Tempest Rising (27 page)

M
ae’s house was jumping. Typical of house-cramming gatherings kindled by some extreme event, happy or sad didn’t matter: People laughed to lift the spirits if there’d been a death or other catastrophe, cried tears of joy if there’d been a wedding or birth. Somebody always came by with a four-layered yellow cake with coconut icing that they’d made from scratch, likewise a pan of fried chicken always showed, a bag of ice for the Kool-Aid, large jars of Nescafé and Maxwell House and Pream nondairy creamer. A deck of cards for the back room, a half gallon of Four Roses whiskey for the center of the kitchen table, and the talk got loud and loose, the forty-fives started spinning, and the converted called for prayer.

Such was the scene as the quality-dressed, coconut-and honey-scented quartet pushed
through the crowded porch to get inside the house. Til led the line, her thick gray and black hair pulled back in a bun, a sterling silver ornamental comb nestled in one side; behind her Blue, undoing his cashmere Burberry scarf from around his neck and muttering, “My goodness, it’s hot in here”; Ness was behind him, taking off her glasses, which had steamed up once she was inside the door; Show brought up the rear, his ten-gallon hat already off his head.

The ocean of people in the living room separated to allow the foursome through, the way it had been separating for the past hour whenever someone new came in to offer expressions of surprise and support over the missing girls. These four didn’t maneuver back to the kitchen, though, the way Hettie had done, and Darlene from the hosiery shop, Beanie, Miss D, even card-playing Clara Jane from downtown. These four just made a line in the center of the living room, and then Til cleared her throat and asked, in her most authoritative voice, who among them had the name Mae.

A hush moved through the living room as people began to notice the oddity of the four, obviously not from around here, certainly not with the short one holding that ten-gallon hat in his hands. Someone pointed toward the kitchen, said Mae was in the back, playing cards, probably, to help keep her mind off of her crisis; who should they say is calling? Now muffled snickers replaced the hush. And Til sucked the air in through her teeth and headed
toward the kitchen with her sister and brothers right at her heels.

“I’m looking for Mae,” Til said as she walked all the way into the kitchen and stood right at the back of Mae’s head.

Mae didn’t turn around at first. She was too centered on the card game that was in fact keeping her from the moaning and hand wringing she’d be prone to right about now over her missing foster girls. “I said raise or fold, bitch”—she sneered across her kitchen table at her card-playing rival Clara Jane from downtown—“’cause you getting ready to lose your motherfucking gold ring in here today.”

Giggled comments about how that Mae can surely talk some shit circled the kitchen, and then Til’s voice got in the middle of the circle and silenced it with her tone, which was sharp and serious and completely different from the jovial air hanging over the table.

“If you are Mae, please put down those got-damn cards and talk to me about my babies.”

“Who might you be?” Mae asked as she started to turn around. “And who the hell are your babies?” She turned around slowly. She had to turn slowly because first she took in everybody’s faces in her view. A cardplayer, she knew how to read faces, and their faces told her that there was a considerable threat standing over and behind her head right now. Now she was standing up. She was shorter than Til. Too much shorter, she had to concede.

Ness reached beyond Blue and grabbed Til’s arm. Said, “Sister, whatever you thinking that’s got the muscles behind your ears jumping like jackrabbits is not worth it; it’s just not, let’s just find out why Shern called and look our girls over and make sure they’re okay.”

“Lord have mercy,” Mae said, clutching at her chest and thanking the God that she was sometimes prone to call in such situations for the substantial weasel room she’d just been blessed with, “are you the natural kin to those girls? Lord, forgive my lack of manners, please let me have your coats. Lord, yes, I am Mae, and those little pudding pies of yours been such a delight, such a pure delight. Now what can I offer you, all kinds of food here, something to drink? Some soda or a little taste?”

“I’ll have one, thank you,” Blue said as he slipped in the chair Mae had just gotten up from and took a shot glass and the Four Roses from a tray in the center of the table.

