His computer was signed on, so the electronic silence meant that she might have found one of his precious few throwaway questions, one he could live without. If she could only ferret out a few more of those, her headache might go away.
A message popped across the top of her screen:
WHY THE LONG FACE, GIRLFRIEND? NOT SO ROSY WITH MR. PERFECT? (P. DONOVITCH)
Peter Donovitch sat only three desks across from her, maybe twenty feet away, but messages had long ago replaced conversation in the newsroom. She smiled over at him wanly. She’d looked for Peter as soon as she walked in that morning, wanting to clasp a friend’s warm hand to start her day, but he’d been out all morning and she’d been so preoccupied with her story that she hadn’t noticed him come in.
In a newsroom filled with reporters who wore drab, frumpy clothes that never seemed to fit, Peter always stood out in his pastel shirts, paisley ties, and suspenders. His red-brown hair, cut short around his ears, was noticeably flecked with premature gray, as was his moustache, probably thanks to fifteen years as a reporter. Peter was her mentor on the I-Team. Thank goodness he was also a family friend who would understand.
She typed a response:
TERRIBLE NEWS. PRINCESS DIED LAST NIGHT. (J. WOLDE)
She heard her message beep to his screen, and saw his shoulders jump. He whirled around to mouth “I’m sorry” to her. She shrugged and typed another note:
MASSIVE DEADLINE. QUICK LUNCH LATER MAYBE? (J. WOLDE)
SURE THING, SWEETHEART. GOD I’M SORRY. (P. DONOVITCH)
Then, an instant later:
WELCOME BACK. WE MISSED YOU. (P. DONOVITCH)
She couldn’t help smiling, this time from warm pleasure.
MISSED YOU TOO. NOW LEAVE ME ALONE. (J. WOLDE)
As soon as she sent the message, she laughed. He laughed, too, nodding as he read it. He understood. On deadline, all friendships were off.
Maybe she’d survive today, after all. Just having Peter nearby made her feel less anxious about the ordeal that morning. It wasn’t even so bad with Kira, but David’s sobbing anguish had really thrown her. He’d cried that way only once before, after a fight when they were still dating. She was frazzled from exams and she threatened to break up with him over some foolishness she couldn’t even remember now. She’d dropped the words carelessly out of the side of her mouth, and they hit their mark—and then some. To her amazement, he began to weep, a mourning cry, not a wounded one. Just like he’d cried again that morning for Princess.
YOU NEED TO PIN DOWN THAT EXAMINER. (S. GREENE),
the next message on her computer said.
Jessica set her jaw. Pin him down? How many more times could she get that man on the phone to repeat his same tired old statement? Why was Sy purposely riding on her nerves?
F-U-C-K O-F-F,
she typed. She thought, then decided not to send the message. She could save that one for later in the day. She would probably need it.
“How’s Mr. Perfect taking it?”
“Lousy. He cried all night,” Jessica told Peter, stirring NutraSweet into the murky depths of her iced tea.
“All night?”
“You know how he is with that dog. How he was, I mean.”
At nearly four o’clock, it was closer to dinnertime than lunchtime, but it was Jessica’s first break all day. Peter convinced her to forgo the newspaper’s cafeteria and eat at O’Leary’s, a hotel bar across the street from their building, where they could sit on the patio in the muted warmth of the sun, which was emerging for the first time after a morning of rain. The only thing Irish about O’Leary’s—which served glorified bar food, hamburgers, and buffalo wings—was its name. Their table sat just beyond the shimmering waters of the hotel’s untroubled pool. The water was such a rich chlorine-blue, it seemed to glow. Jessica wanted to leap in— skirt, pumps, and all.
Thinking of Princess, Jessica was tempted to order a beer to go with her grilled chicken sandwich, but she held off. That would put her to sleep for sure. Caffeine would have to do.
“Jessica,” Peter said, lifting his dripping water glass in a toast, “that man of yours is a saint. This seals it. Any man who can cry over losing a pet has the most special of souls. Mr. Perfect, once again, earns his sobriquet.”
