The Good House Part 11

The Orishas sang about Chango, too. Their drums were probably playing to Chango, Corey thought. Osvaldo had shown him a dance for Chango, clowning in cla.s.s one day. Flapping his arms like a chicken, hips quivering. The other kids had laughed, but Corey thought it looked cool as h.e.l.l, dancing for a G.o.d. Osvaldo's skin was white, but Corey realized when he saw him doing that chicken dance that Osvaldo was more African than he was. Africa was still living in Osvaldo.

"This music's all right," Corey said, nodding to the Orishas' beat.

With twenty-four days to live, Corey Hill started to believe the summer might not be so bad.

That night, Corey dreamed of a door painted bright blue, an endless blue. It was the same dream he'd had every night since his arrival in Sacajawea, always returning as soon as he was asleep, the lone fixture in his dream s.p.a.ce. Corey settled into the dream as if he were returning home, bathed in whispers without true voices as he walked toward the door he visited so often.

Behind the blue door, Corey heard someone calling his name.

Nine.

Present-day.

MONDAY.

IT HAPPENED WITHOUT FORETHOUGHT.Instead of going left toward the master bedroom where she had planned to take a nap after driving Naomi to the airport, Angela went to the bedroom across the hall from hers, next to the window seat, the room with the closed door. She turned the bra.s.s doork.n.o.b, pushed the door open, walked in.

Since the curtains were open, the sun soldiering outside washed the smallish bedroom in light. Bare wooden floorboards reflected the sunlight, bouncing it back up against the white walls. The room looked like a dream-s.p.a.ce, and for an instant it seemed to be a living thing because so many of the sights impacted her at once: Janet Jackson flirting in the poster on the wall with a sculpted midriff, Corey's jeans and bath towel thrown across the back of his chair, his desk covered in CD jewel cases, his wire notebook open beside them, an overflowing black duffel bag stuffed halfway into the open closet door, Corey's Air Jordans in the middle of the floor-one toppled on its side, the other standing upright, just tossed off. Corey must be standing behind the door, Angela thought, certain of it. She could almost hear him breathing.

There was a neatly folded note on the pillow mound on the made-up bed. Angela was so calm, she did not feel the maws of panic when she saw the note, even though a part of her nightmarish vision had leaped into reality. There had not been a note in here That Day. She and Tariq and Sheriff Rob Graybold had searched this room for a note-they had opened the desk drawers and flipped through Corey's notebook full of poems and rap lyrics-and there had been no note explaining why he was dead. This note was new. Angela unfolded the piece of stationery and read the familiar jittery script, an old woman's: Angie- I made the bed, but I didn't see fit to move anything without your say so.

If you would like this room cleaned, please let me know.

Rgds, Laurel Everly Bless you, Mrs. Everly, Angela thought. It would be better if the bed hadn't been made, but this was good, too. An untouched room was the only way to commune with Corey now, where she could spend time in his personal s.p.a.ce and take note of the evidences of him.

She needed to see him again.

Angela looked behind the door, and Corey's brown bomber-style leather jacket hung there. She'd given him that jacket for Christmas, and he liked it so much he'd brought it to Sacajawea despite the summer heat. The jacket's brown leather still smelled new. Gently, Angela took the jacket from its hook and searched for her son's scent. The leather smell was strongest because the jacket had not belonged to him long, but Corey was there at the neckline. A teenager's cheap cologne, glycerin and oils from a hair moisturizer he'd started using to make his tight, wiry black locks glisten. At the armpit, the jacket's black lining smelled of deodorant and a whisper of tart musk.Yes . Corey'd had a strong smell since p.u.b.erty, with strong body salts, like his father. Smelling him was a shock. Angela's legs felt weak, but only in a twinge. She wished she could bottle Corey's smell and keep it.

What had kept her from coming to see her son? Corey had been here all along.

She went to his desk next, reading the poems left behind in his notebook. She had tried once before, desperate to find traces of him, but hadn't been able to finish. This time, she wasn't as bothered by the s.e.xuality and profanity as she had been right after he died, when she'd wanted so much to find only his childlike affection preserved, not his burgeoning manhood. She'd felt so crushed by the disappointment of whatwasn't in his words, in her memory Corey's poems had been p.o.r.nographic, a source of shame. Now, she read Corey's writings with appreciative eyes.

