by Melanie Tem
Jamie does not know how he knows these names, but the dead know all the names. The dead have time for names. More and more, Jamie thinks he needs a new name. All the dead need new names.
Danielle will no longer sleep in the same bed with him. She is afraid of waking up with his body lying beside hers. The singing of Eliza’s nvumbi starts and stops all night long.
Sometimes the Miller women leave him and Pierre in the house alone. He sits and watches the electric can opener. He starts the clothes washer and stops it again. He takes off his slippers, throws them into the dryer, starts it, stops it, then puts his slippers back on again. He sits by the window and watches the children on their bicycles.
Pierre sings. Jamie dislikes Pierre’s singing and wants to tell him to stop.
Jamie thinks about the dark tunnel with the light at its end. It will not let him go. It grows inside him, becomes his throat. When he opens his mouth wide he feels the light inside.
Danielle takes Jamie to the grocery store. There is little he feels he can eat: grains, a few vegetables. The thought of raw, dead meat makes him sick. She is careful what she buys; she tells him she will go on a diet just so he won’t suffer watching her eat. She tells him this shows how much she cares.
Jamie knows he must agree. He knows to nod; he forces a slight smile across his lips. But it bothers him.
He picks up a tomato and examines it. Danielle looks at him curiously as he picks up each vegetable in turn and looks at them.
Danielle is angry with him again. She pushes the grocery cart swiftly through the aisles. People stare at Jamie when he chases her, his arms full of vegetables.
Jamie tries but he cannot use the phone. When a voice comes out of the wire, out of the tabled receiver, he cannot pick up the receiver. He cannot touch that detached, lost voice.
Jamie smiles the way he imagines mashed potatoes might smile. The dead can imagine anything.
“I do not want you leaving with that man,” Jamie says hesitantly. “He is no good. He will hurt you. You are too young for him, daughter.”
Eliza looks at her nvumbi father with scorn. Her scorn is so heavy that she doesn’t appear surprised to hear him talk. “Say what? You’re telling me what to do? Nvumbi!” She almost spits the word.
“I am your father. And I don’t … I do not want you to be hurt.”
She looks at him for a moment, as if seeing him for the first time. But then the calm passes, and it is as if the veil has suddenly crossed her face. “Ma told you to say that, right? Make me keep Pierre? Well, ain’t no way!” Pierre stands in Jamie’s old spot, grinning and grinning and grinning. “Stupid nvumbi! I’m gonna get me a real boyfriend!”
Jamie and Pierre watch as Eliza gets in the car with the dark, older man. He cups her breast with his long, slender hand. Jamie can see him putting his tongue into her mouth. He can hear her laughing as if she is flattered, as if she is loved. She is just a child. She knows nothing. She is his child.
Pierre sings a cheerful song. But the dead cannot laugh.
Jamie watches as the car takes his daughter away from him. Pierre sings and sings and sings. Jamie can do nothing. His daughter belongs at home, but Jamie can do nothing. He rubs his hands together slowly, thinking of her beautiful braids.
The dead cannot weep.
For a week Jamie watches over Pierre—feeding him, putting him to bed, covering the nvumbi’s mouth with his hand when Pierre will not stop singing. Danielle and Claudine come into the room now and then to observe the two nvumbi, and are sometimes puzzled, sometimes amused by what they see.
One day a huge yellow Cadillac backs into the alley behind the Miller house. Jamie has been watching it from an upstairs window—it has been backing up toward this house for many blocks. The car door opens and Doctor Lezare climbs out. He opens up the trunk of the car and goes to pick up the singing Pierre from his spot on the back porch. Dr. Lezare sticks his tongue into Pierre’s mouth and eats his song. Then he removes the bottle from his pocket.
In the window above them Jamie watches as the Cadillac drives away with Pierre and Doctor Lezare. He would do something. He would do something.
But the dead do not weep.
Jamie stands quietly in his spot waiting for his daughter to come home. He has stood here many months. He feels the dust collecting on his skin, a sensation like powder, or a butterfly’s brittle wings. He is fully awake now, but still he waits, and thinks of the song he will sing for his daughter, the sweet lullabies his dry lips will kiss into her hair. His wife and his motherin-law pass in and out of this room but they pay him no mind.
For the dead do not speak. And the dead do not weep.
But the dead will wait forever.
THE PERFECT DIAMOND
for Chris
Christopher walked down the street, a free man. Actually, what the guard processing them out of prison had said was, “Free to go.” As if he could go anywhere he wanted, do anything he wanted.
He’d looked to see if the guy was kidding or had an attitude, but he couldn’t tell and it wasn’t worth finding out.
In his mind he’d seen the guard holding a red bird, sort of like a cardinal but really not like any bird he’d ever seen. Then letting the bird go, saying, “You’re free to go!” and the bird trying to fly but falling, falling, until it got so mad about falling all the time that it exploded into a rainbow of trailing colors, a shower of splintered diamonds.
He almost stopped in the middle of the street. He wanted to stop and think about the bird, and, especially, the diamond. Was it part of the bird? Did the bird spit it out? Did the same person or thing that made the bird fall also break the diamond? Or did the bird itself break it, falling, or thinking it could fly in the first place?
