Chasing Sophea: A Novel

  Also by Gabrielle Pina

  BLISS

  FOR RACHEL

  In honor of your immeasurable courage

  and unconditional love

  FOR TAMARA

  In honor of your grace, patience, and

  unwavering loyalty

  FOR TRACY ANN

  In honor of your sheer determination, perseverance,

  and passion for sisterhood

  FOR GINA

  In honor of your vibrancy, your voice of reason, and

  for always infusing my life with laughter

  I found God in myself & I loved her

  I loved her fiercely.

  —NTOZAKE SHANGE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I want to thank the spirit that sustains me and allows me to keep writing, living, and loving. Thanks to my agent, Sasha Goodman, for always being there whenever I need you. Thank you to Melody Guy, my editor at Random House, for consistently being supportive of my work and for being patient as well. I sincerely appreciate your efforts on my behalf. Thanks also to Danielle Durkin and Porscha Burke at Random House for answering my calls and my questions.

  My heartfelt thanks to the women in my life who constantly keep me on my toes: my mom, Diane Richardson, and my aunts Denise, Dolores, and Darlene and always my grandma, Marjorie Richardson, for your special kind of inspiration. Special thanks to my daughter, Maia Noelle, for not letting me pick my lip when I was stressed, bite my nails, or indulge in any other selfdestructive behavior. Also, thank you to my son, Julian, for encouraging me every day and reminding me to breathe when I felt overwhelmed and for letting me make chicken pot pies every now and then.

  Thank you Ron Kelly, for answering a multitude of rather sensitive questions over the past two years. You are unlike any mortician I have ever seen and that’s a good thing. Thank you Dr. Richard Beyer, for all your help with the psychological aspects of this novel. Your insight was invaluable and the character was the better for it. And, of course, thank you to Dr. James Ragan, director of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, for always being in my corner.

  Many thanks to the Imani Book Club in Los Angeles for their nine years of sisterhood and loving support. Thank you to my spirited friend, Rebecca Huston, for being incredibly supportive and for introducing me to Tibetan food. Also, blessings to my very special friend Patricia Loar for your amazing guidance, love, and celestial inspiration. Finally, a million heartfelt thanks to my best friend, my soul mate, and my husband, Ron McCurdy, the absolute love of my life. Thank you for being so supportive and for loving me just the way I am. Thank you my love, for taking such good care of me, for kicking me out of bed at 4:00 a.m. to write when I was too tired, and for showing me every day, without hestitation or fanfare, what love truly is. With you I am safe. With you I am love. With you I am home.

  There was a tornado watch issued for the entire state of Texas the day my mama went crazy. Our block on Haven Street was buzzing about “the one” rotating its way through Tornado Alley stirring up all kinds of trouble. Showing out—that’s what it was doing, twisting and twirling like it was mad at somebody. My Aunt Baby said that tornado looked mighty hungry and intended to suck up houses until it was full and satisfied.

  “See,” she said, “cars and trailer parks are only appetizers. This here tornado craves a five-course meal. The sky is talking up a storm today, Dahlia, and by the looks of it, we’re all getting cursed out.” She leaned down and whispered in my ear, “It’s a bad one, though, baby doll. I can feel it in my bones.”

  The entire house always knew when a storm was brewing because some part of Aunt Baby’s body would start aching, and on that day, she announced that all four of her corns were screaming bloody murder. I was scared after she said that, and she tried her best to reassure me, calm my nerves. She promised me our house wasn’t anywhere near the suck zone. And besides, didn’t I know by now that tornadoes skipped over funeral parlors? “Tornadoes only like foolin’ with live people, and we have way too many stiffs up yonder to interest that old twister. So don’t worry, baby doll,” she cooed. “Don’t worry.”

  People don’t usually name tornadoes, but that year, Daddy insisted.

  “Dahlia, darlin’,” he said, “any twister that beautiful and that dangerous can only be female. Reminds me of a woman I used to know named Sophea.” He laughed. “Sophea, Sophea.” His eyes twinkled when that name rolled off his tongue, and his laughter that night was loud, full, and contagious.