“You help yourself with your tall, good-looking self,” Mae said, and let her hand rest on Blue’s shoulder, and then lifted her hand quickly as if Blue’s shoulder were a glowing coal. “Pardon me, please,” she said to Til, “I didn’t mean any disrespect if this is your man friend or intended—”

“My brother,” Til said, putting all her weight on her feet so that her usually squared shoulders rounded out some. “His name is Blue, and behind me is my sister, Ness, and that’s my other brother, Show.”

“Mae, you in the game or out?” Clara Jane called from the table. “’Cause I’m getting ready to deal your hand to this tall man with the pretty mouth who done took over your seat, he damned sure better to look at than you.”

The crowd around the table laughed except for Til and Ness and Show. Then Clara went on. “Mae, thought you already knew about them anyhow. Didn’t your cut buddy Vie tell you everything you needed to know about the kinfolk of those girls?”

“Vie?” Til said as her shoulders went square again.

“Vie?” Ness repeated behind her sister. “You a friend of Vie’s?”

“Vie?” This from Blue as he drained the shot glass and stood at Mae’s back.

“Vie?” Even the short, reserved brother, Show, added his questioning, threatening tone to the air in the kitchen that had gotten suddenly stark still.

“Vie?” Now Mae said it too. “What the hell you talking about, Clara Jane? I ain’t seen nor talked to no fucking Vie!”

“You’s a damned lie,” Clara Jane said, incited by her several shots of the Four Roses and a decade and a half of harbored resentments over Mae’s ability to get foster children over everybody else. “I can’t even get a foster child placed with me but once or twice a year since you and that fat-assed Vie so chummie. Shit, between you and that no-good Bernie, it’s a wonder any foster mother in this city gets work.”

“Clara Jane, shut your big, lying mouth right
now.” Mae started moving through the kitchen toward Clara Jane. If she was going to have to fight in here today, she’d take her chances with Clara Jane over the square-shouldered Til.

“I ain’t shutting shit.” Clara Jane stood and grabbed the knife resting on the plate with the coconut cake. “And I hope once they find those girls, they take them right from your conniving ass. Ain’t like they safe here. I live all the way downtown, and I heard about how some printer’s son had to step to crazy-ass Larry about bothering those girls. And when I heard it, I said, ‘Well, that conniving Mae ain’t gonna say nothing. Shit, might mess up her good thing she got going with Vie.’”

The aunts and uncles gasped simultaneously at this information about needing to find the girls. Their lifestyle of contented isolation had kept this news from seeping under the door to their Queen Street row house. Now Til suppressed a horrified shriek at the mention of Larry in context with the girls. She knew not to get in between Clara Jane’s words, though, even as Ness rubbed her arm to keep a fit from coming on. She knew Clara Jane was saying everything they’d need to hear to give their lawyer ammunition to go up against the judge’s ruling. Hotheaded though she was, and as badly as she wanted an explanation about what all was being uttered, she let her weight go to her feet again, let her shoulders round out, and stood back between Ness and Show as Mae and Clara Jane called each other liars and cheaters and whores and were quickly run
ning out of base phrases to sling at each other, which meant the “I’ll kick your ass” threats would surely follow, and, as was inevitable at times like this, happy or sad didn’t matter, there was laughter and tears, coconut cake, chicken, coffee and cream, Four Roses holding up the center of the kitchen table, and often, at times like this, there was a fight.

R
amona sat back against the smooth leather interior of Perry’s deuce and a quarter. Now she felt like a person. Her breaths were moving through her chest absent that block of granite that always surfaced when she tried to do something like this: be comfortable with a man in a way that was honest and precluded her having to look over her shoulder for somebody’s wife or other love interest to jump out at her, maybe throw lye in her face, stab her with an ice pick, pitch a cherry bomb through her front window. The threats she’d endured in the name of what? Certainly not love, not even desire, more just living up to what she’d been told about herself for as long as she could remember. But this was love she was feeling now, as Tyrone clasped her hand and squeezed her fingers one by one, telling
her not to worry; he just felt in his heart that the girls were okay.

