“Quint, I’m as angry as Temple,” Natalie said quickly. “But it’s different with me. I never looked to the suit to make any real difference. I thought whatever judgment we got would be my son’s blood money. Temple saw it as reparations. He feels cheated. I feel nothing at all.”
“I’ve seen clients so invested in these cases that they got stuck living in the past. Even when there was a judgment in their favor. I don’t want that to happen to Temple.”
“You mean living in a past with a loved one who’s dead?”
“That’s not quite what I meant.”
“What else could you have possibly meant, Quint?” Natalie asked icily. “How can my husband think about a future without our son?”
When Masterson failed to reply, Natalie told him, “Quint, I appreciate your concern. We’ll get through this. I don’t know how, but we will.”
While Temple refused to accept the ruling, Natalie wrestled with thoughts that she rarely shared with him. Paul’s death was an injustice they would have to live with. There was little justice on earth, even less in the courts. There was no cosmic answer, only the terrible thing that happened.
Natalie moved to this place of acceptance during retreats spent in silence at a former monastery in Germantown, Maryland. The twenty-six acres were rustic and elegant. Six elderly nuns, pale, sturdy, white-haired women, feisty and chaste as a flock of aged birds, who still wore old-fashioned habits, lived on the grounds. Natalie’s room in the monastery was as spare as a cell, with a small single bed, a chest, a desk and a small lamp with a forty-watt bulb. The silence was a respite from Temple’s anger and the pressing need to respond to it. Over time, the days she spent walking the grounds, huddled in the monastery library reading, picking a book at random from the library shelf, tamping down her energies, fear, and anger, overhauled her soul. She exhumed Paul in the confines of this quietude, experienced anew his spirit, absolutely present and vivid, as a cool drink quenching the thirst of her love for him. And it was in that place that she most often found herself filled with thoughts of one day meeting Carson Blake. So stunned was she by the initial invasion of the thought that she tried to resist it, convincing herself that it was merely another example of God’s strange sense of humor. But the idea haunted her, tough and resilient. She refused to stoke its life by speaking of it aloud, and yet she was soon radiant with belief that one day the meeting she dreaded, but that was now clearly ordained, would take place. Her spirit grew quietly vigilant. She was exhausted by the demands of hatred, the requirements of grief. She’d been paddling her boat steadily toward that shore day after day, and now the waters had shifted in another direction. The waves were pulling her leaky craft inexorably toward the deep end of the ocean. She did not know how, she did not know why, but she threw her paddle into the murky, enlightened depths and gave up and gave in.
Natalie had searched for words to say to describe the inexplicable. When she stopped talking, the tyranny and significance of words expired. She’d spent much of her adult life working with words, ferreting out the meanings of language, depending on her ability to summon the power of words and speech for her livelihood. But it was silence that whispered unto her all she needed to know. Natalie eased back gradually into the awesome, weighty arms of her husband’s love and need. Her heart wept and bound itself into an instrument that they both could count on. There were days when she was awash in emotion too tender for expression, as potent as prayer, as normal as the gift of love and her husband’s unabashed hopes.
Out of those days of silence came the idea to establish a scholarship in Paul’s name in the master’s of education program at Columbia. The school was receptive to the idea, and Natalie and Temple stipulated that the scholarship would go to a worthy African American student accepted into the program.
Temple had accepted Washington College’s offer of early retirement and the chance to continue as a part-time administrator, which with his pension left his income nearly unchanged. Now on campus only two days a week, Temple spends time with their grandson, Darren, who lives with Lisa’s mother while Lisa attends medical school at Johns Hopkins. At a year and a half, the boy’s mere existence seems to them both a miracle.
Babysitting Darren one weekend, as the child lay asleep between them in bed, Natalie wondered aloud, “What will Paul possibly mean to Darren? My Lord, he’s just a picture in an album, some man Lisa will tell him that she once loved long ago.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Nat—Paul’s all over this boy, inside and out. He’s gonna be tall like his father, I can tell that already. And when he smiles, I swear, Paul is in the room. Paul wasn’t just some nameless, faceless seed-bearer. His imprint will shape Darren. And we’re not just grandparents, Nat, we’re Paul’s representatives. This is the assignment he left us.”
