Bebe Moore Campbell (6 page)

I could see PJ with his scrawny teenage body, all decorated with tats, swaggering down high school halls, his pores exuding do-or-die bravado. He would stumble through life, learning everything the hard way. His older brother, stable, dependable Jabari, was risk-aversive. PJ was my favorite.

Orlando sighed. “Well, I guess I’ll go eat my lunch all by myself. Listen, I start rehearsals for a play. Will you come see me? Think about it,” he said, when I didn’t respond.

We stared at each other. He wasn’t really handsome; his features weren’t chiseled enough for that category. Just shy of six feet, broad in the shoulders with a bit of a belly, he exuded power without doing much of anything. Orlando was the kind of man who opened his front door when the bell rang without asking for a name or looking through a peephole.

“That man!” I said after he left. Frances just laughed. “You just don’t know,” I said, and she laughed harder. “Is that stain out yet?”

She shook her head. “I’ve tried everything. Whatever it is don’t want to come out. In fact, I think it’s worse.”

Back in the office I examined the jacket. The spot was spreading. Instead of a dime, it had now grown to the size of a quarter. I picked up the jacket, folding it across my arm. “I’ll take it down the street.” Most repairs we tried to fix in-house. But the cleaner’s at the end of our block specialized in hard cases. An ancient Jamaican man was the commander of an arsenal of solutions and potions that made most dirt disappear. “The Old Man will get it out,” I said.

AT ONE-THIRTY, I TOSSED THE JACKET ONTO THE BACK seat of my car, drove down to a little restaurant near the hospital, and had lunch. I left my car on the side street and trudged over to Beth Israel’s Weitz Center. Usually I waited for Trina outside, but by three-ten, when she still hadn’t come down, I decided to go in. Occasionally she dallied to talk with some of her group mates or to one of the counselors. Today wouldn’t be the first time I’d had to get her.

Jasmine scented the air as I climbed the stairs. Inside, I walked past the security guard, beyond the station where a Japanese woman with a kind face handled insurance and payments, down the hall to where the partial program was located. There was no one at the front desk, and when I glanced quickly around the large area into the various rooms, there were people milling around but no Trina. A dark-haired woman emerged from one of the offices in the back, and I recognized her as the program coordinator.

“Mrs. Whitmore, is it?” she asked. Her British accent made her words sound somewhat formal.

“Elaine, please call me Keri. I came to pick up my daughter. ”

“I was going to call you tonight, Keri,” Elaine said.

“You were?”

“Do you have a minute?”

“Sure, but I’d like to let Trina know that I’m here.”

“Trina’s not here, Keri. That’s what I want to talk with you about.”

Gonegonegonegonegone.

“What do you mean, she’s not here? Where is she?” My words shook out, one tremble at a time.

“No one knows. She and another client didn’t come back from the last break, which was at one-thirty. The two of them usually go out on the patio and smoke. They’ve become friends.”

Elaine was speaking, but her words seemed one long incomprehensible jumble. My mind was a vast empty cavern with only one echoing sound:
Gonegonegonegonegone.
I felt Elaine’s hand on my arm, guiding me toward an area with sofas and chairs.

“Why don’t you sit down,” she said.

“No. No, thank you.”

“These things happen,” Elaine said, “and there may be a plausible explanation. Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“All right,” I said.

Gonegonegonegonegone.

“Trina is doing exceptionally well here. She’s quite forthcoming. She contributes a great deal to group discussions. She’s one of the leaders.”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe—”

“Calm down,” Elaine said.

Yes, calm down. And then I bolted, out the door, down the hall, past the guard, down the stairs, into the dazzling sunlight and jasmine-drenched air, dreading the moment my feet hit the pavement because I didn’t know where to turn.

There was a time when I had known how Trina would react to every situation, but that time had passed. The era when I had known the friends she hung out with and the places she might be was a far-off country. Trina’s friends had moved on. She went only where I took her. She was in a rebuilding phase of her life. The first step was taking responsibility for her healing. The next was forming relationships, becoming more independent, regaining her autonomy. She had been inching closer to that place called normal. Now normal had been sold deep south.

