After (17 page)

There was the summer Paul came home from his first year at Morehouse and was arrested one weekend in D.C. for selling marijuana to an undercover police officer. It was only then that they learned he’d been selling and smoking it for three years. Paul told Natalie and Temple, without a trace of remorse, when they interrogated him at home after paying his bail, “You wanna know how I got started? All the kids at Mansfield used it, sold it. That’s where I got into it.”

“I don’t give a damn what those kids do. You aren’t them. They can do drugs and still end up a CEO, a general, a senator. Boy, have you forgotten who the hell you are? Who we are?”

“That’s not what you said when I was at Mansfield,” Paul shouted bitterly. “You said I could do anything. Be anything. Which is it, Dad? Am I free, or just a nigger anyway?”

Temple grabbed Paul by the collar of his oversize shirt and through clenched teeth told his son, “If you choose to be a nigger, that’s your call. Don’t blame me or anybody else for your stupidity. I didn’t raise a pothead, and if that’s the best you can do, get out of my house.”

Natalie felt bewildered and betrayed. An expensive attorney got Paul probation and his record expunged. Paul rebounded, returned to Morehouse toeing the line, calling Temple and Natalie during the middle of the fall semester to tell them by phone what he could not face-to-face: “I love you and thank you for saving my butt.” He graduated cum laude and decided to teach, getting a master’s degree in education from Columbia, then returning to D.C. and opting to teach in the D.C. public schools.

Natalie looks for Paul everywhere, because in the year before his death there were times she wondered if she had ever known him at all. He pushed his girlfriend, Lisa, when they argued, because she was pregnant. Natalie couldn’t believe the call from Lisa one morning, the girl in tears, recounting the argument with Paul and how it had degenerated into a shoving match. Lisa wanted to have the child. Paul didn’t.

Natalie stormed over to Paul’s apartment and found him at home watching television. When he opened the door, Natalie strode past him furiously without a hello and shouted, “You never saw your father put his hands on me—where the hell is this coming from?”

“I didn’t mean it,” he told Natalie, slinking onto the twin bed he’d camouflaged to look like a sofa, pushing aside a stack of textbooks, a pizza box with a stale, half-eaten vegetarian pizza and several CDs.

“She’s carrying your child. You could have caused a miscarriage. Is that what you wanted?” Natalie demanded, furious that the son she had raised to honor and respect women had shoved the woman carrying his child.

“No.”

“Well, what, then?”

“She wants to get married,” he said angrily, his face clouded by a confusion and near terror that made Natalie’s heart tremble. “I’m not feeling that right now.”

“What are you feeling, Paul? Tell me why my son struck the woman who is carrying his child? This isn’t you.”

“I didn’t strike her,” Paul insisted. Natalie felt like screaming, listening to the self-serving linguistic hair-splitting of her Ivy League–educated son. “Lisa’s cool. We been together a year, but I can’t hardly take care of myself, and now a baby?”

“What’s really going on?” she asked, softening her voice, mostly to calm her nerves as she sat down beside Paul.

“Everything’s messed up. It’s like school was easy compared to real life. You ever try to teach third-graders? I got a poor evaluation last week and got in trouble for touching a student while trying to break up a fight. I wanna get out of this gig, but I need it to pay off my student loans. I go in pumped up, enthusiastic, and spend three quarters of my time trying to get the kids to be quiet. All we do is teach them how to pass standardized tests. I feel like I’m in a holding facility, and damn, I didn’t know there could be so many papers to grade.”

“And that’s why you hit Lisa?”

“I don’t know. I’m not saying it is, but—”

“Do you ever think what she must feel, Paul? She’s in her senior year at Howard. Wants to go to medical school, is in love with a young man who apparently isn’t serious about her, finds herself pregnant and doesn’t believe in abortion so she’s gonna have the baby. And when we talked last night she said she’s been accepted at Johns Hopkins Medical School and she’s going to delay going until after she has the baby. She steps up to the plate. Can you? You don’t have to get married, but you can’t run her and your child out of your life. She won’t stand for it and neither will I.”

