After (11 page)

“Why you hate me?”

Carson had not planned to ask the question. Had not planned to say anything at all. But he felt so assaulted that he thought,
Fuck it, I can say anything. Ask anything.

Jimmy drained his glass and stared at Carson through eyes that were cloudy, screened by a milky film. Eyes off-kilter and trembling. But Carson sensed that through that haze he was in focus, and that Jimmy Blake had never before seen him so clearly.

“Boy, if you only
knew
,” he said with a shake of his head, the words thick, heavy.

“Knew
what
?”

“How little I hate you. How your being in this house proves that whatever I feel for you, it sure ain’t hate.” His drunken gaze probed Carson unsteadily.

“You’re not my father, are you?” Carson had not planned this question either, and he was stunned by how it fell through his lips so slow and easy, after all the years it had bubbled, undigested and acidic, inside him. He knew the answer. But how would he survive if he heard Jimmy Blake say it out loud?

“Your mama wanted to protect you. All these years. But I’ve thought for a long time now you been old enough to know the truth.” He shifted in the chair, turned his body and crossed his legs, hunched his shoulders, pushed the liquor away from him, to the center of the table. Jimmy Blake was stalling. Carson couldn’t believe it. Did he fear what he was about to say as much as Carson did?

In those drunken eyes he saw sadness, sympathy, pity. It wasn’t all for him.

“Naw, I ain’t your daddy.”

The words, finally, released and relieved him. He owed Jimmy Blake nothing. No respect. No love. He was free.
But whose child am I?
Carson wondered. He always thought that once he knew the truth that he would want to know who his father was. But Jimmy Blake was more father than he could stand.

“Naw, you ain’t mine,” he said again, this time shivering mightily, almost as if he could not believe it himself. “For me, there wadn’t never nobody else. But your mama, she went off an…” he began.
Who?
Carson wondered, blotting out the accusation. The question was as natural as breathing. But he didn’t want to know the answer. And, silently, he prayed,
Don’t tell me
. If he was a father worth having, Carson reasoned, he’d know who he was. But he could not help but wonder,
Who?

Behind the storm of these thoughts he vaguely heard Jimmy Blake talking about Alma and the man who was Carson’s father. But what Carson heard over and over, what became the only sound in the world, were the words “Naw, you ain’t mine.” Words that crashed like a ceiling onto his shoulders. He’d thought the truth was a lifeboat. Now he knew it was a sinking ship.

He couldn’t tell anyone what he suspected. How could he tell anyone what he now knew?

Alma’s love was a shield protecting Carson from the father who seemed not to love him at all. Memory, Carson had concluded even on that night in the kitchen, is the place where nothing good ever happens.

Carson left Jimmy Blake sitting at the kitchen table, babbling family secrets in a hushed whisper. In the room Carson shared with Richard, he undressed in the dark and then, beneath the covers all that night long, wondered why he was crying. Were the tears for Jimmy Blake’s wounded pride or his own sense of betrayal? On no other night had he felt himself so completely Jimmy Blake’s son.

Two days after that night, when Alma came to Carson, found him cleaning out the garage, she slumped down on the steps leading into the house, hugged her body and rocked herself gently, her eyes closed.

“What is it?” Carson asked, knowing why she sought him out.

“Jimmy told me about the other night,” she said, her eyes shuttered and downcast.

“I always knew. It’s no big deal.”

“Carson…”

“He told me everything. Now what do you want to say?”

“I’m ashamed. I have been for years.”

“So what else is new?”

His bitterness raised her eyes, and she reminded Carson, “I gave you life.”

“I wish you hadn’t.”

Alma marshaled the marrow of what was required to walk over to Carson and calmly, quickly slap him. As fast as it came, he could have grabbed her arm. Ducked. Run. But he didn’t.

“You think because Jimmy told you he’s not your father he told you everything. He told you who you’re not. I’m the one who can tell you who you are.” She shuffled back to the stairs and sat down. She sat in silence so long, Carson turned his back and began going through the boxes as Jimmy had told him to do, searching for rusted tools and junk he planned to throw away. Carson had almost forgotten she was there when her words summoned and startled him. “Some men love you like a hurricane. What they give you sinks down below the root of all your feelings. Your father, Eli Bailey, loved me like that.” Carson turned to look at his mother, her eyes wide, bright with the heat of remembrance.

