And it was true. The Silver Sax had a full house. The fullest Morgan had ever seen it. This was the night dreams were made of.
The First Lady of Song arrived in all her elegance and splendor, wearing a blue metallic brocade gown. She expressed joy about his mother’s expected recovery. Morgan, subdued and contrite, expressed his gratitude for her compassion and generosity.
Ray and the rest of the fellows waited on stage. All wearing their best suits and ties, and all clean-shaven and shoes spit shined. When Morgan joined them, they each gave him their solemn well wishes for his mom’s recovery. But the occasion was too momentous to keep their excitement in check for long. Morgan couldn’t blame them. If it were under any other circumstance, he would be crowing the loudest right now.
Charles walked on stage so he could introduce the Sax’s special guest himself. All the fellows grinned as they took their places. Morgan moved beside Ray, who said, “You okay, kid?”
Morgan nodded. His finger rubbed the initials on his horn.
Charles finished his intro for Miss Fitzgerald and she took the stage. The crowd erupted in a cacophony of applause. Morgan wondered if it was like this for her every night, and if one ever got used to it.
As the crowd’s adoration started to fade, Ella turned to Morgan and smiled an invitation for him to begin. He inhaled deeply and pressed his lips, buzzing into the trumpet the opening notes to “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”
The fellows joined in. Ella did her trademark scat, then sung those lovely words. Her soothing voice made Morgan forget about the wretched things he’d done, all in the name of chasing a dream and being a dutiful son. The music was a balm to his troubled soul.
To play the sweet, sweet music was all he ever wanted.
Morgan closed his eyes. Ella’s voice and his horn were the only things that mattered. Not Deacon Bennett, not Charles, not his mother, and possibly not even his father.
As they reached the song’s final chords, he opened his eyes.
Two uniformed officers moved through the crowd. No one seemed to notice, so fixated were they on Ella. The cops’ attention never wavered from the stage, but it wasn’t the Queen of Jazz they were interested in. They only had eyes for Morgan, would-be legendary jazz trumpeter straight out of Five Points.
The song ended, and the crowd was on its feet. Ella’s smile was radiant, and she bowed, then turned to present Morgan.
Yes, he probably would have gotten that coveted invitation. But he wouldn’t be leaving Denver tomorrow. And it wasn’t his destiny to play in the great Miss Ella Fitzgerald’s band.
He had it all wrong.
God didn’t put the idea of stealing the church money in front of him. It was the devil, and like his mom told him, the devil always collected his due.
On Grasmere Lake
by Mathangi Subramanian
Washington Park
The day they found her father’s body, Nithi’s feet moved on their own, carrying her out of her front door and down Louisiana Avenue, toward Washington Park. It was winter, and pale, leafless maple and oak trees twisted toward the sky like bleached bones. Renovated homes alternated with cleared plots of land, the houseless dirt turned up like freshly dug graves.
It’s over, Nithi told herself, it’s all over now. She waited to feel relief, but all she felt was the wind, cold and fierce and lifeless, beating against her cheeks.
Nithi lived with her mother, Priya, in a bungalow on Clayton Street that Priya inherited from her parents. Priya’s mother had died of breast cancer when Priya was in elementary school. Her father had died of a heart attack when Priya was nineteen, just days after she told him she was pregnant with Nithi.
“I dream about him,” Priya told Nithi. “He sits on my bed, we talk. He still smells piney, like his favorite aftershave. It’s so... comforting. So real.”
Nithi’s dead father, Jason, visited her dreams too, though his presence was anything but comforting. His form shifted and blinked, as though what was left of his body couldn’t get a proper grip on the atmosphere. Waves of fury radiated off him, shimmering hotly. He never spoke to Nithi. He just watched her, his pinprick pupils inky black, his irises blue as broken glass.
Were his eyes blue when he was alive? Nithi couldn’t remember. All she remembered was the way hatred spewed out of him like lava, the way his fists cratered the walls of their home, turning it into a foreign planet, a landscape unable to sustain human life.
At Grasmere Lake, Nithi collapsed onto her favorite bench by the dirt path that led to the lawn bowling club, and faced the frozen water. A flock of Canada geese slid across the frozen surface of the lake. A few of them broke away from the group and rose, honking, beating their long, sharp wings against the frigid air. Their choked voices cut a silver path through the corpse-gray sky.
Nithi tucked her down jacket tightly around her legs. Not that it made a difference: on the walk over, her body had grown too numb to feel anything, even the frosty air. Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
“Are you okay?” Priya asked.
“Yes,” Nithi lied. How many times in her life had her mother asked if she was okay? How many times had Nithi said yes, when she really meant no?
“Don’t worry, kanna,” Priya said. “Farah Aunty’s the detective on the case.”
Farah Aunty was Priya’s mother’s best friend. They had gone to South High together. This is good, Nithi told herself. Farah Aunty’s smart. She’ll take care of this.
Nithi clutched the phone to her ear and whispered, “Amma, I can’t lose you.”
“No one’s losing anyone,” Priya said steadily.
Nithi wanted to believe her. But after everything that had happened, it was hard to remember what hope felt like.
In high school, Nithi would study her reflection in the mirror, searching for traces of her father. Jason was white, his hair blond and thinning. There was something wan and discolored about him, as though he were already half-dead. Nithi’s skin, on the other hand, was dark brown, her hair thick and black, like her Tamil American mother’s. When Nithi found no evidence of Jason in her high cheekbones, her snub nose — all inherited from Priya — her shoulders would sag with relief.
Her first year at Community College of Denver, Nithi took a course called “Human Services for Families.” In one unit, they discussed domestic violence. The required reading felt like a time line of Nithi’s parents’ lives. Survivors of abuse, the text said, tended to start dating their spouses young (Priya and Jason met in high school), to have little family support (Jason was in and out of foster care; after her father’s death, Priya was an orphan), and to have a limited social network (as far as Nithi knew, Farah Aunty was Priya’s only friend).
Abusers, the text said, often had histories of trauma. Jason never talked to Nithi much about his childhood — he never talked to Nithi much at all — so she couldn’t confirm this. But when she read about abusers’ lack of employment, their heavy alcohol and drug use, their history of depression, she thought of her father coming home at the end of the day, his time unaccounted for, his collar reeking of smoke and cheap beer, his eyes bloodshot and bagged.
Nithi shuddered, remembering those evenings. She would do her homework, Priya would return from her nursing shift at Rose Medical. The two of them would make dinner together, cheerfully gossiping about Priya’s colleagues and Nithi’s classmates, amiably arguing about how much was too much salt. Then Jason would arrive, and the air around them would congeal. In her nervousness, Nithi would grow clumsy, dropping vegetable peels on the floor or nicking herself with a knife. Jason would swoop down on her like a raptor, berating her for making a mess, for not being able to do anything right. The pressure cooker would shriek and he would yell about the noise, tell Priya to learn to cook something besides her damn foreign food. The women crept around him, trying to erase themselves, or, if they stayed visible, to be Jason’s idea of perfect. But it was no use. Whatever they did, it was never enough. He was always angry. They were always wrong.