Like bandits, they crept up the stairs. Dawit held Kira’s hand so she wouldn’t betray them and go leaping into the open bedroom doorway. Safely hidden around the corner, he brought his clarinet to his lips and began to breathe out the soulful melody of “My Funny Valentine,” one of Jessica’s favorite songs. He allowed the resonance of the deep, long notes to pierce the air, then took deep breaths to begin the next strains. The music overpowered the chatter from the news on her television set.
Jessica leaped out of bed and ran out of the room to find the source of the music. She was still in bedclothes, a faded T-shirt that reached her thighs. He could see the loose curves of her bare breasts beneath the thin material, the spread of her hips, and he longed to drop to his knees and kiss every smooth inch of her torso. Even with her hair uncombed, sticking straight up near her temples, she was impossible to resist. She stood riveted with a smile.
When the song was finished, Kira cheered and clapped. Jessica clapped too, squinting in confusion. “David … when did you …”
“My old clarinet from college. Got it from an antiques shop in Cambridge. I haven’t seen it in ages.”
“Amazing,” Jessica said, still intrigued. She touched the instrument, then drew her hand away as though she were afraid of harming it. “I mean, you sound good. I can’t believe you never told me you play. What else don’t I know about you?”
He winked at her and kissed her lips lightly, then whispered in her ear. “You don’t know how horny I get when I play.”
“Really?” she said, kissing his earlobe in response. Her warm breath lingered there, journeying to his loins until he squirmed. She also lowered her voice to a breath. “Well, you don’t know how horny I get when I’m serenaded.”
“I can’t hear!” Kira complained.
Jessica and Dawit ignored her, sharing a playful gaze. That night, for the first time since Peter’s death, they made love. Dawit would not let her rest until she was whimpering his name.
15
One Sunday Jessica decided, with unexpected resolve, that she would drag her butt back in to work the next week. She’d been away nearly three weeks, munching on Doritos, gaining weight, half reading books, avoiding church, reflecting on her life, and she decided it was enough. She couldn’t just run away.
David and Kira were at the Dade County Youth Fair. Jessica had planned to go with them, but at the last minute the promise of an empty house overshadowed her desire to be a good sport. She’d outgrown the fair and its farm smells, loud music, and expensive snack foods. She loved rides, but hated lines. Better for David to go. He had more patience. She didn’t know where in the world he got it from.
Strolling beneath her neighborhood’s hundred-year-old live oaks with Teacake slung agreeably across her shoulder, Jessica felt lonely. More than lonely. She felt alone. At midafternoon, Night Song’s voice was quiet. The day was hot, and the shade only makebelieve. The cooler weather was probably behind them now; the climate was charging into a mean summertime mode on the eve of spring.
“Guess I won’t be writing that book,” she said aloud, surprising herself with the straightforwardness in her voice. It wasn’t the statement itself that made her happy; it was her ability to say it and live with it. Honor Thy Father and Mother had been Peter’s book, both in inception and inspiration. Without Peter, it felt like a dress fitting two sizes too big.
She could write a book more true to herself. She’d always wanted to write a memoir about her great-grandfather Lucius Benton, who’d come to Miami from the Bahamas to work on Henry Flagler’s railroads. She’d been told his name could be found on the 1896 charter that incorporated Miami into a city. Jessica had always meant to sit down with her mother and pay close attention to all of the stories about her most immediate ancestors. It was time to do it. She wouldn’t need a book leave. She could do it in her spare time and bring Kira along to hear Grandma’s stories too. Wasn’t that the only way the stories got passed along? She couldn’t keep waiting forever.
Today would not be a crying day, Jessica realized, and she passed the granite Tequesta ground marker on the hill across the street from their house. Even when the image of the bloody Mustang tried to assault her, she fought it away. Instead, she remembered the troll Peter had given her, which she’d hidden from sight in the closet, and smiled.
Was she finally coping with losing him?
