What They Found Read online

  “You know what he asked me? He asked me where I was.”

  “I thought you were sitting in the museum.”

  “We were,” Gaylee said. “But what he meant was where I really was. He looked dead into my eyes and asked me where my heart was and I wanted to curl up and die. I mean, my heart was beating so hard I thought he could see it through my blouse.”

  “So, like, was he hitting on you?”

  “No, Elena. Look, he’s got to make a commitment to a school and he doesn’t want to be too far away from me,” Gaylee said. “And he wants us to be a couple. You know, Auburn is like a foreign land to me. There are no brothers going there who aren’t on some ball team. I think he wants me to be his woman.”

  “He said that or you just thinking that?”

  “He said he’s had me in his heart for a long time, and now it’s time he was accepting the feeling he had for me,” Gaylee said. “I know it sounds romantic and everything, but I did ask him if he really meant it and he said he did.”

  “And he didn’t hit on you? Because this is kind of sudden, right?”

  “Girl, you have a one-track mind. Look, I was thinking, we don’t have to be into a Romeo and Juliet kind of thing, but we can be supportive of each other and take care of each other while we’re away from home. I’m not trying just to get a man or anything, but college can be hard and it’s good to have some support.”

  “I think it’s like when guys go into the army and they need to tighten up the home front,” Elena said. “They get into settling down and stuff. Did he say he loved you?”

  “No, but he said he felt we could be very special together,” Gaylee said. “And I have a lot of feeling for him. But I’m easing into it slowly.”

  “It doesn’t sound that slow to me, Gaylee,” Elena said. “But the brother is fine, so if you need to get on your track shoes—go for it. He said he had a lot of feeling for you, too?”

  “He said that sometimes you find a special moment and you know deep within yourself that you have to rise to it,” Gaylee said. “I think that’s what it was for both of us.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him I would think about it,” Gaylee said. “I think I’m going to call him tonight after I get home from the clinic.”

  “Call me up first and we’ll make it a conference call and I can listen in and give you advice if—”

  “No! I will handle the situation,” Gaylee said.

  At the clinic she was asked to clip the nails of a pretty Burmese shorthair. Gaylee wrapped the sleek animal in a fluffy white towel and took out one paw after the other to clip her nails as the cat purred.

  “She likes it,” said Dr. Van Pelt. “She gets pampered more than most people in this world.”

  “All of these animals do,” Gaylee said.

  “No, they don’t,” Dr. Van Pelt said. “Look at that shivering bundle over there.”

  Gaylee looked and saw the black and white patch of fur in the corner of an open cage. “It’s afraid to come out?”

  “Abused,” Dr. Van Pelt said. “We’ve started antibiotics and cleaned him up, but we don’t know if he’s going to make it. He’s dehydrated, but it’s hard to tell how badly. We’ll give him water for a day or so, but to save him we might have to hydrate him intravenously. That’s a decision we’ll have to make when we get to it. It’s an expensive process.”

  “Who does he belong to?”

  “No one, the police found him in an abandoned building tied to a radiator. He’s a French bulldog.”

  “Why would anyone abuse a dog like that?”

  “Gaylee, if you’re going to be a doctor of any kind you’re going to see abuse,” Dr. Van Pelt said, leaning against the white cabinets. “People make up excuses why it’s all right. They need to teach an animal discipline. They were angry. The animal misbehaved. In the end it’s all about the unpleasant discovery that usually they can get away with it and move on to the next stage of their lives. We don’t know who owned this poor dog.”

  “If no one …” Gaylee wondered what would happen next.

  “Is he worth saving? Depends. Does his opinion matter? Do you think he wants to be saved? Finish the nails, then I need you to check out some turtles for a third-grade class.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Gaylee finished the cat’s nails, gave it a hug, and put it back in the visitors’ cage to wait for its owner. All the while she thought of what she would say to Malcolm. She knew that the only word in her mind was yes, but she didn’t want to seem too eager.

