The Between

  CHAPTER 21

  MIAMI—The FBI confirmed Monday that it is investigating death threats against newly elected circuit court judge Dede James, the county’s only black woman criminal-court judge.

  “There have been a series of threats delivered to Judge James in writing,” said Miami FBI spokesman Lance Kinnebrew.

  Although Kinnebrew refused to be specific, he did disclose that the threats have been racial in nature.

  James, 37, won a close race last fall against former circuit court judge Phillip Reedman.

  James spent 12 years as a prosecutor in the Dade state attorney’s office, and is most recognized for her role in convicting the so-called Kendale Lakes Rapist in 1990.

  Kinnebrew would not confirm or deny that the FBI has a suspect, but he said the threats are being taken seriously.

  Bonita Dandridge, president of the civil rights group Miami Action Coalition, said she was disappointed and saddened.

  “No matter what your accomplishments, there are always these reminders that racial hatred lives on,” she said.

  James lives near Coral Gables with her husband, Miami New Day Recovery Center director Hilton James, and their two children.

  She could not be reached for comment.

  CHAPTER 22

  Hilton is a boy again. His shoulders cannot reach the top of the barbed-wire fence as he walks on the gravel road. He is carrying a book called Spelling Primer in his hand, slapping it against his thigh. Though the heat feels like midafternoon, a strange fog is settled everywhere, making it hard to see. His house is at the end of the street; he sees the pointed tip of the slanted roof poking through the mist.

  A strange man, a white man, is standing in the doorway with his arm leaning across the door frame. He wears jeans and a white T-shirt. He is waiting.

  “Who are you?” Hilton calls out in his child’s voice.

  The fog breaks around the man’s face, revealing his grin. Charles Ray.

  “Get out of my dream,” Hilton says.

  “This is my dream,” Charles Ray says in a rasp that rakes Hilton’s tiny spine, like ice water. Charles Ray nods his head toward the doorway. “You’re late. Come on in. You know the way. Goddamn, it stinks in here. Something’s burning.”

  Hilton, nervous, walks past the three-wheeled red wagon sitting in the patch of grass he plays in. He trudges up the creaky wooden porch steps, keeping his eyes on Charles Ray’s.

  “Come on along, little niglet,” Charles Ray coaxes, his grin trembling as though he can barely contain himself.

  Hilton glares at him, then walks beneath Charles Ray’s raised arm into the living room. He smells the sharp musk of Charles Ray’s deodorant. Is this real, after all?

  He is at home. Yes, this is home. Nana’s pink robe is crumpled on the couch, covering the spot where the couch is frayed most badly. He walks across the woven straw mat on the floor and looks up at the wall, where he sees the portrait of Jesus. Next to it, taped to the same wall, he recognizes a fan from church with an image of Martin Luther King. He remembers this fan.

  Nana has been writing hymns. On the table, he sees her handwritten sheet music with the heavy lines she has drawn for staffs, scattered with delicate-looking notes. This hymn, he reads from Nana’s coarse script, is called “Glory Home.”

  “Glory Home!” He remembers this one. In his mind, he hears Nana’s humming to follow the words he reads: My Lord has made a bed for me . . . in my Glory Home . . .

  Charles Ray snatches the music from the table and scowls as he reads, shaking his head. “If there’s one thing you all got, it’s religion. You steal everything in sight on Earth, and you’ve got your eye on heaven, too.”

  “That’s mine,” Hilton says, but Charles Ray holds the pages above Hilton’s head, out of his reach. Then he tosses the pages into the air and they vanish. Hilton gasps.

  “Toldyou, boy. It’s my dream,” Charles Ray says. He pulls a pack of Marlboros out of his breast pocket, clamps a cigarette between his teeth, and slides it out of the pack. Then he finds his matches and strikes one, making a brilliant flame as he leans close to light it. Smoke floats upward, blending with the fog-

  “You like it so far?” Charles Ray asks, tossing the burning match to the floor, where it quickly extinguishes against the wood. “The best part’s coming next.”

  Hilton is shaking. He doesn’t know why. His bare knees are trembling until he wants to sit down. It’s thin smoke, not fog, that fills the room. And the burning smell all around them isn’t coming from the match or the cigarette. It’s from the kitchen.

