The Wall of Winnipeg and Me

by Mariana Zapata

  There was a pause before he asked, “You don’t visit your mom?”

  “No.” I realized after I said it how dismissive I sounded. “My sisters spend it with her. She’s married now and has step-kids that go over there. She’s not alone.” And even if she were all by herself, I would still not go. I could be honest with myself.

  “Where’s your brother?”

  “With his friend.”

  “Your friend? Diana?”

  With how busy he’d been, we hadn’t spent much time together other than saying ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ and catching some TV at the same time. “She’s with her family.” After I said it, I realized how it sounded. “I swear, I’m usually okay. I just feel off, I guess. What about you? Are you fine?”

  “I’ve spent most of my Christmas’ alone for the last decade. It isn’t a big deal.”

  Of all the people to spend the holidays with, it was with the one whose history was a little too similar to mine. “I guess the good thing is, you don’t have to spend it alone anymore if you don’t want to.” I’m not sure why I said what I said next, but I did. “At least while you’re stuck with me.”

  Could I sound any more pathetic?

  “I am stuck with you, aren’t I?” he asked in a deceptively soft voice.

  He was trying to make me feel better, wasn’t he? “For the next four years and eight months.” I smiled over at him even as this incredible sense of sadness filled my belly like sand in an hourglass.

  His head jerked back. The action was tiny, tiny, tiny, but it had been there.

  Or had I imagined it?

  Before I could wonder too much about whether he’d reacted or not, the big guy who seemed to swallow up his bed, bluntly asked, “Are you finally going to tell me what your sister did to piss you off?”

  Of course he would ask. Why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t like I considered it a secret. I just didn’t like talking about it. On the other hand, if there were someone in the world I could talk about Susie with, it would be Aiden. Who would he tell? The thing was, even if he did have someone to, if I really thought about it, he was more than likely the most trustworthy person I knew.

  I wasn’t sure when that had happened, but I wasn’t going to wonder about it too much, especially not on Christmas Eve when he’d invited me to his bed, and I was feeling lonelier than I had in a long time.

  Shifting a little on the mattress, I propped my head up on my hand and just went for it. “She hit me with a car when I was eighteen.”

  Those incredibly long black eyelashes hovered low over his eyes. Were his ears going red? “The car accident,” his voice was hoarse, “the person that you told me ran you over…” His blink was so slow I might have thought there was something wrong with him if I hadn’t known otherwise. “It was your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  Aiden stared straight at me, the confusion apparent in the slight lines that crept out from the corners of his eyes. “What happened?” he ground the question out.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I have time for you.”

  “It’s a really long story,” I insisted.

  “Okay.”

  This guy. I had to stretch my neck as if warming up for this crap storm. “All of my sisters have issues, but Susie’s always been something else. I have anger problems, I know. Surprising right? The only one of us who I think doesn’t have problems is my little brother. I think my mom was boozing it up while she was pregnant with us or maybe our dads were just different levels of assholes, I’m not sure.”

  Why was I telling him that? “Anyway, things have always been bad between us. I don’t have a single decent memory of her. Not one, Aiden. There was the closet thing, her coming up and smacking me in the face for no reason, yelling at me, pulling my hair, breaking my things for no reason… I mean, all kinds of crap. I didn’t fight back for the longest until I got tired of her shit, right around when I grew to be bigger than she was, and I finally had enough. She had already been drinking and doing drugs by then. I know she had been for a while. But I didn’t care. I was tired of being her punching bag.

  “Well, this one time, she really kicked my ass. She pushed me down the stairs and I broke my arm. My mom was… I don’t know where she was. My little brother freaked out and called 911. The ambulance came and took me to the hospital. The doctors or the nurses or someone called my mom. She didn’t answer. I didn’t know where she was and neither did any of my siblings. The hospital finally called CPS and they took me, and then they took them. I don’t know how long it took my mom to figure out we were all gone, but she lost custody.

  “I spent the next almost four years with my foster parents and little brother. I saw my mom a few times, but that was it. Right after I went away to school, she started calling me asking what I was going to do during the summer, telling me how she’d love to see me. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking back then. She had a steady job, so I went… and it wasn’t until I got there that I realized she wasn’t living alone. Susie and my oldest sister were living with her. I hadn’t seen either one of them in years.

  “I should have known then that it would have been better for me to go somewhere else. My friend Diana’s parents were still living next door, but she was doing something that weekend so she wasn’t going to be home, and I didn’t want to stay there without her; my foster parents had told me I always had a home with them—I mean, my little brother was still with them. But for some stupid reason, I wanted to give my mom a chance. We—Susie and I—started fighting the moment I got there, and I should have fucking known. The moment I saw her, I could tell she was on something. I tried to talk to my mom about it, but she blew me off and said Susie had changed, blah, blah, blah.

  “Seriously, it was my second night back, and I had walked by my mom’s room and found her going through my mom’s drawers. We started arguing. She called me a bunch of ugly stuff, started throwing things at me, and nailed me with a vase. I barely saw her grab my purse off the kitchen counter when she ran out of the house with whatever else she had grabbed before I caught her. I was so pissed off, Aiden.

