Keeper of Keys (3 page)

"Kai-girl." Eve greeted me as she always did. But my nickname came out of her mouth in syllables that made me think that she had been missing the Banyan trees for a long time.

Alice couldn't speak. Even without the tubes in her throat, she would not have said a word. She could hardly breath and should have been gone days ago, but my grandmother had begged and pleaded that they wait until I was able to come.

"Is she sleeping?" That was the question that came out of my mouth, not any of the ones that were scrambling around my head. My best friend Deborah broke her arm two summers ago. It didn't put her in the hospital, so why was my mother here?

"No…no. Well…yes….yes, in a way she is." My grandmother said and wrapped her arms around my shoulders. "She is in a very deep sleep." She was speaking into my neck; I could feel her tears dripping down my collarbone. "She's tired…tired and the doctor's think that it would be best if she sleeps….forever."

Eve was crying and I had never seen Eve do anything else but smile and laugh.

"Forever?"

Eternity is not something you lay on a child suddenly. It's a concept that finds its way into their minds with maturity. I was ten years old and eternity was lying in the bed before me.

She would be asleep forever.

She would be gone forever.

I would be with out her….. forever.

"She's dead?" I asked even though her chest rose and fell beneath the white sheet that covered her body and I could hear her heartbeat from the machine above her head.

"Dying." My grandmother said.

I would find out that my mother had bone cancer, it had eaten away the marrow, making her bones as brittle as burnt wood and just as weak. Her limbs began to snap in two as easily as the colored pencils she used to sketch out her ideas with.

It took her over quickly and there wasn't anything anyone could do to save her.

My grandparents stepped out of the room right before Doctor Tate, our family physician, turned off the machines.

Only Eve and I remained.

Our fingers linked, we locked our breaths away in our chests as the last switch was flicked off and the white accordion in the bottle went flat and silent.

I kissed my mother's warm cheek and wished that I could have left pink lips there for her to carry through her dreams.

Eve leaned in and for the second time, I watched as she kissed my mother the way Joni kissed Chachi.

My tires squealed against the steel of the railroad tracks as I pressed down hard on the gas pedal. My jeep jerked forward and out of harms way just as the 12:56 to Manhattan rounded the bend. I could see the startled face of the motorman as he pulled the red string that sounded the long foreboding wail of the whistle.

I had forty dollars stuffed in the pocket of my jeans; some change in the ashtray a full tank of gas and tears in my eyes when I started on the seventeen-hour trip to Sandersville, Georgia.

I had to get my daughter; I would not allow history to repeat itself. Would not have my daughter mourning the loss of a mother she never got to say good-bye to.

I wouldn't have her aunts and uncles mumbling things beneath their breaths about the extra money it was costing them to feed and cloth her, just as my family members did after my grandfather passed away and my grandmother was put into a resting home.

No, for now my child had a mother and a home and I was going to bring her back to me and never let her go again!

The hours in the car passed as hours do, sometimes unhurried other times as quick as light and just as splendid.

I would share that with this man that would forever remind me of the Masaii tribesman I had encountered on the pages of a National Geographic Magazine. The man that came into my life four years three months and two days after I'd convinced myself that I would never be held by another man.

I would tell this man, this fixer of homes and repairer of spirit, that I felt my mother riding along with me that day. Felt her so strongly that I pulled to the side of the road and ran my hands along the leather of the passenger seat.

"I could smell her." I told him. And I did, my car was filled with the light scent of the coconut oil she used in her hair.

"She was there," Journey replied. And I knew he meant it and did not think I was insane for thinking it or even saying it aloud to him.

It was almost midnight when I turned down the dark road that would bring me to Poor Boy's house. I still called him that, even though at age thirty he had decided to drop the nickname that had followed him since he was a year old.

His mother had dubbed him Poor Boy because of the way his diapers hung off his narrow hips and how he tottered around, bent over as if he had the world on his shoulders and not a dime in his pocket.

"It's James," he would say in a voice too dignified and out of place for a man who'd spent his whole life farming and slopping hogs.

He was a wealthy man now. The half million dollars I'd given him from my lotto winnings had propelled him into socialite status, even though the elite he was apart of was small, new and consisted of his mother, wife, two daughters, his mother Beck, Precious, her four kids and himself.

Precious on the other hand enjoyed the adoration her nickname afforded her. Helen wasn't a name to which people paid much attention. Precious on the other hand made you think of a smiling rosy-cheeked child or an expensive piece of porcelain.

Precious enjoyed being compared with delicate things and took even greater pleasure in the sound of her name in the mouths of the men who courted her. She was a beautiful woman who had always been pursued by the men of Sandersville - she had four children to prove it - and had never been married once. Precious was still pregnant with her second child when she started dating the man that would father her third.

"I'm changing my name legally to Precious." She announced the day the check I'd written out to her cleared. Aunt Beck, their mother, didn't even raise an eyebrow at her daughter's announcement, she just moved the phone she cradled between her cheek and shoulder from the right ear to the left and waited patiently for the representative at her bank to come back on and tell her the status of the check I'd written out to her.

"I wanna make sure my headstone say Precious Lady on it."

Lady was her surname and had been a great source of torment to her father Daniel Lady. If he had money he would have changed it, but he was poor his whole life and had died that way just days before the six numbers popped up out of the lotto machine on television, making me a millionaire.

"Uh-huh, here lies Precious Lady, may she rest in eternal peace!" Precious squealed and began to jump up and down with glee. Her babies, three walking and one creeping began to squeal and bounce right along with her.

