No Time to Die (15 page)

When I woke, I couldn’t move. I wanted to call out but my tongue crowded my mouth and I struggled against a mounting wave of panic. I was choking on dust and wondered if this was how people checked out. Choking on dust. Ashes-to-ashes dust. Images raced through my head and collided with a huge shocking riff of pain that cracked through me like a current.

 … I am not dead. What happened?

Asking myself the question, even without articulating it, caused pain to speed-dial his cousin super-pain. Then I heard a familiar voice, my voice, from far away say, Ooohhh shit …

I wanted to close my eyes to shut out the white ceiling but the ceiling was what connected me to life. Behind my closed lids lay a red darkness and a fear of remaining there. Something—a shadow—hovered, blocking the light, and a large stone settled in the center of my chest. The stone had fingers and another wave of pain hit and I heard the oohhh sound again, closer this time. Finally the light and the ceiling came back:

“… eyes are clearing, pupils back to normal. Miss Anderson? Can you hear me? Blink twice if you can hear me.”

 … Blink twice. Why do I have to blink at all? Why not just say, Of course I can hear you?

But my damn tongue was still stuck to the roof of my mouth. I blinked twice and the voice said if I felt pain I should blink again. I blinked like a broken traffic light, winked until my eyelashes hurt, flicked my lids until something warm flowed through my arm, then spread in my chest, and I floated off on an old and very mellow Joe Simon riff. Cruised away on an ancient plea that resonated down to my toes: “Let me rock you in the cradle of my love.” The voice was an echo fading in the wind.

Dad had sung that song to Mom way back when. Why would I remember it now? It was old folks who remembered old things but couldn’t remember where they put their keys five minutes earlier.

I still had more than thirty years until I’d be ready for Social Security but I couldn’t remember anything. I drifted deeper and another voice, a man’s voice, came in, sweet, low, vaguely familiar:

“Baby, you look good enough to eat.”

“Leg or breast?”

“What’s in between?”

“Dessert. Chocolate, low-fat, and guaranteed to satisfy your sweet tooth.”

“Jesus, baby …”

The voice sighed and drifted away. Then music, lower, slower, segued into some more old stuff: Aretha, the Dells, the O’Jays. Even Al Green before he met grits and God. I was in a timeless void and could have gone on forever.

I don’t know when the fog lifted and the music stopped but the dreams vanished and I heard Dad’s voice. “Mali, can you hear me? You had us scared, girl. Really scared. Can you hear me?”

I floated to shore and opened my eyes.

“Scared? Of what? What happened?”

Dad looked like an old man. When Alvin’s face came into focus, he also looked old.

“What happened to you guys?” I asked.

They glanced at each other, then at me, but I was staring around. At the hospital curtains, the tall window with its blinds half drawn, the pale pastel color of the bedspread, and finally at the chalk-white plaster of the cast on my left arm and leg and the tubes running into my right arm from a drip line.

“What happened to me?”

“You were hit by a car. You had a concussion, your left arm’s broken, your leg’s fractured in two places, and your knee is dislocated. You were out of it for a while. They did a scan and there’re no blood clots. You were lucky. Someone said you flew about fifteen feet before you hit the ground.”

I looked around, trying to recall where I’d been before I’d ended up here. I couldn’t remember. Finally I said, “Was anyone else hurt?”

I had visions of a cab jumping a curb and mowing down a line of pedestrians.

“No. Just you. Hit and run. Tad said he’d left you at 145th Street and Seventh. You were hit on 137th and Lenox. Needless to say, he’s very upset.”

“Yep. And Bertha and Elizabeth too. As a matter of fact, Tad should be along any minute.” Dad checked his watch again.

Alvin leaned over my shoulder to kiss my forehead
and I felt his tears. “Aunt Mali. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be—” He straightened up and left the room to stand outside in the hallway. I listened to him blowing his nose.

“Boy was worried, Mali. Plenty worried.”