They were almost to Chestnut Hill. Had just left the trolley tracks and shops of Germantown Avenue and were onto huge streets with no white or yellow lines that marked all the streets of this size in West Philly to hold the traffic in place. There was not much traffic here to hold in place. Just houses as large as the streets were wide, two-, three-storied, deep and long brick houses sitting back behind snow-draped trees; she couldn’t even name these trees, they had such exotic shapes.

“No wonder those girls wanted to get back here.” Ramona sighed. It was a tear-laced sigh. She’d cried such rivers today: for Mae, for those girls, for Donald Booker, for herself. She especially cried for herself.

Now Tyrone was going in between her fingers, taking his time, leaving no speck of her fingers untouched by his hand. “Well, of course, they wanted to get back here, Mona, not just because of their house; it’s just that this is where their essence is. Don’t matter how good or bad they were treated staying with you and your mother, they still would have wanted to get back here to, you know, to breathe.”

Ramona squeezed his hand. Thought about how her essence had been left back in that park eighteen years ago and how she’d had to go back there, at least in her mind, so that she could breathe.

She rolled her window down. The air was still gray, and the temperature was dropping again. She rubbed her hands together and blew into them. She hoped the girls had doubled their socks. They were almost to where a tree had fallen and spread itself out halfway across the road. This was the block; Ramona could tell by the police cars, one marked, one unmarked, sitting in front of a grand stone Victorian.

“You think we need to get out of the car?” she asked. “That must be the house up there where the police cars are sitting. Maybe we could talk to the neighbors; maybe they’d tell us details they might leave out for the police.”

“Sure, baby doll.” Tyrone pointed out of the passenger-side window, motioning to a woman who’d just crossed their view. “We could start with her.”

When Ramona looked at the tall, slender figure gliding up the street as if she were walking on velvet instead of ice-covered concrete and noticed the vintage fox-foot–collar coat she was wearing, she was getting ready to say to Tyrone that you can always tell people with money by the way they walk and the quality to their coats. She had her mouth all fixed to let go a barrage of observations about the rich. But then she noticed the purple wool blanket-like shawl hanging in a loose drape around the woman’s head as if she were an Arabian princess. She couldn’t even say anything after that.

It was the stitch. All through the shawl, that tight
knit-purl cross-stitch, that stitch she’d never seen until she’d seen it woven through all of the hats and scarves and gloves that belonged to the girls. So all she could do was shriek, “Oh, my God! Stop the car right now, Tyrone. You gotta stop the car.”

Tyrone almost ran up on the curb, unaccustomed as he was to driving Perry’s fully loaded automatic transmission with power brakes.

“What? Ramona! What the hell is it?”

“That’s her.” Ramona pointed wildly toward the woman.

“Who?”

“Her, it’s her. My God! She must have gotten out. They must have let her out.”

“Who? Shern? Victoria? Bliss? Who? Who do you see?”

“Their mother, right there, that woman gliding up the street. That’s their mother. My God, that’s Clarise.”

“That’s Clarise?”

“I’m telling you, I’d know that stitch anywhere.”

“You lost me, baby”

“Never mind, sit here. I’m getting out. I’m going to talk to her; I know that’s her. I’ll be right back. That’s her. That’s the girls’ mother, Clarise.”

Clarise drew into herself as Ramona approached. She balled her fists under her coat sleeve, deciding whether to run or try to fight her off. She couldn’t run, damned tree was blocking her. It was the Pattersons’ tree; the last ones to welcome them to the neighborhood, the first ones to point out all the
business Finch was losing to the catering chains.

Clarise turned her back on the fallen tree and faced Ramona. She looked for her shoes. Darn, black rubber slip-on boots, so she couldn’t tell if she was wearing the white oxford, rubber-soled shoes all the institute staff seemed to wear. Like the ones she was wearing now, borrowed from the day shift nurse who had left them in the utility room next to the opened bottle of White-All shoe polish and the three-tiered squeegee sponge. Good shoes too. Her feet had remained dry and fairly warm the whole walk here. She sniffed. No aura of wintergreen alcohol surrounded her. She unfurled her fists, then balled them again quickly. This woman was calling her name. Who was she, calling her name like this? She centered her weight. Took the stance taught her by the aunts. Fixed her eyes on Ramona like they were cannon loaded and ready to fire. “Who the hell are you?” she asked. “And how is it that you know my name and I don’t know yours?”

