The Between

  “A white man?” Kessie was silent a moment. “There was a lawn man . . . Hilton, what are you saying to me?”

  When Hilton told her about his conversation with Charles Ray Goode, she became nearly hysterical. How did he find us? Did he follow us from the children’s schools? I live here alone, she cried. Hilton did his best to assure her that Goode probably would not be back, that he had an FBI tail and couldn’t simply come and go as he pleased. He’d already complained to the agent, so the visit was a fluke, Hilton said. Just please be more careful. He wants to scare us.

  “Hilton, please go back home,” Kessie said. “See a doctor, do what you have to do, but you must go back to your family as long as that man is out there.”

  “I will, Mama Kessie,” he promised.

  As soon as Hilton hung up his phone, his red message light was glowing for the first time since he’d lived in the hotel. He didn’t even have to check to see who it was.

  Finally, Andres Puerta was home.

  Andres sounded much younger than Hilton expected, with an easygoing and jovial tone that contrasted with Raul’s deliberate thoughtfulness. He had hardly any trace of an accent. Andres explained he’d been out of town at a terminal caregivers’ conference upstate, or he would have called sooner. The more Andres spoke, the more certain Hilton felt that he’d reached the right person. His stomach was tight, nervous.

  “So you want to know about Marguerite Chastain?”

  “Yes. Raul mentioned her,” Hilton said. “Is she—”

  “We need to meet in person,” Andres interrupted. “How about lunch tomorrow on the beach? Do you know the News Cafe?”

  Tomorrow was an eternity. Hilton would feel the maddeningly slow passing of each hour until then without the luxury of sleep, but he agreed nonetheless. Noon. The News Cafe on Ocean Drive.

  “Will you bring Marguerite with you?” Hilton asked.

  “I can’t do that,” Andres said. “I’ll explain tomorrow.”

  Their scheduled meeting was the last day of February, which found South Beach thronging with northern and European tourists and modeling-production trucks despite a noontime chill that prompted Hilton to wear his jacket over his shorts and T-shirt. The sun flamed against the restored Art Deco architecture up and down Ocean Drive, enlivening the paints of lime green, salmon, peach, and pale yellow that distinguished the strip. To the east, where the beach stretched to the shoreline, the ocean was dyed turquoise, balancing sailboats and more-distant cruise ships.

  hilton, you get back here, boy

  The scene from his sidewalk table at the News Cafe was at once breathtaking and unnerving to Hilton. He rarely came here. In his regimented existence between his hotel room, his home street, and Goode’s trailer park, he’d forgotten that he lived in a region that inspired photographers and drew the snow-weary with its charms. As he studied the bohemian and self-consciously hip people passing by, he realized that much had changed since his last visit to South Beach. A different place had sprung up while his back was turned. The world had gone on without him.

  Hilton had been waiting since eleven, working on his second glass of iced tea despite complaints from his stomach, and he was tired of scanning faces for Hispanic men who looked like Raul. He had no idea what Andres looked like, and he had been fidgeting since his yellow Timex sports watch flashed noon ten minutes before. It was after five o’clock in London, after six in Madrid. No matter what the time zone, Andres was late.

  He’d seen the chestnut-colored young man in a tank top and black biker shorts survey the cafe twice, but he’d dismissed him. When Hilton noticed the man peering at him from behind rose-tinted granny glasses, he glanced away quickly, thinking the man was one of the locals checking him out. The next thing he knew, the man was standing over his table with a woven knapsack slung over his shoulder. He smelled of cologne, and his dark hair was gelled down flat across his scalp.

  Get lost, Hilton thought. Instead, he said, “Can I help you?”

  “Excuse me, but are you Hilton James?” the man asked in a clear, deep voice Hilton recognized from the telephone.

  Hilton leaped up, smiling apologetically, and shook the young man’s hand. He couldn’t be much older than twenty-five. He looked like a model, not a graduate psychology student. “Andres? Yes, it’s me. I’m sorry. I thought you would look . . . more like your brother.”

