Rainey Royal (25 page)

“Help me.” Rainey sits up. “I’m going to throw up again.”

“Not in bed,” says Tina. The doorbell is a steady rasping ring.

“Tina, he’ll kill me.”

“Did you change the basement lock?” Maybe Howard’s key will work there.

“Duh.”

Tina hears a sound she recognizes in the dark from her rotation in the ER. It’s the irregular dental clicking of terrified patients: Rainey’s teeth are chattering. It sounds like a Teletype in old movies.

“I need Flynn,” says Rainey.

“You could call him,” says Tina, “but he needs sleep like I do.”

“What if Howard breaks down the door?”

“It’s unbreakable.” The door is a heavy wrought-iron grille with glass on the inside. Tina thinks of him outside in the frost and wants to be there, wants to put her hand gently on his arm:
Howard, take it easy
.

“You could let him in,” says Tina. “He might talk now.”

“I’m scared. I want him to call me. There’s a pay phone on Sixth.”

The bell rings and rings. Along with it, faint and distant, comes a high-pitched metallic banging that could be keys slamming into scrolled ironwork.

Rainey hugs her knees. “Will you go down and talk to him?”

“Fuck no,” says Tina. “Wait till he calls.”

The doorbell stops ringing.

“If he calls, will you talk to him?”

“He’s your father, sweetie.” Tina’s words slur; she’s that tired. “Tell him if he calms down et cetera, you’ll let him in.”

“I can’t,” says Rainey. “You tell him.”

“Practice,” says Tina. “Just say it.”

Now the silence is almost as loud as the doorbell.

Rainey draws in a breath, holds it a few seconds, and says, “Did you ever go to bed with my father?”

“Are you seriously asking me that?” says Tina. “Seriously?”

“Well …” Rainey ducks her head, and her hair covers her face; she sounds like a little girl. “I just want to say it would be like cheating.” Tina stays dramatically silent. “I mean, sometimes I hear you on the stairs late at night.” Tina waits. “Creaking,” says Rainey. “It freaks me out.”

Silence from downstairs.

“And you wait till now to ask me? I get insomnia,” says Tina. “I drink some wine. I sit in the parlor. I would rather die than sleep with Howard. Nothing personal.”

She listens to Rainey think. She waits for Rainey to say,
Yeah but I never hear the bottom flight creak
, and she
understands that Rainey is either filling in the missing creaks or counting them. In the quiet she drifts off for a second or an hour; she isn’t sure.

F
OUR NIGHTS THAT WEEK
Tina awakens to the banging of keys and the doorbell’s persistent shrill. It lasts about fifteen minutes, she thinks. She has no idea where Howard sleeps. She misses the smell of his sheets, the velvety irony in his voice. In the mornings Rainey, hollow eyed, says nothing. But the shopping bags she left in the front garden, holding clothes and money for Howard and Gordy, are gone.

On the fifth night’s visit the banging barely begins when it stops. After a long moment of silence the telephone rings. Did Howard sprint to Sixth Avenue? Tina stumbles into the hall and answers.

It isn’t Howard. It’s Gordy. He says he is phoning from the neighbors’.

“I just called an ambulance,” says Gordy. “You better come down.”

Tina runs downstairs in her pajamas and socks. Rainey calls from her bedroom, “Don’t let him in.” From blocks away a siren begins its song.

Tina spots only her reflection in the glass of the front door and cups her hand to it, peering out. The bulb in the lantern has been dead for months. No Gordy, no Howard. She pulls open the heavy door, shivers, and scans the empty sidewalk. Darkness is on the block like a lid. Streetlamps are
on a short distance away, and snow billows through clouds of light. Tina glances down.

Howard is a dark form on the stoop.

“Oh, baby,” she murmurs. Then she turns and calls, “Rainey.” Snowflakes whirl into the foyer. Tina shoves Gordy’s trumpet case down the stairs and unzips Howard’s parka. “Baby, wake up. Wake up for me.”

The siren howls distantly from the direction of Saint Vincent’s. Howard is no longer an asshole, no longer a teacher, no longer a lover. He is a man Tina has to save. Disobeying every rule she knows, she bolts back inside, losing critical seconds, and shouts, “Rainey!” Then she straddles Howard under the sifting snow, crosses her palms over the face of a black man on his T-shirt, and pumps and pumps. Howard lies inert. He must be kidding. It is one of his sick jokes, like when he slowly felt up one of the girl musicians right in front of her, smiling at Tina the whole time. The man on his shirt has to be a musician. There’s lettering under his face, but her arms and the darkness obscure it. She lunges forward, pinches Howard’s nose closed, and breathes hard into his mouth, twice.

