After (15 page)

When Proctor calms down he rises to go to the john, assuring Carson that he won’t stop at the table of the two who told him to be quiet. His seat is empty, but Carson still feels the booth charged, crackling with the sound of Proctor’s voice and his anger and fear. Carson wonders if he will burst into flames or, even worse, end up like Proctor. Imprisoned by The Job. A danger to civilians. A stranger to himself. These thoughts inspire Carson to throw a ten-dollar bill on the table and head for the door, and make him ignore Proctor calling out to him when he comes out of the john, “Hey, Blake, where you going?”

He is in the parking lot, opening the car door, and Proctor is all over him, pulling on his arm.

“Where you going?” he demands again.

“I gotta go.”

“You were gonna leave just like that? What’d I do? What’d I say?”

“Why did you ask me to meet you? Just tell me that,” Carson shouts, inching so close to Proctor that he steps back.

“I thought you could use a friend.”

“I’m not like you, Proctor. I want you to know that. I’m not like you. So how could we be friends?”

“You’re more like me than you know.”

“Everything you said back there was a lie or a cover-up. I can drink alone. I can lie to myself without your help.”

“What do you want from me? A confession? Yeah, I lied. I’ve thought about the perp I shot.”

Carson shrugs and gets into his car. Proctor leans on the door, his face close to Carson’s through the window. “I lied about another thing too. It was me who needed a friend. Come on, Blake, you know how that feels.”

“Yeah, Proctor,” Carson tells him, placing his key in the ignition, “I do.”

10

She wanted to name
him Prince. But Temple insisted on Paul. For the great Black athlete, actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. Temple was convinced their son would grow, like Robeson, into a man defying categorization. That he’d carry his own world with him. She too possessed grand dreams for the long-limbed, husky baby delivered after an agonizing eighteen-hour labor, a birthing that defeated Temple’s promise to last at her side in the delivery room, to be the one to place their child in her arms.

Natalie had decided on Princess for a girl. Like Prince, it was an affirmation and an anointing. She yearned for a daughter radiant with a sense of her own worth, or a son of whom it would be said, “He has a good heart.” As always, Temple wanted much more. His son (and Temple knew absolutely that Natalie carried a boy, even as they decided against the ultrasound exam that would have confirmed his intuition),
his
child, must roar through his life, not merely live it. And so Temple named their child for a man who beat all the odds. He named their child Paul.

But Paul had always been
her
prince. And because of that they had done everything right. Still, Temple warned her, back when Paul was five and enrolled in a Montessori school, when he was eight and joined the Cub Scouts, when Temple and Paul accompanied Natalie to Senegal for a weeklong conference on African diaspora literature, with side trips to Ivory Coast and Ghana, “Doing everything right might still not be enough.”

In the tremulous, secret-code-filled conversations instigated by Temple’s admonition, they never completed the thought. Never said it out loud.
Doing everything right might not be enough to save him
. For if they lost Paul, then they too were doomed. Their construction of a psychic space beyond White folks’ reach. Their massive love for their son. None of it, in the end, perhaps even at the beginning, was guaranteed to be enough.

Two pregnancies before Paul had ended in death. A cyst on the back of the baby’s neck killed the first; a cord bunched around the neck of the second prevented the baby from breathing. Natalie might have had her Princess, for both babies were girls. So Paul bore the weight. He had lived most intensely in their imagination, suspended between what he was and what he was to become. Always, it seemed, Paul was most real in their dreams for him. Dreams that encompassed all the good they could imagine and some that they could not even name. A child is a whispered prophecy. Hope is the middle name of every child ever born.

Once, the instant the door closed after Paul’s departure from the house, Natalie felt the fear. The turning of the lock, such a minute, momentary sound, summoned the demons. When Paul got his license and went with friends to weekend parties, Natalie lay in bed restless and fitful, until she heard the lock on the door once again and Paul ascending the stairs with a purposeful stealth designed not to wake them. On those nights, Temple slept beside her, his snores and stolid, heavy slumber signaling a trust of the night that she could never call forth. Her dread was mighty, the imagined calamities numerous—a traffic accident, a fight, a shooting at a club, a stop by the police, a robbery. She harbored the unspeakable, shameful thought that if the early-morning call must come, let the phone jar some other couple awake—God help her, she would pass this cup on to another.