  “We have the same smile,” Andres said, taking his seat, and smiled to prove it. The similarity of their teeth was uncanny, although their complexions and facial structures couldn’t be more different. Puerto Rican families, Hilton decided, must be as varied in appearance as some blacks. “See?”

  “So you do.”

  A waiter who’d been hovering near Hilton’s table since his arrival, waiting for a more significant order, returned to ask what they would be eating. Andres ordered a salad-and-bread plate without glancing at the menu. Hilton noticed, with discomfort, an extended eye contact between Andres and the waiter. Hilton ordered a smoked turkey sandwich, keeping his eyes straight ahead. Yes, he recalled, Raul had said something once about his brother being gay, but he’d forgotten the remark before now. Hilton didn’t have any gay friends, although Dede did, and he knew he suffered from the same mild form of homophobia most of his men friends did. Still, if Andres could help him, Hilton didn’t care if he was gay, a Jesuit priest, or a bigamist.

  As soon as the waiter was gone, Hilton launched into his story. “Raul wasn’t sure I should see you. He thinks I’m schizophrenic. But I think it’s something else. I have a problem with bad dreams.”

  Andres nodded with recognition. “Like Marguerite.”

  “He never told me her name, just bits of her story. He said I reminded him of a Haitian girl with nightmares.”

  “She was a vision. She had the most lovely face,” Andres said dreamily, sipping his ice water. “I always told her I’d marry her, but she never believed me. I knew her a year ago, while I was still an undergrad. Her family moved up to central Florida after a few months. She dropped out of school, her dreams were so bad.”

  Hilton felt disappointed, but he began to recount the nightmares he’d suffered from since he was an orphaned eight-year-old pulled from the salt water at Virginia Key Beach. He discussed his therapy with Raul, the dreams’ five-year disappearance, and their reappearance when the threatening notes began. He tried to remember all of the unusual circumstances that followed, even confessing his infidelity, then described his encounter with the blind man, with Jamil, and how he’d found himself owning a handgun. Finally, he told him about finding Nana on the kitchen floor. How she’d had bad dreams, too.

  By the time he finished, Andres had eaten his salad and was leaning back in his seat with his arms folded, absorbing every word Hilton spoke. His eyes were nearly unblinking. Hilton’s throat was parched from speaking. He slurped down the rest of his tea, which was barely cold and diluted from melted ice.

  “Raul was right to send you to me,” Andres said quietly, opening his knapsack to pull out a notebook. “At first, I thought your hopes might have been raised for nothing. But I believe I can help you find perspective.”

  There. He’d sounded exactly like his brother then. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “Although I’m completely shocked. My brother has never taken my work very seriously.” Andres parted his lips, hesitating. “How much do you know about what I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then let me explain,” Andres said, sighing. “I started college pretty late because I spent three years nursing my best friend until he died of AIDS. That got me pretty closely acquainted with death, more closely than I wanted to be. But after visiting him so long at the hospice, I decided I wanted to work at one as a therapist, helping people deal with death and dying. We don’t know enough about it, and we don’t want to know even though we all have to face it someday.”

  Hilton nodded. The tightening he’d felt in his stomach earlier began growing into a small churn. He remembered
to begin eating, though he knew the feeling gnawing at him wasn’t hunger.

  “What I discovered, even with Bryan, is that everybody has different superstitions about death. He was Cuban, and his mother believed in Santeria—in Chango, the war god; and in Hermano Jose, the ghost of the old black slave who talks to the Cuban soothsayers. It’s all the religion the Africans took with them to Cuba. So I’ve been interviewing people about their beliefs, gathering everything I can on death culture and near-death experiences. I’ve heard some freaky stories, believe me. But I’m a student, not a practitioner. This place is too thick with spirits for me, with the Cubans and their santeros and the Haitians with their vodun. I only observe, and listen. So, I learn.

  “You say you’re afraid of your dreams? Listen, dreams are where we face our mortality, so it’s natural to be afraid. Why else do we have the superstition that if you die in your dream, you die in real life? Marguerite understood the relationship between the two like few others. That’s why she came to me. She heard about my near-death research from a friend, and she wanted to talk to someone who would believe her.”