“He must’ve been. Imagine calling me
Aunt
Mali. Makes me feel like I’m ninety years old.”

“Yeah, well. We were all worried.”

Dad cleared his throat. I saw that his eyes were also full, and behind the unshed tears was an anxiety I’d never seen before. I wanted to hug him to me and let him know that I was going to be all right and from now on I would be more careful. Look both ways. Cross at the green. I wanted to hug him but the cast was heavier than it looked and my other arm was also immobilized.

“Dad. Go and see about Alvin. Make sure he’s all right.”

He rose at once, and the activity, the act of having something to do, having to see about someone else’s comfort, restored him. I watched until he walked out, then I closed my eyes. A hit-and-run. Was the driver drunk? High? Had he had a dizzy spell? Was he blabbing on a cell phone while trying to maneuver through traffic and lost control?

I was tired suddenly but snapped awake when I felt the soft mustache brush the side of my mouth, then kiss me full on the lips. I tasted the familiar flavor, saw Tad’s half-closed eyes and the small dimple in his chin and the silver in the edge of his hair, and nearly broke my other arm in an effort to hold him to me.

“Mali. You had us all goin’ for a while, girl. You had us goin’.”

“I’m sorry. This is all probably my fault. My own carelessness. I should’ve watched where I—”

His finger went to my mouth, then he kissed me again. “Don’t say anything. Not now. You’re gonna be all right and that’s what matters. That’s what counts. You’re gonna be walkin’ out of here in a couple more weeks. Then we can talk about it. I love you, baby. I love you.”

Two weeks and more X rays and another CAT scan and I was fitted with a plastic leg brace and released. I left the room in a wheelchair with Dad and Alvin walking beside me. A plainclothes officer who was sitting at the end of the corridor accompanied us onto the elevator, through the lobby, and out to the curb where Tad was waiting with the motor running. He helped maneuver me into the front seat, gave Tad a thumbs-up, then walked across Lenox Avenue and disappeared into the noonday crowd.

I watched as Tad buckled me into the front seat. My left side felt stiff and a flash of pain shot through me as I tried to turn around.

“That officer, he a friend of yours?” I asked, trying to ignore my discomfort.

“You might say that.”

Dad and Alvin were silent and I could feel something building as we cruised along. Finally I said, “Was the officer there the whole time I was in there?”

“Couple of ’em.”

“Why? Was I under arrest? I wasn’t the driver. I was the victim.”

“It was for your protection, Mali,” Dad finally said.

Alvin was quiet but I could hear him moving restlessly in the seat behind me. I tried to turn around to look at Dad but the cast made it impossible. I gazed at
Tad, who was driving as if he were on a minibike in the fast lane of the Jersey Turnpike.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’ll talk when we get home,” he said.

The ride was short but so quiet I didn’t know if we were coming from or going to a funeral.

Ruffin was so glad to see me he nearly bowled me over. His wagging tail beat against me with the force and power of a hammer, and all the pain I thought I’d left in the hospital came back. I hobbled over to the sofa and eased down against the pillows. Alvin shooed him back to his favorite spot near the fireplace while Dad made sure I was comfortable. Everyone busied themselves with small activity and my patience faded as I watched.

“What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On?”

I try not to use hard language in Alvin’s presence but my patience was gone and something else, fear perhaps, had settled in its space. Tad turned. He had been checking the windows, making sure they were locked. Now he came over to sit next to me.

“Mali. Here’s what happened. The hit-and-run was no accident.”

“What?”

“It was deliberate.”

My mind scrambled with images, memory. Was it someone from the precinct where I’d filed the lawsuit?
The cop who’d harassed me, made all those threatening phone calls, was now dead. Terry Keenan had been killed in a crack den uptown. He and Danny Williams, Tad’s partner, had been part of a drug distribution network, and Danny had shot Terry in that small room just as the DEA busted in. I had been trapped in there and saw the whole thing.

Was someone at the precinct still nursing some misplaced grudge because two of their own had been brought down and the entire precinct had come under a cloud?

