by Wiley Cash
Colleen followed her father and Mr. Bellamy through the front door and into the living room of a home that was comfortably furnished. Immediately, Colleen got the sense of this being Rodney and his wife’s first home, and although the house that she and Scott had purchased together in Dallas was very different, this home still carried with it the same luster of hope and possibility that she and Scott had invested in theirs. Colleen’s chest seized with awful and terrifying grief, for both the loss she felt in her own life and the loss she knew Rodney’s widow must be feeling, and she found herself desperate to see Scott, to touch him, to hear his voice.
But then Rodney’s widow appeared, a beautiful young woman in a well-fitted purple dress with a made-up face and well-set hair, smiling, wiping her hands dry on a towel that she tossed on the counter, reaching for Colleen’s hand and holding it and shaking it firmly, the woman’s clothes or body or hair smelling faintly of something clean and soft, like vanilla or powder. Janelle introduced herself, and when she let go of Colleen’s hand, a smile still on her face, Colleen placed the scent of what she had just smelled: baby. Janelle Bellamy smelled like her baby. She fought the urge to raise the hand that Janelle had just shaken and smell it to see if it too now smelled like a baby, but she knew there was no way to do that without looking strange and rude. But she was desperate for another whiff of that scent, which ran through her body like a drug she unknowingly had been craving and now knew she couldn’t live without.
Colleen had known that Rodney and his wife had a baby—Winston had told her that just a few days ago—so of course she knew a baby would be in the house somewhere. But how had she forgotten? Her eyes quickly scanned the room for the child or any signs of it: a pacifier, toys, a blanket or a bottle; but there was nothing there.
Janelle looked from Colleen to Winston. “Can I get y’all something?” she asked. “Coffee or a glass of tea?”
“No, no,” Winston said. “We don’t want to take too much of your time.” He paused and looked over at Colleen where she stood to his right. “I have a few questions I have to ask, just formalities really, and Colleen came along . . .” His voice trailed off, and it was clear that he was thinking about how best to frame her visit. “She was friends with Rodney.”
“Rodney and I went to high school together,” Colleen said. “Mr. Bellamy was my teacher.” Janelle nodded her head and tried her best to smile at them both, and in that moment, Colleen felt like a child standing in her jeans and Keds in front of this put-together woman who had a child and who’d already lost a husband.
“Well, thank you for coming,” Janelle said. She gestured toward the sofa.
Colleen and her father sat down, and Janelle sat in a blue armchair to Colleen’s left. Bellamy sat in a matching chair to Colleen’s father’s right.
“Are you sure I can’t get you anything?” Janelle asked.
“No,” Winston said, “but thank you.” He sat, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his hands clenched tight together. “Now, Mrs. Bellamy, I know—”
“Please,” she said, “call me Janelle.”
“Miss Janelle,” he began.
“No, please,” she said, “just Janelle. I prefer just Janelle.”
“Okay,” Winston said. He seemed flustered, embarrassed, and Colleen could not remember him ever coming across that way in front of her. It made her feel relaxed and in control, as if she might have to step in and manage or redirect any awkwardness Winston might reveal. Now she understood why he’d wanted to bring her with him. He needed her, and it felt good to play a role for someone, to be relied upon. She looked to the right across the small glass coffee table at Bellamy while Winston spoke with Janelle. Mr. Bellamy was no longer the gruff, demanding history teacher he’d been when she was a teenager. His eyes flicked to hers, and his mouth, which had been slack while he looked at Colleen’s father, now flattened itself into a hard, straight line once his eyes met hers.
“Janelle,” Winston said, “I’ve spoken with Ed about what happened out here at your home night before last, and I want to apologize to you as the sheriff of this county. No one deserves to go through something like that, especially after what you’ve all been through.” He paused as if giving Janelle the room to say something, but she remained silent. “The deputy who answered the call without reporting it has been fired from the sheriff’s office. I understand that Captain Glenn Haste has interviewed you and your brother, and I want you to know that my office will continue to look into—”
“It was Bradley Frye,” Bellamy said.
Colleen’s father turned to face him. “Ed, let me finish.”
“There’s nothing to look into, Winston.”
Winston turned back to Janelle. “My office will continue to look into what happened, and if I find the person who broke that window, I will arrest that person. Until then, I can’t do anything but warn people away from doing something like that again.”
“That’s not enough,” Bellamy said.
“That’s all I can do, Ed.”
“That’s not enough,” Bellamy said again.
“No one could be identified, Ed.”
“I saw Bradley Frye’s truck flying through here in the middle of the night with that goddamned flag on the back of it.”
“I can’t arrest him for that.”
Janelle spoke up as if attempting to break the impasse. “It’s okay,” she said. “I understand. Let’s just—” She waved her hands in front of her as if signaling Colleen’s father to continue.
“Janelle,” Winston said, “I hate to have to ask you questions about what happened to Rodney, but I do. They’re just going to be routine questions that should be easy to answer, but you take all the time you need.”
Janelle inhaled as if she were preparing to do something physical. For the first time, Colleen noticed that Janelle had a tissue wadded up in her hand, and she figured Janelle must be carrying them in her pockets all the time now, having become adept at removing and using them discreetly.