Strange that they call it the kiss of life. She knows what it means to kiss Howard Royal, whose mouth, he told her, had muscles—a strong mouth.
Embouchure
, he called it.
You feel it, baby?
From the clarinet. But this is nothing like a kiss. This is all business.

She is just pumping again when Gordy comes from next
door with a ridiculous pom-pom hat pulled low over his forehead and says, “Don’t stop.”

Tina would never stop. “I’m not stopping,” she says, panting. A few minutes in, she feels a rib break, a thick icicle. An ambulance wails around the corner and onto their block. Where is Rainey? Why does her own mouth taste of cigarettes? Tina keeps going, but she is sure that Howard has left her, the way he stares up past the cornice with disinterest, and she knows from her grandmother that the dead only come back as ghosts. Tina pumps. She pumps. She remembers that Howard smokes; she remembers the taste of his mouth. Rainey does not materialize. The ambulance sails to a silent stop outside their door, its red eye flaring.

Lights come on in two townhouses across the street.

Two EMT guys gently pull Tina back. The bigger one takes over pumping Howard’s heart, and the other takes Howard’s carotid pulse for a long time. “You tried,” he finally says. “You did good. I saw you. We’ll need some information.”

SATCHMO
. The lettering on the T-shirt says
SATCHMO
.

Gordy sits on the snowy steps, bent, his forehead resting on Howard’s calf.

“Let his daughter say good-bye.” Tina runs up to Rainey’s bedroom and peels the top of her quilt down. “Rainey,” she says, “he can’t yell at you.” She can’t say
dead
. “He isn’t mad anymore. You better come down,” she says, and Rainey looks at her with the eyes of someone falling off a roof.

From the stoop, in the strobe of red light, Tina watches her. Howard is on a stretcher. Rainey touches his beard.

“I killed him,” she says, almost marveling.

Tina sees Rainey, barefoot, on the sidewalk in a delicate frost, and she feels the snow through her own thick socks. She sees Rainey press her cheek to Howard’s, and feels the stubble prick her own skin.

W
HEN
R
AINEY CALLS THE
clinic the next day, Tina’s looking at the plump, puckered cervix of a sixteen-year-old girl. She spins away on her stool and gets the sample IUD and dangles it by its string.

“Look how small,” she says.

“No way you’re sticking that in me,” says the girl.

The high school intern knocks and hands in a green message slip. “The lady said it couldn’t wait,” she says. “Sorry.”

No autopsy
, says the slip.

“Just take care of me,” the girl says. She wears a silver band around one toe and has neatly painted her toenails white. Her vagina is pretty, a little purse. Tina wonders if male gyns get picky about their lovers’ vaginas, or if it all becomes a field of pink and hair. It is something she wishes she could ask Flynn, laughing, intimate, in the way that she wishes she could fuse with all of Rainey’s men.

“Let me make an appointment for this, too,” Tina says. “You’ll barely feel it.”

On the message slip, it says,
Thank God
.

“No thanks,” says the girl.

“I still have to make a referral,” says Tina. “I don’t do abortions.”

She has never said this before. She can get fired for saying it.

Of course there would be no autopsy; it was just a heart attack. But what if Howard had a congenital arrhythmia? If he did, sudden rage could short-circuit his heart so it quivered instead of pumped.

Tina sees it glossy and shivering, failing its true purpose.

Rainey could have this condition, too. Brugada Syndrome, maybe, or Long Q, one of those.

“You’re not paying attention,” says the girl. “You’re supposed to take care of me.”

Tina loves Rainey more than she loves anyone.

“I want to get on with my life,” says the girl.

Also, there is this.

Rainey could get tested to see if she has this grenade in her chest. If she does, she could live serenely. Have a placid marriage. Say
om
. Certainly don’t go plunging into cold water. Screw the Jersey Shore.

But if she has it, Rainey would know she could die at any time. She might hate Tina Dial for letting her lock Howard out, for being the messenger, something.

Tina’s not risking that. Four years ago she lost her grandmother. Rainey Royal she loves so much, she doesn’t get why God made them both girls.

She should say nothing. Let it be a regular heart attack.

