Visible Empire, page 24
Downstairs, Genie’s eyes were wide. Her right socket had swollen considerably since Anastasia first walked in. Tito must have only just hit her before she arrived. Billy was at the front door; Orvil’s birdcage was at his side. The parrot looked sluggish. Someone had already moved the painting and duffels to the car.
Genie moaned loudly and wagged her head.
“Let’s go,” said Billy. “Quick.”
Anastasia paused at Genie’s side. She looked at Billy. “Not the bird,” she said.
“He’s worth something.”
“No,” said Anastasia.
A few of Orvil’s feathers fluttered to the floor.
Billy sighed audibly and chewed at his lower lip. He was annoyed. But she knew he would do as she asked. “Fine,” he said. “But hurry up in there. We need to skip town.” He pushed the birdcage away from him.
Outside, it was early morning. The sun was rising. Soon it would be fully light out.
She waited until Billy was out of the house before she set down the ivory box and the mink throw. She knelt next to Genie, who stopped moaning as soon as Billy was gone.
Slowly, maintaining eye contact all the while, Anastasia removed the handkerchief from Genie’s mouth and wiped her chin with her thumb. The old woman jerked her head away from Anastasia’s hands. She stared at the floor.
“I love you,” Genie whispered.
Anastasia tried to caress her cheek. This only made the old woman weep. “Please,” said Genie. “Please. Why are you doing this?”
“You don’t love me.” Anastasia also whispered when she spoke. She rose up a little and kissed the woman’s forehead.
“I do love you.” She was whimpering now, almost whimpering, something close to a mewl. “I won’t tell. I won’t.”
Anastasia’s lips were still against the old woman’s skin, and she spoke now into it, her own breath echoing back into her mouth in a not unpleasant way. “I know you won’t tell,” she whispered. “I know you won’t.”
Genie pressed her forehead into Anastasia’s lips, but only for a moment. She raised her head finally. For what felt like several moments, the women looked at one another.
“Untie me,” Genie said. “I love you. Untie me.”
Anastasia stood up. “You don’t even know me.” She dusted off the hem of her skirt, though nothing was there, nothing could have been there. “You don’t know me at all, which means you can’t love me.” She picked up the stole and the jewelry box. Outside, a car horn honked. “My godparents,” said Anastasia, “weren’t even on the plane.”
Genie, as the girl spoke, allowed her head to roll back, and as Anastasia delivered her confession, the old woman gazed at the chandelier overhead. Then, though it started as something close to a hiccup and from there increased, expanded, grew to outlandish proportions, she laughed. Genie, the old woman whose hands and feet were still bound to a chair pulled out of her own dining room, was laughing uncontrollably.
“Stop it,” said Anastasia. The girl looked anxiously toward the front door. It was even lighter now. She could hear the car—whatever ride her brother had arranged—idling in the roundabout. She thought, in the distance, to the east, she could hear the revving motors of a neighbor’s lawn crew.
Genie laughed so long, so hard, that there was fresh saliva on her chin. Anastasia did not attempt to wipe it off.
“You think,” Genie said, snorting as she caught her breath finally, “you think I didn’t know?” And here the old woman’s smiling and wheezing morphed into something like earnest physical pain. “I knew before I brought you home. I knew when I watched you dive.” The old woman’s demeanor turned suddenly and deathly serious. “Oh, sweetie,” she said, “I knew every person on that plane.”
Anastasia should have walked out right then. She should have untied the woman, walked out the door, and told her brother to floor it. She didn’t.
“But why?” the girl asked. “It makes no sense.”
Genie shook her head. The earnest pain had morphed again, now into genuine sadness or what seemed to Anastasia to be genuine sadness. “I was lonely,” Genie said. “And you looked so dumb out there. You looked so gullible. I knew I could have you. Before I even met you, I knew having you would be easy.”
Anastasia ran outside before Genie could say any more. She didn’t bother shutting the door. It was everything she’d ever feared: in her life, she had learned nothing.
Robert
“Snap out of it.”
Overhead, there was a loud pop, two hands being brought forcefully together in an intentionally unpleasant way.
“Snap out of it, I say.” The voice was familiar. All Robert had to do was open his eyes, and he’d see the face and then place the voice.
“Up,” said the voice. Something kicked at Robert’s shins, which was when he realized he wasn’t lying down, as he’d initially thought, but sitting somewhere, his cheek pressed flat against something hard and cold. More than anything, he hoped he was in the back room of a police station somewhere. Anywhere, he prayed, other than a bar.
The chair he was sitting on—he could feel it now, the ache in his lower back and the numbness in his quads that suggested he’d been in this position for at least a few hours—was abruptly pulled out from beneath him. His knees landed hard on the floor.
Unless he was prepared to stay that way forever, prairie-dogged on a linoleum floor in exquisite physical discomfort, he had no choice but to open his eyes.
The first thing he saw was a hand stretched out: an offering. Without looking up, Robert grabbed it. He was pulled to his feet, where, once erect, he discovered that the hand belonged to the worst possible person; it belonged to Raif Bentley.