  “You know what?” Charles Ray says. “I’ve been cooling my heels here for quite a while, and I haven’t seen that old bitch around. Now, what kind of a hostess is that? I wonder where she could be.” He sniffs the air. “Well, I’ll be damned. I believe somebody’s cooking. Do you like your food well-done?”

  Hilton runs past Charles Ray to the open kitchen doorway. Suddenly, everything is loud. A pot is boiling over on the stove, and the lid is clanking up and down like machinery. Smoke from a blackened frying pan is rising to the ceiling, and he can hear the hissing of burning meat.

  Hilton covers his eyes, afraid to look at the floor, but then he peeks between his fingers. Nana is there in her flowered dress, her head wrapped in a white scarf, as though she curled up and decided to take a nap on the hard wood. Her face is damp, her lips drawn into a grimace. Her eyes are closed. Maybe she just fainted. It’s so hot in here, of course she could faint.

  Hilton kneels beside her. “Nana?”he asks.

  He touches her arm but moves his hand away with a jolt. Her skin is cold. Dead-cold. Hilton screams, jumping to his feet.

  He has to run. He has to get help.

  Charles Ray blocks him in the doorway, still grinning. “I’ve got a joke for you: How do you spot a good nigger?”

  Tears are running down Hilton’s face. He cannot speak.

  Charles Ray nudges the tip of his boot against Nana’s calf, making her leg jump until the rubbery flesh falls back into place. “Here’s one here,” Charles Ray says. “She’s dead. Get it? A good nigger? Think about it, boy. It’ll come to you. You’ll wake up at two in the morning laughing yourself silly.”

  “She’s not dead,” the Hilton-child sobs.

  Charles Ray gazes at him with mock pity, his eyes wide as he nods up and down. He talks without moving the burning cigarette from his mouth, so his words sound slurred. “Oh, she’s dead, all right. I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you. This is the way it’s supposed to be. Just like it would have happened if the bitch hadn’t fought so hard. She ain’t fighting now, is she?”

  Hilton stares down at Nana’s frozen face.

  Charles Ray sighs, his eyes searing down into Hilton’s. “Now, if she’s dead . . . ” he begins, pulling the cigarette from his lips, “where does that leave you? Who’s going to save you from drowning? Huh, boy? And who’s going to spawn those little niglets of yours? This changes things, doesn’t it?”

  With a cry, Hilton lunges toward him, but he flies into thin air through the open doorway and stumbles across his feet to the floor, where his head knocks against the wood. Charles Ray is gone, just like the sheet music. Hilton’s jaw is scraped and he feels dazed. He cannot see Charles Ray, but he hears his satisfied laugh all around him.

  From nowhere, a lighted match falls in front of Hilton’s nose. “Say good night, Grade,” Charles Ray’s voice says.

  In an instant, the match is a tower of flames.

  CHAPTER 23

  The grace period was over. The lines for battle were once again drawn in the James household. The shouting had begun the first night, when Dede demanded to know why she hadn’t been told about Charles Ray Goode’s history as soon as Hilton knew. “Instead, you’re out playing cops and robbers like a young boy,” she chastised while Kaya and Jamil listened in uncomfortable silence from the dinner table in the next room. “What were you thinking? When did you graduate from the police academy?”
br />   That quickly deteriorated into complaints about his mood-iness, rumors she’d heard that he was slacking off at work, questions about how he spent his time when he wasn’t in bed with her at night. “How do I even know you’re at home? Tell me that.”

  Hilton didn’t fight back. Half of him didn’t trust himself to control his anger, half couldn’t blame her for the way she felt. He hadn’t been a husband to her in so long, he couldn’t remember the last time they’d made love. And there had been Danitra, whether their encounter had been real or an elaborate fantasy. He knew Dede could sense Danitra’s intrusion in his silences.

  That weekend, the accusations followed him around the house as he busied himself buffing the living room floor, clearing out the garage so both cars wouldn’t be left vulnerable in the driveway, and polishing and loading the shotgun.

