True North: A Wordsmith Chronicles MC Standalone
Page 15
I listen to all this standing in the waiting room. My mind is a sea of violence. The friend and club member in me want revenge, but the man in me wants to comfort Ana, who’s probably scared out of her mind. Delilah comes over and peels Ana off of me and gives her a hug, and we both sit with her for a half hour until Joaquin’s surgeon comes out. I just listen.
“Mrs. Suarez,” she says. “Your husband is nowhere near out of the woods yet, but we managed to stop the bleeding. He had lacerations all over him, and he has several internal injuries. He’s in the ICU recovery room. It’s very touch and go at the moment. There’s a chance that he won’t make it through the night, but we’ll stay hopeful.”
You’ve got to hand it to doctors. Ain’t no training in the world that can teach you how to tell people the kind of news he just told Ana. Got to hand it to the man, he did a decent job, if there’s even such a thing. I’ve heard all I needed to hear. Now it’s time to do what needs to be done.
“Ana, what do you need me to do?” There’s almost no point in trying to have a normal conversation right now. Ana’s hysterical, and I don’t blame her. A strange man just told her that her husband might be dead before the sun rises. I’d be a fucking mess also. “Do you want me to go check on the house? Make sure everything is okay?”
She nods. It’s all she can do right now. I’ll do what I promised, but that’s not the extent of what’s going to happen when I leave. I don’t say anything else, I just turn and walk away. “North!” Delilah yells. “Wait up. Ana, I’ll be right back.” Ana’s not even paying attention right now, but Delilah knows exactly what I’m thinking about. She follows me into the elevator, and it’s just the two of us on a ride down to the main floor. “Don’t, North.”
“Don’t what?”
“Stop!” she yells. “I’m not some dumb broad. I know what you’re going to do. I’m begging you, don’t.”
“Delilah, this here isn’t about you and me. I need you to understand that. That man almost killed my best friend—my brother—he may not live to see tomorrow. And it was all over a real estate deal. You think I can just sit here in a waiting room and not do anything about it?”
“You can do whatever you choose to do. Going off and getting yourself killed isn’t going to heal Joaquin’s injuries. It’s just going to have me doing what Ana’s doing right now. Sobbing into a tissue and wondering what the hell just happened to the man I . . .”
She stops abruptly as the elevator door opens to the lobby. I don’t know if it was the opening of the doors or her own self restraint that stopped the next words, but I don’t follow up. I’m too focused on what needs to be done. I don’t want to hurt Delilah, and I sure as fuck don’t want to end up like Joaquin, but I need to go handle my business right now.
“Listen to me,” she says, grabbing my arm. “I understand. I get it. I know how upset you are.”
“Do you?” I yell, getting annoyed at this little exchange we’re having. “I don’t see how you possibly could. Don’t take this wrong, but you’re an outsider to this world I live in. You don’t understand how it works. This isn’t normal society where, if you’re wronged, you call the cops and hope that the court system deals with your problems for you. This is an honor culture I’m from, and we right our own wrongs when we have to.”
“You really still think of me that way? An outsider?”
“You are, Delilah. And that’s not an insult, it’s the truth. I know me going off to find Travis seems like some crazy gang shit to you, but it’s how we deal with these things.”
“Who the hell are ‘we’, North? I thought you were leaving this life. I thought we were starting something together?”
“We are!” I yell. “But that doesn’t mean that I turn my back on a man who’s practically my brother. One has nothing to do with the other.”
“Getting yourself killed doesn’t do him any justice. You know this.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But doing nothing is an injustice, and I can’t have that. I’m sorry, Delilah, but I have to go, even if you don’t understand why.”
She yells one last time as I turn my back. “I’m not doing this crazy shit again. I spent my last few years dealing with an unstable man who put me through a world of shit. I can’t do that again.”
“I’d never put you through that again. And I’m not him. But I am James North, and this is part of who I am as a human being. I’m not a piece of shit like your ex. I’m not trying to hurt you or deceive you. This is the epitome of honesty right now, you just don’t understand it. If you can’t see the difference then we have issues.”
“Well I guess we have issues, then.”
“I’ve gotta go. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to hurt you, but I’ve gotta go.”
I leave her there in the parking lot, as hysterical as Ana was a minute ago. The last thing in this world I want is to hurt Delilah, or to add to the pile of misery that I’m dealing with.
But Joaquin is my brother, and someone has to answer for what’s happened to him.
Thirty Eight—Delilah—Now
When Emily and I leave my OB appointment I feel sick.
Not just pregnancy sick, but sick with worry over North.
I laughed when my doctor told me to stay relaxed—that stress would be bad for the baby. He looked at me like I was crazy, but the idea of not stressing after my husband’s been taken by his rival MC was kind of funny, in a twisted sort of way. So, I laughed. Emily shot me the judgmental look because she doesn’t know exactly what’s going on. I can’t tell her. She thinks North is off on a bender or something.
I let her keep her illusion. I don’t want everyone to know exactly the danger North is in, if he’s still alive that is. Jesus, I can’t believe that I just let myself have that thought. For a second after it’s over, the implications of my own unfiltered thought hit me right in the gut. My eyes well up, right there in the parking lot, and I start to cry uncontrollably.
