The Between (25 page)

“I’ve asked you to get help,” Dede went on, “but you’ve ignored me. I can’t help you, Hilton. I don’t know how. I wish I did, but I don’t. So now I’m left holding on to the one truth I know: I can’t let you stay here to do whatever you did to Jamil today, or worse. I can’t allow it. No fit mother would.”

“Do I get to testify on my own behalf, Your Honor?” he asked without looking at her, his voice sharp with sarcasm.

“His jaw is still hurting him!” Dede screamed at him, losing the composure she’d no doubt been mustering since she’d seen Jamil. “He’ll barely say a word to me or Kaya. There’s no excuse! I want you out, Hilton, and I want you out tonight.”

The rage that had visited Hilton at Miami New Day reappeared, and he flung the pan from the stovetop with his palm, burning his fingers, until the metal clattered to the floor and spilled hot grease and food two feet from Dede’s feet. She cried out, leaping out of her chair. Dede backed away from Hilton, her eyes wide, and took refuge on the other side of the pass-through counter.

She raised an unsteady finger at him. “You see? Just look.”

“This is my house,” Hilton said, “and you need me here, you ungrateful bitch. You need me here. Kaya and Jamil need me here.”

“You need to go to a hospital, Hilton,” Dede said, her face wrenching with suppressed tears. “Please go. I’m afraid of you. He’s afraid of you.”

“Afraid?” Hilton roared, taking a step toward her. “What the fuck is there to be afraid of? I’ve given him his life. He wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me. Don’t you get it? They weren’t even supposed to be born!”

Dede began to sob, shaking her head as she backed from Hilton. “Get out!” she shouted.

Hilton lashed at her with a fierce flurry of obscenities he’d been holding back since the days, weeks before, when her insensitivity first began to infuriate him. He heard words flying from his mouth he’d never spoken, that he’d never consciously thought. Dede shrank from him, crying, until she was backed against the wall in the family room.

Suddenly, her eyes darted away from him to the family room entrance. “No. Go to your room,” Dede choked.

Kaya was there. Her face was splotchy and damp with tears, and all of her limbs were trembling. “Why are you doing this?” she shrieked at Hilton with a rage in her eyes that robbed them of their youth.

Hilton felt dizzy under their stares, by the suddenness of the moment’s turn against him. He took a lurching step toward Kaya, who ran away from him into Dede’s waiting arms. “Stop it, Hilton,” Dede pleaded, clinging to Kaya. “Please stop. Please.”

I wasn’t going to hurt her, Hilton thought, wounded to his soul. Jesus. Why would I try to hurt her? He gave them both a baleful look, then he stumbled out of the family room through the hallway, grabbing his wallet and car keys from the table in the foyer. He could barely breathe, they’d hurt him so much with their fear. All of them.

Standing near the front door, he stared down the hallway at Jamil’s closed room and fought not to go there, sit on Jamil’s bed and try to fix everything. He could barely comprehend the idea that he was not free to go to his son’s room, that in Dede’s state she might actually call the police.

Hilton took one last glance at his serene living room, then fumbled with the doorknob to face the darkening skies outside.

Screaming, Hilton finds himself flung inside a dance of bright, hungry flames. When he moves, the hissing fire licks at his face and bare chest. He bats at the blaze as though it is a cloud of marsh mosquitoes, spittle running down his chin.

Then he sees her.

She is thin, tall, with an angular neck and her chin held high as she stands motionless in the wall of fire, which does not seem to touch her. She is a young woman Hilton has never seen before, but instantly he divines everything about her: she speaks French and Creole, she was bom in Port-au-Prince, her name is Marguerite. She is beautiful and dark, and he longs to hug her like a sister. He wants to take her hand and run.

How is it she doesn’t writhe in the heat or feel the pain? The girl lowers her chin until her large brown eyes are staring at Hilton dead-on. She is weary, he sees. She is too tired even to scream.

“Your last death,” she says in a fractured whisper, “will come in a burst of flames. It’s not so difficult. Just watch.”

Then, slowly, she clasps her hands in front of her chest and begins to kneel. The flames seize her; first stripping away her shoulder-length hair, then feeding off of her dress and her flesh until she is so charred she begins to wither before him. Her eyes watch him, unblinking in the sockets of her bubbling skull.

“Come, Hilton,” she says.

“La reina,
Celia Cruz,” the radio announcer kept saying between salsa sets, and Hilton tried to invoke his sophomore-year Spanish to remember what the word meant. He passed five minutes drumming his fingers against his temple until it hit him: the queen. Relief washed through him like an elixir. The smallest victories were so important to him.

Raul hadn’t moved his Biscayne Boulevard office, though the neighborhood around it had grown more shabby in the years since Hilton last visited. He had plush carpeting now and central air conditioning instead of fans, but he was in the same building, playing the same Spanish-language radio station. Hilton flipped through the issues of
Cosmopolitan
in Spanish and
Psychology Today
on the magazine rack, simply waiting, as he had been for nearly two hours. All of the pages were a blur to him. The seats around him were empty, and he was alone except for Raul’s receptionist.

The door to Raul’s office opened, and a middle-aged woman wearing a black dress and veil, mourning clothes, walked out. Her face was nearly covered in liver spots. She seemed to take a long gaze at Hilton, then she said a few friendly words to the receptionist in Spanish, pausing to confirm her next appointment. Already, Hilton was on his feet.

“One moment, sir,” the receptionist said to him, looking annoyed. She didn’t know Hilton, and he’d been hounding her all morning. She finished her conversation with the woman in black, pointedly taking her time, then punched her speaker phone to buzz Raul on his intercom.

