“I’m a member of her family, for God’s sake. Please.”
“You’re a pain in the ass is what you are. Do you want it sent to the same number where we sent you those files on Malik?”
“Perfect. I’ll talk to you before five.”
“Cat-”
I hang up, then get up and run for the bathroom. My father’s body is coming out of the ground today, and nothing is going to stop that. If the judge needs an affidavit from my mother to issue a court order for exhumation, he’ll get one. There will be no more denial for the women of the DeSalle family.
Denial is death.
Chapter 54
Mom is sitting at her kitchen table in a sweat-soaked housecoat, staring blankly into a mug of coffee. She doesn’t even look up at the sound of the door. Only when I sit down opposite her do her eyes rise to take me in.
“Has Grandpapa been here?” I ask.
She shrugs.
I’ve already slipped into my grandfather’s office and retrieved the autopsy report that Kaiser faxed there. I was lucky Grandpapa wasn’t in his office when it arrived-though part of me wished he had been-but my luck ended when I tried to borrow another pistol from his gun safe. The combination had been changed.
“I have some things to tell you, Mom. They won’t be easy to hear, but you don’t have a choice anymore. You owe it to Ann.”
Her eyes are shot with blood, and the skin of the orbits gleams blue-black. But her mind seems alert. Whatever drug she was on yesterday has been flushed from her system.
In a soft but deliberate voice, I tell her what the pathologist discovered during Ann’s autopsy: that she was sterilized many years ago by an unorthodox procedure, probably during her “emergency appendectomy” on the island. Mom listens like someone being told that her child has been tortured to death. I have the sense that if I pricked her face with a needle, she wouldn’t flinch.
“There’s something else,” I add. “I had a dream last night. It’s the recurring one, about riding in the old pickup truck with Grandpapa. Last night I saw the end of it. He parked by the pond, and then…Mom, he started touching me.”
Her eyes remain focused on the table.
“And right before he took my pants down, he pulled Lena from under the seat and stuck her in my arms.”
A trembling has begun in my mother’s hands.
“That’s how they found Ann,” I remind her. “With Timid Thomas beside her naked body.”
“I had a dream last night, too,” Mom says softly.
“You…you did?”
She lifts her coffee cup to her lips, takes a sip, then sets it rattling on the saucer. “Something happened on the island when I was young,” she says in a voice I’ve never heard from her. There is no affect, no illusion, nothing added for the benefit of the listener. “I was fourteen. It was summer, and I’d gotten to be friends with a boy there. A Negro boy. He was a year older than I. It was innocent, mostly. But toward the end of the summer, we did some touching. He touched me, anyway.”
She takes another sip of coffee, the tremor in her hand so pronounced that I fear she’ll drop the cup. “We’d meet by an old shack near the river. Nobody ever went there. But one day a cousin of mine followed us. And he saw Jesse touching me.”
“The boy’s name was Jesse?” I flash back to a black man speaking through burn-scarred lips:
“Yes.”
“Jesse Billups?”
At last her eyes focus on mine. “Yes. He was in love with me.”
“My God…Mom, I talked to him the other day.”
“How did he look?”
“All right, I guess. He seemed to have a lot of anger in him.”
“I’m sure he does, after what happened to him in the war. He used to be handsome, believe it or not. I did what I could for him. He has the best job on the island now.”
She shrugs as if it hardly matters now. “The day my cousin saw us, he told his father. And
A chill goes through me. “What happened?”
“Daddy went down to Jesse’s parents’ house that night, dragged Jesse outside, and beat him within an inch of his life.”
Jesse Billups’s words come back to me with perfect clarity:
Tears are running down my mother’s face. I grab a paper towel from the counter and hand it to her.
“Mom?”
She laughs strangely, a note of hysteria in her voice. “I thought Daddy did that because Jesse was black. You see? And I was miserable afterward. I was like you. I wouldn’t talk. And Daddy got madder and madder at me. Finally he demanded to know why I wouldn’t say anything.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That he’d beaten Jesse like the boy had raped me or something, but the truth was that I’d
I try to imagine my grandfather hearing this from his daughter in 1966. “What happened?”
“Daddy’s face went white. We were staying in a suite at the Peabody in Memphis. He yanked me up from my chair and dragged me back to their bedroom. He took off his belt and whipped me till I bled, and then he kept on whipping me.”
“What was Grandmama doing?”
Mom shakes her head as if genuinely curious. “I don’t know. She disappeared.”
“The thing is,” Mom goes on, “the thing I forgot and didn’t remember until my dream last night was that he stripped me naked before he did it. He
“What about them?”
“It wasn’t just anger I saw in them, Cat.”
A rush of terrifying images flashes through my mind. Wild, unseeing eyes and a raging mouth. “What was it?”
Mom closes her eyes and shakes her head, like some primitive woman afraid to name a demon.
“Mama? What did you see in his eyes?”
Her answer is a fearful whisper.
A shudder passes through my body, leaving fear in its wake. But somewhere beneath the fear is a feeling of elation.
“Do you have any memories of Grandpapa touching you?”
She shakes her head. “But you were right about what you said about my problems. There are things I can’t