“I’d been married to Jimmy a year and a half and thought all the life of feelings and passion was gone. Dead and buried. Something I’d never have again. Jimmy’s love brought me to shore and kept me tied there. Eli released me, took me out in the deepest water. We almost made it to the horizon. Nobody tells you how long it takes to learn to love somebody, that you got to give up almost everything you want, every dream you ever had, to
be
married, to
stay
married, to
make
a marriage. How humble and grateful you’ve got to be for love plainspoken and honest. How it doesn’t come to you wrapped in shiny paper and ribbons that take your breath away. I did a terrible thing to Jimmy Blake when I fell in love with Eli. But back then I thought because Jimmy had made me feel like my life was over, that was a crime I had the right to avenge.”

The words came like a blast, rooting Carson where he stood surrounded by the lawn mower, several sawhorses, the barbecue grill, and water hoses. He wanted her to stop. It was too much. Too soon. Too late. Alma stood up wearily, as though her words, her confession, aged rather than freed her. But she was not finished. She had just started, and the words that she would speak, the promise and the threat of them, plunged Carson into obedient, breathless silence.

“Loving Eli made me feel like I wasn’t just fighting for my life but that I could get it back. When I met Eli I was a married woman. I still wasn’t ready to give nothing up. I was parched and dry inside. Jimmy’s love had turned me into a desert. But I was determined to find a way to bloom. I started hating everything about Jimmy, everything that I had once respected. His steadiness, his job, this house that he wanted to buy for us to raise a family in. Eli and I weren’t even together that long. Six, seven months. It doesn’t take long for a storm to rise and drench and soak you and set you shivering. In six, seven months I met your father and left Jimmy, went to live with my mother. Eli lived in a boardinghouse across the street from my mother. Oh, it was a scandal. But I didn’t care. You know, your father would wash my hair? He’d touch me even when we weren’t behind closed doors. Just reach for my hand like it was a precious thing. He’d kiss me in public, for everybody to see. And we’d talk like talking was medicine. I’d never told anybody so much about what I felt or what I wanted.”

Alma stopped as though astonished at the rhapsodic tone of her words, but then forged ahead. “I know that may not sound like much to you, Carson. But those things, those little things, they
save
a woman’s life. I’d walked away from my husband and I hadn’t looked back. Eli was working construction, making good money, but he didn’t want to work for anybody, wanted to work for himself. Then he said he was gonna go to Brooklyn and get settled, set up a contracting business, and he’d send for me. I waited but he never called. The phone number he gave me was disconnected. I took the Greyhound bus to New York and found the address was a vacant lot. I didn’t want to go back to Jimmy, but he begged me, said he needed me like I’d needed Eli. When I found out I was pregnant, Jimmy and I both knew it was Eli’s child, but he swore he’d love you like his own. I think he did. Until you were born. He didn’t forgive me until Richard was born. A couple of years later Eli came back to D.C. and got in touch with me through my mother. Said he knew about you. Said he was sorry, but what he did was for the best. All he asked was to just see you sometimes. He didn’t want to disrupt our family, but he did want to see you.”

Walking toward Carson, Alma said with a wistful gentleness, “When you were little, sometimes I’d take you places where he could see you. I’d tell him what park I was taking you to play. Once we sat in the waiting room at Union Station and he sat across from us, just looking at you. When you graduated from elementary school and junior high school he was in the auditorium.” Her palm cupped her son’s cheek, and her voice offered Carson not just her love but the love of the father he never knew.

Carson strained to remember a stranger’s eyes on him at a school Christmas pageant or as he squirmed in his seat on stage in the sixth grade. “He lives in Brookland, in D.C. He’s a subway conductor for Metro. You look just like him. I can give you his address. His phone number.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little late for that?”

“No. No I don’t,” she insisted.

“Did you ever forgive him?”

“If I hadn’t he never would’ve laid eyes on you.”