Before he moved into his own apartment in D.C., some nights Natalie stood at the wide front window, pulled back the curtains, and watched Paul’s Nissan coast down the driveway, turn the corner, leaving Glory Road and turning onto Pleasant Prospect Lane, the taillights, the car, disappearing with that sharp left turn, as though the darkness, the night itself, had quickly and ravenously feasted on the vehicle and Paul. Gone. Out of her reach. Beyond the sound of her voice, her admonition, her protection. Her love.

But that night, Paul’s last night, she had not felt the fear, deep, abiding, terrible. Even when she called out to Paul before he bounded out the door on his way to the supermarket at the nearby mall to get her a bottle of aspirin, Natalie brushed aside the eerie ache of doubt that shot through her like an echo of the old familiar fear. She had not felt the fear. Not at first, anyway. It was the headache, she told herself as she embraced Paul, her hands wet, her body arched backward to give herself up and over to his height. It was a headache that made her feel so odd, so uneasy. Nothing more.

When an hour and a half passed and Paul had not returned, Natalie thought to call him on his cell phone. It was a Tuesday night. How crowded could the supermarket be? Then she recalled the surprisingly long lines that greeted her sometimes at night when she dashed in to pick up an item or two. No, she wouldn’t call him on his cell phone. It might not even be on. To suppress the distress bubbling inside her, she turned on the stereo in the living room, heard on the jazz station an early-fifties ballad by Miles Davis pouring through the speakers, the sounds unfurling as lazy as the shy, coiled petals of a rosebud, but not calming her, not for a second. She willed herself to think of something else. Anything else. Her mind drifted to Lisa, carrying Paul’s baby.
Carrying
. How apt was the term. Wasn’t she carrying Paul right now? Wasn’t he at twenty-five still a blessed burden that she had wanted more than anything? Even more than Temple or his love. To be a mother. And soon she would have a grandchild.

The knock on the door was firm and Natalie would think in the aftermath of that night,
That’s when I knew. I could hear it in the sound of their knuckles pounding my front door. A sound that was heavy, yet strangely hesitant, that would not be denied, yet that pushed me deeper into the chair in which I sat beside the front window (where I had sat down finally after pacing I don’t know how long). Waiting to see the lights of Paul’s car swing back onto Glory Road.

In remembrance, and she sometimes heard it even now, the knocking seemed to go on forever. She would not respond to it. Because she knew. Maybe if she simply did not answer the door…Maybe if the lights were out. But the house, their stately three-story brick Georgian colonial with the wide white columns, was ablaze with light. So whoever was knocking, and she knew it was the police (who else knocked like that), knew someone was home.

Temple’s voice broke the spell of her resistance. Her determined denial. He’d been in the basement practicing his golf swing and come upstairs, shouting, “For Christ’s sake, Natalie, answer the front door.”
No, don’t answer it
. That’s what she wanted to scream. But before her lips could part, lips raw and bleeding—she’d bitten into them so deeply, in her fear—the door was open. And now she could hear everything. The door was open. Open and evil, and disaster entered like a tidal wave in the form of the two policemen in plain clothes who stood on the porch and asked if Paul Houston lived here. Paul hadn’t gotten a D.C. license yet, still carried his Maryland license with their address.

Temple’s impatience gave way to wary anxiety, which Natalie heard throbbing in the simple “Yes.” And after the yes, she was drowning and everything was swept away.

“Are you his parents?”

“Your son’s been involved in a shooting. We need you to come to the hospital with us.”

Natalie rose from the chair, sprang from its confines. Standing at the door beside Temple, she could not have said what the policemen looked like. Who really gazes deep, fearlessly, into the face of the angel of death?

“What happened? What happened?” Temple asked. “We can only tell you that your son is at the County Hospital and we’ve been told to take you there, one of the men said.”

“Is he alive?” Temple asked.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Houston. I can’t tell you anything more.”

