“That’s a lot for a girl to remember, isn’t it? One slip and”—he snaps his fingers—“you’re pregnant. So they’ve developed these new pills that are just as effective and you don’t have to take them as often. I’ve given you enough to last through three cycles. I’ll call you to see how you’re—”
“Call me?” She shakes her head. “No! Please don’t call. My parents can’t . . . please.”
“I see. Discretion is in order, then?”
“Yes. I . . . I don’t want anyone to know about this.”
“Of course.” He nods, assured that what happened here will remain private.
That’s why he’s chosen only teenaged girls, always so tentative and vaguely ashamed. He suspects, though, that even the more experienced grown women and wives who visit the clinic keep the details to themselves.
Margaret has no idea that her cursory internal exam—a finger poke, a couple of belly pats—wasn’t the norm. He knew she just wanted to get it over with, and he felt the same way. Now isn’t the time for anything more intimate.
That time will come, though.
May 10. He’d done the math after she’d called and given him the details of her menstrual cycle.
He opens the appointment book waiting on the receptionist’s desk. The real one is tucked in a drawer for the time being. This one is identical, but belongs only to him.
They schedule her next visit for early May, an evening, of course.
“Have a good evening, Margaret, and get home safely.”
“I will, Doctor. Thank you.”
Oran locks the door after her and watches from the window as those go-go boots ascend the slick subway stairs. Once, she slips and nearly falls, but steadies herself and continues doggedly on up.
Attagirl. You’re doing just fine. And I’ll see you in May, on the night when you’ll be most fertile.
Back in the reception area, he takes the official appointment book out of the drawer and opens it on the desk.
He looks down at his own, smiling. A few days ago, he’d had Christina Myers in for her second visit to make sure that she’s been taking her “birth control pills” precisely as he’d directed and avoiding intercourse until they “become effective.” She’d thanked him profusely and he’d given her another three months’ worth. Placebos this time. Why hand out more clomiphene than he had to? He needs it for the others.
His pulse quickens when he sees the bold black circle around next Tuesday, February 13, along with the initials CM. Not another appointment for Christina, but a rendezvous on the night she’ll be most fertile.
Melody sits beside Cyril staring into the darkness beyond the porch. Both their rocking chairs are motionless as is Otis lying on the plank floor between them, nose on his paws, eyes alert as though he, too, is absorbing the news that Melody is pregnant.
Cyril LeBlanc is not the kind of man to blurt a reaction.
He’s the kind of man whose first question tonight, after months apart with no communication, had been pure selflessness.
“Did you get news about your husband?”
He knows she wouldn’t pop up unexpectedly for coffee and casual conversation. Everyone is well aware of what’s happening in Southeast Asia this week. The grim headlines are pervasive. People are dying. Hundreds, thousands of people. Civilians, the enemy, American soldiers.
“No. No word yet.”
“Bloodbath over there.”
“That’s what the news is saying, but the president thinks the offensive will be over soon. He says we’re way more powerful than—”
“You really believe that, Melody? You need to wake up!”
“What?”
“Not just you—Americans! We need to wake up. This is not our war to be fighting. We have our own war right here. Dr. King says . . . never mind. I’m sorry. All I wanted to know was whether you’d heard from your husband, and here I am on my damned soapbox again.”
“It’s all right. And thank you for asking.”
It speaks volumes about Cyril’s character, given what he’s been through and what she’s told him about Travis.
What does it say about your own that you’re still married to him?
But how do you divorce your husband when he’s under siege overseas?
How do you pray for his safe return, knowing what you know?
Her fingers toy with the etched metal buttons on the cardigan he’d taken off and draped around her shoulders when he’d spotted her here in the February chill. She presses her nose into the soft wool, breathing him in, sneaking a glance at him.
He’s thinner since she’d last seen him, and his textured hair is longer—not a full afro, but shaggy and tousled, like Jimi Hendrix.
Twilight shadows don’t mask the long scars on his face.
Surgical incisions, he’d told her last summer when she’d first noticed them. He’d been injured when he and a group of fellow NAACP Youth Council demonstrators had been attacked by a mob of two hundred white men armed with makeshift clubs outside a luncheonette. His jaw had been broken; a second blow had shattered his foot and left him with a lifelong limp.
Where had her husband been on that day, Jacksonville’s now-infamous Axe Handle Saturday?
August 1960 . . .
Travis would have been sixteen years old, cruising the streets, riding the waves, watching Hitchcock’s Psycho at the drive-in with girls who wore red lipstick. Girls like Amy Connors and Debbie Mason; prissy, pretty girls who’d made Melody’s little sister’s junior high school days miserable.
Born just eighteen months apart, Melody and Eleanor had been inseparable. Melly and Ellie, everyone called them. In the summer of 1960, Melody had been fourteen; Ellie thirteen, and ill, and dying, and lying in a casket with her hands clasped across the pale pink silk bodice Honeybee had chosen.
Her sister would have hated spending eternity in that childish dress that didn’t do a thing for her scrawny figure. She’d have hated that the undertaker had curled her long black hair into unnatural corkscrews, and the lipstick . . .
Before Ellie got sick, she and Melody had futilely begged their mother to let them wear red lipstick, like Marilyn Monroe. This lipstick was as sickly pink as the unnatural color on Ellie’s cheeks, freckles hidden behind pale makeup. She could have been a stranger lying there, but it was Ellie in a death mask.
Amy and Debbie had been the first to arrive, crying into lace handkerchiefs, seeking macabre dibs on the loss. People who’d never known Ellie had wept as if they had, touching her hand as they filed past, talking about what a wonderful girl she’d been.
Ellie would have hated it, all of it. She didn’t like attention. That’s why she never sang for anyone but the family, even though her voice was every bit as lovely as Honeybee’s and better, back then, than Melody’s.
Daddy stood between the casket and Melody, nodding and shaking hands. Honeybee wailed and moaned and sometimes fainted dead away. Not just there, at the funeral home, but for weeks afterward. Months.
Melody’s own grief had been devastating, but her parents’ sorrow was unbearable. Even their longtime housekeeper, Raelene, was shattered. Some days, the household adults were hypervigilant with Melody, as though she, too, might succumb if they turned their backs for an instant. Other days they barely seemed to notice her, and she could escape to the beach. She’d walk for hours, finding some strange measure of reassurance in predictable tidal rhythms, scooping up the occasional gleaming black shark’s tooth deposited amid shell shards in her path, remembering a time when there’d been two sets of barefoot prints along the scalloped edge of hard-packed, glistening sand.