Losing Hope (15 page)

My day was still not over.

After dropping Roman off at home for the evening, I headed toward 695. I had a class in Portuguese to begin.

The class was offered by one of the local community colleges but was held inside of a high school. The Web site listed it as a noncredit “life enrichment” course, along with other subjects like kickboxing, French cuisine, photography, and digital art. As I walked through the hallways, which were dimmed for the evening, I passed by numerous language classes: Spanish, French, Chinese, but mostly English for nonnative speakers. It was a few minutes after six, and I could hear teachers of all tongues as I walked down the hallway. The clashing of accents and foreign words made me feel like I was in a language buffet.

I stopped at the last room on the wing.
INTRO TO PORTUGUESE
:
BASIC ELEMENTS
was written on a sheet of notebook paper taped to the door. I entered the room and immediately wondered if I'd made a mistake.

“This is Intro to Portuguese, right?” I asked the young, coffee-colored, bald girl with bright blue foot-long feather earrings who sat at the front of the mainly empty classroom. A folded-over piece of paper on her desk read MS. TOMEEKA ANTOINETTE RYANS.

“Uh, that
is
what's written on the door.” She rolled her eyes and giggled at the sole student in the room, a Mediterranean guy who looked like he'd just stepped out of a Calvin Klein commercial, white tee, tight jeans and all.

“And you are . . . ?” I raised an eyebrow, confused.

“Your teacher, Ms. Ryans.” She enunciated each syllable of her name, as if I could not understand English, then giggled at her other student again.

This little chick must be crazy or think that I am if she thinks I am going to be calling her Ms. anything.
My son looked older than her. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but she could not have been a day over twenty-one.

“Are you going to sit down and join us? You're already late, and it is not fair to our students to continue with this interruption.”

She actually said “students.”

“You speak Portuguese?” I tried to sound civilized, but even I heard the bite in my tone.

“Obviously.” Tomeeka rolled her eyes again.

I wanted to tell her that the only obvious thing about her was her stank attitude.

“Are you from a Portuguese-speaking nation?” I was trying to give the young girl the benefit of the doubt. There were plenty of places in Africa where Portuguese was spoken. However, she did not necessarily look like she was African, European, or South American. She looked and sounded like a good old-fashioned Baltimorean.

“For your information, I studied Portuguese for three years in college, and I spent a winter break in Brazil. Now, are you going to sit down, or do you need me to pull out my transcripts and photo album?”

We glared at each other a few moments more, but who was I kidding? I needed someone who could speak the language of the people who knew something about my husband, and Tomeeka currently was my one and only option.

“Sorry that I'm late.” I slid into my seat.

“Very well. Let's take attendance. I had to cancel our first session last week, so now we can really get started.”

Take attendance?
Was this girl serious? I guess she was, because she unclipped a sheet of paper and began calling names.

“Martha Johnson?”

She scanned the room, and surprisingly, no one answered.

“Verdice Long?”

Again silence.

“Luca Alexander?”

The Calvin Klein model wannabe raised his hand.

“Fernando Alverez?”

Of course no answer. I could feel my temples heating up.

“Sarah Norman?” She looked up at me, and when I said nothing, she rescanned her list. “Those are all the names I have.”

“I just registered yesterday. My name is Sienna St. James.”

She looked displeased as she scribbled something down on her list.

“Do you need me to spell my name?”

She completely ignored my question. “Okay, I want you both to tell me why you have decided to begin learning ‘the sweet language,' as Cervantes called it, of Portuguese.”

Luca shrugged his shoulders. “I have a trip to Rio coming up, and I want to make the most of it.”

“Ooh, Rio.” The young girl's eyes glittered. “I'll have to tell you all the places you need to go. And you, Sienna? Why are you here?” she snapped as the glitter turned to stone.

I truthfully was beginning to wonder the same thing, but instead I answered, “Because I'm going to need your help finding my husband.”

Tomeeka uncrossed her arms and leaned forward, a sudden look of curious mischief taking over her eyes. Her ears were itching for drama.

I could tell I'd just won her over.

“Almada, Portugal. It is right here.” With his index finger Luca pointed to a small yellow dot on the southwestern edge of Europe. The small country of Portugal was between the Atlantic Ocean and Spain.

We were standing over a world map spread out over Tomeeka's desk. Tomeeka, who smelled like cocoa butter and feet up close, seemed overjoyed at Luca's discovery.

“This is so exciting and romantic.” She giggled. “Trying to find your long-lost love.”

Of course, I had not shared the entire story about RiChard. Ashes and murder and urns seemed too gruesome a tale to share with someone who couldn't seem to stop giggling. From her oversized attitude to her overwhelming giddiness, I was not sure what to make of this woman who was my best hope at the moment for getting answers about RiChard's whereabouts.

“Do you think he is having an affair with a European supermodel and wants to keep you from finding out?” She blinked innocently.

What is the girl talking about?
I had to catch myself from wrongly answering her misdirected question by remembering the story I had just told them:

I had not seen my husband in many years after he left to complete a mission in another country, which I could not discuss. He might have run into problems in a city in Portugal. I knew this because he sent a cryptic message through some residents there who were not giving me any additional information, for reasons I was not privy to. I was afraid that he might be in trouble, and I was looking for assistance with breaking the language barrier to see if I could get some clues to his whereabouts.

Like I said, of course this wasn't the complete story. I had not lied. Just left out some key elements. Such as it had been nearly fourteen years since I'd last seen him.

And he might be dead.

“Do you think he's been kidnapped? Or is he into something illegal?” Tomeeka seemed to derive great joy from coming up with these scenarios.

