Twenty-Seven #2
I stand at the window, and Adele joins me there. Looks out to see what I see: the men, pacing through the wild garden. Al throws his hands up and says something. Bernard shrugs. Lionel laughs. They don’t know what to do with a yard like this. “We’re trying to help you,” Adele says. “Tell us how.”
I keep watching out the window, waiting for an answer. I will something to appear to me.
“Think about it this way,” she says. “When you aren’t working and you aren’t with the kids, how do you want to spend your time? What would make you happy?”
“Painting,” I say.
“A studio?” she asks. I nod. “You have plenty of room for it. I’ll go tell them.”
“It’s a big job,” I say. “They might not be up for something so big.”
Adele ignores me, walks out the kitchen door.
I watch her cross the garden to them. They’ve been squatting, discussing the weeds.
They rise when she nears them. She says a few words.
Al nods. Bernard lifts his hand to his chin, envisioning.
Lionel steps back, points downslope. I crane my head to see.
The flat land that leads up to the forest part, framed by an oak and a palm, a halo of sunlight warming it.
Al dusts off his knees and strides down.
I can’t wait here anymore, not knowing what’s being discussed. I go out after them.
“You’ll need a sink, yes?” Bernard says. “Would you prefer it inside or maybe mounted to an exterior wall?”
“We’ll need to run the pipes down from the house and add drainage either way,” Al says. “So it’s simply a matter of preference.”
“I helped a friend out with a demo job about a month ago,” Lionel says. “He took home a truckful of old windows. I’ll bet he’d give us some.”
“We’ll make it look real sharp for you, Odette,” Bernard says. “You make us a list of what you want. We’ll make it happen. What do you say, a cinder block foundation, Lionel? Can’t imagine getting a mixer down here.”
“Cinder block’ll be fine. We’ll hide it with a little decking. Odette, how about redwood around the perimeter? We could make one side wider so there’s room for some chairs and a table. Would you ever paint outside? There’s a word for that, isn’t there?”
“Plein air. And yes, yes I would.”
“No need to cry, Odette,” Adele says, her arm around my waist. “Now, now. No need to cry.”
They wait out the winter rains and then begin.
Put the Sunday parties on hold, meet me at the front gate early on the weekends, drive straight to my place from the plant, their work clothes packed in the car.
Lionel brings over his little radio and whenever “Earth Angel” comes on I hear all three of them singing from below.
With each pound of the hammer and each load they carry down, each step through my front gate and bottle of beer drunk on my patio, I feel their love for me.
But I recognize, even more, that there’s something unknowable about me, a part of me that I can’t let them know.
And it eats the love away, feeds at it from the inside of my stomach, and I am a husk as I hug them goodbye.
Summer comes, and Felix still hasn’t written to tell us where he is or how to find him.
“Did he die?” Clément asks on our way to the train station, Adele’s car right ahead of ours.
I’m careful to make my voice steady, explain with as much assuredness and gentleness as I can muster.
I say it’s most likely we would have heard if he’d died.
That sometimes people get a little lost, and they lose track of time, or they come to feel very harshly about themselves and they don’t know how to get past it.
Then I’m waving at the Sunset Limited as it leaves the station, heading to the library as soon as it’s gone, scouring the newspapers for lewd vagrancy charges and death notices and train accidents.
I phone old acquaintances and ask if they’ve heard from him.
I bring lunch to Al and Bernard and Lionel, working out back in the afternoon sun.
They’re setting the windows today. We sit on a pile of cinder blocks in the shade, eating sandwiches and drinking iced tea.
They assure me they’d have told me if any news had reached them.
I imagine Felix with amnesia and my heart aches. I imagine him happy, drinking in bars and surrounded by beautiful men and thinking nothing of us and I hate him. Halfway through the visit, Clément phones me from the Laurent house.
“Has Daddy called you yet?” he asks.
“No, honey,” I say, and he starts to cry.
Nathalie’s voice now, saying, “We only have two more weeks.”
“I know, my love. I’ve been trying as hard as I can to find him.”
And I make another round of calls. And another visit to the library for the papers. And the men finish my studio—a spacious empty room, wide and light with a deck off one of its sides and a high, flat ceiling. I lie down at the center of the floor and close my eyes.
