Antoinette and the other girls watched the smoke and huge fireball rise into the air, wondering what or who had blown up.
I closed my eyes and sat in silence. Jack drove the Ford on through Missouri toward St. Louis. Inside my mind I said farewells to Emme and Antoine by remembering every single second I had spent with each of them, in the desert and at sea and in Paris. They were much more than friends to me and to the Meq. They were two of the best people I have ever known. Geaxi warned me once about becoming too attached to any Giza. She told me they would break my heart. “Your feelings for them cannot and shall not sustain them,” she said. I disagreed with her then, but now I realized Geaxi was simply telling the truth. When I finally looked up, we were already in St. Louis, only one block from Carolina’s house. Ancient oaks and maples shaded the streets. A few were just beginning to show leaves of red, yellow, and burnt orange. I could smell Forest Park in the distance. I looked over at Jack. “Where is Antoinette?”
He drove another block, then slowed and pulled into the long private driveway, coming to a stop under the stone archway just outside two massive oak doors that used to serve as the entrance to the best whorehouse in St. Louis. “Right here,” Jack said with a grin. “Mitch and Mercy brought her back to the States with them and now they’re all staying with Carolina.” He turned off the engine and told me to be quiet. He grinned again. “We’ll sneak in on them. They don’t know we’re coming.”
Once we were inside the big house, we crept toward the kitchen. I could hear a man and woman talking, and a baseball game was on the radio. I had completely forgotten that the World Series was in progress. The Cubs were playing the Tigers. When Jack walked into the kitchen without a word, Mercy saw him first and broke into joyous laughter. She ran over to give him a hug and Mitch turned around in his chair. We locked eyes immediately.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mitch said. On the radio the broadcaster announced Hank Greenberg had just doubled for the Tigers.
“Who’s winning?” I asked.
“Who cares?” Mitch said, pulling out a chair at the table and turning off the radio. “Come here and sit down, Z. You sure are a sight for sore eyes, man.”
Mercy let go of Jack and bent over at the waist, giving me a warm embrace. There were multicolored specks of paint on her shirt and jeans and she smelled of turpentine. “You’ve been working,” I said.
“Yes … finally.”
I looked at both of them. Mercy was in her early forties and Mitch in his early fifties. They seemed well and healthy; however, the strain of living, fighting, and surviving in wartime France showed on their faces. I told Mitch how often I had thought of him and how much I had worried about everyone during the war years. Mitch asked if Jack had mentioned Emme and Antoine. I said yes, I had heard the whole bloody, idiotic mess, then Jack changed the subject, going into a long, vivid account of our journey east in his Ford Deluxe station wagon. He sounded like a teenager describing his first trip in his first automobile. Before he got us out of California, I leaned over and asked Mercy, “Where is Carolina?” She pointed through the window in the direction of the carriage house. I excused myself and headed out the door toward the “Honeycircle.”
In the years since I’d been gone the honeysuckle, forsythia, and wisteria bushes had grown much taller and thicker. Everything inside the “Honeycircle” was completely hidden from view, but I could hear a woman singing an old Cole Porter song slightly off-key. I walked through the opening. She was kneeling in a small vegetable garden with her back to me, collecting a few puny tomatoes still left on the vines. She wore green slacks and a long plaid shirt with a sweater wrapped around her waist. She had her hair piled up and under a faded red baseball cap. I stayed silent and watched her work. Ten or fifteen seconds passed. Suddenly she stopped singing. She seemed suspended, frozen like a statue holding the tomato she’d just picked. In a soft, distant voice, and without turning around, she said, “It’s you, isn’t it, Z?”
Nicholas and Owen had said it time and time again, and they were right — she was remarkable. I smiled to myself and waited another heartbeat. “Those tomatoes,” I said, “I think they might be a lost cause.”
Carolina dropped her arm and let the tomato fall away. She was on her knees, but she turned slowly in a half circle until our eyes met. Hers were wet with tears. She shook her head back and forth once, then picked up the tomato and threw it at me. I caught it easily in one hand. “I think
“It was difficult to correspond from Japan.”
“Japan? What? Is that a joke, Z?”
“No.”
Her face was lined and creased from seventy-five years, yet beautiful, and inside her blue-gray eyes I could still see tiny flecks of gold. She took off her baseball cap and let her hair fall free. It was silver and just past shoulder length. Our eyes remained locked on each other. “My God, Z,” she said. “How … how did you …”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”
“Come here, Z. Come over here now.”
She stayed on her knees and opened her arms. I walked the few steps between us and we embraced for several moments, never saying a word. If someone had been watching, they might have thought they were seeing a poignant reunion between a boy and his grandmother, or great-grandmother. It was anything but that. “You cannot do this to me again,” she whispered. “I am too old, Z. Please, tell me you will be here for … for at least a while. If Opari calls, then I will understand.”
“Has she?”
“No, I haven’t heard from her.”
“Have you heard anything from any of us?”
“Not a word, not even from Ray.”
“Well, that’s understandable. You know Ray.”
Carolina smiled. “Yes, I know Ray,” she said, then paused. “Z … will you stay?”
I smiled back. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Now, tell me about the current state of the Cardinals pitching staff.”
She laughed and I laughed with her. I grabbed the basket of puny red tomatoes and Carolina stood up, then we walked out of the “Honeycircle” and toward the big house. It was October 7, 1945. The sun was just setting over St. Louis. “What’s for dinner?” I asked.
“Whatever you want,” she said.
I had been anxious to meet Antoinette, but she was nowhere to be seen. As Carolina and Mercy were preparing dinner, Jack asked about her absence. Carolina said Antoinette had entered Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and wouldn’t be back to St. Louis until Christmas. A childhood girlfriend from Marseille was enrolled there and Antoinette wanted to be near her friend. She said it would be like old times, when they studied and played together before the war. As it turned out, Antoinette’s absence allowed Carolina and me to spend hours and hours alone together, something we had not done in years. Everyone else was busy. Within days after arriving, Jack left for Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, promising Carolina he would be home for Christmas. Mitch was starting another new business downtown, and Mercy painted obsessively in her studio, which was really a converted bedroom in the carriage house. Every day, even as the temperature began to drop, Carolina and I went for endless wandering walks through and around Forest Park. She had arthritis in her hips and knees, yet she never complained or mentioned it. Once, on a cold and windy afternoon in late November, we were walking along one of our familiar trails. Suddenly, with silver hair flying and a heavy shawl wrapped around her thin shoulders, Carolina started running, laughing, and kicking wildly, scattering a pile of golden leaves in every direction. “Come on, Z,” she yelled back. “Let’s kick the leaves while we can!”
In the following days, I adopted the general look and attitude of a post-war American kid. It was easy. The look, which I liked, was simple — white T-shirt and blue jeans — and the attitude of the American twelve-year-old seemed to never change.
I silently hoped I would hear from one of the Meq, especially Opari. It didn’t happen, although I did dream about her on five consecutive nights. They were all vivid dreams in faraway places, places I had never seen. Opari knew all the paths, trails, springs, valleys, caves, and beaches. In one of the dreams, under a broad bright night
