The Between

  “Whose makeup is it?” Dede screamed back, her dark lips pulled tightly across her teeth. “I don’t wear that goddamned paint on my face. Whose is it?”

  Hilton leaped to his feet, and Dede drew back from him without fear softening her face. He tossed the shirt to her feet, wishing it could make some awesome noise; he was more angry than he could remember being at someone he loved. “The commission meeting was today, and we got our funding. Commissioner Price gave me a hug, if you want to be jealous of an old bitch who could be my mother. She was congratulating me, which is more than I get from my fucking wife.”

  The fights began this way, but they didn’t end. As Jamil grew from infant to toddler, their fights grew more heated, more painful, until they were a part of the household. The choices were between silence or shouts, and often they chose silence.

  Part of the problem, he knew, was that Dede had worried about her father’s fidelity before he died a year after Jamil was born; the community’s gossip was vicious, and most blacks in town had heard a story about some woman Lionel Campbell had supposedly set up in an apartment. Mr. Campbell knew of the rumors himself and denied them in print before he died, but they were always there. Dede must have had some reason to believe them.

  And when Hilton tried to reason her out of her jealousy, asking her what he’d ever done to deserve her distrust, she countered by asking why he couldn’t simply come home at night.

  Here they reached an impasse. She knew when she married him what his schedule was like, what his commitments to his community were, he said. What did she think the riots were all about? He’d already given up his literacy tutoring, he’d given up his vice president’s position at the Miami Action Coalition. Was he supposed to give up everything?

  The mood inside their house seeped to every corner; Kaya, at seven, became more irritable, teasing her brother to tears for attention. Hilton began to spank her with a belt, never hitting her hard enough to hurt her, but the ritual of the lashes to her palm made her howl and then sob for hours in her room. Kaya was crying, Jamil was crying, Dede was unreachable.

  One Sunday, sitting in front of a television set he was staring at but not watching, Hilton knew he could not stay like this any longer. He found Dede typing at the desk in the den and stood watching her with tears in his eyes. She looked up at him. He simply shook his head, a surrender. She turned away, expressionless, and continued to type. He heard the electric clacking as he walked to their bedroom and began to pack a suitcase, tossing in random shirts and slacks.

  “So where should I tell them their father is?” Dede asked from the doorway in a voice unlike the one he knew. He didn’t know how long she’d been there.

  He couldn’t answer right away. He didn’t know. “If we can’t do better than this, Dede, we can’t be together.”

  “What happened?” Dede asked. “Did we fall out of love?”

  Love was the least of his worries; love was burning a hole in his stomach and sucking his mouth dry. “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Neither did I.” A whisper.

  He clicked his suitcase shut. “Then it must take more than that,” he said.

  “It does.”

  Her friends at the prosecutor’s office and his friend Stu, a physician at Miami New Day, intervened and insisted they get marriage counseling before he spent all his money at the Holiday Inn and things went too far to turn back. After eight years of marriage, two children, and three days of separation, Hilton and Dede visited the Biscayne Boulevard office of Dr. Raul A. Puerta, Ph.D., family and individual counselor.

  Hilton was unhappy with the arrangement, partially because Dede did the choosing, but mostly because he wanted a black therapist—and if not black, certainly not Hispanic. The entire flavor and language of Miami had changed since thousands of Cuban exiles flooded the city from the Mariel boat lift in 1980, and this was the one time he couldn’t afford communication problems. While they waited in a room filled with tall stalklike plants and Spanish-language ballads on the radio, Dede told him to be quiet and consider it a compromise because she would have preferred a woman therapist. She’d been told Puerta was good, one of the best in town. And, she added, we need all the help we can get.

  Puerta was young and overthin, in his early thirties, with a moustache and round-frame glasses. He was dark-skinned, but not as dark as some of the Afro-Cubans Hilton had seen, who were indistinguishable from any brother on the street. Puerta wore a short-sleeved shirt with a loose tie, keeping cool with a small fan on his desk. He asked them a few standard questions: their names, what they did, about their children, how long they’d been married. Hilton noted his thick accent and grew distracted by the cars he could see through the window, passing by. He began to perspire, slouching in his upholstered seat.