  Aunt Baby opened every window in the house and turned off the electricity after we caught a glimpse of Miss Sophea on the news. She was mesmerizing and terrifying at the same time and, as expected, terrorized trailer parks up and down the Lone Star State. But you know, despite Sophea’s petulant disposition, I longed to just run up to her and thrust my hand somewhere deep in the middle. You know, introduce myself and make her acquaintance. To me, she resembled one of those peculiar van Gogh paintings, except it’s flying at you at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. And all the while you think you comprehend what you’re looking at until you’re tempted to look a little closer.

  Anyway, while most of Dallas County was worried about being swept clear to Oklahoma, I was wondering if my mother was going to make it through another day without creating a catastrophe. She didn’t.

  And now that I think about it, since you are forcing me to remember it, that morning began the same as any other. We had just decorated the house the night before for Christmas. Daddy had to stop twice to go set the features on two cases—you know, fix the eyes, cheekbones, basically make the nonviewable viewable. He possessed an extraordinary gift for such things, restructuring dead people, re-creating bone. He could transform just about anybody into someone acceptable to gawk at on a Sunday afternoon. People who weren’t even related to the families would come to wakes sometimes just to marvel at the artistry of my father’s work. He probably should have been a surgeon, although I don’t think that would have made his life any easier. You see, the phone never stopped ringing for him as it was.

  People seemed to be dying a lot that year, dropping like flies, ultimately ending up downstairs in my house cold and stiff, waiting to have their fluids flushed by my father. Oh, I’m sorry. You seem surprised. I can understand that. I mean, who would ever guess how bizarre my upbringing was just by looking at me? And you want to know one of the things I remember the most? The clothes. You wouldn’t believe the getups some people dressed their relatives in after they died. Ridiculous ensembles that would kill the dead all over again if they woke up and saw themselves.

  Anyway, Daddy was extremely busy that day. There was plenty of prep work to do because there were five bodies that had to be bathed, embalmed, and made up. Mercy Blue, the girl in charge of postlife makeovers, was wearing a tight red dress. Red was her favorite color. Go figure. And it was a Tuesday because John Coltrane resonated from every corner of the house. Daddy always listened to ‘Trane on Tuesdays. Daddy was in a manageable mood, too, because Uncle Brother—that’s what we’ve always called him—was back from New Orleans. Daddy didn’t like to admit it, but he depended on Uncle Brother to lighten his mood on the days when Mama was having one of her brain tantrums. Aunt Baby was on the other side of town mixing up some concoction for somebody, I can’t recall exactly. I just remember that she wasn’t there. If only she had been there …

  My mother was scurrying from one room to the next like a rat with a cat hot on its tail. She was a blur, a brown blur. You know, she always did that, zipped around from place to place as if her life was getting ready to end and she just had to complete one last task before her heart stopped beating. Haste was an ongoing obsession with her. Sometimes,
I swear, she moved so quickly it looked like she was gliding on air. Mama swore the earth would swallow her whole if she stood still for any length of time. Really. I’m completely serious. It’s confounding, I know.

  Okay, let me clarify this madness for you. You see, if she was sitting on a chair with her feet up, that would be acceptable, but her legs could never ever touch the ground for more than a couple of minutes. Clearly my mother was, shall we say, not playing with a full deck or was four cans short of a six-pack. How about missing two digits in her phone number? Bread was half-baked? Elevator didn’t rise all the way to the top? You get the picture? She even propped her feet on a stool when she went to the bathroom.

  That being said, avoiding well-placed stools became something of a military exercise in my house. We used to pretend like they were land mines ready to blow us to kingdom come if we disturbed them an inch. Jesus, she was crazy. Mama had those stools placed just so because she needed to be able to leap up on one in case the floor started to buckle and suck her under. My brother and sister and I navigated around them with extreme caution. But I said that already, didn’t I? You’ll have to excuse my redundancy.

