But that last night, there were no stories or pictures. There was only music as Ella Fitzgerald serenaded them from a radio that had finally become clear. Billy used the clothes he was peeling off himself to dry Tawana’s body. By the time she was naked, they were both weeping—Billy for having his innocence stolen and no idea how to get it back, Tawana for feeling helpless she couldn’t help him find it. Then, Billy pulled his hopeful wife into bed with him in order to make love to her like they were Harlem newlyweds again, when the discovery of their passion was still fresh. They ravished one another like they had done before they really knew each other, before either of their imperfections or haunted memories had revealed themselves like fingerprints purposely left behind as a confession. Their lovemaking—at once hungry, violent, and necessary—played out like the battles they had begun to fight long before they met, when they were both searching for love, good jobs, and a sunny place to call home.

His last night on this earth, Billy lay on his wife’s stomach and started to have a dream—it began about his babies, what the future held, the life he and his woman could make once the right chances came along. He couldn’t have known he was lying on top of me—newly conceived, already a spirit planting the good life in his mind. Most of the memories he had of his first nineteen years had been squeezed out of his brain by two short but long years of being tossed around Europe. He had been seeking honor, purpose, earnings, and skills—the promises that lured him and over a million other Blacks to fight in yet another war they had nothing to do with. Away from all that he knew, he had felt like he was chained in a movie theater and forced to watch a story that was not his own. During the day, there was vision, but no sound. At night, horrible sounds that spared the permanence of vision. With his first violent introduction to the highly mechanical warfare that paralyzed even the most well-trained American soldiers, he had witnessed his closest comrade’s lips moving in prayer even after he was nearly decapitated by shrapnel. Billy decided then to no longer believe in God or any reliability of relationships. Yet he had returned to the States and fallen back in love with the girl he had married and gotten pregnant before it all, a Southern enigma recently migrated with her family from Mississippi. The dream turned into a nightmare when scissors held by a blue-eyed soldier were cutting open Tawana’s stomach, and he woke up screaming with his hands still across her navel.

In the aftermath of this dream and all the others, she asked him with wet eyes, How can you still love me?