“I don’t want another doctor,” says the girl. “I want you.”

In her mind’s eye Tina sees the fetus radiant and slick inside the girl, a second thrumming heart. It’s not
First, do no harm
, Tina thinks. It’s
First, define harm
.

H
OWARD
’
S DOORKNOB IS COLD
in Tina’s hand, and the hall is velvety black. She eases the door open.

His room still smells of him. She moves confidently to the bed in the dark and turns on a lamp.

Socks. Books. Records. T-shirts, inside out. He lived like a teenager, except the posters and album covers on his walls were signed and framed, and his name was on some of the albums.
Piano: Howard Royal
. No one has made his bed—Rainey stopped doing that a few years back. The bed’s an antique, with carved pineapples on the four posts, and he told Tina once that pineapples meant hospitality.

The room does not feel hospitable now.

Tina wants something Howard cared about. Something that feels like him in her hand, or triggers her olfactory lobe; or a photo—something Rainey won’t miss.

Not his nightstand drawers; she knows what’s there. His bureau, maybe. She scans the room in dim light. Between the windows, under stacks of paper that render it almost useless, stands a narrow desk.

Though she’s sure it’s full of sheet music and reeds and dried-up pens, she tugs gently on the long top drawer. It
sticks. She yanks harder. The drawer shrieks. It sounds like a train braking.

Tina freezes. She waits for discovery. For a long moment she stands motionless at the desk and waits. Then she thinks,
What the fuck am I doing? I need to look completely innocent
. Gingerly, she turns her back to the door and starts sifting through papers.

In about a minute the door opens.

“Hi,” says Tina. Slowly, she pivots. Her left hand bristles with papers, and she sets them on the desk. Show no weakness, she thinks. Without apology, she says, “I wanted something of his.”

“Uh-huh,” says Rainey. “I think you left something in his room you didn’t want me to find.”

Tina stares. This is going to be easier than she thought.

“Oh, please,” she says. “I wanted some little memento. Anything. I’ve known your father since I was a kid, and I barely had a father of my own.” Tina silently prays for forgiveness; she has a perfectly good father, he just wasn’t around.

“That’s all?” Rainey lifts her hair with all ten fingers as if massaging her thoughts. “Why didn’t you say?”

“I said it now. I thought it would sound funny if I came out and asked.”

Rainey slants a look at her. “It shouldn’t sound funny,” she says. “Why would it sound funny?”

Suddenly Tina is exhausted. She wants to collapse on the
bed. She also knows that she must not ever, in Rainey’s presence, sit on Howard’s bed. “I practically grew up here. He was like my second dad,” she says, and this time she asks no forgiveness.

Rainey crosses her arms over her red silk bathrobe, stained below the waist. Over the years tiny rips have appeared in the sleeves, and though she sews beautifully, she has not mended them. The bathrobe is an old thing of her mother’s, and it touches Tina, the way Rainey can neither give it up nor tend it. “Look me in the eye,” says Rainey.

Tina says, “I am looking you in the eye,” but it’s a lie. She adjusts her gaze.

What does a person need to know about a father? John Dial pages her at work, tells her the facts of his life.
It was just a little blood, baby. A man can cough up a little blood, and it don’t mean nothing
. John Dial requires an X-ray, which he refuses to get, and cash, which she does not have. She remembers riding on his shoulders when she was little and now she can’t spare a few bucks for the OTB.

The tip of a strand of hair finds its way into Rainey’s mouth.

“Okay, here goes,” she finally says, and Tina stops breathing. “I’m going to give you something special of his. And it’s going to kill me to do it. I want you to know that. Wait here.” She leaves the room, her red robe fading into the dark hallway. Tina looks longingly at the bed.

Rainey comes back with her palm extended.

The watch is silver in color, with a worn brown leather band whose cracks are as meaningful and impenetrable to Tina as the creases on Howard’s palm. Its face, silvery-white and generous, says
HAMILTON
. Tina stops herself from mouthing the word. Her heart starts ticking. She had not known until this moment that the watch was what she sought.

She says, surprising herself, “I don’t think you should give me that.”

“Why not?”

Tina’s wrist feels naked already, though she is wearing Paul’s watch from ten years back. It dawns on her now that she will have to take Howard’s watch off to shower. “Because you’ll miss it,” she says.
Because I’m going to wear it every second of every day, and you’ll always wonder
.