by Terra Little
“I love you too.” He squeezes me and growls like a bear, right in my ear. “You feel that?” I nod. “That’s me telling you I feel the same way. Does that scare you?”
“What I feel for you scares me.”
“Flow with it,” Aaron tells me. “Flow with me, Lena. Marry me.”
I take a deep breath and fight against the tears in my throat. “That’s a big step.”
“Bigger than making a home together? Raising your daughter together?”
“She’s already half grown,” I say, and a sob escapes without my permission. I hate myself for being weak, for crying when tears are useless, and I scrub a rough hand across my face to punish myself. “I missed all the years in between. All the important stuff.”
“You have some important stuff to look forward to though. A lot of years ahead of you to make up for lost time.”
“I can’t get the time I lost back.”
“You can cherish what you do have though. Some people don’t even have that.”
I tap into his train of thought and think of Yo-Yo and then of Stella and then of Denny. Scratch my nails through the hair on his arm and shake my head. “So much for feeling bad about myself. I can’t do it with you around.”
“And I plan on being around for a long time,” he says and turns my face for a kiss. “Speaking of which, we’re about to have five bedrooms to figure out what to do with.”
“And?”
“And . . . we could put a few babies in them. Marry me, Lena.”
“Aaron, please.” I want to sound long-suffering but I don’t quite pull it off. He touches me in a deep place and I know he knows it. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say yes.”
“I need some time.”
“How much time?”
“Some,” I say and step away from him. I come back a few seconds later, facing him. I pull his face down to mine and search his eyes in the darkness. “Just some.”
“Not too long?”
“Not too long.”
We go back to bed and we make love the way we always do. Hard and fast, hot and thick, and then slow and easy. It feels like we have been doing it for years. Like we know each other inside out, like we know what every sound and every touch means, and we can make each other hurt so good that it is almost shameful. I call out to him and he chuckles. He answers my call with one of his own and whispers to me that Beige’s bedroom will have to be on the other side of the house. Otherwise we will corrupt her.
She might hear the headboard knocking and think someone or something is trying to get inside of our home, might hear the sounds we make and think we are being harmed in some way. Four walls and a closed door cannot keep our lovemaking confined. It has to be out there in the air around us, living and breathing with a life of its own. She is not ready for the power of it, and I hope she will not be for many years to come. It might scare the shit out of her if she is ever lucky enough to find it for herself. When I sit still long enough to think about it, it scares the shit out of me. I’m scared of having it and even more scared of losing it.
Fear makes me raise my head from the middle of Aaron’s chest and crawl up his body until we are face to face. “Are you sleeping?” I know good and well he is because he snores softly and breathes evenly, but I need him to wake up.
“I was,” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes. “You need something? Did you have a bad dream?”
“A little bit. Can I tell you something?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” I say and wait for him to get it.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Lena?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you’re saying what I think you’re saying, yes, you had a bad dream, or—”
“Just . . .” I press my lips to his to stop his words. He is starting to confuse me, and it is too early in the morning for confusion. I’m thinking more clearly than I have in years. Thinking that maybe he is someone that God sent for me, if there is a God and I am somewhere on His radar. Then I think, no, not maybe, definitely. He is for me and I am for him, regardless of who or what placed him in my path. Something this good cannot be bad for me, and I don’t want to miss out on any more possibilities. So I say, “Just yes, okay, baby? Yes. I can’t do this without you.”
“Yeah, you can,” Aaron says. “You can do it, Lena. But you’re not going to.” He taps his lips and puckers up, and I fall into him. I wait for him to catch me, and I sigh when he does.
I tell Beige about Nettie, tell her about the legend of the woman who loved her children so much that she died trying to save them, and she looks at me like I am losing my good sense faster than she had hoped. Like I have been stricken with a mental illness that she is not ready to deal with. A typical teenager, she wants to see pictures of the mythical woman, wants to lay hands on tangible evidence that she existed in some time and place. I shrug helplessly and tell her what I know, that Aaron told me the story and that is proof enough for me. She is still less than totally convinced.
As bedtime stories go, she is not impressed. Her head rolls to the side and she giggles at me from her side of the futon. “Nettie?” she says. “Mom, please. What kind of name is that?”
“Probably short for something,” I say and yawn. “Aquashanetta or something.”
“And she had a star on her forehead?” Skepticism owns her voice.
“No, her kids did. Like a birthmark.”
“Pfft. Whatever.” She snuggles into her pillow and sends her knee in my direction. I push it down and we wrestle over sleeping space. She thinks the same thing I think: She can’t get her own bed fast enough. Then she gives up the fight and scoots close to me, wants me to make a seat for her bottom and to drop an arm around her waist. She wants me to hold her like I did when she was small enough for me to push my nose into her hair and smell her all night long.
