Nash
The building was quiet. No lights lit up the hallways and no answer came when we knocked on the door. “We should check the roof.”
Will nodded, holding my hand when I offered it to her as we headed toward the stairs. “You said his cell was disconnected?”
“Yeah.” I held open the door, letting her in front of me as we climbed the stairs. “Been at least a week since I’ve heard from him. But then sometimes he goes AWOL. He always shows up again.” She moved through the door, holding it open for me when I came behind her and we walked toward the cages where Roan kept his pigeons.
“Think he’ll show up again?”
But I didn’t answer Willow. There was a little too much worry crowding my head, coupled with all the other confusing things that had happened that day. The cages were empty.
“There were pigeons. Hundreds of them.” I waved at the empty cages, two sets of six rows, all vacant, even the water from the dispensers and the feed in the bowls were gone. In fact, the only thing that remained of the birds were some random feathers and a single spattering of droppings. Everything else had been cleaned away.
She moved around the cages, closing the open doors, her head shaking as she looked first at me, then around the roof. “I don’t understand why…”
“What is that?” I asked, pointing at a red envelope stuck between two of the cages. Will was closer and grabbed it, but once she looked at it, she smiled. “I’m guessing this is for you.”
Will handed it over and I copied her smile, spotting Roan’s messy scrawl “My man…”
When I opened the envelope there were numerous sheets of neatly folded paper and a silver key which fell from between them. Read this inside was jotted on the outside of the pages. “What does he…”
“Here,” Willow said, picking up the key to hand it over. “There’s more to discover, it seems.”
The old bastard had slipped his apartment key in the envelope, something that struck me as monumental since I’d never gotten even the smallest glimpse inside his place before now. But the key had a number, 1313, and I knew exactly which door it would open, though none had numbers.
“Come on.”
We headed to the last door on the third floor, a place Roan had told me he had taken over when he moved into the building because he liked to watch the sunrise from that spot. It gave him a clear view of the park.
A slip of the key and we were inside, exploring the nearly empty apartment. There was no furniture anywhere in the large, loft space, which I guess hadn’t always been a loft. Heavy wood beams stretched from one end of the room to the other and in the center, near to where a small kitchenette sat in a corner, two more beams ran vertical on either side. It looked like Roan had used a small air mattress to sleep on, but it was deflated and a thick blanket sat in the center, folded neatly with a pillow on top of it.
“Didn’t leave much, did he?” Will asked stepping away from me to nose through the row of upturned boxes and the books that lay scattered across the brick floor. She squatted down, picking up one by the corner, a smile tugging on her mouth when she read the cover.
“What is it?” I asked, coming toward her.
“The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins.” My mom has this one. In fact,” she said, standing up to hand over the book. “I’m pretty sure Roan…or Mr. Lewis…whoever he was gave it to her.”
“Sneaky asshole.”
There was a make-shift wall dividing the main living area and when I walked to the far side of it, I came face to face with an expanse cluttered with photographs, printed images, sketches and graphs. Multi-colored strings of yarn linked one image to another, mapping out relationships, drawing one generation to another. I decided whatever I thought I knew about my old mentor was going to get thrown right out the window—along with so much that I once thought I believed.
“Son of a bitch,” Willow said, voicing my thoughts as she came to stand next to me. Almost all of the pictures were old, some going back a hundred years, maybe even earlier than that. “Nash, the letter.”
Until she mentioned it, I’d almost forgotten. “You read it,” I said, stepping closer to the wall. There was a clear division, with a length of black string separating one section of pictures from the other. At the top of the right side was the messy scrawl of “Simoneaux.” To the left, came “Lanoix.” Those names were familiar and, by looking at the pictures, I started to get an idea why.
