Phantom of Riverside Park (4 page)

With a million dollars she could quit both
jobs and go back to school full time. She could hire a nanny so
Thomas Jennings could spend his days playing checkers and napping
the way other old men do instead of caring for a run-down house and
a rambunctious child. She could buy a house in a better
neighborhood, one with trees in the backyard and flowers in the
beds and a fence so she could get Nicky the dog he wanted. But most
of all, she could give the child the surgery he needed.

Nicky was begging to go home now, the lure of
the doughnut egging him on. Elizabeth gave in, and the old man
began to gather his belongings - a baseball cap with “Eat More
Grits” stamped across the visor, a newspaper one week out of date,
and a small greasy paper bag that had held his and the child’s
lunch, two biscuits with sausage.

He carefully refolded the sack. “What are you
going to do about the check?”

“I don’t know, Papa. I just don’t know.”

They linked hands, the child in the middle.
David watched until they are out of sight then sat at his desk
staring at a pigeon on his windowsill. The silence in the room was
the kind that would smother a man if he thought about it too much.
The pigeon’s throat moved, but the thick walls surrounding David
filtered out the sound.

Far below, street lights came on and people
drifted out of the buildings happy to be released from the bondage
of their jobs, happy to be going home to husbands and wives and
sons and daughters, happy to be planning dinners and social
gatherings and quiet evenings with family, happy they were not
alone.

David pressed a button and a heavy drapery
shut out the view. Another button turned on his computer. The
phosphorescent cursor blinked at him from the middle of the screen,
a tiny green arrow, too small to be a lifeline.

“How appearances deceive,” he said.

Sometimes a thing can grow so big in your
mind there’s no room for anything else.

That’s how it was with the check. All the way
home Elizabeth thought about the million dollars, and about what
she could do with it. She had freedom right in her pocket. All she
had to do was cash the thing, and she’d never have to worry about
money again as long as she lived. Provided the check was real, of
course. It could be a hoax.

Still, the idea of it engaged every brain
cell so that the idle chatter of Nicky and Papa lapped over her
like waves while she was submerged somewhere out of their reach.
She could really run away now, go so far that nobody would ever
find her. She’d build a new life for Papa and Nicky and herself,
take on a new name, not Chiquita but something more appropriate for
a woman of means. Estelle, maybe. Or Blanche. She’d always
empathized with the Tennessee Williams’ heroine who depended on the
kindness of strangers.

Some stranger, somebody Elizabeth had never
seen, somebody she didn’t even know had given her a million
dollars, and if that wasn’t depending on the kindness of strangers
she didn’t know what was.

Or maybe the mysterious donor wasn’t a
stranger after all. Maybe it was the Belliveaus trying to lay claim
to their grandson.

A conversation from long ago played through
Elizabeth’s mind. She and Nicky’s daddy, Taylor Belliveau, had been
standing underneath a tree on the University of Mississippi campus.
She remembered it as clearly as if it had been only yesterday. She
even remembered the tree. It was a golden rain tree, dripping with
yellow clusters of flowers and the moisture from a sudden
shower.

She’d been waiting underneath the tree for
almost an hour, and she was soaked through and through. Just when
she decided Taylor wasn’t going to come, there he was, gorgeous and
golden as the tree, a sapling of a man, yet unformed.

“I came, so what do you want?”

That was his greeting. No apologies for being
late, no questions about her pregnancy, no tender mercies from the
boy who was responsible for her condition.

“I thought we might talk...about the
baby.”

“I told you, I’m not going to marry you. I
thought you understood that.”

“I did. Of course, I did, Taylor, it’s just
that I thought about your parents. They’ll want to know about their
grandchild.”

“Lizzie, if you tell my parents my goose is
cooked.”

“Why? You’re all they’ve got. They dote on
you. They’re bound to want this baby.”

Taylor had to know that was true. His
parents’ reputation was legend: they never let go of anything that
belonged to them.

Red-faced and stiff-backed, Taylor stalked
off fumbling with a pack of cigarettes. They shot out of the
cellophane and spewed around his alligator skin boots. He ground
them into the mud then suddenly his shoulders slumped. When he
turned back to Elizabeth he was a little boy, winning smile,
irresistible charm and all.