“D, what’s the matter?”
“It’s nothing,” I lie. “Just. . . just the hormones. You know, pregnant women.”
“D, stop it. I know you. You can’t lie to me. Tell me what’s really wrong. Is it North? I’m sure he’ll be back soon, don’t worry.”
“Em, he doesn’t even know!”
My words ring out in the parking lot, and the women walking past me with their husbands just stare at the irrational woman with mascara running down her face. I probably look like Ophelia—quietly descending into madness while everyone looks on, wondering why. I know why, but they can’t know.
“I didn’t realize. It’s been eight weeks, why haven’t you told him?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “He’s been away. This signing, that signing. I mean, it’s what we do. I’m part of that world as much as he is, and we always do those things together. But he’s been going without me, which I told him to do to keep his career going, but still. It’s been hard. It’s not the kind of thing you text, for fuck’s sake.”
“No, it’s definitely not. You made the right decision. Wish the bastard was here for you to tell him.”
“Don’t say that about him!” I snap. “I told him to go. But I haven’t been able to get in touch with him.”
“Don’t jump at me when I say this, D, but it’s hardly the first time.”
Her words sting a little. She doesn’t mean to, but she’s kicking me when I’m down. I know that she’s trying to do the opposite. My sister is my best friend, and the last thing she’d ever want is to hurt me. No. She’s trying to comfort me by shitting on North, but it’s making me even more upset. She has her reasons to be saying what she’s saying. North had a spurt of crazy, back in the day, where he struggled with all sorts of demons. This was after he left the Mescaleros—after we’d moved on together. He vanished on me a few times, and whenever I was hurt or upset Emily would be there for me, and we’d shit on North just to make ourselves feel better. It worked back then, at least for a little, but now it’s doing the opposite.
After I get those words out, I’m ruined. I start ugly sobbing, and Emily doesn’t even bother talking to me anymore. She knows me better than almost anyone in the world, and she knows that when I get to this point, best thing to do is just hold onto me and squeeze.
She’s doing it well.
I wish it helped.
Thirty Nine—Delilah—Way Back When
I get home from the hospital exhausted.
I can’t believe that the fucker left me standing and crying in the middle of a parking lot while he went off to avenge his friend.
Maybe I’m being selfish.
No, it’s not that. I’m afraid. I’m completely terrified, and I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t want North to go off on some revenge mission because I don’t want him to get killed. If it were my friend or my sister lying in that hospital bed, better believe my crazy ass would be looking for the person who did it. But this is different. I’m falling in love with North, plain and simple. He’s the first man I’ve felt anything like this for since I left my ex husband, and I can see myself being with him forever.
I can’t tell him how I feel.
I want to, but we haven’t said those kinds of words to each other yet.
At this rate, maybe we never will. I feel sick to my stomach. I let a few minutes pass before I start drinking. I have a bottle of wine calling my name, so I break it open and pour a way-too-full glass and get after it. I did a lot of this during my divorce. Too much. In fact, I was a few ounces per day away from checking myself into rehab. I haven’t drank much since, but tonight I need it.
I miss North already, and I’m feeling a mix of sadness for Ana, concern for Joaquin, and complete worry for North. Look at me, sitting here, embroiled in a world that I know nothing about and never wanted to be a part of. I guess that sometimes it comes with the territory when you get into a relationship, but I never thought when North and I got together that I’d be sitting in the middle of some kind of weird MC war. It’s all really strange to me, but I care enough about North that I’m willing to be here until the end. I just hope it’s not literally the end.
I reach for my phone to text him but then stop myself. Whatever he’s doing, the last thing he needs is for me to complicate the situation further. I put it away and finish what’s sure to be the first of many glasses of red wine.
After my second glass I’m tipsy. Well, a little north of tipsy, but nowhere near drunk. I’m not sure what makes me do this, but I start cleaning uncontrollably. I probably look nuts—a half drunk woman whose eyes are still red from crying, cleaning her place like a maid on crack. But who cares? Cleaning has always been a comfort for me when I was down, and tonight I’m feeling down.
I check my phone to make sure it’s on ring. Before I left a complete mess from the hospital, I pulled myself together just enough to talk to Ana one more time. It probably wasn’t my place, and I don’t know her that well, but I told her that if she didn’t want to stay there all night in a room full of strangers, that she could come over and spend the night. I gave her my address just in case. I know that she probably won’t take me up on it—I know that if it were me in that position I’d probably stop eating and drinking until I knew my man was okay. But the offer is real if she wants to take me up on it.
I vacuum, dust, Swiffer my kitchen floor, and then I decide to transition from cleaning to organizing. I start with the overstuffed drawers of the hutch that’s in my living room. I throw away about a million receipts, cut up old, expired credit cards, and just as I’m getting to the end, I find it—the piece of writing that North gave me.
