After (16 page)

“Well, we would not ask for a definite amount, although we certainly would have one in mind. The jury would consider your son’s life expectancy, what his lifetime earnings would have been, his value to the community because of his work as a teacher, the emotional cost to you and your husband because you lost a son so tragically.” Masterson took them through every laborious step in the process of filing the suit: discovery, which could require two years of research just to make the case against Carson Blake, appeals, continuances, delays, the possibility that the county would seek to have the suit dismissed, appeals.

Natalie was wearied just by the recitation of the process. That meeting was enough to convince Natalie that there could be no justice or fairness in a suit. Although Natalie let Temple ask most of the questions during this initial interview, she asked Masterson, “Tell me, how much do you think my son’s life is worth?”

“Mrs. Houston,” Masterson said, shaking his head in the motion of pity she had grown used to, “no one can put a price tag on a life, but I would try to get you fifty million dollars.” The sum seemed paltry to Natalie.

“What would be likely?”

“I have had judgments in similar cases in the range of eight hundred thousand to three million dollars.”

“Those figures are an insult. O.J. Simpson had to pay twelve million dollars for the life of Ron Goldman, even though he was found innocent of killing him. The best the system would give me for the life of my son is maybe one fourth of that if we were lucky? I don’t like the way these figures are computed, and this is why I’ve told my husband this process will just prolong our grief and tarnish my son’s memory.”

“Natalie, come on,” Temple said, gazing apologetically at Masterson.

“It’s all right, Mr. Houston. People are often ambivalent about filing suits when they realize all that’s involved and the likely outcomes. People surprise themselves. They think money will make them feel better. That’s not always true, and I have to tell you, this is not going to be an easy case.”

“My son was killed by mistake,” Temple said indignantly.

“But we have to prove excessive force, and the situation we are dealing with, as tragic as it is, can be interpreted as justified force.”

“Are you saying we can’t sue?”

A tiny sardonic smile blossomed on Masterson’s face, and he crossed his legs and placed his small manicured hands on his knees and told Temple, “You can sue a ham sandwich. We can always make a case, and if that is what you want me to do, I will.”

That’s exactly what Temple wanted. For Quint Masterson to make a case, for what seemed obvious to him and to Natalie—what happened that night was not justified use of force but murder.

But Natalie thinks, now standing up from the mat on the floor,
If we file the suit, go to court, that will be proof that my son is gone for good.
She knows her son is dead, but the knowing feels tentative, questionable, even negotiable. How can he be dead when he lives in her memory so radiantly, with an incandescence that is ablaze in her heart? How could so much love still fill her for one who is dead?

Resistance to the idea of filing the suit has become a habit, a way of life. Temple first mentioned a wrongful death suit the day after Paul’s funeral. She still shudders at the memory of how calmly he broached the subject even as she was still mired in absolute disbelief, a ravaging hurt so deep, she felt as though a vital part of her—her legs, or arms—had been amputated while she slept.

“If I were any other kind of man, we wouldn’t need a lawyer. I’d find out where that bastard lives and deal with this myself,” he told her, sitting beside Natalie on their bed, his eyes red from weeping. “Revenge never made much sense to me until now. I understand why an eye for an eye could give you a way to go on.”

She too was filled with rage, but it had morphed into a sorrow and longing that made it impossible then to think of suits, lawyers, courts, judgments. Returning from the hospital, knowing her son would never walk through their front door again. The perfect stillness of Paul’s body in the casket, where he looked not at peace but like a mummified caricature of her son. The sound of the minister’s voice at the cemetery as Paul was lowered into the ground, his voice sonorous and filled with faith, when she had never been more certain of the absence of God. She was numb and raw, suspended between yesterday, a definite place in time where she was a mother, and the thousands of days stretching before her, a hell where she had been cast and wandered like a motherless child, for her son had created her as surely as she had made him.

As Natalie sits down at her desk, massaging her jaws, her cheeks, her forehead, Temple’s words reverberate in her thoughts. “If I were a different kind of man…an eye for an eye…” She wants revenge too, but the kind that promises resurrection, that could erase history, beam them into an alternate universe where they’d find Paul waiting for them.

