by Curtis Bunn
“I asked my pastor why this has happened to me and he said, ‘Why not you?’ And that made sense. It’s about what I do while I’m here and not question God’s work.”
“But do you really believe it’s God’s will that you, you know…”
“If I believe that He watches over my daughter and that He wakes me up each morning and that He is the Almighty, then I have to believe that this is His doing. You know what I mean? Either you’re in or you’re out. That doesn’t mean I didn’t question Him or still say ‘Why me?’ But, in the end, He is above all and I embrace seeing Him when I’m it’s my time.”
“You’re so brave. I couldn’t…”
“You’re stronger than you think. We do what we have to do. Also, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. Almost every night I cry myself to sleep. I’m scared to death when it’s quiet and I’m left with my thoughts. I’ve made peace with it…most of the time. But I have broken things and cursed and cried. Inside, I’m petrified.”
“Oh, Calvin. I’m so sorry. You seem like such a good man.”
“I appreciate that. But you should take away that you have been a good part of my life, my new life that started several weeks ago. I’m thankful for that. I have a new friend.”
Teary-eyed, she excused herself and went to the bathroom. I sat back in my chair and looked out onto Virginia Avenue. People held hands as they walked by. Some shopped. Others chatted on their cell phones. I was jealous. It seemed they did not have a care in the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
UNPLEASANT SURPRISE
Venus took the scenic route back to the hotel. She went back up Virginia Avenue, to Monroe Drive and up Tenth Street, alongside Piedmont Park. I held onto her firmly and let the breeze cover my body.
I noticed the birds flying and the clouds above. I noticed the trees swaying and kites flying and people tossing Frisbees and the dogs running free in the park. My senses were aroused. Moses would enjoy all the open space, I thought.
At the light at Peachtree Street, Venus turned to me. “You OK back there?”
“Holding onto your waist? Yeah, I’m good.”
She laughed. “OK. We’re going to go up Peachtree so you can see more sights.”
I nodded. I sensed Venus was not taking pity on me, but that she was a kind woman who liked me and wanted me to see her city. And the ride back was fun. The traffic reminded me of D.C., but the people seemed less stressed and more carefree. The city was full of energy. I loved it.
“I could live here,” I said when we got back to the hotel. We both noticed the irony in that statement.
“Venus, that was a good time. Really appreciate everything.”
“You’re welcome. Let me know how the treatments go. If you’re up to it, let’s meet for lunch or dinner.”
“No doubt. That sounds great.”
We hugged and she kissed me on my face. “I’m praying for you.”
“Thank you, Venus.”
I watched her mount her Harley and ride away before I opened the door to see Moses. He was bouncy and happy, tail wagging. I didn’t even close the door. I grabbed his leash and took him out.
I noticed that I was getting more fatigued quicker than before, so our walk only lasted a few minutes. Once he was done, I headed back to the room.
“Moses, man, I’m tired. All I did was sit up close and hold onto a beautiful woman, but I’m drained,” I said. “I guess you know what’s going on with me, huh?”
That dog made a sound I hadn’t heard before, as if he were sounding out sadness. “It’s OK, man. It’s OK,” I said as I picked him up and played with him on my lap. “I’m going out kicking and screaming with you by my side. OK?”
Moses wagged his tail and I, again, was convinced he understood something. “Let’s relax before we go to the airport,” I said. I thought: Maybe this fucking cancer has spread to my brain. Why do I continually talk to a dog? And ask him questions?
The nap came and went so fast and I awoke feeling sluggish. I was ready for Dr. Ali’s treatment. I didn’t help myself by eating pancakes, but they looked too good and I didn’t want to pass them up while I still had my taste buds.
Her pre-session e-mail indicated I should not eat after four in the afternoon and that I should have plenty of alkalized water, essaic tea and seasilver, a nutritional supplement. Together, along with the coffee enemas, I would be giving my body the best chance to stay healthy the longest. And if I was not too far gone, it would eliminate or cut back big time on the pain and give me energy.
I knew all this would be a temporary fix. The cancer had spread and was not going to stop. There would be a time when I would become emaciated and fade away looking much older than I was.
That was the talk I had to have with Maya. I wanted to warn her, prepare her, so that she would not be overwhelmed with what she saw. I was not sure how to have that conversation; wasn’t sure how I would survive that conversation because I knew what my daughter’s reaction would be, which would cause me to react in kind. Tears.
When it was time to head to the airport, I rubbed on Moses and carried him to the car. For some reason, I babied the puppy, which was a first. But I felt so connected to this little dog. I believed he would drive me home if he thought I needed him to. He’d figure it out.
I wondered if I would have cared for him had my situation not been the same. I wondered a lot about a lot of things because, in a lot of ways, I felt like a different person, someone I always wanted to be but didn’t have the courage or the push to become.
I liked this me better than the pre-cancer me. I was bolder and more connected to the world and the people around me. I cared about more than just my family and my friends. That was the abject lesson in all this: Embrace life.
