When the Reckoning Comes Read online

  Mira bristled. Was this another insult hiding underneath? She couldn’t be sure. “You don’t have to pay for my travel. I can afford it.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean—I know you can afford it, but free is always better, isn’t it? What about your room? It’s the least I can do. They’ve made these suite-sized cottages on the property. I’m sure you’ll love it.”

  “Wait,” Mira said. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask where the wedding would be. She’d assumed it’d be at the country club right on the border of the town, near the golf course and the old-moneyed homes, but the mention of cottages threw her off. “Where are you having this?”

  “This millionaire bought and renovated the old Woodsman property. It’s become a pretty popular touristy place since it opened. We’re going to be the first to have our wedding there, which is a little exciting when you think about it.”

  “Celine, you can’t be serious,” Mira blurted, refusing to hide her disapproval. “You can’t possibly be having your wedding at that plantation.”

  “You wouldn’t even recognize it now,” Celine responded, missing Mira’s point. “The property’s been completely redone.”

  Celine should have known it wasn’t about what the place looked like, but then Celine hadn’t been with them that day, only heard the story afterward like everyone else. Mira and Jesse were the ones who’d snuck off, and in the time since, who knew what it had become? The history rewritten, erased, having become something entirely new. This was what Celine was trying to convince Mira of as she pressed the phone against her cheek and thought back to a past she’d hoped to forget, to the girl she’d been, and to the friend she’d loved.

  “Celine, what about Jesse? Did you invite him too?”

  “Of course I invited him, and yes, he’s coming. He’s fine with the whole thing. We’ve spent a lot of time together since he found out about the wedding. He’s been really supportive. When I worried over the expense he convinced me I was being foolish, and he’s helped me decide on decorations and all the stuff Phillip couldn’t be bothered with. I didn’t think Jesse would be interested in this sort of thing, but maybe he’s just lonely. I never see him talk to too many people around here. He keeps mostly to himself.”

  It was as if the wind had been knocked out of her. Mira leaned against the counter, breathing hard. It not only surprised her that Jesse would want to be involved, but that, at least from Celine’s perspective, they’d become friends again, whereas Mira couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard from him. She didn’t know what to make of any of this. She’d spent years trying not to think about Jesse, about what had happened between them. Hearing Celine talk about Jesse made her ache with longing and regret. When she’d left Kipsen she’d also left him, thereby creating a resoluteness to the possibility of what could have been.

  “What did you say when you invited him?” Mira asked Celine. “How did he respond?”

  “I told him where it was and asked if he’d be okay attending. He said that it was all so long ago. He didn’t care about what happened back then. I asked him if he was sure and he shrugged it off. He’s really okay with it, Mira. In fact, he seemed a little excited about it, if you could believe that.”

  Mira didn’t believe it, but what else was there to say if she was telling the truth?

  “You can think of it all as a sort of vacation if you want. If that will make you say yes.”

  “A vacation.” Mira held in her laugh as she considered the proposition. Nothing about someone else’s wedding could seem like a vacation to the ones not getting married, but she decided not to give Celine an answer on the spot, instead asked her for a little more time to think about it. She figured maybe if enough time passed—she would just not pick up the phone if Celine called, ignore any emails sent—the decision would be made for her. After the wedding she could play it off as if she had forgotten to respond, that she’d become too preoccupied with the end of the school year. She’d make sure a few weeks later to send a nice gift. Something from Neiman’s, a gift she couldn’t afford but would buy for her childhood friend anyway.

  Mira had made up her mind, or she thought she had, but a few days after her conversation with Celine, she received another call. An unrecognizable number on her cell. Mira had missed it but saw the voicemail. She hit play and listened.

  “Hi. Mira? Celine gave me your number. I hope it’s all right,” a man’s voice began, followed by a pause, and she knew in that instant who it was. He forced out a slight laugh before giving a deep-throated cough, an attempt at buying time while figuring out what else to say. “It’s been a long time, I know. I just wanted to call and—I don’t know. I—” He started again, and Mira wished she could know what thoughts lay in the space between his words. Whatever came next would be a revision, only a fraction of the truth. “I—I’ve missed you,” he said, and the message ended.

  Mira called Jesse back immediately but the phone rang and rang. Flustered by the beep of his voicemail and not knowing what to say, she ended the call and didn’t try again.

  Listening to the message, she could picture him—scrawny and tall, ashy knees and elbows. His freckled golden skin and the Afro of curls the sun had tinted a reddish-brown. As he talked, she imagined him rubbing his hand over his mouth, an attempt at masking the small cleft on his upper lip. He was always self-conscious about the way it looked, and she imagined the mustache he’d tried to grow when they were younger had now fully come into being.

  After Mira couldn’t get hold of Jesse, she’d called Celine back. “Yes, I’ll go to the wedding,” she said as she circled the date on her wall calendar. “Yes, yes,” she repeated, reassuring Celine but also in a way herself. She’ll be there. She’d come.