Some were in color—those I only glanced at. Some, like the one Willow had shown me earlier that night, were of Roan, or the man who I thought was Roan. Near the top, taped to a brick was a picture that Will’s great-granddaddy had also had in his little box of keepsakes. There were four people in this one—Sylv and Sookie standing next to Dempsey, all smiling, all glancing to their right, looking at a tall man with dark skin who wore a jaunty fedora. The picture in the old man’s box had listed four names: three we knew, and one we didn't. Sookie, Sylv and Dempsey were familiar, but not the man who went by “Uncle Aron.” Yet even though the name wasn’t familiar, the face certainly was. He hadn’t been Aron when Willow met him as Mr. Lewis, her mother’s university colleague who’d given her the key to his rent-controlled apartment. He hadn't been Aron, but Roan, when I got to know him as one of my college professors, then my mentor; he was the one who, four years ago, clued me in about an apartment building in Brooklyn that I might want to check out. Now his face was in a decades old photograph, while the letter he had written only a day ago was in my hands.
“Read it, please,” I said to Will, my gaze never leaving the images. Hundreds of faces reminded me of my kin; many looked like Will and what I guessed her own people had looked like.
Willow unfolded the papers and began to read. “Nash, you’re reading this letter because things have aligned. Finally, I hope. For the duration of your life, at least, I pray.”
As I listened to her voice, I studied picture of Sookie and Dempsey. Something about the boy’s face in this one seemed vaguely familiar.
Behind me, Will continued. “There are things that should not be explained. Things, I wish I could tell you, but fear you’d never believe, about me, about the life I have led. You told me of the dreams you had and the memories you shared with your Willow. First, let me say that you have not lost your young mind. You aren’t being set up for some prank and Willow isn’t a witch, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself she is.” She lowered the page, telling me with the quick arch of her eyebrow that she wasn’t amused. “You told him I was a witch?”
“Willow, you yanked me into your apartment inside of a minute of laying eyes on me, and then you announced you wanted to cleanse my aura.” I turned, facing her, hoping my smile would disarm her look of skepticism. “Wasn’t long after that I started having the dreams. What else was I supposed to think?”
She smacked my arm with the paper, but smiled while she did it, holding back a laugh. “A witch? Really? Do you see me wearing a pointy hat?” I opened my mouth, gearing up for another apology, but Willow looked down at the letter again and started to read. “And you aren’t experiencing these memories because you’ve lived them before. Reincarnation is a dream made up by folk who can’t believe there is only one go around in life. They cling to it, to the hope that they will get a second chance. This isn’t yours. Well, not completely.”
I turned back to the board, focusing on the same boy, tilting my head to stare at his smile and the shape of his chin.
“There is a connection you feel with Willow because it has existed for a very long time and most probably will continue to exist for many generations into the future. It will not end with your life or with hers. It will go on, you see, as long as the world does.”
Will came to stand next to me as I continued to examine the picture on the wall. When she caught sight of what I was looking at, she lowered the page she had been reading, and lifted up a hand her mouth, which was suddenly hanging open. “What?” I asked, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, as though she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. “I didn’t realize it with the other pictures.” She pointed at the board, right at the picture I’d been staring at. “Dempsey. He’s so young in this picture. I’ve never seen him so damn young.”
“What do you mean?”
She looked at me, pressing her lips together like she wasn’t sure how to make the word unfurrow from her throat. “Dempsey is my great-grandfather, Nash.”
I looked between her and the board, seeing the similarities, the shape of her cheeks, just like Dempsey’s and the sharp point of her chin. They were identical, but that didn’t make sense.
“How?”
“I... I don’t know.” She immediately went back to the letter, skimming through the words, her eyes moving down the page until she came to a line that widened her eyes. “…after Sookie and Babette died, Dempsey’s father blamed Joe Andres, telling the police, those not in Simoneaux’s pocket, that it was the fat man that had started the fire. Dempsey did something stupid, I’d say, though it did free us all up to worry less over that rotten family. He told the sheriff that he’d seen his father start the fire, told him he’d testify if he needed to. Knowing his own son was willing to testify against him, the old man didn’t put up a fight and Simoneaux got hauled off to parish prison. Dempsey’s word, it seemed, was enough to put his daddy in jail for murder and destruction of property—but it wasn’t enough to keep himself safe.
“We took him to Alabama after the trial then on to the Army recruitment station where he signed his name as Eric O’Bryant and O’Bryant is what he remained until the day he died.”
