Yet much has been sacrificed.
She thinks of all those years in Cuba. Of Perry’s eyes, Perry’s whole being, focused only on Gypsy. Not just Perry—an army of followers.
She walks over to the full-length mirror. She takes off the robe, letting it pool at her feet. She reaches for a brush on the vanity and runs it in languid strokes through her long hair.
“Oh, man, baby. What are you trying to do to me?” The man reflected behind her in the bed is now fixated on Gypsy, as he should be.
She looks damned magnificent, not just for her years. In this light, there’s no hint of the faint fine lines around her full mouth and violet eyes. Her body is firm and trim, long legged and sun bronzed without tan lines. A small horse is inked above her left breast.
Every time she sees it, she thinks of Oran’s favorite scripture. John 8:44.
“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.”
But she has no interest in leading disciples to an eternal reward. There can be just one true prophet in paradise.
And there will be, as long as Margaret Costello and her child are found, and eliminated.
There was a time when a stroll down Barnes’s Washington Heights block felt like Russian roulette. Now there’s a community garden adjacent to his building, and a new jungle gym in the courtyard.
As he climbs four flights of stairs to his apartment, he passes a father and son who live on the top floor. They’re hand in hand, the child bundled up, bouncing down one step at a time, and whining.
“Because I said so,” the man is saying, with a weary headshake and smile for Barnes.
He thinks of his own dad. After a grueling double shift, Charles Barnes would detour on the way home to conceal a copper coin on the slide, swings, or teeter-totter. Then, instead of collapsing into bed, he’d rouse Barnes from his and they’d sneak out into the night to play “Penny on the Playground.”
“You’re getting colder!” he’d call as Barnes ran around trying to find the coin. “Ooooh, now you’re warm. Warmer! Son, you are burning hot!”
Not in this moment. Stepping over the threshold, Barnes shivers out of his cashmere overcoat and wool suit jacket. Throughout December, his apartment had been so overheated he’d had the windows wide-open on ten-degree nights. A maintenance man had tinkered with the vents. Ever since, the place has felt like a meat locker, but he keeps forgetting to call the super about it.
He locks the dead bolt and puts his badge, keys, wallet, and leather gloves on an adjacent table beside ten days’ worth of unopened mail. Mostly bills, catalogs, and junk mail. But there are larger envelopes, too, some red or green. Every January, when he opens the final batch of holiday cards from friends and family, he resolves to send out his own next December. It never happens.
Sitting on the couch to untie his shoes, he eyes the photo cards he’d opened early in December and displayed on a shelf. Some feature smiling kids and babies, others entire families. His friend Rob’s card is, as always, the largest and most spectacular of all. He and his wife, Paulette, and their five kids are posed in front of their brick mansion beside a decorated towering pine that rivals the one in Rockefeller Plaza.
The house is as picture-perfect inside as it is out. The family, beyond the facade . . . not so much. Rob swears his rock-solid marriage isn’t faltering, but he and Paulette are increasingly at odds about the kids. Their oldest son is pushing thirty, unemployed, and perpetually at odds with his father. Their middle daughter is on academic probation, and their youngest had her driver’s license suspended for speeding a few weeks after she got it.
Whenever Rob updates Barnes on the household conflict, Barnes usually feels like he dodged a bullet when he opted out of marriage and fatherhood. Still, even troubled families love each other.
Don’t you go feeling sorry for your lonely self, Stockton. You want someone to love, you go find someone to love.
Wash, haunting him as usual.
In the living room, Barnes notices that the coffee table poinsettia has gone limp, and the Douglas fir’s branches have withered beneath the ornaments. He’s been too busy to water them and now he’s too tired and too cold, and anyway, the holidays are over.
Uh-huh, Ebenezer, you just go right ahead and let them die, chides the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, all rolled into one. Barnes sighs and returns to the kitchen, dumping this morning’s cold coffee from the pot and filling it at the sink.
Petals drop as he waters the plant, and when he reaches for the tree’s holder, dry needles rain over a small stack of wrapped gifts. They’re from him, waiting for the woman who already has everything and can afford none of it.
His mother is away on a cruise—her Christmas gift to herself, along with a boatload of costume jewelry courtesy of a home shopping program.
“They’re from Jennifer Lopez’s new line,” she’d said at the pier, showing off her shiny earrings and bangles. “What do you think?”
I think you’re no J. Lo, and you should have put the money toward your insane credit card bills, or the rent.
But he’d long given up trying to curtail his mother’s impulse buys and untangle her finances. She’d given him a heap of Christmas presents he can’t wear, use, or fit into his apartment. He’d thanked her and then returned everything, crediting her account, well aware she’ll never realize.
He gave himself the only gift that matters this year, revisiting the neighborhood tattoo parlor that had long ago inked his father’s initials, and later Wash’s, on his right bicep. Now his daughter’s name is on his left, scrolled across a heart.
“You make a choice, Stockton, and someday you’re either going to regret it, or congratulate yourself that it was the right one,” Wash had said the night Barnes confessed he’d gotten a stranger pregnant during a one-night stand.
“There is no choice. I’m not going to help raise a kid, period. It’ll be better off without me.”
“Were you better off without your father?”
“Hell, no. It’s the same thing, whether you drop dead, or take off because the stock market crashed, or because their mother is a pain in the ass, or because you’re not cut out for being a dad and you never wanted kids in the first place. The kid gets hurt in the end.”
“So it’s better to hurt them in the beginning, is that what you’re saying?”
It was exactly what Barnes had been saying. Charisse couldn’t miss or grieve or hate a man she’d never known.
Now that someday is here, is he looking back congratulating himself that he’d made the right choice?
“I still don’t know, Wash,” he mutters. “How can I know if I regret it until I see how her life turned out?”
He takes a long, hot shower that warms him, leaving him drowsy and craving bed. In the chilly bedroom, he sets the alarm for 3 p.m., and plugs his work phone into the bedside charger.
His personal phone contains a couple of texts. He opens the first as he shoves his bare feet between cold sheets and pulls the quilts up to his chin. It’s a video snippet from Rob aboard a private jet with an iconic jazz musician who says, “Hey, Barnes, I hear you’re a fan of mine. Happy new year, brother. I hope to see you at Rob’s party MLK weekend.”