Searching for Tina Turner - By Jacqueline E. Luckett Page 0,38

room window, Lena watches Randall’s long car pull out of the garage. Twenty-five years ago, Lena discovered that Randall had returned from the East Coast the summer day she drove down Highway 580. From a distance, she watched a man trying to talk a highway patrolman out of a ticket. His distinct hand movements tipped her off: Randall.

Lena sped across two lanes and parked her sports car on the embankment. When the CHP drove off, she jumped out of her car and waited for Randall to look her way; a different version of their first meeting. They hugged for five minutes while cars honked their appreciation for such a public display of affection.

Now, anger fuels Randall’s swift descent down the driveway, morphs his taillights from red dots to snaking stream. His car disappears down the hill and around the corner. Lena loved the way she felt that day long ago: protective and powerful. Powerful enough to slow traffic, to keep Randall from speeding away, to control her destiny. For all of the years she has loved him and more, she has cared for him, worried about him, prayed for his safety. In this instant, she doesn’t care what he does, how fast he drives, or where he goes. But never, never in a million years, did she ever think she would wish he would go to hell.

Chapter 11

Three days.

The first day, Lena retreats to her bed, a bottle of water under the sheets, the bottle of Drambuie on her nightstand. Calls ring through to the answering machine. She listens while Lulu asks, “Why haven’t you come over?” The light bulb in the bathroom, she insists, needs to be changed right away because the new energy-efficient bulbs make her look old and green. She listens when Bobbie insists, “Pick up and tell me what’s going on, Lena-Bena.” She listens to Candace: “I hope you gave Randall a piece of your mind. Let me know if you want to talk.”

The second day Randall calls late in the afternoon, Lena answers when his number flashes on the caller ID screen. She lays the phone on his pillow instead of using her hands and listens to Randall ask about Camille and Kendrick and what bills have come in the mail.

This third day falls into night, and feathered, dark clouds gather in the sky with the threat of rain. She cannot move in her bed, cannot talk to her children, cannot stop thinking of the vials of pills in the medicine cabinet. The lyrics Lena printed out, what seems like years instead of three weeks ago, are piled on the bed. Of all of Tina’s songs, “On Silent Wings”—the words more than the melancholy music—brings tears. She does not have the mental ability this night to understand if it is good or bad to be so average, to live life, or lose love in such an ordinary way that it can be generalized in lyrics that could, and probably do, apply to many. But the songwriter has captured what she believed: the willingness to share a life, the strength of a love that held when times were tough. Someone to hold on to. Randall. They read like her story:

I always thought our love was strong enough

One you could hold on to

Lena climbs out of bed and pulls sweats over her pajamas. Tina gained strength with the help of Buddhist chanting, but it took courage for her to step out on her own. A moan is Lena’s chant. She releases it and lets this depression that runs deep in her bones render her passive for the last time. She stands over Randall’s dresser. Sunglasses, cuff links, and a mound of change are lined neatly on top.

Winter waves crashed on the cliffs behind the restaurant in San Francisco when Randall put that one-carat, emerald cut diamond on her finger. She believed: wife as partner, wife as friend. She believed when he replaced it with this larger stone. Each time he twisted her hand this way and that—like she does from time to time—the stone sparkled on her slim finger. The gold band accentuates the gold in her skin, the gold that comes shining through whenever she sits too long in the sun.

Now she twists her ring—it slips easily from her finger—and tosses it onto his dresser in this bedroom soon to be for one. Wife in name only.

f f f

Lena drives fast and hard. If the two thousand pounds of steel encasing her could lead her to