  What, she asked herself, if Malcolm did try to hit on her before she went off to Auburn? Would she say yes to that, too? She closed her eyes and pushed the thought out of her mind. He had plenty of girls around him. She believed him. And, if worst came to worst, she would see what she would do when the time came.

  “Since you have already left the premises in your mind, Gaylee,” Dr. Van Pelt said, interrupting her thoughts, “you might as well go home now.”

  At home her mother was trying to get the ancient can opener to work and Gaylee chided her about getting a new one.

  “You just need to get the can at the right angle,” her mother said. “Oh, by the way, Elena called. She said it’s important. You know, sometimes she has an accent and sometimes she doesn’t.”

  “She thinks the accent makes her sound sexy,” Gaylee said, scrolling through the numbers on her cell phone as she tossed her books across the bed.

  “Gaylee?”

  “Hi,” Gaylee answered.

  “Look, girl, I don’t know how to tell you this.” Elena’s voice was husky and flat. “I spoke to my cousin Mimi and just mentioned that you were getting tight with Malcolm. She told me that Malcolm had a thing going on with Vanessa Josephs—you know her, she looks a little Indian or something and used to hang out with those girls who wanted to start a singing group? What did they call themselves … the Twilights?”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  “Vanessa is like six months pregnant,” Elena said. “I just thought you might want to check that out.”

  “That’s his business,” Gaylee said.

  Elena was still talking, but Gaylee could hardly understand the words. She closed her eyes and covered her mouth with her hand. An image of a building being demolished on television came to mind. She remembered seeing the building shake, then collapse in a cloud of dust, the sky suddenly appearing where its silhouette had been.

  Somewhere over the next minutes Elena was saying goodbye and Gaylee heard herself trying to sound cheerful as she said she would see her in the morning. Then there was silence, and then there was Gaylee falling across the bed.

  That night Elena’s words came to her again and again. Gaylee couldn’t stop the tears or stop her hands from shaking. She thought about being in the museum, about Malcolm’s quiet conversation, and what she hadn’t said to Elena, that their conversation had ended with her taking Malcolm’s hand in hers and holding it fast against her bosom.

  “My heart is with you,” she had said.

  He had kissed her lightly on the forehead, and then, lifting her chin, had kissed her on the mouth.

  Now she wanted to cry as a million thoughts ricocheted through the confusion that had been her mind. Suppose Elena was mistaken? Suppose she was just jealous and trying to break them up? But Gaylee knew Elena wasn’t wrong. They had been friends for years and Elena had always been there for her.

  After the museum she and Malcolm had walked through the busy uptown streets. There had been a breeze and Malcolm had put his sweater around her shoulders. They had walked and talked, with Malcolm saying that he finally knew what he wanted.

  “I think I have a chance to do something really good with my life,” he had said. “And I want to make good on that chance.”

  They hadn’t spoken of love. There were no promises made, no pledges to be together forever. It was just Malcolm’s feelings of needing to take charge of his life, to move upward an
d to find someone who could share in his thoughts.

  “We make our lives,” he had said.

  “Yes,” she had answered, still holding his hand. “We do.”

  It was nearly midnight when she dialed his number.

  “I just heard something that I wondered about,” she said. She saw herself gesturing in the mirror, as if it were some casual thing.

  “What’s that?” Malcom asked.

  “I heard that Vanessa Josephs is pregnant,” Gaylee said, holding her breath.

  A pause. Gaylee thought she heard him clearing his throat.

  “When I thought about what I wanted to do with my life,” he was saying, “it was after I found out about Vanessa. It was about doing the right thing for everybody, about not turning away from the life you want—the life you need to have—because there are detours.

  “I think Vanessa and I drifted into a relationship without a lot of thinking going on. I don’t think our lives should be that way—just sliding through our moments. Her saying she was pregnant was, in a very real way, a wake-up call, that moment of epiphany I told you about. I had to look deep inside myself and wonder what I really wanted from life. What kind of life I was willing to go for, and who I wanted to go with me on that journey.

