A Deeper Love Inside (50 page)

“How about you? You’re so cool in this confused world,” I said, maybe with too much emotion and attitude.

“I love them also. They are your father’s daughters. If it wasn’t for love, I wouldn’t be here right now,” he said comfortably. I like a man who can be masculine and comfortable when discussing love, like Elisha.

“Can I hug you?” I asked him, feeling emotional and grateful towards him.

“Nah, that wouldn’t be right,” he said, again with a smoothness that made me attracted and angry to be attracted.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a unrelated, unmarried woman,” he said. I guess that was a line out of his “Muslim manual.”

“I thought you said I was a young girl, a juvenile, a minor,” I reminded him.

“That’s what the law says. My eyes see something else,” he said.

“What about Winter?” I asked him.

“What about her?” he asked without changing a tone or his face. He was unmoved.

“Did you ever love her?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She’s not the kind of woman I would love,” he said.

“What about me?” I asked in too quick of a hurry.

“What about you?” he said calmly.

“Am I the kind of woman you could love?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he dismissed me.

“That’s not an answer.”

“You are Elisha Immanuel’s woman. He is a good man, strong, solid, and capable.”

“How do you know that?” I said softly, feeling like I had all of the
wind and breath kicked out of my body. Suddenly I was feeling naked in an unsexy way.

“I told you. I’ve been searching for you since ’94. When Sharp entered the picture, I found a whole new set of people who were connected and searching for you. Right now, Mr. Sharp is waiting for you. He was at the graveyard gate parked. I sent him back. Elisha has been searching for you for so long, that if you delay, he will become someone else’s husband,” Midnight warned, and his warning was burning in my breast, cutting through my heart, and churning in my belly.

“I just wanted to know if you were decent and if you thought that I am decent. I needed to know that, to hear that from you. That’s why I asked you that question: What about me?” I said, trying to erase my guilt.

“I’m not here to judge you. As a man, I’m as decent as a man could be. I know I have a soul. I know I have to answer to the MAKER of my soul, above all else. I can see that you are a beautiful woman, clearly. I feel like you’re decent and that your soul is good,” he said. “InshaAllah, my instincts are right.” He seemed to be thinking still. “Just be smart. Don’t compare yourself to others as a standard. Ask yourself if you are living right and true. And wear some damn clothes,” he said calmly. “Don’t show the world the same that you should only show your husband.”

“I’m not married yet,” I said. I don’t know why.

“I know. You’re also not stupid. So you’ll marry soon.”

“So you like Elisha!” I said, turning excited.

“I like him. Your father likes him. He went to see him a few days ago.”

“Elisha and Poppa.” That was so hard for me to imagine or believe. Elisha had gone all the way up by Canada to meet my father.

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“I know you think you did all of your living on your own. Some young heads think that way. Your father, Ricky Santiaga, protected you as much as any incarcerated father could protect his daughter. You might not realize that yet. Think about it: your father must have given you certain things that ultimately saved your life when you were in a tight spot.” He looked at me to see if I was considering his words. I thought of my money tree.

“Between you and I, my father was a political prisoner. He was away from my life for many years. I fought hard the whole way through his absence. But the whole time
I knew
it was my father who made me a man, who gave me the foundation and the lessons in life that made me a fighter who could win, a strong fighter,” Midnight said. “Mr. Sharp connected back to your father recently. But it was because of your father, Ricky Santiaga, and his reputation that made Mr. Sharp protect you. Mr. Sharp made it safe for you to be a young girl who didn’t get swallowed by the streets. Mr. Sharp was the first one to pick up on Elisha. Sharp’s man brought Elisha to Sharp for hanging round the back alley where you lived. Sharp had a sitdown with Elisha.”

I didn’t say nothing. Midnight was in the process of blowing my mind.

“After I hooked up with Sharp, I picked up Elisha. We didn’t have the same kind of sitdown that he and Sharp had or like me and you are having. I tested him, roughed ’im up a little, to make sure he could hold his own. That’s what men are supposed to do,” Midnight said solemnly.

“That’s good. Elisha loves a test,” I said casually then smiled, letting Midnight know Elisha is damn sure strong. Yet and still, in my heart, I knew Elisha wasn’t no killa. He walked with too much love for that.

