Cold Springs(108)

33

Race was crazy to be at the café. He knew that.

But he needed time to think. He had a decision to make. And he was running out of places to go.

He sat down at the sidewalk table where a month ago Mallory had been taken from him. He stared at a half-empty coffee glass, a chess game the last customers had left unfinished.

He couldn't go back to Nana's apartment. The visit from Chadwick and Jones had unhinged the old lady, made her start drinking and having conversations with Samuel and Talia in the middle of the night, and Race couldn't handle that shit.

His mother's house was sold—some family with a U-Haul already moved in. Race had stood down the block, watching as a boy lugged his wagon of toys up the front steps, a little girl kicked a soccer ball around the stumps of the palm trees like relay race cones.

Last night, he had stayed in the abandoned apartment building behind the café—up at the top of the stairwell where he and Mallory had made love. The BART trains rattled the windows, and a couple of derelicts in the gutted apartment below him had kept him awake, squabbling about laundry money. Race had kept his .22 semiautomatic in his improvised ankle-strap, close enough where he could reach it, just in case they came up the stairs. He didn't sleep until dawn, when the homeless guys wandered out to find their morning booze.

He couldn't handle being in the stairwell another night. Not because of the derelicts, but because the old carpet still smelled of Mallory. Her scent reminded him of their final night together—being pressed against her, how she would pinch his ears, letting him know when he was being too rough. The whole thing had been wrong—as wrong as finding her the he**in she wanted, feeding the death wish that made her want to turn into Katherine. But Race had followed her lead. He always did. And now he was trying hard not to think about her.

During the afternoon, he'd stolen a bike and made the long ride up into the hills—to the condo above the Caldecott Tunnel. He'd been hoping to find some money, but the place had been cleaned out, as if for good. That made Race nervous, made him wonder what was going on. He thought about staying there overnight, but the idea made his throat go dry. The place had worse ghosts than his mother's house; evil breathed into the air like corpse odor from the five or six years it had been occupied—radios and televisions playing in every room, twenty-four hours a day, to drown out the hatred.

Now it was night again, and he was back at his and Mallory's favorite café, where he had failed so miserably to help her.

He shivered, pulled his camouflage coat around himself. It stank. He stank. He had five twenty-dollar bills left—enough to eat for a few days, but this was a miserable time of year to sleep on the street.

He had to make a choice.

Race took out Chadwick's card, fingered the worn edge. He'd looked at this card every day. He'd memorized the damn number. He'd even called it once, but he'd gotten a machine, and hung up.

He could call again. He could even go to the city, to Norma Reyes' house. He would tell her first. Then she would help him. She would make the call for him, protect him from the consequences. He had known for years—ever since the day she defended him against that idiot who called him a monkey in fourth grade—that Miss Reyes was somebody he could trust. It had something to do with the sadness in her eyes, the loneliness that reminded him of his mom, those few times she was between men, when she wasn't high or drunk, and she paid attention to him. He could go to Norma Reyes.

Or he could do what he'd been told. He could wait and be silent.

He thought about Samuel—his dead big brother, whose memory had been resurrected to serve as a monster's skin.

She had promised no one else would die. She had promised to come back for Race and give him a fresh start, a new school, an easy life with plenty of money.

But she had also promised he would graduate from Laurel Heights. She said he could go to college, study history, get a Ph.D. if he wanted to. He could rewrite African-American history and turn the f**king world on its head.

She'd broken her promise.

For a while, his future had been part of her revenge—a thorn in the Zedmans' sides that served her purpose. Now, he was just a loose end.

Race hadn't seen her for days, but he had no illusions. She could find him at a moment's notice. She had almost killed him for saying as much as he had—for leaving the apartment, trying to warn Miss Reyes.

It would be stupid to cross her twice.

He stared at the chipped chess pieces on the table, thought of Mallory teaching him the game, years ago, in third grade. She'd always told him he was smarter than she was, but in chess, like everything else, she always outmaneuvered him.

Inside the café, the evening crowd was settling in with herbal tea and baguette sandwiches. White families, white college students glanced at him apprehensively. When he caught their eye, they stared past him, pretending to be looking somewhere else.

He knew what they were thinking. He was a transient, taking up a table. He would bother them for spare change. Or mug them. Why didn't the café management tell him to move?

Race understood the hate that had driven the knife into his mother thirty-two times. He understood Samuel.

Race's take on it— Being black, you were never far away from a split identity. You always wrestled with a secret desire, a guilty wish that you could be someone else—just slip into a different skin for a while, be invisible, not the object of suspicion and resentment and fear. For him, for a Montrose, it was only a small step from that to schizophrenia, or homicide, or both.