Jessica searched Peter’s kind, faintly green eyes. He had bestowed David with that nickname almost immediately after he met Jessica in the newsroom. David sent her flowers at work in the early days, when she was most frustrated, and on late nights he came to deliver a hot dinner from home. Only now was Jessica beginning to detect a vague longing in Peter’s voice when he spoke of David, a harmless envy.
Peter was intensely private, but she’d figured out that he must be gay even before she spotted him walking closely beside a bearded younger man at a Miami Beach festival two years before. He never mentioned a social life, a domestic life, any kind of life. His sentences were devoid of “we” when he discussed his weekends. He was so closeted that he wasn’t out to her even after nearly seven years of working together at the Sun-News. He never posted his name on the bulletin board as a member of the Gay Journalists’ Alliance, as a half-dozen other reporters had, but someone confided to her that while Peter never came to the meetings, he contributed generously and was on the mailing list. Despite that, there were rumors he’d been married once, and even had a son. He never talked about that either.
Peter’s secrets made Jessica sad. As many times as Peter had brought Kira Christmas gifts (and black dolls, at that) and joined them in sampling David’s honey wine in the backyard, she wondered when she would ever be entertained in Peter’s home with his significant other, if he had one. She just didn’t know, and she would never dare ask. Maybe Peter assumed that since she was a Bible toter, she’d fling passages on Sodom and Gomorrah at him. Christians got a bad rap for intolerance, and she just wasn’t like that. She worried about her own conduct, no one else’s, and she tried to live a good example if anybody cared to notice. But how could she bring up Peter’s personal life if he wouldn’t? She was becoming resigned to the fact that there was simply a great deal she would never know about her friend.
“What about Kira?” Peter asked.
“She was a mess, Peter. It broke my heart. We had to keep her home from school.” She sighed. “Well, at least Daddy is there. Looks like he’s the one who’s always there …”
“Oh, no. Not the oh-god-I’m-such-a-lousy-parent speech.”
“Listen, Peter, I’m serious. My mother had a job too. But she would have taken a day off if something like this had happened.”
“You sound just like one of those guilt-complex moms on Oprah. Stop beating yourself up. You’re a great mom to Kira. She knows you’re there.”
“Maybe I’m there in spirit.”
“Being there in spirit is important too.”
“Too bad spirits are invisible.”
“She knows,” Peter said with certainty, smiling.
David had quit his job teaching at the University of Miami as soon as Kira was born, two years after they married. Just like that. Now, he worked at home as a book translator and a contributing editor to a couple of foreign-language history journals, one in Madrid and one in Paris. He also earned some income from lecturing and from the textbook he’d written on jazz, Body and Soul, which was assigned to music students all over the country. It seemed to Jessica that David was accomplished enough to go anywhere and do anything, but he was perfectly content to sit in that tiny, 1,100- square-foot house and be a full-time daddy.
Was there something wrong with her because she couldn’t do that? She’d never considered abandoning her hopes of being a journalist, even though it was a job that ate parents for lunch because of the time commitment. She was about to be nominated for a Pulitzer at age twenty-eight, exactly as she’d planned for herself. But what about the rest?
“Let me take your mind off Princess,” Peter said, reaching under the table for his ragged brown leather briefcase.
?
??I wondered why you brought that …”
“I have a proposal I think is going to blow your socks off.”
“Well, I’m already married,” Jessica said, “so you can forget about that one.”
“Hope springs eternal,” Peter said, winking. He brought out a folder full of computer printouts she recognized from the newspaper’s NEXIS network. He’d scrawled elderly on the folder in his sloppy script—the reporter’s curse.
“What’s all this?”
“Detroit. Chicago. Los Angeles. Look at this one: Poughkeepsie, New York. I found that in Newsweek. Appalling.”
