Take Her Man Read online

  The female cop and another tall, white cop caught me and pulled me farther down the walkway, away from Jamison and Coreen, who were standing together.

  “Ma’am,” the female officer said, standing in front of me. “I’m Officer Cox. What’s your name?”

  “Kerry…Kerry Taylor.”

  “Ms. Taylor, I can see that you’re upset, but I need you to calm down, so I can talk to you and figure out what exactly is going on here.” Her eyes were soft and brown like my Aunt Luchie’s. The look on her face was sincere, kind, like she was the only person out there who understood what I was feeling. “Now we don’t want anything to happen to your baby. You understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. I wiped a tear from my eye and looked over at Jamison. He was talking to two male officers, a fat white one and a black one who seemed like he was in charge. Coreen was standing beside him with her hand over her mouth.

  “You don’t live here?” Officer Cox asked me again.

  I shook my head no.

  “Were you sleeping here?”

  “No,” I said, looking at Jamison. He was looking back at me. Tears were in his eyes. The other officer was telling him not to come over to me.

  “Is that man with you?” the other, tall officer asked me.

  “He’s my husband.”

  The weight of my words must’ve surprised both of them. Officer Cox stopped writing on her little pad and looked at the other officer.

  “Yes,” I said, confirming what they were both thinking.

  “Hum,” she said and looked over at Coreen. “He’s here with her?”

  “Yes,” I said again.

  “Should’ve told us that first,” the tall cop said. “We would’ve given you more time on him.” They both exchanged glances and a short, nervous laugh.

  “I know what you’re feeling. We see this all the time,” Officer Cox said, writing again. “But you have to control yourself.”

  “And not let the cops see you hit your husband,” the tall cop said.

  “Cox,” the officer in charge called, coming toward us as he adjusted his holster.

  Jamison turned toward the house when the officer walked away, but I could tell he was crying. He punched the door so hard it sounded as if a gun had gone off.

  “Ma’am, I need you to go on in the house,” the white officer said to Coreen. “We’ll come in and speak with you after we’re done out here.”

  Coreen turned and looked at me quickly, her eyes still wet with confession. She went to walk into the house, reaching first for Jamison, who stepped away from her immediately.

  The older officer signaled again for Cox to walk toward him.

  “You just stand here, calm, and I’ll be right back,” she said, stepping away.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. I could see some trace of dread in her eyes.

  “She’s just talking to our captain is all,” the other officer said. “Standard procedure.”

  “Am I in any trouble?” I watched as Officer Cox talked to the captain. Her eyes dropped and she placed her hand over her mouth just like Coreen had.

  “Probably not,” the officer said. “They’ll probably let you go.”

  “Let me go?”

  I looked back at Jamison.

  “Baby,” he tried, his voice filled with desperation.

  “Sir, I’m going to need you to stay where you are,” the fat officer said, putting his hand over his gun.

  “Jamison?” I called. “Jamison.”

  “She’s my wife. You can’t take her.” He kept coming toward us. Two other cops ran to him and held him back from either side. Suddenly, there were at least ten cops between us.

  “Take me? What’s going on?” I asked. I looked back to Officer Cox. She was obviously pleading now with the captain, but he kept shaking his head, and then finally she looked me right in the eye and mouthed the word “sorry.”

  “Just be patient, ma’am,” the officer beside me said timidly. “They’ll be back over in a minute.”

  “Can’t I just speak to her before she goes?” Jamison yelled. “She’s pregnant. She can’t go to jail.”

  “Jail?” I said. The word slapped me so hard my bladder dropped and urine came flowing from between my legs, wetting the front of my nightgown. “Jamison!” I cried. “Stop them!”

  The female officer came toward me, pulling handcuffs from her hip.