Natalie has looked for Paul in the face of Darren, his son, born three months after Paul’s death. She sees Paul in the baby’s face. Thank God, if not for the child. Darren is Paul; he is his father’s child.

Paul asked her
once how she could stand to teach African American literature at all: “It’s so damn depressing.” But she found bravery, eloquence, woven into the simple testimonies of the literature and especially the slave narratives. These men and women had chosen to speak. Were willing to speak and remember the unbearable. She often told her students to think of the slave narratives as a gift from those who had been told they were nothing. Their gift was to alchemize their suffering into a door, a gateway into the depth of the human experience and the human heart. Slave narratives, she told her students, were proof that the human heart could not be broken. For the stories always came, she told them, from the heart, hearts bleeding, tattered, that were repaired in some way by the telling of these stories. She had lied. The human heart could break.

Natalie has not read slave narratives as she has grieved for her son, not once during this long, endless year of mourning. Most of her life has been devoted to writing and reading; she spent hours holed up with books in her bedroom, shunning the company of others as a child, and the feel, the touch of a book that she wants to read can still send a thrill through her body. But she has not read much during this time of grief. Reading would crowd her memories of Paul. And writing? What is there to write now, except the single word, the only question that matters:
Why?

“Our son died for no reason. His death was a mistake. If he had died of a disease, even in a train wreck, during a robbery, perhaps I would not feel so empty. But our son died because his cell phone was mistaken for a gun. Tell me why?” That is all she would write on the tableau of the heavens. In Natalie’s dreams Carson Blake is a monster. She cannot know that he dreams, as does she, of her son.

“I think we should leave around one o’clock,” Temple says, quietly entering the study without knocking, finding Natalie staring out the window at the overcast, sullen sky. Natalie turns around, her arms folded across her chest. She’s been in this room the last two hours, Temple imagines just from the sight of her, those arms crossed, the face so serious and drawn, sharpening her argument against the necessary and the inevitable, which is how he thinks of the suit he wants to file.

“What good will it do? It won’t bring Paul back,” Natalie says. Temple sits in the chair at her desk. This room is where Natalie writes, prays, meditates, composes her class lectures, where she wrote her book, the room where she seeks and finds refuge from the world. Temple wonders how, in this room, his arguments have a chance.

“Natalie…”

“Temple, don’t use that voice with me. That tiptoe-toward-the-crazy-woman voice, trying to tell me I don’t know what I feel.”

“All right. I’ll talk to you the way you haven’t let me since I first told you what we should do.” Temple moves toward Natalie even as she, her arms still folded across her chest, turns away from him, as if the words to come will arrive like a blow.

“Yes, I do want revenge. I know nothing will bring Paul back. But I can’t do nothing. He was my son. I spent my life trying to protect him from everything in the world that was out to get him, and when he needed me most…When he needed us both the most, there was nothing we could do. Now there is. We can remember Paul by standing up for his life and his dignity. Nobody should die the way he did. In some deserted parking lot, in the dark, facing down a cop who just sees you as another criminal, when you’re unarmed, when your only crime is driving with no lights, and you get killed for no reason. No reason at all.”

Natalie stands unmoving, bearing the onslaught of her husband’s words. Temple sees her wipe tears from her cheek.

“It will take years,” Natalie moans softly.

Temple dares a step closer to his wife.

“I don’t care how long it takes. Paul is gone forever.”

When she turns to face him, Temple sees the horror in Natalie’s eyes, feels it stab him as he watches her crumble slowly onto her knees.

“No, don’t say that. Don’t say that,” she whimpers.

Temple lifts Natalie from the surface of the small Turkish rug and shelters her in his arms. Her fists against Temple’s chest keep time with the staccato of her sobs.

“We have to do this for Paul, honey. It’s all for him.”

“You want me to let him go, and I can’t do that.”

“I can’t do it either. We have to live with his memory and without him.”

“The suit won’t bring him back and it confirms he’s gone for good,” Natalie says.

“Honey, you know he’s here. You can feel him right now. Right here. So can I.”