From that night she remembers few sounds, except the thud of Temple’s fist breaking through the wall in the small family counseling room when the doctor told them that Paul was dead. And the chairs and tables he scattered as the security guard pulled him away from the wall and tried to calm him. She remembers her scream; it was a howl, really, a sound that echoes still behind every thought. It felt as if her lungs were on fire. How did the building withstand all that her voice unleashed? How did the hospital not crumble around her feet, shaken to the core by their grief? When she thinks of it now, she can’t remember any of the faces, not the counselor who met them at the main entrance, the doctor who told them Paul was dead, the nurse who accompanied them to the room to look at Paul’s body. But the face of her son she would never forget. The bleeding was massive. The bottoms of his feet and the palms of his hands were as white as chalk. The nurses had placed Paul’s hands on top of the sheet. Natalie wanted to see with her own eyes how Paul had died. When she reached to pull the sheet back, just to see his body, she didn’t care what she’d see. She almost longed for the blood, wanted to see the wounds. How else could she believe her child was dead? But she wasn’t allowed to pull back the sheet. The trauma nurse pulled her arms away from Paul’s body, saying, “This is a coroner’s case now. Everything in this room, including your son’s body, is evidence we can’t tamper with.”

The two policemen drove them back home, back through the gate that lifted when Temple entered the pass code, down Pleasant Prospect Lane and onto Glory Road. Natalie and Temple passed that night together encased in an ancient, primordial silence. Not until the first stirrings of dawn slid through the curtains did Natalie begin to weep, a fulsome, baptismal release that she had stalled all night.

It made no sense. Not then. Not now. The police explanation. Carson Blake’s defense. A year has passed since that dreadful night, and she still doesn’t understand. On too many nights Natalie has sat parked in the mall lot, outside the Chinese restaurant where it happened, staring at the spot as if to make Paul rise from the scrubby cement walkway that had been covered that night with his blood. According to the police, Paul was stopped for driving with no headlights and speeding.
“Be polite. Courteous. Remember Rodney King. Keep your hands where they can see them.”

“You have to let Paul go.” That’s what Temple keeps saying. He tells Natalie this even as his own memories of their son are for him an unremitting, nearly blinding light. “Let him go,” he says, so they can give Paul what he was denied the night of his death, the only pursuit worth embarking on in his name—justice. No, Temple firmly has told Natalie, “I won’t delay or reschedule any more appointments. If you don’t go with me, I’ll go see Quint Masterson alone.”

Her husband has been patient, understanding, has given wide berth to her grief while in the throes of his own. But he will hesitate no longer. For Temple, Natalie often thinks, unfairly she knows, that it is all so simple. He wants justice. She wants their son back. She wants him alive.

Natalie opens her eyes after twenty futile minutes spent trying to quell her thoughts. Sitting on a meditation cushion on the carpet in her study, Natalie recalls bitterly that she’d closed her eyes to find relief from everything that haunts her thoughts. The usual monkey mind she combats throughout her meditation sessions, the restless resistance to tranquillity, was heightened by the internal dialogue about the second meeting with Quint Masterson scheduled for this afternoon. How can she be still, quiet her breathing, slow down her heart, when she is so unsettled by the idea of the wrongful death suit Temple wants to file? The fact that Blake was neither indicted by the courts nor punished by the police force has added urgency to Temple’s arguments that a civil suit is all the recourse that remains.

But for Natalie, a suit will make Paul’s death real. Memory renders him unto her with a generosity that humbles her anew every day. Temple wants “the system” to pay. For what they have lost and will never have again. Yet how much would a jury conclude the life of her son was worth?

The first meeting with Masterson, just weeks after the funeral, sickened her. Considered one of the area’s top civil lawyers, Masterson was high profile and frequently in the news. He met with Natalie and Temple in the high-ceilinged boardroom of his Bethesda office. The long, sweeping marble conference table, the softness of the high-backed leather chairs that enveloped them in a plush embrace, the thick carpeting that she felt herself sinking into as they were ushered into the room by the blond, model-thin receptionist, all of it held the scent of commerce. And that, Natalie felt, had nothing to do with Paul. But money is why Temple chose Masterson. Temple had researched the lawyer exhaustively on his Internet site and even managed to find and talk to former clients who rated him highly, called him “a bulldog” on a case. “This is our man,” Temple had said, beaming when he told Natalie about the appointment for the first meeting.

Masterson was a small, tight, energetic man whose soft voice came as a surprise to Natalie even as she was charmed by the still thick Louisiana accent he made no attempt to alter and clearly used to enhance an image of regularity and down-home honesty. “I have to tell you that I’m not quite ready to consider a suit yet,” she told Masterson that day, “but I am curious as to how a judgment would be determined.”