“You’re not going to tell them, are you,
Lizzie?”

She could never resist Taylor when he looked
at her that way. That’s what had gotten her into this mess in the
first place.

“No, I won’t tell, Taylor.”

“Good. I knew I could count on you, Lizzie. I
don’t want them to know. Not ever.”

A sharp tug on her hand brought Elizabeth
back to the present.

“Mommy!”

“What? What is it, Nicky?”

“I ast you free times already. When we get
home can I play on my swing?”

“Yes, you can.”

What if Taylor’s parents had somehow found
out about Nicky? They’d want him. She’d always believed that. It
was Elizabeth they wouldn’t want, the unsuitable girl from the
wrong side of the tracks. They would find some way of trying to
take Nicky away from her.

And perhaps they had. Perhaps the check was
Belliveau bait, and if she cashed it she would set off a
cataclysmic chain of events that would destroy her, that would
destroy them all.

Elizabeth hastened her step, hurrying toward
the only haven she knew, the ugly house that looked like an old
Dominicker hen with its feathers pecked all to pieces.

She shut her eyes to the exterior, which she
couldn’t do a thing about, and hurried inside. She’d done
everything she could to make it a home, and she’d succeeded in
that, at least, for every evening on the long walk from the park,
Papa and Nicky acted as if they were headed to the Belliveau
mansion.

She pushed open the door and walked inside
and just stood there telling herself to breathe. Forget the check
and breathe.

The soft diffused light of evening lent a
grace to the house that belied the cracked linoleum, the peeling
paint, the scarred furniture. A complete stranger would mistake
what he saw for poverty, but when Elizabeth walked through the
front door she saw a rakish charm. The huge bouquet of black-eyed
Susans and Queen Anne’s lace, wildflowers that grow along every
roadside in the Deep South, disguised the watermarks on the table,
and her grandmother’s crazy quilt covered the faded sofa. Made
mostly of calico, every scrap told a story. Elizabeth’s favorite
was the one her grandmother told about the blue velvet and ivory
lace that adorned the center of the quilt.

All the while she was washing Nicky’s hands
and pouring his glass of milk, Elizabeth felt her grandmother
watching over her shoulder and one of the stories Mae Mae used to
tell popped into her mind. Mae Mae’s stories were always short and
to the point, and always ended with a bit of sage advice.

“When I married Thomas I was poor as a church
mouse,” she used to say. “So was he, but that didn’t stop him from
getting me a fine wedding dress. I had bleached some flour sacks
and was busy sewing up a plain white gown, when Thomas rode up to
my house as big as you please with an armful of blue velvet. ‘Wear
this,’ he said. ‘It matches your eyes.’ Then he rode off without
another word. It was curtains he’d brought me, blue velvet
curtains. I didn’t tell him it was July and a hundred degrees in
the shade. I went down to Woolworth’s Five and Dime and bought a
little medallion of ivory lace for a nickel. Sewed it in the center
of the bodice, right over my heart. Two weeks later I walked down
the aisle at First Baptist sweating like a horse, but Thomas said I
was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. That was good enough for
me.”

“Where did he get the curtains, Mae Mae?”

“I never asked and he never said. Don’t ever
look a gift horse in the mouth, Elizabeth.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re liable to get bit.”

Nicky finished his doughnut and the screen
door banged shut behind him as he raced toward his tire swing. It
was attached to the only tree that had the audacity to grow in
their neighborhood, a spindly sweet gum that clung stubbornly to
the red clay soil beside their back door.

“Come push, Papa,” Nicky yelled.

“As soon as I wash the dishes. And don’t you
go doing anything foolish like trying to climb that tree till I get
there. If you do I’ll skin your hide.”

Nicky giggled, and so did Elizabeth. Her son
didn’t believe Papa any more than she had when she was four years
old. With his competitors and business associates he was tough as
nails, but when it came to his grandchild, he was all bluster and
no bite.