  Hilton tried, but he couldn’t continue eating. The food in his mouth tasted like paste against his dry tongue. He pushed his plate away from him. From the beach, Hilton heard the sudden rhythmic pounding of several drums. He turned to see four old men on folding chairs in a sandy strip of grass, their hands flying across congas in an impromptu session. One man sang a short chorus in Spanish across the beat, and the others repeated in unison, a call and response. Hilton realized they were singing an old song.

  “What did Marguerite tell you?” Hilton asked.

  “She told me about her dreams,” Andres said. “They were so clear to her, she woke up screaming and couldn’t be convinced they weren’t real. She dreamed of voices tormenting her with what she called death spells. She’d fallen from a balcony before the dreams started, and her heart stopped beating in surgery, but she recovered. In her dreams, the voices told her she’d died in that fall, on the operating table. She saw her funeral. She saw her own dead body rotting. She said she met her twins in her dreams. She had many twins, she said. They always chased her.”

  how many times do you think you can die?

  Hilton fidgeted, wishing he had something more to drink. “May I?” he asked, touching Andres’s half-emptied water glass. Andres nodded, so Hilton swallowed the cool liquid down. He felt too warm suddenly, even at their shaded spot under the cafe’s awning, so he pulled his jacket off and arranged it on the back of his chair.

  “Does it sound familiar?” Andres asked, watching him, poised to take notes.

  “I never remember my dreams,” Hilton said. The drums on the beach grew more frantic as the old men’s voices blended with the rhythm. “I must be suppressing them.”

  “Marguerite didn’t. Because of her dreams, she was obsessed with death. She was convinced she would die soon, that she’d died already. Every time she heard an ambulance siren, she turned her head.”

  “That sounds familiar,” Hilton said hoarsely.

  “Her family tried therapy with Raul before she met me, but it didn’t work. Finally, they got desperate and took her to a houngan, a voodoo priest. That was a big step. They were a very conservative family, not superstitious at all.” He paused. “The houngan told Marguerite she was the walking dead.”

  Listening, Hilton rubbed his face and sighed, leaning back in the padded folding chair. Andres watched his discomfort. “Hearing this bothers you,” he observed.

  Hilton nodded.

  “Do you know why?”

  “Not a clue,” Hilton whispered. From habit, his fingertips crept to the carotid artery on his neck and monitored the blood swimming through his veins in rapid spasms. “My pulse is up.”

  “Maybe we should do this another day,” Andres said.

  Hilton shook his head. “No. Go on. I’ve been waiting a long time to hear this, I think.”

  Andres took off his sunglasses and rested them on the table. “Marguerite came to see me that day, and I’ll never forget it. She was wrecked. That was when she decided to drop out of school, and her family moved upstate about a month later. The houngan told her she walked between life, death, and the gods. She was unnatural, he said. She was between.”

  “I said something like that under hypnosis to Raul, about the between,” Hilton said. “I didn’t know what it meant. No one is supposed to live there, I said, or something.”

  Andres began to scribble notes, his face unchanged. “What else did you say?”

  “I talked about being chased by some ‘others’ who are ‘gone.’ I said I’d stolen thirty birthdays, and they’d sent someone to get me. There’s a terrorist threatening my family.”

  “In your dreams?” Andres asked, confused.

  “No. In real life. The guy has an FBI file for terrorist activities. When I was under hypnosis, I said the ‘others’ were talking to him in his sleep.” Andres made a thoughtful sound, still writing, so Hilton searched his memory for other clues. “I called myself a traveler. I said something about finding doorways.”

  Suddenly, Andres’s eyes were on him. Now the young man’s tanned face was visibly captivated. The pupils of his light brown eyes were dilated, huge. “Yes. Marguerite always talked about doorways. That’s the whole thing, we decided.”

  Hilton felt an unbearable urge to run, and his stomach heaved as though he would vomit. A part of him refused to stay, refused to learn. He quickly excused himself and searched for the men’s room inside of the cafe, passing the newsstand and bookshelves of paperbacks that gave the popular cafe its name. He felt the eyes of the other patrons on him as he stumbled toward the rear, past the kitchen. Once in the bathroom, he leaned over the toilet bowl and wondered if he would faint. His head throbbed in sync with his wild heartbeat.