But it hurt too much to stop and think about anything, and stopping in the middle of the street was dangerous, so Chris kept walking. He also kept watch, tried to see everything and everyone at once, before they saw him. But he still had the feeling that something was in his face or tailing him, always just one step ahead or behind.
Which was the truth. Which was not his imagination, or him being crazy and he needed to see some shrink, or him being paranoid after almost two years in prison for probation violation when child molesters got maybe six months and his big crime in the first place was taking some hundred-dollar radio from some guy who owed him money anyway. Something was always one step ahead or behind, something with claws and teeth or with a blade thinner and sharper than most people would have thought possible, waiting for its chance to screw things up.
Christopher had known that all his life. At least, as long as he could remember. At least, ever since the diamond got ruined.
He kept his hands in his pockets with his fists lightly closed. In one pocket was his money. After rent and food, there wasn’t a lot left; they didn’t really give you enough to make much of a difference.
In the other pocket was his diamond. He tried to hold the diamond a lot more loosely than he held the money, but he could still feel the flaw. It made him sick. Ever since he was old enough to realize that the diamond was something perfect that had been ruined, the scratch had made him want to puke whenever he let himself think about it very much.
The diamond was all he had left from when he was a kid, and he hadn’t really been a kid for very long. His mom (his birth mom, his real mom, his first mom, Sandy—he didn’t know how to think about her) had given it to him when he was a baby, he guessed, or maybe somehow he’d been born with it, come out of her body with the diamond already there. Sometimes he’d imagined that she was a foreign spy and the diamond was meant to buy bombs or change the balance of power. Or maybe it had belonged to an evil magician and she’d stolen it to protect the world from the magician’s madness. Or maybe she’d taken it from a world-famous jewel thief she’d been dating, and when the time was right she was going to give it back to the museum or the princess it belonged to, and then she’d be famous herself.
Kid stuff. Actually, she’
d probably just ripped it off herself, or found it somewhere. She probably didn’t have any idea how much it was worth. She probably thought it was nothing but glass.
Christopher knew how much it was worth. Even as a kid he’d known it was just about the most valuable thing in the world. He’d kept it under the mattress in his grandparents’ house, and every time his mother came she’d say she wasn’t ever going to leave him again and she’d remind him not to tell Grandma and Grandpa about the diamond; he didn’t know why. He always made the bed up himself and they never figured it out, even though they should have been suspicious because making his bed was the only chore he’d ever been willing to do around there. Sometimes still it made him mad that they’d never figured out he had a diamond.
He’d taken the diamond out only when nobody else was around. That was dumb, leaving a little kid alone in the house like that. But when they were all gone he’d take the diamond out and hold it up to the light and look through it. It was already scratched. If his mother hadn’t kept leaving him it wouldn’t be scratched. But even past the ugly scratch he would see a whole different world, a world where kids lived with their mothers and knew who their fathers were, and there was plenty of food and friends to play with, and you didn’t have to steal—you didn’t even feel like stealing. And you could count on things staying pretty much the way you wanted them.
He didn’t know exactly when or how the diamond got scratched. All he remembered was the terrible sick feeling when he’d reached into his pocket and taken the diamond out to look at in the light and seen that it was spoiled. Ever since then, for almost as long as he could remember, he’d been trying to fix it or at least to make the scratch not matter to him anymore.
It almost made Chris laugh to think of all the stupid things he’d tried. He’d tried being good, because just before he went to his first foster home when his grandparents didn’t want him, Sandy had picked him up and whispered like a secret in his ear that if he was a real good boy the judge would let her have him back again, but it didn’t work and the diamond was still scratched; if his grandparents had kept him it wouldn’t have been. He’d tried being bad, and he did manage to get himself hit a lot and sent to a lot of different foster homes, but the scratch just got deeper and wider and uglier. He’d tried drugs and booze; cocaine especially could sometimes make it seem that the diamond had never been hurt, but no matter how much coke you did or how high the quality you always had to come down sometime. He’d tried stealing, but he never had found another diamond anywhere near as beautiful as his own once had been.
He went into some bar and ordered a beer.
“Chris?”
Damn. Gina was standing in front of him. Looking so good it hurt. In prison he’d tried to imagine her away, to dream that she’d never been. And here she was. It figured that he’d run into Gina on his first day out, in a city of half a million people. He went and sat down, didn’t say anything to her, drank the beer.
“So, how are you, Chris?”
“Hey,” he said. His stomach felt weird, making him mad. “Doin’ terrific, you know? What do you think? Hey, I want my stuff back.”
He saw that she’d been going to sit down with him but now she’d changed her mind. He couldn’t see much of her face, but her body was outlined by the afternoon haze of the bar. She never had been really good-looking, at least what most guys would call good-looking, but she was looking good now, the way she always had.
