After (22 page)

It took Carson six months to write his letter, but he called Natalie Houston the day her response arrived. The waiting, and the watching, mostly the watching her, had given Carson a sense that she was no stranger, had never been, could never be.

He couldn’t read her emotions on the phone. She was calm. Said nothing about his letter or hers. But when he asked if they could meet soon, she demurred, telling him that she had a number of commitments and that a meeting in several weeks would be better.

Even when
Carson accepts Juwan’s shamefaced apology, offered, he suspects, at Bunny’s urging, he still feels bereft, stripped of all the skills and instincts that had informed his sense of who he is as a father. The transgression with Will pales beside his fear that for his son he will always be guilty, a man who got away with murder. Carson carries Juwan’s damning words not in his memory but in his flesh. He and the boy have exchanged few words since that night, Carson locked behind a steely, stony, silent anger, Juwan so stunned by his outburst that he feels he deserves the punishment of his father’s silence.

And yet a month after the argument between father and son, Juwan approaches Carson in his office one night after dinner. The knock on the door is hesitant and quick.

“Who is it?” Carson calls out, gruff and short, aware that it’s Juwan.

“It’s me, Dad. Can I come in?”

Carson tosses aside the Real Estate section of the
Washington Post
and asks, “Whad’you want?”

“Can I come in? Please?”

“Yeah.”

“What is it?” Carson asks before Juwan has even fully entered the room.

Juwan stands before him like a penitent, his hands folded in front of him, his head downcast.

“If you’re going to talk to me, put your head up and look at me,” Carson orders him.

He’s always thought Juwan resembled Bunny more than him, but when Juwan raises his face Carson sees in the boy
his
eyes and chin, and more than any mere physical trait he sees the determined, strong curve of his lips and the resolute glance with which he now looks at Carson. Carson looks at the boy’s hands, so delicate and expressive, hands that create the pictures filling the walls of this house. Hands that find sanctuary on the page the way his own hands find meaning in the touch and feel of wood. The sight of his son transports him suddenly to the night he straddled Jimmy Blake, his fingers clenched around his stepfather’s neck. He’d imagined hurting Jimmy Blake that night, hurting him bad. Only a heart famished and river deep could contain such massive longing. Did the words Juwan hurled at him spring from a similarly starved heart, one that he himself had denied?

“I know you said you didn’t want Will here, Dad. But can I at least visit him?”

“If I don’t want the boy here, why would I allow you to visit him? Are you being willful or just plain stupid, Juwan? We’ve talked about this enough. I’m not changing my mind. And Friday night at the Art Works program at the Y, I don’t want you all up under him. That will be a big night for you, and I don’t want it spoiled.”

“I’m not going.”

“Oh, really? And when did you decide that?”

“I don’t have to go and I won’t,” he whispers spitefully through clenched teeth.

“But you’ve won first place. You’ve worked all year for this kind of recognition. You aren’t hurting anybody but yourself.”

“I don’t care,” Juwan says petulantly.

“Well, I do.”

“Yeah, about my pictures, not me.”

“Why shouldn’t I be proud of you? You’ve got a gift. If you won’t be present, then that’s okay with me. Your mother or I will accept the award for you.”

“I don’t want it, and I won’t take it, not from you or anybody,” Juwan shouts, storming out of the room.

14

The atmosphere
in the car is as frigid as the cold November night as Bunny and Carson drive to the Art Works ceremony. Juwan and Carson have been in a standoff since his promise a week ago that he would not accept his award. Unsure whether this act is petulance, hurt pride, or a strategic move to gain the psychological upper hand, Carson has ruminated over the meaning of Juwan’s decision, and sees it ushering in a shift in his world and that of his son, a shift he should have seen coming.

“I was sure he’d give in at the last minute,” he says to Bunny, his words soft and humble, a gentle attempt to prod her out of the silence she has maintained since they left the house.

“Why would you think that? He’s as stubborn as you. You’re his father. He’s your son.” Bunny’s voice quakes with exasperation and fatigue.

“Look, I didn’t plan this, okay? I figured this would be a crowning event for him, a night we could all celebrate and enjoy instead of leaving him at home to do homework and watch the girls.”

“Maybe you didn’t plan it, but you’ve got to deal with it. Fix it. Before it’s too late. Before we lose him completely.”

“ ‘We’? He’s got no beef with you. You’re always on his side.”

“Don’t you understand, Carson? If you lose him, then I lose him too. We’re in this together. It’s called a family.”

Driving into the parking lot of the Y, Carson chooses to ignore Bunny’s verbal jab and parks on the gravel-filled area on the side of the building. As Carson and Bunny close their car doors, Carson recognizes Will walking toward them with his mother. They have parked in the same row three cars over. Carson hopes that the clusters of parents and children walking past them will hide him from the boy’s view. He dreads a reprise of all the emotions the boy sets off in him. But Bunny, standing close to Carson, clutching his arm and hunching her shoulders for warmth, says, “There’s Will and Sahara,” as she waves to them.