  “Let’s start with something simple. It’s a role-playing exercise,” Puerta said, pronouncing each syllable with a care that was both annoying and soothing to Hilton. “I find it helpful for couples to try to view the world through the eyes of the partner. I’m going to give you an incomplete sentence, and you must answer as your spouse would. I’ll begin with you, Mrs. James. The sentence is, ‘It makes me angry when . . . ’ ”

  Now Hilton was paying attention. He watched Dede’s face as she searched for an answer. She took a breath, avoiding his eyes: “It makes me angry when you don’t trust me,” she said.

  Damn straight, and say it louder, Hilton thought. Maybe this wouldn’t be such a waste of time after all. Puerta’s brown-green eyes were now on him. “Your turn, Mr. James. Finish this sentence as your wife would. It makes me jealous when . . . ’ ”

  Hilton didn’t need to think. “It makes me jealous when you care about other people more than you care about me,” he said. His voice was unsteady.

  The silence in the room felt like the arrival of a new baby. Dede swallowed, looking at Hilton with a sort of awe. Puerta raised his eyebrows, pleased. “Let’s talk about that. Do you care about others more than you care about your wife and children?”

  “Of course not,” Hilton said, and he could feel Dede’s unspoken objections surging beside him, but she held her silence.

  “Do you think you spend too much time with other people?”

  “Yes,” Hilton said reluctantly. Beside him, Dede exhaled.

  “Why is that, do you think?” Puerta asked.

  Hilton sighed, gazing out of the window again. “I don’t know. Because I have to. Someone has to. I have to give back.”

  “Every night?” Dede whispered.

  Puerta nodded slowly. “Why do you have to?”

  This time, the words came to Hilton’s mouth from a hidden place, and he couldn’t have prepared himself for what he would say if he had imagined it: “Because my grandmother died for me. She drowned for me.”

  After a stunned second at the sound of his voice, Hilton touched his face, finding his cheek damp with tears. Hastily, he looked away from his wife and the stranger, brushing his face against his shirtsleeve. This room was too hot, too cramped. His heart was pounding a river of blood to his temples.

  He’d never told Dede much about his grandmother, about Belle Glade, about the beach. He never thought about it himself. He could barely remember her face.

  nana’s not going to leave you

  “Why don’t we try Mondays and Wednesdays?” Puerta asked.

  Hilton couldn’t speak. “That would be fine,” Dede answered for them. He felt her hand slip to his knee.

  At last, away from the cameras and campaign supporters, they were alone. Without a sound, Hilton eased his nakedness behind the familiar ridges of Dede’s body beneath the hot stream of water. She gasped with a start, clinging for the hand grip, then relaxed and rested against him as his hands smoothed a lather across her waist, her belly, and her nipples. He pinched them slightly with two fingers and felt them stand until they were as solid as his own phallus resting against her slippery buttocks. He kissed her shoulder, lapping up the warm water beading there, then craned t
o gnaw at the spot on her neck that would make her eyes close and her head tilt back to him. He found it. He pressed his mouth to hers and their tongues met, circling.

  There was no room in the shower stall for proper lovemaking. Without drying off or wiping themselves free of soap, they dripped across the bathroom’s Mexican tiles to the plush carpeting of their bedroom and collapsed there in a heap. The soap helped him slip easily inside of her, and his thrusts were prolonged, measured, as he eased his abdomen back and forth across her most sensitive parts. Their chests rubbed together. Her warmth enveloped him like a slick leather glove, and his thrusts grew more determined as his love ache strained for more, more, and he would have thrust his entire torso inside her if he could. Dede clamped her nails into his buttocks, her mouth loose, her face pliant as all cares vanished save the spell of their touch. With the shower still beating hard, they were careless with their cries when their bodies clenched and heaved.

