The Game of Love and Death(57)

“No time,” Flora said. “I do apologize. Thank you again for the ride.”

Helen offered Flora her hand. Flora took it, mostly to end the exchange. But when their bare palms touched, she felt a startling coldness. Her body felt strange, as though she were underwater and sinking deeper, the pressure growing every second. The world dimmed, and she was no longer standing on the sidewalk, but inside the Domino — or at least a version of it from long ago.

The floor of the club hummed with noise and motion. A mustachioed man in a striped shirt and suspenders banged out a rag tune. Dice thumped on felted tables. Highball glasses plinked against each other, and beaded dresses rustled and clicked as women with bobbed hair leaned into the arms of men in suits and turned their powdered faces to the electric chandeliers. Laughter. There was so much of it. But then, it was clearly another time.

Flora wanted to look around, but she wasn’t in control of her gaze. It was as though she was inside someone else’s head. A man’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “What’s a pretty lady like you doing by herself in a joint like this?”

The view shifted to the bartender, whose sleeves were rolled up over his wide forearms. He leaned toward her across the polished slab of wood. A set of fingers, white ones, were laced a few inches away from her drink. The hands pressed flat on the counter and Flora felt something flow into her, something that felt strong and old and smelled like Douglas fir. It was almost as though she were sucking the life out of the bar.

Then there was a sudden lightness in the air, the way she felt when her airplane left the ground. The piano music stopped. People paused in their conversations, drinking, and gambling. The gaze turned to watch as the pianist began to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I present … Miss Vivian Crane and the Starlight band.”

Vivian Crane. Her mother. Alive. How on earth was this happening?

Applause crackled like fire. Flora watched her mother emerge from the shadows into the finger of spotlight in the center of the stage, pivoting so that her back was to the audience. Even from behind, she commanded a person’s full attention. When her mother spun at last to face the audience, sparkling reflections of her filled every eye in the room. But she had eyes for only one person. The bass player. Flora’s father. Her heart lurched to see him, to see them both together like this, alive.

The music began, a shimmer of the hi-hat, a cry from the clarinet, the steady walk of bass strings played by expert hands. Vivian’s lips parted and the sound that emerged was more of a feeling than a voice, one that pressed love and longing into Flora’s borrowed ears, along her wrists, down her throat, and straight into her center. It was hard to breathe.

The view changed. Flora was still inside the Domino, but now she was looking at a man shooting dice. Somehow, she knew there was a police dry squad uniform beneath his overcoat. She also knew his pockets were fat with payoff cash, which he was spending at the dice table as he sneaked pulls of gin from the flask at his hip.

And then she was outside in the snow, waiting in a long and elegant convertible with high, round headlights and a many-spoked spare tire riding on its hip. Through the window holes, winter air sharpened its claws on her skin as she sat in the passenger seat. Time passed. Snow piled up. People wandered out of the Domino. Then, finally, the dice-playing man staggered out, supported by a much younger version of Uncle Sherman.

“You sure you don’t want a cup of coffee, sober up a bit?” Sherman asked.

The man shook his head. “Cold air’ll do the same trick.” He slapped at his own cheeks and walked toward his car just as her parents emerged from the alley. Her father pulled the collar of her mother’s raccoon coat snug around her shoulders. The moonlight bounced off the snowy street and lit them from below. Her father leaned in for a kiss; Vivian laughed and met him halfway, lifting one heel behind her before she finally came up for air.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, my love,” she said.

No, no, no. Flora knew what had happened that night.

The white man slid into the car, reeking of gin. He turned the key. The car coughed. The engine caught. Trying to throw it into reverse, he cursed when the car bumped forward over the curb. Then he found his gear and accelerated backward into the darkness behind him, his tires sliding in the snow. He hunched over the steering wheel and gulped air. Flora tried to scream, but the mouth wouldn’t respond.

Flora’s parents stepped into the street. She tried to reach for the wheel, but the arm wouldn’t move. The man’s foot sank into the accelerator. Her parents heard its engine and turned to face the car, still holding hands. The headlights caught bright pieces of them: eyes, teeth, jewelry that twinkled like falling stars in the blackness ahead.

The man stomped, aiming for the brake, but his sluggish foot found only the gas pedal. And then Flora was outside the car, holding her father. She felt his life flow out of him and into her: the glint of candlelight off the shoulders of his bass, the crack of a bat meeting a softball on Saturday mornings, the smell of corn bread baking in the oven on Sunday afternoons. In a bleak moment, she saw the jagged silver blasts of explosions in the night, smelled the gunpowder, fear and blood, the flash of Captain Girard’s face lit up by a midnight firefight. And then a return to soft light, to the satiny patch of her mother’s skin between her ear and collarbone, the feeling of lips against it. And then her own baby-girl face, all brown eyes and pink gums and fat cheeks.