
“I wasn’t risking my life. Just the stupid deer’s. And don’t you remember what we promised each other when we met?”
“That we’d help each other find our biological families?”
“Exactly. I started this journey with you when I was eighteen. Do you think I’m going to miss a minute of the final stretch?” Her friend flashes her dimples.
“I love you, Jessie. And if you ever change your mind and decide you want to look for your birth parents after all—”
“No, I’m good.” Jessie had long ago put aside her curiosity about that. But things are different for her. She’d been raised by loving parents who are still alive, and she’s happily married with children of her own.
Amelia’s life, by contrast, leaves a lot to be desired.
“Remind me to text the owner of the place we’re staying before we get to Marshboro,” Jessie says, settling back in the passenger’s seat as Amelia takes the wheel of the rental car. “She said to let her know when we’re ten minutes away so she can let us in.”
“I’ll wake you up when we get off the highway.”
“I’m not going to sleep, Mimi. Don’t worry. I’ll keep you company.”
She’s snoring, head thrown back, before they enter southbound Interstate 95.
Amelia thinks back to ten days ago, when she and Stockton Barnes had followed the same highway north from New York to Connecticut. She’s spoken to him a few times since—brief conversations about the still-unsolved double murder and the continued search for the grown foundling who hadn’t been his daughter after all.
If he was devastated to get the news, he hasn’t let on to Amelia—but he’s a cop, and cops are expert compartmentalizers. On the other hand, maybe he’s relieved. His life will be less complicated if he doesn’t have a missing, abandoned daughter with ties to a double murder investigation.
“Hitting me with that paternity claim was obviously just another one of Delia’s scams,” he’d said flatly on the drive home from Bridgeport. “Her husband left her pregnant and moved in with another woman. So she found some stupid sap to sleep with. Guess she figured she had a better chance of getting financial support out of a New York cop than her loser ex-husband. Man, was she right. Stupid sap.”
“You’re not a stupid sap.”
“I was back then. I believed her. I was losing Wash, and when I first saw that baby, I guess . . . it made the future seem less lonely, thinking I had a daughter. I thought that baby really was a preemie. She was so tiny and fragile, and she had so many problems . . . Now I know it’s because her mother was an addict.”
“But Bobby said Delia didn’t get into all that until after the baby was born.”
Barnes just looked at her.
Okay, so Bobby isn’t the most credible witness in the world. Cynthia may not be, either. But Amelia has compared Barnes’s childhood photo with Charisse’s several times since that day. If her mind’s eye were seeing only what it wants to, it wouldn’t see a resemblance.
But Amelia can’t unsee it. Nor can she ignore that Brandy had approached her as a client and shown her the lost baby ring.
Today, however, is about confronting Bettina’s family, and she pokes her passenger back to consciousness as she exits the interstate.
“Hey, we’re almost there.”
Jessie stretches and looks out the window. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and they’re traveling a straight, narrow east-west highway bordered on both sides by a grassy shoulder, tall Southern pines and utility poles. No houses, no businesses, no other cars on the road. No hotels or motels or even inns in the immediate area, but Jessie had rented what she’d described as a storybook cottage.
“Are you excited, Mimi?”
“Nervous is a better word for it, and maybe a little . . .” She swallows a lump, thinking of Bettina, wondering how many times she’d traveled this same road as a little girl growing up in the area.
Chances are, not many. She’d never learned to drive, and her family had been too poor to own a car. She’d never even been out of Georgia until a church youth group outing took her to Memphis. That’s where she’d met Calvin, who was there visiting family. He was a few years older, already living in New York City.
“It was love at first sight, child,” Bettina had told Amelia. “Your daddy and me, we just knew we had to be together.”
They’d written letters for a year. Calvin had proposed in one of them. He’d only been to Marshboro once, for their wedding. As far as Amelia knows, Bettina had never returned after taking the bus to her new home in New York.
Their life together had been just as impoverished as her childhood had been, but Bettina wasn’t one to complain about such things. About anything. That stoic, accepting nature had gotten her through some difficult times, but it had expedited her own demise, as far as Amelia’s concerned. Her mother had ignored ominous physical symptoms until it was too late. It had taken Amelia a long time to forgive her for that, for dying—and for not telling Amelia the truth about how she’d come to her and Calvin . . .
Only for that truth to become a lie when Amelia’s DNA linked her right back to Bettina.
The speed limit drops to 45 mph, and she spots a trooper hidden behind a clump of palmettos just beyond.
A little farther down, it drops to thirty as they pass a painted sign that reads, “Welcome to Marshboro, Georgia, Population 710.”
“It’s grown since I checked a few months ago. It used to be only 706.”
“Wow.” Jessie runs a hand through her short dark hair, and it spikes above her widow’s peak. “Ithaca is small, but this is . . .”
“A post-millennial metropolis. That’s what Auntie Birdie predicted back in 1989, when she came up for Daddy’s funeral.”
“She was a regular Nostradamus.” Jessie consults the directions on her phone. “Keep an eye out for Main Street. That’s where our cotta
ge is.”
They’re on it. It’s the only road in town. They pass a firehouse, a gas station with a Circle K, and a luncheonette.
“Slow down, Mimi—that’s it!” Jessie points at a small structure just ahead.
It’s white with a blue-painted door, perched between two churches. She spots a tire swing dangling from magnolia branches in front of one and knows Bettina’s family had been congregants there. She’d shared fond memories of that swing.
“In springtime, child, that big old tree was just covered with blooms, and my cousins and I would pump our legs so hard, trying to soar up there and pick one.”
As she pulls into the cottage’s dirt driveway, Amelia sees that the church is, indeed, Second Baptist, and the sign out front reads “48th Annual MLK Fundraiser—All Are Welcome—9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, 1/14.”
As she and Jessie take their bags from the trunk, an elderly white woman ambles over from across the street. She’s wearing bare-toed slippers and a housedress.
“You must be Thelma! I’m Jessie, and this is Mimi.”
The woman fumbles in her pockets. “Nice to meet y’all. I’ve got the keys right here some—” She breaks off, gaping at Amelia, as if seeing her for the first time.
“Are you . . .”
“She’s on TV!” Jessie announces.
“You’re an actress?”
“No, I’m on a program called The Roots and Branches Project.”
“Well, bless your heart! I’ve never seen it. But you do remind me of someone, that’s all,” Thelma says, looking again at Amelia as she pulls the key from her pocket. “Why don’t we go on inside and I’ll show you around.”
As they follow her toward the door, Amelia looks back over her shoulder, feeling like she’s being watched from every window along the street.
Marshboro, Georgia
Seated in a window booth, Gypsy sips her third cup of coffee, craving a cigarette, and stares across the street at the little white house with a blue door.
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