Smoke (23 page)

“Did you talk to your PBA rep today?” she said quietly.

“Yeah, I did,” said Dylan, shifting Ben up a little. “He thinks it’s going to be okay. The shooting was good. I know it and everyone who was there that night knows it. I just have to go in and answer questions, so do the other guys. It’s still going to be a week without my weapon, at least.”

She put a hand on his arm. “It’s going to be fine,” she said. They both knew there weren’t any guarantees. If there was unrest in the community over the incident, or if there was some unspoken agenda to come down on white cops that shot black kids, or if he just got an unsympathetic investigator, things could go badly for him.

“It’s good to be with you, Jez. Thanks for being here for me.”

In the elevator, the cell phone rang again but he made no move for it. Benjamin stirred at the noise but didn’t quite wake up.

“Don’t you need to get that?” she asked.

“Nah. It’s probably just Barnes again. The guys are getting together tonight but I told him I needed to spend some time with my family.”

I would have been crazy to divorce this guy, thought Jesamyn. But who the hell is he?

Ben woke up long enough to brush his teeth and put on his pajamas. She knelt down on the floor beside him as she tucked him into bed and kissed him on the head.

“Mom?” he said as she turned off his big light and flipped on the aquarium night-light. “Do you like Dad again?”

She quashed the rise of guilt and smiled. “I’ve always liked your dad. He gave me you. And I love
you
more than anything.”

He looked into her eyes and gave her that smile, a carbon copy of his father’s. Irresistible.

“I love you, too,” he said, turning over.

She closed the door mostly, leaving it slightly ajar the way Ben liked it, and moved quietly down the hall. She heard the tone in his voice before she saw him leaning in the doorjamb to the kitchen, talking into his cell phone like he was making out with it. That tone, that sweet, coaxing tone she knew so well.

“Not tonight, baby,” he said, his voice low. “I’m working. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow. Hey, and honey, don’t call anymore tonight. You’ll get me in trouble with my boss.”

She felt her stomach bottom out and she remembered … a dozen other overheard phone calls, the nights he said he’d made a collar but there was no overtime in his paycheck, once an earring in her couch. Each time it had hit like a blow to the solar plexus. Tonight was no different. She put a hand against the wall. She couldn’t believe he could still do it to her, run her through a gamut of emotions in just a few hours. Was she really this weak, this
stupid
?

In a way she was relieved, because it meant she was right about him all along. She had come to believe that he was pathologically unfaithful, that it wasn’t part of his makeup to be present for her and Ben. He wanted to play; he wanted to party. He didn’t really want to be a husband and a father, not full time anyway. This was why she’d decided to end their marriage. She hadn’t been wrong. Small comfort, but she’d take it.

She picked up his coat off the couch and stood behind him, waiting for him to feel her there. After another sickening few seconds of him cooing on the phone to whomever it was he was cooing to, he flipped the phone shut and turned around.

“Uh—” he said. He looked stricken. “That was Barnes. We were just fooling around.”

“Oh, spare me, Dylan,” she said, handing him his coat. “Just go.”

“Jez, please,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “I
really
need you guys right now.”

“Key,” she said.

“What?”

“Give me that goddamn key before I take it from you. And you know I can.”

He looked at her and his eyes went from pleading to angry.

“This is why we’re not married anymore, Jesamyn,” he said, reaching into his pocket and fishing out the keys. “No understanding, no compromise.”

She let go of a little laugh. “There are some points on which people are not expected to compromise,” she said.

He fumbled with the keys, his jacket over his arm, took one of them off the ring and handed it to her. His face had flushed red and she could see a vein pumping in his temple.

“Both of them,” she said forcing herself to keep her voice down. “The apartment door, too.”

He sighed and took another one off the ring. She tested it in the door; the lock turned.

“I’ll follow you down and check the other one, too. If you don’t mind.”

“You don’t trust me?”

She gave him a smile. She locked the door behind her and they rode the elevator down together in a cool silence.