“Um, miss, um, may I call you Clarise?”

Clarise dropped her fists. This was definitely no one from the institute.

“Um, I’m—my name is Ramona, and actually we’re—” Ramona turned and pointed to Tyrone, who was halfway out of the car.

“Tell him to get back,” Clarise commanded.

Ramona made a frantic motion with her hands, and Tyrone got back in the car.

“We’re over here about your girls.”

“Say their names,” Clarise said.

“Shern, Victoria, and Bliss.” Ramona said the names slowly, seeing each of the girls in this woman as she said the names. Shern had her mother’s eyes for sure, probing, intense, watery, like half-wet circles of gray-black ink. The strong, straight nose was also Victoria’s nose. And Bliss had certainly taken those fleshy lips, that pouty mouth.

Clarise felt a stabbing in her heart as Ramona said each girl’s name. She sat down on the fallen pin oak and buried her face in her hands. “Just tell me. Tell me fast and tell me true. Just tell me right now. What happened? Please tell me what happened to my babies.”

“Um, well, they were staying with me—that is, with my mother and me over in West Philly. Um, you know, my mother takes in foster kids—um, I mean children. And, well, we don’t know all the details yet, but it looks like they ran away sometime late last night or early this morning.”

Clarise was crying into her hands now. Her shoulders were going up and down, the fox-foot collar seeming to stroke her neck as she cried. “I knew something was wrong,” she sobbed into her hands.

The pin oak made a cracking sound as Ramona sat down on the fallen tree next to Clarise. Ramona had her arm around Clarise’s shoulder. It was a stiff arm, Ramona so unused to consoling people using physical contact.

“I’ve been smelling bread, all morning, a yeasty, buttery smell. The morning I woke and my husband wasn’t next to me, hadn’t been in the bed all night,
first time ever I’d woke not knowing exactly where he’d spent the night, I woke to the smell of the sea, a sweet, oily smell that was coming to me in mists, and then in waves, and then I could barely catch my breath, as if my lungs were filling with water.”

Now Clarise was starting to shiver under her aunt’s faithful coat. She had walked from the institute to here. Most of it through snow-covered Fairmount Park, where she had the streets to herself, no cars, no people; the storm had even kept the stray animals and pesky park squirrels in. And she had done the eight miles in three hours and kept reasonably warm, even worked up a mild sweat. But now her heart had almost stopped at the news that her girls were missing, her blood froze a little, and the heat that had settled between her coat and her skin while she’d kept moving was quickly receding, and suddenly she was feeling the gray air for what it was, a dull, throbbing cold.

Clarise’s shoulders felt so frail under Ramona’s arms. So Ramona wrapped her arms fully around her. She rubbed her hand up and down her arm. “Um, uh, um, Clarise, why don’t you come and get into the car with my boyfriend and me? We were riding around looking for your girls. We figured that they’d probably try to get home. Um, but the police look like they had the same idea. Um, maybe you know where else they would try to go. But first why don’t you come and get in the car with us? Please, come on,” she whispered, “let me help you into the car.”

Clarise allowed Ramona to help her up. Because not only was she cold, but she was tired; more than tired, she was weak.

Tyrone had the back door opened when Ramona and Clarise got to the car, and Ramona climbed into the backseat with Clarise.

“Are you warm enough?” she asked her once they were both settled in.

“Much better, thank you,” Clarise answered, and then let the loosely hanging shawl fall from her head and onto her shoulder. Ramona noticed how Clarise tossed her head as if she were royalty to encourage the shawl to fall. She took note. This is how refined people acted.

“Is this your young man?” Clarise asked as she leaned forward to get a better look at Tyrone.

“Um, yes, yes, he is,” Ramona said.

“Can you tell him to drive slowly through this block? This is our block. Even though my girls wouldn’t hide on this street. My Shern has a key. They would just use the key and go on in. Unless, of course, those dumb oxen police so visible in front of my door have scared them off.”

