Bliss (36 page)

“Is there a funeral?” Eva felt her mother in her mind—taller than her mother really was with hair longer than her mother’s really was, with a scent spicier than her mother ever really had—as she’d seen her last. Earth, Wind & Fire or somebody in the background. The Temptations, Eva remembered, or Bill Withers. She kept the tears from her voice. Her father was used to her composure, and she still didn’t like to disappoint him.

“There was a small one,” he said, “from what I understand.
This … man who called wasn’t the most articulate person. I don’t know who he was to her—”

You know. You have an idea
. “When was it?” Eva was more urgent and angrier than she showed.
No funeral. No nothing
. “Please, say everything the man said.”

Eva’s father mistook her awkward sorrow for impatience with his having interrupted her “business” in the “tropics.” “I know you’re working. I hate to call you with this, but no time is a good—”

“Did the man have a message for me? Did the man say anything that came from her, to me?”
Did the man have a name? Did he sound nice? Could she have known how I used this moment before it ever happened?

“She left the same message, the same message we have—”

“Which is what?” Eva was sharp. She thought of that message, the note her mother had given her, the one Eva’d handed to her father when he came in late and tired, the one he handed back to her like it was new policy she’d have to accept. “How old would she be, fifty-three?”

Eva’s father spoke slowly now, assured of his role as messenger of importance. “The man told me that she said she was sorry. And that she saw your picture in
Ebony
and that you are pretty. That she always knew you would be as beautiful and successful as you are.” He paused. “Fifty-two, she would be, by my count.”

Tears rolled down Eva’s face. She wiped them away. “That’s not the same message.”
I know the message by heart. I have the message. It’s my supreme form of ID
.

“Don’t grab at straws, Eva.” It was her father’s turn for sharpness and it was a comfort to her. Someone could be counted on for sameness.

“I’m grabbing what’s there,” Eva said. “Is there anything else? From the man, I mean. Did he say how she died? Did he say what she wanted?” Édouard and Dart seemed far away.
Did he say if she found it?

“There’s nothing else. From her.” He paused. At first, Eva thought he might be overwhelmed. But then she hoped he was remembering who he was, and that even if he was an ass and had been an ass, he
had things other than his daughter’s feats to wonder at, things other than desertion to mourn. Eva also hoped he was reconsidering the ways in which he’d raised her, and that he was calculating the price of his pride. “I didn’t know,” her father said, “if this was going to be emotional for you or not.”

“It is.” Her leg throbbed.

“I can’t tell with you. I never can anymore. Maybe it’s the phone.”

“No, it’s how I am. Cold-blooded.” It was Eva’s turn to pause. She wanted off the phone, but she was beset again with the desire to make a gesture. Eva’d stopped believing years ago that her father was the reason her mom had gone. He’d been a fool, and mean, and often twisted, but Eva felt that at least her father had lived up to the responsibility of what he’d created. She felt her mother to be a quitter plain and simple. A flighty woman, without the demands of a career, who couldn’t even handle a bossy husband and a needy little girl. “How are you with this, Dad?” she asked him formally. “Is it emotional for you?”

He grunted, surprised by the question. He said nothing.

“Hello?” Eva croaked into the phone. She was desperate.

“I will say I’m having a more difficult time with it then I would’ve thought.” He paused. “A more difficult time than I’m showing.”

“We’re the same then.”
There’s no me forgiving her, as there is no me forgiving me
.

Then he spoke as if through a muffler. “Your mother,” he said, “would have hated that.”

“It’s what she set up. She went
AWOL
.”

“She left me, Eva.
Elaine left Ned
. It was never you.”

“She should have took me with her.” Eva realized how this might hurt her father, but she had too much going on. No means for strategy or tact. She reached for her leg, it hurt so bad, but she didn’t touch it.

“She had no money,” he said. “Or a place or—”

“She could’ve come back. At some point. At any point. When I was eighteen or twenty or thirty. She could have called to say she was dying. As a matter of fact—you know what? Never mind. Fuck it.”
Piper
.

“This is not good. What you’re saying.”

“I know,” Eva said tightly. She coughed.
Piper said it, told me on the phone, Your mom called
. “So let me get back to work.”

“Yes, indeed,” he said, relieved. “You take your time with this information, but work cures all ills. You know this. Work and time. Eva?”