This had been hard, harder than she’d imagined anything could be. How would she ever survive if something happened to David? She wouldn’t, that was all. Jessica still couldn’t understand how in the world Bea had managed.
Her father’s death had destroyed their family, in small bits falling out of place. Alexis nearly flunked out of school that year, locking herself in her room and discovering the escape of marijuana with her friends. And Bea was always sad and nearly always silent, never trying to make anyone laugh with her flip comments. She’d had to take a second job, and she never wanted to sit still anymore. After the accident, Jessica couldn’t help feeling she’d lost her mother too.
It wasn’t until her senior year in college, finally grown, that Jessica had felt enough like her mother’s friend to finally ask her what she’d gone through when she was widowed.
“There’s a lot of hurt in life, Jessica,” Bea had said, almost matter-of-factly. “My mother had a hard life. A very hard life. You remember the story.”
Jessica nodded. After her grandmother’s funeral two months before, Jessica had been shocked when Bea told her that Grammy had been raped by her white employer in Quincy. She’d gotten pregnant, and Grandpa, a pastor, wouldn’t hear of an abortion, even if it had been legal. So, she had a son—Bea’s brother, Jessica’s Uncle Joe. Grammy and Bea were so light themselves that no one paid any attention to how fair-skinned the new child was, and Grandpa always claimed Joe was his. As far as Jessica knew, only the women in the family ever told the story, passing on a painful heirloom.
Bea went on: “For the longest time, after my mother told me that, I looked at her differently. The way you look at someone who’s lived through something you can’t imagine. The most severe test of all. But see, my mother never saw it like that. She treated Joe exactly the way she did me, like he was a blessing. So there is light, but only if you can see past the pain.”
“Did you ever see a light, Mom? After Daddy?”
Bea had given Jessica a fragile, wounded smile. Then, she sighed. “Seemed like I spent whole days cursing the Lord out, just asking why. Raymond was the kind of man who, after you met him, made any other man ruined in your eyes. He was that to me. What did I learn? I learned I could lose even that and still survive. One day I looked in the mirror and thought, hardly believing it, I’m all right. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? I wouldn’t have minded living my whole life without knowing it, but I guess it’s something. My mother used to say to me that she collected sorrows and put them in her pocket. Walking around with them that way, by and by, you just learn to carry them all a bit better, to stand up a bit straighter. That’s all life is, on this earth anyway. You’ll see it, too, when your trials come. I wish I could tell you they won’t come, Jessica, but they always do.”
That’s exactly what Jessica was afraid of. Losing her father had ended her childhood, but the rest of her life had been so easy. She’d met David before she began to worry about becoming an Unmarried Black Woman statistic, and he had never failed her. She got the first job she applied for, the only one she’d ever wanted. Kira was healthy except for the asthma that seemed to improve each year.
Why, then, did it all feel so temporal? Their life was like a dream, and she’d learned young that dreams always end.
Would she be strong enough for her trials? Was Peter’s death meant, in some way, to help her learn to carry her sorrows?
When Jessica reached the gravel path at the top of their driveway, Teacake complained and wriggled to spring out of her arms. As usual, he trotted straight for the darkness of the cave and vanished inside. After watching the cave’s mouth fo
r a half-minute, her mind drifting, Jessica found herself walking on the thin dirt path through her yard’s incline of rocks and plants, following Teacake. The cave was at the highest point in their yard, shielded from the street by a cluster of palms, a tangle of staghorns and elephantear plants, and the broad trunk of the oak tree that displayed their address to passers-by on the other side.
Holding the wall with her fingertips for balance, Jessica climbed down the cave’s steep, narrow steps, three of them, until she entered the wider space below. At first, all she could see of Teacake was a red flash from the reflection of his eyes. Teacake, not in the mood for company, meowed in protest and darted past her back outside. Jessica let him go. She hadn’t come to the cave for Teacake.
She’d come because of the feeling.
