The Between (2 page)

He swam easily past the midway point to the buoy, and he could see from here that it was cracked and the glowing paint was old. He wanted to get a closer look at it, maybe grab it and tread water and gaze bick at all those brown bodies on the sand. And it was here that he met up with the undertow.

It was friendly at first. He felt as though the water had closed a grip around his tiny kicking legs and dunked him beneath the surface like a doughnut, then spat him back up a few feet from where he started. Hilton coughed and smiled, splashing with his arms. He didn’t know the water could do that by itself. It was like taking a ride.

The buoy was now farther than it was before the ocean played with him. It was off to his left now when it had been straight ahead. As Hilton waited to see if he could feel those swirling currents beneath him again, he heard splinters of Nana’s voice in the wind, calling from the beach: “Hilton, you get back here, boy! You hear me? Get back here.”

So the ocean was not free after all, Hilton realized. He’d better do as he was told, or he wouldn’t get any coconut cake or peach cobbler, if it wasn’t too late for that already. He began sure strokes back toward the shore.

The current still wanted to play, and this time it was angry Hilton was trying to leave so soon. He felt the cold grip seize his waist and hold his legs still. He was so startled he gasped a big breath of air, just in time to be plunged into the belly of the ocean, tumbled upside down and then up again, with water pounding all around his ears in a roar. Hilton tried to kick and stroke, but he didn’t know which way was up or down and all he could see was the water all around him specked with tiny ocean life. Even in his panic, Hilton knew not to open his mouth, but his lungs were starting to hurt and the tumbling was never-ending. Hilton believed he was being swept to the very bottom of the ocean, or out to sea as far as the ship he’d seen passing earlier. Frantically, he flailed his arms.

He didn’t hear Nana shout out from where she stood at the shore, but he’d hear the story told many times later. There was no lifeguard that day, but there were plenty of Kelly and James men who followed Nana, who stripped herself of her dress and ran into the water. The woman hadn’t been swimming in years, but her limbs didn’t fail her this one time she needed to glide across the water. The men followed the old woman into the sea.

Hilton felt he couldn’t hold his breath anymore, and the water mocked him all around. It filled his ears, his nose, and finally his mouth, and his muscles began to fail him. It was then, just as he believed his entire fifty-pound body would fill with water, that he felt an arm around his waist. He fought the arm at first, thinking it was another current, but the grip was firm and pulled him up, up, up, until he could see light and Nana’s weary, determined face. That was all he saw, because he went limp then.

He would hear the rest from others who told him in gentle ways about Chariots to the Everlasting and that sort of thing. One of the James men had been swimming closely behind Nana, and she passed Hilton to his arms. Then she simply stopped swimming, they said. Said maybe she just gave out. Nana’s head began to sink below the water, and just as one of the Kelly men reached to try to take her arm, the current she’d pulled Hilton from took her instead. The man carrying Hilton could only swim against it with all his might toward the shore. Many people almost drowned that day.

When Hilton’s senses came back to him and he was lying on the beach, caked in gritty sand, all that was left of Nana was her good flowered dress, damp and crumpled at the water’s edge.

So what the gifted old folks, the seers, often say is true:

Sometimes the dead go unburied.

Hilton looked at his watch and winced. Four o’clock. His wife’s reception had started at three, and although the lodge was only a ten-minute drive from here, he was late even by Colored People Time standards.

“You got to go, right?” Danitra asked, her arms folded across her chest, not hiding the disappointment on her painted lips. Hilton was intrigued by lipstick, especially this shade as bright as blood, because Dede never wore it.

But then, Dede didn’t have to.

“I’ll be in trouble if I don’t,” Hilton said, glancing at the boxes stacked in the empty apartment. Anything to keep his eyes off of her black tank top, which she wore with a brazen-ness only a woman in her early twenties could. “You’re all set here, Miss Thang. I know the elevator’s broken, and it’s not Buckingham Palace, but—”

“Oh, please,” Danitra laughed. “Close enough. This is better than I thought it could get for me, Mr. James. And I won’t mess it up this time over shooting up or a man or nothing else.”

