My Soul to Keep Part 1

My Soul to Keep.

Tananarive Due.

Prologue.

Though his steps are not silent, no one hears the man walking down the darkened wing of Windsong Nursing Home in Chicago, his heavy soles echoing across the polished vinyl. His walk has the unhurried confidence of an administrator making his rounds, but since it is after nine o'clock, all of the administrators left hours ago, throwing on their coats and bracing their shoulders against Lake Michigan's unrelenting winds. Tonight's staff is small because of the snowstorm, which prompted some of the night nurses to call in sick. The man is alone in the wing.

He looks for 11-B uninterrupted, absently tapping each closed door with a leather-gloved hand as he pa.s.ses. The halls are painted in shades of cheery peach and gold; the colors are an obvious attempt to brighten the silent, fading spirits hidden behind the doors. Inspirational posters line the walls, one picturing new daylight peeking behind a snow-dusted mountain range: TOMORROW, THERE IS ANOTHER SUNRISE.

He knows where to find the old woman because he asked for her room number at the reception desk earlier that day. He pauses before touching the doork.n.o.b, as though he expects someone to challenge him, but the only sound is the whir of the central heating system. He slips inside. The glow of a fluorescent light carelessly left on in the bathroom makes the room look frozen. The walls are bare. The only evidence of human occupation is a slight form shrouded beneath the sheets in the bed closest to him. The other bed, luckily, is empty.

The old woman's head snaps toward him when she sees his exaggerated shadow on the wall. He stands above the bed and can make out the lines that wrinkles have drawn across her face, the dryness of her lips, her sunken eyes surrounded by discolored skin. His stomach clenches and sinks.

Without meaning to, he says her name aloud. "Rosalie."

He knew she'd turned eighty on her last birthday, but he wasn't expecting this. Her face is a mask crumpled against the arcs of her hidden bones. Her white hair is so thin, it is nearly gone. And the backs of her hands ... splotched and defaced by age. He is nearly forced to look away, his aversion to her appearance is so strong. He realizes her illness has done this to her, eating away at her insides until only this sh.e.l.l remains. She must weigh next to nothing; if he wanted to, he could lift her without straining himself and carry her in his arms into the night.

He must struggle to remember how she looked before, honey-complexioned and bright-cheeked. His eyes run over with tears. It is unconscionable that he has waited this long to come to her, his own flesh. Death, he decides, will be her friend.

Her eyes widen as she stares at his uncorrupted youth, the face of a thirty-year-old. Her moistureless lips tremble violently as she tries to speak. "You came," she says in a hoa.r.s.e shadow of a voice. "We've been waiting. Folks tried to tell us you'd run off for good, but me and Rufus are waiting."

Rufus has been dead at least ten years, of congestive heart failure. He knows this because he saw the obituary while combing through the pages of the Trib in his ritualized search for familiar names among its pages. Rufus's was not the first he'd chanced upon, but seeing it had shocked him more than any other. His only consolation had been reading that Rufus had a survivor, his sister, Rosalie Tillis Banks of Chicago. Only then did he realize that Rosalie was still alive, that she had no one left except him.

What fanciful notion compelled him to call the Chicago operator to ask for Rosalie's telephone number now, after so long? Only to have it? No, of course not. He'd felt an overpowering need to hear her voice on the telephone, if only one or two syllables. But he'd waited nearly too long, confirmed the man who answered Rosalie's line. The old black woman who'd lived in the house before him was very sick, he said, and she'd moved to a nursing home. A day's searching brought him to her. Rosalie. She has seen his face, and she is receiving him with joy, nothing else. Rosalie must be living in her own world of delicate daydreams, where reality and imagination swap stories, he thinks. No wonder she doesn't have the sense to be afraid of him. Maybe, in her mind, he has come for her many times before.

"You know I couldn't leave you, Rosalie," he says, taking her frail hand into his. He shudders to touch her, repulsed and saddened when his fingers meet her sagging, unnatural flesh. This will not do for her, not at all. Not for Rosalie. This is only mockery of a human form!

For a precious few minutes, they speak about Chicago, State Street, the music that always filled the house. The piano and clarinet, his toys. Rosalie's giggles over the piano keys. He remembers Rufus and his temper tantrums. He imagines he can hear Christina's voice, straining for patience. All times from before, not long past. Everything she says makes his heart wring with old thoughts, forgotten regrets threatening to smother him. She sounds almost the way she did then, her voice rising with wonder as she stares, unblinkingly, into his face. She does not ask the first question about where he has been or how he has found her.