  “Mrs. Taylor,” she said, her voice deep and throaty, as if she was forcing it to be stern. “I’m going to have to place you under arrest—”

  “No,” I hollered. “No! I didn’t do anything. I was just here to get my husband. He’s my husband.” I began crying again. My adrenaline was wearing thin and the thought of being arrested for the first time in my life suddenly made me feel desperate and ugly. Not who I was. Not Kerry Taylor who’d grown up privileged, on the right street, in the right part of Atlanta. Not me. Jail? I looked at Jamison, for him to do something. To stop them from taking me away. This thing wasn’t for me.

  “Baby,” he said, still being held by the officers, “just go with them and I’ll come get you. I promise.”

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “Mrs. Taylor,” Officer Cox said, “because we all saw you assault your husband, we’re going to have to take you in for domestic violence.”

  “Domestic violence?” I couldn’t trust the echoes vibrating through my ears. “But he’s here with that woman cheating on me.” My spine began to twitch as the baby shifted, panicking, from side to side.

  “I know. But because we saw you and our captain is with us, we have to do this. If the captain wasn’t with us, we could let you go, but we have to protect ourselves. You understand?” Her voice turned to reason for a second and she slid the cuffs on and began to read me my Miranda rights. The crowd, which had grown even larger, stood silent in fear and amazement.

  “That ain’t necessary, officer,” one woman said, “She’s pregnant. Just let her go.”

  “Yeah,” other people agreed. But it was too late. My hands cuffed on top of my belly, I watched them all desperately as the officer began walking me to the car. I turned again to see Jamison still standing there, looking at me helplessly. He’d done this to us, to me. I was being sent to jail for hitting a man who had beaten my heart to a pulp.

  “You’ll be out quickly,” the female officer said, helping me into the car. The rainbow of lights went shining again and we were off.

  Don’t miss Grace Octavia’s

  SOMETHING SHE CAN FEEL

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  Prologue

  DOA

  June 22, 2008 Ghana, West Africa

  There was a click. There was a bang.

  And then everything behind me went frozen. Dead.

  My arms reached out toward the man falling to the ground in front of me. My heart stopped beating. The only sounds in the room were the bracelets clanking on my wrists and the thump the stranger’s head made as it bounced hard against the bar room floor. I stood above him, frozen in place, and my throat felt tight and grainy. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think of what to do next. This was the closest I’d ever been to someone so near death, and the farthest I’d ever been from home.

  When it was done, when it seemed that I and everyone else in the back room was sure the thing was over, time flickered from being a still, silent thing to something real, something moving, quick and sneaky. This was no picture. No fiction. Not a part of the love poem I’d written in my notebook. It was the real thing. What in the hell was I doing there?

  I gasped.

  I heard the sound of a woman, who I thought was one of the waitresses, screaming, a glass hitting the floor. I could see the gun, pointed up now, in his other hand.

  “He’s dead. Oh-oh, my God, he’s dead,” I said, falling out of the bar behind Dame. The street was empty and we rushed, one behind the other, to hide behind an old van parked a ways down. “You kill
ed him,” I said.

  I turned and tried to stop to look at Dame. I wanted to see his eyes, So I could know that we both knew what was going on, what had happened in just seconds.

  Minutes earlier, we’d been laughing with the stranger in the red shirt and tan hat. His skin was the color and shine of oil. He hovered above our table, his teeth and eyes perfectly white and glowing in the dim light. He’d smiled wide when I told him that since we’d been in Ghana, Dame’s already-shadowy skin had tanned to the color of midnight and my once-permed hair had sweated out into a moist, perfect afro. We were two lovers, mismatched and careless in the middle of a strange place, drunk from liquor that had no label and heat that made my reality a blissful haze.

  “I ain’t kill that fool,” Dame said, tossing me back around before I could get a look at his eyes. “He was dead long before I got a hand on him.”

  I heard wrestling and shouting coming up the street. I craned my neck around the back of the van to see the bar emptying out. People were pointing in different directions along the dirt road and speaking a language I didn’t know.

  “Go,” Dame said, his hand pushing hard at my back.