  “Not so loud, not so loud, not so loud,” Dede repeated, nearly shrieking the words, until he covered her mouth and they both laughed against each other. They lay quietly a moment while he was semirigid and still nestled inside her, listening for scampering feet or hushed voices near their closed door. They heard none; the kids were supposed to be watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger video in Kaya’s room anyway. One of the reasons they’d bought this house was the lure of split bedrooms, with the master bedroom an entire floor plan away from other parts of the house that needed to mind their own business. It wasn’t simply through overindulgence that Kaya had her own VCR and color TV at thirteen; it was strategy.

  “Talk about a wet spot. Look at that carpet,” Dede laughed while she slipped on an oversized Snoopy nightshirt.

  “It’ll dry,” Hilton said, and kissed her nose. “That’s the first time I’ve bribed a judge. What’s your verdict, Your Honor?”

  “I may have to hear your case again in the morning.”

  Hilton glanced down at the tent poking inside his silk pajamas. “You can hear it again now.” He bumped against her.

  With the frenzy of the campaign and the frenzy of the fall season as more homeless addicts came to Miami in search of a warmer climate, Hilton and Dede had not made love in at least a month. That accounted for their eagerness, their tirelessness as they drenched themselves with each other’s wet heat on their bed, then on the leather reclining chair near the bedroom’s glass sliding door. The Venetian blinds painted Dede’s body with striped shimmering reflections from the patios pool while the floodlight outside turned their lair bright green.

  Exhausted, they finally crawled beneath their sheets and held each other. Dede’s earlier anger seemed far away now. “Tell me about your speech,” he whispered drowsily.

  “Not now. You’ve heard it all before.”

  african-coon-tarbaby-nigger-american bitch

  Suddenly, oddly, Hilton snapped wide awake. He raised his head to try to see Dede’s face. He could make out the glistening whites of her eyes. “Dede, tell me what that business was with Curt today. What did he want you to file a police report about?”

  “It’s nothing, baby,” she said, rubbing figure eights on his chest with her index finger. “Something at work Friday. I got a letter, some kind of threat. Nonsense.”

  “Like what? What did it say?”

  She sighed, irritable about being pulled from sleep. “Some guy I must have prosecuted for something. Typical racist garbage. You black bitch and so forth and so on.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “Hil, it’s in my desk drawer. It’s not important. The prosecutors get letters like these, you know? It’s nothing.” Her last words were nearly lost in a yawn.

  “I want you to bring it home Monday, okay? I’m going to call you at work and remind you.”

  Dede mumbled something agreeable. He watched her eyes flicker closed, and he brushed his finger across her cheek. “I’m sorry about today,” he said. “I screwed up. I know it.” “Shhhhhh,” she said. “You had to do what you had to do.” He felt a warmth pouring through his chest that reminded him of holding Dede for the first time in his UM dormitory, swaying to “Reasons” by Earth, Wind & Fire and falling in love. How could he have forgotten that during their troubled times? How did he imagine he could ever walk out on this? “Dede,” he said, “don’t go to sleep. You forgot about it.” Their ritual. They had done it almost every night without fail since he’d undergone two years of therapy alone after their marriage counseling was finished, a habit as ingrained as brushing their teeth, and he felt as though something were missing if he tried to sleep without it.

  Half asleep, Dede craned upward to kiss one temple and then the other. “Sweet dreams,” she said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hilton awakened to find a subdued predawn glow cast across the bedroom, a pristine moment in the day. This was his favorite hour, but he couldn’t enjoy it. He had a headache already and a bad feeling about the day.

  Just as he believed he had a knack for sensing good, occasionally a vague unease settled over Hilton’s psyche, forcing him to try to predict all of the things that might go wrong, and one of them usually would. On a Sunday, it could be as simple as the Dolphins losing their game—although that hardly seemed likely in a home game against the Colts. Still, you could never be sure. He played with the possibilities of fumbles and interceptions that might lie ahead that afternoon, mentally listing the players on injured reserve, but his discomfort grew to a grumble in his stomach and he knew the feeling had nothing to do with football. He decided the family would go to church that day.