Before leaving for Atlanta, I told my friends just that, even the ones who did not know I was dying. Even Maya’s mother, Skylar, who I had no interest in seeing or talking to ever again. She likely felt guilty for all the drama she took me through and called to say she was sorry for my diagnosis. My first instinct was to tell her, I wish you were the one dying, but I held back and told her: “Appreciate that. Just take from me that you have one life to live and you should live it to the max. I know you disregard anything that comes from me, but I had to say that.”
Skylar did unforgivable things to me, things that still make me angry, eighteen years later, which was the last time I actually laid eyes on her. I avoided her at Maya’s high-school and college graduations for fear my rage would make me go off. I literally was in the same space with her but would not look at her. I knew it was hard for Maya, but I had no other emotion around her mother than rage.
I later learned to deal with it; Maya resembled her so much. But if there was such a thing as disliking someone to the brink of hate, that’s how I felt about Skylar.
But she was a far cry from where my mind was as Moses and I pulled up at the airport. I was about to see my daughter, my soul, my lifeblood. I missed her the few days I was away. We had a daddy-daughter love affair that held both of us together.
It was amazing how something so wonderful could come from a relationship so toxic. My baby was pure and sweet and genuine—all the opposite traits of her mother.
I called her to let her know we had arrived at the airport. She was at baggage claim, retrieving her suitcase. “I’m at door N-three,” she said. I was parked right there, ironically enough.
After a few moments, Maya emerged from the sliding doors, smiling a smile so wide that my world lit up.
We embraced long and tight, and Moses looked from the backseat window as I held back tears. I loved her beyond description, and all I had been through since leaving D.C.—helping save the bus driver, finding Moses, making love to Kathy, protecting the woman who was being abused, meeting Venus, helping the homeless man, riding the motorcycle—rushed to my heart. I had those experiences and moved on, but some were bigger than others and truly emotional.
But I composed myself. May
a looked at me with those eyes I loved. The look was strange, though. She said, “Now, Daddy…”
My attention was averted. I saw an image over her left shoulder and glanced up. What I saw made me wish I were dreaming. The reality was a horror show. It was Syklar, Maya’s mother.
I pulled away from my daughter. “What?”
“Daddy, I need you to be calm. Daddy…”
I didn’t answer. I just stared at this demon walking toward me.
“What the hell is she doing here, Maya?”
“Calvin,” Skylar interjected, “I’m here to help. I—”
“Help? Help what? Kill me? Maya? What’s going on?”
“Daddy, calm down. Mom wanted to help, to be here for you.”
“Baby, I love you, but this should never have happened. I have done my best to shield you from all the drama your mother took me through. The last thing I need, especially now, is to see her. Period.”
“Calvin, that was a long time ago,” Skylar said. “It does no good to hold on to so much anger.”
“I’m not holding onto anything—it’s embedded in me.”
“Daddy, please.”
“Please what?”
“Please give her a chance.”
“She had plenty of chances, and all she did was wreck my life, almost ruin my career and land me in jail.”
“What?” Maya said.
“I’m telling you, I have tried to not expose her because she’s your mother. But you’re old enough to hear the truth. And I guess that’s what she wants because there’s no way she could have thought I was going to continue to protect her.”
“Cal—,” Skylar said.
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped.
“OK, Calvin, please. Can we just get in the car and talk about this in private?”
“I don’t want you in my car, even if it is a rental.”
“Daddy, please.”
I was disappointed in Maya, but she never knew the level of my animus toward her mother. I hated when parents would meet with me and bad-mouth the husband or the father of their children—right there in front of the kid. That was misguided and selfish. Misguided because it served no good purpose to belittle the child’s parent. He was still her father. And selfish because it always seemed to me a way of the mother (or father, if that was the case) boosting herself by stepping on the man she laid up with to have this child.
But all gloves were off. Maya’s innocence and my love for her allowed me to open the door for my daughter, place her bag in the trunk and get into the car. I left Skylar’s bag on the curb and didn’t consider opening the door for her.
She struggled getting her bag in the trunk and then got in the backseat with Moses. I liked that because she hated and was afraid of dogs. “What’s this? Can we do something about this…this dog?”
I immediately thought about Richard Pryor in his 1975 album, Is It Something I Said?, when he told the story of Mudbone entering the home of Miss Rudolph, the local witch. Mudbone asked Ms. Rudolph if she could do something about the three-legged money she had in the house. She said, “I don’t have to do shit about the monkey. The monkey lives here, nigga, you’re visiting.”
“This is Moses’ car as much as it is mine, nigga. You’re just visiting,” I said. “Deal with it.”
“Daddy!” Maya said, mortified.
“The gloves are off. If she’s going to be here, she’s going to hear exactly what I feel. Sorry you will have to hear it. But I don’t have time to be nice to people I can’t stand.”
“Oh, my God. Maybe this was a bad idea,” Maya said.
“You think?” I fired back.
“No, it’s going to be fine,” Skylar said. “Just tell the dog to stop staring at me.”
“Stop staring at her, Moses,” I said. “You might turn into stone.”
“Oh, boy. Is this how it’s going to be?” Maya said.
“Bet on it,” I answered.
“Well, can we go somewhere and talk?” Skylar asked.
“Don’t talk to me.”
“Baby, please ask your father if we can go somewhere and talk.”
