40. She Is Here
she is here
julian
fourteen years ago
I was twenty-five, and I had held it together for over four years, and cracked on an ordinary Tuesday.
Nothing about the day was special. It just all came due at once.
Zion had been arrested again two nights before, his fourth fight that year.
This one worse than the others, a charge that wasn’t going to disappear because I called in a favor.
We’d spent the morning on the phone with a lawyer explaining to us that Zion could be facing five years in prison.
I reassured him with a voice that said I have this handled.
But I didn’t really know if I actually could handle it. That was new.
Tre was twenty, about to go on his first tour, and starting to move like a man who’d mistaken success for a safety net.
I could feel him slipping toward something I wouldn’t be able to pull him back from, if it wasn’t reined in now.
Simone was sixteen and was becoming a young woman dealing with things I had no frame of reference for.
I was managing all of it with no manual.
And then there was WadeHouse. We were in the middle of a quarter that needed me laser focused, moves on the table that could multiply the business ten times over in a matter of months, and I was sitting in his old office staring at reports, unable to make the numbers hold still.
I’d told myself he’d come back. I’d built the machine of myself on the quiet assumption that one day my father would return and take some of the load back. By that point, I understood plainly that he was never going to walk back on his own.
So I would go get him.
Uncle Reggie was the only line any of us had to him.
Over four years of he’s all right, he’s just not ready, give him time, delivered in my uncle’s careful voice.
He knew where my father was and had never once told us, because my father made him swear not to.
So Reggie chose to keep a broken man’s confidence over our right to know where our father laid his head.
I found him at his shop and I didn’t ease into it. “Where is he, Unc?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand. “Julian, you know I can’t—”
“I’ve asked you nicely for four years.” I was trying to stay composed. “I’m not asking nice today. He left me carrying everything and he gets to just be gone, and you get to be the wall I run into every time. I’m done with it. Tell me where my father is!”
His face dropped. “It ain’t that simple, Julian.
” He set down the rag in his hands. “You think I like this? I don’t tell y’all where he is ’cause the day I do, he’s gone.
Right now I’m the one line he keeps open.
He calls, asks about y’all, I know he’s breathing, I know he’s fed, I can tell y’all your daddy’s alive without lyin’ to your face.
The second he thinks I’ve given you an address, he stops answering my calls, and then there’s nobody.
You understand? Not you knowing a little.
All of us knowing nothing.” His voice cracked.
“I’m not keeping him from you to be cruel, Jules.
I’m keeping the one thread we got from being cut. ”
I understood. It was true, and I’d have made the same call in his position. It didn’t change what I’d come for.
“Then don’t point me at the door,” I said. “Just don’t stand in front of it.”
He looked at me a long moment, and rubbed his chin, searching for the thing he could give me without breaking the thread himself.
“That house you grew up in isn’t the only property your folks ever put their name on.” He held my eyes. “You’ve got a head for paperwork. That’s as far as I go. I done already went further than I should’ve.”
I went to our family home and into my father’s study, and pulled every folder in the file cabinet until I found it. A deed. A piece of land four hours away, on a lake, in both their names, bought the year before Simone was born.
I stared at it a long time, because I knew this place. Not from ever being there. From not being there.
The lake house was Mama’s. My father had bought it for her, and it was the one place that was only theirs.
Where she went when she needed time for herself, when the four of us got to be too much, or when the two of them wanted to just be a couple in love, instead of somebody’s parents.
None of us had ever set foot in it. It wasn’t for us.
It was the only door in our whole childhood that stayed closed, the place with her name on it that we only ever heard about secondhand.
I copied the address and got in my car.
The road narrowed the closer I got. The trees got taller, and the water came up between pines.
A cabin sat smaller than I’d pictured, set back from the water by fifty feet.
A porch with two chairs and a little table between them faced the water.
A hammock swung slightly in the breeze at the bottom of the slope.
I got out of the car, and I heard a guitar before I made the first step.
I stopped at the bottom of the three steps and put my hand on the porch rail to hold myself up against the sound of it.