“We’ll have to go through it all over again, Temple.”

“I’ll be with you. We’ll get through this. We’ll do it for Paul. For Paul.”

11

Carson pulls
into the circular blacktop driveway in front of the two-story brick Greek revival and parks in front of the garage. The house rises preeminently against the even more commanding heights of the trees and foliage beyond the border of the neatly carved two-acre backyard that holds the woods at bay. Two broad white columns hold up the roof and stand as bold as if shouldering the world. This house is one of a dozen completed homes in a development just off narrow, winding Church Road. The residential community, Belair Mansions, has been carved out of four hundred acres of woodland sprawling on both sides of the two-lane road. New homes have joined the farms, churches, cornfields, the modest split-levels, the occasional weatherbeaten abandoned barn, the rolling hilly turf farms that give the area a secluded feel that pays homage to its once solidly rural past.

Half the houses in this still unfinished community stand like women caught naked, forced to be on display, their roofs consisting only of rafters, the drywall and plywood underbelly exposed. Hispanic immigrant workers, small brown men in blue jeans and plaid workshirts, their raven black hair covered by baseball caps, hammer shingles on the roof of a house fifty feet away and stand almost protectively over a concrete mixer near the entrance to the development. Carson has lived all his life in Prince George’s County and never imagined that one day he would be a real estate agent who had sold a house for eight hundred thousand dollars. He pulled that one off last month. It’s only June, but so far it’s been a good year.

He has a good feeling about this house, but the Fullers haven’t liked much of what he’s shown them. Not the Georgian in Bowie, the rambler in Springdale, or the colonial in Laurel. Carl Fuller strode through the previous houses like General Patton inspecting the troops on D-Day. He’s one of the few Black partners in any of the K Street power-broker D.C. law firms. Built like a linebacker, Fuller starts every sentence by clearing his throat, thrusting his hands behind his back, and entwining his fingers, as if to give himself more backbone. He told Carson during the initial meeting in the Century real estate office that he wanted a showcase home, something to “impress the members of the Old Boys’ club at my firm when I invite them for a Christmas party.” Carson figured that as a partner at McNeill, Covington, and Lowry, Carl Fuller had won all the battles that mattered.

His wife, Rose, is tiny, with a short, frizzy mass of curls framing her high-cheekboned face; a distant, harried look resides in her eyes. But it’s Rose, not Carl, who grills Carson about the test scores in the local schools, the area’s crime rate, median income, the possibility of flooding in the basement, the materials used in construction. Rose wants a house, as she told Carson, “That will make me feel like I’m living a life nobody else possibly could. And I want a big backyard where I can grow tomatoes, collards, and sweet potatoes.”

Belair Mansions. Paradise Acres. Heaven’s Gate. Now that he is selling homes, Carson understands why developments are named to prick the skin of people’s fantasies, their yearnings and dreams. Buy the right house and you will have a perfect life, save your marriage, erase a nightmarish childhood, fill your friends with envy, feel once and for all like you are somebody. That’s what people think. Every time Carson makes a sale he recalls the day he and Bunny chose their first house. And he relives all the reasons why. That’s one thing he likes about what he does now. He makes people happy. For a while, at least.

Inside, the house is cool, even without the air conditioning. The tan parquet floors in the large living room shimmer with a hard polished glaze, the alternate diagonals of the wood turning the floor into a continuous mural beneath his feet. Carson stands beneath the three-tiered crystal chandelier in the formal dining room and reaches for the light switch, which floods the room in an ostentatious yet entirely serene display of warmth and radiance. The light is playfully brilliant and as confident as an edict from heaven.

He likes the empty houses best, rooms bare of pictures or mementos, unburdened by the past of former owners or the artificial present implied by model home decor—cherrywood credenzas filled with china and wineglasses, mantels lined with framed photos of ruddy-faced, freckled White toddlers or handsome Black families, all to stoke the imagination of whoever stands there, grafting their hopes onto the still life they have walked into.