Finally, he sees her exhaustion as her eyes flit closed from time to time, so he says it is time for him to go. She clings to his hand tightly, clawlike, the way a child would.

"I have to do something, Rosalie," he says, leaning close. Even her scent, he notices, is unfamiliar to him. Time has made her a stranger in nearly every way. The countless reminders of what is different about her, what is ruined forever, make him tremble beside her.

"I know," she says, smiling. "I knew it when I saw you."

His teeth are locked tightly, hurting, as he walks to the neighboring bed to grasp the fresh white pillow. Now, all of his head hurts. When he walked into this room, all he'd antic.i.p.ated was a secret visit while she slept. Not this. Not an unretractable impulse. But isn't this precisely what the word mercy was crafted to explain?

He stands over Rosalie for a moment, cradling the pillow against his abdomen. Is it possible that this lump of living remains is the same that fit easily into her favorite red gingham dress, the one she wears in his memories? Is Rosalie's essence preserved somewhere here still?

He blocks those thoughts. He cannot doubt what he must do. "Rest, Rosalie."

He can barely hear the parting whisper from her tattered larynx. "Goodbye, Daddy," she says.

PART ONE.

Mr. Perfect.

1.

A low howl filled the two-story house, bleeding from the cracks in the knotty Dade County pinewood walls. There were intervals of peace, then the sound rose two octaves into a scream that splintered Jessica Jacobs-Wolde's sleep. She sat up, her eyes round. Kira, she thought. Was the awful noise coming through the wall from her daughter's room?

She reached out to touch her husband, but the s.p.a.ce beside her in the bed was empty. The aloneness startled her, and she accidentally bit her tongue. When the scream came again, she realized the noise wasn't human. With wakefulness, logical thought began to wash over her like daylight.

Of course it wasn't Kira. Kira wasn't sick. Princess was sick. The dog was screaming from somewhere downstairs, probably the living room. Jessica closed her eyes, simultaneously relieved and dismayed. Nothing terrified her more than being roused from sleep by a faceless emergency. Her heart raced in dread whenever the phone rang at two A.M., as if the impending disaster she'd spent her life antic.i.p.ating had arrived, just as expected. Sleep always made the unknown a tragedy, and this was bad in itself. There was something horribly wrong with the dog.

She heard clumping up the wooden stairs, then David's lanky form, in white briefs, appeared in the bedroom doorway. "We need to call the vet," he said, breathless. At certain times, like this, she could hear a buried lilt in his accent, showing his upbringing scattered between Africa and France. Usually, he sounded all-American bourgeois Negro, just like her. "We can't wait. I don't know what's wrong with her, Jess."

"I'll page him," she said, swinging her bare legs over the side of the bed to slip into her waiting Nikes. If you're a doctor, even a doggie doctor, you have to learn to expect calls at four in the morning, she told herself. She pulled the fading ta.s.sel on the black Oriental lamp on the nightstand, illuminating the helpless desperation on her husband's usually opal-smooth brown face. Worry lines were etched in his forehead. "See if Kira's awake, David. Don't wake her if she isn't."

He nodded, moving his lips to repeat her words before darting out of the doorway. His movements looked jerky, confused.

He was scared. She'd never seen him more scared in their seven years of marriage, aside from Kira's asthma attack the year before. They both lost their heads then, listening to their child gasping to breathe as they flew down the expressway. It was a wonder they hadn't crashed the car. To Jessica, that memory was still potent enough to make her chest tighten; she'd been convinced, for those endless minutes, that her child was dying in her arms and that she couldn't do a d.a.m.n thing. No mother should know that feeling.

Yes, thank you, dear Lord, it's only Princess, she thought. I hate for the dog to be sick, but better the dog than my baby.

Poor Princess.

Princess, by pure size, had reached nearly human status in their family, especially with David. The Great Dane gave Kira rides and chased David's Frisbees on the beach with a red kerchief tied around her bulky neck. Truthfully, Jessica had never been able to muster the same affection for goofy Princess as she felt for her rust-orange tomcat, Teacake, when he crawled on top of her breastbone and folded his paws beneath his chin, meeting her eyes for silent conversations. Dogs were entertainers; cats, philosophers.