Four years since I’d heard my father play.
I hadn’t prepared for what the sound of him playing inside that house would do to me.
Then I went up and knocked. The guitar stopped and the silence after it ran longer than the playing had.
I knocked again and called out. “Pops. It’s Julian.”
After another long moment, his weight crossed the floor, the latch turned, and the door opened.
I stared at him. He was tall the way he’d always been. Everything else had changed. His hair grown out in a gray, uncombed afro. His beard halfway down his chest, and the posture of a man who’d stopped lifting things. He had on the slippers I’d bought him the Christmas before Mama died.
He stared at me. I stared at him. Two of the exact same eyes looking back at each other.
His face did the work his voice couldn’t. Guilt arriving before any words. Sadness under it, and shame. He was looking at his oldest son for the first time in years, on a porch he’d never expected me to stand on.
“Pops.” I swallowed, holding back the tears fighting their way up.
His eyes filled with his own tears, but he didn’t answer.
“Can I come in?”
He glanced at the door, then back at me.
He couldn’t say no out loud. To refuse me to my face was a thing he didn’t have the nerve for.
So he pulled the door shut behind him with the care of a man closing off a room that held something precious to him and stepped past me, lowering himself into one of the two chairs. He lifted his hand toward the other.
That was his answer. So I sat.
The water was in front of us and the pines swayed.
I’d rehearsed whole paragraphs of what to say to him on the drive up. What came out was the smallest version of it.
“Pops. I need you to come home.”
He didn’t answer.
“It’s been over four years.”
He closed his eyes and looked down.
“Simone’s fifteen.”
“I know.” Finally, some sort of response.
“She’s the only girl in a house full of boys, trying to be a woman at fifteen, and she shouldn’t have to be. I do what I can. But there are things a girl needs from her father that her brother can’t give her, no matter how hard I try. And I’ve tried. I’m not enough for her, Pops.”
His hands lay in his lap and his eyes stayed on the water.
“Zion’s in real trouble now, too.”
His head turned. “What kind of trouble?”
“The kind that puts you in a cell. Put a man in a hospital last week. He’s looking at real time if I can’t get him the right people.
” I leaned toward him. “He’s drinking himself sick, swinging at men twice his size, and somebody is going to put him down for good if it isn’t you that reaches him first. He used to listen to you.
He will again. I can’t get through to him. Can’t control him.”
My father’s mouth worked once and closed. When he spoke it was sideways, toward the practical.
“There’s a lawyer. Patterson — Yale Law. Reggie can put you on him inside a few days. I still know the judge in that county. Wade name still moves a few things. I’ll reach him before he reaches Zion.”
“He needs you, Pops.”
“I’m giving what I can, son.”
“Tre’s going to need you too.”
He looked at me.
“He’s decided college isn’t for him. He’s been recording, and Pop — he’s got it.
He’s got whatever you had. A band’s coming together.
There’s talk of touring.” I turned my hands over on my knees.
“I can run the label. I know how to do that now, I taught myself the whole business side, I can carry that part with my eyes closed. But that’s not the part I’m scared of. ”
He didn’t say anything. He was listening, which was more than I’d expected to get.
“You know Tre. He’s nineteen and he’s wild and he’s got no brakes, and here at home I can watch him.
I can rein him in, put my hand on his chest before he does the stupid thing.
But I can’t do that on a tour bus in a city I’ve never been to.
I can’t follow him from town to town. And I don’t know that world, Pop.
I know how to read a contract. I don’t know what it’s like to walk out in front of thirty thousand people and then come down off that with nobody around who loves you.
I’ve never done it.” I made myself say the rest. “You have. You know exactly what’s out there waiting for a kid like him — the people, the stuff, all of it.
It’s worse now than when you were in it.
And you got out. You came home. You used to tell us those stories like they were funny, but I’m older now and I know why you really quit. ”
He looked away, toward the water.
He was quiet a long time. When he finally spoke there was something in his voice I hadn’t heard in three years — but it wasn’t what I’d come for.