Metro-Dade police had referred Danitra to Hilton’s drug-rehab center six months ago, when the remnants of her stitched-on, store-bought braids hung sloppily from her scalp, her lips were never quite closed and never quite dry, and her arms were swollen from needle tracks. Now her arms had dark bruises from the habit she would fight off all her remaining years, but they were also sculpted with muscles. Her faded jeans at last had a form to cling to, and cling they did.

This was a dangerous place for a married man to be today, Hilton thought. Higher intentions were one thing, but it was a plain fact the woman was looking good, and the two of them had spent the past hour working up a healthy sweat carrying boxes and donated furniture up two flights of stairs to move her and her baby into a place they hadn’t known for the infant’s entire eighteen-month life: a home.

And Danitra had brains going for her. Even when she used to get high, she never shared needles, which kept her and her baby free of the disease that had decimated his clients who shot up. She had a strength that reminded him of his wife, with a will to match.

All of these qualities added, in his mind, to her general fineness. He couldn’t help thinking about what might have happened between them if he were single, which he hadn’t been in fifteen years. The bare, airy room felt too small for them both.

She read his mind. “You know, there was a time a man like you would have asked for my phone number. Back before I tore myself up like I did.”

“A man like me would ask for your phone number now,” Hilton said carefully, to reassure her that she should not be ashamed, “if a man like me weren’t married.”

“I guess you already got my number, don’t you?” She took his hand and pressed it to her chest near her collarbone, where beneath a thin film of perspiration her skin felt touched with fever.

another time, a different doorway

another life

His lips parting slightly, Hilton gently pulled his hand away and patted her firmly on the shoulder. Danitra laughed at the brotherly gesture.

“Don’t be looking at me like that, girl. I don’t know what you want with an old man anyway.”

“Not that old. I don’t see no gray in that beard yet.”

“You aren’t looking closely enough.”

“Well, I don’t think I’d better look no closer, seeing as you have that ring on your finger and you won’t take it off.”

Still smiling, Hilton shook his head. Her attraction was flattering. “Damn. You don’t give up, do you?” he asked.

“No, sir. That’s why I’m standing where I am right now.”

He saw a fleeting image of the two of them nude, entwined behind boxes on the carpeting, christening her new home, but he forced the thought away because he felt the heavy warmth of arousal growing beneath his stomach. He took a deep breath and pinched her cheek. “Good luck, sweetheart. I’m late. I’d better leave.”

“Yeah,” Danitra said, grinning knowingly, “you’d better.”

As Hilton climbed into the dented Corolla he’d driven since grad school in the late 1970s, the thrill of temptation buzzed in his mind. Instead of regret, he felt a sense of power over it, knowing he had chosen not to act. He had Dede, who even now was being lauded as a newly elected circuit-court judge, the only black woman in Dade with that title; and together they had Kaya and Jamil, whom only a certified fool would risk willingly. Cute wasn’t worth it. Ten times cute wasn’t worth it.

He knew and respected men who didn’t feel the same carnal allegiances—and he’d heard straight-faced arguments from black friends on how insulting it was to try to force fidelity, a European notion, on the descendants of African princes—but Hilton had already come too close to losing his own tribe from selfishness. Fucking around, as far as he was concerned, was just another form of selfishness. One he didn’t dare explore.

The Elks lodge on Northwest Seventh Avenue was flanked by rented limousines with tinted windows and three Miami police cars, sirens flashing, just in case any restless have-nots nearby got ideas about crashing the bourgeois party. Seventh Avenue was otherwise occupied by storefronts badly in need of paint and customers; the Burger King across the street was bustling, but the African-fashions store next to the lodge was nearly empty. Hilton adjusted the kente-cloth necktie Dede bought him from the little shop as he excused himself past the huddles at the lodge door. Inside, he scanned the balloon-filled hall for his family.

He saw Dede immediately, but she didn’t see him. She was center-stage with a dozen other black officials wearing name tags, posing for group photographs. She stood among the tallest, a graceful giant with a long neck and a sculpted natural that sloped above her forehead. Alongside her were two black mayors, state legislators, local commissioners, and two black U.S. congressmen. All had been guests in his home at one time or another. Hilton was struck by how impressive the group was and consciously stood a bit straighter when he reminded himself that his own wife was among them. Flashing bulbs lit the room like strobes.