  Jesse’s message had been brief, but hearing it eased an ache she’d never soothed. Throughout their friendship they’d always been on the cusp of becoming something more, and the yearning for what she’d missed out on had lingered over every relationship she’d had since. Each a short-lived affair, and each with a man who’d left her longing. Maybe, she wondered, it was because her heart still pined for him.

  Now, alone in her car, she felt foolish in this admittance. Ten years was a long time. A whole new life could have been created in the ten years since she’d last seen him. He could be seeing someone. He could be married. And if neither of those were true, there were no guarantees he could be interested, not after all this time.

  She wondered if he thought about her.

  A person moved through the world with no knowledge and no assurances, only hope and faith to guide them through the belief they were making the right decisions. Who could say now that returning wouldn’t lead to the greatest heartbreak of her life? She didn’t know, as no one could know, but hearing his voice on the phone was all the urging she had needed. Hearing his voice on the phone saying how much he missed her.

  Mira pressed harder on the gas. She’d left the interstate long ago, pulling off to take this two-lane road that would eventually lead her home, or what used to be her home. The closer she got the more unrecognizable it felt. As she drove, Mira passed abandoned cars, their tires stripped, the metal exterior rusted, their glass windows shattered. She could guess what had happened—the car running out of gas, or breaking down, and the owner leaving it, not realizing there were thieves waiting to strip it and sell it for parts. Mira should have been worried, but she still had a half tank of gas and she knew the way, knew where this road would take her, and if she was patient enough, she’d get there.

  It could have been whispers, the way the wind blew through the cracks of her car windows as she drove east on Highway 158 toward Kipsen. The sound unsettled her in its vague familiarity as she got closer, enough that she shook the feeling away and turned the windows up, putting the air conditioner on full blast.

  Mira hadn’t mentioned it to Celine, but she’d heard about the Woodsman house being bought. Her mother had told her shortly after it happened. A few years after Mira left for college, a man named Alden Jones came to Kipsen saying he was interested in buying all the land around the Woodsman property. Roman Woodsman had been a nineteenth-century plantation owner, mostly of tobacco, and his house once sat on over a thousand acres, one of the largest plantations in North Carolina. After Roman died, the family sold off plots of his land to white farmers, but over the decades afterward, whites fled the area and migrated north, closer to the downtown square, hoping to get as far away from the river as they could go. Those who left blamed it on not wanting to be near blacks who were buying up the properties instead, but sometimes after loosening with drinks they’d tell another story—at night they heard whispers beckoning them, and sometimes the whispers told them strange things, unconscionable things they’d never dare repeat in the daylight. A few went further, saying they saw visions they couldn’t explain. “What kind of visions?” others would ask, and they’d only stare back, unwilling to go further.

  Black families bought up the cheapened houses the white ones had left behind. By the time Mira’s mother came along, people called the area Nigger Field. Whites relished in the slur as they warned others about the part of town they never visited.

  Mira’s mother hated the name, cursing under her breath every time she heard it, but a house there was the only one a loan would let her afford. When a man offered to buy not just the Woodsman place but all the surrounding land including hers, she accepted the deal with barely a breath of a hesitation. She took this white man’s money and escaped to a beach town near the coast. His money was her deliverance and she never wanted to return. “Too much poverty and history,” she’d told Mira, and never again wanted to be reminded of either.

  “I don’t understand why you’re going back,” her mother had said when Mira told her she was returning
to Kipsen. “Nothing’s left for you there.”

  “It’s for Celine’s wedding,” Mira had answered. “She’s willing to throw a whole bunch of money to get me to come, so who am I to say no? We were childhood friends and that seems to still mean something to her. You remember her, right?”

  “What about the boy?”

  Mira flinched at the question and she wondered if in her brief hesitation her mother caught her vulnerability. “Jesse? I don’t know. I imagine he’ll be there, so I’ll see him.”

  “I always felt bad for what happened to him, but he should have known better.”

  “It wasn’t his fault. It was my idea in the first place.”

  “He should have left all that alone,” her mother interrupted. She paused, considering Mira’s response, before adding, “Both of you should have just left that house alone.”

  Maybe Mira might have, but once, driving home, her mother had taken a back road, what she’d hoped was a shortcut, and they’d found the house hidden deep among the trees.

  “Christ almighty,” her mother had said, gasping at the sight. “There it is. I knew this plantation was nearby, but I didn’t realize how close.”

  Mira was a young girl then. She sat in the back of the car, fiddling with a coloring book, when her mother told her to look out the window. “Do you see?” her mother asked urgently. She caught Mira’s reflection in the rearview mirror and asked her again.

  “See what?”

  “Child, look.”

  Mira glanced out the window and gasped. Three stories tall, with several prominent Greek Revival columns, it was the largest house she’d ever seen. There it loomed, this relic of a distant era, a forgotten past. Hundred-year-old maples lined the path, their twisted branches framed the entrance. It was the trees that made Mira’s mother slow her car, almost stopping, her breath held for just a moment. Mira saw those maple trees and wanted to turn away, but her mother made her hold her gaze, hoping it would be enough to sear the image into Mira’s memory.