She isn’t small anymore, but I still push my nose into her hair and I make a seat for her. “Don’t make fun of the gris-gris,” I tell her as she falls asleep, and she wakes up long enough to crack up.
There isn’t anything close to laughter on her face when Aaron’s mother opens the door and welcomes us into her home. Beige looks like she has seen a ghost, and I do too. We both stare at the star-shaped birthmark on the woman’s forehead. It is not in the middle, but off to the side, near her hairline. It’s not quite how Aaron described it, but it is there all the same. Apparently it got relocated as the legend and the genes passed from generation to generation.
Aaron’s mother smiles and kisses me on both cheeks. She notices the direction of my gaze and sends her son an exasperated look over my head. “I see Aaron told you about Nettie,” she says in her husky, accented voice. She smells like bread baking and freshly churned butter, like she is safe and warm, and I like her immediately. She touches the spot where Nettie lives and winks at Beige.
“Is she real?” Beige wants to know.
“Got a picture I can show you right now.” She reaches for my baby’s hand and disappears with her, deeper into the house. I look at Aaron and he winks. Then I take off behind my future mother-in-law and my daughter. It’s not that I don’t believe Aaron, not that I don’t believe Nettie was real, but I have to see the picture too. Have to see if I can see myself in her eyes.
If I had known that I was going to be ambushed, I wouldn’t have gotten into my car and driven right into it. If I had known that today was going to be the day that I break down and fall apart, I wouldn’t have left the little patch of dirt that Aaron and I are making into a vegetable garden. I wouldn’t have showered away my good mood and brought not one, but two bags of peanut butter cups with me.
He is not himself today, a little voice in the back of my mind whispers to me. Watch yourself. But I don’t fully comprehend what it is that I’m supposed to be watching until I am halfway through the first bag of candy and tearing into what has to be my thirtieth peanut butter cup in as many minutes. Until he says what he says to me and I finally f
igure out that Kimmick is the bastard of all bastards and he knows it.
He wants me to think that his questions are innocent. That he only wants to gather more background information for future reference. But that is not his game at all. He pushes and provokes me, wants to break me, and he starts his attack by calling me a liar. I call him a bastard, and it doesn’t faze him in the least. He says he’s been called that and worse and lived to tell about it. He reminds me that I have called him much worse, especially back when I first started coming to see him. By now I’ve been coming to see him every week for at least six months, which means that I’m almost family, and he has cousins that he hasn’t seen as many times as he’s seen me. It’s too late to go back to the way we were.
I get that he won’t stoop to my level and let himself be distracted, and decide to humor him. “How do you figure I lied to you?”
“You told me that yours was a family made up entirely of women,” he says. “That was a lie.”
“No, it wasn’t. I told you there’s been a woman at the head of my family for as long as I can remember. That’s what I said, Kimmick. Don’t twist my words around.”
“No, Lena.” He says my name like I don’t remember what it is and he has to remind me. “You said no men. Break-ins at sperm banks and genetic mutation. Things like that, that’s what you said.”
“So what’s your point—or do you even have one?”
“My point is that you’re evasive.”
“I should spill my guts to you? Tell you everything there is to tell about me?”
“That might help,” he says and pops a peanut butter cup in his mouth. He talks around a glob of chocolate and clears his throat. “In any case, it would certainly help if you stopped picking apart the information you tell me before you tell it to me. You sift through it, decide what you want me to know, and you keep everything else to yourself.”
“That’s my prerogative, isn’t it?” I sit up, and my feet drop to the floor like lead weights. I brace my elbows on my knees and stare at him. “I don’t have to tell you anything I don’t want to tell you, Kimmick. You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.”
“That’s important to you, isn’t it? Having control over yourself and not doing things you don’t want to do?”
“I’ve done all kinds of shit I didn’t want to do to survive, so that’s not even an issue.”
“Like what? What kinds of things have you done?”
“Fight, steal, lie,” I say. “Hell, whatever the situation called for. You can’t be a parent and not do at least one thing you thought you’d never do.”
He thinks about what I have said and nods his head in agreement with a silent observation. “What about going to prison? Was that something you thought you’d never do?”
“What kind of question is that? Do you think I would’ve wasted my time earning a master’s degree and taking a good-paying job if I planned on giving it up to go and lay down for eight years?”
“Lay down?”
“Serve time.”
“Oh. No, that doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“You know it doesn’t.”
“Why did you go to prison then, Lena?”
I look at him like he is crazy. “Did I have a choice?”
“We always have choices,” he says. “They might not be the ones we want, but we have them. You shot and killed a woman. That was a choice you made.”
“And if you already know that, then why ask the question in the first place? There’s your answer: I went to prison because I shot and killed a woman. That was my choice.”
“You had other ones.”
“Not really.”
