After (19 page)

Bunny is silent for several long minutes in which, rather than speaking, she spends the moments looking at Carson’s hair, thick and a bit unruly on this day and in need of trimming, the fringe of gray hairs around his hairline as uniform and lovely as lace. There is the gray hair and the gaunt slimness of his face, because of the weight he’s lost. His eyes are lit as they often are now by a resilient, starry glint that she has seen in cancer survivors, who, having danced with the angel of death and refused the summons, look upon life with a transformed gaze.

“Why are you doing this now, Carson? Why are you doing it at all?”

“I don’t feel like they’re strangers. I never have. I killed their son. I have to live with that. This is one of the things I’m doing to try to make that possible.”

“So you’ve been planning to do this for a long time?”

“In the last couple of months the idea of the letter just came to me, and I couldn’t shake it. I have my son. Because of me they don’t have theirs.”

“But what on earth do you want from them? They tried to sue you. Why not leave them, leave what happened, alone?”

“That’s not a choice, Bunny. It’s in my life; it’s in our life. Do you think I ever forget that I killed a man? I was sentenced that night. The grand jury, the internal investigation—that was all legalities. My punishment started in that mall parking lot.”

“I know, Carson, but—”

“I don’t know exactly why I wrote Natalie Houston. I don’t know what I want, but I’ve got to find some way to stumble into some meaning, a glimmer of hope, and this was the only thing I could think of.”

“I don’t want you to be hurt anymore. They could rebuff you. You don’t know them.”

“But I do know them, Bunny, I do,” he says with a passion that startles her. “We’ve had the same dreams. We’ve mourned the same person and wondered, Why me? Don’t tell me I don’t know these people.”

When Bunny walks out of Carson’s office, she walks away from him, trembling. Walks past Roslyn and Roseanne playing Monopoly in the kitchen and Juwan barefoot and huddled on the living room sofa, watching music videos. Bunny walks through the house that she has felt as a haven since they moved here.

In her bedroom she closes the door and sinks into the rocking chair beside the bed. She’s only six weeks’ pregnant, but she clutches her stomach anyway. Carson had his secrets. She had hers. She stopped taking her birth control pills. She wanted this baby. If marriage is destiny, then parenthood is too. Another reason to live. Another reason to love. Another reason to put the past aside. For her the judgment of the appeals court set them free. They had put everything behind them, or tried to, anyway.

Now she wanted a baby, to symbolize their new life. She kept thinking of their life as before and after. Before and after. Before the shooting and after the shooting. Of course she knew that he could never forget what he’d done. But couldn’t they try? Maybe he couldn’t forget, but because she loved him she could make them a world in which on some days, anyway, amnesia was possible. She was the one who urged them to move, who’d suggested he try real estate; everything, it seemed to her, was possible once he decided to leave the force. He’d foundered, but Bunny would never forget how she felt the night he came home and told her, “I had drinks with Vince Proctor. I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but I’ll be damned if I end up like him.” Carson was a brooder and decision making for him a slow, methodical, tinkering process, but Bunny knew that night that he would resign, that she did not have to say any more.

Carson told her more about The Job in his final months on the force than in the previous twelve years. How once he was relieved of the boring and demeaning desk duty and reassigned to a regular shift, patrolling his district, like before he was gripped by uncertainty and fear. “I don’t trust myself. I’m letting too many things slide. I’ll see a driver go through a red light, catch sight of a car speeding past me, and when I start to pursue them it all comes back, everything about that night. I see the Nissan speeding past me in the dark on Enterprise Road and I’m back there, two years ago, wondering what the hell is going on, why this guy doesn’t pull over, feeling exactly the same things I felt that night.” He didn’t wear his gun when he was off duty, courting a reprimand if he was caught, and on three occasions when he was on duty, dressed in his uniform, left for headquarters and realized he’d left his weapon at home. When his commanding officer called him into his office one day for what he hoped would be a fatherly lecture offering support rather than sanctions, Carson surprised himself by resigning moments after he took his seat.

Now they had a new house, a new marriage, and a new life. After the months of private sessions with Carson, Carrie Petersen asked Bunny to join them in the counseling sessions. It was during those sessions that Bunny discovered and confronted Carson in unimaginable ways. Carrie Petersen helped them create a language to talk about their marriage and their love in ways that exploded every lie they had told each other and perfected in order to keep the peace between them or to make it through another married day. She told them over and over that Carson had to write a new story about his life, one that wove the night of the shooting into its chapters. He had to change, she told them. And he had tried, more and more, breaking the seal on his emotions and taking an interest in every aspect of the children’s lives. Now they had a life worthy of bringing another child into.

