I observed photographs of my parents, myself, and a love letter my father had written to me on the day I was born that I found hidden beneath my mother’s mail in a top dresser drawer when I was eight and discovered the scent of Chanel No. 5 perfume on my fingertips.

     Last night, the hospital had called me before Blue Greene had. My father’s pressure had been dropping all evening. Daddy had been in a diabetic coma for two days.

     Waiting for death a day before my birthday when I was 12 gave me anxiety every birthday after that because I was always waiting for a phone call telling me that someone had died. For 17 years, I’ve been waiting, only to find out that now, at age 29, I can’t handle it.

     I placed the phone’s receiver back on the machine anyway.  I let the photographs and a love letter fill a cave in my soul overflowing like the Gullah/Geechee heritage of Georgia I owned, but had never learned. Inside the cave lived a dark mix that reminded me of tough roots, cypress forests, and peat moss that thrived on the shores of the Okefenoke Swamp as well as the Ogeechee and Savannah Rivers that surrounded low country living. I never learned the language my mother and father spoke whenever they wanted to share a secret about a murder in 1901 that kept my father from sleeping comfortably most nights when he came to visit Mama and me when I was a child. But the language of photographs and a love letter kept appearing on the walls of the cave that had grown in my soul along with the oak trees, especially on my 12th birthday, when my mother’s sweet whispers of her love for me disappeared.

     That night, I learned the art of dancing people used to wipe tears away.

     It was Christmas morning, 1999, and now I knew in advance what I was waiting for as I longed for a warm familiar family quilt with the design of a holy river named Eridanus that my grandmother used to cover me with whenever I was cold.

     To calm my nerves I sipped whiskey for breakfast, something I began doing around this time last year after a shower of champagne hit my face.

     "Please God," I whispered, "I need some answers soon."

     I wiped away the tears as I tried to forget that while I was wrapped in paisley sheets scented with White Musk oil, Blue Greene, a man with skin that reminded me of a red maple tree with comforting hands, had kissed my lips, neck, breasts, stomach, and then had worked his way up again to my ear to say, "Sweet, I have to tend to some business. You know that, don’t you?"

     His lips moved across my face to my lips again.

     I then watched him watch all two hundred and fifty-seven pounds of me. He apologized again by kissing the handprint he had placed on my face, a swollen bruise on the left side that remained from last night’s slap for reminding him that I needed his love more than jewelry.

     He called me "unappreciative." He then calmly repeated, "Got to tend to some business in the morning, understand?"     Yes, I did. He had made being with his common-law wife, Linda Cree, on Christmas, business. 

     But I had smiled, given him another gift of fine cologne, quietly made him breakfast, and sipped my cup of coffee in the living room as I watched him leave at five in the morning to go over to The Blue Zephyr, the tasteful nightclub he owned on Dandelion Street and Simpson Avenue, which was five blocks walking distance from my home. Then I had returned to the paisley sheets, then to my father’s chair, then back to the sheets to continue my modern dance of wiping away tears, and waiting.

     Terror lived in my stomach as I listened to the sound of the ringing phone and a message that made me pray.

     "Ms. Henderson?" After I let Dr. Lateesha Clarke know that I was listening well, she told me that my father died at 4:45 A.M., never recovering from his diabetic coma.

     I sipped more whiskey.  Dr. Clarke on the other end kept talking, "I’m so very sorry to tell you this news.  Ms. Henderson?"

     "Yes, thank you for calling," I whispered.

     Dr. Clarke continued, "Call me, Ms. Henderson, if you need to talk. Any other information I receive later, I’ll be sure to give to you," she said.

     I lied, "I will call you if I need anything. Thank you, doctor."

     I listened to the dial tone until I heard an operator’s recording informing me to hang up, and then I heard loud, uninterrupted beeping, and then silence. The waiting was now over.

    A haunting memory kept me so still after I got the news of my father’s death that all I could do was move my eyelids to limit the flow of water I tried unsuccessfully to control. My tears forced me to remember what Autumn did the night the devil took my mother, the night I became a foster child. It was Christmas Eve, 1982, the day before my 12th birthday. The same night, God took Nana Zola Jewel.  And the same feeling I had then of loneliness, I have now.

    I, along with the police thought the most logical place for me to be was with my father. Autumn detested the idea. No other woman’s child would move in and mess up her marriage.

    My hand held the image of a party, hers. On the evening of my mother’s suicide, Autumn celebrated her 35th birthday, and I was waiting to celebrate my 12th birthday the next day.

    Photograph: I was put in a police car with our neighbor Mrs.Greta Johnson to ride to Autumn’s house where Daddy was living on Dandelion Street, just off of Robinson Boulevard. The policeman rang the doorbell. 

   He gave Autumn the news about Mama because Daddy wasn’t home.  Although I stood behind the policeman, I could smell beer on Autumn’s breath.

     She laughed at the news and said, "Ruby Jewel Weaver? She’s really dead? Nana too! Good!" More laughter. I lunged forward and jumped on her.

     She ran to the kitchen, got a butcher knife, and started swinging and calling me names, "Just like your Mama. Come on. You wanna’ fight me?  You think you’re woman enough?"

     Yes, I thought, adjusting the coat over my pajamas. The knife had left a cut on my right arm and on my shoulder, only slightly visible now, thanks to cocoa butter.

     There was a lot of blood.

     The knife also left a cut on the policeman’s hand. He began yelling into his radio, "Backup! I need backup."

     The knife fell to the floor. Minutes later another policeman dragged me to the police car.

     The ambulance arrived, and I was dressed in pajamas and bandages.

    Autumn told me, "Next time, I’ll kill you."

   The terror she planted in my stomach that night has never left me.

     The news made me ask, "But my Mama is dead? Nana, too?"

     That’s when I learned the art of dancing people used to wipe tears away.

     Now, Daddy was gone.

     My tears were interrupted by the voices coming from my next-door neighbor, Valerie Jacob’s house. She had been calling me or banging on the door all night as Blue slept peacefully. She had given up on waiting for me to answer her around three in the morning.

      Guests from Valerie’s Christmas Eve party that I had been invited to, but had turned down for a night with Blue, were streaming out of her three-family brownstone and piling into luxurious cars. I heard Redd, Valerie’s husband, offer to give familiar voices that belonged to familiar people rides home. I recognized the voices of the only family I had, Cayenne, Mark, and Bless Brown; Angela Montgomery, Cayenne’s new girlfriend was there also.

      The haunting memory of Autumn’s breath took me deeper into the cave of my soul where Christmas Eve, 1982 lived, and I placed my father’s article back into my journal along with nine pictures.

      The tenth was the most recent.

      That night, Nana died peacefully at the age of 82.

      That night, Mama killed herself after she got the news. She was 45 years old.

      After midnight, I became 12. Every birthday after that I have been waiting for someone to die not realizing that each year something inside of me died as I waited.

     Both Nana’s and Mama’s funerals were held one week apart from each other. That week I learned the art of hiding. And I learned how to talk to God about what confusion does to the photographs that linger on my mind.

     That night in 1982, I was taken to a Catholic group home in Jewel Park named St. Mary’s Place for God’s Children where I lived for two years. After that, I was placed in foster care, and from ages 12 to 21, I lived at eight different places. Each time I entered a house, I searched for mansions and jewels, holding on to each celebration of hope that Daddy would find me, but he never did find me the way I wanted him to.

     Now Daddy was gone, just like Nana and Mama, on my birthday.