The kitchen is the spiritual nexus of a home. It’s the hub and the heart, where nourishment comes in many different forms. In the kitchen Carson leans on the cool black marble top of the island in the center of the room, a shower of sunlight bathing him through four slanting skylight windows above a plant ledge. The kitchen, so functional, so necessary, often sells the house. This kitchen is an atrium, a greenhouse, a canvas of sorts. Where the Fullers will expect a wall, the designer of this house placed windows from just above the sink to the ceiling. This is the room that will sell Rose Fuller on the property. Through the expanse of glass she will have an unobscured view of the backyard, the massive oak and the tangle of foliage surrounding it. Carson hopes she will have visions of her garden.

He’s dealing with different people now. That’s what he thought in the beginning. But Carson now knows that if he sneaked into the homes of the people he’s sold property to, he’d find illegal drugs, stolen property. If he were psychic, he’d read their minds and find them raging with criminal thought, malicious intent. These people aren’t different. They’re just luckier than the people he busted for drug deals at midnight on the playground of an elementary school or wrestled to the ground after they’d tried to hold up a pizza deliveryman with a BB gun. But he
does
make people happy. In his top desk drawer at home are letters of praise and thanks from his real estate clients. Some even send him Christmas and birthday cards.

An estate planner Carson settled into a luxury condo gave him a free consult about retirement plans, now that planning for retirement is on him. That beats free coffee and doughnuts any day. Bunny persuaded Carson to give real estate a try after asking her cousin in Baltimore, an associate broker, to talk to him. Sam didn’t have to twist his arm. In the accelerated two-week course Carson took, his fellow students were ex-cops, former firefighters, retired teachers, housewives whose children were grown, laid-off white-collar corporate types, all of them, like him, starting over, getting a second chance. His hours spill over into family time, but he can also make his own schedule and he now has more time and sees more of his children than when he was on the force. And nobody hates real estate agents. When Carson tells people what he does they don’t shut down, instead they ask his advice, eagerly take his card. Two years have passed since that night in March, and Carson is thirty-nine, nearing the age of burnout on the force. Thirty-nine, starting over.

The sound of the front door opening pierces the silence of the house, cuts through his thoughts. “I’m in the kitchen,” he calls out, deciding to remain where he is. Carl and Rose Fuller are walking slowly through the hallway, the living room, and the family room. He can’t see them, but their footsteps—leisurely, pronounced, halting—inform Carson that they are studying the spaciousness of the house. Finally he hears their voices, murmuring, soft but animated. He’d bet money they are standing beneath the chandelier. Carson isn’t hard sell. He figures his job is simple—find a house his client will want. Houses are like clothing, books, the man or woman you want to sleep with or marry, personal and unpredictable. Everybody’s got tastes they can’t explain and would never change. There are hundreds of houses, and he can keep showing until the client walks into the place they want to live in.

“Damn, man, how’d you find
this
?” Carl asks, scanning the circumference of the kitchen. This is the first time he has addressed Carson, without his K Street lawyer persona strapped on like a shield. Rose stands in the entrance to the kitchen, staring at the roof windows as if to ascertain the source of the light. It’s hard to tell if she’s amazed or disappointed. But when she enters the kitchen Carson sees the look on her face that tells him the deal is done. It’s not a look of happiness but rather a look of relief. Everything clients like about a house, everything they hate, gets mapped on their face, fills it with tension, fatigue, disappointment, anger because Carson hasn’t found their dream house, impatience because they took a long lunch break to see a house they don’t want and have to get back into traffic, hoping they aren’t late…and when they’re standing in the house they want, the house they would move in that day if they could, he gets to see a face he hasn’t seen them display before.

Carl is opening the chrome and black refrigerator, twisting knobs on the stove. Rose walks to the sink and lets her hands rest on the sill, and she looks out the wall-wide windows into the backyard. Her pale blue linen pantsuit is slightly wrinkled. She stands with eyes closed, her hands on the windowsill, as though channeling the spirit of the house. This action stops Carl’s busy inspection and he and Carson both stand watching Rose, her breathing an audible pulse. She opens her eyes, turns around, and hugs Carson, telling him, “Thank you for bringing us home.”