My tears were rising as I stepped onto the sidewalk. Above me a jacaranda tree loomed, its purple blossoms my personal sky. Already, a heavy haziness was settling in my mind.
Please don’t let the madness start
all over again.
Then I saw her. Trina was sitting across the street on the ledge of the short concrete wall that bordered the portion of the parking lot that faced Weitz Center. Next to her was a woman who appeared to be in her early thirties, dark and heavy with a loud shriek of a laugh. They were both carrying Macy’s bags. “Trina,” I called.

She looked up and smiled; then she and the woman walked across the street to me.

“Mommy, this is Melody Pratt. Melody, this is my mother, Keri Whitmore. Mommy, I told Melody that you’d give her a ride home.”

Did I smell liquor? Were their eyes glassy? Were their words slurred from an afternoon of self-medicating?

“I’d really appreciate it,” Melody said. She turned to Trina.

They knew that I knew. I could tell by their friendly, phony smiles. Where had they been besides shopping? What had they been doing?

“It’s nice to meet you, Melody.”

Trina slipped her arm through mine. I breathed deeply to detect weed or alcohol, then stared into her eyes. Were her pupils dilated? “Don’t be mad,” she said. “Melody and I skipped the last hour of group.”

I modulated my internal screaming, made my voice sound normal. “Really?”

“They were just talking about the same old stuff they always talk about, so we went to the store. I told you that I needed a top. Look.”

She opened the bag and pulled out a pale yellow blouse.

“Nice,” I said.

She beamed, then retrieved a smaller bag from inside the larger one and handed it to me.

A lipstick. Just my shade of red.

“Thanks, honey. You know,” I said, looking at Trina, “I have to get back to the shop. A couple of clients are bringing in clothes. Where do you live, Melody?”

“In Compton.”

“Compton! You come all the way from Compton to Beverly Hills?”

“The program out my way was full.”

I looked at my watch. It was three-twenty. The trip to Compton and back to the store would take at least an hour and a half, maybe more if I ran into traffic. My first client was due at four-thirty and the next at six o’clock.

My daughter’s smile was bright and expectant, manipulative. Regardless of what it had taken away, mental illness had conveyed to her a kind of protracted childhood, a long pause filled with delusions of grandeur, no responsibility, very few apologies, and endless adventure. And to me it should have bequeathed an elastic sense of gratitude for life’s most minuscule concessions: My daughter was standing right in front of me; I didn’t have to go looking for her. Instead, I felt anxious.
When is she going to get back to normal?

“BE GRATEFUL,” MA MISSY TOLD ME ONE MORNING, WHEN my mother’s semiconscious body was lying across the living room floor. She was breathing, but we couldn’t rouse her. It was important for her to wake up, wash up, get dressed, and accompany me to school, as she had promised that she would. She was supposed to meet my teachers, sit in the back of the room, and smile when she saw my papers with stars hanging up on the bulletin board, smile again when she heard all the good things the teachers had to say about me. But she wasn’t moving, only moaning as I shook her. Ma Missy called her name, softly at first and then loudly. I began to cry. Ma Missy stopped calling my mother and put her arms around me.

“Be grateful, baby. One of these days she’ll be all right, and you won’t even remember the bad times. Plenty things worse than a drunk mama. Be strong, girl.”

But I had never learned to be grateful for having less than I really wanted.

“WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO HURRY,” I SAID, PICKING UP MY cell phone.

Once we reached the car, Trina and Melody sat in the back together, their loud conversation a kind of voluble stage for me to pitch my thoughts against. From time to time they would lower their voices and whisper, reminding me of two conspiratorial teenagers, plotting against the adult.

Compton always surprised me. The neighborhood seemed less the subject of the bicoastal gang warfare of rap lyrics than a blue-collar version of the American dream. Away from its hardscrabble commercial strip, with its row of fast-food restaurants—that high-fat staple of urban America—Korean mom-and-pops, overpriced gas stations, and more beauty salons than beauty, the LA version of “da ’hood” looked like a PG-rated movie. I let Melody out in the middle of a block of neat bungalows, in front of a gray house with a postage-stamp lawn bordered by roses and the ubiquitous impatiens that claimed every garden in LA as home.

“I sure do appreciate the ride,” Melody said, as Trina exchanged her seat for the one beside me. “Drive safe.” She smiled, then waved green dragon-lady fingernails in my direction.