Last month, to celebrate the end of the school year, they drove to Ocean City, Maryland, to spend the weekend. Carson and Bunny and the twins were relaxing at table a few feet from the hotel pool one afternoon when Bunny noticed the stricken gaze of Roseanne looking past her, her brown eyes bulging with panic as she pointed to the pool, where when she turned around she saw Juwan, arms flailing, bobbing unsteadily on the surface of the astringent chlorinated water and then sinking fast.

Carson dove into the pool, his turquoise trunks a quivering flash past Bunny’s still-uncomprehending gaze, his lean, charged body treading a thick shower of water, his arms scattering other swimming children. Carson’s left arm was a stabilizing caress around Juwan’s neck as he sank beneath the surface of the water and he pulled him up and to the pool’s edge, where he coughed up a spasm of fear and terror. Inside the twelfth-floor bedroom suite, Carson placed Juwan on his bed and watched him shiver beneath the sheets but soon fall into a heavy, restorative slumber. In bed that night Carson wondered aloud if what almost happened was some kind of retribution.

“That’s not the kind of God I believe in, Carson, and you don’t either,” Bunny told him.

“It’s just that, what if…”

“But we don’t have to ask that, because you saved our son.”

Bunny can imagine what Natalie Houston must feel, had known it long before she watched Juwan flailing for breath and life before her eyes, a crowd of stunned strangers hearing her son’s cries for help.

She isn’t blind, and she doesn’t care if she’s selfish. Carson thinks he knows the Houstons because he was the last one to see their son alive, because he knows the value of their house and the name of their insurance company, because they sued him and they both have surely wished for some cosmic exchange of his life for their son’s. But he doesn’t know them—he has only just recently begun to know himself…again. A self risen from the ashes of everything they don’t want to remember but must because it’s now their name. They have a good life now. Why spoil it? In bed some evenings while she’s reading a novel, Carson to Bunny’s amazement and satisfaction is thumbing through self-help books. And once or twice a month he joins Bunny and the children for services at a Unity church in Bowie.

And now he wants to offer himself up as a sacrifice to a family who might be praying for
his
death. Hadn’t they sacrificed enough?

12

Natalie Houston
hasn’t answered the letter. But why should she, Carson wonders, now that months rather than days or weeks have passed since he drove to the post office, parked his car, and walked up to the mailbox as though approaching a cliff that had become in his mind his destiny, willing his mind into a blur, a blank, so he couldn’t talk himself out of the act.
One hundred days
. And still no response.

Carson doesn’t think of what he’s doing as stalking. After all, these occasional reconnaissance missions grew out a stroke of happenstance.
Luck
doesn’t sound or feel quite right as an explanation for how he came to be sitting this day in the bleachers around the outdoor track of the Sports and Learning Center, watching Natalie Houston take her morning walk. His navy blue fleece running suit and athletic shoes feel like camouflage, although he wears them when he takes his own run around Allen Pond.

She’s rounding the middle ring of the circular track for the third time, her strides moderately paced, matching the rhythm of her arms. The other walkers are fit, prosperous-looking middle-aged retirees, walking leisurely, waving to one another in recognition. Carson knows Natalie Houston’s routine well by now. She walks three days a week for half an hour, then goes to her burgundy Avalon, reclines her seat, turns on her car radio, and closes her eyes and cools down. She sits like this for five or ten minutes and then leaves the track. He doesn’t follow her wherever she’s headed next; it’s enough that he’s seen her.

For a while he felt redeemed by the small acts he had performed. He wrote the letter (and quickly forgot that it required six agonizing months to compose the paragraph of a hundred and thirty-two words). After he wrote the letter he mailed it. Small, simple acts that cost him everything to perform.

After Labor Day when there was still no response, the panic set in. Was the letter lost? If not lost, why not even a response that damned him, that took offense at his invasion of the Houstons’ grief? This utter silence was a rebuttal and a crucible. And then he got a listing in Heaven’s Gate. Few residents of the exclusive community once ensconced in its embrace chose to leave. But Brad and Mary Beverly were moving to Los Angeles to be near their grown daughters and grandchildren. The Beverlys, it turned out, lived two streets over from the Houstons.