“You mean our assignment from God?” Natalie asked, grateful beyond expression for the tranquillity she heard in Temple’s voice.
“I’ll let you call it that,” Temple said, stroking the perspiration on Darren’s forehead. “But by the time I get through telling him about Paul playing Frederick Douglass in his sixth-grade Black History Month play, about how hardheaded he could be, showing him pictures of Paul with us on Goree Island, taking him over to Burroughs Elementary where Paul taught, he’ll know who his daddy was.”
“Is that all we tell him?”
“When he’s old enough, you and me and Lisa together, we tell him about how Paul died. Ain’t nothing to hide, no reason to feel ashamed.”
After she read the letter the first time, Natalie wept for her smallness and the hardness of her heart. The brief, clearly tortured epistle, so inarticulate and yet so eloquent, has filled her mind with thoughts of writing Carson Blake, of one day even meeting him. This still-nascent but outrageous yearning is more than she often allows herself to think about, much less reveal to her husband. The letter pricked the skin of Natalie’s desire to live in the world whole again, informed her that her work is not yet done. There’s more to the rest of her life than muted perpetual grief, love of her son’s child; there is also this cursed bond with Carson Blake, which he out of desperation to calm and perhaps save his own soul had acknowledged. Was this letter, this summons, and the response to it, that she and Temple had to shape, their assignment too?
Shirley is seated in a corner table beside a wide window through which she looks down upon now-dark Wisconsin Avenue when Natalie arrives. When the two women hug, Natalie takes in a whiff of cigarette smoke embedded in the weave of Shirley’s pink cashmere halter-top sweater. She’s a health-care professional who has tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to kick the habit. With her big clip-on gold earrings that look to Natalie as heavy as small trees, the thick slash of black eyeliner and gray shadow, burnt red lipstick, and thin veneer of matte makeup on her high-cheekboned face, Shirley is, as she likes to tell Natalie, “prepared for anything.”
“Well, you look like Christmas,” Natalie tells Shirley as she removes her jacket.
“You never know where or when I might meet Mr. Wonderful.”
“Love that sweater.”
“Randall gave it to me for my birthday.”
“The brother’s got good taste.”
“In clothes and women.”
“Does he know how lucky he is?” Natalie teases.
“Honey, I remind him constantly.” As the two women’s girlish giggles peak, the waiter approaches their table. Shirley tells the cherub-faced White boy that she wants a glass of house white wine, and Natalie orders a cosmopolitan.
“You have another one of those faculty meetings, that why you need something pretty and strong?”
“No, not today. In fact, I had a very satisfying meeting with one of my best students, a young brother who’s got ‘save the race’ written all over him.”
“How young?”
“Shirley!”
“This is a new day. You’ve been happily married so long you’d need a passport to enter my world.”
“What about Randall?”
“Oh, his days are numbered.”
“I’m not gonna ask why.”
“I hope he’ll be as generous. But come on now, what’s going on? You sounded in need of handholding when you suggested dinner in the middle of the week.”
The waiter places the drinks on the table and they place their orders, then Natalie reaches into her purse and retrieves the letter, hands it to Shirley.
“What’s this?”
“Just read it.”
Shirley gasps as she quickly scans the letter, then takes a sip from her glass of wine and reads the letter again more slowly.
“Well, I’ll be damned. What did Temple say?”
“I haven’t shown it to him.”
“And why not?” Shirley asks, turning as stern as Natalie imagines she is in the triage unit at Washington Hospital Center, where she’s a head nurse.
“I don’t know how he’d handle it.” Squirming under the disbelieving gaze of her friend, Natalie looks out the window at the street below, the slow-moving snarl of traffic and the lights studding the breast of the city.
“I’d say you’re crazy if you answered it.”
“At first I agreed with you, but I want to.”
“This is too much,” Shirley moans. “If you answer the letter, that’ll open the door for more contact.”
“I know.”
“And…”
“I’m going to answer the letter. I don’t know what I’m going to say. I won’t know until I say it.” Natalie practiced this three-sentence mantra through the zoo of Beltway traffic and as she parked in a nearby lot, anticipating Shirley’s reaction.
“Natalie, I’ve known you too long to believe that. You’ll know what to say.”