Just a week before the children come back, Adele comes over unannounced, calling to me from the street.
“You’ve been crying,” I say when I open the gate. “What’s wrong?”
She hands me the new issue of Jet magazine.
Bright olive cover, Beverly Weathersby smiling in a barely-there white dress.
“Page six,” Adele says. It’s an article about Emmett Till.
I know about him from the newspaper and the radio broadcasts, but here’s a photograph that blurs my vision.
Sends my ears ringing. Monstrous, to do that to another human being. Beyond what I had imagined.
“His mother asked the magazine to print the photo,” Adele says. “I can’t stop seeing it. He was only two years older than Rudy. A child.”
I take her inside. I make us cups of tea even though it’s hot out.
She says tonight is the summer soiree, hosted by Les Dames Amis.
She says it doesn’t feel right to go anymore.
How could she dress up and celebrate, and what does it even mean anyway, to be Creole in Los Angeles?
To make that distinction. “When Rudy walks down the street, he walks down the street as a colored person in America. Same as Titter and Bobby and Al and Lionel. And us—if people know what to look for. Why am I holding on to some idea that we’re different?
I won’t do it anymore. I’m going to call Claire and tell her I’m not going.
There are better ways to use my time than pageantry. ”
She leaves the magazine on my sofa, drives away. I don’t touch it, and yet I can’t stop seeing the photograph in my mind. Fourteen years old and gone.
And then I’m sick with worry, needing the children to come home.
Rudy and Nathalie and Clément and Titter and Bobby.
Little Sebastian, still practically a baby.
I want them back in Los Angeles. I want them tucked into their beds.
I call the Laurent house, teary at the sound of Mama Laurent’s voice.
“The kids are over at Hattie’s,” she says.
“Eating crawfish and playing cards. We’re all trying to keep their minds off wondering if Felix will call. ”
“Thank you,” I say. “I can’t find him. I’ve tried.”
A pause. And then, “Cyril would have loved every moment of this. Being a father. To the both of them.”
“I know he would have,” I say, but only to please her, because how do I know if it’s true?
How do any of us know what a person will do, or how they might surprise us.
“The kids are having fun, though? Being safe? Sometimes Rudy thinks of himself as more grown up than he is. When you have all the cousins with you, will you be sure to keep a close watch on him especially?”
“Oh, baby,” she says. “Is that sweet Emmett boy on your mind? He’s all anyone’s talking about these days. Enough tears to drown in. You’re worried?”
“Yeah. I am.”
“They’re safe. We’re with them all the time.”
I nod even though she can’t see me.
“You did the right thing, going out to California,” she says.
“I wish the family could have stayed together, but Lord knows you all did the right thing for your children.” But poor Emmett Till’s mother did the right thing, too.
She moved her family to Chicago, only to have the South kill her child anyway, while he was on a visit back home.
A week later, I pick Nathalie and Clément up from the train station.
Search them for heartbreak over Felix, wonder if they’re feeling the same finality that I am, as though our chance of reuniting extended only through the summer, and now that summer’s ending, it’s time for hope to end, too.
I splurge on a second record player and we lie on our backs in the studio, listening to music.
We hang the banner my sisters made for me.
Listen Your Heart Out. I set us up a still life and we each paint it, the windows and doors open wide.
And I think about Delphine, cutting me out, giving me no choice.
At least she was honest with me. At least she didn’t keep me hoping.
And the school year starts again. And we gather for a late autumn picnic in Brookside Park with families from church, from Our Lady of Victory, from Les Dames Amis.
I’m helping to set out the salads with my sisters at a table, glancing over at Nathalie now and then.
She’s sitting in a little circle with Titter and Bobby, listening to them intently.
Clément approaches and she scoots to invite him in.
I dish potato salad onto plates. Lionel comes through the line, cigarette dangling from his lips, smiling at me.
While we’re eating, clustered in groups on picnic blankets and benches, Nathalie calls out to get our attention.
“My cousins have something important that they would like to share with all of you. It’s about something that matters to them, so I hope you’ll really listen.
Okay, stand up,” she says, looking at Titter and Bobby.
We’re all watching them. They look as though they’ve been placed at a strange dinner table in a strange living room, and they have no clue as to who they are or why they’re here.