Keeper of Dreams (56 page)

“Can I call you again?” she said. “Please?”

“Whenever you want, Deeny,” he said.

“Until you decide you can go on,” she said. “It’s OK with me if you go, whenever you want, that’s OK. But while you’re still here, I can call?”

“Just pick up the phone. You don’t even have to press the buttons. It doesn’t even have to have any juice. Just pick up the phone and I’ll be there.”

And he was.

Six years later. Deeny was married. Not to Jake Wu, though they came close, until it became clear that his family really did expect that his career would swallow her up and she realized she couldn’t live that way, and couldn’t bear their disappointment if she didn’t. But the guy she married was just like Jake. Not in any obvious superficial way, but just like him all the same, in the way he treated her, in the things he wanted from her. Only he didn’t want her to become a support for his life. The man she married wanted them to support each other. And now she had his baby, their firstborn child, a girl, and she could see that he loved the baby, that he was going to be a great father.

And that was why she came to the cemetery. She had finally found Vaughn Carson, even though he had never told her where his body was. Maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he didn’t care, or maybe he simply didn’t notice how much she wondered. But she found him, anyway, in a cemetery two states away. How he got from where he lived and died to where she was as a teenager—maybe she really had been calling out like a siren. Or maybe it was one hunger calling to another.

However he had found her, now she’d found him back, and here she was, standing at his grave, a single red rose in one hand, a cellphone in the other.

“You’re so silly,” he said when she opened the phone. “It’s just dust now. Dust in a box.”

“I just wanted to tell you,” she said. “That my husband is a wonderful father.”

“I know,” he said. “I told you he would be when I gave you my permission to marry him.”

“No, you’re not hearing me. It isn’t that he’s a wonderful father, it’s that I
know
he’s a wonderful father. How do you think I know what a wonderful father even is?”

She didn’t have to say, Because I had you. She knew he heard what was in her heart.

“So what I’m saying,” she said, “is that you’ve had that daughter. Not the way you wanted. Not with Dawn. But you found a fatherless girl and you led her out of despair and instead of marrying somebody like my own father because I thought that’s what I deserved, I married some-body . . . good.”

“Good,” he said. His voice was only a whisper.

“And so,” she said, “it’s done. You can go on.”

“Go on,” he said.

“You can face whatever it is you have to face, because you’ve done the thing you hungered most to do. You’ve done it, and you can go on.”

“Go on,” he whispered.

“And I will love you forever, Vaughn Carson, even when you aren’t on the phone anymore. Because you
were
on the phone when I needed you.”

“Needed you,” he echoed.

She laid the rose on the engraved plate that was set in concrete at the head of the grave. It softened the stainless steel of death a little. Even though the rose, too, was dying now. It was still, for this brief moment, vivid and red as blood.

She took the phone from her ear and kissed it. “Good-bye, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll miss you. But I’m glad I had you for as long as I did.”

“Long as I did,” he echoed. And then one last sigh. “Good-bye.” And she thought she heard something else as if he had laid it gently inside her heart instead of speaking it aloud. “My daughter.”

It turns out that Janis Ian and I had been fans of each other’s work for a long time without suspecting the other felt the same way. I, of course, memorized all the words to “At Seventeen” and played her first album over and over. But being a consumer of pop music, not a connoisseur, I had no idea of what had happened to her after that wonderful early work, or what course her life had taken.

But we made contact—both AOL users, it turned out—and emailed each other until we had a chance to meet at a concert she gave in Raleigh, North Carolina. I brought my daughter Emily with me and we loved the concert. Her new songs were better than ever, and Janis is a stunning performer on the stage, a born actress.

She took time to visit with us after the show and the friendship was cemented. A while later, when we held the first (and only) EnderCon—a convention for fans of
Ender’s Game
—Janis not only came, she performed and offered a master class. Talk about generous!

I wasn’t her only friend in the world of sci-fi, though; with Mike Resnick she was editing an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories based on her songs (
Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian
). When she invited me, of course I accepted.

It was a pleasure to listen to everything and find the story I wanted to write.

Oddly enough, though, I kept coming back to a single phrase in “At Seventeen” about invented lovers on the phone. That lyric had haunted me as a teenager, too, the idea of being so lonely that you
pretend
to be talking to someone just to hear yourself in a conversation. And the “vague obscenities” part—well, that song came out just as I was busy inventing sexual desire (every teenager thinks that he invented it) and I understood that, too. This was long before I ever heard any public mention of the idea of “phone sex,” but Janis Ian, natural-born sci-fi writer that she is, had not only thought of it, she had taken it a step further.

When Janis wrote that lyric we all used telephones that were tied to the wall. Now it’s cellphones—but cellphones make the sad little girl of her song all the more believable. Now she has her phone there at school, and she can walk around where others might hear her and pretend she has
a boyfriend who is too cool or too old to attend this crappy high school. I liked this girl, the sad defiance of her attitude.

Of course, it was an anthology of sci-fi and fantasy stories. Janis said they didn’t have to be speculative fiction, but the literary story I first intended to write would have belonged in a different kind of publication. So I found the daemon in the cellphone and wrote this tale.

By the way, at the time I wrote this, individual cellphone numbers did
not
show up on caller ID, the way they do now.

First off you got to know about Tamika, how it was with her and water. First time she got into a pool, she was only two, we had those tube things around her arms to hold her up and me and Sondra, we were both there in the water, she was our baby and no way she was going to be out of our sight for a second, so we were both there kind of holding her up and making sure those air things really kept her from sinking. So Sondra was kind of holding her on one side and me on the other and Tamika just laughed and shrieked and we could feel how she was kicking and wiggling her arms and it sort of came to me how maybe by holding on to her I was holding her back, and so I let go, figuring Sondra had her on the other side anyway, so she’d be safe. Only later on Sondra tells me she had the same thought at the same moment and
she
let go and right away, Tamika starts moving forward through the water, kicking her legs, pulling with her arms, smiling and keeping her head above water and there was no mistake about it, she was swimming. By the end of that day we had those tubes off her arms and never looked back. She was born for the water, she was born to swim.

