The Between (30 page)

“Yes,” Hilton choked.

“The truth hasn’t changed, Hilton. Your mind has changed. This is normal in schizophrenia’s early stages, this confusion. You know something is wrong. You only have to accept it.”

“I. . . I’m not sure . . .”

“You’re not sure of what?” Raul asked, and Hilton didn’t answer. “Did you talk to my brother?”

“Yes.”

“And what did he say to you?”

New tears sprang to Hilton’s eyes. “That maybe I’m dead.”

There was a long pause, followed by a flurry of curses in Spanish as Raul lost his cool. He struggled to calm his voice, remembering Hilton on the phone. “Hilton, listen to me. I don’t know what nonsense Andres has filled your head with, but I warned you not to see him. I’m giving you a simple, concise, physiological reason your perceptions and behavior have changed. You reject all that for a theory that you’re some sort of living ghost? That is preferable to you?”

Right then, to Hilton, his alternatives became clear. There were none. At once, he felt his breath flowing with ease through his lungs. “No,” he said. “I know I’m not dead.”

“Well, thank goodness one of you has some sense,” Raul said. “Come back to my office as soon as possible. My doctor friend and I will assess you, and I’ll explain every step to you. For now, I think you should go home. Go to your wife and children. I have a feeling you’ll be more than welcome there now.”

No wonder Raul had that feeling, Hilton thought, since he had told Dede everything about his visit and the preliminary diagnosis. When Hilton first walked into Dede’s bedroom the night she pulled him from the car, he found a half dozen library books on mental illness lying across the bed and pages of scrawled notes and charts on her legal pad. She’d even found a support group for spouses of schizophrenics, circling the newspaper listing with a red pen.

Now, at breakfast, it was clear she’d even explained some of his condition to Kaya and Jamil. They had all set out to make this a family struggle, not merely his own. Watching their faces as they wolfed down the pancakes, Hilton felt transfixed by his love for them. As though she knew what he was thinking, Dede playfully rested her hand on Hilton’s thigh. Kaya, seeing the blurred shape of Dede’s hand through the glass-top table, smiled a secret smile. Hilton decided he would get better, not for himself, but for them. Everything he had done or would do in his life was for these three. Forever.

The white street sign flaking with rust says Douglass Road.

Hilton doesn’t know how long he has been walking, but his bare feet trudge along a sinuous dirt path in a haze of darkness. Cool, thick fog envelops everything around him, holding the dreary scene still. The fog is hard to breathe, but Hilton forces the thick air into his lungs and walks on. On his left he sees a barbed wire fence hanging in disrepair along a string of crooked wooden posts. Beyond that, it is hard to see.

The endless stretch of overgrown grass could be a meadow, could be farmland, could be a cemetery. Yes, a cemetery. As he strains to peer through the darkness, he sees tombstones and upright crosses dotting the field. The same sight meets him when he looks to his right, as far as his vision can reach. This is a village of the dead, and he walks alone.

He hears the loud chugging of a motor. In the distance ahead, two white pinpricks sweep before him as a vehicle meanders along the twisted path, closer and closer until Hilton can no longer see past the lights’ rigorous gleaming.

The lights stop within feet of Hilton, casting him as a silhouette in the night. Hilton steps aside slightly and can make out the shape of the huge vehicle, an antiquated black hearse with white curtains in the windows. He cannot see the driver.

“Wouldyou like a ride?” a man’s friendly voice calls.

Hilton shakes his head. He pats the ice-cold hood of the hearse and walks around it until he finds the path again.

Loose stones hurt his feet, but he presses on. He isn’t sure where he is going, but he knows he will be there soon.

“Happy birthday, Hilton,” Charles Ray calls after him, and Hilton hears his voice chuckling over the struggling motor as the hearse drives into the dead night.

“Well, my goodness gracious, if this isn’t the biggest surprise,” Auntie said, beaming, as she opened the screen door to the painted porch where Hilton had spent hours reading Superman comics when he was young, Richard Wright when he was older.

“Who’s that? Lucius and them?” C.J.’s voice called from inside.

“No, Carl, it’s Hilton.”

C.J. chuckled sarcastically. “Hilton? Hilton who?”

