Without Faith Page 15

  I shut my eyes again, remembering the strong, austere look of his father, the pride and humility that somehow balanced on the face of his mother. But I could not recall their names. I shook my head, opened my eyes again.

  “All I remember is that he had a fiancée named Mbali. I dreamt about her last night, and I hadn’t even thought about her once in years.” I smiled. “She had been a student at Kisu’s university but then dropped out to help her family at home when her mother died. She was the oldest girl, and was ordered to come help care for her younger siblings, despite having two older brothers who lived right there, or so I remember. I remember thinking she had every reason to be angry, to be bitter; but she truly lived up to the meaning of her name: flower. She was very nice toward me when I was there, and the way she and Kisu looked at each other . . .” I stopped as a stinging sensation that filled my chest threatened to bring me to tears. “We did look at each other like that once, RiChard and I,” I whispered.

  Laz was too busy scribbling down notes to notice my sudden spell of heart sorrow. “Perugia, Italy,” he mumbled before looking back at me. “You said his mother was Italian. Is that the city she was from?”

  “Yes. I never met her though. His father, either. RiChard showed me a picture once of them that he kept with him. It was a picture of all three of them together, all smiling. They looked like an ad for the United Colors of Benetton,” I said, chuckling. “All of them were beautiful, his dad with his dreads, his mother with her long, dark hair, pale green eyes, and freckles.”

  I paused, thinking of when RiChard showed me the photo. It was the same night that I’d introduced him to my parents at Thanksgiving dinner my freshman year of college, when I told them I was dropping out of school to marry him and travel with him around the world.

  After the firestorm of my mother’s wrath and my father’s silence, we’d sat in his old, rusted car and he showed me the one picture he had of his parents. RiChard was about sixteen years old in that photo, from what I remembered him saying, the same age Roman was now. He told me that the events that led to his parents’ divorce happened shortly after the picture was taken and all three of them more or less went their separate ways, leaving RiChard on his own. I never knew what had happened to his parents’ marriage. I never asked and he never volunteered that info.

  “Okay.” Laz was back to writing. “Can I see a picture of RiChard?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  He looked back up at me with a question on his face; but I guess he saw the look on mine and left it alone.

  “I know you said you never met his mother, but do you know anything or anyone in Perugia? I guess I’m trying to figure out the significance of Kisu using this address.”

  “I don’t know a living soul in Perugia or any other parts of Italy.” I shook my head. “No, wait. Well, that’s not really anything.”

  “What?”

  “The person who translated the letter from Portugal for me two years ago was a teacher at a community college. I briefly signed up for her course solely to seek assistance with getting answers about the package from someone who could speak the language; and the night I went, the only other student there said he was originally from Perugia. He seemed willing to help, but I had too much going on at the time.” I could still see in my mind the young man with the tight jeans and white tee, looking a like a cologne or underwear model, his accent thick, his manner casual. “His name was Luca. Luca Alexander. He signed up for the class because he was planning a trip to Rio and wanted to learn basic Portuguese before then.”

  Laz dismissed my comments with a quick wave of his hand. “Unless he is someone you really know, or are in touch with, I don’t really see how that is helpful. So, anyway,” he moved on, “you’ve given me a lot to start with. I’ll check some of the resources and sources I have and will see if I can come up with some clues of RiChard’s whereabouts.” He looked me squarely in the eye. “That is, if he is even still alive, and is willing to be found.”

  “Roman obviously found something to make him willing to leave and look.”

  I could tell Laz was weighing what I said as he began packing up his things.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yeah, unless you want me to stay.” His face unfolded into a wide smile that made me uneasy.

  “No, I mean, it’s . . .” I struggled to find words. “I thought you were going to help me. I just told you all I could about what I know, or don’t know, as it is. How are we going to do this, find him?”

  “I am helping you. You gave me info, and I’m going to follow up on it. That’s what I do.”

  “I thought we were going to work together.”

  “I get my best work done alone.

  “Laz—”

  “Let me do my thing, Sienna. I promise I’m good. I mean, really good.” His grin at the moment reminded me of the Cheshire cat.

  “Okay, yeah, you do need to go.”

  He winked as he put his fedora back on his head. “I’ll be in touch very soon.”

  Chapter 28

  As I closed the door behind him, a new wave of exhaustion threatened to break my momentum. I’d never told anyone even a quarter of what I had shared with him. Talking about it all had worn me out. Though it was only early morning, I felt like I’d already lived through the whole day and was ready to go to bed.

  But too much had been triggered in me to stop now.

  Pieces.

  That’s what my heart felt like. What my life looked like. What my understanding of what was going on was. Bits and pieces, no coherent whole.

  I changed into a more presentable outfit, grabbed my keys, and stepped outside.

  The night’s chill was still in the air. My breath crystallized in front of me and I was glad I had on my leather gloves. I got in my car, and sat in it until the sun finally finished its daily climb to the top of the morning sky. As the morning’s temperature began rising, I started my car, not sure exactly where I was going, but putting it in reverse just the same to back out of my parking space.

  I needed answers, directions.