Will lowered the letter again, stretching a hand out to rest it on my arm, like she needed me to keep her from falling. Her face was open, her features expressive as she blinked and seemed to look inward, as though there were too many thoughts clouding up her mind and she need to sort them out.
“That means…” she looked at the board, searching for a name, maybe a face, and after a few moments she covered her mouth again, pointing at the string of yarn that ran from her great-grandfather’s picture to a smaller one further down. “Nash, look. It’s Riley. Riley and Isaac.”
I had to look closely at it, and there was Riley, standing on the steps of a synagogue with an older version of Dempsey at her side, next to an older woman—Riley’s mother I guessed— and a man that looked even more like Will than her great-granddaddy. I nodded to the man and Will smile. “That’s Ryan. That’s my daddy’s daddy, Nash. Riley’s brother Ryan. I’d never put the name together. Riley. They never talked about her. Not ever. I only knew her name because it was in my grandfather’s prayer book. I saw it when I was ten and asked him who she was.” She stared at the image again, stretching a finger toward it. “He said Riley was his sister who’d gone off to heaven a long time ago. Then he made me promise never to mention her to Gramps. He said it would hurt him too bad to talk about her.”
Next to Riley was a tall, broad black man. There was a small grin on his face and he held Riley close to his side, but he stood ramrod straight, like a soldier, and I wondered how long Isaac went on that way, being on guard, once Riley was gone. I wondered if when he was alone with Riley he smiled the way I did when Willow looked at me.
“Isaac,” I said, pointing to the picture, then frowning when I fingered the string that ran from his wedding picture, then across the board to the second family tree. “Holy shit.”
“Nash…”
I pointed at another picture, this one with Isaac too, but Riley was missing. He looked younger in that picture and there was nothing resembling a grin on his face as he stood next to a face I knew. I’d seen it in a handful of pictures in the family album my mother kept in the front room of our small apartment. It had been next to her family Bible, and the envelopes she said were for important papers. Nat and my birth certificates, my parents’ wedding license, the number to the detective who always called to check on my father if he’d gone too long falling asleep on the front porch.
Next to the Bible she’d stacked a thick photo album. There were baby pictures of me and Natalie, things that only a first-time parent would keep—locks from our first haircuts, pictures we’d drawn in pre-school and dozens of photos from her family in California. In the back of that album was a handful of images, not as well kept as my mother’s, all of our father’s people. His parents, who had died one night, just like my mother had, exactly for the same reason. My grandfather Lenny had gotten drunk. We’d heard rumors from the family, things that got passed along like how many husbands a certain cousin had or how many times someone had been in jail. Lenny had been a drunk, and had passed that habit down to my father. There had been whispers told behind our backs, when the gossips thought Nat and I slept: Lenny and his wife Clara had never gotten over the loss of her brother. They’d been close at some point but had fallen out when her brother married a woman Clara didn’t like.
I’d only heard the story once, but knew it well enough that seeing my grandfather and Isaac wasn’t a much of a surprise as it should have been.
“It’s Lenny,” I told Willow, nodding toward the picture.
“Isaac’s friend?”
“And my father’s father, Will.”
“What?”
We traced the string, how it moved up, linking Clara to Sylv, Sookie’s brother. I glanced over at the O’Bryant tree, moving my fingertips along it and saw the timelines were nearly even. For every Lanoix family member that married and had children, so went an O’Bryant. Nearly every year since Sookie’s death, there had been a birth, a marriage on Willow’s side of the family.
“It’s the same,” I said, glancing at Will, noticing that her eyes had gone wide again as she quickly scanned Roan’s letter.
She moved her fingernail over the pages, stopping when she came to Isaac’s name. She looked up at me. “He almost…” Will shook her head and I caught the glint of tears between her lashes. “Isaac might have had a good life,” she read, “with Winston, his son and maybe that would have been enough. But for Winston’s birthday, he wanted the boy to meet his family, to bring him to his sister and hope that his son would be the one to bring them back together.” Will’s throat worked, as though she had to swallow the large knot that blocked her voice. “The plane they were on crashed somewhere off the South Carolina coast and Isaac and Winston went on to be with Riley before the boy had turned five.”
