Blonde Faith

13

By the time I got home, I had plotted and abandoned six different ways to get to Bonnie and convince her to come back to me. I considered everything from just apologizing to buying her a house in Baldwin Hills where we could start life anew. I even flirted with the notion of killing Joguye Cham. . . . That was when I understood that I was truly, madly in love.

Frenchie was waiting on the other side of the door this time, growling and baring his teeth. He snapped at me when I crossed the threshold into my own home.

“Hi, Dad,” Feather said, coming out of her room. Easter Dawn came after her, wearing a pink kimono and carrying an ornately crocheted purse that looked something like a briefcase with a red silken shoulder strap.

“Hey,” I said to the children, the crush of melancholy just below the surface of my greeting.

Feather stared at me a moment and then turned to the tiny child.

“E.D., go into my room and set up all the dolls the way you did for me so Dad can see them.”

The child’s eyes glittered. “Okay,” she said excitedly, and then she ran for the back of the house, the shoulder-strap briefcase flapping at her side.

It was the first time I’d seen Feather manipulate a situation with a third person in order to get her way. She looked intently at my face and came up to me, putting her hands on either side of my head.

This gesture made me very uncomfortable. It wasn’t the father-and-daughter relationship I’d had with Feather for close to a dozen years. She was almost a woman and I was nearly a man.

“We have to talk,” she said.

I wanted to find the child in her, to tell her a joke or tickle her. I wanted to dismiss her serious stare, but I could not.

I sat down on the love seat in the small room that divided the living room from the kitchen, and she sat there beside me.

“Juice and I are going to Bonnie’s wedding,” she said.

“So I’ve heard.”

“We have to do it,” Feather continued. “Bonnie is as much our mother as you are our father.”

Did she find you two in the street like I did? Would she have brought you to live with her with no father to help her? Would she have risked her life to save you? I thought these things, but I did not say them. Bonnie was a wonderful woman and of strong mind. She might have done more than I could have imagined. As far as I knew, her affair with Joguye was to ensure that Feather had the medical treatment that saved her life.

“I know you love her,” I said. “And I would never stand in the way of that.”

“And you should come too,” Feather said. “She needs you to tell her it’s all right.”

I don’t think that the experience of losing my mother at the tender age of seven hurt as much as Feather’s request. I looked up with a blank expression on my face and absolutely nothing in my mind.

“She has to move on, Daddy. She can’t wait forever for a man who doesn’t have forgiveness in his heart.”

I’d been called a nigger many times in my life. It was always a painful, enraging experience. But it was nothing compared to the simple truths that Feather was speaking. I wanted her to be quiet. I wanted to stand up and go into my bedroom, take out my .38, and just start shooting: the mirror, the wall, the floor under my feet.

“She waited for you to call,” Feather continued. “She told me that she loved you more than any other man. She knew what happened with her and Uncle Joguye was wrong, but she got all confused when she was watching him make those doctors work on me. She wanted to come back home, Daddy, but you wouldn’t let her.”

Maybe, I thought, there was a God. He wasn’t some gigantic and powerful deity but just the vessel of all knowledge and therefore a judge of truth. Now and then he inhabited some person and made them say the words that had gone unsaid. At this moment Feather was the expression of that God. He was using her to condemn me for my wrongdoing.

“You can’t expect us to choose between you,” Feather was saying. “We can’t help what happened.”

I wanted to say that I understood what she was telling me and that it was true. I opened my mouth and a sound came out, but it was not words. It was a small mewling utterance, something that had never before come from me or anyone else I’d heard.

When Feather heard this muted cry, a look of shock crossed her face. She was my daughter again. I could see in her alarm all the things she was feeling.

Feather had been mad at me for making Bonnie leave our house. She identified with Bonnie’s broken heart and her need for love in her life. Now she felt guilty about going to the wedding and angrier still that I would feel betrayed about her going.

I was her father. I never felt pain or weakness. I never got tired or brokenhearted. I was invulnerable and could therefore hear her anger without danger of being hurt.

But the moment that sound came from me, Feather understood the pain that had been festering inside me, the pain I had never shared with her.

She put her arms around me and said, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, honey,” I said in constricted little words. “I know you love both of us. I know I was wrong. You do whatever you feel is right, and I will love you no matter what.”

“Mr. Rawlins,” Easter Dawn said, running from Feather’s room. “I have all the dolls set up for you to see.”

IT TOOK ME ALMOST an hour to get dressed for dinner. I closed my door and sat on the bed, trying to will myself into normalcy. Feather’s words had cut so deeply that I couldn’t even think of a place that wasn’t filled with hurt.

Deciding on a pair of socks took me five minutes; putting them on took ten.

FEATHER AND E.D. kissed me good-bye at the door. My daughter looked at me, feeling for the first time what it was like to be in my mind. It was a curse I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemy.