A Deeper Love Inside (45 page)

SCENE 4

Elisha and I were both young businesspeople. We were both used to working, negotiating, saving, investing, selling, and purchasing. That same night, on my thirteenth birthday, we tried to “manage” our love.

“It’s 1:30 in the morning,” I told him.

“My parents are at a convention in Washington, DC,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, not knowing nothing about a “convention,” but understanding that Elisha was out late cause no one was making him stay home.

“I’m staying with you,” he said. “I’m not moving.”

“You want me to have your baby now?” I asked him.

“Do you want to have my baby?” he asked me.

“The truth?” I said softly. “I want to give you anything you want. No, I want to give you everything I have. I feel like my heart is gonna burst out my chest. But, Elisha, down here where I live,
morning never comes
. There are no windows and there is no sunshine.”

“I see that,” was all he said. “So what does that mean to you?” he asked calmly. He was caressing me, pressed against my back, both of us naked.

“You know how the sun reminds us of the reality? Down here is different. You and I could just stay down here and love each other until we die. But if there was a window, you would see the sunlight and remember your mother, remember your school, and your friends, remember that you’re a movie director, remember your life.”

“So?” he asked.

“So I’m saying. I want you to do it to me. I want to do it with you, but do we want a baby, now? Maybe we should accomplish something first,” I said. I could feel him smiling, but he was still stroking my skin. We were lying on my bed trying really, really hard to manage.

“Alright, so after I make my first film and it’s big, big, big, you’ll give me some pussy?” he teased, touching me there. “I’ll buy you a house with great big windows and plenty of sunshine. You’ll be my wife and have my babies?” Elisha said it like he was on the set directing the movie scenes exactly how he saw them in his mind, and how he wanted them to go. His strong hand was lying over my pussy bush. My whole body was so ignited it was threatening to overrule my mind and everything my mouth was saying.

“How long before you think our love will disappear?” I asked him.

“Love never disappears,” he said calmly. “It’s impossible. If it disappears it was never love,” he said.

Hot tears boiled and spilled from my eyes like water shooting up from the earth. He was sucking my nipples now and stroking my hips with his hands. I couldn’t stop crying cause Elisha was the sun. I only wanted to revolve around him. I wasn’t used to it though, this incredible feeling.

Elisha’s light was cutting through my extreme darkness, and exposing something that my heart with five holes in it could not bear.
Momma, Poppa, and Winter didn’t really love me. They had all disappeared. When shit got fucked up, they didn’t fight back hard enough. They didn’t come get me. They didn’t send no one for me. They didn’t check on me. They didn’t come see about me. Worse than that, they let their loving feelings disappear.

“I know. You had me suffer for eight months.” Elisha said speaking of our separation. “Love didn’t leave me,” he said. “It was walking with me the whole time, just getting stronger and stronger.” We were tonguing again. The heat was even in our mouths. I held his hardness in my hand. He placed his hand over mine and moved it up and down. I kept holding it, massaging it, jerking it until hot sticky fluid spilled all over my fingers.

“We can work it out,” Elisha said. “There’s a whole bunch of ways we can move.
Let’s just make moves together
.” I was thirteen. He would soon be fifteen. My heart agreed. My tongue agreed. My mind agreed. I fucking agreed.

• • •

So what could be wrong?
I was asking myself seven days before my fourteenth birthday. My thoughts had all turned dark. It was like I was being pulled beneath the ground beneath the underground. I was already underground. Could I actually be pulled down any further, any lower? Was there a last floor to the ground, a lowest level, a place where, no matter what, a person couldn’t fall or be pulled or dragged any lower?

Naked, I was seated in the closet, collapsed after dancing, seven days before my fourteenth birthday, one night after seeing Momma, bruised and broken,
again
.

Elisha was too true and too right. Love does not disappear. Love never leaves. Even when someone you love does not love you, and
does not return the love, the love you carry for them is still on. It’s right there. Like Elisha said, it’s walking right beside you night and day, day and night. It never goes away. Elisha’s love has shown me who loves me and who never truly did. Problem was I loved them, my family. Since love never leaves, it was like every day I had five invisible people walking beside me, nonstop.