There’d been that time in January when
Elizabeth had defied Papa’s and Mae Mae’s orders and gone wading in
the icy pond behind the barn. She’d stepped into a hole and
wondered whether she’d be dead by drowning before she froze to
death. Then all of a sudden she decided she was too young and too
mean to die, and she’d finally floundered backward to the safety of
the pool bank.

“I’m going to skin your hide,” Papa had said,
then he’d built a big fire, wrapped her in towels and sat in a
rocking chair holding her till she quit crying.

Mae Mae was mad as an old wet hen. “I
declare, Thomas Jennings, you’re too soft when it comes to
her.”

“Now, Lola Mae, she was just trying out the
boots Santy Claus brought her.”

He hummed “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light
Brown Hair” while the rockers squeaked on the worn oak floor, and
Elizabeth knew, even then, that as long as she had Papa nothing bad
could happen to her.

“You let her get away with murder,
Thomas.”

He hadn’t, though. It was her grandfather who
had taught her thrift and responsibility. And honesty.

The only time he’d ever been really angry at
her was the Sunday she’d kept the quarter he’d given her for the
Sunday School collection plate so she could buy some candy for
herself. When Papa discovered the stashed loot, he’d made her sit
in the corner and think about what she’d done.

“You don’t take what doesn’t belong to you,
Elizabeth, and that quarter belongs to God.”

Since nobody had ever told her Heaven had
five and dime stores, she’d wondered what in the world God was
going to do with her quarter. But she hadn’t wondered aloud so Papa
could hear.

He was as tough on blasphemers as he was on
thieves.

The check in her pocket felt like stolen
goods. Elizabeth set it down where it put out roots and sprouted
tentacles that covered the whole kitchen table. Something ripped
inside her, and she was split into equal parts of fear and
hope.

“I guess I know what you’re thinking,” Papa
said.

“I guess you do.”

Neither of them had to say more. It was Nicky
they were thinking of, Nicky with the sunny personality and the
sweet disposition, Nicky with the bright smile and the questing
mind, Nicky with the cherub’s face and the monstrous upper lip from
surgery gone wrong.

Through the back door came squeals of
laughter. How long would that last after Nicky started
kindergarten? How long before that single incident of bullying in
the park became such a part of his life that he started believing
he was the monster other children labeled him?

“You could have his surgery done just like
that.”

Papa snapped his fingers, and the sound
exploded like firecrackers in the room.

They stared at the check that had suddenly
shrunk down to normal size. Elizabeth snatched it off the table and
marched to the telephone. Papa pretended not to notice what she was
doing as she thumbed through the telephone book. He went to the
sink and turned on the water as she worked her way through the
bank’s computerized answering service until she got a real person.
But she knew he was watching out of the corner of his eyes. She saw
how he was standing tilted sideways with his good ear turned her
way so he could hear every word.

She found out what she wanted to know and
hung up the phone.

“The check’s good.”

“I knew it the minute I saw it. I’m not so
old I can’t tell counterfeit from the real thing. No ma’am, I
didn’t roll off a watermelon truck. Even if some folks around here
whose name I won’t bother to mention think I don’t know what I’m
doing.”

Papa snapped the dish towel, a sure sign he
was miffed.

“I didn’t say that, Papa.”

“Now if it was me, I’d cash that check before
this fellow, whoever he is, changes his mind and takes it all
back.” He gave her a sly glance. “If I had a child who needed an
operation and if it was me.”

Elizabeth smiled. Papa would offer advice
till the cows came home, as Mae Mae used to say, but he was never
one to ask questions.

That wasn’t Papa’s way. He hadn’t even
questioned her when she’d showed up on his doorstep with all her
suitcases five years ago.

“The sheets in the spare room are clean,”
he’d said. “Get a good night’s sleep. We can talk in the mornin’ if
you want to. Breakfast is at five-thirty.”

Lying in the pine bed Papa had made she’d
felt as if she were constructed of glass. She lay with her feet
together and arms straight down at her sides, unmoving lest she
shatter. She’d heard the wind stir when it was disturbed by a
hawk’s wings, the call of the owl as it soared through the darkness
looking for prey, the soft scrunch of dead leaves as mice scurried
through the night.