“No,” said Robert. He tried to sit back down, he tried to back away in fact, but Bentley held on to his hand.
“You’re awake,” Bentley said. “Good.”
Robert was shaking his head, which was freshly bandaged. “I didn’t ask them to call you.” The words spilled out quickly and without thought. “I need you to know. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t deserve your help.”
Bentley let go of his hand. Instead he held him now by both shoulders. “Don’t test me,” he said. But he smiled as he spoke, which Robert didn’t like at all. It was exactly what he’d feared from Bentley: he was as decent as ever, possibly more. The world around them had gone to hell, and Bentley still had it in him to smile. At him. At Robert Tucker.
“I have something to show you,” Bentley said. He turned as if to walk out freely of the room they were in, which Robert only then realized wasn’t part of a police station or courthouse. Beyond the swinging door with its large glass window, a man walked by dressed entirely in blue; a surgical mask dangled beneath his chin.
“Where am I?” asked Robert, who now grabbed at his friend’s elbow.
“You passed out in the ambulance.”
The events of the night came back to Robert in a single nasty flash. “Is Coleman here? The girl? Are they all right?”
Bentley stopped at the door. He seemed to be studying Robert, assessing his spiritual constitution. “You’re done with Coleman. That’s non-negotiable. He isn’t a good man. You are. You’ve fucked up. But you’re ready. I can see that now. You’re done with the past. It’s time to move forward.”
Robert nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I am. I never—” But he could find no more words than those.
There were two things Bentley wanted to show Robert. The second one was Lily, who was sleeping when they walked in, her body angled away from the curtain, her knees drawn up fetal-like. Bentley had arranged for a private room. He was that kind of friend.
They hovered by the door, not wanting to wake her.
“She looks like an angel,” said Robert.
“You should know she’s asked something of me and I’ve done it. I didn’t wait for your approval, and I didn’t bloody well need it anyway.”
Robert was only barely paying attention. He found it difficult to take his eyes away from Lily.
“There’s a Negro she’s asked me to see about.”
“His name is Piedmont,” said Robert, not yet looking away from Lily. “He’s gotten himself mixed up with a bad crowd.”
“Yes,” Bentley said, “at the Chateau. It’ll be in the paper. That’s unavoidable, I’m afraid. But I’ve already talked to Ivan. He’s going to keep the kid safe.”
“How?”
“I make it a point not to ask certain questions.”
Robert nodded.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Bentley. “And you’re wrong. Money has nothing to do with it. It’s called friendship. It’s called being a good person and making the right decision. It’s called being there for someone when he needs you so that he’s there for you when you need him.”
Robert rested a hand on Bentley’s forearm. “Yes,” Robert said. “I believe you.”
This—standing in the doorway, watching Lily sleep—was where they were now, the long night behind them and much of the morning too. But before taking Robert to see Lily, Bentley had taken him first to the fourth floor of the east wing of St. Joseph’s Hospital on Courtland Street.
They had walked corridor after corridor, each hallway seeming to alternate between blinding brightness from the burgeoning afternoon sun to yellow dimness where shades had been pulled to muted mustard darkness where no windows existed at all. They walked and walked, Bentley in front, Robert behind. If there were thoughts in his brain, he wasn’t aware of them. Instead, he was aware of his breathing, slow and somewhat labored. His lower back was wet where his shirt was somehow still tucked in. He looked down; the front tail of the oxford was brown with dried blood. Had it been only four weeks since the crash? One month nearly to the day? Was that all? For one month, then, Robert had tried to rid himself of the reminders of time and body. For one month, he’d been gliding, he’d been rolling, he’d been sliding straight downhill, waiting, waiting, waiting to make contact with anything, anyone solid enough to stop him.
Ahead of him, his friend walked with none of the apparent effort of movement that Robert’s body required. But that was no longer a fair assumption. A person could look one way and be another. Bentley could wake up in the morning, put his pants on one leg at a time, tighten his tie, feed his boys, start the car—he could do all these things with the same apparent breezy instinct he’d been doing them all this life, and inside he could be dying. Inside, he could be beating his chest with his open palm. It was staggering: the myopia Robert had been indulging in for so long.
At the end of a narrow and dark hallway, Bentley finally stopped. There was no door that Robert could see. There was only a large window, but the window didn’t let in any sunlight. He wondered what they were doing here; what lesson he’d been brought here to learn. He wasn’t annoyed. Not in the least. He was ready for an education. A stroke victim who’d been brought back in the nick of time, he was hungry and ready for knowledge, for the synapses to connect correctly with the muscle. He wasn’t beyond saving, Bentley was right: there was still hope—for everyone, for anyone. There had to be.
“This,” Bentley was saying, his finger pressed against the glass wall, “is what I wanted to show you.”
Robert turned to see.
Before him, on the other side of the partition, were a dozen or so sleeping babies, swaddled in pinks and blues.