Alma thought she had given her son a gift. But all Carson heard and remembered was that his father, a man named Eli Bailey, had run out on his mother. Abandoned her. Deserted her. And him. Why would he exchange Jimmy Blake for a father like that?

The next day Alma gave Carson a slip of paper with his father’s name and address and phone number on it. It was years before he used it. It was years before he refuted the sense of himself as nobody’s child. Not the child of the father he did not know. Not Jimmy Blake’s. Not the son of the mother who could not shield him from the abandonment of one, the rejection of the other.

Jimmy Blake died of liver problems while Carson was in the army. Now Alma goes on cruises to Alaska, the Bahamas, is a member of a bridge club, and works as a part-time receptionist in a doctor’s office. Jimmy Blake is dead. But Carson still hears the words “Naw, you ain’t mine” every time he enters his mother’s house.

He has not intended to reveal so much. Talk so long. Each word seeding a harvest of other words and memories rendered as much with his body as with his tongue. A tongue untied, spilling forth a babble of whispers and secrets. And by the time Carson tells Carrie Petersen that Jimmy Blake is dead, he is hoarse, unaccustomed to the strain of such relentless revelation.

She listens to him as she always does, her eyes focused on him, gentle eyes that he still feels unable to meet steadily for very long. She sits, legs crossed, an ankle-length black skirt billowing, filling the chair, her hands folded in her lap. Carson had asked at the end of one session how she could stand hearing the stories her clients told.

“I choose to hear them and to listen,” she assured him. “They are difficult stories to hear, but they aren’t all terrible. People reveal to me moments of rebirth and redemption as well as struggle and loss.”

“Who listens to you when you need to talk?” he pressed her.

“A good friend and fellow therapist who is a mentor to me. When my mother died last year I talked to him quite a lot.”

“You asked me why I became a police officer,” he says now. “I don’t know why I told you all that. I’m surprised I remember so much. Especially so much I wanted to forget.”

“There’s actually very little that we forget, Carson. There’s a lot, however, that we deny, or bury.” Carrie rises from her chair and goes to a small refrigerator on the floor in the corner of the office and retrieves a bottle of water for Carson.

“This is hard, you know,” he tells her, taking the bottle and opening it, then drinking the water, which saps so much more than just his thirst.

“What?”

“This.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

“I’ve never looked at my life. Not like this. It feels like punishment.”

“Not every officer could have submitted himself to this. Give yourself credit for that. Can you tell me the worst thing you think your stepfather did to you?”

Carson sets the empty bottle of water on the floor beside his chair. He closes his eyes. Carrie Petersen allows him to choose silence in response to some of her questions. Lets him pass on the occasional inquiry. They have sat for half an hour in this room, Carrie patiently waiting for Carson to blink.

Opening his eyes, he tells her, “He drove me to the streets.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I found out for sure that he wasn’t my father. When I finally knew for sure, I couldn’t stand living in that house. I didn’t feel I owed him or my mother anything. I’d been spending a lot of time at the rec center and at Keith’s and Damion’s houses, but after that night I remember the only place I wanted to be was in the streets. We’d haunt the dark, empty roads and streets of Bowie, Lanham, Capital Heights, in Keith’s Crown Vic, on the weekends and now and then even on school nights. I’d lie and tell my mom I was studying at the library with Keith. We spent the evening smoking herb. Or we’d stand outside a liquor store and ask somebody to buy us a six-pack of beer or maybe some cheap wine. Park on some strip mall lot and watch the stores closing down. Then one night we wanted to go to a club and between us we had a dollar. Damion said, ‘Gimme five minutes,’ and before me and Keith could say a word he was out of the car, striding up to an elderly White man putting a bag of groceries in the backseat of his van. It was maybe nine or ten o’clock. Damion walked up to the man, stood behind him, and we saw him put his hand in his jacket like he had a gun. It took less than a minute before he was walking back to the car. When Damion did that we crossed a border that each one of us, for different reasons, was ready to cross. The first time I did it I got seventy-eight dollars and twenty-three cents from a woman who, when I looked at her closely, reminded me of my mother.”

“How’d you feel when you robbed people?”

“In control.”