Phantom of Riverside Park (6 page)

Hope is stubborn, springing to life with
almost no encouragement at all. Elizabeth grasped the last tiny
shred.

“It won’t take long to arrange a civil
ceremony, Taylor. I don’t even have to buy a new dress.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” He sat
close, an accident she guessed since all his attention was focused
on putting on his shoes. “Elizabeth, I’m not going to marry you.
Period. I’ll pay for the abortion, and that’ll be the end of
it.”

“Abortion.” She glared at him as if he’d
suddenly grown horns and a tail. “Nobody is going to take this baby
away from me. Nobody.”

“Shhh. Stop yelling. Somebody’s going to hear
you. They’ll find you out here naked and think I’m raping you.” He
grabbed her shoulders. “It was not rape, Elizabeth. Remember that.
What we had was consensual sex.”

“You’re wrong, Taylor. I thought it was
love.”

So young. So naive.

All that had changed now. She’d earned her
degree in what Papa called the School of Hard Knocks. “Got a PhD,
myself,” he often said.

As she drove through Tunica she searched the
darkness for familiar landmarks, the neon sign over what used to be
the town’s only motel, the four-way stop sign at the Texaco gas
station, the hundred and fifty-year-old magnolia folks called the
killing tree because it had been used for so many lynchings.

The moon had skittered behind a cloud, and
when Elizabeth came to the place that used to be Papa’s farm she
was glad the land was shrouded in darkness, glad she could barely
see the variety store where Papa’s milk shed used to be, glad she
could hardly make out the paved parking lot on what used to be
Papa’s vegetable garden.

“So much blood spilled on this land, it sings
when I rake my hoe across it,” he used to say.

The land sang still, and whispered and
groaned as she drove past, telling Elizabeth’s history in broken
bits and jagged pieces that snatched at her throat and punched
holes in her heart. She turned her radio on full volume to drown
out the noise, but it was as persistent as bees buzzing around her
head.

North of Papa’s farm was the house where she
grew up, squatting in on itself as if it barely had the energy to
hold up the rotting shingles. Though she couldn’t see the railroad
this time of night she knew it was there snaking around the creek,
just as she knew that the curtains were blue chintz and that Judith
and Manny Jennings were lying side by side on a rusty iron bedstead
dreaming their separate dreams, Manny of rain that would drench the
parched Delta earth and Judith of a red satin dress she saw in the
Sears catalogue, a dress she knows she’ll never have.

Elizabeth drove slowly, trying not to look,
but the pull of her history was too strong. She had a dreamy
sensation, as if her car were floating backward through time, and
instead of arriving in Tunica on a hot July night she arrived on a
chilly November day when the leaves curled and crunched beneath her
feet and the smell of fatback and greens filled the house.

“Mom, I’m home.”

The woman who had answered her call bore no
resemblance to Elizabeth. Except for the blood they shared, they
could be complete strangers.

There was no return greeting, no kiss on the
cheek, no hug. Judith Jennings took in Elizabeth, her hair damp
with the rain that started somewhere north of Oxford, her arms
loaded with books, her suitcases at her feet.

“I’ll get your father,” she said.

She’d stayed in the kitchen while Elizabeth
told Manny Jennings she had dropped out of school, shut the door
when Elizabeth told him she was pregnant, stayed behind her
barricade of silence while Manny turned his daughter out of the
house.

“After all we’ve done for you, this is how
you repay us.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean for any of
this to happen.”

“You’ve made your bed, you can lie it.”

Something hot and scalding flooded through
Elizabeth as she crash landed in the present, and though her eyes
were as dry as the dust that blows through a field of newly
harvested cotton, she knew her heart was weeping, crying still from
the wound of words spoken so many years ago.

She drove on, leaving behind that house where
once she’d been young and full of dreams, and it was a pure relief
to Elizabeth when she saw a spot of light in the darkness.

The lone security light at the gymnasium cast
a small patch of brightness over the gravel parking lot. Elizabeth
had to strain to see Taylor’s car parked in the west corner in a
thick patch of darkness. He got out quickly and slid into the front
seat of her car.

