Read The Wave for Free Online Page A

fit,” the man inside the uniform suggested. “If his clothes fit, then maybe he’ll feel more normal.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Angelique was seven and a half months into a difficult pregnancy. The simple effort of answering the door exhausted her.
    “Hi, Errol,” she said wanly, looking at Nella and then GT. “What are you doing here?”
    “Can we come in, Angie?”
    “Oh.” She hesitated. “I guess so.”
    Angelique and Lon lived on the ground floor of a three-story house that had been subdivided into three apartments. Light flooded in from every window. The floor was bright pine, and all of the furniture was lightly varnished white ash. Lon was a carpenter and a furniture maker. He was from a South Carolinian ex-slaveholding family that had broken off contact with him when he married my light-skinned sister.
    I was the darker of the two children. Angie looked almost white. But Lon’s parents wouldn’t have cared if she’d been blond and blue-eyed. Black was black, where they came from. I guess that was why Lon moved to L.A.
    Angelique sat us in the living room. By then she was stealing concerned glances at GT.
    “This is Nella Bombury, Angie,” I said as soon as we were seated, “my, um . . . And this is GT.”
    “Hi, Anj,” GT said. “How’s the Waterwog?”
    The shock registering on my sister’s face brought me all the way back to our childhood. Her wide eyes gawked, and her jaw dropped down as if there weren’t a bone in it.
    “Daddy?”
    “Baby girl,” GT said.
    He went to sit by her and folded her in his arms.
    Nella looked over at me with
I told you so
radiating from her face.
    “No,” I said. “He’s a fake, a sham. He is not our father.”

10
    Angelique accepted GT as her father with no qualms and few questions. I thought at the time that it had something to do with her pregnancy; the life growing inside her enhancing her spiritual side.
    “. . . and do you remember when we went down near Pismo Beach that year there was that big windstorm . . .” my sister was saying.
    “. . . and Airy held out his coattails like wings, and the wind caught him and he went flying over the edge,” GT said, finishing the sentence, further proving to my sister that he was our father come back from the dead.
    “Mama was so scared,” Angelique said.
    “But,” GT continued, “he landed in that scrub oak just over the drop and cried for all he was worth.”
    I didn’t remember the event because I’d been too young. I doubted if Angelique did, either, but our parents had told the story so often that she believed she was calling on her own memory.
    “It’s just a story,” I said. “Somebody, probably our father, told GT when he was a child. Now he thinks that he was there, but it’s just the same as you, Angie—you’ve heard it so often that you think you remember me falling. But you don’t.”
    “I do,” she said.
    “She might remember, Errol,” Nella said. “How do you know what’s in somebody else’s mind?”
    “Because I was five when it happened, and she was only three.”
    “Three-year-olds can remember,” Nella argued.
    “But I don’t even remember,” I said.
    “You’re the one who fell,” she reasoned. “Maybe it was too upsetting. Maybe you blocked it out.”
    “Look at him. He’s not even twenty. How the hell could he be our father?”
    “Here,” Angelique said.
    While Nella and I argued, my sister had gone and gotten the family album our mother had made for her. She opened it to an old black-and-white photograph of Dad. He was sitting in a chair set before a fake backdrop of a potted fern and a window looking out onto a large painting of an empty beach. He was smiling, with his legs crossed, wearing a light jacket and dark trousers.
    He was the exact duplicate of the man sitting on the couch before me.
    “GT’s probably his son,” I said again. “That’s the only explanation. Dad had a second family, one that he never told us about. You know how he loved to tell