Those Bones Are Not My Child (79 page)

His face was turned her way, his head against the wall, the pillows bunched behind his neck. His eyes stayed on the juice as she approached. His hands crossed over his stomach.

Holding the saucer lid down and gripping the spoon tightly, she carried the bowl to the bed. It wouldn’t do to drop anything. He was skittish. She sat down gently and felt him tighten up. She eased the bowl onto the night table, taking her time so that he would learn to take his. There was a father in Winston-Salem who’d written that his son didn’t speak at all the first eight weeks. When he finally did, he spoke not as the seven-year-old that he was but as the four-year-old he’d been when he disappeared from a Founders’ Day parade at the college.

She eased around, lifting her leg and placing her knee carefully on the bed. She was learning how to do things in slow motion. She would have to learn other things too. How to open her lungs again, retrain them after a year of shallow breathing. How to unclench her thighs, teach her back to relax. And she would have to learn to call him Sonny again.

“You don’t look comfortable,” she said when he squirmed against the pillows. She placed her hands carefully on the corners of the pillow behind his neck and tugged, expecting him to help, to raise himself a little. “I guess you’re too sore to move?” She fluffed the pillow and slid her hands down onto his shoulders. She could feel his boniness through the blue-and-white cotton. She could feel his heat, clammy and sudden.

“I couldn’t …”

It was a croak. And the sound seemed to scare him as much as it did her. He fell back against the pillows and clamped his mouth shut, though she hadn’t shushed him this time. This time she looked at him squarely, to show that she could, to show that whatever he’d been through he was seeable.

“No matter what,” she said, then lost what she’d planned to say next because his face was moving, rubbery and stiff at the same time. She couldn’t make out what he was trying to tell her. When he pried his jaws apart, she turned away from the smell of him, a rusty, unfamiliar smell, and picked up the soup bowl. She leaned closer so she could feel his breath on her hands. It shivered the hairs near the base of her fingers. She hadn’t known she had hair on the base of her fingers. And she’d never been so aware of the size and shape of his head. His neck seemed too fragile to carry it.

The bad smell came out of him again and she almost pulled away. She concentrated on not spilling the soup. He leaned forward from the neck. She watched his mouth close over the spoon. And he watched her, his eyes inching forward from deep, purplish sockets to the puffy blue swells of his cheeks. She felt a tiny wind ruffling in her uterus and wanted to say something, wanted to use his name. But then his grip loosened and she hesitated, for if she pulled the spoon out, words would follow. And she was no more prepared now to hear it, the rush of it, tumbled and confused, than she’d been on the Fourth of July when he’d limped into the bathroom to hide from Dave, come for the car.

“Eat,” she said, letting go of the spoon. She pressed the bowl to his chest until he took it. He turned his face away sharply. The sun on that side of the room caught him full in the face and he had to close his eyes and turn his head again.

She slid toward the foot of the bed, moving Kofi’s toy out of the way. He sat there a long time holding the bowl, the spoon stuck in his mouth. He hadn’t forgotten how to feed himself: She’d seen him doing it spying from the adjoining bedroom through the keyhole; she’d seen Kenti sitting cross-legged on the windowseat, asking him how come he hadn’t used his kung fu to get away from the kidnappers. He was wolfing down the remains of her cheese toast, leaving the breakfast tray Gerry had set on the table untouched.

Zala waited. She’d learned how. And now he would have to learn a few things too. He would have to learn to understand food again. She too. Meanwhile, she would learn how to hem up the dragging flesh of her life with careful, tiny stitches. She watched him. And he watched her. Staring for so long without blinking, she saw specks of black and green clouding her vision, but she could be as stubborn as he was.

He blinked when the children called out to the mailman. His glance flickered away from her face for a split second to look at the juice on the dresser. When his gaze returned, she smiled. Angrily, he pulled the spoon out and ate, greedily, rapidly. He was fuming and would not look at her.

When he threw the bowl, down on the bed and flung the spoon after, hoping to break the bowl, she said, “I’ve done that. I’ve gotten into a car because I thought somebody called my name.” She watched the smeared trail the spoon made across the checkerboard dry before she spoke again. She measured her words to teach him how it was done.

