The Dying Ground (26 page)

“That’s my baby in there! My baby! She’s hurt behind shit everybody told y’all to leave alone.”

As my throat closed beneath his strong fingers, the words “my baby” rang in my ears, separating his blood child from me. It spoke directly to the fear I’d always harbored in my soul.

Me and them, separately.

“Al, please,” Gra’mère pleaded softly, as if she was in prayer. “Al, please.”

Daddy Al stuttered with rage and didn’t hear a word she said. Rachel stepped forward and tried to unlace his fingers from Holly’s neck. His grip intensified the more she tried. “Come on, Daddy. Let go.”

“Let go? I ought to choke the life out of both of them.” His eyes flashed like fire. The veins in his fingers and hands pulsated
as he slammed Holly against the wall. It shook from the blow. He still held me tightly with his other hand.

“Redfield!” It was a command. Another man’s voice. I hadn’t seen Midnight Blue enter the hospital. I had thought he was gone, back to Louisiana. “Redfield!” he repeated again.

Daddy Al responded, not by letting go but loosening his grip enough for Holly to breathe. He swung me around and pinned me alongside the sputtering Holly. “You two think it’s okay to play games with my girl’s life?” He knocked our heads together like rocks. “Ya think it’s okay for my baby to be laid up in there?”

Neither one of us spoke. Gra’mère continued to plead behind him.

“We raised you both with everything we had, and you think it’s okay to pay us back like this.” He swung me around so that I faced Gra’mère.

“That’s the only mama you ever had, boy. The only one! And a child she carried might die because of you!”

“Daddy, you need to let those boys go.” Rachel stepped in between me and Gra’mère. Phine and Nelia kept their distance. Rachel had always been the only one fearless enough to approach Daddy Al in moments of extreme anger. “We need to deal with Cissy right now.”

He let us go, but not before a final powerful push of disgust. Holly stood silent, as did I. Neither one of us had the nerve to walk away. Daddy Al turned his attention from us and looked for the first time into Cissy’s room. He seemed to deflate and grow old right before our eyes.

“Oh, my God. Sweet Jesus,” he said, at the sight of her.

“Come on, Al.” Gra’mère grabbed his arm and pushed open the door of the room.

Rachel reached a hand out toward me and whispered, “Y’all get out of here.”

Daddy Al stopped and turned to us before he disappeared inside. In just that instant he had withered, multiplied in age, and come out a very old man. His voice was laced with venom as he railed at Holly. “You came to us like an alley cat and we made you family.” He spit at his feet.

Holly took off, running full speed down the hall. The aunties stepped quickly away. They must have thought that he was running away from Daddy Al’s words, the family’s anger and disappointment, but I knew different. He ran with a purpose. He was going to get Smokey.

I was left in the hall with Alixe and Midnight Blue. Blue wouldn’t look at me. He just stared through the window at the family gathered around Cissy. “Maceo,” he said, “you don’t need to be here.”

Alixe left the top off the Jeep as we sped through the streets of East Oakland toward Jack London Square. I didn’t know where we were going and I didn’t ask. I wondered briefly where Holly was, but it didn’t seem important. My mission had lost its purpose. Not even images of Felicia’s frightened face could jump-start my heart.

Alixe wheeled into the parking lot alongside Ole Spaghetti Factory in Jack London and jumped out of the car. I followed, listless, not even tired or in pain. We walked away from the restaurant down a path near the water. Boats bobbed darkly in the marina. She moved with purpose. She was still in uniform, and I hadn’t seen her check out or tell anyone she was leaving.

At the last boat in the slip she stepped aboard and motioned for me to do the same. “This is where I live.”

I looked around. Any other time I might have been impressed or curious but not now.

She kept talking to fill in the silence. “I look after the place for one of the doctors. He lets me live here rent free, and I take care of things. Have a seat.”

She cleared a place for me on the bed. I sat.

“Lie down if you want. I’m going to jump in the shower.”

I did as I was told. I fell asleep to the sound of running water coming from the bathroom.

I awoke hours later to find Alixe at my side. She mumbled and slid into me perfectly. I absorbed the warmth of her skin. “Maceo.” She blinked to clear the sleep from her eyes. “You okay? You need anything?”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you in any pain?”

“Sore all over.” It was more than soreness but I deserved it. Even if I had access to painkillers I wouldn’t take them. I deserved to feel every inch of the pain.

“Do you think they’ll catch the guys who did this?”

Holly flashed through my mind. “I don’t know.”

“How safe is it for you to be here?”

“Not too. My granddaddy wants me to go to Louisiana, out to the farm, until everything calms down.”

“Are you going to go?”

“I can’t leave Holly here.”

She looked me right in the eye. “Yes, you can, and you should. If you have a place to go, you should go as soon as possible.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Yes, it is, it
is
that easy. It seems to me your only other option is death. I don’t know how you could look at Cissy and not see how important it is that you leave for a while.”

“Alixe.”

“You never want to hear what’s right. I don’t understand that.”

“You never want to let things go.”

She glanced at the blood splattered across my T-shirt. Her voice softened. “Let me help you out of that.” She sat up and I noticed she was wearing only a T-shirt.

Her legs brushed against mine as she moved to pull the shirt from my head. “You want to get out of those pants?”