  “Don’t you touch that gun when I’m talking to you,” Dede said. She cornered him in the doorway of the study, which he’d transformed into his bedroom and had become as cluttered as he felt. A mess. Both of their antique mahogany desks were buried beneath dirty clothes and piles of papers, and the room smelled musty. “It’s unnatural, you and that gun. Put it down.”

  Hilton hesitated, rolling his eyes upward to look at her as he ran the cloth up and down the handsome black Remington’s steel barrel. He answered for the first time that day. “Why? You think I’m going to shoot you?”

  “God only knows what you would do. Look at you. You look like the devil, and act like him the rest of the time. Only a fool would be as sick as you and refuse to see a doctor.”

  Hilton had wearied of her voice too much to listen. “If I’m sick, you made me that way,” he retorted. “Why do you think I’m doing all this? You think I like living in a goddamned prison with some psycho trying to kill us? What the fuck do you expect?”

  And then the long silences followed, sometimes for hours. Kaya and Jamil weren’t allowed to play outside or go to the mall or movies with their friends—period—so they were sulking. There wasn’t anything good on TV, they said. It was hot, they said. Jamil ran down the street when he heard the ice-cream man’s bell on Sunday and was greeted at the door by Hilton with a leather belt.

  “But, Daddy, I said I was— ”

  “What did I tell you about leaving the house? Huh?” Hilton asked, thrashing Jamil’s bottom with swift lashes through his denim jeans. Jamil, who hadn’t earned a whipping in years, sobbed. “You go on and cry. Next time, goddammit, you’ll listen to me.”

  New walls were erected throughout the house, walls of resentment, pain and doubt. Dede was beginning to sound like a broken record: Is all this really necessary? Didn’t the FBI already have a tail on Goode? Do we really have to crawl on the ground to check the car for a bomb every time we drive to the store? Aren’t you taking this too far?

  Too far. As if there were such a thing.

  No point in talking to her, trying to make her understand. No point in paying any attention to Kaya s and Jamil’s immature complaints. The more they resisted, the more Hilton felt driven into his own thoughts, his own routines. No one greeted him when he came home from work in the evenings. Eyes darted away from him when he walked into a room.

  Fine. He didn’t need their fucking thanks. Goode was making them like this, and he’d be stopped soon enough. Goode’s time would come.

  A tense week passed after Hilton first met Goode and his eyes, and Hilton was certain they were both waiting for something. Then, sure enough, the time arrived. Goode finally came on a Friday.

  Charlie had been restless in the front yard since nightfall, tugging against his chain and whimpering toward the sky. Hilton sat with him on the cool grass, rubbing the dog’s sleek fur and massaging the graying hairs on his chin. Hilton watched the traffic passing on the busy thoroughfare three blocks east, a red haze from brake lights righting their way in the last of the rush hour. His street was calm, silent. All of the neighbors were already inside, their lights and television sets on, and a circle of darkness surrounded Hilton from the peripheries of his security lights. Charlie whimpered again, then licked Hilton’s ear in a rare display of affection. Hilton sensed suddenly that he should not be sitting outside without his gun, as good as naked. He must go inside.

  He found Dede, Kaya, and Jamil playing Scrabble on the floor in the family room, a new favorite pastime since the children were restricted to the house. All three glanced up at him when he stood in the entranceway with his shotgun, but their attention returned quickly to the game. Jamil was arguing that he should be able to use the word gonna, and Dede and Kaya were holding fast. Although he was only eight, Jamil was an excellent speller; he wasn’t allowed many breaks. Hilton gazed at them and listened to their banter, realizing that the three of them were a complete entity without him. This is the way they would look if he weren’t here, and they would be all right. The thought was both sad and uplifting to him.

  Silently, Hilton walked around their circle and closed the blinds across the sliding glass door. How many times had he told them someone could see them through the patio door if they left the light on inside and the blinds wide open?

  “It’s still your go, Jamil. Try again,” Dede said in a too-cheerful voice, ignoring Hilton’s presence. He left them.

  Hours later, after the children were in bed and Dede had closed herself up in her bedroom, Hilton returned to the family room, turned off the light, and sat in a white wicker chair to stare out at the patio through the glass. He watched the bright shimmering from the pool’s water waving across his lap, then grasped the gun tightly beside him and trained his eyes outside.

