Leap Year (18 page)

I found her most uncooperative about the whole matter, which leads me to believe that she should be at least more closely supervised, if not dismissed. I know it isn’t easy to find qualified daycare practitioners, but our record hasn’t been very good. It seems that if Kate isn’t singing insipid Jesus songs (remember Mrs. Betty?) she’s performing satanic rituals. I’m all for progressive education (we’re planning to send Kate to the Little Red School House), but I feel that activities in the daycare center may be getting out of hand. I hope you agree with me and will look into this matter. Perhaps we should schedule a meeting to discuss this.

“What can you do?” the man asked Heath.

“Well, I can mix just about any drink known to man. I’m good with people. And I’ve had lots of experience: I’ve worked for two years at the Cafe Wisteria—that’s in Tribeca—and before that I worked in a restaurant in Charlottesville.”

“Can you do tricks?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, tricks. Like in that movie.”

“What movie?”

“The one with Tom Cruise.
Cocktail.
Have you seen it?”

“No,” said Heath. “I heard it was awful.”

“Awful? It was great. You should have seem him. He could…well, he and this other guy, they threw bottles around and danced a lot and shook drinks behind their backs. He also recited poems, but I wouldn’t want you to do that. I don’t like poetry.”

“Well, I’m just a normal bartender. I mix the drinks, you know, without messing around.”

“Anyone can do that. I can do that. What I want is someone who can dance around and throw stuff. Juggle, I mean.”

Get me out of here, thought Heath. Colette Menzies, his lawyer, had told him he had to find a job: He couldn’t be unemployed when his case came to trial, especially now that Solange was dead. Colette didn’t appreciate the fact that he had been trying but that no one wanted to hire someone accused of attempted murder. She told him if worse came to worst, he would have to go to McDonald’s. A few days earlier he thought he had found a job as a Party Animal. He would have had to dress up like a dog or something and go to children’s birthday parties and act stupid. The person doing the hiring thought it would be okay to use him because he’d be in a disguise, but then she called back the next day to say the boss had said no. A cow Party Animal had recently molested a birthday girl, so they were being unusually careful.

Heath hadn’t slept since he heard Solange had died, at least not at night. He slept a little during the day in front of the TV, but it was hard to tell how much he slept because he watched soap operas and time seemed very skewed on them. He also noticed how nobody had windows in their houses on the soaps. Or if they did, their curtains were always drawn.

He had called David a couple of times and listened to his machine, trying to think of some clever, pithy, and hurtful message to leave. But he thought of nothing. Once David had picked up, which was odd, since he was living downtown with Loren.

It was horrible just waiting to be found guilty. Sometimes he thought about killing himself. All he knew was that he didn’t want to go to prison. The one night he had spent in jail had been awful. One of the men in the cell with him—a thin drunk man with very few teeth—kept trying to hug him. For luck, he said. I’ll hug you for luck. Come here and I’ll hug you. I’ll hug you good. Heath couldn’t face fifteen years of that.

Solange woke up in the hotel room in Aix. It was evening. The room had gone dark. It was still raining. Someone—Anton—was closing the terrace doors, drawing the drapes. He came and sat beside her on the huge tousled bed.

“Darling,” he said, stroking hair off her forehead, “you’ve slept for ages. Was it nice?”

She looked up at him. In the gloom she could just make out his face, peering lovingly down at her. “I’ve been dreaming…” she said.

“Lovely,” he said. He lifted back the blankets from her throat, tucking them under her breasts, which lay uncovered, quivering slightly in the cool air, like something at the bottom of a river. He touched them both. “You’re shivering,” he said.

“You didn’t kill me,” she said.

He smiled, leaned down, touched his lips to her sternum. “Not quite,” he whispered into her skin.

She reached her hand out from under the blankets and stroked the back of his head, tangling her fingers in his silky hair.

“I thought you were going to kill me,” she said.

He lifted his head, brought it close to her face. “Was I too rough, darling?” he asked.

“No,” she said, confused. “It’s…I thought I was…I thought you were…it was an awful dream.” She lifted her face toward his, kissed him, long and slow. She closed her eyes and reached out in the dark to embrace him, to pull him down alongside her, but her hands, however far out they reached, remained empty.…She opened her eyes.

