My Soul to Keep (4 page)
“I wondered why you brought that …”
“I have a proposal I think is going to blow your socks off.”
“Well, I’m already married,” Jessica said, “so you can forget about that one.”
“Hope springs eternal,” Peter said, winking. He brought out a folder full of computer printouts she recognized from the newspaper’s
NEXIS
network. He’d scrawled elderly on the folder in his sloppy script—the reporter’s curse.
“What’s all this?”
“Detroit. Chicago. Los Angeles. Look at this one: Poughkeepsie, New York. I found that in Newsweek. Appalling.”
All of the stories were about abuse or neglect of the elderly in nursing homes, adult congregate living facilities, and hospitals. A headline from the Chicago Tribune arrested her attention and forced her to read: E
LDERLY
P
ATIENT
S
MOTHERED,
C
ORNER
S
AYS.
An eighty-year-old woman with cancer had apparently been asphyxiated while she slept, her nose broken. Rosalie Tillis Banks, a schoolteacher, daughter of a jazz musician from the 1920s. No suspects, no motives. The story quoted someone speculating the killer might have been a staffer, but administrators denied it. Windsong Nursing Home.
“Damn,” Jessica said. “Suddenly, our Riverview is sounding like a five-star hotel.”
“You’re getting the picture.”
“Why’d you pull these?”
“Because I read your story in the computer system while you were on vacation. I don’t know why you’re so shy about showing me your copy. It’s amazing stuff, Jess. Sy is raving about you.”
“That’ll be the day.”
“Behind your back, he does. Believe me,” Peter said, smiling at her like an older brother. “Your pieces got me thinking about the treatment of the elderly. It reminded me of a housing minister I once met who was visiting from Brazil. The Miami social services people gave her a fancy tour, including a nursing home where all the old folks sang her a song. She burst out crying. They thought she was happy. But she was really crying because, in Brazil, she’d never seen such a thing. They take care of their elderly at home.”
Jessica knew what he meant. Her mother was playing nursemaid to Jessica’s diabetic great-uncle at her house in north Dade; he’d had a stroke the year before, so he moved down from Georgia to stay with her. Bea Jacobs didn’t believe in nursing homes. She’d taken Uncle Billy on cheerfully, even though Jessica told her she was crazy. So far, it was working out fine. And there was a certain sense to it, a cosmic logic: You take care of your own.
Jessica thought of Frederic losing his foot at Riverview, and the dead woman with the broken nose in Chicago. “Somewhere along the way,” she mused, “family stopped mattering, didn’t it?”
“It’s a book,” Peter said, pronouncing the words slowly as he held Jessica’s eyes. “I already described your piece to my agent, and he likes the idea. All he needs is a proposal, and we have a publisher within a month.”
“A book … ?” Jessica asked, puzzled.
“Honor Thy Father and Mother: America’s Abuse and Neglect of the Elderly. We keep it simple. Some overview stuff, but mostly we concentrate on two dozen or so horrific cases from around the country. We interview friends, family. We interview advocates for the elderly, health professionals. We try to find out what’s going wrong. We take a book leave for four months, even less, and then we’re out. Bam.”
Jessica felt a mild tingling sensation sweep across the hair on her arms, equal parts exhilaration and nerves. She’d forgotten how direct Peter could be when he wanted to. He’d already published two books, one on Florida’s mob heyday, the other on a local serial murderer and rapist, and to him the process wasn’t mystifying. To her, it was a sacred dream from childhood and therefore needed to be approached with caution.
“You don’t need me for that,” she said.
“Don’t be crazy. Of course I do. These are your pieces. I have more experience in research, but you write with a grace I can only salivate over. Seriously. We do it together.”
Jessica’s thoughts scattered. “Four months? I can’t stay away that long. I can’t—”
Peter playfully slapped his palm on the tabletop, making the silverware on their empty plates clatter. “You’re afraid of success. I keep telling you that. Well, I can’t assure you this won’t get us on the talk-show circuit, because it probably will. But the important thing is that somebody needs to write this book. And that somebody might as well be us.”