As soon as I see his name on the cover sheet the emotions that I’ve been trying to suppress with alcohol and cleaning come rushing back to me. I didn’t plan on reading this at a moment like this. It was going to be something to savor over a fresh cup of coffee on a Sunday morning, but life’s gotten in the way. I don’t have North with me—I may never have him again, but I have his words, and right now all I want to do is read them.
I open up the cover and let my eyes scan over the pages.
JAMES NORTH
ASSIGNMENT—VERSION 1
CREATIVE WRITING FOR ADULTS—GREENFIELD COMMUNITY COLLEGE
I’m an open book.
Ask me anything and I’ll tell you the truth. The truth is all I know how to tell. That’s probably because if I dared tell a lie as a kid, my parents would have whooped my ass until I couldn’t sit for a week. I’ve done some things in my life—things I’m not proud of and things that I am—but the only thing I’ve never told anyone is why I left the military.
‘Left’ isn’t the right way to say it.
I was dishonorably discharged. I was kicked out.
I never told anyone that story, and the only people who know the truth of those events are the ones who were there, even though they lied through their teeth about it. I understand why. To admit what happened would mean certain jail time. I get it. I hid the truth also to protect her. That’s the one time in my life that I’ve lied, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
The prompt for this assignment was to tell a story from our lives that helped make us who we are today. I don’t know if that experience made me who I am, or if who I was caused me to go through that experience. Either way, it’s time to talk about what happened that night.
The first thing you should know about me is that I’m no hero. I don’t want commendations, or praise, or even credit for doing things that I thought were the right thing to do. I’m just a principled man, and this isn’t a world built for principled men. I went into the military with dreams of glory, like a lot of young fools throughout history, and what I came out with was mostly bitterness and a few good stories. It is what it is. I’m glad that I signed up, and I’m glad that I got to kill a few bad guys in the process. It wasn’t the fighting that embittered me like it does for most guys. I expected complexity. I expected a horror show. I expected to compromise a little bit of who I am for the greater good of what I felt we were doing over there, and I wouldn’t change a second of that part of my experience.
What I never expected was the enemy within—that it would be another American who ultimately led to my departure from military service. That part I didn’t see coming. We’d all just finished dinner. There were a lot of men in my unit, but a single woman—Lucrezia. I remember when we first met. I joked about how I was too stupid and uncultured to pronounce such a beautiful name. But she was tough. Tougher than her name sounded. She could keep up with any man in our unit, and then some.
We all formed a real bond, as people who share such unique experiences tend to do. Lucrezia became like a sister to me, but even if she had been just a random woman on the base, I still would have done the same thing that I did that night.
Our commanding officer, a man whom I once had the utmost respect for, decided against all protocol to have a lot of drinks that night. He was shitfaced—no other way to say it. Like many people, alcohol changed who he was. I’d never liked being around drunks, especially when I was stone-cold sober, but he was my superior, and the situation didn’t give me much choice in the matter. All I could do was remove myself from our usual post dinner conversation, which I did, retreating to my room to sleep off another stressful day.
Lucrezia had a room next to mine, and she’d gone to bed before any of us. I laid my head down not only because I was tired, but because I had a splitting headache that didn’t feel like it was anywhere near going away. I closed my eyes even though sleep was a long way away, and just rested there, breathing deeply and waiting to drift off.
That’s when I heard the sounds.
First, they sounded like nonspecific noise—just the rustling of objects in a room, nothing to cause any alarm. Then I heard her voice, and the unmistakable sound of struggle. M
ost of the muffled tones were lost to my ears, but when I clearly heard the phrase ‘stop it’, that was all I needed to act.
I ran next door and pushed the closed door open with all the force I could muster. That’s when I saw Lucrezia, bent over her bed, her underwear pushed to the side, and her bare ass staring at me. My commanding officer was behind her, his pants around his ankles, and his hand pressing down on her back to keep her in place. She was crying, and he looked like what he was—a man caught in the middle of a heinous act.
What happened next astonished me. He didn’t pull his pants up, or apologize, or even feign shock that I’d walked in. He simply told me to turn around, close the door, and forget that I saw him about to rape Lucrezia. I don’t know why his words filled me with such rage, but they did, and nothing I tried to tell myself—not that he was my commanding officer, or that hurting him would ruin my career—would calm that rage. I didn’t think, I just acted.
It probably looked cartoonish, beating a man whose pants were down around his ankles, but there was nothing funny about it. The first punch slept him, and I landed a few more as he fell. Being unconscious was a gift he didn’t deserve. He deserved to feel the pain and humiliation he’d inflicted on her, and I was happy to make him feel at least some of it.
I grabbed a blanket and covered Lucrezia as she pulled her own pants up. I turned around so that she could have her dignity. All I felt were the arms around me, squeezing me as she thanked me again and again.
I was discharged shortly thereafter. The officer in question brought me up on charges, claiming that in a drunken stupor I attacked him without provocation. I didn’t fight the charges, nor did I bring up any of my own. That was for Lucrezia to do, which I hear she did shortly after I left. I was just there to help clean up the mess, and I didn’t fight because I was disillusioned with the military. I didn’t want to be a part of an organization where rape was a tolerated part of the culture, so I left without a fight.