Free In the Night of the Heat by Blair Underwood Page B

me. I had a role in a series for the first time in a decade. Responsibilities awaited me at home every day. Never.
    â€œI’ll wait for you,” my mouth said, surprising me. “Only six months, right?”
    April nestled her face against my bare shoulder, exactly where she’d gently bitten me, and I felt her shaking her head. “I’m not asking you to wait, Ten. I can’t. I won’t.”
    The room was so pitch that I couldn’t see her face. In the din of our whispered voices, I suddenly understood our rediscovery in the shower, and the clarity felt like an anvil straight to my gut. April’s caresses hadn’t meant she was loosening up, or letting me in.
    She had just wished me good-bye.

SIX
    MONDAY, OCTOBER 20
    Dad was waiting for me when I came downstairs.
    It was almost three weeks after my shower with April, our last night in my bed. She was gone so fast, it all seemed like a dream. Being barred at the security gate on Sunday while April walked toward a plane to the other side of the world felt like a sentence. We could hardly look each other in the eye, as if we’d had a blowout instead of merely divergent lives.
    For days I’d been expecting bad news. Perhaps because when you hurt, it is hard to believe the rest of the world could possibly be in good order. I’d been cracking my father’s door open at night to make sure I could hear his long, strained breaths in the dark. My stomach was hurting even before I saw the look on Dad’s face, but his frown made the pain sharper.
    â€œYou hear?” Dad said.
    â€œChela?” I said, my first guess. It was almost 8 A.M. Chela was supposed to be up for school, but life doesn’t happen the way it’ssupposed to. I steeled myself to hear that Chela was hurt, or had run away. Chela felt temporary, too.
    Dad shook his head and motioned toward the living room. “TV,” he said, truncating his sentence as usual. “T.D. Jackson.”
    Dad wheeled himself to the spot beside Marcela, who was planted on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn in her lap while she watched the wide-screen with fascinated eyes. I didn’t have to hear the CNN announcer’s voice to know what had happened. An aerial shot showed the facade of T.D. Jackson’s gated Mediterranean house in Pacific Palisades surrounded by LAPD vehicles, the scene draped in telltale yellow tape.
    BREAKING NEWS , the screen read. T.D. JACKSON FOUND DEAD .
    A stentorian announcer filled in the rest: “…details emerging in the death of T.D. Jackson, who was found dead at his desk this morning after an apparent gunshot…”
    â€œApril get off okay?” Marcela asked me gently, realizing I was in the room.
    I nodded, but I barely heard her. My encounter with T.D. Jackson made the news report so personal that it felt like watching my own house on TV. Between that and the mention of April’s name, the pain in my stomach bloated into a boulder. I didn’t know the man—and there was a good chance he’d killed those two people—but I felt a stab of grief.
    I heard myself whisper, “Shit,” before I ever realized I’d spoken.
    I remembered T.D.’s manic, reddened eyes imploring mine while he grasped my hand, and that image morphed into April’s stone-jawed profile as she turned away from me at LAX. Your fault, my Evil Voice said, and this time I couldn’t disagree.
    Dad glanced at me meaningfully. I’d told him about T.D.’s request. “Reap whatchu sow…” Dad said. His idea of comforting words.
    The announcer went on: “…unnamed sources within the police department are speculating that Jackson, recently acquitted in the double murder of his ex-wife and her fiancé, might have shot himself at his desk, in a state of apparent depression about both financial and legal affairs…”
    I remembered T.D.’s eyes. Financial problems? The strain of another