A stage whisper floated to Hilton’s ear from behind him:
“Psssst.
Dad.”

He saw his daughter waving in her lilac taffeta dress from a table near the buffet line. Her permed hair was curled loose against her shoulders instead of in ponytails, the way he was used to seeing her. Apparently, she’d been allowed to wear a touch of rouge on her cheeks. She’d won many of these little compromises since her thirteenth birthday, or, as Kaya called it, her “teenagehood.” Jamil’s head popped up from whatever game he was playing crouched under the table. They had inherited their mother’s sharp jawbone and long neck, and their faces were smooth and round, looking nearly identical in a complexion mingling Dede’s darker shade with Hilton’s red-clay-tinged brown.

“You’re late, Dad,” Kaya observed while Hilton kissed her forehead and massaged Jamil’s scalp.

“Watch out for my fade, Daddy,” Jamil said, patting his flat hairstyle back into place. Hilton couldn’t remember being that vain at eight, or at any age since.

“Mom made a speech,” Kaya said, and Hilton’s spirits sank. He’d left the house to help Danitra move out of the rehab center before he could listen to Dede practice her speech as he’d promised that afternoon. Now he’d missed the real thing too.

“Uh-oh,” he said. Uh-oh was an understatement. “I bet it was good, though.”

“Of course it was. She got a standing ovation.” Hilton gazed intently at the group posing for pictures, and Dede suddenly shifted her head and saw him. Not daring a smile, Hilton raised his hand to greet her. Dede’s face remained unchanged, unreadable. I’m sorry, he mouthed to her. Her eyes returned to the camera, and she managed an insincere smile for the picture. With her mother on vacation in the Bahamas, Hilton remembered, he would have been especially missed today. Hilton knew he was most certainly, without a doubt, in big trouble.

“I’ve got an idea,” Kaya said, close to his ear. “Say your car broke down. She’ll believe that. It’s always broken.” “Thanks a lot. I’m glad we raised you to be honest.” “You’d better have some excuse, Dad. She wanted you here.” Sorry, dear, Hilton rehearsed in his mind ruefully, I would have been here for your shining moment, but I was getting a hard-on for one of my junkie clients.

Once Dede joined them, Hilton won a reprieve from her solemn dark eyes in the stream of well-wishers who wanted to shake her hand, who remembered her from when she was only so tall, who’d contributed to her campaign and were so happy to finally see a sister in there. In these situations, Hilton envied Dede for her liquid smile and easy enthusiasm. She lost herself in the warmth of other people in a way he could not, grasping their shoulders, hugging them, taking telephone numbers with relish.

Dede maintained her gracious dignity while allowing an infectious playfulness to peek through. She had a peal of laughter he could usually hear from across the room. Maybe that was the African in her; Dede’s mother was Ghanaian and equally effusive. Dede’s nature spilled into her campaign, a clean race that found her victorious, despite their bare-bones finances, over an older white man with a recognized name. By the end, Kaya and Jamil were scrawling campaign signs with colored markers.

Hilton held Dede’s hand while she spoke to one person after another, brushing her knuckle gently with his thumb; this was half an involuntary impulse to remind her admirers that he’d had the good sense to choose her, half a silent apology. A black Metro-Dade police officer they’d both known for years, dressed smartly in his brown-and-beige uniform, kissed Dede’s cheek, then gave Hilton a soul shake. Curtis was a vice sergeant who often steered homeless addicts to Hilton’s Miami New Day center with his finesse for ignoring county paperwork. He’d brought Danitra after finding her asleep with a needle in one arm and her baby in the other, beneath the Interstate 95 overpass.

“Watch it, Hil, or I’m ’a take this lady right from under your nose. You know how they like the uniform, right?”

“Look here, you can try,” Hilton said.

“Curtis, you’d better go get a plate of food and stop being foolish,” Dede dismissed him.

Curt pursed his lips grimly beneath his moustache. He leaned closer to Dede, his voice free of mirth. “You let me know if you change your mind and decide to file a report on that thing. I’ll make sure it gets looked after.”

“Hold up. What thing?” Hilton asked.