What's Mine and Yours(77)

Noelle gasped and covered her mouth with one hand, reached for Gee with the other, but he was already drifting ahead of her. He felt his blood rushing in his ears, his feet lifting off the ground, his vision razor sharp. He scanned the walls.

There was no order to the posters, neither chronology nor class of crime. They had included things as minor as car pileups on a busy boulevard, as dire as a child caught in the crossfire in a drive-by. The sheets were large and washed-out, the print fuzzy, the photographs distorted.

Gee must have found the article, but it seemed as if it had found him. The large print of the headline was a terrible beacon calling him forward. Local Man Murdered on Ewing Street. Gee hadn’t known the street name. He’d never seen an article about that day.

Raymond Gilbert, it said. Twenty-four, it said. There was no mention of Superfine, or the other article that was soon to run in the same paper, as if they were different men, the baker and the murder victim, Ray and Ray.

Wilson wasn’t named; neither was the assailant. There was no mention of the blood, or all the big pieces of furniture on the lawn. An image sailed into Gee’s mind: a boxy pink armchair, an oak dresser. He had run among them, as if in a maze. The article mentioned a disagreement, a debt. The assailant had done time before for assault and battery, illegal possession of a deadly weapon. He owed alimony. In the altercation, no one else had been harmed.

A photograph of Ray hovered between the two slender columns of the story. The picture was inky, too granular to really give an impression of his face, but he looked younger than Gee ever remembered him being. Had he been that young when he died, when he was his father? He looked as if someone had taken the picture before he was ready, his mouth only beginning to smile. It was stiff, posed, like a high school portrait.

Gee had seen many articles like this, so many photographs of people he had no trouble believing were gone because to him they had never existed. But to see Ray’s face was different; it was as if a faraway fact, a thing he had known without knowing, had resurfaced, monstrous and real.

Raymond Gilbert had left behind a girlfriend and his girlfriend’s son. It didn’t say he’d been his father, and it didn’t mention his name, except for Gilbert, his surname, but that alone wouldn’t be enough for anyone to know.

That was what he wondered: whether anyone would know. Gee felt himself tremble. He slumped to the ground. He wished Ray had never died, and even more he wished he’d never had a father who had died. He was disloyal; he was selfish. He lowered his head to the ground, felt the cool tile of the floor. His teeth fastened together, his jaw sealed tight. He felt his ribs heave and contract as he tried to breathe.

He heard Noelle calling him, her voice far, getting farther, even though he knew she must be getting closer. She was watching him. She was reaching for him. Her hands on his shoulders. If he wasn’t careful, she would see. Gee found a way to steady himself. He pushed off his hands. He stood up.





13



October 2018


The Piedmont, North Carolina

The hospital chapel was one austere room. A golden crucifix was mounted on a pinewood altar, folding chairs arrayed before it in narrow rows. Robbie sat in the rear beneath a painting of a stained-glass window. The sanctuary was airless, musty.

He had decided to pray. In the derelict room, he said to God all of the things he’d lose the nerve to say to Lacey May when he saw her.

In the years since the divorce, he had never stopped believing they would find their way to one another. In his vision of death, when it came, they were together. One of them would go first, the other soon after. They would be old. It wasn’t such a crazy dream.

He didn’t doubt that she had learned to love Hank, in the way one loved a distant relative, or a dog, or an old lady from church—it was love that was mostly fondness, gratitude, the vague desire to see someone again. It was mild, and it was pleasant, but there was a limit. It wasn’t what he and Lacey May had, the feeling he was sure she still harbored for him, the feeling she would give herself over to if he were ever ready for her, suitable, but he never was.

Noelle had left, then Margarita, and Diane, and he had missed every window to win her back. It was his own fault. He would wish that he had never started, but it would be pointless. Prayers couldn’t undo time, undo who you were.

If he were ever good enough one day, what would it matter that he’d left her alone for so long? What would it matter that he’d stolen from her? She wouldn’t hold it against him if he were her man again, if she could trust him, if he weren’t so useless. She had been good to him, never kept the girls away, only herself, which he understood. If he could have kept away from himself, he would have, too.

There were times he had gotten close. He worked, saved money, blew it, started over again. He got fired, moved on, got fired again. In between, there were women; there were apartments; there were days that seemed like the bottom but weren’t. The highs weren’t what kept him alive; it was Lacey May. She was the reason he went on cycling through motel rooms and cities and years. The girls didn’t need him, not anymore, maybe not ever. But Lacey, the promise of Lacey, of getting clean and loving her again, was enough to go on painting cars, checking his brakes and changing his tires, brushing his teeth, stamping out his cigarettes at night so he wouldn’t set fire to the bed.

He had meant to pray about the cancer, but he had wound up talking about himself. What was there to say to God? Please don’t take her? Death would come for them all. Help me let her go? That was impossible, even for the Heavenly Father. Finally, he prayed, Not yet, and, Por favor, Se?or, give her a little time for me. It was selfish, but there was no use in lying to God. The Lord already knew it all, knew Robbie didn’t deserve anything. But He also knew that Lacey May had been his wife all along; in his heart, he hadn’t betrayed her. That wasn’t nothing.