Hilton shuddered. He rubbed his hand along the back of his neck, which now felt feverish. He swallowed against the bitter-tasting bile tickling the back of his throat. “From my point of view, there’s a big problem with this theory of yours,” he said.
“I know,” Andres said, looking away from his eyes.
“I’m not dead.” He said it uncertainly at first, but he felt a strength from the sound of the words. The chorus of old men’s voices was louder, laced inside their steady drumbeats. “I’m not dead. I’ve never died. I’ve never had a near-death experience.”
Andres looked out toward the water. “You said something about stealing thirty birthdays. What about when you nearly drowned?”
“I know what you’re thinking, man, but it wasn’t like that. Maybe I passed out for a few seconds, but that’s all. I never stopped breathing. My heart never stopped beating. I didn’t see flashing lights and all that crap you probably hear about.”
Andres didn’t smile. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I’m sure I’m alive. It’s not like Marguerite. Maybe that’s what happened to Nana and that’s why she had the dreams. I think Nana died that day I found her. I really do. And then she saved me, just like Marguerite saved her cousins. I can see your point, I see the similarities, but . . .” He faltered. His eyes felt glazed as he followed Andres’s stare to the waters, where the choppy waves foamed white.
“Why do you think you have the dreams?” Andres asked in a gentle monotone.
“I don’t know why. They went away once, after my therapy. Then they came back last year.”
“When?”
Hilton sighed. “I told you. They started again right after my wife’s election, when the death threats started. I think it was the night. . .”
“The night what?”
The car. The hearse. A too-pale man’s face and sunglasses peering at him, peculiar, through the back curtains. “I bumped my head on the windshield. We nearly had an accident. That’s when they started again.”
Abruptly, the drumming on the beach stopped. Hilton heard the old men laugh, bragging and joking in Spanish. He hadn’t realized before now that his face and armpits were itching with perspiration, even in the cool air. “I didn’t die,” Hilton said firmly. “I’m not Marguerite.”
Andres smiled at him, although Hilton could catch a glimpse of the sadness concealed in his face. “I’m glad to hear it. I like you,” Raul’s brother said.
The strained voice of one of the old men rose in the breeze, and the drums exploded once more in an ancient dance.
CHAPTER 33
Just before he began to doze in his car parked beneath the tree across from his house, Hilton heard a tapping at his passenger-side window. He bit his tongue, nearly drawing blood, and whirled his head around to try to make out the shape in the darkness. Instinctively, he reached for the glove compartment and the gun he’d hidden there. “Hilton?” Dede’s voice called softly.
Hilton slammed the glove compartment shut. He reached over to unlock the door, finally seeing the sheen of Dede’s robe in the dark. When she climbed into the car beside him, he smelled the musk of her bath oil on her skin. He looked away from her, toward Charlie pacing the backyard behind the fence.
“You come here every night?” Dede asked after a silence.
Hilton nodded, rubbing his nose.
Dede didn’t sound like herself. She was uncertain of her words, and her voice was artificially cheery. Hilton wondered if she was waiting for him to apologize. That would be so simple, but he couldn’t. He remembered her face screaming at him, the distrust in her eyes, and his mouth remained clamped.
“You are a man who loves his family,” Dede said. “I never doubted that. Even through all the mess I didn’t understand, I knew it was only your way of showing it.”
Hilton couldn’t answer.
“Raul called me,” Dede said, and Hilton blinked. She reached for his fingers and clasped them hard. Hilton squeezed back. Through his open window he heard the trilling of crickets around them, and he felt as though the entire city slept except for them. Dede sighed. “You know what I was thinking about? When Daddy got sick. It was worst right near the end, when he was fed up with everyone and everything and nobody could tell him anything. You remember how it was, with Mom frantic and me losing my mind, too.”
