My laughter at the memory breaks the silence in the car, and I wish she were here beside me, curled up in the passenger seat talking about everything or nothing. I’d settle for her silence, her voice, her scent. I’d take anything of her I could get.
It makes me eager to get home—to put this road trip behind me and find a way to see her. I’ll speak with Dr. Packer and figure out when we can talk to Simone, what to say. It’s time to bring Lotus back into my life, into our lives.
I’m not-so-patiently stuck riding behind a slow truck carrying huge pipes when my headlights illuminate a chain anchoring the pipes as it pops loose. The pipe slides off the truck and toward me, headed for my windshield.
“Shit!”
I swerve, avoiding the pipe that lands in the road where my truck was mere seconds ago. Another pipe slips from the truck’s flatbed, bouncing on an unpredictable trajectory. The entire sequence takes seconds, but everything retards to a slow-moving, terrifying crawl. Inside of me, though, accelerant douses everything—my racing, pounding heartbeat, the blood rushing through my veins like river rapids, the quick, shallow breaths chopping up in my chest as my body deploys adrenaline to every vital organ.
The wheel slips through my hands as the truck hurtles toward the guardrail. In my mind, I see Lotus clutching her little saint, her face wreathed in fear and love by the flickering light of candles, eyes fixed on me, never looking away. All I hear is Lotus’s urgent recitation, the psalm falling from her lips with the determined persistence of raindrops pinging a tin roof.
It’s the last thing I hear before the groan and crash and moan of colliding metal take it all away.
45
Lotus
“You ready to hit this J train?” Yari asks.
“In a minute.” I glance up from the dress I’m pinning for JP. “Isn’t this gorgeous?”
“Girl, yes.” Yari walks farther into the fitting room where the models usually try on the clothes. I’m working from a body form, though. “What’s that for?”
“A certain Hollywood actress wants to be wearing this when the Oscar goes to her,” I mumble around the pins in my mouth. “We’ve got plenty of time since she hasn’t even been nominated yet.”
We share a quick laugh. I get up and stretch from the long time on my knees. “Let me grab my stuff.”
My phone rings in my pocket as I’m walking back to my cubicle. Iris’s ringtone.
“Hey, Bo. What’s up?” I ask, motioning to Yari that we can keep walking out. “You calling to complain about how hungry my nephew is again? I’ve told you that formula—”
“Lo,” she breaks in. “No, I, um . . . that’s not why I’m calling.”
The somber note weighing her voice down stops me shy of the elevator. Yari stops, too, eyeing me curiously.
“Oh,” I say. “You sound funny, Bo. What’s up? The kids okay?”
“The kids are fine.” Her voice catches. “It’s, um, it’s Kenan, hon.”
All my bodily functions pause. Or at least, it feels that way. The whole building, the whole city, the whole world seems to stop for a second. I want to stay in this tiny window of time before I know how bad it is, before she tells me something that will demolish my heart and ruin my life.
“What about . . .” I clear my throat, but the fear doesn’t move. An unbudgeable dread gathers and ties knots in my belly. “What about him? He’s okay, right? Iris, he’s okay?”
The silence that follows blares in my ears. I pull the phone away and press it to my chest, closing my eyes and forcing myself to listen again.
“Lotus?” Iris asks. “You there?”
“Yeah. Just tell me”
“He was in a car accident.”
“But he’s okay. He’s alive. I’d know if he weren’t.”
Iris’s skepticism reaches me across the phone—the same skepticism I get from Kenan. She thinks I make it up—that I’ve bought into some of MiMi’s old-lady nonsense. She doesn’t understand. She never really has.
My soul would know. I’d get goosebumps. The damn sky would open up and pour out fire. Somehow, some way, I would know if Kenan Ross had left this Earth.
“He’s alive, yeah. He’s in surgery now,” Iris says. “But it’s serious. You need to come. August is chartering a flight to get you here as quickly as possible.”