“How do you know it was deliberate?” I asked. “Who was it?”

“James.”

“James?”

I stared at him. James. When it finally registered, I wanted to laugh but the side of my face still felt as if I’d run into a wall. James. The coward couldn’t deal face-to-face. He had to use a car to get at me.

“I had the car impounded,” Tad said. “It had been stolen and his prints came up along with some others, plus when he jumped out of the wreck, several witnesses got a pretty good look as he ran.”

Alvin rose suddenly from the chair where he’d been listening quietly. “If me and my boys find him, Mali, he’s gonna get tagged. He’s gonna wish he’d picked someone else to mess over. I got Morris and Clarence on the drum too. We’ll get him.”

I watched him pace the floor, his long legs covering the length of the room in what seemed like five steps, his muscular arms pressed against his chest. His dark handsome face had lost its softness. He was about to say more when Dad held up his hand.

“Alvin, that man is crazy and he’s dangerous. I understand how you feel but I’m asking you not to get
involved. And I’m asking you not to involve Morris or Clarence either.”

“But, Grandpa, he meant to kill—”

“That’s true but you’ve got to let the police handle this.”

Alvin shot a glance at Tad, a scowl that said if the cops were doing their job, how come they haven’t found him yet?

“We’ll get him,” Tad said, acknowledging the unspoken question.

Alvin glared at him, then looked at me again. “See, Mali. If Aunt Celia was here, she’d know how to take care of business. She wouldn’t wait for anything or anybody. They’d just slow her down.”

With that he turned and walked out of the room. His footsteps echoed loudly on the stairs, then we listened to his bedroom door slam shut.

Dad cleared his throat and rose to move toward the stairs. “That boy is gettin’ beside himself. He needs to—”

“No, Mr. Anderson. Wait,” Tad said. “Leave him alone for a while. He’s more frightened for Mali than he is angry. He feels we’re not doing enough but we’ll get James. We will get him.”

Dad nodded but his face looked drawn.

“Who’s his Aunt Celia?” Tad asked.

“Actually, it’s my grandaunt,” I said. “She was my mother’s aunt. Lived in Charleston in the twenties and had her own way of dealing with things … Her boy was murdered by a cop for sitting on his own stoop.”

And I told the story the way my mother had told it to me, the one story in particular that she had carried through the years like a shield on her arm and a rock in her pocket. I told it now to pull my mind away from the pain that was piercing my leg like a bullet.

“Celia was a medicine woman and went one night to help a midwife with a hard delivery. While she was helping to coax one stubborn child into the world, her own was taken out.

“It went like this, her neighbor said, who had watched from the shadows of her own porch. ‘Saw the whole thing. Policeman, that big ugly one, come ’round the way, spotted Sun, and told ’im to move. Sun tell him he live in the house. Ugly policeman, you know the one I’m talkin’ about, said he didn’t care. Wanted the boy off the steps by the time he made the corner again.

“ ‘And naturally Sun, bein’ the boy he was raised to be, didn’t move and the policeman when he made the corner again, came and tooken ’im away. We didn’t know where and by the time we got word to Miss Celia, it was probably too late.’

“When Celia and Mr. Mickey, the colored undertaker, retrieved the broken body from the alley in back of the courthouse, she said not one word, other than what she instructed Mr. Mickey to do.

“ ‘No. Don’t clean nuthin’ on him. Leave him, leave his clothes just as you see it now. But you and your boys bring me the finest, the most beautiful box you have. I’ll take care of everything else. Everything, you hear me?’

“And Mr. Mickey, knowing Celia, knew better than to say a word. So her boy, not quite eighteen, was laid in a velvet-lined casket of African mahogany, placed in the front parlor near the windows for two days with two rows of candles, and for two nights Aunt Celia sat with him in a cloud of frankincense.

“On the third sunrise, she placed a gold coin on each eyelid, and at his feet, a small hen, the red just beginning
to dampen its white feathers, and she closed and sealed the casket herself.