Page 33 of Meet Me in the Garden

On the drive home, I tune out Bernard and Al’s conversation and picture Delphine. She’s in a sunroom, aglow in the early evening light. She’s sewing a button onto her daughter’s dress. She stops, sets down her mending, closes her eyes. My life is coming together. She senses it. She knows.

And then, a week later, on Friday, I see her.

I’m heading to pick up groceries after work, President Truman on the radio, when the cars ahead of me swerve and stop, and I slam my foot on the brake.

There’s a woman in the middle of Crenshaw Boulevard, slowing traffic across four lanes. Her back is to me. Slender frame, long dark hair, a brown dress, mirage-like. I’m certain it’s Delphine, I’d recognize her anywhere. But how could Delphine appear this way, out of nowhere, in the middle of the street?

She turns and I see her profile. Unmistakable now. I open the car door, call her name. She’s going to see me and come rushing over. Delphine and me alone in my car, going anywhere we want to. “Delphine!” I shout again.

She’s looking down. Has she dropped something? Or maybe an animal’s been struck, or her daughter—I crane my neck and thank Godthere is no little girl there, not even some poor dog escaped from a yard. But she’s barefoot on the road and there’s more honking now. She doesn’t seem to hear it. She lifts a tube of lipstick in one hand, a compact mirror in the other, and applies the color to her mouth.

“Oh, come on,” a man shouts out his window. Delphine draws slow circles around her lips, and even from two car lengths away I see that red is smearing all over now, all over her beautiful mouth, and the honking’s getting louder and voices boom through the rolled-down windows. I cut the engine and I get out, leave my car right here in the middle of the lane.

“Delphine,” I call as I hurry toward her, but my voice is nothing against the horns and the strangers’ shouts, and now I’ve reached her, but she doesn’t see me. I touch her arm, but she shakes me off. Steps back. Bare wrists and a pungent odor, grease in her hair. She applies another layer of color. Red on her teeth, red in a smear across her cheek, her gaze fixed to the compact mirror.

“Delphine. It’s me. Odette.” My voice isn’t loud enough. I can barely speak. “Come with me.” I touch her elbow, so gently.

She flinches. Her eyes are unfocused, alarmed, they don’t know where to rest. I can’t tell if she knows me.

“It’s Odette,” I tell her again. I’m panicked, I’m crying, I’m trying my best to be calm for her.

She drops the compact—silver, engraved with roses—against the asphalt. I bend to pick it up and in the second it takes me to rise, she’s turning. I reach for her arm but she’s too fast. She’s across Crenshaw and the cars are moving again and the drivers honk and I realize it’smethey’re honking at now. Like I’ve lost my mind, taken her place. My vision tilts, rights itself. I run back to my car, steer it in the direction she ran, but there’s so much traffic, and even though I circle and weave through the streets, scanning from the window, parking and running the blocks she disappeared into, I don’t find her.

Adele’s in the kitchen when I get home. She hears the door shut, calls, “Just in time. Will you slice up the bread?” Her back’s to me, she’s spooningtomato soup into bowls. Children’s laughter in the living room. Al’s voice, scolding one of the twins. Sinatra croons from the Victrola. Adele turns around. “You didn’t make it to the store?”

There’s a folded paper with a grocery list in my pocket. I was supposed to pick up bread and rice and carrots and butter. “I forgot,” I say, and then my legs are weak and Adele’s crouching in front of me, asking me what’s wrong, what’s happening, and I choke out the words as best I can.

There’s a flurry then—the children are hastily fed, Claire and Bernard arrive, Betty from across the street comes to babysit, and Adele’s on the phone to New Orleans, asking Auntie Bertha to tell her what she’s heard over the last few years, if she has an address for her, any idea at all about where Delphine might be. “Ask for her last name,” I say. I listen as she presses, as her questions become more grasping. “Isn’t thereanythingyou know about your own daughter?” she finally asks, voice tremulant, and it’s unlike her, and I’m grateful for it. I’m not the only one who’s afraid.

Claire stands in the living room and says, “We’ll go to the hospitals and the police stations. We’ll ask for a woman in a brown dress. If we can find her ourselves, we’ll be able to handle this discreetly.”

“You girls take the stations if that’s all right,” Al says, his face clouded, and it brings me back to the panic-charged nights in the blue house when we didn’t know where Lionel was or if he’d be okay. “Bernard and I will take the hospitals.”

It feels like months have passed since I saw Delphine and lost her. I’m slipping into something, I’m underwater now. All I can do is nod and follow their movements, put my shoes on when they do, wave to Betty when they do, follow them outside. Adele guides me into the front seat, sits next to me, our arms pressed together. The doors shut. Inside is hushed, it smells like Claire’s perfume. She adjusts the mirror while she and Adele check with each other about directions, but I can barely hear them. It’s only when we walk into the station that the world snaps back. The ringing phones and shuffling papers, so many conversations all at once, people coming and going and standing and pacing, voices firm orplaintive, some low, some rising. Wooden benches line one of the walls and I scan them for Delphine, imagine her sitting straight-backed among the others, waiting for us.

If only.

We wait, three in a row, in the line to speak to the officer behind the desk. Heads turn back to us. Claire tips her chin up, Adele tosses her hair, and I remember that I’m an Honoré sister. It’s a comfort. Not myself, just the youngest of three, following along. Finally, it’s our turn. Claire speaks for us, states plainly what happened to an officer who can’t be much older than me.

“You said Crenshaw?” he says. “Hold on a second.”

When he comes back, he’s with another officer, his senior. Claire tells the story from beginning to end again, and when she’s finished, the older officer says, “Your cousin caused quite the traffic jam, but that’s all we heard about it. No one matching her description was picked up today as far as I’m aware.”

“What about a little girl?” An ache in my throat as soon as I say it.

It’s the first time I’ve spoken, and he turns to me. “Say more.”

“She has a daughter. She’s five.”

“You have reason to think she isn’t being taken care of? What about the father?”

“I don’t know. I have a bad feeling.” My sisters are looking at me, stricken.

The older officer sets his hands down, folded, on the desk. “A lot of people come in here with bad feelings. Not much we can do about those. But a five-year-old girl with a missing mother, unattended somewhere in the city… that’s something we’d take very seriously. How about you give me a description of the girl and we’ll call around to the other precincts in case someone knows something.”

I go very still.

“We can’t give you a description,” Adele says. “We’ve been estranged.”