Midnight had that energy like he had deleted a few men who deserved it. Like he eliminated them with a swiftness, without even a speck of doubt or hesitation.

“Now, you, Porsche, are Elisha’s job. Make him work for you.” Midnight smiled, his first smile, a million-dollar smile that is perma
nently pressed into my memory. I jumped on him, leaned against him, gave him a tight hug and a kiss on his cheek.

“Sorry,” I told him afterward, pulling back. “I’m subjected to violent outbursts,” I confessed. We both laughed.

Chapter 47

Four days later, in the back room of Sharp’s Golden Needle shop, the immaculate carpeted place where both Ricky and Lana Santiaga had once stood at the top of their game, I was sliding into my red debutante’s ball gown, designed by Mr. Sharp. It wasn’t short. It wasn’t long. The elegance of it was in both the fabric and design; the shoulder straps; the criss-crossing back out; the tapered waist; and the way it hugged my breast and stitched out my small waist and exploded in layers at my hips. It was “an eye catcher,” as Mr. Sharp put it. “A traffic stopper and a shockwave.” Once I was in it, I felt like a Spanish dancer, the ones who held castanets in their hands and made music with their fingertips combined with the click of their high heels. Then I imagined I was a female matador, wearing a dress so red that instead of one bull, it inspired a whole herd to charge and chase me.

Enticed by the feminine sleek satin heels that matched the dress and criss-crossed on my ankles, I still chose to wear a brand-new pair of red high-top Converses, which nearly gave Sharp a cardiac episode.

“I’m walking twenty-eight blocks to the organic market, Mr. Sharp, not on the New York or Paris runway!” He shook his head the way older people who love the young ones shake their head. “Drop ’em in your handbag, just in case,” he said. I opened the red Epi Leather. He dropped them in.

With my skin glistening, my manicure and pedicure perfectly designed in an overpriced, by-appointment-only exclusive Manhattan salon and my hair freshly done by Esmeralda herself, I began walking down Sharp’s block, past Sharp’s building and down twenty-eight more blocks. My excitement mounted with each step. I loved that when I walked out of Elisha’s life for a while, he didn’t suspect me, like I was out hoeing or anything like that. “You said you love me, so don’t go loving no one else,” he had told me when I was twelve, and that meant the world to me. It made me hot when he had first said it. It kept me hot, on many cold lonely nights on the roads far away from Brooklyn.

The sun was bright and high. The air was thick and warm. I was feeling a thousand pounds lighter than I had in eight years. The Brooklyn summer sidewalks were swelling with people. None of them were wearing debutante gowns. I was wearing one, and several sets of eyes were massaging me—the men, the boys, and even the women. I was almost there, but couldn’t see my way clear to the organic market.

Surrounded by three hundred people, Elisha finally saw me. As I pushed through them, he moved towards me. The people were cheering for him, I realized. However, it seemed that Elisha could only see me. Serious-faced till we reached one another, he grabbed me up and hugged me so tight and squeezed me so hard! Over his strong shoulder I saw cameras snapping our photos. He must’ve seen cameras, too, and him knowing that I didn’t want my photos taken, grabbed my hand and bolted, pulling me through the crowd. Now we were running, and the crowd began chasing us. Elisha was leading, my feet were running and my heart was racing. The Eyewitness News van was chasing us with their television cameras. I couldn’t fucking believe it. I looked back at the crowd and instead of getting smaller and farther away, it was increasing in size and getting closer as we ran. My body was excited. I didn’t have time to think. I was just feeling the rush and the thrill of fleeing.

Traffic was jamming as people spilled into the streets. Drivers stepped out of their cars to try and see and understand what was happening. Shop owners were leaning out their doors, some of ’em calling out Elisha’s name with enthusiastic familiarity. I began laughing. What was going on?

“Elisha, where are we running to?” I asked him, as we kept moving.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Long as we running together.”