For the next half hour Carson and the Fullers inspect every part of the house, the basement, unfinished but large enough to exist as a separate domicile within the house, the second-floor master bedroom with a built-in den and a tiny but functional kitchenette in the hallway. He hasn’t had a sale in a while, and the Fullers should be a slam dunk. His commission on this house will be sweet, very sweet. There’s qualifying, finding a lender, paperwork, and bureaucracy, but the Fullers will qualify easily.

As the Fullers drive away, Rose turns around and waves, the look on her face exultant. Driving out of Belair Mansions a few minutes later, Carson passes the Hispanic workers. They pause to watch him driving out of the complex, their gaze on Carson, unflinching and inscrutable. It wouldn’t surprise him at all if in a couple of years he was selling houses to them. A good day. He and Bunny will have something to celebrate tonight.

Carson drives
along Route 1 to his new house. When Carson resigned from the force, he and Bunny decided to put everything from the past behind them. The house swollen with memories they both wanted to forsake. The rooms Bunny called a crime scene because of what their walls had witnessed after that March night. They moved a mere fifteen miles away from Paradise Glen, the Bowie, Maryland, enclave where Carson and Bunny first sunk the roots of marriage and became parents. But it feels a world away.

This part of Hyattsville is a crazy quilt. The University of Maryland sprawls, a concrete behemoth, spawning bookstores, diners, boutiques, all strung like pearls on a necklace choking the area around the campus, infusing it with a perpetual frenzy of people, cars, and motion. The campus is bordered by stretches of gas stations and budget motels. Then there are the aging strip malls whose major draw are warehouses selling really cheap shoes, storefronts specializing in used CDs, basement walk downs with neon signs offer tarot card and palm readings by Madame Rosa. These commercial throwbacks give much of the Route 1 strip the feel of a main road that fell to earth from the twilight zone. Parts of Route 1 stretch a scarred arm along this part of Hyattsville into Mt. Rainier, the liquor stores spilling over the line onto D.C.’s Rhode Island Avenue.

He’s half a mile from his house. His street. His new life. When Carson stops at a light, on his left is Franklin’s, a renovated, jazzed-up former abandoned building that has been turned into a popular brewery. The restaurant and brewery occupy the corner of a block with gentrified stores that are the wave of the future—a gallery specializing in Black art, an upscale women’s boutique, and a store that sells high-quality antiques.

Carson’s house is a five-bedroom American foursquare surrounded by a large sloping lawn and braced by front and back porches. It sits solid and confident on a half acre, set back from the wide swath of street. He and Bunny know everyone in the eight houses on the block. A month after they moved in, Danielle Robinson and her husband, Edgar, who had once lived in their three-story frame house with four other couples in a commune, and who own a nearby health food store, hosted a backyard barbecue welcoming them to the neighborhood. Danielle wears Birkenstock sandals and colorful thick socks year-round. Her brown hair flows to her hips and is threaded through with glints of silver. Her titanic laugh erupts often on the occasions when she and Edgar come for dinner, and he tells stories about his years in the Foreign Service as a cultural officer in Istabul, Madrid, Caracas. Whenever Carson is asked why he’s no longer a cop, he just shrugs, the movement implying, falsely, that he has never given the question much thought, and says, “It’s a tough job.”

Bunny calls the street “U.N. Central.” Their neighbors include an Indian physicist who teaches at the University of Maryland. Velu Arulsamy is a tall, stately man nearly the color of coal who at the barbecue told Carson that he was a Dalit, a member of the untouchable caste in India, and of his journey from Tamil in southern India to the United States. His wife, Reeta, gave Bunny a lavender-colored sari for her birthday last year. Their daughter, Sonia, is the same age as the twins, and Bunny and Reeta shop for school clothes for the girls at Potomac Mills and go to plays at Arena Stage. Juan Martinez is a Dominican who works for the county’s office of outreach to its burgeoning Hispanic population. When Carson and Bunny spent ten days in the Dominican Republic last summer, Juan’s cousin was their unofficial tour guide, showing them around the island.