  We hustled fast, in silence now, to the car, which seemed so far away. One of my bracelets popped and the wooden beads—red, black, and green, spelling out my name in rude, hand-painted white letters—scattered J-O-U-R-N-E-Y everywhere.

  “Get everything. Everything,” Dame said after he’d kicked in the door to our hotel room. “I’m calling Benji. We going back to Accra right now.”

  He paced the floor, flipping his cell phone open and closed as I sat motionless in the space I’d found in the middle of the bed. Dame was in a rage. Moving his body around heavily, deliberately like a boxer.

  I didn’t know what would happen next. I had to think. I needed to pray.

  With my purse still on my shoulder, I looked around. Everything was the same. The same as it was when we’d left the room that morning. My sea-colored sarong was on the floor. His sneakers were next to the nightstand. Outside, the black night above the beach was awaiting our nightly walk. It was still Kumasi. But everything was different.

  I closed my eyes to pray for clarity. For forgiveness. For the man’s soul. For Dame’s soul. For anything I could think of. Just in that one second. To try to understand. But all I could hear was bang. Bang. Bang.

  “This shit ain’t working,” I heard Dame say. I opened my eyes and looked up to see him looking at the phone and then at me. “Journey,” Dame called, walking to me, “What you doing? We got to go.”

  “I—I…” I wanted to say something, but I kept remembering the blood choking out of the man’s stomach as he landed at my feet.

  “J,” Dame said softly, bending down in front of me at the foot of the bed. “We don’t have time for you to get all nervous now. We got to get out of here. You saw those people. They gonna come for us.”

  I watched as he tried to soften his eyes to persuade me. But I could not be moved. The man I was in love with just took someone’s life. Was he a man at all? Had I just been lying to myself all these weeks? Was everyone else right about Dame?

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

  “Fuck!” Dame got up and turned his back.

  “If you’d just let Benji come with us…everything would’ve been…” I got up and followed him as he rushed to the closet.

  “Fine?” He looked at me as he pulled out our suitcases. “You said you wanted me to yourself.”

  “Yeah,” I cried, “but I didn’t think anything like this would happen.”

  “What do you think the bodyguards are for, J? You ain’t with some random nigga. Everywhere I go, some fool comes up to test me,” he said frustrated. He threw the bags onto the bed and then began clumsily tossing things from the floor inside of them.

  “But you still didn’t have to do that. You shot that man.”

  “He pulled out a gun. He would’ve killed both of us.”

  “It was just on the table. He didn’t say he was going to use it. He just wanted your watch.” I looked down at the circle of diamonds and platinum hanging heavy and oversized from his wrist. Suddenly it seemed incredibly out of place.

  “So, I was supposed to give it to him and then he was just gonna let us walk out of there? It don’t work like that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I know that you didn’t have to let things get out of control.”

  “Look, I ain’t no country nigga that’s about to have some fool that ain’t even pointed a gun at me take my shit. He took the gun out first. He should’ve used it first. I ain’t no pussy and if you want a pussy, I believe you got one at home waiting on you.”

  “Don’t bring him into this.”

  “Well, that’s what you wanted, right?” Dame stopped again and looked at me, his dark eyes seemingly looking right through me. “Me to talk it out and shit? Give that motherfucker my watch and then buy him dinner? Drinks on me? Right?” He turned to me and I could see beads of sweat swelling across his tattoo-covered skin. A picture of Mary and Jesus on his stomach; a cross etched over his chest; his grandmother’s name on his right arm; the entire continent of Africa across his back, the northernmost tip near his left ear and the southernmost by his rear. He was all strength. His muscles moved in consistent, solid shapes when he took a single step. Massive and strong. I once loved this. But now he seemed larger than anything I could handle. Almost dangerous. He snatched the bag from the bed and turned around, nearly hitting me with it.

  “I just don’t understand you.”