  Peace.

  A sound mind.

  Sadie Spriggs had shared a verse about power, love, and a sound mind being the opposite of fear.

  I was afraid.

  For my son.

  For myself.

  Heck, I was scared for Silver and her mother because something was clearly off and wrong and desperate, but I did not know what to do for them. I didn’t even know if I was supposed to go to the police. Leon had said something about the detective moving on to some other lead.

  Leon.

  Tears burned my eyelids, but I blinked them away.

  I was halfway to my destination before I realized where I was going.

  There was a public garden in the city off of Northern Parkway that had acres of greenery, open space, and walkways. Every now and then, when I was exceptionally stressed, or sad, or otherwise out of sync, I would go there to meander through the landscaped grounds, to sit on the cement benches. To think. Pray. Cry. Meditate.

  I hadn’t been there in a few years. Actually, now that I thought about it, I had not been there since the day after Roman’s thirteenth birthday.

  The day after the last time RiChard called us.

  I guess I’d subconsciously known even then that something significant had just happened in our lives.

  The gates to the gardens had opened only minutes earlier. It was the near the beginning of spring, a Saturday, and the first day of the season that I could recall that the early temperature was already over fifty degrees. Despite the chill from earlier, I believed the forecasters who’d called for a dry, sunny day with a high in the sixties.

  It would only be a matter of time before other people starting walking through the arboretum’s manicured gardens.

  I parked my car on a lot near a modern-looking glass visitor’s center that had not been there the last time I’d visited. Right beyond this building sat the stately Victorian
mansion that had graced the grounds since the 1800s. Lion statues that framed the porch seemed to watch me as I walked by. I stopped at the first garden and sat down on a bench nearly hidden by shrubs and bright flowers. Crickets, birds, and other wildlife competing for attention at the start of the day serenaded me. I inhaled and the scent of sweet flowers calmed me.

  “Jesus.”

  It was the best prayer, the only prayer I could get out. With all the questions, confusion, and turmoil I faced, one thing I knew for certain. God would get what I could not say. I was certain of this, realizing that as my sanity threatened to break from under the pressure of the past few days, the only thing keeping it from doing so was a smidgeon of faith that held on to the belief that somehow, someway, everything would turn out okay.

  I recalled driving by a church marquee once that had a phrase that stuck with me: THE OPPOSITE OF FAITH IS FEAR. I wondered why I had not remembered this the other night when I asked Sadie Spriggs what the opposite of fear was.

  Power.

  Love.

  A sound mind.

  Wasn’t faith needed for those three things to take root, to grow, to thrive? It would take faith for my mind not to break; faith to believe that I could experience true love; faith to have the power to address the situation with my son, to figure out what to do about the circumstance surrounding Silver.

  Without faith, it is impossible to please God. I remembered a verse my pastor had shared with me once.

  Without faith, I would have every reason to be afraid.

  “God, I trust you.” I whispered as a slight breeze rustled through the leaves. “Even if I can’t see you, or understand what is happening, or know for sure what will happen next, I am confident that my life and times are in your hands and this too shall pass.”

  I thought of Ava’s flowers and realized why I had not been in this garden for so long. For the past few years, when I faced disaster, I usually ran to her. A smile filled my face even as tears filled my eyes. Ava would be proud to know I had grown up enough to run to my source. A peace I could not explain took hold of me. Peace and strength.

  I was ready to face the day and whatever it held.

  I stood and decided to take the long way back to my car. The serenity of the moment was too precious and rare to rush through. As I passed a couple of smaller gardens on the pathway back to the lot, a sudden flurry of color caught my eyes, startled me, and then made me chuckle.

  The butterfly garden.

  I paused at a small area of butterfly-loving flowers and bushes, finding a youthful pleasure in the fluttering of black, purple, orange, yellow, and white wings. One of my three paintings that hung on the walls of my house was based on a snapshot I’d taken at this very spot during a nature walk with Roman when he was a wee little thing: the purple, orange, and black-spotted butterfly. It warmed my heart both then and now to see the carefree beauty of the insects flittering over the flowers. I stared in admiration at them a few seconds more before turning back to my car.

  That is when it hit me.

  Butterflies.

  I’d been instinctively bothered about something ever since Silver had given me the necklace with the broken butterfly charm.

  The woman in the police footage of the kidnapping had a butterfly tattoo on her neck. It had caught my eye when I reviewed and paused the news story on my computer the other night. I had met the woman allegedly kidnapped just yesterday and she did not have any tattoos. She had been wearing a barely there black halter top with plenty of open room to see her neck.

  Nada. No butterfly.

  “So either the woman I met was not Silver . . .” I said out loud as my pace quickened to get to my car. “Or”—I gasped—“the kidnapped woman was someone else.” I dug in my purse for the necklace, pulled it out and studied it anew. I looked at the broken inscription on the back: WITH FAITH ALL. I wondered what the rest of it said—where the rest of it was. There had to be another person involved.