  “It’s so dumb when I think about it now, and what’s even dumber is that I still would have chased after her even knowing what would happen. She got into her car, and I started yelling at her through the window when she backed out of the driveway. I didn’t want to get my toes run over, so I went to stand in front of her car when she suddenly put it into drive and hit the gas pedal.”

  Anxiety and grief kind of grabbed my lungs as I kept telling him what happened. “I remember her face when she did it. I remember everything. I didn’t black out until the ambulance showed up, which was after she peeled out of the driveway and left me there. Diana had gotten home early and she was in her room when it happened, and overheard us shouting. She came out right before Susie hit me and called 911, thankfully. The doctor told me later on that I was lucky I had my body turned just right and that she only hit one of my knees and not both.”

  How many times had I told myself that I was over this? A thousand? But the betrayal still stung me in a million different sensitive places. “Lucky. Lucky that my sister hit me with a car and only hurt one of my knees. Can you believe that?”

  Something bubbled up in my throat and then made its way up to the back of my eyes. Some people would call them tears, but I wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to cry over what happened. And my voice definitely wasn’t cracking with emotion. “My tendon was ruptured. I had to miss an entire semester of school to recover.”

  The big guy stared at me. His nostrils flared just slightly. “What happened after she hit you?”

  “She disappeared for a couple months. Not everyone believed me when I told them she’d done it, even though I had a witness. I was pretty sure she’d been sober when she did it—that’s probably why she was stealing money, to go get whatever it was she wanted. My mom wanted me to forgive her and move on, but… how could she ask me to do that? She knew what she’d been doing. Susie h
ad stolen money from her too. She’d chosen to do it, you know? And even if she’d been high, it would still have been her choice to get high and steal shit from the people she was supposed to love. Her choice led her to that moment. I can’t feel bad for that.”

  I couldn’t. Could I? Forgiveness was a virtue, or at least that’s what someone had told me, but I wasn’t feeling very virtuous.

  “I went and stayed with my foster parents afterward. There was no way I was going to stay at Diana’s right next door. My foster dad had me do his accounting work, be his secretary, all kinds of things so I could at least earn my room and board because I didn’t want to freeload off of them. Then I went back to school once I was better.”

  “What happened with your sister?” he asked.

  “After she hit me, I didn’t see her again for years. You know what kills me the most though? She never apologized to me.” I shrugged. “Maybe it makes me a little coldblooded, but—”

  “It doesn’t make you coldblooded, Van,” The Wall of Winnipeg interjected with a crisp tone. “Someone you should have been able to trust hurt you. No one can blame you for not wanting to give her a hug after that. I haven’t been able to forgive people for less.”

  That made me snort bitterly. “You’d be surprised, Aiden. It’s still a sore subject. No one besides my little brother understands why I’m mad. Why I don’t just get over it. I get that they’ve never liked me for whatever reason, but it still feels like a betrayal that they’d be behind Susie instead of me. I don’t understand why. Or what I did to make them feel like I’m their enemy. What am I supposed to do?”

  Aiden frowned. “You’re a good person and you’re talented, Vanessa. Look at you. I don’t know what your sisters are like, but I can’t believe they’re half of what you are.”

  He listed the attributes so breezily they didn’t feel like compliments. They felt like statements, and I didn’t know what to do with it, especially because in the back of my head, I knew Aiden wouldn’t say those things to make me feel better. He just wasn’t the type to nurture, even if he felt obligated, unless he genuinely, really wanted to.

  But before I could think about it anymore, he admitted something so out of the blue, I wasn’t remotely prepared for it. “I might not be the best person to give you family advice. I haven’t talked to my parents in twelve years.”

  I jumped on that wagon the second I could, preferring to talk about him than me. “I thought you went to go live with your grandparents when you were fifteen?”

  “I did, but my grandfather died when I was a senior in high school. They came to the funeral, found out he had left everything to my grandmother, and my mom told me to take care of myself. I’ve never seen them since then,” Aiden recounted.

  “Your dad didn’t say anything?”

  Aiden shifted in bed, almost as if he was lowering himself to be flatter on the mattress. “No. I was four inches taller than him by then, sixty pounds heavier. The only time he talked to me when I lived with them was when he wanted to yell at someone.”

  “I’m sorry to talk about your dad, but he sounds like an asshole.”

  “He was an asshole. I’m sure he still is.”

  I wondered… “Is he why you don’t cuss?”

  No-bullshit Aiden answered. “Yes.”

  It was in that moment, that I realized how similar Aiden and I were. This intense sense of affection, okay maybe it was more than affection—I could be an adult and admit it—squeezed my heart.

  Looking at Aiden, I held back the sympathy I felt and just kept a grip on the simmering anger as I eyed his scar. “How did he do that to you?”

  “I was fourteen, right before I hit my big growth spurt.” He cleared his throat, his face aimed at the ceiling, confirming he knew that I knew. “He’d been drinking too much and he was mad at me for eating the last lamb chop… he shoved me into the fireplace.”

  I was going to kill his dad. “Did you go to the hospital?”