Sweet honey cream, wild woman of my dream, will you swallow me h-o-l-e?

Can I be the burrowing mole in your field of streams?

Can you hear my (eager) screams?

Hold my l.u.s.t with your fevered hand.

Let me taste the Promised Land.

"You were becoming a writer, weren't you?" Angela said.

For an hour, Angela sat at the edge of her son's bed and read, forgetting about Naomi and Onyx. The creations from Corey's pen awed her. Corey's love poems were full of surprisingly astute s.e.xual metaphors, but not all of the poems were s.e.xual. She was amused to see that he'd written a poem about Sean's horse, Sheba. And his rap rhymes, although they were littered with the requisitef.u.c.k ands.h.i.t seasonings to make them palatable to young tastes, were more than the empty bravado she'd a.s.sumed they were. One longer rap, called "Rebelution," seemed to be a plea to young blacks to look beyond society's expectations of them. One of her favorite pa.s.sages from "Rebelution" was:Five-O? You best just go. / You ain't got s.h.i.t on me. / This n.i.g.g.ah don't subscribe to slave mentality. / Your prisons don't define me, / This rebel's got a mind,G.

Inevitably, she came to a blank page, and then another. And another. She'd reached the end of Corey's work. Angela flipped forward into the notebook, finding nothing until she was nearly at the end, with only five or six pages remaining. There, she saw Corey's handwriting in block letters so large that five words nearly took up the entire page: WE HAVE f.u.c.kED UPBIG.

The wordBIG was underlined six times. The ink was dark, and the paper was deeply indented, so she knew Corey must have been bearing down hard on the page. The sight of the ominous phrase was such a stark contrast to the other writings that Angela felt her fingertips thrill when she touched the words. The next pages in the notebook were bleak white. She checked them one by one. Empty.

Secret s.e.x poems. Secret fears. Her son's secret life.

Angela ma.s.saged a cramp in her neck. Corey might have written those last words close to the date of his death. He'd separated that page from the work he cared about, perhaps choosing it at random in a moment of anxiety. Had he met a girl and gotten her pregnant? Had he killed himself because he'd been afraid to tell her and Tariq about something he'd done?

"Was it really so hard to talk to me, Corey?" Angela said. "Was I that bad?"

It wasn't a suicide note, not exactly, but it was evidence that Corey had been upset about something. That wasn't a surprise. She knew he'd been upset that day. She'd asked him several times what was wrong, but this was the first clue she'd come across. Why hadn't this notebook been taken into evidence? How had this been overlooked?

Suicide. The word raked at her, but Angela had always known it was possible. No, it was probable. Would she rather believe that a boy as bright as Corey had found a gun, accidentally put it to his head, and pulled the trigger? A young child might do that, but a teenager? Yes, it happened, Sheriff Rob Graybold had said. Teenagers play Russian roulette all the time. Or, Corey might not have realized the gun was loaded. She'd accepted the accidental death theory only because it was more gentle than the alternative.

Corey's last note had nothing to do with her, and Angela felt relief roll across her soul. Who did the "we" in the note refer to, then? And was there a relationship between WE HAVE f.u.c.kED UPBIG and his last words to her,I'm gonna take care of you good? Angela's heart raced, although the racing had nothing to do with the fear that had kept her away from Gramma Marie's house and Corey's room for so long. This was something else. Resolve. Excitement, even. She could solve this. She would find the answer because she was no longer afraid to look for it.

Angela went to Corey's closet, where a few of his clothes were hanging up neatly while most of them were piled on the floor, hidden from sight. This time, she didn't pause to search for his scent. Angela studied the clothes on the floor, which were mostly dirty, stained with gra.s.s, mud, and dried perspiration. She checked the pockets of his jeans. She found a movie stub for the R-ratedThe Fast and the Furious, which Tariq must have snuck Corey in to see in Longview, d.a.m.n him. An Almond Joy wrapper. Loose change. She didn't know what she was looking for, but she figured she would know it when she saw it.