“Shirley, for all my hatred of Carson Blake, he was never real until the letter. It was like Paul had been killed by some anonymous force in the world. He was a bad cop. A dangerous man. A murderer. A thief who stole my child’s life. But Shirley, he was never real. And as long as he wasn’t real, my bitterness was a balm. When I saw his handwriting, when he told me what he’s gone through, hating him made no more sense than Paul’s death.”
“But doesn’t the letter make it hurt more?”
“I thought it would. You don’t know how many times I’ve imagined and dreamed about confronting him, trying to make him feel everything I’ve felt. I counted on seeing him during the trial for the civil suit, looking him in the face, but I was denied that. I lost my son because he killed him. How do you tally whose personal hell is worse?”
“You almost sound like you feel sorry for him. You know you’ve got to tell Temple.”
“Answering the letter seems easier for me at this point than telling Temple, not only that I got the letter but that I’ve held on to it for months without telling him about it.”
“Well, you better figure out something to say. You owe him that.”
“This could be a setback for him.”
“Stop the bull, Natalie—it’s had the opposite effect on you.”
“But we’ve dealt with all this in different ways. I can’t see us finding common ground on this.”
“If you two didn’t live in the same world, you wouldn’t have come this far.”
“I’ve known you
had something to tell me for a while now.” That’s all Temple says after reading the letter and letting it fall onto the bed between them. He picks up the remote and turns on the television. She looks at his profile, his receding hairline and bushy brows, his lips pursed and angry, the only sign he allows as a hint of what he must feel. Natalie rests her hand on the sleeve of his pajamas. Temple’s skin bristles at her touch, a reflex that scorns her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t show it to you when I first got it, but—”
“That’s one thing you don’t have to apologize for,” he says, not turning away from the screen.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“That I don’t give a damn how guilty he feels. But what I don’t understand is why you still have the letter. What on earth are you keeping it for? If he’d been anybody but a cop, he’d be in jail, where he’d have plenty of time to do nothing but write letters.” For this blast he looks at Natalie, and she wishes that he hadn’t.
“I’m as confused, as surprised as you are that I’ve held on to the letter so long. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to upset you.” The words are inept, weak, an insult.
“You think this letter upsets me? Losing my son upsets me. A letter from a coward means nothing to me at all. I know you, Nat, and if you’re holding on to that letter it’s because you want to write him back.”
“Look, Temple—”
“Whatever is happening to you, you have to go there and be with it on your own. Don’t involve me. I won’t answer the letter and I want nothing from the man.” Temple turns off the television and orchestrates a brusque yank on the comforter and huddles beneath it, reaching out to turn off the lamp on his bed stand.
Natalie slides beneath the comforter and burrows on her side. There are nights when Paul comes to her untouched by life or death, pure essence washing up on the outer shores of her sleep. Maybe she can will him to come to her like that tonight, Natalie thinks as she closes her eyes and allows herself a shallow whimper at the thought of what she wants to do. She hears Temple snoring beside her. But no tears, she promises herself and her son.
No tears. Not tonight.
The next morning Natalie writes:
Mr. Blake:
Writing you this letter is an amazement to me. I could never have imagined myself communicating with you. Initially, your letter resurrected the intense feelings of rage and violation I’ve lived with for so long. The senselessness of my son’s death haunts me every day, and every year that passes I wonder what he would be doing now if he were alive. When I received your letter that act seemed as arrogant as the way in which I assumed you had so easily taken my son’s life. I wanted to destroy the letter, but I didn’t. Your honesty frightens and humbles me. You were the last person to see my son alive. I am the woman who brought him into this world. I don’t know what I would say to you if we ever met, but I believe that whatever you want or need to say to me should be said to me rather than written. I promise you nothing, Mr. Blake, neither forgiveness nor closure of a wound that for neither of us can never really heal. You are asking more of me than anyone has ever asked before. More, I think, than you have a right to ask. I’m certain that I can’t give you what you ask in between the lines of your cryptic yet painfully revealing letter. I find myself now wanting to see the face of the man who took my son from me. Are you willing to see the face that your actions made? The greatest discomfort that your letter has provoked in me is that I now know that you are more human than I wanted with my shattered heart to believe.