To Jessica’s relief, the waitress finally remembered them on the patio and brought out their check. Jessica tried to look like she was concentrating on figuring out her portion, but her mind was in a fit and her heart was pounding.
First Princess, now this. Her mother always said life rolls in cycles of good and bad, but sometimes even good news could be overwhelming. She wanted to run away from it. She wasn’t even sure why. Maybe it was safer to run from both.
“I won’t push for an answer today,” Peter said as they crossed the street back toward the newspaper building, a six-story Art Deco monstrosity that resembled a staircase, painted lemon-yellow and facing Biscayne Bay.
“That’s a shock.”
“You have to think about it. Talk to David, but fight him if you have to. He’s way too possessive of your time. You know that. He’s not looking out for your career, Jess. But I am. I know these things. You have to trust me.”
Jessica stared at the sidewalk as she walked, mumbling. “It’s just that Kira’s nearly finished kindergarten… and I wanted to know her teacher better, and already …”
Peter slipped his arm around her shoulder, and she was slightly embarrassed to realize that his lightly cologned scent was a comfort to her. She remembered how, early on, she’d mistaken his kindness for a crush, and how much that had flattered her. Not that she would ever consider another a man since she had David, but she’d always told herself she would have been nearly as lucky to end up with someone like Peter. Very nearly.
“You can do both, Mommy. You really can. You’ll be based at home. Writing this book will be just like your job here, with a little more traveling. It’s not a two-headed dragon. I promise.”
Jessica laughed, imagining how naive she must sound to Peter. Here he was, practically handing her the one thing she’d longed for as long as she could remember, and she was stammering with excuses. That’s the difference between us and white folks, she told herself. They don’t stop to say “I can’t” or “Should I,” they just do. And it was a skill, sooner or later, she would need to pick up despite herself.
Honor Thy Father and Mother
. She liked the sound of it.
But David would be another matter.
“I’ll talk to him,” she promised. She was already dreading her return to the sadness at home, but now she had reason to dread it even more.
If someone had told Jessica Jacobs, at twenty, that she had recently met the man she would marry, she wouldn’t have thought to include David Wolde on her list of possibilities. Far from it.
She would have hoped he was Shane, the pro-bound UM fullback she’d had a frenzied petting session with after an Omega party at the beginning of the semester. Or even Lawrence, the lanky physics major who sat with her at the student union, but couldn’t muster the nerve to ask her out. She might even have believed it was Michel, the tight-jawed president of the Black Student Caucus, who called her “little sister” and would have had potential if he’d remembered to sprinkle in some fun between bouts of righteous indignation.
But not David Wolde. He didn’t fit any side of her at all, at least not any she’d discovered yet.
Granted, she couldn’t concentrate on a word he said the first day she sat in his Intermediate Spanish tutorial because she was so absorbed by his face, and not just his startling beauty. (Beauty, she’d decided, even now, was the only word to describe his face’s impression, an assortment of complementary features.) He simply looked unusual. He was black, that was certain. His unblemished skin was a rich clay-brown, and his tightly curled hair was kinky if somewhat wispy. But the slope of his forehead and nose, and his burnt-sienna lips, made him look nearly Middle Eastern, or some mix from somewhere far from the United States. Moorish descent, maybe. He spoke Spanish like a native, with a slight Castilian lisp. Yet, on the rare occasions he spoke English in class, the accent was touched by a ring of the unfamiliar. His face and his voice, in harmony, were a mystery that captivated Jessica from the start.
That aside, nothing else about Dr. Wolde (he pronounced it WOL-day, but everyone usually shortened it to WOLD) encouraged romantic thoughts. He almost never smiled, never flirted in the least, and his dark eyes lighted on male and female students with equal indifference. He looked young, possibly thirty, but carried himself as though he were at least forty. He was an old-fashioned black college professor, the kind her mother described from her days at Fisk in the 1950s. They don’t play. They’re only about business. They make that white guy on The Paper Chase look like a doddering old pushover.
There was no such thing as coasting in Dr. Wolde’s class. And if you were absent a day, upon your return he asked you to stand up in front of everyone and, in Spanish, explain why. He spoke rapidly, his cadences trilling up and down and all around them, never mind that the language was always a hair away from sounding like babble to them.