  “What I’m hoping is that you can forgive me my past errors and move on with me,” he said.

  Gaylee said she would have to think about it. She listened as Malcolm said that he would do right by Vanessa, that his parents would even help support her.

  She felt that he was reaching for her, that he didn’t want to end the conversation. What she wanted was to think, to run the words through her mind again, to hear them and weigh them.

  But all she could do in the quiet darkness of her room was to cry. For a long time nothing else came. No ideas, no argument to be considered, just the tears and the disappointment.

  She didn’t sleep at all. She thought about Malcolm until the first light of day rose from between the redbrick tenements along Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and the first rays of the sun began to glint off the windows along the slowly waking street. Malcolm had had an epiphany a moment of suddenly realizing who he was and what he wanted. Gaylee went into the kitchen and put on water for tea. She needed to have her own moment.

  She didn’t see Elena for nearly the entire day. She had seen Malcolm and he had asked if they could meet after school.

  “Malcolm, I’m a slow thinker,” she had said. “I’m still working on it.”

  “Gaylee, I love you,” he had said.

  She was at her locker when Elena came up to lean against the locker next to hers.

  “I should have kept my big mouth shut, right?”

  “No,” Gaylee said.

  “You talk to Malcolm?”

  “I can’t look at him and say anything,” Gaylee answered. “I know I’ll just show how disappointed I am and end up slobbering all over the place. You ever see how bad I look when I cry?”

  “Gaylee, I’m sorry,” Elena said. “Look, I think he likes you and doesn’t care two cents about no Vanessa.”

  “Could be,” Gaylee said. “But this morning when I got up I realized two things. The first was that I was lonelier than I thought I was and just hadn’t admitted it to myself. The second was that after listening to everything Malcolm said about fulfilling his potential and going on with his life, I knew he was just talking about what he had decided to do, and what he could do. I’m not brave enough to spit out my two cents to his face, but I know I don’t want to be his choice of the day. Right now I’m not in the mood for long explanations or even short goodbyes, but I know I’m not going to see him again. So I’ll just keep on feeling bad for a while and then I’ll get over it. Look, I’m crying again.”

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.”

  “Hey, so am I,” Gaylee said.

  At the clinic Dr. Van Pelt asked her if she was all right.

  “You’ve been crying,” the doctor said. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Not for me,” Gaylee said, trying to force a smile. “I just wondered about that little French bulldog. You going to give him water through his veins?”

  “You think he’s worth it?” Dr. Van Pelt put down the manual she was holding. “We won’t get any thanks for it. We’ll lose money on him and he still might not make it. And with his tiny veins it won’t be easy. But sometimes there just seems to be a right thing to do and you have to do it.”

  Gaylee opened the dog’s cage and saw him raise his head, trying to respond. As she lifted the shivering animal out of his cage, her mind drifted back to Malcolm, as it did a hundred times a day.

  He could have been the answer to a prayer she hadn’t remembered making, the fulfillment of a dream that had been too long in the closet of her mind.

  “Don’t get too attached to that dog,” Dr. Van Pelt said, smiling. “If he makes it we’ll probably end up selling him.”

  “It’s all right,” Gaylee said. “I’ll be able to give him up when the time comes.”

  burn

  I’ve always been quiet. Abeni said I was too quiet and shy for my own good, that I would never find a man if I didn’t learn to “put myself out there.” But I didn’t have my sister’s brilliant smile or that tough, tall body she inherited from our father. What I had was a heart always ready to retreat, eyes too eager to look down when a boy spoke to me, and a tongue that forgot how to speak when anyone expressed interest in me.

  Between working in the shop, going to school, and volunteering at the Children’s Center, I kept myself busy and pretended I wasn’t interested in dating. Abeni told me I needed to come out of my ivory tower and give the boys a chance. What I wanted, what I needed, was for the boys to storm the gates and carry me off. I knew Mama was worried.

