Against all protocol, I leaned across the table and squeezed his hand where the tongue of the snake licked his knuckles.
When I got back to the city, I took the story to Bobby. But he said he had enough going on without digging under a building on Stony Island looking for one more dead gangbanger. “Even if Lamont Gadsden’s there, even if we find him, what am I going to do about it? It’ll be Merton’s word against Dornick’s, and even if for one day out of my entire forty years on the force I am willing to believe a gang scum over a cop, I’d never sell the state’s attorney on it. Dornick has plenty on his plate. Let it ride, Vicki. Let it ride.”
I let it ride. But I did cash in some old chips of my own with the state. I didn’t try to get Johnny’s sentence reduced—he was in prison for serious and well-documented crimes—but I did see that he was transferred to a less punitive part of the system. And I let Dayo see the photos, let her see her father had saved Martin Luther King’s life that hot August day forty years ago.
I was also able to tell the story to Miss Ella and to Miss Claudia before she died. Miss Ella seemed almost sorry that I’d found her son. It took away one of her pleasures, the pleasure of complaining that I was taking her money and not delivering. But Miss Claudia, in one of her final lucid moments, told her sister to be ashamed of herself.
“Hate and bitterness, always wrong, Ella. Always wrong. Lamont with Jesus. I know it, I know in my heart. White girl, you did good job. Hard, I know. Hurt, burn, beaten, you stay working. I know, Pastor Karen tell me all. Good, good girl.” She pressed my fingers as hard as she could and then lay back against her pillows.
At first, I thought she’d fallen asleep. But she was just mustering her strength, this time to tell us she wanted Pastor Karen to preach at her funeral. And when Ella harrumphed about women being silent in church, Claudia said, “Men kill Lamont. Men hurt world, do war, do torture. Pastor Karen preach.”
That was the last time she spoke. She died two days later without ever regaining consciousness again. After the funeral, after the supper in the church hall with everyone’s favorite casserole, and ham, and the black-eyed peas with chitterlings that Miss Claudia so loved, Max and Lotty took me away with them for a long weekend in the country.
The day after I got back, Jake Thibaut knocked at my door. I’d seen him a few times just passing on the stairs, him liking to joke about whether I needed him to get a clarinet case or something to carry my body around, but we hadn’t really talked.
This evening, he had a CD in his hand. “Those tapes you gave me—your mother singing—I had them professionally mastered for you. She had an amazing voice. I’m privileged that I got to hear it.”
I had forgotten about the tapes, in the chaos I’d been living in. Now I put the CD in my stereo. As Gabriella’s voice, that golden bell, filled my home, I felt so overcome with all the grief and loss of the last forty years that I could hardly bear to listen.
“Forse un giorno il cielo ancora / Sentirà pietà di me.”
(One day, perhaps, Heaven again / will feel pity for me.)
I played it over and over while Jake stood awkwardly by. At one point, he disappeared, but then returned moments later with his bass. He played the aria through, first in company, then in counterpoint, with my mother’s voice. After that, it seemed natural to bring out her red wineglasses and toast her memory, and exchange our life stories, and, finally, to lie together on the living room rug while Mozart and my mother filled the room.
The End