“Oh, but when she danced!” Pea said, her voice almost as soft as the buzzing of fly wings.
Pea poured the last of the second bottle into Tamara’s glass. She pulled her old lighter from her pocket, considered, and then put it back.
“Why didn’t you get rid of it?” Tamara asked. “When you found out?”
She regretted the question immediately. It came close—too close—to their unspeakable shore. Pea blinked. She looked up at the sky. “I tried,” she said. “There’s no doctors here to do it, certainly not for a colored woman. So I went to a rootworker outside Poughkeepsie. When I came back Dev was half-mad, he’d gotten some tale from Alvin. We were desperate for each other. He was sure I’d been fucking Bobby Junior of all people. And the next morning I drank it and vomited it right back up. I think she just decided to stay.”
Phyllis smiled down at the mountain of her belly and the baby kicked in response. “I don’t regret it. She makes me remember who I was, before.”
“Before the hands?”
“Before I went back.”
Tamara wasn’t sure what this meant. She didn’t ask; in that moment Phyllis looked more angel than saint.
She drank down her glass.
Pea said, “Dev wrote, you know.”
Till all my human hungers are fulfilled … What would he say, when he learned of her choice? Or had the baby already dreamed it for him?
Tamara snorted. “I won’t steal it this time. Promise.”
She didn’t need to know what else he might have told Pea, alone on the other side of the ocean and so afraid. It was over now. They were all safe. She had made sure of it.
Pea met her eyes. Fireflies swam between them, flashing slow heartbeats. From the river came a chorus of crickets, legs pumping with invisible fury: a song, a song, a scream.
12
It was late morning when Walter’s Packard pulled in front of the house. They watched him come from the garden. He must have been driving all night.
Phyllis stood up to see him, stood up all by herself. Then she turned around. She faced the river, not Walter’s slow walk. He had blood on his cuffs.
Tamara understood, then, what Phyllis had seen immediately.
She moved to block him. “Don’t say it.” She didn’t think he heard her. “Wouldn’t they have told us?” she tried, but of course Walter would know before anyone, his back-channel sources would have contacted him the second the casualty reports came over the wires. For a terrible moment, she wanted it to be Clyde. This couldn’t be happening. She had taken the curse! She’d turned aside the fury of the hands!
“What happened?”
Walter never looked at her, but he said, with that great stillness that was equal to his anger, “From what I could piece together, he was sent on a suicide mission. A cover for the real attack. Expendable, they said.”
She choked, but the roots wouldn’t let any air pass, their rage was a mirror of her own. Walter held her up, thumped her on her back, never looked away from Pea. Tammy coughed until she could breathe again. She straightened.
There seemed to be a faint outline at Phyllis’s back, though the sun was so bright that day she could never be sure. The shape of a man, broad shoulders and long fingers that lingered at her waist. He was saying something, but Tamara couldn’t make out his words. Only the murmur of a current against a rock, a tone she had heard before, and loved.
Phyllis tipped her head back, exposed that long neck to the touch of light. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a cigarette and then her old lighter. She ran her thumb over the circle scratched into the metal. She thumbed the catch and brought the flame to her face.
A soft trickle of water dripped down the porch slats beneath her feet and onto the earth.
“That means it’s yours,” she whispered. “It’s time, sweet Pea.”
They took her to the hospital in Hudson. The liquid falling between Phyllis’s legs turned pink as a sunset and she wandered like an ancient between the corridors of past and present, dream and reality. Walter took the turn to the emergency entrance in one smooth rush that pressed them hard against the back seat leather. A pair of nurses rushed out of the door when they saw the silver Packard but they paused when Walter climbed from the front seat.
Phyllis breathed heavy against Tamara’s collarbone. Her eyes were wide, her pupils blasted, but she blinked when Tamara called her name.
“Come on, sweetie, let’s get you inside, all right?”
Walter had come around to open the passenger-side door. He pulled it open and bent for Pea. The two nurses—joined now by a doctor and a few others with a gurney—peered around Walter’s bulk. One of them met Tamara’s eyes and gasped.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh no, I’m sorry—”
Walter turned around with Phyllis in his arms. The gathered crowd stepped back as though he were carrying a gun. Tamara climbed out behind him. She’d had vague notions, in the midst of their frantic rush to the hospital, of playing the easiest game, now that they had such extreme need of it: a pregnant white woman with her Negro maid, easy as you please, let us in, this woman needs medical attention urgently! But standing beside Walter and Phyllis before that gaping crowd, she faltered. Facing this wall of well-heeled, professional whiteness, she had a flash (so vividly that in later years she would recoil at the mere mention of the dentist’s name) of Marty’s foreshortened horse’s heads and their marching rows of commercial-white teeth.
“We don’t accept colored patients here,” the doctor said, shortly. “You’ll have to leave. Try Poughkeepsie.”
Tamara glanced at Phyllis, who had roused herself enough to look around. It was easy to see where they’d gone wrong: her hair was loose, floating around her head in thick, fuzzy curls. She was pale from pain, but unmistakably high yellow, golden from the springtime gardening. Her stained plaid