“Yes, I got in. And yes, I knew better, but I got in anyway.” He obviously thought she was making it up. His mouth was sneery, but the rest of his face didn’t join in, so she continued, slowly teaching him how he should tell his story. “I didn’t recognize the car either,” she added. A little at a time so he’d know how to do it. Small bites, tiny sips. “Or the driver. Didn’t recognize her either. Didn’t even look. Just got in.”

He was moving his head like a swimmer with water in his ears. Then he stopped and formed a word with his lips, his mouth still closed in doubt. He thought she was making it up.

“Yes, me. And I was cursing God at the time.” She could see that that shocked him. “That’s right. I was cursing God when the car—it was a van, a green van—it pulled up and I was ordered to get in.”

She tensed when he leaned forward, pressing his knuckles into the bed. He was suppressing a cough. She thought he was going to laugh. She was afraid. She’d left no room in her plans for panic.

On the fourth day in Miami, she’d been flipping through a medical journal waiting to see him when she heard him coughing. Hammer blows against the walls of his lungs, crashing tissue, blood, and water together in a crackling tidal wave. He’d recovered, his face twisted in pain; but she hadn’t.

“Careful,” she said, touching his foot. He stretched out a little and blew the bad smell down the front of himself. She took his feet onto her lap and rubbed them until he pulled them away. Watching his face gray, she began to doubt the wisdom of what she was doing. Mouth grim, balling his fists, his eyes darting over her face, he was clearly worried. Maybe he thought she’d meant as a girl.

“Juice?”

His nod came in stages. He dipped his head, and his eyes moved right, left, then came to a rest and closed. She thought he might be drifting off, but he was clenching his fists more tightly. He raised his head to complete the nod, then opened his eyes, swiveled them toward the dresser, and sighed. One day soon, she thought, rising slowly from the bed, they would speak of this moment, and she would imitate his gesture, and call it regal. They would laugh with no fear of bruising his lungs.

She poured the orange juice over the ice. He watched her in the mirror. “It was a Monday morning in autumn,” she said, turning away from the dresser to address him directly. “October 13 of last year.” She walked back to the bed. He was concentrating hard on what she had said. What had he been experiencing that day as she was on her way downtown to be lied to once again? He eased back against the pillows and slid his arms out to the side. His palms were sweaty. The date relieved him: she’d not been a girl getting into a van but his mother.

He reached for the glass with both hands. She helped him hold it, trying to prevent him from gulping it down. “That was the day a nursery blew up.” His frown didn’t seem to mean he’d heard of it but that
the glass was empty. He shook it and looked at the ice cubes, then allowed her to take the glass from him. “When they brought the bodies out … me and Daddy were praying that … We feared you might be … We …”

She hadn’t meant to go that far. His eyes grew dull when she set the glass on the night table and gathered the bowl and the spoon from the bed. It was a long time after she’d sat down again that he seemed to come back from a great distance away. He was trying to say something, not necessarily to her, but something important that pained him. When he opened his mouth, there was a bubble in front, a thin spit bubble. It had colors in it like a rainbow.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” she said and left it at that, wondering when he would seem real to her.

Her back turned, Gerry unwrapped her bubba, shook the wrinkles free, then secured the cloth around her hips again, tucking the ends in tightly around her waist. She glanced over her shoulder at Spence, then continued slitting the mail open with the steak knife.

Spence was leaning against the little water heater and looking up at the ceiling. It was the first day Gerry had been able to ease them apart. Reluctant to let each other out of sight, obsessively attentive to what each was doing, the Spencers communicated what it meant to have lived in Atlanta in a state of siege. The murmuring from above had stopped, but he continued to stare at the grate until satisfied that no more conversation would be traveling down the duct from upstairs.

“There’s a letter from New York,” Gerry said, “with a June postmark.” She read it through quickly and offered as compact a synopsis as she could, for his attention span was worse than the week before. “From a Charles Logan. He’s in touch with a firm called G. Kelly Associates. They’re specialists in destructive cults. Says Innis and McGill are in attendance. More to follow.” She waited to see if the message registered. She looked at the pile of mail to go, anxious to get to the unopened mail addressed to Sonny to see what Spence would instruct her to do.

