Belliver House was demolished in 2005. There’s a soccer pitch where it used to stand. The land beyond has been pleasantly groomed and planted, professionally landscaped into meadowy park with winding trails of white stone, a man-made pond, and a vast playground. I paid for most of it. I wish Shelly had lived to see the place. I am as haunted by her dying view of a parking lot and dumpsters as I am by my memories of the Phoenician. I don’t like to think about her last days in that dismal little room—but I wouldn’t erase those recollections even if I could. As awful as they are, those memories are me, and I would be less without them.
We all went down to the park for the big opening: my wife and our two boys. It was August, and there was thunder in the morning—big, rolling cannonades of it—but come afternoon the skies were stripped clean and blue, and you couldn’t have wished for a better day. The town put on a good show. A thirty-piece brass band played old-timey swing music in the bandstand. There was free face-painting, and one of those guys who makes animals out of balloons, and my old high school turned out the cheerleading troupe to do some jumping and tumbling and rah-rah-ing.
What my boys liked most was a roaming magician, a guy with slicked-back hair and waxed mustaches. He wore a purple tailcoat and a ruffled green blouse, and his great trick was making things disappear. He juggled burning torches, and somehow, as each one came down, it vanished as if it hadn’t been. He held an egg in one hand and smashed his fist into it and it was gone—shell and all. When he opened his fist, a chickadee sat chirping in his palm. He sat on a straight-backed chair and then collapsed into the dirt, because the chair was gone. My boys, six and four, knelt in the grass with dozens of other children, watching raptly.
Me, I mostly watched the sparrows. There was a flock of them settled on the slope above the pond, picking contentedly. My wife took pictures—with her phone, not a Polaroid. Tubas and trombones blatted in the dreamy distance. When I closed my eyes, the past seemed very close, only the thinnest of membranes separating yesterday from today.
I was close to dozing off when one of my sons, Boone, the younger boy, tugged on my shorts. The magician had walked behind a tree and dematerialized. The show was over.
“He’s all gone!” Boone cried in wonder. “You missed it.”
“You can tell me about it. That will be just as good.”
The older boy, Neville, laughed scornfully. “No it won’t. You should’ve kept watching.”
“That’s Daddy’s magic trick. I can close my eyes and make the whole world disappear,” I said. “Anyone want to see if we can make some ice cream vanish? I think there’s a place selling soft-serve on the other side of the pond.”
I got up and took Neville’s hand. My wife took Boone’s. We started away, crossing the greensward and startling the sparrows, which took off in one great rustling swoop.
“Dad,” Boone said, “do you think we can always remember today? I don’t want to forget the magic.”
“Me neither,” I said—and I haven’t yet.
LOADED
October 14, 1993
AISHA THOUGHT OF HIM AS her brother, even though they weren’t blood.
His name was Colson, but his friends called him Romeo, because he had played that role in the park last summer, getting fresh with a white Juliet who had teeth so bright she should’ve been in a chewing-gum ad.
Aisha had watched him perform on a hot July evening, when dusk seemed to last for hours, a line of glowering red light on the horizon, the clouds shavings of gold against the dark sky behind. Aisha was ten and didn’t understand half of what Colson said, up there on the stage, dressed in purple velvet like he was Prince. She couldn’t follow the words, but she didn’t have any problem making sense of the way Juliet looked at him. Aisha didn’t have any problem figuring out why Juliet’s cousin hated Romeo either. Tybalt didn’t want some smooth-talking black kid crowding in on any white girl, let alone someone in his family.
Now it was fall, and Aisha was getting ready for a performance of her own, the Holiday Vogue, which meant modern-dance classes twice a week after school. Practice didn’t end on Thursday nights until six-thirty, and her mother wasn’t there to collect her when it was done. Instead Colson showed up, twenty minutes late, after all the other girls had left and Aisha was waiting alone on the stone steps. He looked good in a black denim jacket and camouflage pants, coming up the path, out of the dark, in long strides.
“Hey, Twinkletoes,” he said. “Let’s dance.”
“I already did.”
He bumped his fist on the top of her head, grabbed her school backpack by one strap. She had the other and didn’t let go, so he towed her along after him, into the darkness, which smelled of grass and sun-warmed asphalt and—distantly—the sea.
“Where’s Mom?” Aisha asked.
“At work.”
“Why’s she at work? She’s supposed to get off at four.”
“Dunno. ’Cause Dick Clark hates black people, I guess,” he said. Her mother worked the grill at a Dick Clark’s Bandstand Restaurant, an hour-long bus ride south in Daytona Beach. On the weekends she vacuumed at the Hilton Bayfront in St. Augustine, an hour’s bus ride north.
“How come Dad didn’t pick me up?”
“He’s cleaning up after the drunks tonight.” Her father was an orderly at a blue-collar rehab facility for alcoholics, work that combined the pleasures of janitorial labor—there was always puke to mop up—with the invigorating effort of wrestling hysterical junkies in the throes of withdrawal. He often came home with bite marks on his arms.
Colson lived with Aisha’s father and Aisha’s stepmother, Paula. Colson’s mother was Paula’s sister, but Paula’s sister couldn’t look after herself, let alone anyone else. Why she couldn’t look after herself had never been adequately explained to Aisha, and in truth she didn’t much care. If Colson Withers had a Coca-Cola and she wanted a sip, he’d let her have one, no hesitation. If they were out where there was a video game and he had a quarter in his pocket, it was hers. And if he didn’t listen to her when she told a long, rambling story about the stupid things Sheryl Portis said in dance class, he also never told her to shut up.
They trotted along Copper Street to Mission Avenue. The east-west streets in that part of town were all colors: copper, gold, rose. There was no Blue Street, and there was no Black Street (although there was a Negroponte Avenue, which Aisha suspected might be racist), but the whole area had always been called the Black & Blue. Much as it had never occurred to her to find out why Colson didn’t live with his own mother, she’d never thought to ask anyone why she lived in a part of town that sounded like a beating instead of a neighborhood.
Mission Avenue was four lanes wide where it intersected with Copper. A big strip mall, the Coastal Mercantile, ran for a few blocks along the far side of the road. The lot was desolate, only a handful of cars parked there.