Grace (29 page)

I wish I could disappear.

“And if you feel this way, too, let me know now.”

He unblocks the door.

I cain't look at him.

“Do you?” he say.

I wish we could go back to the way we was.

Wish we could erase the lie my kiss told. It's easier if you don't love me, I want to say but don't.

“Naomi?”

“You're a good man, Albert. But ain't no more room in my heart to love. Jeremy took all I had with him. And I'm sorry for it.”

He nods his head.

Clears his throat.

“Don't be sorry,” he say. “That's all I wanted to hear. The truth.”

I want to take it back. Take back everything I just said and lie. What's wrong with somebody believing they're loved in every way? I shoulda lied. Made an excuse for why we couldn't be together like that. And that way, he'd always know he was loved.

“And this baby?” he say. “Could you let it love me?”

My heart breaks at his asking. Must be what sorrow is. Not being able to change the truth. Not even for love.

“I know what you're thinking,” he say. “The child ain't mine. But seeing as Jeremy's gone, you can let her love me.”

“I cain't make somebody love somebody else, Albert. I cain't promise that.”

“But you're the mother. Mothers can set a child's heart to the way she should go. So set her heart on me.”

I don't know.

“Say yes.”

His softness right now—the way his eyes plead and his shoulder sag, defenseless—remind me of the way James was with Hazel. His surrender.

“All right,” I say.

He hugs me like his body ain't still in pain or my belly ain't a bridge between us. And for the first time, touching him this close feels right. For the first time since Momma and Hazel, I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be.

41
/ FLASH

Conyers, Georgia, 1848

T
HE KNOCKING ON
the door is hard and wild.

I hobble to a stand on my swole toes. Cynthia yells my name from the door and pushes it open, barges in. She don't never come out here. Not for months.

“Gaw-lee, look at cha,” she say. “Ain't grown a pinch. Belly's still small as four months pregnant. Not the six or seven you claim. Albert, you sure this ain't your baby?”

“Can I get you a drink?” Albert say.

“No,” she say.

“Can I get you something else?” Albert say.

“Privacy. With Naomi.”

I don't want him to leave. Albert reads my thoughts and don't go. He say, “Let me get you whiskey. Or bourbon?”

“I just want a minute with her,” she say.

“What you need?” Albert say. “Naomi can't do nothin for you in her condition.”

“This is something I need to say to only her. Wait outside the door if you want to. What you think I'm here to do, Albert? I'm the one helped save your life.”

“The past is the past,” I say, final. I nod to Albert. Let him go out.

“You should sit down,” Cynthia say. “Your feet don't seem right. Might be getting the swelling condition. Could make you seize if it gets too bad.”

“I'm fine. I'll stand.”

“Could kill the baby, too.”

She helps me sit.

From her waistband, she wiggles out an old brown leather notebook. Her mother's diary. The same one she's held onto and cussed at on the nights she's drunk.

“Maybe things would've been different if I woulda read it before recent,” she say. “Maybe not. I don't know.” She opens her diary to a folded page. “I need you to read something.” She sits next to me on the bench and holds the book out for me to take but I stare at it, think of all the private things I've ever done and never wrote down. But if I did, I'd never want a stranger to see it.

I say, “I cain't read this.”

She flicks her wrist. “My momma wouldn't mind. She's dead.”

I shake my head. I won't.

Cynthia lays the book flat on her lap, closed. “All right,” she say. “My mother was dying when I found her. I was eleven years old. She had been in bed all day and into the night when she called to me. She took my hand and what I remember most is how cold she was. Middle of the hot summer and she was cold. Her grip was so weak. Even her tears were weak. They dried just as they fell.

“All she kept saying was, ‘I'm sorry.'

“When she died, she left me with an empty box and a blade. The blade was on the end of a candlestick holder. The holder had a small lever inside that slid up and down. And when I pulled it down, a blade shot out the top of it and the holder itself became my handle.”

Cynthia holds out her book to me again. “Please, Naomi. I want you to see. I need you to read it.”

I reach out for it, hesitating.

She jerks it away. “I just want you to know,” she say. “My momma was a saint. Remember that when you read this.”

I say, “Cynthia, I don't have to read it.”

“She didn't know much about nothing. Was just like you when you came.”

“Cynthia . . .”

“Some women hid Shakespeare, mine had Fanny Hill. Wasn't her choice. A pauper gave it to her and Momma didn't know no better. It's all she had for literature. Pornographic novels have story, too. So don't judge her. It gave her permission, I think, to write what she did.”

“You giving me pornography to read?”

“That ain't what I said. I said my momma's a saint.”

She puts the diary in my hand.

I don't want to read it.

I sit with it on my lap, then open it slowly, turn it to the creased page halfway in and start reading it to myself.

              
21 October 1818

              
Dear Diary,

              
I fear I am with child.

                   
For a bundle of rags
—
I am.

                   
But I want to remember. Recall every moment of the happening so as to never forget what happiness feels like.

                   
I was drying my hair when the rag salesman rattled my door. I should have covered my head but I did not. It had been a long time since we welcomed company here, over a year since we settled, the first time I had been alone in our home for so long
—
just over a fortnight.

                   
He stood behind the haze of my screen wearing his out of place business suit, his silly smile, and his almost ugly face, saved only by his pretty blue eyes.

                   
Just twenty-five cents, he said, and pulled from his leather bag a bundle of thick pink cloths.

                   
I opened my screen door though I'd already decided his fee was thievish. But I thought my husband and I could have used some color, some softness, to make us alive again so I agreed he could attempt to sway me.

                   
After a moment of salesmanship, I bent over to look into his bag and
—
I'm almost ashamed to say, but
—
I smelled him. Not on purpose, but
—
I did. Maybe my inhale was, at first, a sigh but I certainly breathed him in and smelled him fresh like jasmine.