“I remember,” Hilton said. Lionel Campbell’s colon cancer had gone too long undetected, and he died three months after his diagnosis, living hardly a day without intense pain. Hilton remembered feeling acutely relieved when the ordeal was over. Not relieved for Dede, Kessie, or himself; relieved for Dede’s father. “I think that was the hardest thing for her. It was bad enough losing him at all, but she’d lost him already to this other man, this bitter man who’d forgotten how to smile and who’d throw his plate on the floor when he didn’t want to eat. She’d just cry and cry, Hilton. And I’d hold her hand, just like this, and say, ‘He’s sick, Mom. You can’t blame people for being sick.’” Dede’s voice splintered at the end.
Raul must have told her, he realized. So much for doctor-patient confidentiality. But Hilton couldn’t blame Raul; he’d known them both for years, and he was right to do it. Hilton would have wanted the same if the situation had been reversed.
“I haven’t forgotten how to smile,” Hilton said. “I haven’t forgotten a thing I’ve ever said or done with you. I know you were wearing a white sundress the day we met. That part of me isn’t gone now, and it never will be.”
Dede leaned to him and kissed him tenderly on the mouth, rubbing her hands across his head. He wrapped both arms around her, burying his face in her bosom until her smell swallowed him and shut out his other senses. Here, like this, he thought, he could sleep safely, without dreams.
CHAPTER 34
The phone rang early the next morning, a Sunday. Dede was in the shower, so Hilton reached across the bed they had shared for the first time all year to pick up the receiver. He felt renewed after a long-awaited night of rest. He’d really slept this time.
“Hilton? Damn, it’s you. Didn’t know you were back, man,” came Curt s excited voice.
“In the flesh. Whassup?”
Curt paused, and Hilton wondered what Dede had told him, if anything. “You all right, partner?” Curt asked.
“I’m all right. We got it under control.”
Jamil’s head peeked through the bedroom doorway tentatively. He was wearing his GI Joe pajamas, fresh from sleep. Both he and Kaya had gotten up the night before when Hilton made his reappearance, wrestling him to the floor with hugs. Now Jamil was checking to make sure he was still there. He grinned at Hilton and vanished after Hilton waved. That kid was handsome, Hilton thought. He sure would be a heartbreaker someday if he ever—
Grows up. What a strange thought to have, Hilton realized.
“Well, I was calling to give Dede the good news, but guess I’ll just pass it to you,” Curt said. “I gotta give you credit. I didn’t know what to think when the FBI told me you’d been up at Goode’s place, but you must have done something right.”
“What do you mean?”
“He told his probation officer he wants to move up to Pensacola. He’s got a job lined up and everything. The FBI’s so glad to get rid of him, they’re helping pay his expenses, if you can believe that. They’ve been shadowing his ass like a motherfucker. I guess he figures the heat will ease up once he’s gone, and he’s probably right. Goode and his girl’ll be gone by Monday.”
“You’re shitting me,” Hilton said, stunned. This was too easy, too simple. He waited for the punch line.
“You scared that SOB straight out of town. Guess it’s an early Christmas present for you, man.”
“More like an early birthday present,” Hilton said. Goode was leaving, and his thirty-ninth birthday was in ten days. Last night, he’d heard Kaya and Jamil whispering about a surprise party they could plan now that he was back at home. They were so anxious for things to be back to normal, th
ey were beside themselves.
“Y’all just try to hang on and rest a little easier. I think it’s over, man. You need to just work on keeping things together, you know what I’m saying?”
“I know,” Hilton said, feeling a surge of warmth for his friend. “Man, I don’t know what to say. You’ve really been here for us. I don’t know what we would have done without your big ass hanging around here drinking up our coffee.”
Curt laughed heartily. “You better watch out. I think Dede’s got a thing for me. It’s the uniform, I’m telling you.”
“Well, maybe I better get one.”
“Maybe you better. Hey, let’s see the Heat sometime this month. We should hook up with Raul. Boys’ night out.”
Hilton paused. Between the therapy plan he’d mapped out with Dede that morning, making arrangements to go back to work, figuring out the financial mess he’d made by purchasing such an expensive security system, and living in a hotel for so long, he knew there was no time. He wouldn’t be able to see the Heat with Curt.