“That was why…” I closed my eyes, wondering for a second if things would have been different. If my life would have changed if Isaac hadn’t crashed with his son, if his sister and Lenny had never been forced into the sorrow that took over their lives. “My father said once his folks were sad people. There had been so much loss. Too much, it seemed. He said they never laughed. They never…”
Willow came to my side, curling an arm around me and I hugged her close, looking at the pictures, the endless strings that weaved in and out, that touched and moved and connected all these lives.
“What else does it say?” I asked her and she lifted her hand, passing over the letter for me to read.
“There is a force at work that cannot be explained,” Roan had written. “Something that moves through the ages. The same thing that made it possible for me to be an uncle in New Orleans, that brought me to Riley and Isaac in a D.C. library, and also to a young woman who wanted to learn, so she could show her young daughter, Willow, that a woman was a force to be reckoned with. It led me to you to me as well, Nash when you were scared, when you needed a father because yours had not been one at all.
“This force, this power directs, guides us, plants within us the memory of generations, things that should have been and weren’t, things that could have been yet failed. And sometimes, as you probably are realizing by now, those should-have things will try again and again, searching for a fitting end, searching for a finality that will lead not to sorry, not to loss, not to failure, but to joy. I cannot name it, this ancient, sacred thing. I can only follow it, obey it and hope that one day it ends with love. In my bones, my friend, I believe that it will, and that you will be one of those happy endings. For you, Nash, have found everything you need in the woman at your side.”
* * *
Later, Willow lay on my chest, our bodies sweaty and slick, our heartbeats slowing as we lay naked, sated in my bed. There were boxes and bags all over my floors. Her toothbrush had been unpacked and we shared a pillow. I thought the jasmine scent would never leave my sheets, in the same thought I realized I didn’t want it to.
“A hundred lifetimes, I bet,” Willow said, staring up at the ceiling with her fingers moving over my arm.
“What?”
“A hundred. All those people, moving together. All the lifetimes spent searching, wanting to come together. We can’t be the first, Nash.” She lifted on her elbow, resting her palm against my chest as she watched me. “How sad would it be if after all those lifetimes it’s you and me who get our happy ending and no one else.” She laid back down, turning to rest her chin on my chest. “Doesn’t seem fair.”
“No,” I said, pulling her closer. “I don’t think it’s fair at all.”
“Why us, do you think? After all this time…why is it us?”
I’d thought of nothing else on the taxi ride home. We’d splurged, celebrating Roan’s departure with a cab ride back to Brooklyn and a pizza delivered ten minutes after we’d lugged Willow’s suitcases back into the building.
“Maybe it’s because no one learned.” I felt her move her head, her hair rustling against my shoulder. “It’s like this country and all the people who are still clueless. We kill each other, we fight and fuss and we forget that there was a time, not that long ago, where we were even more divided. It’s two hundred years and we’re still divided. Maybe all those people in our families, maybe they were divided too. Maybe because the world was, they couldn’t get past that to someplace where they could be happy.”
“And we can?”
I nodded, a non-answer that gave her pause. She was warm against me, a solid weight that was soft, and sweet and so new and exciting. Her life and mine were moving together, real and honestly, closing the gap on the distance that seemed to have always divided our families.
“Sometime, next year, I need to go to California.”
“To see your sister?” She was curious, and I tugged her further up my chest. I’d been thinking about Nat since we read Roan’s letter. How family and blood cross tides of time. How there had been so much anger, so much loss and nothing ever got settled from holding onto it. I didn’t want that for me. I didn’t want it for Natalie, either.
“Yes,” I told her, swallowing as the words came. “To see Nat and…to see my father. It’s been a long time.” I exhaled when Willow relaxed against me. “I’ve hated him for a long time, Will. But... I don’t want to anymore. It’s time to start healing.” She nodded, I felt the movement of her chin. “Will you go with me?”
“Of course,” she said, kissing my chest. “I’ll go anywhere with you.”
She hummed when I kissed her, holding her face between my hands, feeling our bodies twining together. “We can have our happy, Will," I whispered to her, “the two of us. I know we can. I know it with everything I am.”