Somebody has to go,
I thought to myself. Siri said, “Not Elisha, he loves us.”

“It’s me. I have to go.”

Chapter 41

“Gentlemen are always discreet.” Mr. Sharp had used this expression more than once in his back-office business conversations.

One day when I was helping Elisha study for his vocabulary exam, I asked him, “What does discreet mean?”

Elisha said, “Calm and cool, like nothing’s happening even though it really is happening.”

“Use it in a sentence.” I pushed Elisha. He had to be able to use all of his vocab study words in a proper sentence anyway.

“Let me see . . .” He was thinking.

“My father flips through the pages of his naked girly magazine, while discreetly pretending to read the newspaper.” We laughed. I understood.

Mr. Sharp’s discreetness was elegant to me. He knew Poppa, Momma, and me. He never mixed or shared or exposed any of our secrets to the others. He never mentioned to me if he had seen Momma recently. If he did see her, he never mentioned what condition she was in. He never let on that he knew she lived in the ground beneath the store floor, one store in a string of stores, which
he
owned. He never revealed that he was aware that Momma was any different than how she appeared in the pretty photo that he had framed and given to me. He never used words like
crackhead
,
addiction
,
filthy
,
regretful
,
shameful
,
embarrassing
, in reference to Momma. Mr. Sharp never said if it was him who struck a deal with Big Johnnie to allow Momma to live in the underground for free, or if it was Johnnie who had some agreement with Momma himself.

Mr. Sharp only said that, even though he was just his tailor, he loved Poppa like a brother. He never said that he knew Poppa was doing life, and for what reasons he was locked up. Mr. Sharp never said if he had ever visited Poppa at the prison, or if he had written or received Poppa’s letters. Had Poppa known that Sharp gave me a job, paid me well, put out a word of protection on the streets that no one should fuck with the attractive, ambitious little meter maid, personal assistant, errand girl, cigarette hustler? Sharp’s word had kept away all the young hustlers and hotheads in the area who started sweating me as soon as hit thirteen. I don’t know if Poppa knew. Mr. Sharp was so discreet he didn’t say.

Mr. Sharp didn’t ask me for ID, Social Security numbers, working papers, nothing. When I flashed him a sign, he’d drop a question or a topic that he knew I didn’t want to discuss. He never said I was too young to think, work, earn, or be responsible, or asked me what happened or why.

It must’ve been shocking, a fourteen-years-young naked girl found half dead on his property. He never mentioned how I got to the hospital or why I was registered under the name Ivory Sharp. He never searched for approval, credit, or a financial reimbursement for his time and trouble posing as my biological father in the hospital or anywhere it needed to be done. That’s why Sharp was an elegant discreet gentleman to me. So discreet in fact, he never uttered the phrase
attempted suicide
to me. In the end he was the bridge that held three Santiagas together.

Chapter 42

When Mr. Sharp called my cell phone, which Elisha had upgraded to a BlackBerry, I knew something was wrong. I was sixteen. It was the first and only call I had received from Sharp on my mobile. From age eleven through fourteen, all of our business had been face-to-face, in his office shop, based on spoken words and agreements. Our bond grew stronger each time one of us did exactly what we said we were going to do, exactly when we said we were gonna do it, and at the standard we expected of each other.

Now, having been away from him for two years, and him being used to receiving a call from me from a phone number or phone card that he couldn’t trace back, and only on Sunday’s, his voicemail to my BlackBerry was clearly an urgent call.

“Mr. Sharp,” I said, returning his call.

“Ivory,” he said.

“Yes?” I said.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Lana . . .” He said Momma’s name. A cold wave moved through my body.

“I’m coming,” I said and hung up.

I took a Lufthansa flight using a passport that identified me as Onatah Rivers. The same one I had been using for the past year. I ate nothing on the flight. I was a dancer with butterflies dancing in my belly. I felt so nervous, I kept having the feeling that I had to pee and poop. I would walk directly to the bathroom, lock myself in, and nothing would come out of me. After four or five times, I stopped falling for the trick my body was playing on me.