“That’s a date,” Hilton said, a lie.
“Bless you, man,” Curt said. “I’ll catch you later.”
Goode was leaving. It was true, Hilton’s sixth sense told him. After hanging up, Hilton felt a glow that made him giddy. He leaped out of bed and crept across the bathroom tiles to surprise Dede behind the shower curtain, where she was lathered and looked luscious. She screamed with laughter when he wrapped his arms around her, as the water pelted splotched patterns across his pajamas. He kissed her neck.
“Not again. You’ll wear me out, Hil,” Dede said.
“Goode is leaving town. I just heard from Curt.”
Her face grew bright, girlish. “Are we free again?”
“Absolutely free,” he said, kissing her again. “Absolutely.”
Kaya cooked pancakes for breakfast, and Dede suggested they should eat on the patio and enjoy the Florida living they rarely appreciated from the confines of their central air conditioning. Between the sweet smell of frying batter wafting from the house and the comforting sight of the nursery of plants growing around them as they ate, Hilton fought off the dreamlike sensation he’d felt so many times before.
Everyone was trying so hard, that was part of it. Kaya and Jamil sat fully dressed with their hair combed, which wasn’t like them on a Sunday morning. Dede was going out of her way to be pleasant, often meeting Hilton’s eyes to smile at him. They all wanted this to work, to remain like this. They were all trying to forget that he’d just returned after spending nearly two weeks away. They were trying to pretend away the shouting and the fear that had been in the house, on this very patio. The scorched holes in the patio screen from Hilton’s shotgun blasts still flapped in the morning breeze, but no one looked that way.
“Daddy, what you have, what’s it called again?” Jamil asked suddenly, his mouth nearly full. Kaya gave him a disdainful look from across the table.
Hilton chuckled, pouring swirls of thick syrup on top of his pancake stack. He hadn’t been prepared to spell out everything to Kaya and Jamil just yet, but as usual children didn’t leave much leeway for planning. Cooties, he could say. But instead of giving a smart-ass answer, he decided to look Jamil right in the eye. “It’s called schizophrenia.”
“What’s that?” Jamil persisted.
“Oh, God, Jamil,” Kaya murmured. “Will you be quiet?”
“We’ll talk about this later, Jamil,” Dede said.
“No, it’s all right,” Hilton said, patting Dede’s wrist. “It’s a sickness in my head that makes me act funny sometimes when I don’t want to. But I can go to a doctor and get better.”
Jamil smiled, satisfied. “So you can’t die from it?”
“No. I won’t die from it. Once I start taking medicine, it’ll be just like it’s gone.” Hilton felt as though he were explaining his condition to himself as much as to Jamil, since this was his first conscious admission that Raul was probably right about what had been troubling him for these past few months.
After his meeting with Andres Puerta, Hilton had locked himself in his hotel room and sat in darkness for two days, his curtains drawn, racked with tears. He was harrowed by images of a thin, dark, beautiful girl on her knees, flailing her arms against an assault of bright flames with a silent scream. And yet, for some reason, she did not run.
In that room Hilton remembered clearly, for the first time since the near-accident, how he’d stared at a pale man with sunglasses in the back of the hearse while he still felt dizzy from the blow to his head. And then the man was gone.
He reached for the Gideon Bible in his hotel drawer, but his hands trembled when he tried to flip the stiff pages to John 3:16. Whosoever believeth in Him, whosoever believeth in Him, his mind repeated.
Shall have everlasting life. Everlasting life.
Did he believe? Did he believe enough to let go, to kneel in front of the fire as Marguerite Chastain had done? His mind’s biblical chant was replaced by a new one. No. No. No. No.
He found himself dialing Raul’s number. It was after midnight. He felt such despair, he thought he would leap from the hotel’s rooftop if no one answered Raul’s phone.
“Where are you?” Raul asked, concerned by Hilton’s voice.