“Can you tell me about the last time you saw Rodney?”
Janelle exhaled the breath she must have been holding, and she turned to look at her father-in-law. He nodded, his mouth even tighter and straighter than it had been before. She began.
“We’d been up late with the baby,” she said. “He was colicky, a lot of crying, fussy.” She looked down at her lap and paused for a moment. “Rodney was good with him when he was like that. Sometimes he could calm him down, get him settled.” Her face drew in on itself in a way that pinched off whatever words she may have planned to say next. She lifted her hand that held the tissue and dabbed at one of her eyes and then her nose.
Janelle gathered herself and raised her face to Colleen’s father, her countenance having taken on a look completely absent of the emotion they all knew she had just taken a moment or two to suppress, and Colleen found herself high on the realization that someone else’s tragedy was not hers.
“I went back to bed,” Janelle said, “but I could hear them across the hall, Rodney singing and talking to the baby. He finally got him down and came into the bedroom. I guess he could tell I was still awake. He told me he wouldn’t be able to sleep so he was going to get diapers from the store.”
“Did you need diapers?” Winston asked.
For a moment, Janelle appeared betrayed, as if Winston had not believed what she’d just said, but Colleen watched Janelle’s face settle again, perhaps thinking, This man has no idea how many diapers you need. “Yes, we needed diapers,” she finally said. “We always need diapers.”
“Which store did he go to?” Winston asked.
“The Food Lion,” she said. “Up on Beach Road.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Winston said.
“It’s right up the road from the airport,” Bellamy added. “He probably saw that plane come in.”
“Did he seem strange or worried or upset when he left?” Colleen’s father asked.
“No,” Janelle said. “He
seemed normal. He seemed like himself.”
“Did he have any friends who were in trouble, or had he started to hang around with anybody who seemed like trouble to you?”
“Oh, come on,” Bellamy said. He shook his head and looked at the front door for a moment.
“It’s okay, Ed,” Janelle said. She looked at Winston. “No,” she said. “No new friends, no one who seemed like trouble.”
“Did you get the sense that he was scared of anyone?”
Bellamy stood up from the armchair. “Excuse me,” he said.
“It’s okay, Ed,” Janelle said again. “These are just questions.”
Bellamy stepped around the coffee table, his back turned to the three of them. He had his hands in his pockets, and Colleen could see that he was clenching and unclenching them, the cotton fabric of his pants tightening and untightening around his thighs each time his fingers moved. He stared down at the carpet.
“Ed,” Janelle said.
Without turning, Bellamy raised his head as if he were going to speak, but he must’ve decided against it. Instead he took one of his hands out of his pocket and opened the front door.
“I’ll wait outside,” he said before pulling the door closed behind him.
Colleen, her father, and Janelle all sat in silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” Janelle said. “He’s just—” But she stopped talking as if unsure of how to explain what her father-in-law was feeling and what had just happened.
“It’s okay,” Winston said. “I can’t imagine what he’s been through, what y’all have been through.”
Janelle nodded her head as if she’d heard what Winston had said, but Colleen knew she wasn’t really listening. Janelle had kept her eyes locked on the door after Bellamy closed it behind him, and Colleen knew what she was thinking: Ed Bellamy was now her only link to this place. Sure, Janelle had her baby, but the baby would keep her at home, anchored there, marooned away from the world. Colleen couldn’t help but think about her own life back in Dallas, especially her life after they lost the baby: the long, interminable hours of daylight between the time when Scott left for work and the time he returned home, Colleen wandering the house that now seemed more like a fortress of solitude than a home, all the while feeling alternately enraged and forlorn at the idea that she and Scott could have ever made a life—much less had a family—there. Colleen shifted in her seat and shook her own life from her mind. Winston had returned to his questions, and Janelle’s eyes had left the door and settled again on his face.
“Did you ever get the sense that Rodney was in debt, that maybe he owed people money?”
Janelle laughed a little, not at the absurdity of the question, but at the absurdity of what it seemed to imply.
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. Rodney had a great job with Brunswick Electric. They loved him, and he loved it. That job was what brought us back home.” She stopped talking for a moment while her gaze took in the small living room around her as if she were making an inventory of the things inside it. “I wouldn’t have let him take me out of Atlanta for just any job.”
“Is that where y’all met?” Winston asked.
“Yes,” Janelle said.
“At Morehouse? He went to Morehouse, right?”
“Morehouse is a men’s university,” she said.
“Oh,” Winston said. “Is there a women’s?”
“Yes,” Janelle said. “Spelman. But I graduated from Emory.”
Janelle kept her eyes on Winston as if the mention of the university might carry weight or mean something to him, but Colleen knew it wouldn’t, not because he didn’t believe in education or wasn’t impressed by credentials, but because he didn’t know enough about that world to extrapolate any differences between Morehouse and Spelman and Emory. Colleen knew that to people like her father college was a place where one went to learn something particular, perhaps peculiar, and one school was as good as another. But Colleen knew better. “What did you major in?” she asked, her voice coming out too clear, too bright.