Sahara, draped in a heavy wool caftan, her blond curly Afro-cut hair glowing platinum in the dark, smiles as she and Will near Bunny and Carson. Bunny drops Carson’s arm and hugs Sahara. Carson mutely nods hello to Sahara, refusing to look at Will. Bunny and Sahara trail Carson and Will as they head toward the building.

Carson hears Bunny say, “He’s coming down with a cold and felt awful—I thought he should stay home.”

“That’s too bad,” Sahara says. “He hasn’t visited Will in a while. I’ve missed seeing him.”

“I’m sorry for what I said to you that day at school, Mr. Blake,” Will mumbles in a barely coherent whisper, his hands dug deep into the pockets of his jacket. “It’s just that…”

“Forget it,” Carson tells the boy, speeding up his stride in order to open the door and hold it for Bunny and Sahara.

Inside the gymnasium thirty paintings and drawings hang from the walls. The canvases of the winner and two finalists are draped in cloth and lean on easels near the elevated stage. Juwan has won first prize for a drawing neither Carson nor Bunny has yet seen. Bunny will accept the plaque for Juwan that will join the other awards and certificates on his bedroom wall.

Bunny and Sahara have been chatting nonstop and sit in the second row of aluminum folding chairs. Carson sits beside Bunny, and Will settles into a chair next to his mother. All over the gymnasium parents snap photos of their children standing before their drawings and paintings. Carson waves to parents he recognizes from two years of shuttling Juwan to the Art Works Saturday program. Youngsters drift toward the table in a corner laden with bowls of peanuts, trays of cookies, and a sheet cake with green and white icing, gazing hungrily at the spread.

When the program begins, Gina Rosen, the program coordinator, walks onto the stage, taps the microphone on the podium to test it, and then thanks the parents in the audience for their support of their children in the program and asks for a round of applause for all the youngsters involved in Art Works. She’s a broad-shouldered, tall woman with gray-blond hair cascading around her wide face and down her back, so much of it, the hair appears to be a separate appendage. There are brief speeches given by the director of the Y, the head of the county arts commission that helped fund the initiative, and a high school senior who attended the program years earlier and praised it for giving him a sense that art could be a career, not just a pastime.

Carson only vaguely hears the speakers. He sits thinking about Juwan. That it was the boy’s decision not to accept his award does little to absolve Carson of regret and the feeling that it is he who has hijacked his son’s moment of glory.

The second- and first-place finalists are called to the stage to accept their certificates. One is a poised teenage Black girl who strides triumphantly across the stage, posing with practiced perfection and a huge smile as she accepts the certificate and gazes at the audience and her parents in the fourth row, who snap picture after picture; the other a chunky, freckle-faced White boy no more, Carson guesses, than ten, who bashfully reaches for the certificate and nearly runs off the stage. As the runners-up accept their certificates, their canvases are unveiled.

When Juwan is announced as the winner, Bunny goes to the stage to accept his plaque and a one-hundred-dollar savings bond. “My son has worked very hard for this kind of recognition, but it was only possible because of the wonderful teachers in the Art Works program. He couldn’t be here tonight, but he is very grateful,” Bunny says, and then turns to look at the canvas that Gina Rosen uncovers behind her.

All the mystery, the weeks of not knowing the subject of Juwan’s winning picture had prepared Carson for anything. The picture, he’d felt waiting for it to be revealed, would be a reprieve from the bitterness between them. He could always trust Juwan’s drawings to soothe and restore him. But the pencil drawing of Will stabs him, a direct hit to the heart. The audience begins to applaud, but Carson sits drinking in the sensuality and precision of the portrait, which blasts open his shuttered eyes. There is sadness, defiance, and wariness in the broad lips and full-on gaze of the boy who sits two seats away from him in the flesh. This is no child’s drawing but a reverent meditation.

“Oh my God,” Sahara gasps.

“Did you know?” she asks Will.

“He did it back in the summer, but he didn’t tell me he was entering it in the competition,” Will says, gushing with surprise and leaning forward in his seat to look more deeply at the picture.

“Your son has an amazing talent,” Sahara tells Carson, leaning over Bunny’s empty chair to touch Carson on the arm.

“Yes, yes, he does” is all Carson can manage to say.

During the drive back home, Carson asks Bunny, “Did you know about the drawing?”

“I had no idea. He kept it a secret, even from me. Carson, that picture is a confession. What more does he have to say? What more can he?”

When Carson
and Bunny arrive home, the portrait of Will in the trunk of the car, Carson pushes the remote to open the garage door. As it slowly rises, as Carson backs slowly up the sloping driveway, through the rearview mirror he sees a figure crouched over a pile of objects on the garage floor and the flickering of a sputtering flame.

“What the hell is he doing?” Carson asks as he stops the car and bounds toward the garage.

“Juwan, are you trying to burn down the house?” Carson yells, catching sight of the pile of papers, crinkling as they are devoured by the flame, which leaves an icing of black soot as fragile as lace. Carson pushes Juwan away from the smouldering mass and stamps out the small yet still threatening fire.

“What is this?” he yells.