Angela moved on to the duffel bag, and she found a box of condoms in a zippered compartment. The box had been opened, so she counted the wrapped condoms inside, finding eleven. One was missing, then. That made sense, she remembered: There had been one condom hidden in Corey's wallet, which he'd had in his back pocket at the time of his death. She'd brought that wallet home with her, and it was probably in her box of Corey's things, somewhere in her bedroom. She wished she had brought it with her.

Angela found a dozen CDs in the duffel bag, all of them marked with Explicit Lyrics parental advisories. Little stinker, Angela chuckled. She'd run the same game on Gramma Marie in high school, keeping her Richard Pryor alb.u.ms hidden from her grandmother's prying eyes, listening to them late at night, with the volume turned low. She couldn't help thinking that Richard Pryor was definitely the better end of the artistic deal, but every generation has its heroes, she reminded herself. She'd been looking forward to the day when Corey would no longer be a minor, when she wouldn't feel responsible for shepherding his values, and she might have said,Okay, Corey, put on some Snoop Dogg and tell me what's so special about his dope-smoking and p.u.s.s.y-hunting . The day Corey graduated from college, she had planned to share a gla.s.s of wine with him, and on that day they could have started becoming friends instead of just two strong-willed individuals with conflicting agendas, the role they had been mired in all his life.

Tariq had never pushed the parent s.p.a.ce with Corey, behaving like a buddy from the day the kid could talk, and she'd always felt forced to take up the slack. Dominique Toussaint had never been stable enough to keep track of where Angela was, who she was with, or what she was doing, leaving her to make her own decisions, and as a consequence Angela had been drinking Schlitz and smoking pot at twelve, having s.e.x a few months later, when she was thirteen. Gramma Marie had given her boundaries. Corey had never had the chance to grow up and understand why Angela had been so rigid about discipline, so fanatical about not exposing him to predators and seemingly innocuous traps. To Corey, she'd been the Bad Cop to his father's Good Cop, and it wasn't fair. She'd never had the chance to be his buddy, too.

Angela felt some of her newfound strength seep away as new tears fell. She needed to lie down. She went to Corey's bed and lay atop the bedspread, her knees pulled close to her chest in a fetal position. She waited for sobs, but they never came. A raw sense of regret burned in her chest, flaring hot, but it would cool soon. Grief in smaller, manageable doses.

She could do this.

Angela faced the window's sunshine where she lay, and her eyes rested on the window seat, which Corey had left piled with his good-sized boom box, a stack of clean socks, and copies ofVibe magazine. Staring, Angela felt memory tickling her, and something more nebulous than memory. Something she could not put a name to.

The window seat in this room, like the ones in the master bedroom and the hallway, opened up to reveal a cranny beneath the seat, she remembered. Angela wasn't sure if Corey had known the s.p.a.ce was there, but she felt an overpowering desire to see if anything was inside. Somethingwas inside. For the first time since her Fourth of July party, Angela felt genuine intuition.

Angela moved the items on the window seat carefully to the floor, clearing the cushion. That done, she gripped the whitewashed wood beneath the upholstered padding and lifted with both hands.

Angela gaped. And gaped more, her eyes traveling from one end of the s.p.a.ce to the other.

A white towel lay there, spread out with one stone at each corner, as if to hold it in place. A white bowl from the kitchen sat in the center, with a discoloration that told her it had probably been full for some time, the water slowly evaporating. Beside that, she saw an oft-burned white candle, half-melted, with a charred wick. There was some kind of tarnished saint's medal with a faded blue ribbon. And a photograph.

Her fingers trembling, Angela reached down to bring the photograph closer to her face, so she could be sure what she was seeing: It was a picture of Corey at three years old, grinning in the arms of snow-haired Gramma Marie. Her face was already thinning out, the way it had much more in the little time she had left to live when this picture was taken.

Christmas 1988. Two years before Gramma Marie died.

It was an altar. Gramma Marie had kept altars in her bedroom, with candles galore, pictures of Jesus, and all kinds of trinkets, although she had never explained the meaning of the altars to Angela beyond saying it was the place where she prayed. Gramma Marie had often left bowls of water sitting around the house, too, both on her nightstand and on top of the refrigerator, meant to serve as some kind of blessing. Warding off evil. It had always seemed silly to Angela.