"It cleared!" Aunt Beck screamed above Precious and her children's jubilance. "I'm rich, rich rich!" She yelled hugging the receiver to her chest.

I turned into the driveway that would lead me up to Poor Boy's house. The dogs he kept in the yard began barking as soon as my headlights sliced through the darkness. I saw a shadow move behind the front window and then the curtain parted and Poor Boy's eyes were squinting back at me.

I put the car in park and that's all my body allowed me to do. I broke down and cried until Poor Boy came and dragged me into the house.

"What's happened Kai?" Poor Boy asked over and over again. It couldn't be a death because everyone he knew lived either up the road or down the road and they were all living and breathing when he'd put the cat out and locked the doors for the night.

Sherry, his wife, watched nervously from the kitchen as she tried to decide whether to put the kettle on for tea or pull the plastic cover off of the new Hamilton Beach, for coffee.

"What done happen to you? You sick? Someone dead?" Poor Boy asked and folded his hands in his lap. I knew his real interest was whether or not I had a will and who I was leaving the rest of my money too.

"You tell me now, tell me what's wrong with you."

We sat on a couch so white that it should have been a crime to have it out there in the country where cows and goats grazed a stones throw away.

Not wanting to repeat himself, he edged closer to me and placed an awkward arm around my shoulder.

"Poor thing," Sherry said, finally deciding on tea.

"Where is Alice?" I was finally able to speak. "Where's my daughter?" I asked barely able to see him through my swollen, tear filled, over tired eyes.

Poor Boy shot his wife a look before he answered and I would always remember that look saying: Should we tell her? She seems kind of crazy.

I didn't want them to have any reason to try and keep my mother's namesake from me. I straightened my shoulders and wiped at the tears and road grime on my face. "I come to take her home." I said trying so hard to sound calm.

"She with Precious tonight." Poor Boy said and then glanced at the phone. "But its so late now, you can get her in the morning." He quickly injected.

"No I - " I started to object.

"Kai do you really want her to see you this way?" Sherry questioned in her baby soft voice. She set a cup of tea down on the table in front of me. "You should get some rest….take a shower…eat some, before you go and get her." Sherry looked at her husband and then back at me. "She fine with Precious, you can have her in the morning."

I looked at her and wondered where the saucer was for the teacup. Money can't buy class or common sense, I thought as I watched her walk back to the kitchen. 
"I-I guess you're right," I said and lifted the cup from the table. A small wet circle had formed on the wood. I wondered if they knew it would be white in the morning.

They put me in the guestroom where they had a single bed with no headboard. A short brown dresser and attending mirror looked out of place and lonely against the wall.

I sat down on the bed and tried hard not to listen to the voices seeping through my cousin's bedroom door a few steps away from my own. I knew they were discussing me and when I heard the sound of the rotary dial on their telephone, I knew that they had decided to wake Precious from her slumber.

I stretched out on the bed and the coiled springs complained beneath my weight. By then, my body had gone long past tired. The aching started in my head and spread through my body until my entire being throbbed.

Panic began to spread over me as the pain that took over my body reminded me, once again that I was sick and had left town without the medication Dr. Tate had prescribed for me. I hadn't even filled the prescriptions and now the disease that was living in my blood was making itself known.

"Stop it!" I hissed to myself. My words bounced off of the walls and came to rest on my chest. My breath caught in my throat and for a moment I couldn't inhale or exhale. I jumped up and ran to the window. My fingers seemed to fumble forever with the latch before I realized that the window swung open instead of pushed up.
My throat unlocked and I inhaled the cool night air. Honeysuckle and magnolia filled my lungs, the sweat that covered my forehead, dissipated and the fear that had suddenly struck me waned, fading into a dull throbbing that attached itself to my temples.

"Kai?" The knock came first and then Sherry's serene voice. "Kai are you sleeping?"

"No, " I said and wiped at the last remnants of sweat that clung to the space above my lip.

The door opened slowly and Sherry's face popped in. She was smiling, but her eyes were worried and tired. "Here," she said stepping in and placing a nightgown, towel and wash cloth on the bed.

"James checked your trunk and there wasn't any luggage or anything, so I supposed you'd be needing something to sleep in." 
Her eyes traveled across the room and stopped on the open window for a moment and then moved on.

"I can put those clothes in the washer for you, if you'd like." She said stepping towards me, her arms out stretched, hands reaching out for me. For a moment I thought she would try and undress me and then she stopped abruptly and folded her arms across her chest.

"I've already been too much trouble…I can just -"

"It's no problem at all Kai, really. Just drop 'em outside the door and I'll collect them when I get up again in a few hours. It's no problem at all." She said and stepped backwards and out the door. "You know there's a bathroom right there," she said and pointed towards a door to my left. "The faucet in the sink leaks so, just make sure you shut it off tight and uhm, there's soap in there and toothpaste too."

The room was always ready for guests, even though I was the only who ever utilized it and that was just once or twice a year.

"Thanks Sherry."

"You need anything else, just let us know." Her words dangled in the space between us. She wanted to say more and know more, but I wasn't saying any more than required. I would be up and out of their hair at first light.

"Well, you uhm…you have a good rest and we'll talk in the morning, okay?" Her request was hopeful and eager. I didn't even feel sorry that I was going to have to disappoint her.

I don't know how long I lay there staring at the ceiling. Unable to sleep I finally pulled myself from the bed and back to the window to stare out into the moonlit night.
My body was tired but my mind wouldn't shut down. The muscles in my neck, arms and calves throbbed and the tendons in my hands burned with the strain I had put on them from gripping the steering wheel too tight for too long.