I stood and undid the buttons of my jeans.

“I called the hospital while you were sleeping. No change.”

“How long I been asleep?”

“Three hours.” She brushed my cheek with her hand. I moved it to my lips and kissed the open palm. She glided up, careful of my ribs, and kissed me. It didn’t take long for us to get to where we were going. My body was a solid wall of aching pain but I’d once pitched an entire series with swollen elbows and sprained wrists. I thought at the least, for my own sanity, I could make love through the soreness.

I covered her body with mine and guided her hands down to help pull away my shorts. She slipped her T-shirt off and let it fall on the pillow above my head. Her skin was soft, her lips wide and generous.

I dropped my head to her breasts and took one in my mouth. She attempted to move my face back up to hers but I resisted. I moved from one to the other, feeling like I’d been rescued from a famine.

Her hands moved down my body until she reached the very center. She took me in her hand and guided me to her core. When I slipped inside I heard a sigh from deep within her throat. It made me harder. She sighed again and I went farther inside. She was tight and shallow enough to make me feel safe.

Her lips spurred me on and I moved with a fury. I knew it
was all fueled by Billy’s death, Felicia’s disappearance, and Cissy but I needed a way to disappear. As the bed rocked beneath us I knew deep down that I played a fool’s game. I was gambling with raw emotions as chips, and the house held my sanity as collateral.

But I went on, moving like a blind man, desperate, choosing to let everything ride on the woman beneath me.

“Maceo.” Her eyes were closed, her upper lip damp with sweat. She delivered my name to me as the sweetest sound in the world.

“Damn, Alixe” was all I could say in response. She matched me stroke for stroke until I was close to the edge. The sound of her voice, her body, her smell—it all worked with me to keep reality at bay. I raced to the finish line.

F
irst thing in the morning I made a call to the hospital. Cissy had regained consciousness once, briefly, but no one in my family was willing to speak to me. I left four messages for Holly and reached out for my clothes.

I pulled the keys Regina had given me days ago from my jeans and held them in the air. Alixe walked in with a cup of coffee and found me holding them. She handed me the coffee and pulled a videotape from behind her back.

“I made this for you the other day. I don’t know why but I did. Maybe it’s really to help me understand you and the world that holds so much appeal for you.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s for your friend if she ever comes back.”

“What is it?” I took the tape.

“The funeral. They were running it yesterday on Soul Beat.” I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t. Soul Beat was a ghettoized Oakland channel where news correspondents
showed up notoriously unprepared for various events with microphones visible above their heads.

“Thanks.”

“Maybe something there might give you a clue to what this was all about. Maybe not.”

“Thanks.”

“What do you want to do now?” She flopped down beside me and kissed the side of my neck. I wanted to stay, to climb back under the covers and hide from everything, but I knew the reprieve was over.

“I need to go home.” I held Regina’s extra keys in the air again. “But I need to make a stop on the way.”

Yellow police tape was still strung across the door of Felicia’s apartment, but I whacked it down and used the key from Regina to enter. Alixe was behind me. The living room had been returned to normalcy, just a little more disheveled than before.

“What are you looking for?”

“I want to get a phone number.”

I went to the stand near the couch and opened the drawer. There were fragments of a cracked figurine inside. I moved the pieces around until I found the paper with the emergency numbers. I tore it from the pad and shoved it in my pocket.

I heard Alixe move down the hall and then I saw her disappear into Felicia’s room. I gave her a minute and then went inside. She stood near the shattered bed and looked at the cracked photographs atop the mattress.

She picked one up. “Is this her? Is this Felicia?”

It was, one of her best pictures. It made her vivid again, seeing the photo. A smiling face with still no indication of whether she was dead or alive.

“Yeah, that’s her,” I answered.

“She’s beautiful.” She searched my face. “You loved her, didn’t you?”

I turned away and walked to the door. “We should go.”

“Don’t do that, please.”

I sighed. “Yeah, Alixe, I loved her.”

She returned the picture to the pile.

Out in the car we were silent. I knew her next question before she asked it. “Do you still love her?”

I answered simply, truthfully. “Yes.”

She wheeled onto Alcatraz and headed toward my house. “Even after all that’s happened? Even after seeing Cissy like that?”

I didn’t answer.

She pulled up in front of my house and kept the motor running. “I hope you find her, Maceo.”

I believed she meant it. “Why?”

She cut the engine but didn’t get out. I took the lead and got out onto the sidewalk. “Because I like you.” She continued, “I think we like each other.”

“Alixe, I appreciate everything you did last night. At the hospital. Everything.”

“I wasn’t fishing for a compliment. I like you, independent of how you feel about me. I just hope you find her, even if her coming back means I don’t get to keep you.”

“Why would you wish that?”

“’cause Felicia is too potent as a ghost. Who can compete with that.” She dropped her voice at the end of the sentence. “What fool would want to?” She popped the engine. “You should go to Louisiana, Maceo. As soon as possible.” She handed me the tape of the funeral I had placed on the dashboard. “Find what you need.”

I watched her drive away.

R
achel sat on the front steps of the cottage. She stood up when I came through the gate and wrinkled her nose at the sight of me. I still wore the bloodied shirt from the night before.

“You just getting home?” she asked.