They rode in silence through the block. Ramona respected the silence even though she was brimming over with questions for Clarise. When did she get out? Why hadn’t they known she was getting out? Why was she just walking through the streets like that? How did it feel to go through life without any idea who her father was? She gasped as she thought this last question. Had never been aware of any
yearnings to know her real father. Was just beginning to understand that that didn’t mean the yearnings weren’t there.

Clarise was sitting forward to get a better view of the snow-covered block, seeing her girls in strollers, then tricycles, then roller skates, then two-wheeler bikes with training wheels; splashing around in the inflatable toy pool on the front lawn that would make Clarise’s jaws ache when she had to blow it up; posing for pictures on Easter Sunday and Mother’s Day. The images were building one on the top of the other like a slide show in fast motion, she could even hear a clicking sound as her mind went from one scene to the next, and now she was screaming and startling the quiet in the car. “Oh, dear God. Dear, dear God,” she hollered. “Please let them be safe. After my Finch, I just couldn’t bear another loss. Not a loss like that, not my girls. Sweet Father in heaven, please, not my girls.” She closed her eyes tightly. Then wrapped her arms around her chest.

“Why don’t you sit back and try to relax?” Ramona said as she reached for Clarise’s shoulder.

“Relax? How can I relax? I’ve run away from the institute, yes, that’s right, run away,” she said to the shock in Ramona’s eyes. “My girls are God knows where, and you tell me to relax.” She stared hard into Ramona’s face. She lowered her voice. “My dear, if you think it is even remotely possible for me to try and relax right now, then the institute has a bed waiting for the wrong woman.”

She saw Ramona’s features recede to a hurtful downcast. Noticed then Ramona’s red eyes, puffy nose. She sat back against the seat and closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead lightly with her long, slender fingers. She moved her fingers outward along her face and let them rest at her temples. “Well, at least you let me have a decent outburst without shooting me with that navy haze. I’m not crazy. Never was. It was the medication. Had me so bogged down all I could see was navy. The more I reacted to it, the more they gave me. Educated fools, those doctors. I stopped taking it on my own, you know. Look at me now. Or at least listen to me. Don’t I sound as sane as the two of you?”

Tyrone caught Ramona’s eyes through the rearview mirror. Did a questioning move with his eyebrow as if to ask Ramona if she was okay back there with this woman claiming not to be crazy. Clarise saw him too. She sat up again, tapped him on his shoulder, said, “My dear, I’d put my clarity of thought against yours any day of the week. I’ll bet over the past week you’ve found yourself in situations and wondered why you were there, and knew you shouldn’t be there, and continued to stay there. Personally I think
that’s
crazy. Are you locked up somewhere forbidden time and space with the things you hold most dear?”

Tyrone thought about his week with Candy. How he’d started off unable to resist, humming all the way to her animal skin–covered walls. But after five, six, seven days in a row, the skins and the smoky
mirrors made him dizzy, and even the way she so readily went wide open for him that had so excited him in the beginning he thought his natural head would burst, after a week straight, the predictability of their time together made him miss Ramona’s hot and cold, hard and soft changeable nature.

“I didn’t mean you any disrespect,” Tyrone said. He fixed his eyes on the street unfolding in front of the car lest his guilty eyebrows show. “Any suggestion on where we should go?” he asked the hood of the car.

“To your house,” Clarise said, and lightly touched Ramona’s suede-trimmed trench coat. “That’s where my girls left from. I believe that’s where they’ll return. I’ll call my aunts and uncles when we get there. When I see what’s what, I may even let them take me back. But they’ve got to understand about the medicine. I’ll explain it to my aunt Til; she’ll fight for me.” She smiled weakly at the thought of Til fighting for her. And then she turned to face Ramona again. “Young lady,” she said, “I need a favor. Can you please remove these tight-ass rubber bands from my hair. Why they did this, I certainly can’t figure, they should have just left my hair be, let it go wild; the African bush seems a popular hair statement, don’t you think?”