"Thank you," I said, "Merci."
"Merci," she repeated, nodding and smilina. I opened the note.
Dear Summer,
I had to leave with my father early to get to his job site. I checked on you all night, but you were sleeping so soundly, I didn't want to wake you. Same this morning. We should be back by four. I know you are going to call your parents today. I'd like to ask a favor. Please don't tell them exactly where we are just yet. I need this day with my dad and I know if they find out where we are, your mother will tell Roy for sure and they'll either come get us or call the police to come get us and ruin it all. I know its mean of me to ask you to do this but it would be just for another day. If you can't, you can't.I'll understand.
Love, Harley
I expected Harley was right about what Mommy would do and certainly what Roy might do, but it wasn't going to be easy to keep such information from her. I hoped I could make her understand. If she wasn't so angry at me, that is. I thought and got myself moving. I dabbed my face in cold water and after going to the bathroom. started down the stairs. I heard Suze humming some Haitian melody as she cleaned the house. Going directly into the kitchen. I picked up the receiver and dialed for an operator. I listened, but I didn't hear any ringing. so I tried again and listened. I pressed the hook up and down and dialed and listened. Still. all I heard was silence so I went to find Suze.
She was dusting in the living room.
"Excuse me," I said and she stopped humming and working and turned to me.
"The phone doesn't seem to work. Is there something wrong with it?"
She pressed her lips together and walked to the kitchen. I hobbled behind her and watched her lift the receiver and listen after she had dialed the operator, too. Then she cradled it and shook her head.
"It be dead again. Out of order," she recited. "Thunderstorm last night probably do it down."
"Well. when will it be fixed?""
"Soon, maybe. Maybe not so soon," she replied. She started back to the living room.
"Well, is there any place else nearby with a phone that would work?'
"The grocery store on the corner has a phone," she said. "Pay phone."
"Okay."
I took a deep breath and started for the front door. "You need rest," she advised.
"As soon as I do this," I said. "Merci."
She shook her head and returned to her work. I opened the door and went out. The sky was quite overcast now. The break in the clouds that we had earlier had completely disappeared and there was a stronger breeze. I could almost feel the rain coming. It was a typical summer thunderstorm day where it would rain in isolated areas for a while and then move on to another area. I might get caught in it. I thought. but I have to call Mommy. I can't let her worry another minute.
I moved as quickly as I could while still keeping off my left foot. If I did put it down too hard, my ankle immediately complained. Thankfully, it wasn't that far to the grocery store. I could see the pay phone on the outside wall near the door. The moment I lifted the receiver and dialed for the operator. I knew this phone was out of order. too. My heart sank. I had to get in touch with my parents. I had to.
I entered the grocery store. There was only a short fat man sitting behind the deli counter. He had a round, pockmarked face with thinning light brown hair, but thick sideburns. He looked up at me through thick-lensed glasses, which made his eyes look like they bulged, resembling fish eyes.
"Can I help you?" he asked with a face of curiosity. After all, how many strangers on a crutch came into his store? I thought,
"I need to make an important phone call and the phone in the house I'm in doesn't work and your pay phone doesn't work," I explained.
He smirked.
"Oh. Well, we had a bad electric storm early this morning and the lines are dead."
"When will they be fixed?"
"I don't know. Sometimes it takes hours and hours.' "There isn't a phone here that works?"
"I don't know," he said. "Probably not," he added. "Where are you staying?"
"At Mr. Victor's house," I replied.
"Oh," he said. Then he grimaced and added. "Maybe he just didn't pay his phone bill again. I'm tired of taking calls for him. You can tell him Stuart said so."
"If your phone's dead, too, then his isn't dead because he didn't pay his bill," I pointed out.
"Maybe," he said. "know long has it been dead?"
"Well, it was working a few days ago. I know that." I said feeling a pain through my temples. Why was I standing here arguing with him? There was something so irritating about his tone of voice that his arrogant manner made me want to defeat him.
"You said it yourself. A few days ago. Between then and now, they might have turned off his phone. Once, he had his electric turned off. too. What are you, a relative?" he asked, turning the corner of his mouth down with disgust.
"I'm a friend of a relative." I said.
"Lucky for you," he quipped and looked down at whatever he was reading. From what I could see of it, it looked like either Playboy or something close to it.
"Thanks. Sorry to have interrupted you," I said and left to the sound of his grunt.
When I stepped out, I felt some raindrops and hurried back toward the house. I got caught in a sprinkle just as I was turning down the walk. However, the sprinkle turned into a regular cloudburst before I reached the steps. I gasped and cried out, swinging my crutch ahead of me. One of the stones was already slick and the bottom of the crutch slipped off, causing me to lose my balance when it shot out. I fell into the bushes and then sat hard on my rear. The rain got even heavier.
Gasping. I shouted for help and worked myself to my feet. By the time I got up the steps and under the porch roof. which leaked. I was soaked to the skin. I practically lunged for the door, but it was locked. I pounded hard and finally Suze came to it.
"Look you now. I said so." she remarked. "'You need to get clothes off quickly and not track in all that mud, too. I just done washing the floor."