  “Understand me?” He threw the bag down angrily and hurried over to me, grabbing my arms and pushing me up against the wall. A vein shuddered in his right temple. I saw the devil in him suddenly, pulsing in erratic red threads in his eyes. He wasn’t even thinking. Pressed against me, I could feel his heart thumping madly, faster than the seconds that ran by. “Don’t try to fucking understand me. I told you not to.” His voice was hard and distant. “I ain’t that man. I ain’t him. I ain’t…” He shoved me against the wall again and pushed away from me. “Shit,” he shouted, turning away and balling up his fists, punching at the air in anger. “I knew this would happen if I brought you here. You don’t belong here.”

  “What?” Still up against the wall and afraid to move, I began crying. Now my heart was thumping and twitching in fear. I struggled to breathe. “Now I don’t belong here? What about everything you said?”

  “Look,” he turned and came back to me, “I ain’t trying to be understood. I ain’t that motherfucker. I’m from the street. All I know how to do is live. Stay alive.” Spit gathered at the sides of his mouth and tears glossed his eyes, but in his rage not one would fall. “I’m an animal.” He swung at the wall to the right of my head and his fist went right through to the other side. He pulled his hand out of the wall and blood dripped to the floor. “I’m a fucking king. No one in the world understands me. Not supposed to.”

  “Oh, my God, what did you do?” I said. I tried to grab his arm, but he pushed me to the floor.

  “Take the car and go,” he said, his voice now void of any emotion. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the car keys and threw them at me. “Go back to Accra and get on the first plane back to Alabama. Get as far away from me as you can.”

  “But, Dame,” I said, picking up the keys and fighting to see him through the tears in my eyes. He wasn’t thinking. “They’re gonna come for you.”

  He looked at me hard and just before a single tear fell from his right eye, calm and clear as the waves outside the door, he whispered, “Go,” and walked out.

  Journey…Just Living

  June 23, 2008 Sunrise

  My father lied to me. Love does hurt. In fact, sometimes, love can hurt so badly it burns your insides fast and heartless like the reddest part of a flame. Now I’d known this for a long time. I’d seen that red flame in my mother’s eyes when my father didn’t come home from Bible study some nights, even heard it in the cut
ting cries of my best friend when the love of her life hurt her and let her down again and again, so hard all she could do was weep. But I’d never felt it for myself. Never been there, out on the flame, burning and ready to die for something I’d loved with all of my living heart. I’d been safe from it all. In the incubator my life had built around me. Until that morning. The morning after Dame left me alone on the floor of a hotel room in the middle of nowhere in the world. Through the blue-black night, I’d found my way out of Kumasi and to the airport just as the sun rose in the sky. After spending every nickel I had on each of the plastic cards in my wallet to get on a plane home, I was standing outside on the tarmac of the runway waiting to board a plane back to the United States.

  Flicking the ticket in my hand back and forth to create some coolness in the already-humid morning heat, I felt a sinking in my insides I’d never known. Hours ago I had everything I ever wanted. Freedom. Music. And true love. Out of my incubator, I’d convinced myself that that was all I needed from the world to survive. I’d risked everything for that. Walked away from my whole life. And now it was all gone. Just like that. I was going home. Alone. Hopeless. And feeling like a complete fool. My mother was right. I was thirty-three years old and playing with my life like I was a child.

  I kept running through everything that had happened. Dame’s hand on my thigh. The man sitting at our table. The watch. The gun. The bang. The fight. It wasn’t real. I wanted so badly to hate Dame for everything that had gone wrong. For leaving me. But the Dame from last night wasn’t the Dame I knew. Wasn’t the Dame I loved. And standing there in that line, hurt from everything else in the world, my heart felt pain because I really wanted him to come chase after me. To at least apologize. Even I knew that was crazy. But it was true. Hidden in my heart, it was true. And I kept peeking over my shoulder to see if he’d appear. Lord, I prayed he’d come running. To make this all right. To make me not seem so crazy for turning my back on my life—my family, my friends, my world—for him. Foolish. But I looked and looked and he never came.