• • •

Face to face with Mr. Sharp, words weren’t necessary. His facial ex
pression told the story of Momma’s death. His look, I know, was 99 percent pain that he felt
for me
.

“Do you want me to take you to the hospital where she is?” he asked.

“No,” I said softly, sweetly, and sorrowfully. I knew he meant, where her dead, naked, cold body, and what remained of it is . . . being refrigerated.

“You should sit down then,” Sharp said. “Here’s the situation. I’ve made all of the arrangements. The wake will be at the Johnson’s Funeral Home on Eastern Parkway, but it won’t happen for at least ten days. Your father is processing through the red tape to be able to attend the funeral and it looks like it’s gonna happen.”

• • •

Shopping alone in Neiman Marcus for Momma’s final outfit, I was shaking. With the wake set to occur in twenty-four hours, and the undertaker waiting for my fashion choices so he could dress Momma’s dead body, my brain drew a black blank. My own mind was afraid to show me any images of Momma after 1994, when Momma was a stunner and the priceless crown jewel in Poppa’s crown. It was as though my memory of Momma hooked and dragged down by crack was temporarily erased. The team-in-my-head were working feverishly to decorate and redecorate. They were spraying perfume on everything, covering up the stench, and removing the stains. They were converting Momma into an angel, who could never do and never did anything wrong.

Maybe that’s how I ended up at the register with a white dress designed by Gianni Versace in his heyday, and the stilettos Momma definitely would’ve worn with it.

I paid in cash without blinking an eye, losing one breath, or even reviewing the receipt. I’m sixteen, and I’m made of money. I have it bulging out of my Birkin bag, falling out the sky over my head, and leaving a trail wherever I walked. Like Midas, every business venture I ever took on, doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled, and turned to gold. My stacks of money was easy, getting my mind right was complicated. Fixing my heart was fucking impossible.

It’s crazy. No, I should say, it’s
ironic
. Elisha taught me that word.
Momma had died on my sixteenth birthday. It had taken Mr. Sharp a couple days to make contact. Why that day? What was Momma saying to me? From now on, on my birthday, when I’m supposed to be happy and celebrating my life, I will be remembering Momma’s death.

• • •

Undertakers look at dead people all day. For them, that’s a normal life. When Momma’s undertaker looked at the outfit I selected, he handed it right back to me and then excused himself, calling Mr. Sharp on his back-office phone, as I overheard the conversation.

“The young lady has purchased a white minidress for the Santiago corpse,” he began saying to Sharp.

In my state of mind, I knew Mr. Sharp would take care of everything. I wanted to speak to him, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t assemble one sentence to say out loud, much less a string of sensible sentences. It was as if I was trapped in the corner of my mind screaming, while soft music played. It was not the kind of music I was used to or that I danced to.

There were no drums, no drum machine, no guitar, acoustic or electric, no bass, trumpet, violin, or sax, or even piano. The music I heard was the tingle of someone tapping the triangle, while another played only the xylophone. And that’s it, no other instruments.

When my cell phone rang I just stared at it. I didn’t pick up. It was an interruption to my music. When I returned to my hotel room, the hotel phone was blinking red with recorded messages unheard. Suddenly it began ringing loudly, too loudly to ignore. I picked it up but couldn’t remember how to form my mouth to say hello.

“It’s me,” Mr. Sharp said. “There’s a gentleman here to see you, a Mr. Bilal Ode. He’s out in my reception area. Before you hang up,
listen. I’ve seen this man before. He used to come with your father for fittings. Silent man, never said one word besides the greetings. I just thought you should know that, before you send him away without hearing him out.”

Bilal Ode, Bilal Ode, Bilal Ode, Bilal Ode, a chorus began singing the name over and over again, opera style, until my tears boiled up and spilled. The African man who adopted my baby girls, the twins, and moved them to a place Momma called, “the African Jungle,” I thought to myself.

“Are you listening?” Mr. Sharp asked me calmly. I hung up.

I didn’t call down for them to bring the Benz around from valet parking. I couldn’t speak. Downstairs I handed the parking attendant a valet ticket and a ten-dollar bill.