But to David, Princess was family. Jessica stared up at an eight-by-ten photograph of Princess that David had framed on their bedroom wall. The sleek black Dane was wearing a birthday hat and seemed to be grinning for the camera. Goofy, but lovable. Jessica smiled sadly. She'd better find that vet's number if she wanted to keep David from having a breakdown. She fumbled through her overstuffed woven African purse for her directory.

She didn't understand it. One moment, everything was fine; the next, life took on a mind of its own.

Princess, glad to be out of the kennel after their vacation, had been jogging up and down the street with David earlier, just before sunset. But after she wolfed down a can of dog food, she found a corner in the house and retreated there, coughing slightly as though trying to dislodge something irritating from her throat. It reminded Jessica of a person who'd eaten something that had gone bad and didn't feel well.

David wanted to call Dr. Roman right away, even before the slight froth of dripping foam appeared at her jowls. But Jessica knew Princess couldn't be having a rabies attack, not just like that, and she'd had all of her shots. David wouldn't have let her bite a poisonous toad, and even if she had-as one of her family's two German shepherds had when Jessica was six-Princess would have died immediately. No, Princess was probably just nauseated. All she needed was a nap, and she'd be all better.

Let's give it until morning, she'd said.

Now, those words were ringing in Jessica's head with their stupidity. Again, she'd hoped to make something better by just ignoring it, hoping it would fix itself. She did it when her car made unfamiliar noises, when she got phone messages she didn't want to face, when she felt a strange ache or pain after a mishap. She should have learned better by now. She thought of the slogan at her dentist's office, which seemed to be posted for her benefit alone: IGNORE YOUR TEETH AND THEY'LL GO AWAY.

Princess wailed again, an agonizing plea that made tears find Jessica's eyes. What the h.e.l.l could be hurting poor Princess so much? Why did the dog have to get sick now? In just hours, Jessica would need to perform emergency cosmetic surgery on her nursing-home stories for the newspaper. It was hard enough to drag into work the first day after a week's vacation, but she'd never be alert now, considering that they'd just made the five-hour drive back from Orlando that afternoon. Images of strolling costumed characters, endlessly winding lines, and fireworks spectacles were still glued to her brain. She grabbed a Minnie Mouse pencil from her purse to jab Dr. Roman's number on the telephone. Following the voice mail's recorded instructions, she punched the code to page him. Minnie's carefree grin stared up at her inanely.

Dr. Roman had been treating Princess since she was a puppy four years before. He was the one who patiently taped and re-taped Princess's ears for months to help them stand upright, despite the dog's irritable wriggling. He would understand.

"Did you call?" David shouted from downstairs.

Jessica sighed. She'd told him not to wake the baby, not that anyone could sleep through all of the noise in the house. Sure enough, Kira pulled her door open and stuck her fuzzy head out. Jessica still called her The Baby, forgetting she wasn't a baby at all. "Mommy," Kira demanded, whispering, "what's wrong?"

Jessica went to her and leaned over to kiss her forehead, then took Kira's hand to lead her back into the dark room. Kira's old Beauty and the Beast night-light glowed on the wall near her bed, a beacon against boogeymen. Jessica always felt like a little girl again in her daughter's room, with its happy colors and toys and the sweet smell of mini candy bars melting in their wrappers on her windowsill. David was a good artist, and he painted a new cartoon character on Kira's east wall each year; it was long past time to paint over the broad-chested, smirking blue genie from Aladdin. Before that, it had been Barney's wall. Jessica hadn't been sorry to see that sugar-coated purple beast go.

"Princess is still sick. You just stay in here, okay? Don't come out. Go back to sleep." Tears already. Kira bit her bottom lip hard. "What's wrong with Princess?" She would be sobbing soon unless Mommy said something rea.s.suring.

"We don't know, honey," Jessica said. "We'll fix it."

"Mommy, will she die?"

Another yelp from downstairs, as though Princess had been struck sharply. Jessica tried to hold her expression blank, pretending she'd heard nothing, as though the dog's pain wasn't hurting her. She stroked the top of Kira's head. "Shhhh. Go to sleep, sweetheart. It'll be better soon."

Teacake warbled and bounded into the room. Jessica lifted the oversized cat and dropped him on top of Kira's bed as she slipped back beneath her blanket.