  Aiden’s scoff caught me totally off guard. “No. We didn’t—he wouldn’t have let me go. That’s why it healed so badly.”

  Yeah, I slid lower into the bed, unable to look at him. Was this what he was feeling? Shame and anger?

  What were you supposed to say after something like that? Was there anything? I lay there, choking on uncertain words for what felt like forever, telling myself I had no reason to cry when he wasn’t. “Is your dad as big are you are?”

  “Not anymore.” He let out a rough sounding snicker. “No. He’s maybe a hundred and sixty pounds, five foot ten if that. At least, that’s how he was last time I saw him.”

  “Huh.”

  He shifted around on the bed for a second before abruptly saying, “I’m pretty sure he wasn’t my real dad. My mom’s a blonde, so is he. They’re both average. My grandparents were blonds. My mom used to work with this guy who was always really nice to me when I went to her job. My parents fought a lot, but I thought it was normal since my dad was always trying to fight somebody. It didn’t matter who.” The similarity to Diana’s boyfriend didn’t escape me. “My grandmother was the one who admitted to me that my mom used to cheat on my dad.”

  I wondered if they were still together or not. “That sounds like a miserable experience for both of them.”

  He nodded, his breathing slow and even as his gaze stuck itself on the television. “Yeah, but now I see that they were both so unhappy with each other that they could never be happy with me, no matter what I did, and it makes it a lot easier to go on with my life. The best thing they ever did was relinquish their rights and take me to my grandparents. I didn’t do anything to them, and I’m better off with the way things turned out than I would have been otherwise. Everything I have, I have because of my grandma and grandpa.” He turned his head and made sure to make eye contact with me. “I wasn’t about to waste my life away, upset, because I was raised by people who couldn’t commit to anything in their lives. All they did was show me the kind of person I didn’t want to be.”

  Why did it feel like he was talking about my mom?

  We both lay there for a while, neither one of us saying a word. I was thinking about my mom and all of the mistakes I’d taken upon myself in all these years. “Sometimes, I wonder why the hell I bother still trying to have a relationship with my mom. If I didn’t call her, she’d call me twice a year unless there was something she needed or wanted, or she was feeling bad about something she remembered doing—or not doing. I know it’s shitty to think that, but I do.”

  “Did you tell her we got married?”

  That had me snickering. “Remember that day we went to your lawyer’s office and you’d answered her call? She was calling because someone had told her; they recognized my name.” The next snicker that came out of me was even angrier. “When I called her back, the first thing she asked was when I was going to get her tickets to one of your games. I told her never to ask me that again and she got so defensive… I swear to God, even now, I think about how I never, ever want to be anything like her.”

  My hands had started clenching and I forced them to relax. I made myself calm down, trying to let go of that anger that seemed to pop up every so often.

  “Like I said. I don’t know your mom and I really don’t want to ever know her, but you’re doing all right, Van. Better than all right most of the time.”

  All right. Most of the time. The word choice had me smiling up at the ceiling as I calmed down even more. “Thanks, big guy.”

  “Uh-huh,” he replied before going right for it. “I’d say all the time, but I know how much money you owe in student loans.”

  I rolled onto my side to look at him. Finally. “I was wondering if you were ever going to bring that up,” I mumbled.

  The big guy rolled over to face me as well, his expression wiped clean of any residual anger at his memories. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  I sighed. “Not everyone gets a scholarship, hot shot.”

  “There’s cheaper schools you
could have gone to.”

  Ugh. “Yeah, but I didn’t want to go to any of them.” I said it and realized how stupid that sounded. “And yeah, I regret it a little now, but what can I do? It’s done. I was just stubborn and stupid. And I’d never gotten to do what I wanted to do, I guess, you know? I just wanted to get away.”

  Aiden seemed to consider that a moment before propping his head up on his fist. “Does anyone know about them?”

  “Are you kidding me? No way. If anyone asked, I told them I got a scholarship,” I finally admitted to someone. “You’re the first person I’ve ever admitted that to.”

  “You haven’t even told Zac?”

  I gave him a weird look. “No. I don’t like telling everyone that I’m an idiot.”

  “Just me?”

  I stuck my tongue out. “Shut up.”

  * * *

  It didn’t matter how old I got, the first thing that came to mind every morning on December twenty-fifth was: It’s Christmas. There hadn’t always been presents under the tree, but after I’d learned not to expect anything, it hadn’t taken away from the magic of it.

  The fact I woke up the next morning in a room that wasn’t mine, didn’t curb my excitement. The sheets were up to my neck and I was on my side. In front of me was Aiden. The only thing visible other than the top of his head were sleepy brown eyes. I gave him a little smile.

  “Merry Christmas,” I whispered, making sure my morning breath wasn’t blowing directly into his face.

  Tugging the sheet and comforter down from where he had it up to his nose, his mouth opened in a deep yawn. “Merry Christmas.”

  I was going to ask when he’d woken up, but it was obvious it hadn’t been long. He brought up a hand to scrub at his eyes before making another soundless yawn. He punched his hands up toward the headboard in a long stretch. Those miles of tan, taut skin reached up passed the headboard, his biceps elongating as his fingers stretched far, like a big, lazy cat.