“I can’t believe I thought—” she started and then clamped her mouth shut.

“You and I haven’t been together in a long time, Jez,” he said softly. “I have every right to be involved with someone else. I didn’t know things were going to heat up between us again.”

She shook her head and didn’t respond further. The doors slid open and she walked quickly to the outside entrance and tried the key. When the lock turned, she stepped aside and held it for him.

“Jez, let’s talk about this.” He spoke softly, reaching for her hand. She folded her arms across her chest.

“Dylan, everything that needs saying between us, we said a long time ago. I was just suffering from some kind of temporary insanity. Clearly.”

He walked onto the street and stood looking at her through the glass. He was so handsome and the girl in her loved him so much, she could imagine herself throwing the door open and running into his arms. She
wanted
to, even now. Instead, she turned and walked coolly for the elevator door though she wanted to run, catching it just before
it closed again. She rode up, staring at her reflection in the mirrored doors, her body tense, her mouth pressed into a straight, hard line. She looked hard at the woman glaring back at her. Only her eyes betrayed the terrible sadness and disappointment she felt. She just made it into the apartment before she started to cry. She cried quietly, her head against the door, careful not to wake her son.

Twelve

M
aybe fifty people had gathered in front of The New Day building. They stood in the cold, smoking cigarettes, drinking from paper coffee cups. A thin girl, very young with bad acne, stood with shoulders stooped, shivering against the cold. A woman wearing a three-quarter-length wool coat over a business suit clutched a soft briefcase to her side and looked around with a frown on her face, like she was somewhere she didn’t want to be. A smallish man with slicked-back hair, wearing creased jeans, a faux leather jacket and matching loafers, laughed nervously as he tried to make conversation with a pretty black woman.

Lydia stood off to the side, leaning against a maple tree and listening to the quiet conversations that cropped up between strangers waiting for a common event. People seemed nervous, excited, tentative. She had to wonder why they’d come here. What were they seeking? Her eyes fell on the thin girl with the bad skin. The girl hunched her shoulders in, stood away from the crowd. She seemed sad and tired. It was contagious; Lydia started to feel that way, too.

After a while, a willowy woman in the white tunic and blue jeans Lydia had seen on the website opened the large wooden doors and people filed inside. Lydia lingered outside awhile, moving behind the tree. She wanted to be among the last to enter and sit toward the back. She hoped that her baseball hat and wire-rimmed glasses would keep anyone from recognizing her, though Jeffrey had been skeptical. He’d given up the argument and they’d parted angry with each other.

She hung back with the smokers and entered with the last of the people to walk through the door. They walked through the foyer and Lydia chose a seat as close to the door as possible, gratified that no one
seemed to notice her. She had a row to herself and watched as people took tea from an urn on a table off to the side, dumping packs of sugar and creamer into their paper cups. People chattered a little at first, then grew silent. A definite tension built as people waited, started to get impatient.

“You’re here because you want to change your life,” said Trevor Rhames loudly as he entered the room from an unseen door to the side. “But you don’t know how.

“People always think it’s the things they
don’t
have that are making them unhappy. ‘If I can just get this, or buy that, or have that, then finally I’ll achieve real peace and joy.’ What they don’t realize is that it’s leaving things behind, wanting
less
that is the secret to true happiness.”

Trevor Rhames spoke quietly but his voice resonated with authority. He was short and stocky, his hair just a shadow on his shaved head, but there was a powerful bearing to him. His eyes were ice blue, pale and dramatic. They demanded. He wore black jeans and a black cotton shirt open at the chest, heavy leather boots. An unlikely getup for a preacher. He paced the front of the room slowly, picking a pair of eyes from the crowd and then focusing on that person for a while, as if he were speaking directly to him.

“It is when we
abandon
materialism and vanity, worry less about what kind of car we drive and how much we weigh, that we open our minds to the Universe, to the thing religion calls God. God is everywhere, all around us; he
is
the ground beneath our feet, the sky above us, and the trees around us. He
is
us. All we have to do is recognize him.”