Angela put the photograph back, noticing three paper bags crammed in the corner of the cranny, beyond the towel's border. All of the bags were wrapped tightly at the mouth, although the one closest to her was the most loose. Angela took that one first, and it was heavier than it looked. She peeked inside. It was half-filled with dark soil.

The second bag was lighter, spotted with faded dots of grease at the bottom. This one was full of dried chicken bones. No gristle or meat. Just bones.

"Jesus help," Angela said, surprised. Her spine vibrated, singing from the ma.s.sage of invisible cold fingers. Cautiously, she brought the bag to her nose, sniffing. Just dryness and the vaguest memory of flesh. Any maggots' work was long finished. These were old bones.

Confused, Angela unrolled the crumpled mouth of the third bag-and this time a black feather suddenly poked out at her. Angela dropped the bag with a gasp, falling onto her backside, her palms steadying her against the floor.

The bag lay on the floor before her, stock-still. Several black bird feathers had spilled onto the floorboards, but the movement had been her imagination, she decided. This bag was just filled with feathers. Raven feathers.

This must be one of Gramma Marie's old altars. This altar was crude, not nearly as lush as her old bedroom altar. Angela had regretted not leaving Gramma Marie's altar intact, and now she'd accidentally unearthed one she had never seen. She checked the s.p.a.ce one more time, and she found a stack of index cards bound by a red rubber band. She'd almost missed the cards because they were upright, leaning against the side closest to her, nearly out of her vision. She unwound the rubber band. Each card had a single symbol drawn in black Magic Marker. A triangle. A double-squiggle. These symbols looked familiar to her. Where had she seen them?

The answer was on her left ring finger, she realized. Gramma Marie's ring.

Angela compared the markings on her ring to those on the index cards, a dozen in all, and each symbol had a match, even if some were rendered less convincingly than others. The cards were hand-numbered, and Angela suddenly recognized the looping numerals. When she did, she felt what seemed like a stab of electricity.

This was Corey's handwriting, not Gramma Marie's. Jesus, was thisCorey's altar?

Sitting alone in the bright stillness of her son's bedroom, Angela held her breath. Corey had asked her about the symbols on her ring the day he died. She couldn't remember his exact words, but he had asked if the symbols had power. By G.o.d, he had. He had.

Angela didn't know what it meant, but she knew it was important. This mattered, and the fact that it mattered was slowly but surely scaring the h.e.l.l out of her. Condoms and profane CDs were one thing, but Corey had been hiding a part of himself she hadn't known a trace of. How had he learned to make an altar? Gramma Marie had died before she'd had a chance to teach him, and Gramma Marie had never taught her or her mother anything significant about hervodou roots, so why would she teach Corey? And if not her, then who?

Raising herself onto her knees to gaze back into the heart of the window seat's cavity, Angela surveyed the a.s.sortment of objects inside with growing trepidation. Her eyes couldn't leave the photograph of Gramma Marie and Corey that he must have placed there himself, for a reason she couldn't fathom. Gramma Marie looked old and tired, almost too weary to smile, and pudgy-cheeked Corey was bursting with the joy of new life. The two of them were posed together, their cheeks pressed close, frozen in time.

WE HAVE f.u.c.kED UPBIG, Corey's note said.

Angela had a firm inkling who the "we" was. And although it was terrible timing, she was going to find every sc.r.a.p of information she could about her son's last few weeks of life. She'd asked questions once before, long ago, and gotten nowhere.

This time, she had gotten somewhere already.

Ten.

THE DOUGH-FACED WOMANwho answered the door looked harried and distrustful, as if she were accustomed to unprovoked cruelties from strangers. She did not smile, and although she was probably no older than Angela, her forehead was already deeply grooved with lines.

"I'm your neighbor," Angela said. "I brought some things for Sean. He and my son were friends. I'm so sorry about what happened."

The woman's smallish eyes were dull, unresponsive. "Thank you," she said.

"Would it be possible for me to talk to Sean?"

The woman stepped aside. Her profile made her look heavier, with most of her weight carried behind her. "Come on in. He's in his room," she said.