  James, J-A-M-E-S. Hilton, H-I-L-T-O-N, like the hotel is this one slice and dice or on ice?

  These are just stories, he told himself. They don’t mean anything. Get some control. Maybe these are your dreams, after all, and knowing them will help you conquer them.

  Knowing will help you conquer. After three minutes, the heaving from his abdomen stopped and he felt steady enough to return to the table.

  Two fresh glasses of water were waiting for him. Andres smiled at him gently, like Raul would. “Are you okay?”

  Hilton nodded, taking his seat. “I need you to go on,” he said. “You were telling me about the doorways.”

  Andres folded his hands, apparently searching for words. “This is the part that’s hardest for me to explain, Hilton. One day, Marguerite came to me and asked me why I shaved my moustache. Well, I never had a moustache. But she described every word of a conversation she said we’d had the week before, when I was growing a moustache—and she knew personal things, mind you, things about Bryan I would never discuss. And the conversation she referred to never happened.”

  “Was it a dream?”

  “That’s what I thought, but she said it wasn’t a dream. She insisted. She said she’d had enough dreams to tell the difference. Every time she dreamed and woke up, she said, she felt as though things had shifted out of place. Not big things, but small things here and there. Once, her clothes were different. Another time, she’d written three pages on a paper she knew she hadn’t started. But that thing with me and my moustache was the biggest difference. It reminds me of you and some of the things you said, like that woman you slept with. And waking up to find your son feeding the bird again. Marguerite said that when she dreamed, she walked through different doorways. She had to choose a new one each time. What she found when she woke up depended on the doorway.”

  “Traveling . . .” Hilton murmured, remembering the old man at Miami New Day. He felt as though someone were brushing a feather’s tip against the back of his neck.

  “It’s like Marguerite walked between natural worlds and spirit worlds. From what she said, if there’s more than one doorway to a spirit, maybe there’s more than on
e natural world. More than one reality. Say Marguerite really did die in that fall, in one version of reality. Her spirit fled to another doorway, to another version. And everything was fine until she slept. Then her dreams were like a bridge between the worlds, and she always had to run because she knew she was supposed to be dead.”

  “But which version is real?” Hilton asked. “The one where you have a moustache or not?”

  “Maybe all of them are real. Maybe none of them,” Andres said. “I believe that wherever the spirit rests is that moment’s reality.”

  “You said you’ve talked to other people with near-death experiences. Do they all say the same thing?”

  “No. That’s why I agree with Marguerite’s houngan, that it must be unnatural. Most people die and go to wherever the beyond is, or they live to tell what they saw or felt while their hearts were stopped and then go on normally. But some people, like Marguerite, die and refuse to go. So they run away. They find the other doorways. Maybe it’s a special gift. Maybe it happens for a special reason. I think I know Marguerite’s reason.”

  “What?”

  Andres’s face grew reflective, sad. He stared at the table a moment before speaking. “Three months after Marguerite moved upstate, her aunts house caught fire. Marguerite pulled out her three young cousins and saved them. Everyone said she got confused and ran into the burning house a fourth time. She never came out.”

  “So Marguerite is dead,” Hilton said, feeling desolate suddenly, left alone by this stranger he’d intended to seek out as his shepherd. He could almost picture her face in the flames, her eyes, arms reaching . . .

  “Yes. My own theory is that she walked back into the fire on purpose. I think she decided to finally stop fighting. Maybe saving them was why she’d stayed behind all along, cheating death. Those children would have died if she hadn’t been there. In this reality we know, anyway.”

  Stop fighting. Who had told him that? Hilton remembered hearing the words from Kaya, but he didn’t know when or why. Maybe it was when she told him about her dream the night he fired his shotgun. Yes, it was. The dream when Antoinette told her she wasn’t supposed to be born. And why wasn’t she supposed to be born? Why not? Because she really had no father?