  I was eleven. My brother was seven, and my sister was three, I think. Anyway, my brother, Jazz, loved trains. He had this LGB train set that Aunt Baby ordered from a Sears catalog. He adored it and, much to everyone’s dismay, usually played with it early in the mornings. The sound of the train annoyed me, so I went downstairs to check on Mama. Keeping an eye on Mama was my responsibility since I was the oldest. She looked and sounded almost normal that day, you know, like she used to.

  “Good morning, baby doll. Help me get everybody dressed. I feel like going for a drive this morning.”

  “What about the tornado, mama?”

  “You think I’m afraid of a little old tornado?”

  “Mama, they said on channel 8that Miss Sophea had a big fat core! I’m gonna get to see a real live twister!”

  “Hush that talk now, you hear. We’ve got things to do and places to go.”

  She was smiling and she had combed her hair, and I swear to God I thought maybe we were going to Swensons to get ice cream. She used to take me there and allowed me to get two scoops of lemon custard even though I always managed to drop the top one on the seat of her car.

  “Jazz! Jazz! Stop fooling around with that train and get dressed. Mama said we’re going somewhere.”

  I rushed to get the baby ready. I was so excited at the prospect of having a normal mother again. And outside, Miss Sophea seemed like a distant relative. You know if I close my eyes, I can still hear ‘Trane playing in my head, smooth and melodious. It was “In a Sentimental Mood” da de da da da de da da. You know, the version he recorded with Duke Ellington.

  “Baby doll, hurry up now,” Mama whispered. “We have to get out of here. This hell of a house doesn’t want to let us go, and it’ll die trying to hold us in.”

  I was so giddy about wrapping my tongue around that damn sugar cone that I didn’t remember to tell anyone that we were leaving. I didn’t tell my father, and I was supposed to. You understand. It was my responsibility. Anyway, it was extremely windy outside, and I remember struggling a little to get in the car. It was a burgundy Mercedes with a beige leather interior, and it smelled of strawberries and Chanel Number 5. I remember consoling my baby sister, Livia, because she couldn’t quite figure out how to tie her shoes. I remember Uncle Brother running, sprinting out of the front door, and the urgency in his tone yelling for my mother to come back.

  “Reva! Reva! Come back here, Reva! Do you hear me? Come back.”

  Oh, and Jazz’s sweet face. I remember Jazz’s sweet face. I remember driving past Swensons on Parker Avenue and feeling my stomach starting to swirl. I remember thinking that something was terribly wrong, and I remember now how normal Mama looked when she turned around and smiled.

  “Hey, baby doll,” she said, “how about I take y’all to see a real, live choo-choo train?”

  It was happening again: that feeling of being adrift in her own body, mystified by the simplest of things. Like a mourned lover, it had crept up on her out of nowhere, intoxicating her senses, and she struggled to remain focused on the task at hand. But what was the task? And how long would it be before she remembered—seconds like before or hours? Days perhaps. Unfortunately, time for her had become much too easy to lose.

  Dahlia paused at the light on the corner of Colorado Boulevard and Orange Grove and wondered where she would end up this time. The signal changed, horns sounded, and still confusion in all its glory danced around in her head, spinning and twirling with reckless abandon. She was aware that she was somehow off balance, but she was at a loss for how to identify the cause of her difficulty. If anyone were to ask her, she wouldn’t know how to adequately articulate how she felt without sounding like she was in desperate need of a padded room and wrist restraints. No, there was nothing to be revealed to anyone about these random spells that were beginning to occur more and more frequently. She would work through them—lean into the curve, so to speak—and in time, this one would pass just like the others and she would be no worse for wear. Wrinkled a little, yes, but not shredded into countless pieces—not right now, anyway. Dahlia pressed her foot on the accelerator and followed the gold Mercedes in front of her onto the 134 freeway. Today she’d go west toward Los Angeles, toward the ocean.