“Let’s talk about those choices, shall we?” He pretends that I haven’t spoken, that I haven’t said I had no other choices. He shows me his palm and ticks off his points on the tips of his fingers. “One, you could’ve called the police and let them handle whatever the problem was. Two, you could’ve cut yourself off from the situation and steered clear of it altogether. And three, you could’ve aimed the gun lower. Somewhere that wasn’t fatal but that would’ve gotten your point across just as well. Did you think of any of those choices?”
My feet need to be in motion, so I stand and start pacing. I cross my arms over my chest and review the choices he lays out, one by one. They all sound overly simple and generic, too pat and not the way the world really turns. But they do have their merits. “I did aim the gun lower and I did call the police.” I look over my shoulder and down at him as I pass. “On myself after it was over and done with. And steering clear of the situation wasn’t possible. I had to face it head on and deal with it. Nobody else had the guts to do it.”
“So we’re back to the fact that you planned to kill your grandmother?”
“I told you I didn’t plan on shooting her. Stop trying to make me admit to premeditation, okay? I can’t be tried twice for the same crime.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Lena. You can be tried a hundred different times for the same crime, if you insist on being the judge, jury and the defendant in your own trial.”
“What psycho nonsense are you trying to trip me up with now?”
“You don’t think about what happened?”
I scrub my hands across my face and fill my palms with my breath. “Of course I think about it.”
“You replay the sequence of events over and over in your mind every day.”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
“You see yourself raising the gun and pulling the trigger.”
“Sometimes.”
“You torture yourself by watching yourself do what you did and remembering why you did it.”
“I said I did, didn’t I? Where are you going with this?”
“I’m going back to where we started the session,” he says and shifts around in his chair. “Back to the fact that you’re evasive. I’m curious to know why, if you experience all the things we just mentioned, you never bring them up in session. You talk around the elephant in the room like it’s not even there.”
“It’s not there.”
“Another lie.”
“Fuck you, Kimmick. What do you want from me?”
“What do you want from you, Lena? You want to purge yourself of the guilt you feel?”
“I feel guilty about leaving my daughter, but that’s it. Everything else was necessary.”
“She’s what, fifteen now? Your daughter?”
“Fourteen.”
“And her name is Red?”
I crack a smile. “Beige.”
“Interesting name. Why was killing a woman necessary?”
“You’re killing me,” I say. “Jumping from subject to subject is killing me.”
“Will you answer the question?”
“Yeah. It just was.”
“And will you sit down?” He chuckles. “You’re starting to make me anxious. Like I have somewhere to go but I can’t remember where.”
I go back to the couch and fall back against the leather like I have worked a double shift and I’m exhausted. A long sigh escapes my mouth. We watch each other and say nothing. Then I say, “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to tell me about the man, Lena. I think that’s a good starting place. Once we bring him into the room, we can start doing some real work here. I want you to stop looking over and around him and start looking at him.”
“There is no man.”
“You’re a liar.”
“You’re telling me what my truth is?”
“I’m asking you to tell me the truth.”
“This is part of the truth,” I say, pushing my index finger into the cushion next to me. “This is what the truth is, Kimmick. Right now, right this very minute, you’re looking at a diabolical killer. A murderer. I’m no different from anybody else as far as that goes—except for the fact that I was stupid enough to turn myself in.”
“What was the alternative?”
“I could’ve set it up t
o look like a robbery gone bad. A suicide or something.”
“Why didn’t you?”
I shrug. “I didn’t think that far ahead. Everything was down to time and place. It had to be done in that time and in that place.”
“Your grandmother’s house had to be the place.”
“That’s where it all started, and that’s where it needed to end.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
He rubs his beard and scribbles something on a notepad. Pisses me off with his nonchalance and his absent scribbling. He doesn’t even watch himself write whatever it is he writes. He just scribbles. I sit up and lock in on his eyes.
“Listen to me. I was the one running the show. I called the shots, and if I say it had to be done, then it had to be done. That’s it, end of story.”
“You had to be in control.”
“Damn right I did. I had to do what God couldn’t seem to find the time to do. For all of the goodness and mercy people run around talking about, He couldn’t spare even a pinch of it on me. So I had to do what I had to do.”
“Because control was the one thing you’d lost.”
“I never had it.”
“Control of your mind and control of your life.” Kimmick digs around in a desk drawer for forever and a day. He shuffles stuff around and makes noise as he does it. He stops digging, has a thought, closes one drawer and then opens another one. Keeps digging. “Control of your body,” he finally says and goes still. “You never had control of that either, did you?”
For a second, I freeze. Then I make myself thaw out. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Kimmick.”
“Just what you tell me, which is nothing, really. Am I wrong?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“I think we need to talk about this.” Done bullshitting with the drawers, he swivels around in his chair and laces his fingers on the highest slope of his belly. “I think we need to talk about what really happened, Lena. I think you need to talk about it, because if you don’t, you’ll—”
“I’ll what?” I hold my breath.