“At my hotel.”
“Where are you staying? I’m coming there now.”
Hilton didn’t answer, making a sound that resembled a whimper. He realized that he was petrified in a way he had never felt, as helpless as a child. His own intellect and psyche had betrayed him, leaving him unable to function.
“You’re confused, Hilton. I understand that,” came his friend’s patient voice. “You’re an intelligent man whose mind is playing horrible tricks on him. You don’t know how to reconcile what’s going through your head with what you know to be truth, or what you thought you knew. You may feel as though some other force is controlling your life. It’s a bad feeling, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Hilton choked.
“The truth hasn’t changed, Hilton. Your mind has changed. This is normal in schizophrenia’s early stages, this confusion. You know something is wrong. You only have to accept it.”
“I. . . I’m not sure . . .”
“You’re not sure of what?” Raul asked, and Hilton didn’t answer. “Did you talk to my brother?”
“Yes.”
“And what did he say to you?”
New tears sprang to Hilton’s eyes. “That maybe I’m dead.”
There was a long pause, followed by a flurry of curses in Spanish as Raul lost his cool. He struggled to calm his voice, remembering Hilton on the phone. “Hilton, listen to me. I don’t know what nonsense Andres has filled your head with, but I warned you not to see him. I’m giving you a simple, concise, physiological reason your perceptions and behavior have changed. You reject all that for a theory that you’re some sort of living ghost? That is preferable to you?”
Right then, to Hilton, his alternatives became clear. There were none. At once, he felt his breath flowing with ease through his lungs. “No,” he said. “I know I’m not dead.”
“Well, thank goodness one of you has some sense,” Raul said. “Come back to my office as soon as possible. My doctor friend and I will assess you, and I’ll explain every step to you. For now, I think you should go home. Go to your wife and children. I have a feeling you’ll be more than welcome there now.”
No wonder Raul had that feeling, Hilton thought, since he had told Dede everything about his visit and the preliminary diagnosis. When Hilton first walked into Dede’s bedroom the night she pulled him from the car, he found a half dozen library books on mental illness lying across the bed and pages of scrawled notes and charts on her legal pad. She’d even found a support group for spouses of schizophrenics, circling the newspaper listing with a red pen.
Now, at breakfast, it was clear she’d even explained some of his condition to Kaya and Jamil. They had all set out to make this a family struggle, not merely his own. Watchin
g their faces as they wolfed down the pancakes, Hilton felt transfixed by his love for them. As though she knew what he was thinking, Dede playfully rested her hand on Hilton’s thigh. Kaya, seeing the blurred shape of Dede’s hand through the glass-top table, smiled a secret smile. Hilton decided he would get better, not for himself, but for them. Everything he had done or would do in his life was for these three. Forever.
CHAPTER 35
The white street sign flaking with rust says Douglass Road.
Hilton doesn’t know how long he has been walking, but his bare feet trudge along a sinuous dirt path in a haze of darkness. Cool, thick fog envelops everything around him, holding the dreary scene still. The fog is hard to breathe, but Hilton forces the thick air into his lungs and walks on. On his left he sees a barbed wire fence hanging in disrepair along a string of crooked wooden posts. Beyond that, it is hard to see.
The endless stretch of overgrown grass could be a meadow, could be farmland, could be a cemetery. Yes, a cemetery. As he strains to peer through the darkness, he sees tombstones and upright crosses dotting the field. The same sight meets him when he looks to his right, as far as his vision can reach. This is a village of the dead, and he walks alone.
He hears the loud chugging of a motor. In the distance ahead, two white pinpricks sweep before him as a vehicle meanders along the twisted path, closer and closer until Hilton can no longer see past the lights’ rigorous gleaming.
The lights stop within feet of Hilton, casting him as a silhouette in the night. Hilton steps aside slightly and can make out the shape of the huge vehicle, an antiquated black hearse with white curtains in the windows. He cannot see the driver.
“Wouldyou like a ride?” a man’s friendly voice calls.