She shut the door.
"Wait." she said and rushed down the hallway. Moments later, she was back with a towel and started to rub my hair vigorously. I had to stop her because she was so rough, Then she started to help me take off my clothes.
"I get these dry," she said as she gathered my jeans and my blouse. My bra and panties were wet as well. She waited, beckoning me to give my
undergarments to her. I did so quickly and wrapped the towel around me. Then I moved as quickly as I could to the stair.vay and went up to my room. I got out some new clothes: another pair of jeans and a sweatshirt along with another pair of panties. Then I went into the bathroom to clean up.
I considered taking a warm bath and stripped off my Ace bandage so I could use it again. Then I started to fill the tub. What a mess I was in. I thought. Everything I do to try to make it better, just makes it worse. However, once I lowered myself into the warm water. I immediately relaxed. It was so soothing. It even helped my ankle. I closed my eyes and just enjoyed the soak. imagining I was back home, back in my own luxurious bathroom. Soon I would go downstairs to one of Mrs. Geary's wonderful lunches. If you pretend hard enough. I thought, maybe you could make it happen.
Of course, it didn't. but I did feel better. The rain would stop. The phone line would be fixed. and Id be able to call Mommy and Daddy. They'd understand. They'd be happy to hear from me. Harley would get to know his father and all would be well.
Why. I wondered, did that sound so much like someone's fairy-tale hope?
It wouldn't be all that much longer before I would find out.
12
The Shrine
.
It suddenly occurred to me that here I was in
some strange house daydreaming in a bathtub, but daydreams were really no more than cobwebs easily tearing under us and dropping us back into reality, and the reality was that I was in a place so different from my home, I could be on Mars!
The water was warm
enough and clean enough, but the tub was old and chipped and stained with rust. The faucet dripped no matter how hard I tightened the handles. The linoleum on the floor was torn and cracked as well as faded. The walls around me were crying out for a coat of paint like some naked child in a snowstorm crying for clothes and warmth, but mostly crying for loving concern.
Harley's father lived here with his Haitian woman. However, they didn't treat this home with love and respect. They weren't half as proud of it as Harley was. and Harley had just seen it for the first time yesterday.
All of these thoughts left me cold, even in the tepid bath. I had seen and heard enough to start a small drip of ice down my spine. Harley won't be happy here. I concluded. He won't find the father he's never had or the family he thought was just waiting to embrace him as soon as he showed up on their doorstep. There wasn't really much of a doorstep, and no one had put out the welcome mat the way I would have wanted it put out for me. If they had, it would probably have been a shredded, torn and faded thing anyway. I concluded.
Hopefully. Harley would realize all this for himself, and when he returned from work with his father, he would come to me and almost
apologetically say, "Let's go home. Summer. Let's go now."
Surely it was too weird here to stay much longer. His father had only vague memories of his mother. and Suze was truly from another world, spoke another language and lived with a much different set of ideas and beliefs. Harley would feel like a stranger in this house.
I was sure I'd soon be calling Mommy from the road to tell her we were on our way back.
"We just had to see for ourselves," I would say. "You understand. Mommy. I know you do. Now it will be easier for Harley to go on."
When I arrived home. I knew she would welcome me proudly, proud that I had helped Harley.
"You frightened us," she would say. "but you did a nice thing for someone you care about. and I guess I can't fault you for that."
Was I daydreaming again, imagining it all and wishing too hard?
My reverie ended when I heard Suze in the upstairs hallway. What she hummed wasn't exactly a song so much as it was a chant. Unexpectedly, she opened the bathroom door and stopped the moment she saw me.
"Excusez-moi," she muttered. "Excuse. Pardonnez-moi, but me need to get water."
She held up her pail and mop.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'll get out now. I'm finished anyway."
She didn't step out. She stood in the doorway and waited, watching me lift myself up and out of the tub as carefully as I could. I reached quickly for my towel and wrapped it around myself. I didn't consider myself an overly bashful person. but I still had modesty, especially in front of someone who had such searching eyes. She looked like she was judging every bone in my body.
"You not be one to have many children." she remarked, shaking her head.
"Why not?" I asked.
With her free hand, she made a gesture over her hip bone and across her abdomen.
"Not good for many children,"
"I don't want many children anyway. Just two."
"Bon, " she said nodding.
She wasn't going to leave so I started to dry myself, glancing at her furtively.
"What about you?" I fired back at her. "Have you any children?"
"Oui."
"You do? How many?" She held up one finger. "A boy or a girl?"
"Boy," she said.
"Well, where is he?" I asked, clipping on my bra and slipping my arms through the sleeves of my blouse.
"Downstairs," she replied.
"Downstairs?" Obviously, she wasn't
understanding me. I thought. I shook my head.
"No, where does he live now?"
"Downstairs," she repeated.
I paused.
"Downstairs? Where. downstairs?"
"In my holy room," she said. "I'll show you when you are ready."