When anybody asked Jessica if she believed in visits from ghosts, she laughed the way she did when she watched those television programs about folks claiming they’d been kidnapped by UFOs. And she didn’t count her believing in Night Song and the spirits from the burial ground, because a few unexplained whistles from the trees wasn’t the same as having a face-to-face conversation with Aunt Josephina.
But alone, during reflective moments, she felt it. The cave had been built to store arrowroot, David told her, but all of the Tequesta neighborhood stories made her think of it as a burial cave instead. Now, she knew why. She could feel it as she crouched, balancing herself with one knee touching the rough floor. She could admit it to herself at this moment, but not again anytime soon—not to herself, not to Bea, not to Alex, and, most of all, not to David:
Jessica believed her father was in this cave.
She couldn’t pinpoint the first time the feeling had come, but she’d felt such an attachment to David’s house because of the cave. He hadn’t even mentioned it until they’d been dating for two months, but she was hooked the moment she explored it with him. Visiting it by herself, she’d always found that the cave made her feel more alive and yet calm, as if she’d been nestled in someone’s arms. And she’d thought it was only coincidence that when she was inside, she always thought of her father at least once. She’d even caught herself thinking “Goodbye, Daddy” whenever she left.
But something had happened a few months before, when David had been on his music lecture in Chicago and Kira was taking a nap in the house. Jessica had wandered into the cave and allowed herself to believe that her father was in there with her. As soon as she thought it, she felt comforted. And on that day, when she’d realized how late it was and whispered “Goodbye, Daddy,” she thought she’d heard not even a whisper, but an echo in her head:
Goodbye, Baby Girl.
It had startled her, making her pause before she climbed the steps, but then she pushed it out of her head. Just like that. Maybe it was so natural to her that she hadn’t even given it half a thought.
Until now.
As her eyes adjusted to the diminished light in the cave, Jessica studied the pockmarked, flaking limestone. She saw bugs crawling in a line around around tiny roots and moss that had made their way down here. She felt stupid suddenly, like Alice crouching in a miniature room. It’s just a cave, she thought, disappointed.
Jessica waited a long three minutes before she spoke. “Hey, Daddy,” she whispered halfheartedly, hopefully. She was so desperate to hear a response that her brain gave her one: Hey, Baby Girl.
That hadn’t been a voice, not this time, not like before. It was just a thought, a memory. That’s what her father had always called her. To him, Alex had been Big Girl and Jessica had been Baby Girl, as if they didn’t have given names.
“Hot in here today,” Jessica muttered, thinking aloud.
Just thick-blooded, an interior voice of her mind said. Thick-blooded? Oh, yes. She remembered how she used to always complain about being too hot when she was young, so Bea had told her she was “thick-blooded,” the opposite of thin-blooded. “To match your thick head,” Bea used to say.
Yours is the warmest blood, Baby Girl.
A voice. She heard the distinct roll of her father’s timbre in the voice, all seven words spoken with a schoolteacher’s slow deliberateness. She’d nearly forgotten the true sound of that voice. She hadn’t heard it in more than twenty years until this moment when she heard it so perfectly in her mind. Jessica’s breathing slowed. Could it really have come from her head?
No, she decided. No, it hadn’t.
As if in confirmation, there was a low-pitched laugh from somewhere. Below her? Above her? It might have come from across the street, camouflaged in a breeze, but Jessica heard it with her ears, not her mind. A loving laugh. Her father’s laugh.
Staring at the wall, Jessica thought she might be seeing something, so faint that it was like a fleck out the corner of her eye that would be gone if she blinked or looked too hard. Her father could be sitting right across from her, cross-legged, wearing his old Oakland Raiders cap and dusty work boots with the bright red laces, the ones she remembered. And she almost imagined she could see him eating a Whopper with Cheese, still nestled in the wrapper. Smiling at her.
Was it really seeing, or was it just wanting to see? She couldn’t tell.
You’re a big girl now, Jessica.
The voice was so unexpected and clear this time that goosebumps bloomed across Jessica’s arms. Her blood didn’t feel warm now.
“I know I’m a big girl,” she whispered, not knowing what else to say.