“Dr. Puerta, there’s a man here—”

“It’s lunchtime, Mercedes,” Raul’s voice came back.

The receptionist shrugged at Hilton. “I know. He wants to—”

“It’s me, Raul,” Hilton said, leaning over into the speaker.

“Hilton?” the voice crackled back. In an instant, Raul was standing in front of him, holding tightly to Hilton’s forearms as though he would kiss him, his expression overjoyed but cautious. “I’ve been trying to find you for three days. Come in.”

“Where’s the funeral?” Hilton asked, following Raul into his office, which now had walnut bookshelves stacked across the walls and gave the room an air of dignity that had been absent before. Hilton felt as though Raul were someone entirely different now; not the therapist he’d known, not the friend he’d been so at ease with.

“Mrs. Sanchez? She’s a widow. We’re doing grief-resolution therapy. You shouldn’t make fun. Grief is a monster many people lose their lives to.”

“Letting go . . .” Hilton mumbled.

“Exactly.”

“Believe me, I’m in no position to poke fun at anyone,” Hilton said dourly. He refused the coffee Raul offered him from the espresso machine on his desk and watched while Raul poured the thick, dark liquid into a nearly thimble-sized plastic cup for himself. As much as Raul tried to hide it, Hilton could see Raul was disturbed by his looks, and he couldn’t blame him. With his beard growing untrimmed and the swollen discoloration beneath his eyes, Hilton had barely recognized himself that morning when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. He’d been living at the Holiday Inn on South Dixie Highway, ten minutes from his home.

“So,
compadre . . .
how are you?” Raul asked.

“If you were looking for me, you must have some idea.”

Raul acknowledged him with a sheepish smile. “I tried to call you at home over the weekend, and I spoke to Dede at length. I’m very sorry, Hilton.”

Hilton blinked, staring out of the window at the vagrants and underdressed women passing outside. No one had offered him condolences until now because he’d avoided his friends, including Curt, and Raul’s words stung him anew with their finality. Then anger replaced his sadness. “I’m sure she told you I’ve turned into Jack Nicholson from
The Shining.”

Raul hesitated. “Dede is in a lot of pain.”

“She can join the fucking club.”

“Tell me what happened, exactly.”

“If I do, you’ll take her side.”

“Look at me, Hilton,” Raul said, and Hilton gazed back at his friend’s soft eyes. “You know me better than that. Since when do I take sides? She’s very eager to find solutions. She said she’s willing to start counseling if you—”

“If I what? Commit myself to Bellevue?”

“It’s not like you to close your mind so, Hilton,” Raul said. Not fucking like him. It also wasn’t like him to carry on conversations with corpses. Between the look on Raul’s face and the ridiculous understatement he’d just made, Hilton couldn’t help laughing. He sank into his chair until he was slouching, the laughter was so deep and quenching.

Raul wasn’t smiling. “Why didn’t you call me?”

Hilton’s laughter stopped abruptly. “Because I needed a therapist,” Hilton said, glaring.

Raul lowered his eyes. “Touché. I deserved that, so I’ll accept your hostility. But I had no idea of the extent of this, Hilton. If I had, I would have behaved much differently. Whatever you need me for, I’m here for you now.”

Finally. Those were the words he’d craved to hear. “If I am cracking up, it’s because of my dreams. Hypnotize me. I need to remember, Raul.”

Raul sighed, distressed. He tasted his coffee in silence. “If not, I walk. It’s that simple,” Hilton said.

“Yes, yes,” Raul said. “All right. I can see you intend to make my work more uncomfortable than it is already. You want me to be your therapist, yet you diagnose yourself and offer your own treatment. You realize you’ve never been able to recollect the dreams under hypnosis before.”

“I realize that. Let’s go. I don’t care how long it takes.”

Raul began to fumble with the cassette player he used to record his hypnosis sessions, and he pulled a small glistening boom box from under his desk. “You need to be relaxed.”

“I am relaxed. As relaxed as I’m going to be, wired on caffeine and sugar and getting no goddamn sleep.”

“Sit all the way back in your chair, and put your feet flat on the floor,” Raul said. He flipped on gliding, futuristic-sounding music at a barely audible level. “Allow your eyes to close.”

Relax. For an hour, they had little success. It’s not working, Hilton kept saying, but Raul pressed on with a patience that softened Hilton’s mood. Raul told Hilton to imagine himself at the top of a steep mountain, and with each step down he felt ten times more relaxed. Together, they breathed deeply. In and out, in and out. Bit by bit, Hilton felt himself letting go.

“Did you dream last night, Hilton?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what happened in the dream.”

Complete silence, Hilton would hear on Raul’s recording when they listened to the tape an hour later. Hilton couldn’t remember much of the session, and he couldn’t understand why his friend looked so shaken, why his fingers were unsteady as he pressed the button to fast-forward the tape. He was almost afraid to find out, as he’d felt afraid to hear the answer to the question he’d asked Kessie that night.

“We didn’t have much luck with the dreams,” Raul explained as the tape whirred on its spools, “but there’s something very important I want you to hear, from when your trance state was deepest.” Raul pressed the
PLAY
button, and Hilton heard the conversational drone of his own voice in midsentence:

Raul turned the tape off, his eyes weighing heavily on Hilton.

Hilton didn’t move, the words from the cassette still ringing in his ears with their utter lack of sense, spoken from his own lips.

“So what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Hilton asked.