“Look, I know I told you I’d support the kid,
but you know how it is. I got busy and just forgot, that’s all.” He
was a small child, begging forgiveness with slumped shoulders and a
winsome smile. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise. How much do I
owe you?”

“Taylor, I stopped expecting checks from you
in the mail a long time ago.”

“I sent some. Once a month. You know I
did.”

“For how many months, Taylor? Five, six?”

Taylor couldn’t look at her. Instead he
adjusted the stations on the radio, finding one that played his
favorite country and western. Mellow tones filled the car, Garth
Brooks moaning another she-done-me-wrong song.

Elizabeth wanted to scream. Maybe she would.
Later. On that long stretch of road to Memphis.

There was a whippoorwill somewhere deep in
the woods behind the school. His cry pierced the darkness, four
mournful notes repeated at intervals, “no rain tonight, no rain
tonight.” A mosquito had sneaked inside the car when Taylor opened
the door, and he dive-bombed Elizabeth’s head. She didn’t even swat
him away.

“How much, Elizabeth? How much will it take
to keep you quiet?”

“Do you think that’s what this about?
Blackmail? After all these years do you think I’d come crawling to
you for money?”

“Who knows the way of the female mind? I
stopped trying to figure it out when I was five. Miss Anna Lisa
taught me it was a losing battle.”

He spoke his mother’s name with an underlying
tone of awe, and not without kindness. Elizabeth felt a certain
empathy with Anna Lisa Belliveau, felt almost as if she had become
Taylor’s mother.

“You’ll never grow up, will you?”

“I reckon I’m about to, Lizzie. Miss Anna
Lisa laid down the law and even picked out the girl. I’m tying the
knot in December.”

“I suppose she has a pedigree as long as my
leg.”

“One of the Beauforts from St. Charles,
Louisiana. Our mothers were sorority sisters.”

How easy it was to be sucked up in Taylor’s
life, as if her own had no meaning. Elizabeth rolled down the car
window to let in some air.

“I’ll bet she doesn’t even sweat.”

Taylor’s big boom of laughter filled the car,
but he sobered quickly and placed one hand on the back of her neck.
Her lack of emotion caught her by surprise. When she was eighteen
she thought she’d thrill to his touch forever.

“I never meant to hurt you, Elizabeth.”

“I know that, Taylor.”

His hand on her neck had no meaning, and she
let it rest there, a small connection to the man who had fathered
her child.

“I didn’t come to ask you for money nor even
to ask that you acknowledge Nicky as your son.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“I know you won’t. I came to terms with that
a long time ago, Taylor.”

It was time to go home. Taylor obviously knew
nothing about the million dollars. But if he wasn’t behind the
money, who was?

“Do your parents know about Nicky?”

“No! And neither does Jennifer. You’re not
going to stir up that hornet’s nest, are you?”

“That’s not my intent.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I guess I’m just tying up loose ends. A
journey down memory lane. That sort of thing.”

“In the middle of the night?” Taylor lit a
cigarette then found another country western station more to his
liking. “I don’t buy it, Elizabeth.”

She swatted the mosquito on her neck and drew
blood. The bond between her and the man sitting on the front seat
of her car might as well be made of steel. No amount of time nor
distance could alter the fact that Taylor Belliveau was Nicky’s
daddy. For that reason alone, she owed him the truth.

“I’ll be honest with you, Taylor. An
anonymous philanthropist sent me a check, and I thought it might be
you, trying to buy your way back into our lives. I thought you or
your parents might even be trying to take Nicky.”

“He’s yours, Lizzie. Nobody by the name of
Belliveau even knows he exists. And they’ll never hear it from
me.”

“I guess that’s it, then.”

“I guess it is, kiddo.”

On the radio Waylon Jennings, no kin to
Elizabeth, not even first cousin twice removed, wailed of love
lost.

Elizabeth wouldn’t have to worry about that
now. It was a pure relief not to love Taylor Belliveau anymore, and
an even greater relief to know he had no claims on Nicky.

“Are you and the boy happy, Lizzie?”