                   
I sorted through his bag pretending not to notice, chose the fluffy yellow bunch and smiled. He said, pure cotton.

                   
I liked the sweet smell of his breath. It was not like my husband's
—
whiskey laden and cigar stale. His was like honey, his lips full, drawing me in too long. He touched my chin and told me I was pretty.

                   
I dropped his rags and told him I was married. He said he understood and asked if he could show me how well his rags dry. He unfolded a gold one from behind the fastened compartment of his bag. He touched it to my damp hair.

                   
He dried it slowly while I watched his hands squeeze down the length of my brown hair and near my breast. I did not pull away when his slender fingers returned to my cheek, grazing it . . . and again. I closed my eyes. Felt the hairs on my cheek rise from his strokes and hold themselves there after his pass. My head rested on his hand.

                   
I allowed him to step through my door and felt the hard and soft of him brush by me. In an instant, he woke the whole of my body.

                   
I closed the solid door and waited there. He dropped his bag, pushed me against the wall. His lips were as sticky-sweet as they promised.

                   
But I had to stop him, told him I could not. He said he understood, adjusted himself and picked up his bag. He said he knew what I needed, said, “I can be your first.”

                   
I had been married since I was thirteen, I told him, ten years since my wedding night
—
he was too late to be first at anything. I put my hand on the doorknob, ready to pull it open when he took my other hand and kissed it like a gentleman's good-bye.

                   
When he raised his head from my hand, I was captured by the bliss of his baby blues.

                   
In my hesitation, he pushed me against the door, his tongue pressing on mine, then he released me, asked if I still wanted him to go.

                   
In one motion, I lifted his shirt over his head, let him tear my dress, pressed my body against his, and I crawled up him 'til my legs were tethered around his waist; my backside seated in his hands. His trousers fell away.

                   
I let go of my grip around him, rested my feet gently on the ground, his hand cupped between my legs, my pantaloons the only barrier between us. He tore up their seams, from my knees to the crotch, slid his thumb along the ridge of the torn material at the top of my thighs, dragged what was left of it, over to the side, feeling me wet. I wanted him to touch me again.

                   
His weight on my body was light, his kisses like bites. He ran two fingers between my legs and inside me, tapped my warm spot in short pulses. Felt myself engorge.

                   
My hips found his, surrounded him inside me, his size stretching me to my potential. Suddenly, a pure pleasure paralyzed me and I clinched down around him, my eyes wide, my body releasing everything in this world that's lovely.

                   
I let it happen once more. And again. The third time, we finished together, rocking in each other's laps.

I fold the diary closed and say to Cynthia, “I'm sorry.”

“Did you get to July, yet?” she say. “I was six years old.”

“I've read enough.”

“Just read July.”

“No . . . that's all right.”

“July,” she say, nudging the book.

I open it again, slump down in my seat, flip through the pages.

              
8 July 1825

              
Dear Diary,

              
More and more my good husband has remarked that our child doesn't favor him
—
But of course not, she looks like me, I tell him. At seven years old, her features are still developing.

                   
I don't think he believes me.

                   
He spent most of last month with varying versions of the same accusation. “We all look alike in my family,” he said. “Men in my family can only have boys.” So I asked him who he thought his sister belonged to? He slapped me
—
deservingly
—
I told him I meant that anything was possible and maybe being out here, detached from our community, has put us both on edge.

                   
I think my good husband prefers to keep me isolated. Only in the fall does he allow me to go into the heart of Charles Towne, the nearest temple, for the Days of Awe and occasionally to teach children in return for good favors from the congregation. He is committed that way
—
he is. But otherwise, he manages his hidden affairs out of their sights, except in those days when he allows everyone to see I am fine.

                   
Today, he told me our child has an “independent spirit” like no woman in his family. I told him, maybe she has mine. But that only confused him because he does not know me. Not even after nineteen years. He thinks he does, but he does not.

                   
Then yesterday, he asked me the question that prompted this entry. “Why in thirteen years of trying had you never been pregnant before? Or since?”

                   
I told him I'd prayed and he should not question a gift that God has seen fit to give.

                   
He stopped asking questions.

I close the book again, this time for good, and hand it back to Cynthia, say, “It must've been hard for you not knowing your daddy. White folks tend to know.”

“You're missing the point,” Cynthia say, opening the diary to the back pages and pulling out a loose piece of folded paper. She unfolds it and hands it to me but I won't take it. I tell her, “I won't read no more.”

She draws it back in and starts reading out loud. “‘Seventeenth of September, Eighteen Hundred and Thirty.' I was eleven.”

              
Dear Diary,

              
I am writing to you on this piece of torn-out paper because the good husband found you. He was sitting in the outhouse, taking too long, when I found it missing. He had been reading page after page of my life, taking the shortcuts to secrets he has not bothered to learn from me. Thank God he started from the beginning, our fifth anniversary. When I ripped it away from him he only knew enough to ask, “Who's this rag salesman? And what happened when he came to our door worth writing about?”

                   
I ran away with my book and buried it under the house. But by then, it may have been too late. Things began to come together in his mind
—
the date, the birth of my beautiful baby girl.

                   
Our anger was equal at first
—
mine and the good husband's. His, for what he was almost sure I did years ago, and my anger because he stole something so personal to me. The only
difference between us was his hate was unimaginable. So when he said to me two weeks ago, “This girl is not mine, is she?” I should have corrected him immediately, kept up my lie, been forthright about it. But I did not. I took pause.

                   
In the second and a half that it took me to tell him he was mistaken, it was too late. He struck me. And though I lied again, it was my pause that he believed.