“I’m right here, Dad.” The Miami deejay’s Spanglish burst into Eva’s consciousness again. He was still tinny, but she heard him announce an old song from the Eagles.

“You know you’re my girl, right?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“All right then.”

Eva pressed OFF. She leaned back in the chair. She heard Édouard and Dart holler something about they’d be back later.

There was no more crying. No awestruck face-holding. Just Eva, and her baby, and going back to life. She felt her leg might explode off her body.

Eva was on the couch, and awoke to the sound of Benjamin’s car on the driveway. Then Ben stood in the doorway of the room with its closed curtains, said a quick hello and good-bye, and was off before Eva could sit up. Groggy, coughing, and still in clothes from the day before, Eva swished open the drapes and pushed up the windows.

Pritz stoode in the Rowe’s living room in a pleated lavender silk poplin skirt, pale orange see-through tank with a form-fitting lace tank beneath, and shiny ivory sling-backs with a tiny kitten heel. Her hair was still jet but glossy now, and cut in an elfin style, with a plain black Giada-style bobby pin holding short bangs off her forehead. Pritz was moist with the late morning heat, and her neatly arched eyebrows were in a frown.

“Jesus, Eva. Ciao.”

“You’re here.” Pritz’s presence and sleek appearance made Eva feel degenerate. “Wow. Let me pull it together.” Eva went to the bathroom, wiped her face and under her arms with a hot cloth, brushed
her teeth, and found her stretchy yellow lace skirt, which was wrinkled and damp. She pulled on a white Nike T-shirt that she’d had drying over the shower rod and found her filthy flip-flops. Looking into the bathroom mirror, she tried her best to smooth her peeling skin with the coconut oil but it only made her face look greasy and shocked. She wet her parched hair, pulled the front back with a red rubber band, and was glad for the diamond studs still in her ears.

I look a fucking mess. But, shit. I didn’t invite her ass over here
. “Tired from the trip?” Eva called from the bathroom. She let loose a long cough, and then threw up in the toilet. Her leg still leaked and ached. And she thought of her mother and mix tapes made from the radio.

“Are you all right?”

“I have a cold.” Eva wiped her mouth, brushed her teeth again, and then went to the living room feeling like every blood vessel in her eyes had burst.

“You want to walk?” Eva asked. She gave Pritz a light kiss on the cheek. “To Hermitage?”

Pritz said, “Yeah,” without asking what Hermitage was. In the living room, she slipped from her outfit into sneakers and comfortable shorts, and as they walked, Pritz told the tale of her last days as a senior manager of radio promotions.

Grass feathered the paved road toward Hermitage, the monastery on Mount Alvernia for which Benjamin named his car-rental place. Eva had already been there. As Audrey and Ben and Édouard had each told her, at 206 feet, Alvernia was the highest point of all the islands of the Bahamas.

Pritz and Eva turned onto a dirt road and hiked up a slope past hand-carved Stations of the Cross. Eva half-listened to Pritz until she said that after a three- or four-month sabbatical, she planned to move from London to Los Angeles to work for Hakeem for as long as her visa lasted. Then, feeling way out of the game, Eva put Pritz on complete mute.

They hiked up to the bell tower, and then stood in a chapel that could hold no more than three people. From a small window, the
hushed green of North Cat lay like a eucalyptus leaf on the dark Atlantic. Eva was transfixed. In the silence, she coughed with her hand on her stomach, licked her dry lips, and made herself not think about the fact that even if Gayle had dialed the number, the message left with Piper was from her mother.

“Nothing is like the Caribbean,” Pritz said, trying to draw Eva out. “The culture, the people, the ocean.”

“This is the Atlantic.” Eva thought that if her real mother had called, and she’d dismissed it, she wanted to drown. Deserved to drown in whatever ocean was in front of her.

“Are you sure? I would have thought—”

“It’s what most people think.”

Disappointed tourists poked in and out of the old stone buildings, expecting both more familiarity and more fantasy than Cat had to offer. Eva felt as connected and as disconnected to them as she felt to Pritz. The sightseers seemed like they belonged at Fernandez Bay, Cat’s one resort. Or like they were booked at Lost City, on a day trip to the Out Islands for some local flavor.
Come explore the mystery and grandeur. This ancient civilization has risen up from the sea. Inspiration and adventure. Marine habitats. Imagination
.

