His Third Wife

Mrs. Taylor came rushing down the hallway when she heard her son’s cries. She’d been sitting nervous in the waiting room where she’d been sequestered since they arrived at the hospital and the doctors, noting how hysterical Val was, had advised that Jamison ought to be the only person allowed in the room.

Mrs. Taylor jumped right into the fight.

“What’s this? You came here to start trouble?” she said to Leaf. “My son is mourning! Can’t you see that? This is no place for you! No place!” She turned to the security guards holding Jamison back. “You let go of my son and remove this man here from this hospital!” She pointed at Leaf. “He does not need to be here. He is stressing my poor son out. And at this time!”

The guards followed orders from a woman who signed not one of their checks. They released Jamison and escorted Leaf down the empty hallway.

Mrs. Taylor pulled Jamison into her arms. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay,” she said. “I’m here.”

When I was five years old, my mother gave me this fat pink doll with short blond curls she got at the dollar store in the mall. It was supposed to be a baby, but my big sister pointed out that it had on blue eye shadow and streaks of lavender blush over the cheeks. I took it up to my room and looked at it. Pulled the clothes off. The paisley bonnet. Slid down a little square of floor fabric that was supposed to be a diaper. I held the doll up and looked at her pink body in the sunlight coming through my bedroom window. I could see right through her. Right through what was supposed to be her belly. Right through what was supposed to be her heart. Her brain. There was nothing inside. She was all a pink shell. But she was mine. My baby. Pink and empty. My mother told me to name her. I never did though. I hid her clothes in my sock drawer and set her on my bed. When my mother asked why she was naked and what I’d done with the clothes, I said she didn’t have a heart so she couldn’t feel the cold and I was saving my clothes for my real baby who could feel the cold. One day after school when I was bored, I cut off all of her cute blond curls and burned them in the backyard behind the shed. When my mother saw her bald head, I explained that my baby was stupid and she didn’t need nice hair because she didn’t know about nice hair. On another day when I was bored, I broke off one of her pink baby arms. On the next day, I broke off the other arm. Then the right leg. Then the left. When my mother saw the armless, legless baby lying on my pillow, she demanded that I put the arms and legs back on. “You’re too young to be doing all this, missy! You’re not ready. Something ain’t right with you.” I couldn’t find the arms and legs, so she popped me on the butt ten times and asked if I could imagine how that baby might feel without her arms and legs. I cried. And when my mother left the bedroom, I grabbed that armless, legless pink baby, my baby, and held her up to the sunlight. She had no heart. No brain. What could she feel? The next thing I remember is getting my sister’s art marker and writing all over my baby’s body. I wasn’t bored. I think I just wanted to make a point. I wrote every curse word I knew. And there were many. Over her forehead, I wrote Broken. I put her back on my bed and went outside to play by myself. When I came back into the house, my mother beat me again. She said I was being ugly and hateful. And that was the very first and very last doll she’d ever buy for me. She said the next baby I’d get would be the one I birthed on my own and she’d see how I treated that one.

All my life, I’ve only had broken shit. Broken. When it came to me that way. Or I made it that way. Broken. Old books from the thrift store with pages torn out the back. Freshly painted nails with beautiful red lacquer that smudged right after I walk out of the nail salon. Friends with no loyalty. Men with no hearts. A run up the back of my stocking. Rain anytime. And that’s not what hurts. No, the broken thing being there doesn’t hurt. I built up the expectation for it. I learned young that even if it isn’t there, maybe I should find the broken thing. It is coming. For sure. Just like my father, found floating in an old swimming hole. It’s coming. What hurts is forgetting that it’s coming and soon secretly thinking maybe it won’t.

When I was on the bathroom floor with that toilet filled with red broken things, I realized it was happening because of me. I forgot about the breaking. About how fragile every fucking thing around me is. No matter how hard I try to hold it together, it will fall apart. Even inside of me.

I should’ve expected it. I couldn’t think Jamison would just suddenly love me. And then our baby would come and he would love the baby. And we would hold our baby up to the sunlight. And see that it had a heart and a brain. And it would stay together. And we would stay together. And never fall into pieces. I couldn’t think that. But I should’ve.

When I woke up at the hospital, I felt an emptiness that let me know the doctors had sucked every living thing out of me, placed me in a bed, and covered me up in something white. At first, I was still pretending for myself. Maybe they’d saved the baby. I’d given birth in my sleep and my child, no bigger than my hand, was somewhere in a nursery under a blue light with white gauze pads covering her eyes. But I looked at Jamison and knew I had to stop. It was the first time he ever looked sorry for me. His eyelids were low. His lips were somewhere between smiling and frowning. He asked, “What happened?” I was about to tell him I didn’t know, I didn’t remember. But then I started remembering, going back past the bathroom floor and toilet. The wet mattress beneath me. My stomach hurt like someone was cutting me wide open from the inside out with kitchen knives. Walking up to my bedroom. Mrs. Taylor telling me to go lie down if I wasn’t feeling well. My stomach hurting just a little bit—maybe gas. Sitting in the kitchen beside the new frien

d I’d found in a mother-in-law who insisted I eat a second serving of the summer soup she wasn’t eating. Her laugh. A cackle.