“Save the Logan letter,” he said, running his hands over the tank. The only portion of the water heater still white was the rectangle where the trademark plate had fallen away, leaving two small, brownish holes.
He tightened the screw in the porcelain knob and swung the gate open and shook his head.

“A little faith, my brother.” Gerry brought him the box of matches. “It’s really quite reliable despite its years.”

“Faith,” he said and turned on the gas. “The faith of the bather.” He struck the match and stared in at the rusty entrails.

She had to nudge his arm before he moved the match. He held it against the orangish iron, and the flames sprang up around the ring. “Surprise, surprise,” she said, since that was the expression he wore.

He tilted his head and looked at the ceiling again, and she waited. She’d been in the company of parents often enough to know they could hear sounds that other people couldn’t and would leave the room before anyone else registered a thing. She’d been for a long time in the company of people who lived in a state of siege, people who could hear a jeep twenty kilometers off, could distinguish the sound of a government motor from one of a raiding party from across the border, could cock their head to the side and tell whether the vehicle was slowly carrying the wounded or was triumphantly transporting Israeli weapons confiscated from the invading South African troops.

When his attention returned to the water heater, she went back to the table. “The STOP organization has made an appeal to accountants to help them get their books in order.” She was not sure she understood that. “Does that mean they’re preparing to apply for part of the reward?”

“No. They’re being hassled. Upsets people to see poor folks with money. Now that the cops have got Williams to take the fall, it’s open season on STOP.”

Gerry shook her head. The logic of the case continually escaped her. “I don’t understand this,” she said, flipping through clipped-together newsprint. “The papers talk about Williams’s motives for killing the children, although he’s not been charged with murdering children. For example, ‘Williams, charged with the murder of two ex-cons, Nathaniel Cater, twenty-seven, and Jimmy Ray Payne, twenty-one …’ And what’s more curious—” She interrupted herself to locate an article from earlier in the week in which the death certificates had been cited. She was certain that one of the deaths had been attributed to drowning and had been called a probable suicide. She could have sworn the other document mentioned a history of suicide attempts by strangling, a description
her stepsister Marzala’s husband had said might be a misinterpretation of or a euphemistic term for “enhanced masturbation gone too far.” She was sure that the death certificate of one of the men had listed a history of heart disease, and was sure that neither death had been termed a homicide until after Wayne Williams’s arrest.

“Of course, I wouldn’t put it past the coroners to change official documents. In my part of the world it’s the rule rather than the exception. The Pretoria regime originally listed suicide as the cause of Biko’s death, for example. Then it was changed to heart trouble. Of course, any who knew Steven Biko knew that his health was excellent and knew a lie for a lie. Once the counselors for the family were able to get the body released and people saw—ah, my brother, what they saw—then the state termed it ‘a necessary death for the preservation of the nation.’ ” Gerry looked over at Spence. She was not so surprised to discover that he’d not been listening. From the first, they’d all been so totally absorbed with the feeding and comfort of Sundiata, a whole day might go by without a word or a kiss between them.

“What is it?”

“Ex-cons.” He wagged his head. His smile was ugly. “That’s what they’re calling them now? Having a good time—street hoodlums, retards, ex-cons, and the Fiend. Trash it, Gerry.”

Reluctantly, she dropped the envelope and its contents into the box by her feet, then hurried on while she had his attention. “Con helping police establish links between Williams and other kidnappers disappears the day Williams is formally charged.”

“Trash.”

“One moment.” She read through the now familiar story of a brother who’d managed to talk his way out of prison even though “Extreme Escape Risk” had been stamped all over his record. His police escort had hung back to allow him to locate supposed companions of Williams who allegedly frequented the bars near the Greyhound terminal. Gerry wondered if the escaped prisoner, Watson, had information that was related in any way to the story her nephew had been narrating piecemeal in the past few days. “You’re sure you don’t want to save it? Looks important.”