Angela took a quick glance around the trailer before she followed the woman's pointing finger. She saw dishes piled precariously high in the sink in the kitchen near the entryway, and in the living room two young children who looked eight and ten were sitting in front of the television set. The little girl's thick gla.s.ses reflected the television screen, and the darker-skinned boy, who was older and taller, had an uneven Afro in dire need of either tr.i.m.m.i.n.g or combing. His hair must be a mystery to whomever was grooming him, Angela thought. Neither of the children glanced in her direction, transfixed by after-school television.

Sean's room was the first bedroom to her right, recognizable by the posters plastering the door and the raucous squeal of a rock guitar from inside. Angela knocked.

"I turned it down already!" came an annoyed shout. He might as well have been Corey.

"Sean, it's me, Corey's mother. Angela Toussaint."

After an instant, the music vanished in mid-riff. The door flung open, and Sean stood there with hair hanging over his eyes. His hair was s.h.a.ggier than Angela remembered it, closer to the way his father had worn it. Sean had also grown substantially. He was six feet and rangy, towering.

"Hi, sweetheart," she said, smiling sadly. "I'm so sorry about your dad."

Sean flipped his hair away from his eyes, resting his palm against his forehead. He gazed at her for a moment with an unreadable expression, more than simple surprise. "Yeah. Come in," he said, and he closed the door behind her.

Sean Leahy's room was a disaster. The floor had a few clear spots, but every other s.p.a.ce was covered with clothes, concert posters, books, traffic signs, naked store mannequins with bizarre body paint, or charcoal sketches, all of it marked with the scent of tobacco. Sean dumped a pile of clothes from his folding metal desk chair and turned it around to offer her the seat. Then, he sagged down onto his bed.

Angela sat, too. "I was going through Corey's room, and I found a few CDs I thought you might want. I remember how much you both enjoy music. I wasn't sure what to bring you, so maybe you can come to his room sometime and find something else you'd like."

Angela had brought Sean ten of Corey's CDs, mostly the ones with the explicit lyrics, because she couldn't bring herself to part with anything else, even music she had never heard of. Now, in Sean's presence, she felt magnanimous. She wanted to do something more for him.

"That's nice of you. I bet that was hard to do," Sean said. He looked inside the bag only briefly after resting it on the floor between his legs.

"Corey would want this."

She'd hoped the gift would relax him, but after his initial probing gaze, the boy was not making eye contact with her. He wasn't obvious about it, but he only glanced at her at short intervals before his eyes went to the wall behind her or to the floor. Anywhere but back to her face.

"You're going through a horrible time," Angela said.

A short sigh, but no answer.

"I'm really so sor-"

"s.h.i.t happens, huh? Excuse my language."

This was not the same carefully mannered boy who had visited her home and spent so much time discussing the books in her library with her, Corey's cheerful companion. Sean was skittish and distant, and Angela got the feeling that if she didn't come to her point soon, he would ask her to leave. From experience, she knew grief left little room for hospitality.

"What happened to your dad is awful," she said, "but I wanted to talk to you about Corey."

Sean shifted his body weight, rubbing the back of his neck. His pale blue eyes skipped toward her, then away. "What about him?"

Angela reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out the index cards marked with the symbols from her ring. This was a long shot, she knew, but it was the quickest way to answer the most troubling question that had arisen from her visit to Corey's room. She extended the cards to him. "Would you look at these and tell me..."

But Sean was on his feet. He held his palms up like he was being robbed, stumbling away from her. "I don't want those."

Angela paused, surprised by his reaction. "You know what these are?"

Sean didn't answer. His jaw had gone hard, resolute. This was the same way Sean had behaved when she and Sheriff Rob Graybold had questioned him right after Corey's death, volunteering nothing with a cornered look in his eyes.

"Put those away," Sean said, his voice at the barest edge of civility. It nearly scared her.

"All right, I'm putting them away," she said. She stuffed the cards back into her pocket, out of sight. "See? They're gone."

Sean eyed her warily, then sat again, clasping his hands between his knees. He was silent for a minute or longer. Angela sat in silence, waiting him out.