Big girls have to walk with their eyes open. Wide enough to see.
“I do, Daddy,” Jessica said, again very softly, not wanting to spoil it. She was afraid to move. She winced when she heard a bird squawk outside, wondering if the noise would chase him away. Here she was, a grown woman talking to herself in a cave in the middle of the afternoon, but she couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t hear.
Your strength is the strength of stones.
Suddenly, Jessica wanted to cry. Was he going to leave her now? She didn’t want to be alone again, not yet. “No it’s not, Daddy,” she whispered, blinking away tears.
For a long time after that, there was silence. Jessica felt as though she were waiting for something, so she was still, breathing patiently. He wasn’t gone. She knew that. She could feel him here, loving her. For a moment, the cave seemed to breathe around her, as though it were sighing.
And then the fluid feeling left, as abruptly as the end of an embrace. She didn’t feel like crying anymore. A contentment spread through her chest, making her feel flushed.
The apparition, or whatever it had been, was gone. All she could see was the cave wall.
Hold tight to Kira for me, Baby Girl. Until it splits your heart and soul.
The voice—or at least it still seemed like a voice—was fading. Now, Jessica could only hear a distant rambling, spoken unhurriedly, just within her hearing.
There are no good monsters. Tell her.
Then, nothing. Jessica suddenly felt uneasy, not comforted. The last words had confused her. Even scared her.
Quickly, Jessica stood up and practically stumbled back up toward the light outside. Emerging from the cave and gazing around her yard as though she were seeing it for the first time, Jessica realized her heart was thrashing from her chest to her throat. She felt a headache coming on. Served her right. Irritated with herself, Jessica wiped gray dust and mulch from her knees. Already, her rational mind was telling her she’d been in there making it all up, like the nonsensical thoughts that buzzed through her mind right before she fell asleep at night.
Guess you can believe in anything if you want it badly enough, Jessica thought.
She stood at the top of the hill, gazing at the shadowed, empty windows of her house until a feeling of solitude began to stifle her. Why did she feel like someone was watching her? Not her father or a friendly spirit, but someone who didn’t belong?
She’d hold tight to Kira, all right, Jessica decided. As soon as David and Kira got back, she was going to hug them both like they’d
been out at sea.
“Come on, Teacake,” she said, scooping the cat into her arms from a bed of dry leaves near the mouth of the cave.
Jessica was walking at an unhurried pace as she began to make her way down the driveway, but by the time she reached the front porch she was in full sprint, clinging tightly to Teacake. There are no good monsters, she kept thinking, that cryptic phrase she thought she’d heard in the cave swimming around in her head.
All afternoon, while she waited, it wouldn’t go away.
16
502 State Street
Apartment B Chicago,
Illinois
MAY 1926
“No, it’s like this: one-two, one-two. You have to listen. I told you, it’s up-tempo.”
“What you wanna go change the tempo for, Spider? Thought this was a ballad. It’s late, nigger. I gotta split. It’s a wonder your neighbors don’t lynch you.”
“Let’s run through this new intro real fast, see how it sounds. Let’s go. One-two …”
“Daddy?”
“… One-two, one-two, ready, play—”
“Daddy …” A voice, an interruption.
Dawit freezes, his clarinet reed a half inch from his waiting lips. The oxygen seeps unaccompanied from his lungs, and the inspiration vanishes from his head. The Joplin-style chords and syncopation that had been tumbling inside his imagination, waiting for release, fall silent. Lester sighs and plinks a few sour keys on the Baldwin. The piano needs tuning, and Dawit keeps forgetting to make the time to do it. The flat sound will soon grate on Lester’s nerves and give him another excuse to insist he has to go, Dawit knows. Lester is so damn temperamental. It’s nine-thirty. They’ll only be able to play for another half-hour before the landlord comes knocking about the noise. They’re scheduled in the recording studio by midmorning, and he won’t be able to pull in Al, Tommy, and Cleve before eight to rehearse.
That’s only three hours to make it work. At the most.