"Your job is to watch Teacake, okay?" Jessica asked.

"Okay. I'll do that," Kira said with an urgency of purpose.

Downstairs, David was kneeling beside Princess on a pallet he'd made from blankets and newspapers near the dining nook, the corner of the house he had converted into his office. His computer sat on the dining room table in the midst of piles of papers. He'd stacked history journals, music theory books, hardbound cla.s.sic novels, and language books on shelves that reached the ceiling. Sometimes the clutter of their house made Jessica feel like she couldn't breathe, and she wondered if Princess was having the same reaction. Princess was lying p.r.o.ne, her head resting against the hardwood floor beyond the pallet, her eyes wide open. Foam was still dripping from her mouth. David stroked her neck, occasionally rubbing behind her upright ears.

"Maybe you shouldn't touch her. She may bite you. She's in agony," Jessica said, squatting beside him.

"She won't bite. She knows it's me."

"David, I wish I could figure out what happened."

"We missed something," David said, moving his hand to Princess's abdomen. "Feel here."

Gingerly, Jessica touched Princess. She drew her hand away quickly. Princess's abdomen was stone-bloated and tight. "Oh, my Lord. What's-"

"It's serious. We should have done something. It's not just her throat. It's something internal." David could barely speak.

Hindsight. d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n. It was her fault. An apology was forming on Jessica's lips when the phone rang, its sudden shrill making her jump. Their living room phone was an old-fashioned black antique with a rotary dial, and it rang with a jangling bell that reached every corner of the house. She grabbed it to silence it.

Dr. Roman sounded put out at first, but he drilled her with questions about Princess's condition. Had she eaten just before she got sick? Did her tummy feel bloated? When did it first start? The longer they spoke, the less sleepy his voice became, and the more rapid his words.

"I want you and your husband to get her to my office," Dr. Roman said, "but I feel obligated to prepare you. It sounds like it might be a stomach torsion, Jessica, and if it is, it's very grave. Princess may not make it. The only thing would be surgery, if it's not too late. And even then..."

She saw David staring up at her expectantly, and she could only listen with her mouth half open as the veterinarian's words a.s.saulted her with their finality: Very grave. May not make it. "I don't think we can lift her," she said softly to Dr. Roman, filling a silence on the line she'd been unaware of for seconds.

"We'll lift her," David said, standing, sounding encouraged.

Jessica stared at him and shook her head slowly, the tears creeping to her cheeks. She watched David's boyish face change slowly, from puzzlement to gradual understanding to despair. He understood her eyes. Once again, he kneeled beside his dog and began to stroke her ears, speaking to her in low, soothing tones. Princess had been very quiet for a long time. "I'll meet you at the office," Dr. Roman said to Jessica.

Jessica told Kira not to worry and to stay in bed. They were opening the front door because Mommy and Daddy were putting Princess in the car, and then Mommy would be right back.

Luckily, the minivan was empty because Jessica had forced David to help her move their bags out so she wouldn't have to face the task in the morning. They folded the backseat forward to make room. Jessica hesitated to touch the dog at first, still thinking she might snap at them, but David was getting frantic, telling her to hurry up and to take the dog's haunches.

Sweet Jesus. The dog weighed nearly two hundred pounds and felt unbelievably heavy. They strained to half drag her across the aged marble tiles to the doorway, then they grabbed her at either end to lift her into the back of the minivan, which David had driven over their dirt pathway to back in as close as possible to the front door. Princess, wide-eyed, didn't utter a complaint. By the time David slammed the back hatch down, they were both perspiring and Jessica's forearms ached.

Jessica smelled something in the air besides the blend of their combined unshowered musk; it was sickness, turgid and bitter.

Jessica stood in the breeze and watched the vehicle rock as it drove up the steep driveway, the only sound on their quiet street of houses sleeping beneath a blanket of eucalyptus and ficus trees, and majestic old oaks buried with hanging moss. The red lights from the minivan's brakes lit up the street, illuminating clumps of the moss that appeared to be hanging from air. Then, with a screech, David was gone. Jessica heard the water from Little River lapping softly behind their house, and a dog from across the way barked into the dark. Princess's favorite basketball, riddled with teeth marks and half full of air, was on the front stoop beside Jessica, left behind.