Édouard had asked Eva on the journey over if she had “people” on Cat, and now her answer was a tentative yes. But for Dart, she would’ve stayed on at Lost City and then gone on to the Delano in Miami. She would have worked and partied and never thought about any of the Out or “Family” islands, let alone Cat. But for Dart, she would’ve gone back to Manhattan or Santa Monica and had her abortion and been back to work and planning a last-minute trip to Mo Bay again for the holidays. She’d be drinking Scotch and setting up Sun’s second single and doing her best to manipulate Seb. The stuff she was good at.

My mom would still be dead, though
.

And Dart doesn’t want to do anything
.

I’d be dodging Ron
.

That’s what this whole trip is? Dodging Ron? Dodging eveything. AWOL
.

Eva shook it off. “So you’re gonna work for Hawk?” Eva said. “Doing what?”

“What I always do. What you do. The thing that allows us this view from the top.”

“I guess that’s what this is.”
I’ve been AWOL since Mix. Since Mom left
.

“It is up there, for two high-ranking, paid-ass drones. Living large. Pushing product and pushing everything else back. Making sacrifices … for my purse and for my freedom.” Pritz brought out plane peanuts. “But what do the poets say …?”

“Hip hop and it don’t stop?” Eva waved the peanuts away.

“They say there is no sacrifice—only the choices we make. Everything else falls away.”

She knows
, Eva thought. “Say what you came to say, Pritz.”

“Ron told me. That you are pregnant.”

“I didn’t tell him that.”

“Your friend … Édouard, or Benajmin? He told me, too. He told me in way like he thought I knew.”

Eva started back down the hill, but Pritz was on her heels.

“It is Ron’s baby?”

‘It’s my baby,” Eva said. “Leetle John got me pregnant.”

“You are having it?”

Everybody’s question
. “Yeah.” Eva huffed her way down the steep hill.

“You are glad? Why don’t you sound glad? D’Artagnan?”

“Among other things, Pritz.” Eva stopped at the bottom of the slope, but then started down the paved road paces ahead of her.

Pritz just spoke louder. “I think Ron misses you.”

“Of course he misses me,” Eva said, stopping in her tracks. “I miss him. We’re sickly symbiotic. Parasitic, even.”

“Simbee—?”

“A relationship between two that may or may not benefit the other. A relationship of mutual benefit or dependence.”

“Ah. One thing that lives off another without killing it. That is you and Ron? It’s not what he sounds like. Right now, when he discusses you.”

“You talked to him?”

“You know I did.”

“Where is he?”

“Leetle John thinks you are … getting rid of his baby. You should tell him your plans. He is going crazy.”

“He should go crazy. I am.”

“D’Artagnan,” Pritz genuinely inquired, “rubs off on you?”

“He’s not crazy.”

“Sunny is worried, too.”

“She hasn’t called about him. She doesn’t even know where her own brother is.” They were on the short gravelly road that led to the Rowe House. Eva was thirsty, and she needed to sit. She took a few more steps, then leaned against a fence. “He got me here, Pritz.” Eva ran a palm over her face and held her lips in her fist, then heaved a sigh through her stuffed nose. She wiped her upper lip with the back of her hand and wiped it on her skirt. “He got me away from—”

“From work, from Ron.” Pritz reached in her bag and handed Eva an airline napkin. “Your responsibilities.”

“By coming here, I decided to live up to the realest responsibility. You don’t know how it’s been, Pritz. How good this place has been for me.”

“You don’t look that good.”

Eva was truly surprised at the fact that Pritz said it.

“You look thin in your face,” she said. “A little bit … haggard.”

“I’m going to eat more,” Eva said defensively. “I’ve been throwing up a lot. I had a cold. You can see that.”

“And your leg? What is that sore? I agree with you, this is a beautiful place. But you need to come back,” Pritz said. “To Miami. Or at least to Nassau. You have more than yourself to think about.”

Exactly. For the first time since, ever
. “Maybe being at Roadshow isn’t for me anymore,” Eva said wildly. “Maybe I’m not confident enough in my vision anymore. Shit—maybe I don’t have a vision. Not now—with everybody getting shot up. Tupac. Biggie. Both dead. Rap on its last legs and the best thing I can do—even for someone as dope as Sun—is make a cover album.”