When Carson left the Beverlys’ house he drove on to Glory Road, and as he turned onto the street, saw a woman that he knew must be Natalie Houston coasting toward him down the driveway of 11304 Glory Road, the address to which he’d mailed the letter. Carson pulled in front of the Tudor next door and caught a glimpse of her behind the wheel—it was more mirage than an image he could hold on to—the handsome, serious face a blur of the colors she wore: mauve and navy blue. In the seconds it took her to drive past, a momentary, precise flashback to the shooting rose like spewing volcanic ash, littering and singeing his mind, and continued unfolding even when he closed his eyes. He shook his head to loosen its grip, wiped his face suddenly flush with sweat. Yet as awful as he felt, Carson roused himself and followed Natalie Houston out of Heaven’s Gate. Carson followed Natalie Houston along the smooth blacktop roadway past one-of-a-kind houses, many of them occupying an acre or more of land. Past three couples teeing off on the golf course despite the overcast October sky and the frost-tinged chill in the air. Carson trailed her up Route 202 to Landover Road, then turned left onto Sheriff Road and followed her into the parking lot of the Sports and Learning Center. The modern glass and chrome facility was conspicuous in the neighborhood, a mixed bag of well-tended but older houses and apartments and scruffy, weathered domiciles. Like the football stadium behind it, the Sports and Learning Center, which featured state-of-the-art pools, gymnasiums, and exercise equipment, was an architectural taunt to its modest surroundings.

Parking that first day several rows over from the spot where Natalie Houston parked, Carson watched as a short, plump, silver-haired woman exiting the sports center, a small canvas bag over her shoulder, waved and called “Natalie” as Natalie Houston retrieved a bag from the trunk of her car.

The next day he returned to the outdoor track, hoping to see her again. Two days later she returned. It turned out that Natalie Houston came to the track three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at eleven o’clock, and walked for half an hour. In the month since he’s been watching her from the bleachers, Carson has been content to look, to watch her as he would a monument. Sitting in the bleachers this day, he wonders if maybe this will be enough. If he watches her long enough, whatever it is that he seeks could pass between them by osmosis. Is this the answer to his letter? He’s imagined leaving the bleachers and walking behind her, but he can’t stand a reprise of the awful muteness that overwhelmed him the day he caught sight of her coming out of her driveway, his choking on unspoken, impossible-to-speak words.

The NCS printout told him she’s a professor. When are her classes at the university? Carson wonders. What subjects does she teach? She walks, he thinks, like a teacher, surefooted and focused, faster than the amblers around her, but as though she’s not just walking in circles but gaining ground only she can see. Natalie Houston has been walking for eighteen minutes, and Carson sees her slow down as the woman who approached her the first day he followed her comes onto the track. They begin to talk as they walk and suddenly Natalie Houston laughs. How long was it, he wonders, before she could do that? She stops in her tracks, halts mid-stride, throws back her head, and her laughter rains upward, its echo the sound cracking open the sky around him. Carson smiles, the movement of his lips a tiny, momentous reflex.

He’s so much like Paul.
How many times has she thought this about some young man who reminds her of her son at his best—ambitious, certain he could take on the world,
be
anything,
do
anything? This has been the only hard part of advising Ian Harrington on his senior thesis about the novelist Ann Petry.

“Petry was really amazing,” Ian says solemnly. “The same woman who wrote
The Street
then writes
The Narrows
, and the novels couldn’t be more different. The sweep and scale of the later book, and the almost claustrophobic quality of the first. To tackle interracial sex and love, class, wealth, and murder and race in the soul of a small New England town that symbolizes America, and to do that in the early fifties?” Ian’s tight, narrow eyes gleam with a seductive intelligence as he poses the question in a breathless gust of adulation. Natalie sits evaluating the reading list Ian’s submitted for her approval.

“I finished
Miss Muriel and Other Stories
last night, Professor Houston,” Ian continues as Natalie writes in the margins of the list several other essays Ian can reference. “It’s one of those gems like Hughes’s collection
The Ways of White Folks
,” Ian effuses. “She kept transcending her patrician background and gave more dignity and complexity to her characters trapped in ghetto experiences I think than Richard Wright did. Don’t you?”

“Very thorough, Ian,” Natalie says, reaching across her desk to hand him the list. “I agree, but remember, Wright remained a naturalist and Petry’s dramatization of the forces influencing her characters was always pretty subtle. Unfortunately that may be why Petry’s oeuvre had to be virtually unearthed, and Wright remained a reference point. He was a brilliant sledgehammer who validated the need to name so much in our experience that was raw and ugly and disturbing.” She hands him the list. “I wish more of my students got high on literature like you, Ian. You make me remember why I teach—to try to infect others with the passion I feel about these stories.”