He was a supernova. His energy filled the room and sucked everything else out. Even Lydia, who’d come for very different reasons than the other people gathered, felt his power. How powerful would he seem if you were lost, in pain, not sure of anything about yourself and your life? she wondered. How powerful had he seemed to Mickey? To Lily?

He was not a handsome man. His jaw was too big, his nose crooked. The stubble on his face made him look unkempt instead of rugged. A scar ran from behind his ear down the side of his neck and disappeared into the collar of his shirt. His boots added about an inch of height and he was still short. And yet Lydia could see how women might find him attractive. There was a pull to him, like the riptide in a violent sea. She
was not immune to it; she felt the tug in spite of her intellectual perspective on it.

He went on and she settled into her seat in the back of the room. The people around her seemed rapt, hanging on his every word. She noticed something then, that many of them were holding and were sipping from or had placed beside them a paper cup. She scanned the large room, an auditorium with a brightly lit stage and rows of soft, large, comfortable seats. The construction was new, she could smell the leather of the seats around her, the paint on the walls. On a table to the side of the room was a stack of paper cups, an urn with a sign:
TEA
. She remembered what Dax had said about the woman he met earlier handing him a cup and his instinct not to drink from it.

“What they don’t want you to know,” he said loudly, startling her from her thoughts, “is that the media purposely, perpetually keeps you in a state of self-hatred so that you will continue to
consume
.”

He raised his hands and came to stop in front of a woman in the front row. Lydia was too far back to see her; she could only see a head of dyed blonde hair.

“ ‘I’m too fat,’ you think to yourself,” he said, looking down at her. “ ‘Yes, you are,’ says the media. ‘Buy this and you’ll look better, feel better,
be
better. But then have this cheeseburger; you deserve it!’ ” He shook his head in disdain, and then gave the audience a warm, sympathetic smile. He walked up and down the aisle in front of the seats.

“You have wrinkles or your breasts are too small or you’re losing your hair or whatever it is someone
else
has told you is wrong with you. But don’t worry. They have a remedy for everything—for the right price.” He paused here, looking around at the crowd. Lydia found herself shrinking down in her seat. She didn’t want Rhames to see her face.

“What they don’t want you to know is that you are
exactly
the way God intended you and any value or devaluing associated with your appearance or your station in life is man-made. It’s not organic, not real. It’s an illusion created to keep you buying into a system that wants to enslave you, keep you working at a job you hate, hating yourself, buying what they say will make it all better over and over again until you die.”

He paused again, again looking from face to face.

“There’s another way,” he said. He’d lowered his voice to a whisper
and Lydia watched as people unconsciously leaned forward. “I am offering you a New Day.”

He put his hand out to a woman in the audience and when she took it, he gently pulled her in front of the crowd. She was an average-looking woman, her dry, curly hair clearly color damaged. She wore the formless clothing of someone insecure about her body, a cardigan sweater, a long, full skirt. She wore a heavy mask of makeup. In the bright spotlight that shone on the front of the room it looked pink and cakey. She looked around the room, obviously wishing she could sink into the ground.

“When I look at you,” he said, “I see what they’ve sold you. This color in your hair, these clothes to hide a body you think is substandard, this paint to hide a face you don’t want to see when you look in the mirror. But I also see
you
.”

The woman started to tear, put a hand to her mouth. “You’re beautiful,” he told her. “You don’t need to hide from me.”

He embraced her then and she started to sob. She could hear other women in the audience start to sniffle. One man got up and left. No one tried to stop him; he was shaking his head skeptically as he stalked past Lydia. She noticed that he didn’t have a cup.

All the people in here had come because they were in pain; there was no other reason to join a group like this, no reason to come here. Lydia would bet that on the meta-tags of the New Day website, they’d listed words like “depression,” “despair,” “loneliness,” … maybe even things like “weight loss” or “hair loss.” So that anyone searching for those words on the Internet might find a link to The New Day. She glanced at her watch and wondered whether Dax and Jeffrey were in place.