“I double majored,” Janelle said, “in journalism and communications. I was either going to write about the news or deliver it on television.” She laughed and looked down at her hands, the tissue still clenched tight. “I got an internship at CNN, and I thought I was on my way. And then I met Rodney, got married, had the baby, and we moved here instead.”
She raised her eyes to Colleen, and Colleen wondered what to read in her face. Irony? Sadness? Resignation? Colleen had the urge to tell her that it would all be okay, that she could go back to work in the career she had not yet begun, but she fought the urge because she knew how it felt to hear those things when people said them to her as if it were easy for women to start and stop, to have children or to lose them, to rely on a husband who might be out of the house for twelve hours a day or for the rest of your life. Janelle didn’t need to hear any empty consolations from people like Colleen any more than Colleen needed to hear them.
Instead, Colleen offered an affirming nod at what Janelle had said, and her face slid into an apologetic smile as she asked Janelle if she could use the restroom.
“Of course,” Janelle said. She turned in her seat and pointed at the hallway behind her. “It’s the first door on the right, just down the hallway there.”
Colleen stood and excused herself.
She heard Winston resume his questions as she closed the bathroom door. When she flipped the switch, the light over the sink came on, as did the exhaust fan, drowning out the sound of her father’s voice.
Colleen ran a trickle of water in the sink and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. She put her elbows on her knees, dropped her head into her hands. How did she get here? How had her life taken this turn? She heard something coming through the wall to her right, something low and muffled moving just beneath the purr of the exhaust fan in the ceiling above her. It was music.
She stood and turned off the water, and then she flushed the toilet and flipped the light switch so that the room was quiet and lit only by the glow of sunlight that came in through the closed blinds on the window behind the toilet. She recognized the song coming through the wall, although she couldn’t place it. She wondered if Janelle had left the music on or if someone else was in the house.
She opened the door into the hallway, expecting to find the source of the music, but instead, directly across the hall, she saw a powder-blue wall peeking out from behind a cracked door. And then she heard the soft and unmistakable coo of a baby. She shuffled the three or so feet across the hallway, opened the cracked door a little farther, and peeked inside.
She found what she’d both wanted to find and feared finding. Pale blue walls; an old, weathered rocking chair in the corner; and a white, spindled crib with a swaddled baby boy inside. He was lying on his back with one hand worked free and a tiny fist inserted into his mouth, where his gums worked vigorously against his knuckles. Like all babies, his cheeks were full, and his eyes, even though they were dark, were glimmering with light. Black hair had begun to fill out across his small head, and his skin, which was the same tone as Janelle’s, was smooth and crying out to be touched. Aside from her own son, who, strangely, had not crossed her mind in this moment yet was always on her mind, this child was the most beautiful thing Colleen had ever seen.
She found herself pulled across the room as if she were floating, until she stood by the crib in such proximity to the baby that she couldn’t help but reach a finger down into the crib and allow his wet, warm fingers to wrap around it. It was as if she’d taken a hit of some powerful drug; her body felt alive and awake, perfectly attuned to life and all its attendant hopes and limitless possibilities. Which is why, later, when she would look back on this moment, Colleen would be shocked to realize that she had not heard her father open the front door to step outside to talk to Mr. Bellamy. Nor had she heard Janelle stand from her chair and walk down the hallway and into her son’s room, where she would find a woman, a stranger she’
d only just met, standing in the middle of the room and reaching down into the crib and taking her child’s hand without permission.
Who did I think I was? Colleen would ask herself later. That question must have been similar to the one Janelle asked herself in that moment, but the words she chose—“Is he awake?”—were not a direct indictment of Colleen’s trespass, but the tone Janelle wrapped around those words certainly was, and Colleen flinched when she heard the woman’s voice.
She pulled her finger out of the baby’s grip, her hand recoiling back toward her body as if the crib were a tank of murky water and an alligator had just emerged from its depths and snapped at her. The sudden movement scared the baby, and he began to cry. Colleen’s body spun toward Janelle where she stood in the doorway, and Colleen saw that she had already set out across the room, her eyes locked on her baby. Colleen stepped away from the crib, and Janelle leaned over the side and scooped the baby from the mattress.
“I’m so sorry,” Colleen said. For all of it, she wanted to add. For sneaking into the room, for touching Janelle’s child, for making him cry.
“It’s okay,” Janelle whispered, but Colleen didn’t know if Janelle was talking to her or the baby.
“I didn’t mean to scare him,” Colleen said. “I shouldn’t even have come in here.”
“It’s okay,” Janelle said again, this time clearly speaking to Colleen. Janelle bounced the baby in her arms and made her way toward the rocking chair, where she sat down and lowered the straps on her dress and bra and then raised the baby to her breast. He began to nurse.
The intimacy of the scene pained Colleen, and her own breasts began to ache as if remembering a sensation she had never experienced. She thought her heart was going to explode with grief. She was embarrassed to know that she had made the baby cry, and even more embarrassed to witness—aside from birth itself—the most private and maternal moment a woman can share with her child. She turned toward the door.