  “Don’t you think about boys sometime?” she had asked me.

  I thought about them all the time. I just froze when they came near me. Occasionally I told myself that when Mr. Right came along things would be different. That’s the reason I couldn’t decide if I wanted Mama to know that I was almost having a date with Burn. Almost because when he had asked me out I had said no, but then I told him I was doing volunteer work on the weekend and we could always use some new volunteers.

  “What you doing?” he asked, the dark eyes merely slits in his chiseled brown face.

  “We’re taking a boatload of handicapped children up the Hudson to Bear Mountain,” I said, feeling myself look away from his gaze. “It’s just a turnaround cruise. We pick them up in the morning and bring them aboard. Most of the day we play games with them or just let them watch the passing scenery, whatever they want. They have lunch on the boat and then we bring them back. It’s a nice outing.”

  “Yeah, I’ll come,” he had said.

  So in my mind it wasn’t exactly a date.

  “It may not be exactly a date, but it’s Burn!” Mama was sitting in one of the chairs with her feet up and shoes off. “The man’s a thug! What you doing with a thug?”

  “We’re not going out, Mama,” I said. “We’re going to Bear Mountain. Then I’m coming home and he’s going wherever he’s going.”

  “Noee, you haven’t dealt with anybody like Burn before,” Mama said. “And don’t tell me what they haven’t proven. That man is dangerous.”

  I had known Burn back in the day when he was Leon Robinson, a snotty-nosed kid everybody felt sorry for. His mother was caught up in the crack blitz of the eighties and he had to pretty much raise himself the best he could. There were stories about how the man his mother lived with had beat him, and how he had once lived in an empty apartment for days without anything to eat. Then, slowly, he had grown from a kid everybody pushed around into someone that everyone feared. He had been in gang fights and shoot-outs that made even the white newspapers, and had spent at least a year and a half in a juvenile detention facility. Now, at twenty-two, he was four years older than me but looked like he could have been in his thirties.

  He had come into the
shop a week earlier, with a sleek-looking white girl hanging on his arm. She was wearing a white jacket with a white blouse and a little black string tie, white silk pants that came down to mid-thigh, and a black lace skirt over the pants that came down to her knees. It was unusual but on her smallish figure it was looking good. She was built nicely and the only jewelry she wore were matching black onyx pinky rings and three diamond studs in each ear that looked fabulous. They made her blue-green eyes even more striking. She wore her dark hair up and wanted the back of her neck trimmed.

  “I was going to try to do it myself using a mirror,” she said, her Southern accent coming through strongly, “but I figured I’d probably just mess it up.”

  I trimmed her hair. She said her name was Sue Ellen and chatted about a letter from her father in Alabama. He was warning her about the dangers of New York, she said, as if Alabama weren’t just as dangerous.

  All the while Leon—now Burn—sat watching us. He had grown into a good-looking man, a little over six feet tall, and muscled. But the way he watched us, nothing moving except his eyes, he reminded me of a snake, and the whole world was potential prey. It was as if anything you said might set him off and he’d lash out. He wore a gold suit and a gold and black shirt open at the collar. He saw me looking at him in the mirror and smiled. I was embarrassed that he’d caught me checking him out and dropped my eyes to my work.

  When I finished trimming her hair Sue Ellen paid me and gave me a twenty-dollar tip, which was more than the trim.

  Abeni went to the window and gave a running account as they were leaving.

  “He’s got a driver who opened the door for Burn and she opened the door for herself,” Abeni said, peering through the blinds. “And she made sure she showed some leg as she got in.”

  * **

  We talked about Burn and his lady friend for a while longer before going back to the day’s business. When the door opened two days later and I saw him standing there I was surprised. Mama and Abeni had gone downtown to buy supplies and I was checking the bills. I knew he wasn’t going to do anything to me, but I felt a sense of panic when he asked if we could go out sometime. That was when the conversation ended with me telling him about the boat trip.