Auntie extended her cheek for the customary peck, but Hilton instead reached to hug her warmly in the doorway, holding her close to him. Auntie was startled at first, but then her frame shuddered as she relaxed and rubbed his back, laughing. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”

Home. Exiled in his hotel room for all of those days, Hilton had kept his thoughts anchored to home, to Kaya and Jamil and Dede, nourishing himself with memories of before. Before the threats. Before the return of the dreams. But after he was welcomed back and resumed his cleaning routine while Dede worked and Kaya and Jamil were in school, Hilton still felt in himself an overpowering longing to go home, somewhere else.

He thought of the two-bedroom house in Richmond Heights, with its old Florida-style jalousie windows and painted aluminum shutters, where he’d lived with Auntie and C.J. until he was eighteen. He’d never moved back, even for a night, after he left home for college. C.J. had lost part of his roof to Hurricane Andrew, but Hilton barely noticed the difference now, except that the house was repainted white instead of the bright aqua blue it had been for as long as Hilton could remember.

“Well, shut the screen before you let all the mosquitoes in,” C.J. said crankily.

“There are hardly any durn mosquitoes out here in March,” said Auntie, giving Hilton a last pat before she pulled him inside.

C.J. sat in his old blue recliner, watching a soap opera Hilton didn’t recognize on their color console TV. “You just missed a big lunch Lorraine fixed an hour ago, baked chicken and—”

Hilton leaned over to kiss C.J. s bald forehead, an unusual gesture for him with his adoptive father. “I ate already. Sorry to just barge in without calling.”

“Shoot, we aren’t doing anything here except watching the stories,” Auntie said, clearing newspapers from a chair for him.

“Foolishness,” C.J. muttered.

“Oh, just listen to him. And he’s the worst one at twelve-thirty, talking about where’s ‘The Young and the Restless’?”

“Just keep on fibbing. It’ll come back to haunt you one day.”

Hilton smiled, listening to them. They were both older now than Nana must have been when she died. They’d never seemed old to him, but they were. Auntie was thinner than ever, with drawn cheeks, and she walked delicately, bracing for pains. Because of a heart condition, C.J. had long ago given up golf and jogging in favor of his recliner, and he was more humorless than ever. Hilton didn’t visit them often enough, but each visit since they’d retired was much the same. Food, habitual quarrels, and television. And a pointed reminder that both of them might not live much longer, and then he would lose what little grounding he still had in his past.

“I’ve got some pound cake in the back, Hilton.”

Hilton knew there was no point in trying to turn down Auntie’s offering. “That sounds great. Homemade, I hope.”

Auntie scowled at him. “As opposed to what? What other kind of cake do I ever have in this house?”

With Auntie in the kitchen, C.J.’s attention returned to the television’s argument between a blond woman and a man with a moustache. Hilton wandered the cluttered living room, surveying the watercolor paintings of black family scenes and framed photographs on the walls. Unlike Dede, Auntie was a pack rat who crammed every space in her house with some object or another, and she was constantly rearranging. She had a large collection of mammy dolls and darkie memorabilia from the 1930s and 1940s, watermelon-eating and big-lipped reminders of the times she’d grown up in. Better for me to collect it than those other folks, she always said.

Hilton was surprised to see on the wall a framed, fading black-and-white picture he’d left on his bureau when he moved, a photograph of Nana with black hair streaked with white hanging past her shoulders. It must have been taken when she was middle-aged. She looked very different in the photo from when Hilton had known her because she was so heavy, and her dark face so smooth, but Hilton felt a familiar quiver as he gazed at her eyes. Nana.

“When did you put this up?” Hilton asked Auntie when she handed him a plate with a huge slice of yellow cake.

“Months ago, Hilton. You just never saw it. I got tired of letting it sit up in the room. Take it with you if you want.”

Yes, he wanted to, more badly than he’d realized before Auntie offered. It was a crime he’d left it here all of these years with so little thought. This photograph was the only memento he’d taken with him from her little house in Belle Glade when CJ. and Auntie drove him up to gather his clothes after she died. He’d left behind her hymns, her books, everything. He’d thoughtlessly abandoned any chance he might have had to know her.

Carefully, Hilton lifted the photo’s frame from the nail on the wall, admiring his grandmother’s face. Her nose was African, broad and flat, and the Seminole jutted in her sharp cheekbones. She was a warrior, to the last.