• • •

In a schoolyard in Brooklyn, Elisha’s old school, at 7:00 p.m., one thousand people, many of them teens like Elisha and me, were sitting on the cement facing a huge outdoor movie screen, which Elisha had arranged. Excitement filled the air. Vendors with popcorn machines, hot sugared almonds, sliced fruits, ICEEs, ice pops ’n creams, and other treats outlined the yard and their businesses were bubbling.
Kids and parents were racing back to squeeze in next to where their families were seated.

Elisha had still not let go of my hand from when he first grabbed it hours ago. We were seated in the center of the crowd, like regular viewers. Elisha had one arm and one leg tossed around me. It felt good. The movie soundtrack began and hundreds of more people gathered outside of the schoolyard fences to watch Elisha’s first film,
A Love Supreme
.

The soundtrack was awesome. It had emotion and as a dancer and lover of music, I knew that only the best musicians could make music that made crowds of people all catch the same deep feeling at the same time from the same song. It was nice to see a sea of strangers, yet familiar faces, in a Brooklyn neighborhood all grooving together, bodies rocking in syncopation.

When the movie began I saw the familiar face of the female star. It was Audrey. My insides tangled a bit. I was thinking more clearly now. I had left her alone with my man for way too long, stupidly. How dark my mind must’ve been. So dark, I couldn’t consider her, or any other girl or put the possibility of losing him in the first position. Maybe there would be love scenes. Maybe the two of them had rehearsed those scenes over and over again, the way I had laid with Elisha, reciting lines and quizzing him for tests and learning and loving him. Maybe in the making of the film, while I was Momma’s little moneymaker, dancing out my sorrows and my madness, miles and miles away, Audrey had squeezed into his heart. I knew that didn’t mean that I wasn’t in his heart. But maybe it meant I was and she was, too.

That thought triggered the feelings that began to unfreeze my heart, which I had locked up and made ice cold at Momma’s burial. I wrapped my arms around Elisha’s waist. I could feel him, taller, wider, stronger than the strong he already was. While I was away, he had evolved from boy to man, and as both boy and a man he had always been so beautiful to me. As he felt me clinging to him, he held me even tighter.

In some moments, I recognized faces of Elisha’s friends in the film, faces I had seen him talking or walking or working with in our summer together, which began passionately on my birthday when I
turned thirteen. It was a close and thick love between us that continued till seven days before I turned fourteen. That was when Momma showed up to the underground, bruised and broken.

Elisha was down there with me, beneath the floor of Big Johnnie’s store. It was only the second time we had been down there alone. I had told him that we shouldn’t be down there together, because down there nothing would stop him from making love to me, especially not me or him. Down there, we would do things that felt so good that we wouldn’t end up doing anything else but that, which would disappoint both of our well-loved mothers.

I knew Elisha was a great man, and I didn’t want to be the reason he got stuck, causing him to lose focus, lose the confidence of his parents, especially his mother who loved and adored him tremendously. Elisha’s dreams were in color and were larger than many young men could ever imagine. He believed in them, more importantly, he believed he could accomplish them easily. I didn’t want to be the cause for his dreams to die. So we did that year together outdoors, in our market and in parks and schools, restaurants, and studios. Together we stood on the Brooklyn Promenade smelling the stinky water and acting out scenes while glancing at the incredible sky. We walked over the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan. We shopped in the most unique and most odd stores and window-shopped in the most expensive places. Occasionally we mixed with Elisha’s friends, but the majority of times he kept me to himself, which is what we both preferred. Porsche was in love with him. Siri was in love with him. Ivory was in love with him, deeply.

Seven nights before my fourteenth birthday, he strummed a song for me beneath a weeping willow in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. It was one of those summer evenings where the night temperature was as hot as the day. The song he played was his version of Al Green’s song, titled “Simply Beautiful.” His fingers moving on those strings, love in every stroke, the music floating in the open air, sounding more better than in a closed-in room. It was a moaning kind of song moving mostly on feelings, much more than lyrics. Elisha had me so open that night that I wanted him to make love to me. Both my heart and my body couldn’t wait or resist or avoid anymore. I didn’t tell him with words.

When he walked me home, I was touching him in the back alley
right outside of the metal door in the floor. So he was touching me back and we were against the brick wall unable to manage our passion any further. “Stay with me?” my lips said softly, and my eyes begged him.