All of the stories were about abuse or neglect of the elderly in nursing homes, adult congregate living facilities, and hospitals. A headline from the Chicago Tribune arrested her attention and forced her to read: ELDERLY PATIENT SMOTHERED, CORNER SAYS. An eighty-year-old woman with cancer had apparently been asphyxiated while she slept, her nose broken. Rosalie Tillis Banks, a schoolteacher, daughter of a jazz musician from the 1920s. No suspects, no motives. The story quoted someone speculating the killer might have been a staffer, but administrators denied it. Windsong Nursing Home.
“Damn,” Jessica said. “Suddenly, our Riverview is sounding like a five-star hotel.”
“You’re getting the picture.”
“Why’d you pull these?”
“Because I read your story in the computer system while you were on vacation. I don’t know why you’re so shy about showing me your copy. It’s amazing stuff, Jess. Sy is raving about you.”
“That’ll be the day.”
“Behind your back, he does. Believe me,” Peter said, smiling at her like an older brother. “Your pieces got me thinking about the treatment of the elderly. It reminded me of a housing minister I once met who was visiting from Brazil. The Miami social services people gave her a fancy tour, including a nursing home where all the old folks sang her a song. She burst out crying. They thought she was happy. But she was really crying because, in Brazil, she’d never seen such a thing. They take care of their elderly at home.”
Jessica knew what he meant. Her mother was playing nursemaid to Jessica’s diabetic great-uncle at her house in north Dade; he’d had a stroke the year before, so he moved down from Georgia to stay with her. Bea Jacobs didn’t believe in nursing homes. She’d taken Uncle Billy on cheerfully, even though Jessica told her she was crazy. So far, it was working out fine. And there was a certain sense to it, a cosmic logic: You take care of your own.
Jessica thought of Frederic losing his foot at Riverview, and the dead woman with the broken nose in Chicago. “Somewhere along the way,” she mused, “family stopped mattering, didn’t it?”
“It’s a book,” Peter said, pronouncing the words slowly as he held Jessica’s eyes. “I already described your piece to my agent, and he likes the idea. All he needs is a proposal, and we have a publisher within a month.”
“A book … ?” Jessica asked, puzzled.
“Honor Thy Father and Mother: America’s Abuse and Neglect of the Elderly. We keep it simple. Some overview stuff, but mostly we concentrate on two dozen or so horrific cases from around the country. We interview friends, family. We interview advocates for the elderly, health professionals. We try to find out what’s going wrong. We take a book leave for four months, even less, and then we’re out. Bam.”
Jessica felt a mild tingling sensation sweep across the hair on her arms, equal parts exhilaration and nerves. She’d forgotten how direct Peter could be when he wanted to. He’d already published two books, one on Florida’s mob heyday, the other on a local serial murderer and rapist, and to him the process wasn’t mystifying. To her, it was a sacred dream from childhood and therefore needed to be approached with caution.
“You don’t need me for that,” she said.
“Don’t be crazy. Of course I do. These are your pieces. I have more experience in research, but you write with a grace I can only salivate over. Seriously. We do it together.”
Jessica’s thoughts scattered. “Four months? I can’t stay away that long. I can’t—”
Peter playfully slapped his palm on the tabletop, making the silverware on their empty plates clatter. “You’re afraid of success. I keep telling you that. Well, I can’t assure you this won’t get us on the talk-show circuit, because it probably will. But the important thing is that somebody needs to write this book. And that somebody might as well be us.”
To Jessica’s relief, the waitress finally remembered them on the patio and brought out their check. Jessica tried to look like she was concentrating on figuring out her portion, but her mind was in a fit and her heart was pounding.
First Princess, now this. Her mother always said life rolls in cycles of good and bad, but sometimes even good news could be overwhelming. She wanted to run away from it. She wasn’t even sure why. Maybe it was safer to run from both.
“I won’t push for an answer today,” Peter said as they crossed the street back toward the newspaper building, a six-story Art Deco monstrosity that resembled a staircase, painted lemon-yellow and facing Biscayne Bay.
“That’s a shock.”
“You have to think about it. Talk to David, but fight him if you have to. He’s way too possessive of your time. You know that. He’s not looking out for your career, Jess. But I am. I know these things. You have to trust me.”