  The dictate met grumbles from Kaya and Jamil and amazement from his wife. Dede was the more religious of the couple, always wearing a tiny silver cross around her neck, but she was far from devout. The Jameses, who’d raised Hilton, considered God a personal matter and said the only true church was the home. Hilton suspected his adoptive father was agnostic but had yet to ask him. Saying grace was an afterthought at Hilton’s own family table and occurred rarely, usually only on holidays when Dede’s mother was present. Church was a part of their Sunday schedule only when Dede insisted far in advance, announcing, “We will go to church this Sunday” because she didn’t want to be absent so long she’d be ashamed to show her face.

  So the family’s reverently bowed heads as they stood in one of the empty pews near the back of the church belied the arguments and elaborate compromises that had started the morning. Kaya and Jamil had shorts, T-shirts, and roller skates waiting in the trunk of the car to liberate them from starch and lace for their promised trip to the park. Their sullen expressions revealed that in their minds even that hadn’t been a fair trade.

  Hilton tried to keep focused throughout the service. He still hadn’t decided whether or not he believed in God, but if he paid close enough attention, sometimes a sermon would move him to trembling, or an inspired gospel harmony could make him think yes, yes, yes, Jesus. That wasn’t likely today. The regular minister, whose sermons were logical and persuasive, was on vacation. Instead, a younger, associate minister who looked about twenty-one was shouting about Revelation’s “river of water of life,” but Hilton found the message abstract and had no patience for it. The service was more poorly attended than he had ever seen, and Hilton was aware of all the empty space beneath the majestic stained-glass murals. He felt farther from God than ever. He wanted, he needed, to feel closer.

  “Jesus offers an open invitation, his door is always wide,” the young pastor said in a sing-song voice punctuated by organ flourishes. Hilton believed the man was looking directly at him.

  “Some only come calling when they’re sick. You know it’s the truth. Amen. Some only come when they don’t want to lose that job. Amen. Some only come when they feel their hearts are finally wearing out. Someone say amen. Some only come when they know their days on God’s green earth are gone and it’s time to face eternity. Amen. And they knock on the door once, twice, three times, and say, ‘Jesus, I have sinned. Now will you let me in?’?
??

  “Daddy!”

  Jamil’s tearful shout yanked Hilton’s head from the pages of the Sunday New York Times and Dede’s from a Toni Morrison paperback, piercing the serenity of the park. Hilton’s heart leaped as he watched his expert-skater son scramble toward them without finesse, nearly losing his balance. Hilton swept his eyes across the park for Kaya. They’d seen her earlier from where they sat beneath the shade of a banyan tree; she’d been skating on the path near the footbridge over a Biscayne Bay inlet. Dede had the same thought. “Where’s Kaya?” she asked, sitting upright, pulling off her sunglasses.

  “What’s wrong, Jamil? Where’s your sister?”

  “I don’t know,” Jamil sniffled, stumbling and pitching headfirst over the spot where the paved path met the grass. He was wearing knee pads, but he scraped his right elbow raw in the fall. Dede was first to reach him and take his arm to help him stand, warning him to be careful.

  Hilton spotted Kaya skating with an iced lemonade in her hand at the opposite end of the park, and his chest loosened. “There she is. Jamil, what’s wrong?”

  Up close, Hilton could see that his son’s face was tear-streaked with anger instead of only childish upset. “Some bad kids hurt a baby duck,” he said. “There’s a mama duck and a bunch of babies, and they caught one.”

  Hilton almost smiled, comparing the degree of actual urgency to his initial fear, but he couldn’t look at Jamil without sharing his sense of moral outrage. “Okay, little man, let’s go take a look.”

  Hilton and Dede jogged beside Jamil as he led them on the path and then across a strip of grass near the jutting boulders of the landfill separating the park from the bay that stretched into the Atlantic Ocean. The water was dotted with patient, brightly colored sailboats. Jamil stopped at one of the benches facing the bay. “It’s under there. See?”