“Daddy…”
“Talk about what? I don’t understand this at all.”
Maya said, “I found a restaurant in Midtown we should go to and talk. It’s called Negril Village. On North Avenue. You know where that is?”
“I don’t and I definitely don’t have an appetite.”
“We can just sit outside and talk then. Please, Daddy. Can you do this for me?”
“Why am I doing favors for you? You came here to be with me.”
“Daddy, we really need to talk as a family.”
“Family? I guess she gave you some spiked Kool-Aid and you drank it.”
“It was my idea, Daddy.”
“Well, now I’m really messed up. You know what’s happening tomorrow? You think I need her around?”
“We need each other, Daddy. I know there has been tension—more tension than I ever guessed—but you all came together to create me. That’s enough reason for us to be unified, especially now.”
My daughter was too rational for my anger. I didn’t say a thing.
We went to Negril Village, the cool Caribbean restaurant with a great reputation. We got a table outside, and it pained me to sit across from Skylar.
They ordered and I had water. “So, what’s there to talk about?”
“Well, Daddy, I have been doing a lot of reading and one of the things I read was that it is important, with what you’re going through, to be at peace with the people close to you.”
“She’s not close to me.”
“You’re my parents and you should be close. That’s the point.”
“Actually, what’s the point? In three months, six months, I will be gone. What good would being close to her—which wasn’t going to happen—have on my situation? All it’s going to do is make her feel better about herself. Plus, I don’t have that many acceptances of apologies to give.”
“Ain’t nobody come here to apologize,” Skylar said.
“Then you should definitely go home.”
“OK, Calvin, I’m really sorry—for everything. I mean it. But you’ve heard that before. You just have chosen to be stubborn.”
“Don’t come down here, where you are not welcomed, and call me names. Sometimes being stubborn is the best way to deal with ignorance.”
“Again, I want to apologize.”
“For what, Skylar? For what?”
“For everything.”
“What’s that mean, exactly?”
“You know what it means, Calvin.”
“Yeah, but does Maya know? I guess it’s time for her to know ‘We just outgrew each other’ was a lie.”
“Daddy, do we have to do this?”
“I’m not a mean person—you know that, Maya. But I can’t let her gallivant down here like she’s saving the day, knowing her history.”
“So what do you hope to accomplish, Calvin?”
“I’d rather be hanging with my dog and Maya. But since you decided you would come here, I have to deal with you being here.”
“OK, go ahead. I can take it. Maya knows my heart.”
“If you had one, that would make sense.”
“Dad…”
“Maya, let’s go back in time so I can tell you why I’m this close to hating her. I’ll start when you were first born. I had already proposed to your mother. We were discussing wedding plans and living arrangements, everything. Then one day, I check my e-mail and there’s a message from Delta Airlines asking about my experience on a trip to Chicago. She had used my credit card to buy a plane ticket, which I didn’t mind. But she said she was flying to New York.
“So I asked her about the plane ticket. She insisted she went to New York. When I asked her to produce the boarding pass, she couldn’t. We had had issues about her communicating with her old boyfriend in Chicago. So here she was engaged to me visiting another man.”
; “Mom…”
“Baby, I was young and uncertain of myself and about getting married.” It was the same B.S. she said to me way back then. “It looked worse than it was. I wasn’t going to see him. I was going to hang out with my close friend and her sister. I know what it looked like, but I didn’t even see him that weekend.”
“Yeah, right. You might as well had because in my mind, you did,” I said. “And why wouldn’t you just say that you were visiting girlfriends?”
“Because you wouldn’t have believed me.”
“You’re right about.”
But I wasn’t done. “There were other guys calling. There was her stealing money from my account. From my wallet.”
“It was a rough time for me, Maya. Your father was already teaching and doing great and I was trying to find my way. It would have been easy to just ask for the money, but I was embarrassed.”
“My mother used to say, ‘If you lie, you’ll cheat. And if you cheat, you’ll steal.’ And you proved her right.”
Skylar looked embarrassed. “I never wanted this to come out. But you show up here like it’s no big deal, knowing how I have felt about it all these years. But that’s not the worst part.”
“What? There’s more?” Maya asked. “I don’t know if I want to hear any more. Mom, I’m so surprised.”
“Let’s see if you’re surprised by this: Your mother had me arrested.”
Maya turned to Skylar, who lowered her head.
“After all that, I tried to forgive her and move on. It made me angry a lot of times, but I tried to forgive and hang in there because of you. I wanted us to be a family. I believed in that and that once we were together, she’d feel what I was feeling.
“But Valentine’s Day came and I had planned us a nice dinner. Guess who was missing in action. She was nowhere to be found. Wouldn’t answer her phone. So, I finally catch up with her and she’s arrogant about it all. I say, ‘Fine, give me my ring back. I’m done with you.’
“She starts talking about how she’s going to keep it and I don’t deserve it. She knew I was going to ask for it back because she had taken it off and hidden it. So I went out to find it. Once I threw a dresser drawer on the floor, she called the police. I kept searching. She finally got it but still wouldn’t give it to me. So I took it from her, prying her fingers apart until I got it.