Jessica sniffed and wiped her face with her nightshirt before she went back into the house. The sickness smell was on her. And she was alone. And, somehow, she already knew Princess would not be coming back.

Once inside, Jessica switched on the television set in the living room so a familiar noise would drive away her discomfort. As usual, David had the cable channel set to American Movie Cla.s.sics. The black-and-white movie, one of those Fred Astaire dance spectacles, made the living room a safe bluish hue. The song was so cheerful that it made the moment feel more p.r.o.nounced and ugly. Jessica went upstairs to look after her daughter, and to wait.

It was six-thirty, becoming light outside, when Jessica heard the front door open and knew David was back. She had been anxious, only half sleeping on top of the covers, and she felt equally wired and exhausted when he came up to the room. His eyes were pink from strain, vacant. His hair looked bunched.

"No?" Jessica asked.

David shook his head, not looking at her. He stepped out of the green University of Miami sweatpants he'd thrown on and folded them neatly to replace them in the drawer of their antique oak bureau. She knew he was acting out of habit; he should be putting them in the hamper in the bathroom instead.

"It's called a stomach torsion," David said mechanically, as though reading from a veterinary textbook. "It happens with big dogs. Especially Great Danes. Sometimes they're too active or they eat too fast, and their stomach just ... twists ..."

"I'm so sorry, baby," Jessica said. She replayed the dog's last hours in her mind; Princess tearing around the clear patch of gra.s.s on the side of their house, barking at their neighbor, then coughing, the foam at her mouth. How could they have known? "Did he say it would have made a difference if we'd ..."

"I didn't ask," David said quickly, and Jessica knew then that he had asked, and that acting sooner might have saved Princess.

David sighed, shrugging, his back still to her. He was slender but toned, and his shoulder blades poked gently against the sinews of his back. "I guess it was us being out of town, her cooped up at the kennel all that time. A d.a.m.n week. She was just so excited. I don't know. Maybe when she ate, it went down wrong. Something. Dr. Roman said it happens to Danes a lot."

Now, with confirmation, Jessica realized how bad, really bad, this was. Very soon, they would have to wake their five-year-old and tell her that the playmate she'd known as long as her world had existed was gone. Just like that.

David Wolde climbed into the bed beside his wife, hugged her tightly from behind, and began to cry.

2.

Jessica had filed her story with her editors before leaving for Orlando, at midnight to be exact. It had seemed like a painfully long story even then, but now that she'd come back to find the drafts cluttered with highlighted memos and questions, every inch of it weighed on her brain. The main story and sidebar made up ninety solid inches of newspaper copy.

The last thing she'd said to David before she left for work at eight-thirty, after not even two hours of nervous sleep, was that she would be home early. Now, it was past noon and she realized that leaving early, or even on time, would be impossible. This might be one of those twelve-or fourteen-hour days, today of all days. The expose was the Sunday showpiece, so it needed to shine.

Jessica had been on the elite investigative team of the Miami Sun-News for a year, and this was her first major contribution without sharing a byline with another reporter. She'd spent two months researching the abuse and neglect of the elderly in nursing homes, which was sparked by an anonymous tip-off from a former worker at a place called Riverview in Little Haiti. She'd visited there and talked to an old Haitian man, Frederic, who was so infected with bedsores that he was permanently disfigured, his right foot amputated from gangrene. David tagged along to both of her interviews with the toothless old man to translate his Creole, since Jessica didn't trust the nursing staff to accurately interpret his words. David was a master linguist, and Creole was one of eight languages he spoke fluently.

The old man's bedsores were mild compared to the tale he wove. Frederic claimed that the man who'd shared his room, a former school headmaster, had died after two days of unattended moaning and gasping. "He sick, sick," he'd told Jessica in broken English, his eyes running with water. "I say man sick. All day, all night. No listen. No listen." In Creole, he told of how helpless he'd felt, saying the world is on its head because the young ignore pleas from the old. His stories made Jessica's own eyes itchy with tears as she sat beside his bed, scribbling his words. After both visits, she and David went home and talked about Frederic late into the night. Those nights, she took special care to call her mother before she went to sleep.

Luckily, the dead man's family had demanded an autopsy, which uncovered a partial throat obstruction, and Jessica found a physician who confirmed that it could have been treated easily. Then, Jessica harangued the county medical examiner into conceding on the record that Riverview's handling of the man's death "on appearance, may not be shy of neglect."