Eleven #3
A block later, a glimpse of apricot in the distance.
We roll past palms, magnolias, thick hedges, getting closer, and here it is.
A flat facade, its color bright against the sky.
White columns framing the doorway. Drapes parted in the windows.
“It’s this one, on the left,” I say. The number matches.
Lionel pulls over across the street. Together, we stare out his window.
I open the car door, heart in my throat. “You coming?”
“Better for Delphine if I stay.”
He’s right. “Okay. Wish me luck.”
The street’s lined with old houses and expensive cars.
Our front yards in Compton are better kept, and each overgrown bush or patch of dried grass here seems to say, We don’t need to try nearly as hard as you do.
I go up the walk of the apricot house. A man answers the door.
He’s tall and blond. He could be Bill, nothing about him says that he isn’t.
Delphine could be home, right here, in one of these rooms. I tell him my name, say I’m sorry to bother him, explain that I’m Delphine’s cousin, that I’m looking for her.
“Delphine,” he says with a vague recognition.
“Just a minute. Let me get my wife.” The scene shifts.
Not Bill. Not Delphine’s house. A petite woman with a headband appears on the front steps, a baby on her hip.
They bought the house a little over a year ago, she’s heard about Delphine from some of the neighbors.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s see if Linda’s home. ”
Two houses down, Linda answers the door. She’s a brunette, an intelligence in her eyes as she looks me over. “Delphine never mentioned any cousins, but you do look like her.”
“Have you heard from her recently?” I ask.
“Hardly. For a couple years, we had a standing date on Tuesdays to play Bridge—neither of us missed it for the world. She was just darling. We all loved her. And then she started, well, slipping. That would be the tactful way to put it. Naomi, describe what the house was like when you and Phillip first saw it.”
Naomi shifts her baby onto the other hip.
“It was pretty rough. We’d been trying to find a place on this street, so as soon as our real estate agent heard about it we went right over, before it was officially on the market or cleaned up.
None of us knew what we were stepping into.
They left so much behind. Normal stuff like books and furniture, but also dirty dishes and mail and clothes.
We have built-in shelves all along the living room walls—it’s one of the features of the house I love the most—but on the higher shelves, the books were all shoved back to make room for old coffee cups and dirty plates. ”
I’m trying to understand it. “Just the higher shelves?”
“Yes. And a bunch of toys were scattered all over the floor. It was pretty depressing, honestly.”
Linda says, “Delphine used to keep her house up just fine. They had a housekeeper a couple days a week. We shared a girl. But after Bill left, Delphine couldn’t afford to pay her.
All the money ran out. Some of us tried to help but she wouldn’t accept it.
She stopped making sense. And then, one morning, she and Nathalie were just gone. ”
The name Delphine chose, coming from a stranger’s mouth. “Nathalie,” I repeat, so I can hear it in my voice instead.
“Such a spitfire. Delphine was always soft on her. My husband says Bill just couldn’t take it anymore, with either of them.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“There is this one thing,” Naomi says. “It’s in the yard. You can come through the house.”
She leads me back to her door and it’s dreamlike, stepping inside this place where Delphine lived.
It’s smaller than it appears from the street, a strained grandeur to it, decorative white pillars in the foyer, one of them cracked through the center.
High ceilings, plaster walls. A bit like home, where things were old and crumbling and that was part of the beauty, but artificial in a way that home never felt.
The shelves that line the living room are artfully arranged with display books and figurines and framed photographs.
I imagine dirty dishes on the higher shelves.
Out of Nathalie’s reach, I realize. To keep her safe.
Naomi leads me out the French doors to a patio shaded by an old maple tree. The ground is paved in slate and there’s a sculpture of a horse that catches my eye.
“Do you like it?” Naomi asks. “It was here when we moved in. I never can decide whether to keep it or not.” I wonder if Delphine chose it, or if it was there when she bought the house.
I don’t remember Delphine especially liking horses, but then there’s so much I don’t know about her now.
Maybe she invented a love for horses when she became white.
“Anyway,” Naomi says, not waiting for my answer.
“See this old tree? There are all these cuts in it.”
I go closer. A dozen or so gashes in the bark, haphazard, jagged, like they were made with a kitchen knife.
“It’s so strange, isn’t it?” Naomi asks.
“The real estate agent didn’t know anything about it.
It gives me the creeps.” She does a little shimmy with her shoulders, an attempt at a shudder.
I hate her, this woman in her stupid headband, living in Delphine’s house.
I thank her for showing me, leave before I say something I’ll regret, climb into Lionel’s car.
“Delphine doesn’t live there anymore,” I tell him.
The sun’s low in the sky by the time we get back to Compton. Lionel keeps the car running as he drops me off. “I’ll be back tomorrow to check on you,” he says.
I let myself in and Claire’s here, next to Adele on the sofa. They’ve been waiting for me.
“Come,” Claire says. “Sit.”
Adele says, “We got a call from the station. Delphine wandered into a stranger’s house. The police took her to the hospital.”
“Maybe she was injured,” Claire says. “Maybe they’re fixing her up and then they’ll send her home. Let’s not leap to the worst case.”
The house is so still. We’re all three on the sofa, but we’re also on the front porch on Louisiana Avenue, and there’s a car stopped outside and a man in white at the door, and he’s taking our father away.
“Claire,” I say. “Please. We know how this goes.”