  Oftentimes during moments like these, Dahlia reached for an emotional anchor to weigh her down and keep her grounded—a fond memory to calm her insides—but memories good or bad hid from her religiously. She guessed they lingered in her mind trapped in tight spaces unwilling to make an appearance. She longed to remember what it felt like not to be nearly hysterical twenty-four hours a day, but she didn’t have the energy to go chasing after any phantom recollections. Lately it seemed she didn’t have the energy to do much of anything—work, play, or love intensely the way she used to. Her life was escaping from her in minuscule increments day by day, and God help her, sometimes she wanted to simply turn herself off, give in to the pressure and be done with breathing already. But she was stronger than that. Or at least that’s what she always told herself in the midnight hour when thoughts of suicide attempted to seduce her.

  Last night had been more of the usual tossing and turning, screaming and sweating, and this morning her depression was compounded by the lone gray hair she discovered languishing in her punanni as if it belonged there, as if it were finally home. She’d gasped in horror and imagined herself at ninety years old napping in a wheelchair smelling of Bengay and peppermint patties. She’d grabbed tweezers and plucked wildly, trying desperately not to cry in front of her amused husband. He’d laughed, of course, and teased her until that heavy feeling in her chest subsided. “Welcome to my world,” he’d said with a broad grin, and she did feel better for a while or at least until she walked out the door. He was good at that, though, making her forget herself at times. But now even he couldn’t control what was happening to her, and neither, it appeared, could she. She blinked back tears and rummaged around in her purse for Excedrin, Advil, or anything that would make her head stop aching. “No,” she whispered. “Go away.” But the pain persisted, and she kept driving, oblivious to the sugarcoated life waiting for her on the other side of town.

  “Dahlia, baby, it’s time to get up. I don’t want you to be late again.”

  “Late for what? What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve taken care of everything. All you have to do is shower, dress, and get in the car.”

  Dahlia pressed her face deeper into her goose-down pillow. It was so fluffy and obviously new, but she didn’t remember buying it, and Michael—or Milky, as she liked to call him—would never purchase such a luxury. Normally she would be up, out the door, and on her way to the Coffee Bean for a nonfat pure vanilla ice blended. This morning it didn’t seem to matter that she had thirty-odd students at Pasadena City College waiting impatiently for her to give a lecture on God knows what. Lying
in bed all day daydreaming seemed preferable to actually opening her eyes or even moving. Maybe, just maybe, if she didn’t move, kept still like the dead, he’d have mercy on her and leave her be for a moment longer. She wasn’t ready. Why couldn’t he tell that she wasn’t ready? Couldn’t a woman be depressed and suicidal in peace? Jesus.

  Still somewhat oblivious to Michael’s pleas for acknowledgment, Dahlia continued to think about the benefits of remaining buried under a mountain of hand-stitched quilts until the familiar intrusion of cool air jolted her back to the now, to the what is. Real life began to tickle the underside of her toes and disturb the cozy cocoon she’d managed to create for herself. Like yesterday and the day before, Michael had removed the covers and proceeded to swing her legs over the side of the bed as if she were a disobedient child. Despite her budding anger, she decided that she should be grateful for the distraction. If it weren’t for him pushing her forward lately, she’d be a mess, an absolute zombie stumbling around Pasadena proper in Jimmy Choo shoes.

  “Dahlia, I want you to talk to a doctor about this.”

  “Milky, I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  “You’re always tired, Dahlia. You go to sleep and wake up tired. And frankly, I’m tired of you being tired. I want you to make an appointment to see someone today. I mean it. I spoke to Stan and got the name of a good doctor.”

  “Are you attempting to tell me what to do, Milky?”

  “Something is not right here, Dahlia, and we have to find out what it is. Maybe you have chronic fatigue syndrome or—” Dahlia interrupted before he prattled off an endless list of possibilities that could explain her exhaustion. He was a lists man. She’d learned early on in their relationship to ask questions that had only one answer if time was a consideration because Michael was always prepared with countless options. If only he wanted to be a game show contestant, they’d be millionaires by now.