“Sapelo.”
There are Gullah Geechee communities up and down the coastal low country. She can’t assume that everyone with a patois might be connected to Cyril.
“Before, you said something about . . . the nursery?”
“Thought you were asking about the baby. That’s where she is.”
“She?”
“Yes, indeed.” She pours water into a glass. “A little girl. Just perfect. Healthiest preemie I ever did see.”
A little girl . . . perfect . . . healthy . . .
Melody’s heart inflates.
I just knew it. I just knew I was having a daughter.
But then the word preemie hits her like a pin in a balloon. She remembers the lies, and Travis, and Rodney Lee.
“Does she look . . .”
“Like you?” Yvonne finishes for her when she falters. “That’s what every new mama is wanting to know before she lays eyes on her child. I surely did with my daughter, and she’s the spitting image of me now that she’s all grown up, but wouldn’t you know that the first time I saw her, she was whiter than this bedsheet!”
Melody raises her eyebrows, and Yvonne grins.
“You see, I was young and I didn’t know back then that it takes some time for Negro babies to get their pigment. Her daddy didn’t know that, either, and oh, my, you should’a heard him!” Yvonne chuckles, shaking her head as she swings a tray over Melody’s bed and sets the glass on it. “Tell you what, you sip some of this water for me while I go fetch your little girl and you can see her for yourself.”
She sails out of the room.
Melody lifts the glass. Her hand is shaking. Water sloshes over the rim, running down her fingers. She puts the glass down.
Is it true? Will her baby be white, at least for a while, regardless of whether Cyril is the daddy? It wouldn’t solve her dilemma, but will at least buy her some time to sort things out.
Her gaze settles on a vase of pink tulips. Who brought them? Could Cyril have . . .
But of course not. He wouldn’t know she’s here, she realizes, feeling more alone than she ever has in her life.
Then the nurse is back, placing a bundle into her arms.
A tiny, pale-skinned girl gazes up at her with enormous eyes the shade of a dusky sea, and Melody realizes that she’ll never be alone again.
Marceline awakens to a predawn rain and a familiar, unsettled feeling.
Years ago, when Cyril, Sr., had gone off to war, she’d drift from slumber in sweet anticipation of dayclean, only to open her eyes to the sensation that something was wrong. It always took her a few waking moments to remember that her husband was in danger on overseas battlefields, but once she got used to reality again and the day settled over her, the uneasiness would lift.
“You ain’t gotta do anything but wait for me to come home.”
“You never did, though, did you?” She climbs out of bed and glances at that old red satchel full of his things.
Oldest story in the world.
A man, he goes and he does. A woman just waits.
But the good Lord alone knows what’s going to happen when that buckruh woman’s wait is over.
Maybe that’s why Marceline’s apprehension persists as she stands at the stove, stirring her grits. She can feel her husband’s spirit boddun’ around her.
“I know, Cyril. I been frettin’ about that boy.”
She’d heard about the violence unfolding in Memphis and Atlanta, and across the country. He’d turned up back home a few days ago none the worse for his sojourn if somewhat subdued, as though someone had dimmed a lamp behind his eyes.
It’s to be expected. He’s not the only one mourning the fallen civil rights leader. A tide of grief rolled across Barrow Island when the news broke, and the world beyond is more tumultuous than ever.
“That why you been boddun’ me all the time now?” she asks Cyril, Sr. “Or is it something else?”
No reply, just raindrops pattering on the roof, and one of the cats crying on the porch.
She goes to the door to let it in. But when she peers into the wet morning gloom, there’s no sign of a feline. And when she returns to the kitchen, she sees that the pot has boiled over, though she’d set it on a low flame.
“You tryin’ to tell me something?” she asks her dead husband.
She eats the grits with butter and salt, remembering how Cyril, Sr., used to cover his with a layer of sugar. She never did care for that, and scolded him that their son would pick up the bad habit.
He hadn’t, though. He’s a good boy. A good man.
A better man than Mrs. Melody Hunter deserves.
Marceline had gone over to Amelia Island a time or two back in February and March, to see what she could see.
Fernandina Beach is a small enough town that everyone knows everyone else—the household help included. Through a series of casual conversations, Marceline had found her way to a young Gullah woman who worked for a woman who was in a weekly bridge club with Melody’s mother, Honeybee.
“You ever happen to overhear any she she talk?”
In their shared dialect, she she talk is a certain brand of gossip—the kind she imagined a housekeeper might overhear from a gaggle of buckruh women, and she was right.
Honeybee had told the others how newlywed Melody and her husband had moved into a gray bungalow on Elm Street. He was in Vietnam now, and she was expecting their first child.
“That woman, she’s all aflutter about her grandbaby,” the housekeeper told Marceline.
Her grandbaby . . . and mine.
“Why you want to know all this?”
“I worked for the Abernathys years ago. Just wonderin’ how it all turned out.”
You got to be a trutemout’, you heah me? her dead daddy scolded in her head.
Back in his day, she imagines, it was easy to be someone who always tells the truth. But in hers, when lives are hanging in the balance, sometimes the only way to get at the truth is with a lie.
Marceline had walked along Elm Street looking for the gray bungalow, knowing she’d find it before she crossed Eighth, where the neighborhood transitioned into Southside. There are a few white households in that part of town now, but she’d bet Travis Hunter’s isn’t one of them.
She’d have known the house by its description, but she’d spotted the red Camaro first. She’d heard about a buckruh woman driving it around Barrow a while back. At the time, she hadn’t connected her to Cyril, and why would she?
Oh, son. What have you gotten yourself into?
She hadn’t knocked on the door. She’d returned several times, though, just to walk past. And then one day, she’d crossed paths with a pretty, hugely pregnant blonde woman carrying grocery bags that looked too heavy for someone in her condition.
If she were anyone else, Marceline might have stopped and offered her a hand.
When they were close enough, the woman met her gaze with a friendly smile and a pleasant, “Good morning.”
Marceline returned the greeting, surprised by it and by the sweet susceptibility in those big green eyes. She’d turned her head a few times after they’d passed each other, expecting the young woman to walk right on by the gray house, but no, she was unlocking the front door and going inside.
This, then, was Melody Hunter. Not at all crookety, far as Marceline could tell.