“I miss her,” Hilton said unexpectedly.

“‘Course you do,” Auntie said.

Hilton sat and ate, the photo in his lap, while C.J. and Auntie watched television and threw out bits of news from the neighborhood—whose children had married, whose children were on drugs or had AIDS. Neither said a word about Hilton’s separation from Dede, nor did they ask him why he wasn’t at work in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. That was their way. They’d treated him like a man since the day he first walked through their door, and they believed a man’s business was his own.

But Hilton wanted them to know everything. He told them about Goode’s sudden disappearance, and they expressed their relief. Hilton wanted to tell them about his marriage problems, what Raul had told him, and why he wouldn’t be back to work for at least a few more weeks. But the story was so long, and the silence had become so ingrained, Hilton had no idea where to begin.

And though they were both educated, could they really understand the idea of his schizophrenia without fastening ignorant stereotypes to the illness? C.J.’s sister was certifi-ably senile, and C.J. had a tendency to talk about her mercilessly. Hilton didn’t know if it was a defense mechanism because of his own fears of aging or a genuine lack of empathy. Guess what, C.J., Hilton could say, I’m crazy too.

Without prompting, C.J. raised the remote control and zapped the television set mute as the soap opera’s ending credits rolled across the screen. “That woman was something else,” he said.

“Who?” Auntie and Hilton asked in unison.

“Hilton’s Grandma Kelly. I don’t know if I ever met her outright. I can’t recall. The Belle Glade Kellys could be standoffish and didn’t always come to the reunions.”

“No more standoffish than the Miami Jameses,” Auntie said.

C.J. ignored her, shifting in his seat until he was facing Hilton. “I met her for sure the time she brought you to Virginia Key, but only in passing. She was setting up a table of desserts, and she was introduced with a whole bunch of other folks I hadn’t seen. She must have been, say, in her sixties, close to seventy.”

“Sure didn’t look it,” Auntie said, coaxing her Siamese cat to jump into her lap. She scratched the cat’s chin.

C.J. was chuckling suddenly, hiding his mouth behind his palm. “I don’t know what you’re laughing at, Carl,” Auntie said. “There’s not a thing funny I can remember about that day.”

C.J. nodded his agreement, swallowing the last of his chuckles. Hilton left his half-eaten cake on the coffee table beside his chair, listening. He remembered Nana had brought cake with coconut icing that day, but little else. His memories of the beach were vague, more recollections of emotions rather than of occurrences. C.J. was about to tell a story, perhaps a story Hilton hadn’t heard before. C.J. wasn’t a storyteller, so this would be a rare moment. This, Hilton realized, was why he had come.

“I’m sorry to laugh,” C.J. said, “but Hilton, I was just remembering the sight of your Grandma Kelly running across the beach that day.”

“That’s enough, Carl,” Auntie warned.

“No, go on, C.J.,” Hilton said. “I want to hear.”

C.J. mopped his glistening brow with his forearm. Their house wasn’t air-conditioned, and the breeze trickling through the open windows wasn’t quite comfortable on a March midafternoon when Miami’s truer climate was reappearing after a winter respite.

“She was a giant, maybe six foot tall. She was running like I’d never seen a woman run, like she was possessed, almost. I can see her now, panting, saying, ‘My boy’s going to drown!’ And we all looked at each other, because we couldn’t see anyone in the water at all. Not a soul. Truth be told, we were all chasing after that old coot so she wouldn’t drown herself. We thought maybe she was sanctified, wanted to baptize herself right there.”

“You ought to be ashamed,” Auntie said, cross.

“I know it,” C.J. said, laughing. “But I’m just telling the truth, now. That’s what we thought. Next thing we know, she’s ripping at her clothes, pulling her dress off. We just knew she’d lost her mind then.”

“I wish you would listen to yourself—” Auntie said.

C.J. held up his hand, his face turning serious. His eyes drifted away from them as he began to remember. “Even with all of us chasing her, and I mean grown men in full pursuit, we couldn’t catch that half-naked woman before she hit the water. And we thought she was fast before? Now, that woman could swim. We still talk about that, don’t we, Lorraine? Like a streak, like an Olympian. I tell you, I’ve never seen a thing like it, and I never will again. It was almost like she was riding on the water instead of swimming.”
hillll-ton . . .