She stepped farther into the bathroom. I sat on the closed toilet seat, refitted my bandage over my ankle and slipped on my sneakers while she emptied the tub and then stuck her pail under the faucet to fill it with warm water.
Holy room? What was she talking about?
When I was completely dressed. I reached for my crutch. She went out, set the pail on the floor and nodded at the stairway. Nervously. I started down.
Why had I even asked her about children?
When I reached the bottom, she moved past me, into the kitchen, beckoning for me to follow. We went through the kitchen to what I had thought was the pantry, but turned out to be another room.
What I saw made my skin crinkle up and down my body. A half-dozen large black candles provided the only light. The room wasn't very big, but it was crowded with charms and bones, dolls, and bunches of feathers and hair and what I was positive were snakeskins. There was a human shill on a center table and beside it was a chair upon which sat a large jug. On the floor beside the chair were two sets of crossed brooms. There were candles on the floor as well, lighting the ends of a strange design drawn in some sort of bone-colored chalk.
"I don't understand." I managed to say.
"My son be gone. His soul be in there."
"Where?"
"The jug. We must bring back the souls of our loved ones and safeguard them. The chair on which the jug sits belongs to Legba, the god of the crossroads, who controls passing between the living world and the world of the dead."
"Your son is in the jug?" I muttered. She nodded.
"That's not his... not... his skull, is it?" I asked nearly gulping in fear of her response.
She shook her head.
"It be the skull of an ancestor who guards and protects. too."
"How did your son die?"
"His lungs go bad," she said putting her hand over her breast,
"How old was he?"
"Five."
"Five? How terrible. I'm sorry."
She nodded.
"I've got to do the floors upstairs now," she told me and closed the door.
I watched her walk away and looked at the door to the holy room. What was really in that jug? It gave me the shivers to think about it, about everything in that room. I got myself a glass of water and tried the telephone again, hoping to speak to Mommy. It was still dead and the rain had turned into a steady downpour. It beat against the windows and on the roof now, sounding more like hail. How even more dreary and dark the house itself appeared when it rained. I wandered through it, looking at the other rooms, each of which was as drab as the one before, the furniture as worn as that in the living room and the dining room.
The television set was not working either. That line was down. too. In this out-of-the-way place, everything seemed to fall apart so easily, I thought. Still nervous. I searched for ways to distract myself. It would still be hours before Harley returned, unless the weather where they were was just as bad and made it impossible to work. I was hoping for that.
On my way back through the hallway to sit in the living room and wait. I realized there was a door beside the scratched and chipped dark walnut cabinet. The door was so narrow and the paint so faded on both the wall and the door that it was easy to walk right by and not notice it. I imagined it was just a closet. but I opened it anyway and was surprised to see a short stairway down. Perhaps it was a wine cellar. I thought.
Just before I closed the door. I saw the light switch and flipped it. A very low wattage overhead bulb threw dim illumination over the half-dozen steps. I was about to turn the light off and close the door when I noticed a picture on the wall directly opposite the short stairway at the base. It was in a pearl oval frame and the young man in the picture so resembled Harley, I couldn't ignore it.
I paused, listened and heard Suze still upstairs, chanting and working. so I edged myself carefully down the stairway to look more closely at the picture. What a remarkable resemblance. I thought. Was this Harley's father at a young age? He had his hair short, almost military style and wore a shirt and a tie. Yet. as I stu
died the picture longer. I thought the face in it was too handsome for the man I had met. The man in this picture had Harley's mouth as well as his jaw and his ears. In short, there was a much closer
resemblance.
Do people's features change so much as they grow older? I wondered, What difference does it make anyway? I thought. It doesn't change my feelings about his father and this place.
As I turned to go back up. I saw a half-dozen cartons on the floor. They were open, some of their contents overflowing. Most of it was old papers, legal-looking documents, but I saw more pictures on another carton. I knelt down and started to sift through them.
There were many pictures of a young couple enjoying a vacation to what looked like Disney World. In most of the pictures a little boy held onto the hand of a woman I imagined to be his mother. The little boy looked like he could have been Harley. That's how close the resemblance was. Of course. I didn't recognize the woman. but I thought she had a soft beauty. In other pictures, she looked more troubled and in none of them did she look directly at the camera. Her eyes were always shifted in another direction. In some pictures, she seemed to be covering her face deliberately by raising her arm or twisting her shoulder.
There was, however, one good head shot that revealed she had hazel eyes, light brown hair and almost perfectly symmetrical diminutive features. She wasn't smiling in this one either. She looked almost hypnotized, staring without expression.
The house in the background in most of the pictures of the young men, young woman and little boy was different from this one. There were pictures of other people, some alongside the man, woman and child, and then there were pictures of the child at what was obviously his birthday party.
They weren't taking very good care of these photographs. I thought. Some were already torn or bent and many were fading from the dampness. Even the carton itself looked like it was about to collapse. I put it all back, stacking the pictures more carefully than they had been, and then I glanced at the carton on the right. It wasn't as frill and it looked like it contained old newspapers. Were they of some historic value? I wondered and glanced at the issue on the top. The date was only twelve years back. Why save this?