And then I was about to answer Jamison’s question—“What happened?”—I looked at him and saw a hand on his shoulder. Beside my hospital bed where I was lying all hollow was his mother.

I screamed like a freight train was rolling through the room full speed ahead, “Get her out of here!”

“Hell”

There was no funeral for the dead. You can’t bury something with no name or thumb print. Maybe that wasn’t true, but that’s what Val told her mother when she’d called to say she was getting on a bus to Atlanta. “Don’t come, Mama. Ain’t nothing to come for,” she’d said before collapsing into an honest cry Mama Fee never knew could come from her child.

The spectacle of screams sent a thunder clap through Mama Fee’s soul. She dropped the phone on the bed where she’d been sitting and stood mechanically in a way that made clear she’d disconnected her every sense from the world around her.

“Mama? Mama?” her little girl was calling through the abandoned phone, but Mama Fee couldn’t hear. Her feet took her to the old mahogany stained chifforobe willed to her from Val’s great-grandmother, a swamp woman who’d had only the wooden clothing cabinet to her name when she’d died in a muddy abyss in a disregarded part of Louisiana struck hard by Hurricane Katrina. There, in the back of the top drawer that creaked and moaned when Mama Fee pulled the handle, was a little silver picture frame buried beneath a cabal of dried flowers with insidious names like the snake lily and devil’s tongue and five candles burnt to puddles of bubbling wax. “Mama? You there? Can you hear me?” Mama Fee uncovered the silver treasure, wiped bits of the dried flowers from the glass covering the picture, and saw traces of an art she’d learned from the swamp woman as a girl—cut out holes where there had once been eyeballs belonging to those who’d meant to harm what was hers.

“Silver, silver, black and silver,” she said to the holes.

Val could hear her chanting but couldn’t make out what she was saying. “Mama?”

Mama Fee slid her hand back into the mess of snakes and tongues and retrieved a cold heavy weight, a silver candelabra. She pulled it from the mysterious soup, held it high over her head, and lowered it with force to break the glass over the picture to bits. She banged and banged and banged until glass dust was kicking up everywhere in a cloud.

“Mama? What are you doing?” Val was hollering then, but she knew. She always knew.

Mama Fee returned to the phone rewired, reconnected, and in a voice as clear and as calm as if she was floating in a pool of salt water, she said, “Get out of that house. There’s nothing there for you.”

Jamison was handling the loss his own way—which kind of meant not handling it at all. The mayor who’d abandoned his profession for so long Sunday morning pundits had questioned if the city once known as Terminus had a mayor at all and could have elected better replacements that included the newborn panda bear at the zoo and the Big Chicken on Cobb Parkway, dove back into his list of promises with a resolve that had his growing list of faceless enemies suiting up in armor that wasn’t figurative and loading bullets that had a target in mind.

Jamison’s participation in the ambiguous duel wasn’t as methodical though. It was reborn in him in the way a cause was ex humed from the hearts of all great leaders who preceded him: a long hard look in the mirror to measure the man before him. It was time for him to answer to anything he thought he was. Even in the face of what he knew he’d lose. What the unburied thing had shown him was that loss was always possible. Inevitable. And sometimes you could lose things you didn’t know you had. You didn’t know you wanted. Or needed. But he wouldn’t know that until he was tumbling to cold, pressed tar, no future in front of him, but a past of no regrets.

He called Leaf and told him to meet him in the parking lot behind Fox News. When Leaf got there, Jamison was standing on the side of his car, rubbing his palms into the sides of his slacks. Leaf was moving slower than usual, had the distant look of the accused in his eyes.

Jamison had expected this, so he started with something like an apology: “There’s a lot going on. I don’t know who I can trust, but I don’t really believe those things I said to you at the hospital.”

Leaf just nodded and looked up at the huge satellite bolted to the roof of the news station. “Why are we here?” he asked. “There’s nothing on the schedule. Did I miss something?”

“I went to the jail this morning. Met with Ras and his attorney,” Jamison explained, pointing to a stack of papers sitting in the backseat of his car. “Got a lot of information about why the police department—and I don’t know, like the whole damn criminal justice system—seems to want to take him down.”

“Why?”

“Because they want to take me down with him,” Jamison whispered.