  He could tell he would have trouble staying awake tonight. He hadn’t slept much at all the past four nights because he’d been so shaken by a dream after meeting Goode. His catnaps at work had been cut short, and coffee seared through his stomach when he tried to drink it. His stomach was so raw that even Cokes blistered his insides.

  To occupy his mind, Hilton studied each plant and item of furniture on the patio and tried to remember when they first brought them home. That god-awful mock Greek statue had been from Dede’s father, so it stayed for sentimental reasons. The oversized raft floating in the pool was one of Jamil’s Christmas presents. The black Art Deco bar counter was from a garage sale on Old Cutler Road, Dede’s favorite scenic drive.

  “Dad?”

  Hilton jumped, clutching the gun, until his brain processed the voice as Kaya’s. She stood in the family room entrance in a robe, her hair mussed. “You know better than to walk up behind me like that. What are you doing up?” His voice was hard.

  Kaya didn’t speak, shuffling into the room to sit on the floor at his feet. Up close, he could see her face in the odd patio light. She looked so young to him.

  “Did you hear me? What time is it?”

  “It’s almost midnight. I can’t sleep,” she said. She hadn’t gazed at him this closely, like a daughter, in a long time.

  Her gaze melted his irritation. He relaxed in the chair. “What’s wrong? This maniac out there got you scared?”

  She shook her head. “I had a weird dream.”

  Hilton mumbled empathetically and sighed. “I hope you’re not having nightmares too.”

  “Sort of. She was sitting right in my room with me, on my bed. She said I have to watch out for Ray Charles.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Antoinette,” Kaya said, pronouncing her name softly.

  Ray Charles. Hilton straightened in the chair to try to see Kaya more clearly. She was looking up at him like a moonbeam. Everything in the room vanished except her face.

  “What else did she say?”

  “Lots of stuff. She just talked and talked. She said she had to look for me a long time because she found places where there’s no such thing as Kaya James. No such thing, she kept saying. She says I wasn’t supposed to be born.”

  Unreality threatened to wash over Hilton and sweep his consciousness aside, but he anchored his thoughts on Kaya’s fa
ce and the sound of her whispered voice spoken without emotion. He ignored the familiar quickening in his chest.

  “Did that scare you?” he asked her.

  “A little, but she said other things to make me feel better.”

  “Like?”

  Kaya smiled as though telling a girlish secret, wrapping her arms around her bent knees on the floor. “Well, she said I’m going to grow up to be a famous doctor—as long as I look out for Ray Charles. Isn’t he that blind singer?”

  “Maybe she said Charles Ray.”

  Kaya’s mouth dropped open. “That’s right,” she gasped. “She said Charles Ray. How did you know?”

  “Because Charles Ray is the name of the man who wants to hurt us,” Hilton said, matching her matter-of-fact tone. Although they had described him in detail, he and Dede hadn’t seen a reason to tell Kaya and Jamil the man’s name, but it seemed natural now. He told Kaya about how they found Charles Ray and how he’d seen him at the trailer park with his smile, his eyes. The disclosure affected Kaya, because she was quiet for some time. All traces of fun left her face, and she turned her gaze toward the patio’s glass door. She began to rub her arms as though she were cold. “Dad,” she started slowly, “do you think my dream was real?”

  “Dreams can’t be real, at least I don’t believe they can. My grandmother, Nana, used to say she had dreams that came true, but I don’t know. You probably heard us talking about Charles Ray Goode and incorporated him in your dream.” Hilton didn’t even believe himself as he spoke, but the words sounded reassuring.

  “What’s a tea cell?” Kaya asked suddenly.

  “Why?”

  “Because Antoinette said I’m going to discover a way to make people more tea cells. She said she wouldn’t have died if somebody knew how to do that.”

  The feeling of submersion came again, and Hilton could no longer ignore the powerful beating of his heart. He tried to make his voice sound steady for Kaya. “I know that people with the HIV virus are worried about their T cells. It has something to do with the immune system. Kaya, what else did Antoinette tell you?”