“It’s the only thing you care about, Dad—it’s what means more to you than I do,” Juwan announces with a sinister, bemused calm as he watches his father look in puzzlement at the papers, which in their disintegration fill the garage with an acrid, smoky scent.

Bunny is on her knees, searching in her leather-gloved hands through the pile. From the heap she lifts a singed drawing of Roslyn that, when she and Carson left home two hours ago, was framed and hanging on the living room wall. Juwan’s pencil drawings from all the walls in the house lie in the pile, several burned beyond recognition, the others scorched around the edges.

“Not your drawings,” Bunny cries, unbelieving. “Juwan, why?”

It is only as she looks at Juwan now, still holding the picture of Roslyn in her hands, that Bunny sees the tear stains streaking his cheeks and the pursed-lip pout that is his attempt to hold back an onslaught of more tears. The boy’s eyes are as brittle as glass, narrowed and angry, lancing Carson with a fury she never dared imagine he could feel or express.

Bunny rises from the floor and reaches out to Juwan, who shrugs off her touch and walks away from them into the house, slamming the door behind him so violently the frame shakes.

“You go after him, Carson. You make this right,” Bunny shouts, as Carson helps her up from the floor. “
That’s
the son that matters most.”

Alone in the garage, Carson turns to salvaging what’s left of the drawings, lifting the smoky, smouldering pictures from the floor, dousing them with a spray of water from a bottle on the garage shelf. He grabs a broom from the corner and begins sweeping up the ashes that remain. When he is done, he stands on the spot where Juwan set the fire and looks into the cold November sky, clouds bulbous and dark, every star, it seems, vanquished.

Rocked by thoughts of the son whose spiteful actions are a plea he has finally heard, the child whose birth he awaits, and the young man whose life he took, Carson sinks to his knees. In the midst of the tremors this trinity imposes, he sees the face of Jimmy Blake, a ghostly flash riddling his brain. In the seconds of this hallucination he imagines himself on his knees before this face, not begging this time but with hands stretched wide open and revealed. Carson issues a hoarse, guttural, heaving sigh, a cleansing, terrible ache that he has borne, he feels, all his life. Tears wash over the banks of his heart yet refuse to fill his eyes. Dues must be paid, a down payment made on the future that could swallow him whole or thrust him into the ever-shifting terrain of grace. The garage surrounds him like a womb, but he knows he must stand, and he does, with suddenly wobbly, ancient knees, walking to the car and backing it into the garage. Sitting behind the steering wheel, after he’s turned off the ignition he sheds tears for himself, for his son, for the shock, surprise, and gift of second chances. When he enters the house he walks through the laundry room and into the living room, where he finds Juwan sitting on the sofa. Carson sees the walls stripped of the boy’s artwork, a sight that breaks his heart, and sits down beside his Juwan.

“Thank you,” he says, reaching for the boy’s hand.

“For what?” Juwan asks testily, refusing to look at Carson.

“For saying what I needed to hear.”

Juwan roughly pulls his hand from his father’s, turns, and asks him, “Do you love me anyway, no matter what?” the words as unflinching as an interrogation.

Everything about the question, that the boy has dared to ask it, the steely precision of the inquiry, Juwan’s willingness to stare Carson down inspires Carson to hug Juwan, this act so unfamiliar and new and in this moment precious, he doesn’t know how he has lived without the sensation of the boy’s skin against his, the sound of his breathing, raw and waiting, filling his ears. The silence that binds them is replenishing and complete, and it takes several long minutes before Carson says to him, turning to look at Juwan as he speaks, needing to see his son’s face, “You’re the son I want, Juwan. You’re the son I need. Any way. No matter what.”

He wakes
at 4:00 a.m. Sleep of course was impossible. But his sleep was not disrupted by the familiar nightmares, the face of the son, the hidden, shrouded face of the mother; rather, what little sleep he was able to find was an electrified dance on the edge of his brain. At 4:00 a.m. he lay beside Bunny, awake and wondering. The letter provided camouflage even as the form encouraged confession. Confession, it’s good for the soul. He’s never believed that. If it’s so good, why is it always a last resort?

Hours later he’s alone in the house and imagines himself sitting across from Natalie Houston at twelve-thirty in the coffeehouse in the rear of an antiques shop in Old Bowie. He’s never heard of the place, but she gave him directions. He sits trying desperately not to think about what he will say. About what she will say to him. Whose journey has been longer? Harder? He and this woman are explorers who’ve surveyed and mapped the same virgin terrain within each other’s shadow, inhabited the same forest of experience only miles apart. He’s dressed except for his shoes, and he looks at his bare feet. The shoes that will carry him out of the house are willing soldiers beside the closet door. It’s a thirty-eight-degree morning and a chill infects the bones of his house, yet he refuses to put on his shoes. A wave of fear comes over him and he remembers everything—the fateful encounter, the confusion of the aftermath, which lasted forever, the dreams, the nightmares, pushing Bunny away, Carrie Petersen, resigning the job he thought he had to have, the civil suit. Bathed in a baptism of sweat, rankled by old and new fears, Carson considers not putting his shoes on at all.