  “I need you to keep this in case something happens to me. I was holding on to it for a reason, to give it to someone, but I am not sure I will get a chance. When it all makes sense, you’ll know what to do with it.” These had been the words of Silver, or whoever she was, as she had pressed the necklace into my palm. As I reflected on it all, I was convinced that someone else was involved.

  I was winded again as I plopped down in the driver’s seat, unsure of what to make of this revelation, uncertain of what to do, where to go with this thought.

  The detective.

  He had given me his name and number. Perhaps I could call him and talk to him about my concerns. However, I wanted more information before I approached him. I was tired of sounding like a bumbling fool and did not want to open the door to looking like a person of interest again. I was going to get some answers and then present my suspicions to the authorities. A plan of action began fashioning in my mind.

  But first things first.

  Skee-Gee and Tridell should be back from Las Vegas by now, I realized. Perhaps they would know something more about Roman. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the first few numbers for Yvette before thinking better of it. I started over and dialed the first few numbers of my mother’s home. As her phone began ringing, I remembered the crowd of church members who had been sitting there, and wondered if any of them were still there. I hung up immediately and settled with dialing my mother’s cell phone. She answered on the first ring.

  “Well, it’s about time you decided to check in with your family.” Her tone sizzled and popped like hot oil over the phone.

  “Mom,” was all I could say as I thought quickly of how to respond to all she was saying and insinuating. But there was no sly talking or soothing my momma.

  “Do you have any word on the whereabouts of my grandson? I have been worried sick and you have not returned any messages or given me any updates.”

  “I was hoping that you had some updates, or rather, Skee-Gee did, if he’s back. Is he there?”

  “Is he where?” Her diction was sharp and direct. Never a good sign.

  “At your house?”

  There was a long pause and when she did respond, the air had gone out of her voice. “We’re all at Yvette’s.”

  I nearly gasped. My mother, as a rule, never went over to Yvette’s house. When Yvette began the series of her purposeful choices that left her living in a rundown row home in the middle of an abandoned block in Lower Park Heights, my mother did all she could to avoid the dwelling; just as Yvette did all she could to prove some point she’d been trying to make since she first got pregnant by a low-level drug dealer, Skee-Gee’s late father, at the age of sixteen. What either one of their points was was anybody’s guess.

  What I did know at the moment was that I was stepping on foreign and dangerous territory if I ventured to explore why my mother was over there. The sizzling steam in her tone told me she did not want me to suspect or ask. Only to come join them.

  “I’m on my way,” I replied and we both hung up.

  Our entire conversation had consisted of only a few sentences, but so much more had been said. Seems like that’s how all my deep conversations with my mother were spoken: in the emotion-filled pauses in between.

  Chapter 29

  I pulled up to Yvette’s house around 8:30 a.m. and knew immediately that Skee-Gee’s homecoming of sorts was in full swing. The porch was filled with his friends, wannabe gangster-looking types with baggy pants, bandanas, profanity, and sneers that were meant to scare away the timid, all sitting and standing around the covered cement stoop. Whatever lessons Leon had drilled in him along with Roman over the past two years seemed to have been thrown out of the window.

  The effects of Leon’s absence from my life were being felt already.

  I stepped through the mass of directionless young men who barely budged as I pushed through to get to the front door. As a rule, one or two of them were destined to make it. The right configuration of outside help and inside will would somehow join
forces to set in motion an escape route for a couple of them from the trappings of the hood. The rest of them would probably disappear into the short news articles, the not-so-shocking-anymore headlines, the negative statistics that seemed to loom over the success of too many young black men. As a social worker by training, I knew that context was everything, and the context, the setting where these young boys’ lives were playing out, did not give them the best odds from day one.

  I prayed to God that Skee-Gee would be one of the ones who made it out.

  “There she is!” Yvette’s loud voice blared as I crossed the threshold into her living room. “How you doin’, sis? Come on in. We’re eating breakfast.” She flashed a smile before heading back into her kitchen. My mother, Skee-Gee, and Yvette’s other four children were sitting around her dining room table, platters of pancakes, bacon, and scrambled eggs before them.

  I froze in my steps. Yvette never called me “sis.” Shoot, I could not remember the last time I’d seen her even smiling.

  “Good morning, everyone. Welcome back, Skee-Gee.” I plastered a smile on my face and headed to the kitchen, fully knowing what I would find in there.

  And I was right.

  A man.

  As Yvette giggled and carried on over the simple task of getting a bag of oranges out of her refrigerator, a man stood at her sink, washing out a glass pitcher and tall glasses.

  “Nothing like fresh orange juice on a Saturday morning.” He smiled at her, a straight-tooth, bright white smile that sparkled like the diamond solitaires I noticed in Yvette’s ears.

  “Oh, Sienna, this is my friend, Damari.” She patted his arm and they both smiled at each other.

  “Nice to meet you.” I offered a half-smile back, trying my best not to roll my eyes. I was used to the parade of men Yvette seemed to have in and out of her house; but as Damari led us both back to the table and began a genuine prayer of thanksgiving for the food that had been prepared and for Skee-Gee’s safe return, my slight disgust turned into slivers of sorrow.

  Yvette had a good man there.