She thinks of Temple’s words often. Even as she has rejected the assertion that is also a plea, its vigor, strength, and honesty have swelled her with pride for their unbridled passion. If she could, she would move heaven and earth. For Temple, the civil suit will place the world back on a semblance of its axis—it has become his weapon of choice, his antidote to grief. Natalie has prevented him from using it, but she can’t stop him any longer.

She looks for Paul everywhere. There was no bedroom to keep intact like a shrine. Paul lived in a Silver Spring, Maryland. But he’d come to have dinner with Natalie and Temple that night, his last night, like he did once a week. And Natalie can still find him in the 1993 Mansfield Day School yearbook on her desk. Mansfield, the prestigious prep school that sat on thirty lushly wooded acres behind an imposing iron gate in upper northwest Washington. Paul took physics with the sons of cabinet members; attended a birthday party for a classmate whose Democratic Party fund-raiser mother spearheaded a capital campaign for the school that raised five million dollars. In his junior year he dated the biracial daughter of a popular local newscaster.

Everybody knew Paul. Everybody liked Paul. He seemed to fit easily into the snug, privileged world of the school. Paul entered Mansfield in first grade, scoring well on the entrance exam. But by ninth grade he complained of feeling insecure and inferior around his wealthy classmates, who had given him a bird’s-eye view into the world of actual wealth. Even the most affluent Black families seemed like paupers compared to the White students at Mansfield. Over dinner Paul told Natalie and Temple that his classmates talked about nannies and maids from El Salvador, Christmas vacations spent in Aspen, and that the environment that had once fascinated him made him feel like an outsider. Everyone was friendly, White liberal politically correct, even though in the lower school the eight-year-old daughter of an assistant secretary of state had called one of her Black classmates, during a tussle over ownership of a ball, “a stupid nigger,” sparking an indignant, tearful defense by the child’s mother that the girl had never heard those words in their home (a two-million-dollar mansion tucked in the wooded, secluded upper reaches of North West, a stone’s throw away from the home of the vice president). The Black parents, including Temple and Natalie, consistently complained about the need for recruitment of more Black students.

Temple and Natalie had made the proverbial post–civil rights era economic leap, Temple from Boston’s Roxbury, where his father owned a small auto mechanic shop and his mother was a supermarket cashier. Roxbury ranged from middle class to piss poor, and Temple grew up in the largely Black neighborhood’s most hardscrabble section. His younger brother, Johnny, returned from Vietnam in one piece but died of a heroin overdose in a Mattapan alley two years later, his body sprawled as carelessly as if he had been ambushed. Temple remembered Johnny’s death every day, and was embittered by the sordid battlefield his brother had returned to Stateside to find and the death he had outsmarted in Vietnam.

Smart, bristling with drive, Temple won a scholarship to Boston University and did graduate work in political science at Harvard. Memories of Johnny, whom Temple had seen weaving high and unsteady on the streets of Roxbury, Johnny’s dream of being a singer like his idol, Marvin Gaye, singed, gone up in smoke, and their father, who worked fourteen-hour days in the garage behind their rented house repairing long-past-glory Crown Vics, used Volkswagens, and the battered trucks of his small but loyal clientele drove Temple in his ascent. And he remembered his mother, who turned down a scholarship to Bennett, a small Black women’s college in North Carolina, when she discovered she was pregnant and married his father in order to become, in her words, “an honest woman.” His mother squirreled away enough money to buy Temple and Johnny a new set of encyclopedias every three years and forced Temple, against his will back then, to read the
Boston Globe
every day and make a list of new words and their definitions. Now Temple was Dean of Humanities at Washington College in Baltimore County, where Natalie taught African American literature. Everything he had, Temple felt—his degrees, his job, his home in Heaven’s Gate, even the contentment he knew as husband and father—had somehow been bought and paid for with the dust of his family’s ruined dreams.