A large smiling woman sat beside her, patting the soles of her bare feet. “Well, you finally come to,” she said. “We was beginning to wonder.”

Solange closed her eyes.

“Whoah,” said the woman, cradling her face. “Open up. You ain’t going back now you come to. We was worried about you, I’ll say. I got to call Coco. I promised I’d call her moment you come to. I’m Coco’s ma.”

“Coco?” said Solange.

“She’s my daughter,” the woman said. “She brung you here. You been staying with me.”

“How long?” Solange asked.

“Almost two weeks. You was down real deep. We thought you might never come up. I got to call Coco.”

Solange looked around the room. She was lying on a couch, swaddled in an afghan crocheted from fluorescent synthetic yarns. There was an open tin of sardines on the coffee table before her and beyond that a mammoth console TV set on which flickered news.

“You must be starving. You want a fish?” the woman asked, stabbing a sardine with what looked like a fondue fork. She held it toward Solange, dripping bile-colored oil on the afghan.

“No,” said Solange. “Where am I?”

“This is Teaneck, New Jersey, darling. Now I’m going to call Coco. You look real peaky, so hunker back down, you hear. I’ll be right back.”

B
Y THE TIME
C
OCO’S MOTHER
returned from her phone call, Solange had recovered her wits and some of her natural color.

“Coco say she’ll be out to fetch you tomorrow night,” Coco’s mother said. “You hungry?”

“No,” said Solange.

“You should eat something. You ain’t et for two weeks. I could fix you some eggs. How about that?”

“No thank you,” said Solange.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“I think not,” said Solange.

“I’m Jewel,” said Coco’s mother. “You don’t remember Jewel?”

“No,” said Solange.

“You remember anything? Maybe your head messed up.”

“My head,” said Solange, “is just fine.”

Jewel smiled. “Well, I was a maid of your ma’s. Way back when in Port-au-Prince.”

“I didn’t think Coco had a mother,” said Solange.

“Sure she do. I just…I got myself married to this white man, off a cruise, see, and come up to the U.S.A. Coco stay down with you. Your ma took care of her for me.”

“I thought she was an orphan,” said Solange. “She never told me.”

“She’s a strange one, but I don’t blame her. We’re all strange is how I figure. I mean, look at you, talk of strange. You gonna tell me how you come to be a zombie?”

“It’s a long story,” said Solange.

“Time’s one thing I got.”

“Are they sardines?” Solange, overcome by a sudden, lunging hunger, nodded to the tin of fish on the coffee table.

“Best thing for you after a trance. That fish oil warms your blood. Here,” Jewel handed the tin and the fork to Solange, “eat them all, baby.”

While Solange devoured the first tin of fish, Jewel fetched another and a tall glass of water into which she dropped some fizzing pellets.

“What are those?” asked Solange, reaching out for the glass.

“Just something to perk you up,” said Jewel. She watched as Solange’s thirst was slaked. “So,” she prompted, when her patient had returned to the sardines, “you gonna tell me your story?”

“Well,” Solange began, picking a grizzly bit of fish from her teeth, “my husband, Anton, has this mistress named Amanda.”

“That’s a bad name, Amanda. You got to always watch out that way.”

“Anyway, she—Amanda—tried to murder me, to get Anton and my money, I suppose. She shot me, but I didn’t die, I just went into a coma.”

“Good for you.”

“They blamed the murder on an innocent young man. I’m the only one who knew Amanda really shot me, except for this man, who has no witnesses. So you see, if I came out of my coma, Amanda was in…”

“I know what she be in,” said Jewel.

“Exactly,” said Solange. She wiped some fish oil from her chin and then licked her fingers. Delicious. “So when I started to regain consciousness, Anton tried to smother me, but he stopped at the last minute. He couldn’t do it.”

“Most men can’t,” said Jewel.

“That night I did come up, and I knew that Amanda would be back to finish the job. So I decided to do it for her, pretend to be dead until I could figure out how to deal with them. Luckily, Coco was there. She had been coming to see me, trying to get me out with…well, you know, and there was this nurse, Laleel Bundara, who Coco and I know from the church. They put me into the death trance, Laleel had me declared, and then they snuck my body out…”

“And that’s how you come be zombie in Teaneck.”