She hadn’t thought about happiness in a long
time. Eons ago when she was eighteen, she’d thought happiness was
waking in Taylor’s arms, then padding down to the kitchen in her
barefeet, standing in the sunshine watching a cardinal in the
magnolia tree outside his off-campus apartment while she made his
morning coffee. She’d thought happiness was moments of pleasure
strung together in bright beads she could wear around her neck. Now
she knows better: happiness is a state of mind, fed by random
moments of wild joy that come when you least expect them.

Long ago, sitting on a kitchen stool with her
bare feet curled around the foot rest, she would have shared her
thoughts with Taylor. Now she’s learned to guard her thoughts.
Maybe she should thank him.

“Yes, Taylor, we are. What about you?”

“I’m Taylor Belliveau, Lizzie. What more do I
need?”

He flicked his cigarette out the window,
laughing in that way that always caught her hard up under the
breastbone. He was softened in the moonlight, a man-child living in
a world of his own creation. It had been his endearing Peter Pan
quality that made Elizabeth fall in love with him so many years
ago, the quality that made her reach out now and smooth a stray
lock of hair from his forehead.

“Take care of yourself, Taylor.”

“You, too, kiddo.”

He didn’t mention their son and neither did
she. But home tugged at her, and her heart and spirit soared north
toward a little boy asleep in his trundle bed on Vine Street.

She started the engine.

“I hope you can explain to your fiancée why
it took you so long to get cigarettes.”

“No problem.”

Taylor cupped her face then stared at her as
if she were already a half-forgotten memory.

“She’s not as smart as you, Lizzie.”

She could already see how Nicky had Taylor’s
charm. His only salvation would be if he inherited her grit.

Taylor put his hand on the door, and suddenly
she didn’t want to see him go. There was so much she wanted to say
to him, so much she needed to ask: Will you ever acknowledge your
son? Will you ever want to see him? How can you bear not to?

With his hand on the door, he felt the tug of
her unspoken questions.

“Lizzie?”

He was puzzled, a little boy who’s had a
disturbing dream. She held her breath, waiting, and the moment
stretched between them as graceful as the wings of a

butterfly. A strange kind of joy was born in
her - not hope, not peace, but a combination of the two, something
that was as calming to the soul as a walk beside a brook on the
hottest day of summer.

Taylor ducked quickly in her direction for a
hasty kiss that landed on her cheek, then he was out of the car,
striding across the parking lot, hands tucked into his pockets,
head down.

Elizabeth wouldn’t let herself think about
his strange goodbye until she was on the outskirts of Tunica. As
the casino lights faded into the distance she gathered her good
moments with Taylor and pressed them like rose petals between the
pages of her memory.

When she reached South Haven she stopped at
the 7-Eleven and got herself a cherry ice cream float. There was a
certain comfort in ritual.

Thomas was making sugar cookies in the shapes
of stars, and every time he pressed the cookie cutter into the
dough he thought of Lola Mae.

Back when they were first married, she had
done all the cooking. He didn’t know pie crust from pizza dough. If
she sent him to the store for self-rising flour he was just as
likely to come home with corn meal instead.

Now he’s as expert in the kitchen as Julia
Child. He can tell you more about seasonings than Paul Prudhomme,
and he’s determined to perfect cookies to the point that he’ll be
elected room mother, hands down, when Nicky starts to school.

He cut the last of the dough into star
shapes, then shoved the cookies into the oven. They would be ready
by the time he and Nicky left for the park.

“Wait till they all get a gander at these,
Lola Mae.”

The curtains stirred...the whisper of a
breeze, the laughter of angels, and Thomas joined in, picturing how
it would be, thinking of the delight of Nicky’s classmates, not to
mention his teacher. He imagined how she’d look, somebody settled
and comfortable, wearing sensible shoes and a dress that hid her
knees. She would be so appreciative of his cookies she’d nominate
him for room mother herself.

“Don’t get your hopes up, Papa.”

Elizabeth walked into the kitchen, already
dressed in her uniform for the bakery.

“What are you all of a sudden? A mind
reader?”

“I don’t think they select men to be room
mothers.”

“If a woman can be a soldier, why can’t a man
be a room mother?”