“Do you watch a lot of movies, or is it just your nature to think the absolute worst?” I said it jokingly, but I meant it. Some people thrived on drama, and I thought she had made it pretty easy to conclude that she was one of those people. She laughed at my question.

“You should call one of those investigative news shows. I bet they could get to the bottom of it and find your husband.”

“All right, um, I think I'm going to handle it from here. Thanks for your help, but I probably need to go.” I'd had enough of the drastic speculation. This was not helping anything. It was late. I was tired. I wanted to go home. Once again, I wondered what I had expected to get out of coming.

Another dead end.

“But did you still want me to try to call the phone number you said you had?”

I thought about it. What did I have to lose?

“Use my cell phone,” Luca said, joining in the conversation. “I just moved here, so my phone number will not show up as a Maryland number
if
they have caller ID. Less suspicion will be raised.”

What was I doing?

“What will you say?” I eyed Tomeeka.

“Just give me the number. I won't say anything about your husband to tip them off. I'll just try to get some information about who they are or something like that. Maybe they're spies or drug dealers or international sex traffickers. I'm going to find out.”

Yes, she'd been watching too many movies on cable. I shook my head and, against my better judgment, punched the numbers I knew by heart into Luca's cell phone and handed the phone to Tomeeka.

Someone must have answered immediately, because Tomeeka quickly grinned and offered a greeting into the handset. I felt my heart begin to race. Was I about to finally get some answers? She continued talking for a couple of seconds. I had no idea what she was saying, but I watched as her grin slowly disappeared and attitude began creeping across her face. My heart felt like it was about to pound right out of my chest wall when she finally looked over at me, her palm loosely covering the handset.

“European Portuguese is a little different from Brazilian Portuguese. I have no idea what she's saying. I might be wrong, but I think this lady works at a ceramic shop or somewhere like that. Sounds like she wants me to buy a clay pot.” She looked bored, her dreams of high drama and romance dashed into pieces like a shattered vase.

“It is a crematorium.”

Oddly, Tomeeka's face brightened at this new bit of dark information. Obviously, the possibility of death mixed in with deceit was intriguing to her. She began speaking into the phone again; this time her words were slower and deliberate.

“Wait a minute,” Instinctively, I tried to snatch the phone away from her. “What did you just say? Did you just say something about an African American?”

Tomeeka struggled against me, shouting something into the phone just as I grabbed it out of her hands.

It was no use. Nobody was on the other line. Beatriz, or whoever it was, obviously had hung up yet again. I handed the phone back to Luca, who checked it, a little peeved at the momentary mishandling of it by me and Tomeeka. I could only imagine what he was thinking. He'd actually come for a class, not a soap opera.

“See, you made them hang up.” Tomeeka looked at me accusingly.

“What did you say?” I said, seething.

“I know you did not want me to say anything about your husband, but that is not how you go about getting information from the bad guys. You have to let them know that you are on to what they are doing.”

“What did you say?” I did my best to stay calm, while feeling like my chances of finding out what was going on with RiChard were dwindling away.

“I told the woman who answered the phone that I was looking for a missing African American man.”

I groaned and dropped my head into my hands. Instant headache.

“What? Isn't that what you are trying to do?” Tomeeka glared at me. You would think I'd known this girl for longer than forty-five minutes the way her nasty attitude freely turned off and on.

“First of all . . . I mean . . . really, it's too complicated to even begin to explain. I do not even know why I tried.”

“What's so complicated? Your husband left you, and now you think he is in danger or in trouble in another country. What else needs to be said?”

Luca had sat back down, with one leg propped up on the chair in front of him. I wondered if he was going to ask for a refund for the class, or if he thought the entertainment value was worth the price he'd paid.

“It's more than that.” I groaned again. “For starters, my husband is not African American.”

Tomeeka gasped. “You're married to a white man?”

“No. I mean . . . See, he's biracial. His father was from Saint Martin. His mother was from Perugia, Italy. They met in Paris while his father was working as a chef at a restaurant and his mother was on vacation. Paris is where he grew up, but then he came to college here in the States, except for a semester he spent studying in England.” Kisu flashed through my mind. I squeezed my eyes shut to try to stop the torrent of memories surrounding my last trip overseas with RiChard. “It gets even more complicated after that,” is all I could say.

“A son of the world. Beautiful.” Tomeeka had that dreamy look on her face again. “Girl, he's a mix of Caribbean and Italian? Your husband must look some kind of good,” she teased.

I bit my lip, mad at myself for shredding up and throwing away every picture I'd had of RiChard sometime around Roman's fifth birthday.

RiChard was about as fine as they came. He looked as sweet as the chocolate Perugia, Italy, was known for, as smooth as its world-renowned jazz festival, as intoxicating as sweet rum from the islands, as refreshing as the Caribbean shorelines. Mix all those elements together and you had a man that left you breathless with one wink of his eye, with one kiss from his smiling and, yes, luscious lips.

With a decade-and-a-half absence accented by random phone calls, sporadic letters, and now an empty urn and a missing ring.

I'd told my son that the photos of his father had been in a jewelry box that had been stolen when my home was broken into years ago.

There was so much I had not told Roman.

I hoped that he would not be angry with me when he was a grown man and knew the full truth about his father and my relationship with him, or rather his relationship with us.

“His mother is from Perugia?” Luca said, piping up. I had not noticed that his leg had dropped off the chair in front of him and he had straightened up in his seat at my last words.

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“I'm from Perugia,” the dark-haired model wannabe explained.