“TRINA,” I SAID, WHEN WE WERE HALFWAY DOWN THE street, “you’ve had perfect attendance at the partial program. You should be very proud of that. Now”—I hesitated, searching for the right words; Trina’s therapist had told me that she needed my approval—“you must stick to the program schedule and stay until the end of every session.”

“All right,” she said, her voice soft and petulant.

I looked at Trina. Such a pretty face.

“We had lunch with Daddy,” she said. “Aurelia came too. When he called at the shop the other day, we arranged it.”

“Oh.”

“He didn’t know I was ditching group. I thought we’d get back in time, but we were having fun. It was kind of a delayed birthday celebration.”

“Was Melody with you the entire time?”

Our eyes met; our lips twitched: We were still in tune. Trina and I snickered. Clyde was from the Booker T school of black upward mobility. According to him, if people remained on the bottom it was because they wanted to be there. He’d adopted this philosophy after he learned there was money in conservative politics. Now he had a syndicated radio show from which he broadcast his right-wing sentiments during drive time, Monday through Friday. The talk show, his books and speaking engagements, not to mention his very public anti-affirmative-action campaign, had made Clyde popular and rich. Or unpopular and rich, depending on your party affiliation. Clyde had switched parties, switched streams, and was off course, as far as I was concerned. He was a man with a hole in his soul.

Trina giggled. “Dad pulled me aside and he was like, ‘So, do you and Melody hang out together? I mean, she’s a lot older than you, isn’t she?’ ”

“What did you tell him?”

“I was like, ‘Dad, we don’t hang out, per se. We just go to Crazy School together.’ You should have seen his face, Mom. Anyway, they were both nice to her. They didn’t act stuck up or anything, even when she started speaking Ebonics.”

“It’s a miracle,” I said. Trina made a face. “Mom, you shouldn’t stay mad just because you and Daddy broke up before he got rich.”

Before Daddy got rich. The transformation occurred after two failed businesses and reasonable success with a third. Just a chance encounter made all the difference. He’d run into a fellow alum. Coffee and conversation followed. Then came lots of cocktail parties with people who frightened me. An invitation to work on a political campaign followed. Keep an open mind; there are rewards, the fellow told him when he balked. Don’t do it, I advised. But Clyde’s mind had already opened. Something else had closed. Soon I was another thing he’d outgrown.

“I’m not mad,” I said, and Trina rolled her eyes.

We were waiting at the corner light. Beyond Trina, on a sidewalk strip of lawn, stood a lemon tree, filled with blossoms. I rolled down the window and took a deep breath. I’d once read that lemon was the strongest of all flavors, not curry or chocolate or coffee. Plain old lemon, which grew anywhere there was warm dirt, could overpower all other tastes. The red light faded to green. Just before driving off, I spotted a heart and two sets of initials carved into the tree trunk. Below them was a hole, the size that a bullet might make.

Trina was quiet during the ride to the shop and stayed in my office, flipping through a magazine, until we closed. The phone was ringing as I drove into my garage, and by the time I got inside there was a message on my answering machine:
This is Mattie. Please come to the meeting
tonight. Gloria and I want to see you. Milton, too.

The dinner with Marie, Brooke, and Nichelle was on my kitchen calendar. Old friends. New friends. Old life. New life. I called Marie, who had already come by the store, bought the shoes, and reconfirmed our dinner date, hoping she wouldn’t be at home. But she answered the phone, listening politely as I explained quickly that I wouldn’t be able to go to dinner. Something had come up.

“We really wanted to see you,” she said.

If my mind had been clearer, maybe I would have addressed the hurt trickling through Marie’s statement. As it was, I was mostly concerned with getting off the phone. “Oh, we’ll get together, girl.”

“No, we won’t.”

“This is just a very busy time for me.”

“We’re all busy.”

Eyes shut, I visualized Marie, Brooke, and Nichelle, eating in some restaurant, laughing about nothing at all. They’d be talking about casual things, even when they brought up their children. I still couldn’t say Trina’s name without holding my breath. We had been very close once, bonded women. Soon, Trina would recover, catch up, resume her life. When she got back to normal, all the way back, when the bad days faded like ink in the sun and God handed me my freedom papers, then I’d go to dinner with Marie, Brooke, and Nichelle. Then I’d be casual again.