“You do, Professor Houston,” he tells Natalie earnestly, a spasm of alarm quivering in the rich baritone voice that Natalie imagines lecturing before a class. “Your seminar is the high point of my week.” From anyone but Ian, Natalie would hear those words as no more than unabashed brownnosing. But Ian’s been taking her classes since his sophomore year. She’s been his adviser since he entered Washington College. At a private college of generally bright students with solid writing skills, reading Ian’s essays has been for Natalie a special pleasure.

Ian is a young Black male who wants to teach. Just like Paul. When Paul was killed, Ian left a book of sermons by Howard Thurman in her English Department mailbox with a note that read, “These have helped me.” Helped him, Natalie later found out, when his father committed suicide in his senior year of high school.

“I’ll get that recommendation letter off to Yale in the next week, Ian. I have a good feeling about your chances of being accepted.”

“What do you think my backup schools should be?”

“Let me think on that and I’ll send you an e-mail.”

Ian stands up, and from the commanding heights of his six-foot-three frame asks Natalie, “Will you be at the Friday-night poetry slam? I’m on the mike,” he announces proudly. Ian’s got a “Thinking While Black” button on his corduroy jacket. His neat old-school Afro haircut and sideburns frame his rather large face and head.

“Ah, poetry slams and literary criticism. I like that, Ian.”

“We’re clean. In fact, we pride ourselves on not relying on profanity.”

“Is the profane a concept that means anything to your generation?”

“Aw, Professor Houston, that hurts.” Ian laughs and clutches his chest as though wounded.

“Listen to me. I swore I’d never turn into a midlife head-shaking naysayer yearning for the good old days. And that’s exactly what I sound like.”

“You and Dean Houston could come. Not too many faculty come out. If we did use gangsta rap lingo, there’d be letters to the editor of the school newspaper from all the faculty who heard an account thirdhand. Come on, Professor Houston, y’all got to represent.”

“I’ll be there, Ian. I’m eager to hear the rhymes of the next Alain Locke.”

“I’ll look for you. Seven o’clock, Tigner Hall.”

When Ian walked into Natalie’s office as a freshman for his first advising session, Natalie assumed he was on the basketball team. “Sorry to disappoint you and everybody else, but I spent more time reaching for books off the library shelf than dunkin’,” he said apologetically. The young man has inspired a maternal affection in Natalie that, now that he’s a senior, haunts her with fears of losing him.

After Ian leaves, Natalie spends another hour reading essays from her Topics class, then makes notes for her brown bag presentation tomorrow to the English Department faculty on new African writers. At four-thirty, while tossing out old files, she feels the prickly stab of hunger and pauses to envision the sumptuous architectural culinary creations she and Shirley will be sharing over dinner at the Cheesecake Factory at six o’clock. This pleasant thought is hijacked by images of the rush-hour Beltway traffic she will have to navigate to get from Washington College to upper-northwest D.C.

Finally ready to depart, Natalie opens her black leather briefcase, given to her as a gift by Temple when she received her doctorate. The stitching on the shoulder strap is frayed, and scratches and marks have been worn deep into the aged, thinning skin of the leather, which is soft and pliable. Natalie rarely cleans the briefcase, preferring the scent of perspiration and fingerprints and embedded, invisible dirt to the caustic, acrid clean of the leather polishes. She stuffs the briefcase with a folder of résumés for a junior position the department has to fill and the galleys of a novel by one of her students who graduated five years ago for which she has promised a blurb.

Opening her purse, Natalie catches sight of the tip of the envelope stuffed in a side compartment. Over and over she’s read Carson Blake’s letter. Her tears have burned the page. Her fingers more than once almost tore the letter to shreds. On one especially bad day, when she had dreamed the night before not of Paul but of his last moments, her palms balled and crushed the letter, and her hands tossed it into the wastebasket beside her desk, only to retrieve it moments later. The single-paragraph letter has made her a captive of the man who killed her son. She and Temple owe him nothing: not forgiveness, not recognition, not anything. Yet she hasn’t thrown the letter away, and in the four months that the letter has been in her possession, she’s failed to show it to Temple.

The court’s ruling that Carson Blake had qualified immunity left Temple embittered and made him literally sick in the months immediately following the judgment. He developed hypertension, diabetes, had a prostate cancer scare. The biopsy was negative. He spent hours on the Internet looking up cases like Paul’s, calling Quint Masterson every few weeks and asking if there wasn’t some other way the case could still go forward.

Masterson patiently took the calls and only once called Natalie to express concern about Temple, telling her, “I’ve dealt with these kinds of cases before. It’s a setback for you, I know. But I am concerned. Temple needs to put the idea of the civil suit behind him. He’s still a young man, and he has many years ahead of him. You seem to have—”