It’s been like that ever since. We just couldn’t keep her away from swimming pools. We called her our waterbaby, she’d catch sight of a pool and one way or another, in five seconds she’d be in the water. We took to dressing her all summer in a swimsuit instead of underwear cause if we didn’t, she’d go in fully dressed or stark naked, but she was going in, right now. Anybody with a pool, they were Tamika’s best friends whether Sondra and I liked them or not. At three years old she’d head on out the
front door to go over to a house with a pool. We had to put locks high up on the door to keep her in. Sometimes it was scary, she loved the water so much, but we were proud, too, because that girl could swim, Your Honor. You had to see her. She’d go underwater quick as a fish, move like a blur, pop up so far from where she went under you’d be sure there had to be a second kid, nobody could move that fast. When she dove off the board—she was never afraid of heights as long as there was water under her—she was like a bird, but even so, when she slipped into the water it’s like there wasn’t even a splash, the water opened up to take her in. I can hardly think of her except soaking wet, drops glistening on her brown skin like jewels in the sunlight, smiling all the time, she was so beautiful, she was so happy.

Tamika said it all the time. “Oh, Daddy, oh Mama, I wish I didn’t ever have to come out of the water. I wish I was a fish and I could
live
in the water.” And Sondra would always say, “You’re no fish, Tamika, you’re just our own little waterbaby, we found you in a rain puddle and fished you out and took you home and dried you off and your daddy wanted to name you Tunafish but I said, No, she’s Tamika.” Said that all the time when Tamika was three and four. By the time Tamika was six, she’d say, “Oh, Mama, not that again,” but she still loved to hear it.

Sondra and me, our dream was to make enough money to get a house with a pool so she didn’t always have to go somewhere else to swim. But you know how it is, that wasn’t going to happen. We used to joke that the closest thing to a swimming pool we’d ever have was the waterbed me and Sondra slept on. My parents thought we were crazy when we bought that bed. “Black people don’t sleep on waterbeds,” my daddy told me. “Black people have more sense with their dollars.” I wish to Jesus I’d listened to my daddy.

It was a hot summer night, you know how it gets here in LA late in August, you got the ceiling fan going full blast and no covers on top of you but you still got sweat dripping all along your body like rain and your pajamas are soaked and you toss and turn all night and you’re half the time dreaming and half the time thinking about work and problems and worries and you can’t even tell where one leaves off and the other begins. And so that’s why I thought it was a dream at first. I was there on the waterbed only something was moving under me. The bed was rocking
a little and I thought that meant Sondra had gotten up or just lain back down or something, only it kept rocking and I could hear her breathing and she was asleep, and then I felt something bump into me. From below.

Like a fish in the water, a big fish, it bumped me hard. I was awake right away, only I wasn’t sure I was awake, you know? How you’re thinking that you’re dreaming that you’re awake, only maybe you are awake, only you know that it’s still part of the dream? I felt something start pummeling me from below. Like fists punching straight up at me, pounding on my back from inside the waterbed. Hard enough to almost hurt. Little fists. And I got this picture in my mind of a mermaid trapped inside the waterbed, pounding on me to get me to get
off
and that’s when I woke up, or anyway that’s when I rolled over and got off the bed, and I was thinking, This dream’s too much for me. I got up and went to the bathroom and took a piss and got a drink and I was kind of shaking from the dream, it was so real, and then I thought, I gotta look in on the kids, and I knew it was dumb but whenever I felt afraid from a dream or a noise in the night, even if I knew it was nothing, I still had to look at the kids and make sure they were all right.

The boys were fine, the four-year-old, the two-year-old, breathing steady and soft in their beds. And from the door of Tamika’s room she looked fine, too, in a jumble of covers, only then I thought, how can she stand to have so much blanket on her in this heat? So I went over to see if she was maybe sweating too much and I ought to pull off the covers and she wasn’t there. Just her pillow and the covers all wadded up where she must have kicked them in the night and a damp area on the sheets where she’d been sweating and dreaming just like the rest of us.

She must have gotten up to go to the bathroom, I thought.

Only I knew it wasn’t that at all. I knew right then that I hadn’t been dreaming. All the times Tamika had wished she was a fish in the water, tonight somehow she’d dreamed her way or wished her way into the only pool of water in the house that was big enough to hold her and she had somehow realized where she was and knew it was me sleeping right above her and she’d pounded on me to wake up and save her and what was I doing still standing here in her room feeling the sheet when she was drowning?

I knew I was crazy—that’s why I started calling her name, just shouting it, even though I knew it would wake up the boys and wake up Sondra, because I was still hoping I was wrong, that she’d hear me and she’d call out to me from the bathroom or from the kitchen, “I’m in here, Daddy, what’s wrong?” only she didn’t make a sound but I keep on yelling her name so maybe there in the water she can hear me and she’ll know I’m coming. I run into the kitchen and open the high cupboard where we keep the sharp knives and I get the big heavy meat-chopping knife cause I know I can get that one through the rubber of the waterbed and then I’m heading back to my bedroom and Sondra sees me coming with this big knife shouting Tamika’s name and I don’t know what she’s thinking but she grabs me and tries to stop me and I just flung her away, that’s why she had that cut on her head, I didn’t hit her, I was only thinking, Don’t slow me down, my baby’s in that water and I’ve got to get her out.