“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 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 needed 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 frowned 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 sorrow, 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.”