Jessica stared at the sidewalk as she walked, mumbling. “It’s just that Kira’s nearly finished kindergarten… and I wanted to know her teacher better, and already …”
Peter slipped his arm around her shoulder, and she was slightly embarrassed to realize that his lightly cologned scent was a comfort to her. She remembered how, early on, she’d mistaken his kindness for a crush, and how much that had flattered her. Not that she would ever consider another a man since she had David, but she’d always told herself she would have been nearly as lucky to end up with someone like Peter. Very nearly.
“You can do both, Mommy. You really can. You’ll be based at home. Writing this book will be just like your job here, with a little more traveling. It’s not a two-headed dragon. I promise.”
Jessica laughed, imagining how naive she must sound to Peter. Here he was, practically handing her the one thing she’d longed for as long as she could remember, and she was stammering with excuses. That’s the difference between us and white folks, she told herself. They don’t stop to say “I can’t” or “Should I,” they just do. And it was a skill, sooner or later, she would need to pick up despite herself. Honor Thy Father and Mother. She liked the sound of it.
But David would be another matter.
“I’ll talk to him,” she promised. She was already dreading her return to the sadness at home, but now she had reason to dread it even more.
3
If someone had told Jessica Jacobs, at twenty, that she had recently met the man she would marry, she wouldn’t have thought to include David Wolde on her list of possibilities. Far from it.
She would have hoped he was Shane, the pro-bound UM fullback she’d had a frenzied petting session with after an Omega party at the beginning of the semester. Or even Lawrence, the lanky physics major who sat with her at the student union, but couldn’t muster the nerve to ask her out. She might even have believed it was Michel, the tight-jawed president of the Black Student Caucus, who called her “little sister” and would have had potential if he’d remembered to sprinkle in some fun between bouts of righteous indignation.
But not David Wolde. He didn’t fit any side of her at all, at least not any she’d discovered yet.
Granted, she couldn’t concentrate on a word he said the first day she sat in his Intermediate Spanish tutorial because she was so absorbed by his face, and not just his startling beauty. (Beauty, she’d decided, even now, was the only word to describe his face’s impression, an assortment of complementary features.) He simply looked unusual. He was black, that was certain. His unblemished skin was a rich clay-brown, and his tightly curled hair was kinky if somewhat wis
py. But the slope of his forehead and nose, and his burnt-sienna lips, made him look nearly Middle Eastern, or some mix from somewhere far from the United States. Moorish descent, maybe. He spoke Spanish like a native, with a slight Castilian lisp. Yet, on the rare occasions he spoke English in class, the accent was touched by a ring of the unfamiliar. His face and his voice, in harmony, were a mystery that captivated Jessica from the start.
That aside, nothing else about Dr. Wolde (he pronounced it WOL-day, but everyone usually shortened it to WOLD) encouraged romantic thoughts. He almost never smiled, never flirted in the least, and his dark eyes lighted on male and female students with equal indifference. He looked young, possibly thirty, but carried himself as though he were at least forty. He was an old-fashioned black college professor, the kind her mother described from her days at Fisk in the 1950s. They don’t play. They’re only about business. They make that white guy on The Paper Chase look like a doddering old pushover.
There was no such thing as coasting in Dr. Wolde’s class. And if you were absent a day, upon your return he asked you to stand up in front of everyone and, in Spanish, explain why. He spoke rapidly, his cadences trilling up and down and all around them, never mind that the language was always a hair away from sounding like babble to them.
Jessica had assumed Spanish was a blow-off course. In high school, she’d learned to conjugate verbs and her accent was all right, so she figured she’d slide by fine.
She was wrong. Midway through the term, Dr. Wolde’s was the only class she was pulling a C in. She left his office near tears after an argument over a low mark on an essay she’d actually worked hard on. He’d marked off for accent marks that weren’t slanted just the way he liked. This was a damn elective. She was going into journalism, not foreign service. She didn’t need this shit.