Searching for Tina Turner - By Jacqueline E. Luckett Page 0,53
you loved us, you wouldn’t do this to us,” Camille says; tears stream down her face. “Or to Dad.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…. If I could make it hurt less, for all of us, I would.”
“Then I’m going to stay with Dad, too. You kicked him out of the house. He goes to all of the trouble of looking for a new place, and now you’re leaving? It’s not fair.”
When Lena went online and read Camille’s poetry, the words, their meaning, were clear but seemingly not directed at her. Now hearing her children’s words and the force of their anger is hard to take, but the sentiments were easier to handle delivered from the protective distance of cyberspace.
Chapter 17
On this fourteenth day since that rainy night, Lena awakens to the music of her neighborhood: children shriek through a game of tag, a lone bird chirps; a sprinkler head sputters, a gardener’s blower buzzes. It’s been a long time since she’s paid attention to these early morning noises, and now her ears perk up because she is listening to them for the last time.
Pulling on jeans and a sweater in the haphazard fashion that is now her style, she wanders toward Kendrick’s and Camille’s rooms to crack their doors open and check their breathing, as if they were still toddlers, underneath their muddled covers. She stops in the middle of the hallway. Kendrick and Camille are not home. They left last night with barely a smile or a tilted eyebrow or a mischievous wink and headed to wherever Randall lives these days.
Outside, gears grind in the driveway. This truck announces their separation to the neighbors. Lena storms down the stairs and opens the front door. Two burly men with huge moving pads slung across their shoulders ask where she wants to begin. She looks back at them and waits for them to answer their own question.
Their first home was a mishmash of her furniture and Randall’s bachelor trimmings. Lena decorated this house on her own. There were days spent in cold, dusty warehouses to find pristine bathroom tiles; she scoured through racks of granite slabs, as long as they were wide, in search of the right one for the kitchen. She hunted through the crowded aisles of the Everyman’s Bazaar for antiques and sterling silver whatnots. The veneer plastered walls, the coffee table, the dining room table, and several handcrafted lamps are her designs. The corners filled with unobtrusive objects from their travels. Her mark is on everything.
The movers ask again, quieter this time. Lena points out what she wants: half of the pots and pans, the mixer, the toaster, the couch, the coffee table and the photography books on top of it, the jade lion from Hong Kong, the red Chinese armoire, the Persian rugs, the fine china with cobalt blue bands, silverware, picture albums, all of her clothes. The art she loves and her photographs.
With a final glance in the dresser’s mirror, Lena examines the gray strands scattered in her reddish brown hair, the puffs that have replaced the smooth skin under her eyes. She points to the dresser, but not the matching bed where Kendrick and Camille were conceived, where she and Randall swore to be together till death did them part, where they made love, ate popcorn and ice cream, slept in each other’s arms. The thought of sleeping in that bed alone, though she has many times over the years, always eager for Randall’s return, is enough to make her double over in pain.
No. The bed holds too many memories. The last time she and Randall made love, really made love—not just gotten off because he needed to—must have been months before he left on this last trip. She gasped and held her breath, while he moved in and out, out and in. He called her name, and she called his from the back of her throat in a moan she can hear right now. She cannot bear the thought of him making love to another woman in that same space.
At last, the movers signal to Lena that they are done. She wanders around the house. In the hallway, faded squares outline the rectangles of pictures that once decorated those walls: the concentration on Kendrick’s face during his first piano concert, Camille’s first recital, Kendrick and Camille at Disneyland, Lena and Randall on their honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta. Short hair, long hair, mustache, no mustache; infants, toddlers, teens. The story of their lives is in those