  “We come from there, that’s what my grandfather used to say. All our ancestors are buried out on that land, both white and black alike,” her mother said.

  Mira asked what she meant and her mother told her what she knew—that their line had descended from a woman named Marceline, a slave of the Woodsman family, but beyond that, she didn’t know much else.

  “Why don’t you know more? You never asked your grandfather? You didn’t have questions about Marceline or any of the Woodsmans?”

  “I guess I thought what good is knowing about the past when it can’t help me now?”

  Mira sulked in her seat, annoyed at her mother for not providing more information about their family. Why tell her about any of it if she didn’t know the whole story? She probably hadn’t expected Mira’s interest, but still her mother’s revelation bothered her. Her mother seemed to sense this too and attempted to soothe the situation. “None of that matters, hon. We’ve got to move on.”

  Mira listened to her mother because at the time she thought her to be right. She ignored the questions she had over Marceline, deciding there wasn’t much point in thinking about them. No one was left in the family for her to ask anyway except for her mother, and she’d made it clear she’d told Mira everything she knew.

  Yet, every now and again the desire crept back. She’d hear another rumor about the Woodsman house, its mythos growing within Kipsen, and she’d be reminded again of her own connection to the place. Maybe this was why Mira had followed Jesse into those woods that day when he offered to take her to the house, and when she had seen—well, what exactly was it that Mira had seen? Even recalling it now caused the same tightness in her chest from remembering, and she once again told herself it’d been nothing. She’d forced herself to believe this was true. Nothing was what she’d told Jesse when he asked her what she saw. Nothing, nothing, nothing. She hadn’t known how to tell him the truth, because she wasn’t sure if he’d believe it. Nothing, she’d told him, deciding to disavow it all, and over the years, denying had given her comfort, and every day gone she’d worked to put distance between her and the burden of the past. The longer she was gone the less guilt she had for leaving. She thought if she moved far enough away and buried it deep, the truth about that day would never surface. What had taken Mira a long time to realize was that it was always there, hidden but never lost.

  Mira fiddled with the radio. She was getting near the end of her drive and it made her antsy. She needed a distraction for this last leg. If only she hadn’t forgotten to buy one of those cords that would enable her to play music from her phone. Most of the trip she’d listened to the same Billboard chart songs, but she was tired of that now. Her hand shook a little as she slowly turned the dial, searching through the static for the right song to occupy her mind. She wished she could remember the good stations as she passed another country song and two more pop ones. Finally, she came to an old blues song.

  She relaxed in her seat, hoping the rhythm of the music would ease her tension, but a chain gang appeared up ahead. Chained together in five-man groups, they cleaned the ditch under the afternoon sun. They worked in their groups, picking up the trash thrown from cars flying too fast down the road. They all wore the same black-and-white-striped uniform. She’d seen images like this before, of men, even women, stripped of their identity, nothing more than anonymous blurs working their forced labor. The image was not new to her, especially in North Carolina, a state whose newly appointed prison commissioner believed in deterrence. “If a man is humiliated enough maybe he’ll think a little harder about what he’s done and choose not to do it again,” he was heard saying, a quote taken from the commissioner in Louisiana, who was also known for his hard stance. Following in Louisiana’s footsteps, he’d ordered that these inmates be dressed in old-fashioned striped uniforms and forced them outside to work.

  What was new were the shackles. Mira could see the glinting metal wrapped around the men’s ankles. Immediately, the image conjured another—at the school where Mira worked, the administration recommended that at the first sign of trouble in the classroom teachers call the police and let them handle it. She’d never done it, but other teachers had, and typically they’d come and escort the student out of school. Sometimes they were back the next day but often times they were not. Mira never asked where they went.

  A few weeks ago, a social studies teacher at her school, fed up with a student not doing the assignments and talking back in class, asked him to leave and go to the principal. The student refused. The teacher, Mr. Billings, a man who should have retired long ago, called the police. This was the story she’d heard, but the viral video a classmate had circulated afterward told the truth of what happened. She’d watched in horror as two policemen took hold of the student, yanked him from his desk, and drop-kicked him to the ground, pulling both his arms behind his back and cuffing him.

  Mira recognized the student in the video. Javion. He was the kind of kid who forced himself to be invisible. Last to class, he’d slump down in his seat. Expressionless, no matter what she did or said. Other students at least attempted to laugh at her awkward jokes or feigned enthusiasm when she sarcastically chastised them for not being excited enough over the lesson.

  Here she was, a black teacher, one of the few who remained at the school, the rest quitting after a year, moving on to one of the better-funded districts if they lucked out into a position, or they quit the field altogether. She’d stayed, and each day she tried again at connecting with her students, believing she could help them a little along the brutal path of their lives. Javion should be appreciative, but he never said anything, looked bored half the time, and his passiveness pissed her off—the way he made a mockery of her and the work she put into her classroom planning. Every day she’d dreaded seeing him a little bit more, seeing him judge her while putting in such minimal effort himself.