Natalie grew up in D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood, an area of middle-class Black strivers. Her mother, Donna, who was widowed when Natalie was ten and her sister, Rosalind, fourteen, was a civil servant at the Justice Department who had not imagined Natalie a full professor with a Ph.D., the author of a book of essays on Black women writers that was a required text at scores of colleges. Natalie, who spent hours alone, reading in the attic of the small, close two-bedroom house on Shepherd Street, fantasizing about writing poetry like Gwendolyn Brooks, reading
Oliver Twist
and Jane Austen novels and
War and Peace
to escape the barrage of her mother’s predictions that her sister Rosalind would go farther in the world because “she’s got personality,” never saw herself delivering lectures in Europe and Africa, or living in a home with walls filled with art and other mementos from travel in eighteen countries. Natalie and Temple had come far, and were members of the ACLU and the NAACP, had voted for Jesse Jackson when he ran for president although their friends chided them that it was a wasted vote. They knew their roots, were proud of their heritage, and wanted nothing less for Paul than that he should climb onto the next rung of the ladder they had climbed, they felt, with an invisible hand trying to pull them down.

There had been family vacations in Jamaica, Toronto, France. Paul was fluent in Spanish and had spent his junior year abroad, living in Mexico. And Natalie and Temple encouraged Paul to spend time with his cousins Jake and Antoine, her sister Rosalind’s sons, who were star high school football players at Coolidge High in D.C. Paul partied with them and spent weekends with the two boys, not just because they were kin but because Paul wanted to know and speak the lingua franca of the inner city. Natalie and Temple wanted him to possess that particular expertise as well. Heaven’s Gate and Mansfield Day School represented tiny slivers of the world, and Paul was never to forget that.

To their relief Natalie and Temple watched Paul move with apparent ease between the divergent zones of his life. He learned to turn aside his cousins’ jests about attending a “preppy school,” and he could jone and joke with his cousins’ friends in the gruff ghetto slang that gave him a street seal of approval. Paul had told Natalie once, “Mom, Mansfield, Petworth, PG—they’re all just different hoods, and I can talk the talk and walk the walk anywhere I find myself.”

If anything was to ever happen, Natalie imagined Paul caught up in the unthinkable while out driving with his cousins on their way to or from a party in D.C., not shot down outside a Chinese restaurant at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night a mile from their house because of a cell phone. Paul could talk his way out of anything. Where was his voice, Natalie wondered, that night?

The leather photo album devoted to Paul’s graduation from Mansfield lies in her lap, open to her favorite picture. Of all the photos of Paul, this is the one she cherishes most, his wide, dark brown face, the thick, bushy brows that hid small, perceptive eyes. The smile so broad, so bright. The face that Natalie always thought was a map of all that Paul was and could be.

In the weeks and months immediately after his death, Natalie sat for hours, staring at the photo obsessively, as though just looking at it would bring Paul back to life. She has spent other full days rummaging through boxes of mementos in the basement, for treasures and keepsakes neatly packed in cellophane, plastic, stored in boxes that she never thought she would need to look through for anything again. Paul’s report cards from third grade, fifth grade, eighth grade, always filled with A’s and B’s; his first book report written in cursive, his handwriting at eight, large, loopy, big shouldered; a Little League uniform with grass and dirt stains; a letter Paul wrote to God asking why Temple’s father had died from a stroke. There are days that she still spends in the basement, in a solitary, witnessing communion with her son, looking at pictures and remembering. Temple has come upon her in the basement while she was engaged in conversation with Paul, unawares, transported, laughing, arguing gently with him. This is how she grieves.

Temple has told her that it is time to release Paul. A year has passed since his death and she still spends hours alone like this. Grief counseling, which they attended together, did not quell the desire to look back. The counselor spoke of her grief for Paul as though it was an ailment that would subside with time. Natalie cannot imagine that happening. She is lost and found in the hours of this repetitive search for what cannot be. If she gazes away from Paul’s face, she must look upon a world that exists now without him.

He’d been raised to give to and give back and was teaching at a D.C. school under a program that helped him pay back his student loans. He cared about and wanted to help others. Despite all that, Paul was shot in a strip mall parking lot by a cop who thought he had a gun. What might he have been? What could he have done? Those questions plague Natalie and disrupt her sleep, her peace of mind. But there was the darkness and the confusion too, which she has to remember, for to remember Paul she must remember all of him.