He’d quit smoking in prison—not because of any strength of character or concern about his health, but because just his luck they’d passed this stupid law while he was in there, no smoking in public buildings, he was sure it was unconstitutional—and now the smoke in here made his throat hurt, made him crave a cigarette. Gina smoked, or she used to, but he wasn’t going to ask her for anything. It had been a long time, and now, against his will, he missed her.
“What stuff?” she demanded. “What are you talking about?”
“My chair. The kitchen table I made. My gray winter jacket.”
“You gave all that to me, you jerk. You said I could have it.”
He’d never much liked it when girls called him names. He wanted to hold her and slap her at the same time. “Yeah, well, I’m out now and I want it all back.”
“Go to hell,” she said, as she’d said a lot of other times, and walked away. Then she stopped, and without turning around—as if she was talking to the door—she said, “You got the perfect diamond. What else do you need?” Then she left.
Chris didn’t follow her. It wasn’t worth it. She spoiled everything. When she treated him like that, he couldn’t imagine her ever loving him, or him ever loving her back. He’d never hit her, no matter how mad she made him. He’d never hit her.
Gina’d had two abortions while they were together, maybe more that he didn’t know about. She hadn’t told him she was pregnant until it was already too late. Not that he could have talked her out of it. Not that he was ready to have kids, either. Usually he could keep himself from thinking about how she’d killed his kids.
He finished his beer and ordered another one. Beer was one of the things he’d looked forward to in prison—for a while he’d imagined that getting out of a prison would be like starting all over, like a second chance at all the little pleasures of childhood. But beer wasn’t cutting it, because when he put his hand in his pocket he could still feel the scratch across the face of the diamond, and he couldn’t stop thinking about how perfect it once had been.
He and Gina had been together for over a year before he’d told her about the diamond, a lot longer than that before he’d showed it to her. She’d touched it with her fingertips, then kissed it, very gently. She’d whispered “give her time,” she’d smooth it out. For a while the scratch hadn’t seemed so deep, and Christopher had dared to hope she really could make it go away.
When he got sent up he’d hidden the diamond and wouldn’t tell her where it was. And he’d been right, because after a few months she’d written him a letter that said she’d always love him but she had to get away from him because he was bringing her down. Then even though he couldn’t see it he’d imagined how the scratch was deeper and uglier than ever, and in order to stop imagining it he’d assaulted a guard and spent thirty days in the hole. Gina had just made things worse.
Christopher could remember—almost consciously, the way some people said they could remember being born—when his diamond really had been perfect. Perfect to look at: silvery and snowy, with rainbows if you held it in the light just right, and hundreds and hundreds of tiny reflections of anything you put on the other side of it. Perfect to the touch: so smooth that your fingertips left their own patterns on it, like pictures in clouds, like shapes made by your own steady heartbeat or your own warm breath. Once he’d looked inside it to find warm rooms with fireplaces, a lazy dog that slept with him every night, a mother who held him with arms that were magical in the way they wrapped around him, a father who read him stories like his dreams.
Finally Chris left the bar. He had a buzz on, but he was not drunk. It was hot. Heat swelled up from the pavement. He’d lived in this town all his life except the two years in prison and the six weeks he and Gina had tried living in Phoenix but neither one of them could stand the sand or the heat or being away from their families. There was nothing for him here, but there was nothing for him anywhere else, either.
“Christopher!”
He glanced around but didn’t see anybody who should know him.
“Chris!”
He peered into a store window, as if the voice could be coming out of the glass. He squinted into the confusing reflection and saw his dad hurrying toward him, waving. His dad who’d adopted him, the only person he’d ever called dad.
Turning around so he could see better, Christopher wondered, briefly, what it must be like to meet your son downtown who’d just gotten out of prison. No son of his was ever going to prison. He’d see to that.
Before his father could
reach him, three kids went between them on skateboards, maybe nine years old. One of them came back, walking, walked up behind Christopher and offered him a joint, grinning at him in the window. Christopher took the joint without turning around. The kid held out his hand. Chris slapped it away. Kid wasn’t even ten years old. Bad things happen to kids before they were even ten years old.
By the time he was ten years old Chris had been left more times than he could count, and his diamond was a mess. Then when he was ten he got adopted. His parents (adopted parents, real parents, forever parents—he didn’t know how to think about them either) had loved him. They still loved him. He loved them, too, and he loved his adopted brother and sisters. Because of the love, he’d kept waiting for the diamond to be made perfect again, for the scratch to be taken away. But it was already too late. His perfect diamond had already been spoiled, and his adoptive parents hadn’t loved him enough.
His dad stopped a step or two away. Taller than he was. Paler. They didn’t look anything alike. Not knowing what else to do, Christopher held out his hand, but his father put his arms around his waist in a hug and Chris hugged him back. He noticed right away that his dad had put on weight. He wasn’t taking care of himself, wasn’t eating right. He always did drink too much, pop.
“Good to see you,” his father said over his shoulder. Then—as if he didn’t know what else to do, or as if it was really true, he said again, “It’s good to see you.”
Christopher stepped back, looking at his dad, who had this silly grin on his face, like a clown or something. And he was shrugging his shoulders as if he had no idea what more to say. And his eyes looked funny, as if he was about to start crying.
