Aunt Connie smiled and hugged me. “Good; we’ll get you moved in soon as we get you fed. Who’s hungry?”
“I am,” Ali said.
“Hattie’s laying out a spread over to her house,” Connie Lou said. “Let’s get you somewhere you can wash up and we’ll have us a grand time and catch up proper-like.”
My aunt was such a force of nature that Ali, Jannie, and Naomi fell right in behind her when she rumbled off. Bree held out her hand to help Nana Mama and looked at me expectantly.
“I’ll be right along,” I said. “I think I need to go in there alone the first time.”
I could tell my wife didn’t quite understand. Of course, I’d told her very little about my boyhood, because, really, my life began the day Nana Mama took me and my brothers in.
“You do what you have to do,” Bree said.
My grandmother gazed at me evenly, said, “You did nothing to cause any of it. You hear? That was out of your control, Alex Cross.”
Nana Mama used to talk to me like this all the time in the first few years after I went to live with her, teaching me to divorce myself from the self-destruction of others, showing me there could be a better way forward.
“I know, Nana,” I said, and I pushed open the gate.
Walking up to the screened porch, however, I felt as strange and disconnected as I had ever been in my entire life. It was as if I were two people: a man who was a capable detective, a loving husband, and a devoted father who was heading toward a quiet little house in the South, and an unsure and fearful boy of eight trudging toward a home that might be filled with music, love, and joy or, just as easily, screaming, turmoil, and madness.
Chapter
5
Aunt Connie was right. I didn’t recognize the place.
At some point in the past decades, it had been gutted and the configuration of the bungalow totally changed. The porch was the only part I completely recognized. The entryway where we’d leave our shoes was gone. So was a half wall that used to divide the kitchen from the living area, where me and my brothers, Charlie, Blake, and Aaron, used to play and watch television on those occasions when we had one that actually worked.
The new furniture was nice and the flat-screen television large. The kitchen had new cabinets and a new stove, fridge, and dishwasher. There were more windows in there too, and the dim place where we’d eaten our meals at a dreary Formica-top table was now a bright and cheery spot with a built-in breakfast nook.
Standing there, I could almost see my mother on one of her better mornings, dressed in her threadbare robe but glowing like a beauty queen, smoking a filtered Kent cigarette, making us waffles with sunny-side-up eggs on them, and singing along to Sam Cooke on WAAA 980 AM out of Winston-Salem.
…been a long time coming, but I know a change gonna come…
It was her favorite song, and she had an amazing raspy gospel voice developed in her father’s Baptist church. Hearing my mom sing in my head while I stood in the kitchen where she used to sing to us, I choked and then broke down crying.
I never expected it.
I suppose I’d put my mother away for so long in one of those boxes I keep locked in my mind that I thought I was long over the tragedy of her life. But obviously I wasn’t. She’d been smart, sensitive, and very funny. She’d been gifted with words and music. She could make up songs right off the top of her head, and on those rare occasions when I witnessed her singing in church, I swear to you, it was as if an angel possessed her.
But there were other times, too many times, when demons took her. She saw her own father commit suicide in front of her when she was twelve and she was emotionally crippled by it her entire short life. She found relief in vodka and heroin, and in the last few years of her life, I rarely remember her stone-cold sober.
I said that demons took her, but really, it was the memories festering in her drug-and-booze-addled mind that created the monster that she sometimes was late at night. From our beds, we’d hear her crying for her dead father, or screaming at him. On those nights, she’d get violent, break things, and curse God and all of us too.
All the children in an addict’s family play different roles and have different ways of coping. My brothers retreated into themselves when my mother was using and a danger to us. My job was to stop her from hurting herself and, later, to pick her up off the floor and put her to bed. In the language of recovery, I played the roles of hero and caregiver.
Standing there, recalling all those times I’d tri
ed to forget, I suddenly saw plainly that my mother had created me in more ways than the physical. From an early age, I’d dealt with chaos and chaotic people, and to survive, I’d had to swallow my fears and force myself to understand and deal with sick minds. Those hard-won skills had inevitably led to my calling in life, to Johns Hopkins for my doctorate in psychology, and then to police work. And for those reasons and others, I realized that despite all the craziness and the loss, I was grateful to my mother and blessed to be her son.
Wiping my tears away, I left the kitchen and went into the hallway that led to the bedrooms. When I was a boy, there were just two in the house, and we had a single sorry excuse for a bathroom. Recently, another bath had been added. The large room where my brothers and I slept had been split in two. There were bunk beds in both of them now.
Staring into my distant past, oblivious to any noises in the house around me, I remembered my father on one of his better evenings, sober and funny, telling me and my brothers about some trip he was going to take us on to hear jazz on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
Gotta have dreams, boys, he’d always say before he turned out the lights. Gotta have dreams and you’ve got to—
“Freeze!” a man shouted. “Hands up high where we can see them!”