“That’s my story,” said Solange. “What about you? What are you doing in Teaneck?”

“I’m selling real estate,” said Jewel. “I’m with Century 21.”

Pleasant as Jewel was, Solange found being conscious in Teaneck a fate worse than assumed death. So, on the morning after her reawakening, she borrowed twenty dollars and a raincoat from Jewel and took a bus to the Port Authority. She belted the raincoat as chicly as she possibly could, taxied to the Carlyle, registered under an assumed name (Rowena Stronger), and gave her last few coins to the bellboy, promising him more later if he would fetch her up some breakfast. She took a long shower of the type that can only be enjoyed in a clean, luxurious hotel room and emerged from it, swaddled in terry, to find her breakfast delivered. Eggs Florentine had never tasted— No. Nothing had ever tasted this good. She stood by the window, smiling down at the elegant avenue. Raising her glass of fresh-squeezed, she toasted her new life and then set about structuring it.

“Daycare, Miss Coco,” was how Miss Coco answered the phone.

“Guess who?” said Solange.

“Baby mine,” said Miss Coco. “Where are you?”

“Back where I belong. I’ve managed a suite at the Carlyle.”

“The who?”

“A hotel. But I need to get into the apartment. I need clothes and money. And I want my jewelry, if that bitch Amanda hasn’t already made off with it.”

“Well, go get them, baby,” said Miss Coco. “They’re yours.”

“I can’t,” said Solange. “I can’t be seen. I’ve got to lay low for a while. That’s why I need your help. Can you go to the apartment for me?”

“Well, I can’t go now,” said Miss Coco. “I’m at work, lady. And I can’t leave. One bitch is already on my case, trying to get me fired.”

“Why don’t you come by here after work, say, five-thirty? And bring me a wig.”

“A wig? Where am I going to find a wig?”

“There’s a place on Madison, about 61st or so. Enny of Italy. Charge it.”

“What color do you want?”

Solange thought for a moment. “Red,” she decided.

“It gets dark so early now,” said David.

“Yes,” said Lillian, “but you know, I like it. What I really love are those evenings in December when you leave work at five and walk home, and it’s like the middle of the night. The headlights and shop windows. It makes the city seem almost European. Like Paris. Or how I imagine Paris, never having been there.”

“How come you don’t travel more? Don’t you get a lot of free trips through work?”

“Yeah, but I don’t really like it. Traveling confuses my life.”

“That’s funny,” said David. “I feel just the opposite. I feel like my life is confusing and it’s only when I go away that I have any perspective.”

“But you hardly ever travel.”

“I know. That explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

They stood on the corner of Madison Avenue, waiting to cross over toward the park. A short black woman clutching what appeared to be a hatbox bumped into them, excused herself, and hurried away into the ambered dusk.

“That was Miss Coco,” David said. “She works at Kate’s daycare.”

“She looked a little strange,” said Lillian. They entered the park and walked in silence. “Guess who called me the other day?” Lillian finally said.

“Who?”

“Heath.”

“Heath called you? He doesn’t even know you.”

“Yes he does. I met him last spring, when you burned your fingers, and I went down to the Cafe Wisteria and told him. My errand of mercy, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Why did he call you?”

“He wanted some PR advice. Apparently he had a really terrible experience on ‘Orca.’ ”

“He was on ‘Orca’?”

“Yes. So I’m going to try to get him some simpatico interviews. We’re having lunch next week. Do you want me to tell him about you?”

“What about me?”

“About you and Loren. That you’ve split up.”

“No,” said David. “I mean, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. It’s over between Heath and me. Let’s sit down.”

“No,” said Lillian. “We should keep walking. It’s getting awfully dark. Where are we?”

“We’re…if we keep walking this way, we’ll come out near the Museum of Natural History.”

“We’re walking west?”

“Yes. Is that okay? Do you want to turn around?”

“No, this is fine. I’ll take the bus back across.”

“We could have dinner.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t. Are you sure you know where we’re going?”

“Yes. Isn’t that the San Remo? We’re just a bit farther uptown than I thought. I think.”

“As long as you know where we’re going.”

“Are you feeling any better?”

“Yes. I haven’t been sick in weeks.”