Robert nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I get it.” And he did get it: the lesson Bentley was teaching him was that life, its forward movement, its upward trajectory, was all that mattered for everyone—for Bentley, for Piedmont, for that girl in the suede skirt who may or may not have had a concussion and who might or might not be getting the help she needed. Time was necessary, its passage essential, in order to make all of this breathing going on all around them—so many lungs! breathing so much air!—in order to make it valuable, worth something. Take away time and what did you have? You had life without consequence and where was the beauty in that? Yes, Robert understood the lesson.
“No,” said Bentley. “You don’t get it. You don’t get it at all.” He pressed his finger once more to the glass in front of them. “That one,” he said, “right there. Middle of the second row, blue blanket.” He waited. “Do you see which one I’m pointing to?”
Robert looked at Bentley. Then he looked again at the babies. He found the second row, identified the middle infant, swaddled in a blanket of the lightest, faintest blue. He nodded.
“That one,” said Bentley, “is yours.”
Piedmont
“Ma?”
“—”
“Ma? Are you there?”
“—”
“I know you’re there because you accepted the charges. Please talk to me.”
“Are you . . .”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Are you going to break my heart again?”
“—”
“I didn’t raise a boy who couldn’t take a lick.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Not that I ever raised a hand to you.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Neither did your father.”
“I know that too.”
“What I mean to say, what I mean is that I thought I raised someone with a backbone.”
“You did.”
“Someone who faced rejection by standing up and trying again.”
“You did.”
“Why’d you run off ?”
“I was angry.”
“Then I raised a coward.”
“I was confused.”
“Then I taught you nothing.”
“You taught me everything.”
“I’m confused every night, Piedmont. I go to bed confused. I wake up confused. That’s life.”
“Yes,” he said. “I understand that now.”
“I imagine you want to come home all of a sudden.”
“I do.”
“How do I know it’s for good?”
“What can I say?”
“Tell me you went out into the world and learned a lesson.”
“I did.”
“Tell me what you learned.”
“I went out into the world. I went out into it, and I broke my own heart. I saw a real-live airplane take off. I drove a Thunderbird convertible. I was pulled over and beaten up. I held five twenty-dollar bills in my hand. All five of them were stolen from me. I saw a car full of guns, which is more guns than I ever care to see for the rest of my days. I was shown kindness. I slept near a swimming pool. I stood where an entire family once hung by their necks from a single tree. I pressed a magnolia flower between the pages of an encyclopedia. I gave the flower away. I played a baby grand piano. I played it like I was Oscar Peterson or Jelly Roll Morton or Nat King Cole. I danced very slowly with a white lady. I fell in love. I saved a life. It’s possible I saved two lives.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes. That’s all.”
Robert
In the future, once a year on June 3, Robert Tucker would sometimes allow himself the fantasy of what might have happened if the plane hadn’t crashed, if it had instead taken off. Eight or so hours later, it would have landed in New York; another five hours after that, it would have landed in Atlanta. Robert and Lily would have been at the airport, as promised, waiting at the gate for her parents.
Robert, in his fantasy, is standing with McGill, smoking a cigarette; McGill is there to cover the mayor’s press conference and the subsequent welcoming home party.
Robert and McGill watch as the plane lands.
“Lily’s folks are back,” says McGill.
“That’s right,” says Robert.
“Baby is due?”
“Next month.”
McGill nods. “Fortuitous.” He says the word flatly.
Robert stubs out his cigarette. He is thinking about Rita. He is thinking about her last letter, which—if the plane hadn’t disintegrated—he would have received mid-June, at the earliest. But because this is merely a dream, one both manufactured and impossible, he pretends to have read the letter. He pretends to know their affair is over.
Robert’s wife, in his conception of this day, is sitting with a group of other women, with Jane and Polly and Agatha and Martha. Standing near them are the Bentley boys—all three having been dressed up and trotted out in matching blue suits by the nanny.
“Raif’s on the next flight,” says McGill. “Wonder who’s going to stick around to ferry him home.”
Robert is barely listening. The plane has come to a stop a few hundred yards from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the terminal. Detached stairs are being wheeled toward the door by three young Negroes in jumpsuits. They unroll a red carpet that extends nearly to the airport’s exterior entrance one level beneath where he stands with McGill, but Robert is focused on the aircraft’s door. He watches as it separates from the seal first a few inches, then returns, then is swiveled open by a uniformed stewardess in blue. She’s undoubtedly French. She has one of those wonderful pursed mouths with cheeks constantly being bitten from the inside. She looks up at the terminal window and waves to no one in particular.
The crowd inside cheers.
What Robert wants, somewhat obviously, is to see Rita as she disembarks. He wants her to sense his presence, to find him in the crowd above. He wants her to locate him in some mystical way, to feel from several hundred yards away his yearning for her, but also his appreciation for finally letting him go and for having made the decision on her own to continue her life without him.
In Robert’s invention of this day, the crowd around him slowly thins, McGill himself disappears, and, from a platform high above, it is Robert all alone who is watching, waiting, searching the endless stream of passengers for Rita, girl about town.
But this, of course, is not what happened on June 3.
Instead, the plane exploded. Instead, the people aboard died; and when they were finally home from the hospital in the house that had been purchased for them by their dear friend Raif Bentley, it was Lily who delivered to Robert his lover’s final letter.