Jessica had assumed Spanish was a blow-off course. In high school, she’d learned to conjugate verbs and her accent was all right, so she figured she’d slide by fine.
She was wrong. Midway through the term, Dr. Wolde’s was the only class she was pulling a C in. She left his office near tears after an argument over a low mark on an essay she’d actually worked hard on. He’d marked off for accent marks that weren’t slanted just the way he liked. This was a damn elective. She was going into journalism, not foreign service. She didn’t need this shit.
“We’re just learning,” she complained, nearly shouting.
“If you’re learning,” he’d replied calmly, in English, “then what’s the problem?”
During a flu epidemic that sidelined her other teachers at least one or two days, Dr. Wolde never got sick. The class prayed he would stay home just once. He never even got a sniffle.
She could no longer see the beauty in his face. (“Isn’t that brother who teaches Spanish cute?” one of her friends asked her one day, and Jessica stared at the girl as if she’d lost her mind.) She no longer cared where the SOB was from; as far as she was concerned, he’d come from her worst nightmares. She found out he was some kind of expert from the music department, and he taught Spanish for fun. Just her luck. He was making her life miserable in her junior year, the year everyone said was supposed to be her most carefree, when the flow of college is under control and graduation is still a year away.
When all of her friends were at parties, she was up late writing in her Spanish workbook. She was reciting phrases into a tape recorder and playing them back, fearful of Dr. Wolde’s reaction if she stumbled in class. He had a way of gazing at students when they made mistakes, eyebrows arched, that made Jessica want to curl under her desk. He was totally uncompromising. Jessica had always considered herself a perfectionist, and here was someone who made her feel like a slacker. She didn’t like the feeling.
On the day of the final, Dr. Wolde had the nerve to encourage them to sign up for his Intermediate Spanish 2 course. “Honey, pleez …” the other black student, Rene, muttered just within Jessica’s hearing. “This man must be on crack.”
Jessica passed Dr. Wolde’s class with a B-minus, souring a column of A’s and B-pluses. She didn’t know whether to shout with joy from her dorm rooftop or to slash Dr. Wolde’s tires. She swore she’d had all the Spanish she could stand.
She didn’t realize until a week later, chatting to a young man selling roses to motorists at a red light on South Dixie Highway, that she could speak Spanish with confident ease. “Are you Dominican?” the man asked her, in Spanish, indicating the dark skin of her forearm.
“No,” she said. “Pero, tuve un buen profesor.”
She’d had a good teacher.
That same day, Jessica signed up for Intermediate Spanish 2 with Dr. Wolde. The man from her nightmares, she thought ironically, smiling at herself.
Her life would never be the same.
“Mommy’s home!”
Kira called through the screen door as Jessica climbed out of the minivan and let the door fall shut behind her. The driveway was a long, gravelly descent into a yard so overgrown with thick tree trunks, palm trees, and wide leafy plants that the two-story house was invisible from the street. A wooden marker pounded into the live oak just beyond the driveway identified their address, 376 Tequesta Road. They lived in El Portal, a secluded area west of busy Biscayne Boulevard, perched on the bank of the river.
It was long after dark, and Jessica heard a familiar whistling in the treetops overhead. The noise was half human, half something else, sometimes sounding like a war cry. When visitors asked about the high, persistent sound, as Peter had once, she explained it was the call of an old Indian woman’s ghost.
If the visitor looked at her askance, as they almost always did, Jessica told them their house was on haunted Tequesta Indian ground, like in Poltergeist, except their haunts weren’t in a pissy mood. Their property was across the street from a grassy burial mound with a prominent marker erected by the city decades before, and their yard even had a small cave built into a knoll near the street. Children and bent-over adults could actually walk into it and vanish into the solitude. The cave wasn’t elaborate, just rough limestone walls and a pressed dirt floor. No hieroglyphics. Nothing sinister. The cave was one of Teacake’s favorite daytime hiding places, and Kira took her playmates inside during neighborhood barbecues. Five or six could squeeze in at a time.
