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“Miss, we got them out,” the fireman told her.
Adrienne’s body relaxed. “Oh, thank God!” She breathed. “Where are they?”
Mel was unconscious, lying in the back of the ambulance with an oxygen mask pressed over his face and white bandages wrapped around both hands and arms up to his elbows. The only indication that he was still alive was the slow rise and fall of his chest. Two of the paramedics worked feverishly on him. A third paramedic patted her shoulder, saying, “He has some shards of glass in his arms. My partners are more worried about smoke inhalation than anything else right now.”
Adrienne shouted to Mel over the noise, “Mel, I’m here. What happened? Where is Delilah?”
The paramedic rubbed her back. “Ma’am, he is in shock right now and probably doesn’t remember what happened. We’re taking him to the hospital.” He took her elbow. “Have a seat. You can ride along right beside him.”
Adrienne kissed Mel’s forehead and then looked frantically from one face to the other. “Where’s my baby?” she pleaded. The paramedics looked away, but not before their eyes told her what their lips could not.
Adrienne jumped from the ambulance, and a black female police officer rushed over to guide her.
What remained of Delilah was zipped up in a body bag and already placed in the coroner’s wagon. “Ooooooh,” a cry of pain escaped from Adrienne, and the agony ripped through her body with the force of a thousand knives.
Adrienne thought she was sleeping, that the horrific scene in front of her was a bad dream. She would go mad if it were real. Black tears from her mascaraed eyes streamed down her face, and her perfectly manicured nails began to break as she clawed at the doors of the vehicle that held her baby girl. Strong arms grabbed her from behind. It was the female officer, and she was crying, too, as she clutched Adrienne to her bosom.
PART ONE
A BLAST FROM THE PAST
CHAPTER ONE
“Wake up, fool.” Debra Jordan shook her brother’s shoulder. “Your wife is on the phone.”
Melvin groaned and pushed his head deeper into the pillows. What the hell did Adrienne want now?
“Tell her I’m just walkin’ out the door,” he said.
Debra shook harder. “What you talkin’ about? She say you was supposed to meet her this afternoon. Now git up and talk to her. I got company.”
Six months after the fire, Mel lay on a thin mattress on a single bed that was much too short for his lanky frame. He had never bothered to decorate these sleeping quarters, so his back room in Debra’s thirteenth-floor housing-project apartment was practically bare. One scarred bureau held a broken mirror, a rickety lamp, and a cheap clock that didn’t work most of the time.
Mel sat up and shook his head in confusion. “I just lay down for a minute. What time is it?”
Debra sucked her teeth on her way out the door. “Nighttime, fool. It’s just after eight.”
Mel groaned. He had been supposed to meet his wife at 1:00 P.M. to see an apartment. “Damn! Adrienne must be boilin’ mad.”
The sounds of the Mississippi Mass Choir were blaring. Debra played gospel music every Sunday. She also held a card game in her apartment every Sunday night to pick up extra spending money for the coming week. It didn’t matter which players won or lost, because the house got five dollars per game. Debra was a big woman with a toothy grin and dyed red hair, which at this moment was standing straight up on her head, her black roots showing.
It sounded as if there were a hundred people in Debra’s living room, but Mel knew that it was the same half dozen who played blackjack and bid whist and drank rum there every Sunday night. He pushed himself up off the bed and went out into the noisy, smoke-filled living room.
There was a new face at the card table. A woman who looked to be in her late thirties, with caramel skin, full hot pink lips, and wearing a low-cut hot-pink dress to match. Her dark-brown hair was all twirled up in a fancy style. The thin gold bangles that decorated both her arms jingled as she played cards. Mel had not planned to join the game, but the beautiful unknown female in the living room changed his mind. He knew he’d be playing his last five dollars as soon as Adrienne finished telling him off.
It didn’t bother him that Adrienne was annoyed. Sooner or later, she was going to have to face the truth, and then she would dump him anyway. When he and Adrienne first separated because she blamed him for the tragedy, he had prayed for God to take him to his mother so that he wouldn’t have to think about his lost wife and daughter.
With nowhere else to go, he had arrived on Debra’s doorstep, mired in grief and anger. For the first few weeks he didn’t sleep for more than three hours a night. The bus company had forced him to take a three-week leave of absence after a cop found him sobbing at the wheel with a load of irate passengers and other drivers honking their horns and shouting obscenities in the traffic around him.
The truth was that her husband was a street guy who had turned his life around, only to find out that God was determined to return him to the gutter where he belonged. God had killed his baby, driven his wife almost insane, and returned him to his sister’s house, where nothing mattered but the next card game. Mel no longer believed he could have the American dream, but he would not
risk Adrienne’s mental health by telling her that. Sooner or later she would realize it herself. Until then, he’d just go along with the charade.
He winked at Hot Pink, who was sitting between Ann and Ann’s mother, Belle, Debra’s coworkers. From Tuesday through Saturday, Debra worked in Harlem as a barmaid for an illegal dive that couldn’t be seen from the street. The owner paid the cops off every week to keep them from shutting the place down. Everyone prospered except the semiliterate women who worked there. Most of them were middle-aged high school dropouts, who worked for the less than minimum wage plus tips because they couldn’t get a job anywhere else.
Big Boy, a three-hundred-pound fool with only five teeth left in his mouth, took up the whole sofa, which had been pulled up next to Belle. He was an asthmatic who chain-smoked cigarettes. He had also started more than one feud in the projects, yet always emerged with his few remaining teeth intact. Mel didn’t understand why no one had killed his ass yet. Big Boy slapped an ace down on the table and noticed Mel at the same time. “If I was as ugly as you and somethin’ that pretty was on the phone for me, I’da been outa that bed long before now.”
Everybody thought this was real funny. Mel ignored the laughter while he shuffled through the room and picked up the receiver, which was lying facedown on a washing machine that hadn’t worked in more than twenty years. Debra refused to get rid of it, because, aside from some old pictures, it was all they had to remind them of their mother.
