“This is a nice piece of property. What are you going to do with it?” he asks.
“I haven’t quite decided yet,” Max replies.
“I know exactly what to do with it,” I butt in. “We’re going to turn it into a safe house for battered women,” I say matter of factly.
“We’re turning it into a safe house for battered women,” Max repeats to the man. “It’s going to be called, Chloe’s House.”
A smile forms on my lips. Yes, that is exactly what this will be. What once was a house of abomination, will be a house of refuge for women who believe they have no other options but to take what their so called husband or boyfriend have to dish out to them. And if any of those women need prenatal care, I can help them with that too. Women should always have a choice. I don’t want any woman to think they don’t because they have nowhere else to go.
Dumpsters are being brought in and the house will be hauled away, evil brick by brick. With each piece that is thrown in a land fill, I visualize a tiny piece of my soul put back together like a puzzle. The basement will be filled in with cement, never to be seen again. A new house will be built, suitable to house several women at a time. What was once a house of repulsion will be a house of hope to many. The place where the house used to sit, I’ll plant a garden and in that garden things will grow, and it will be a reminder that we can move on and that it is possible to flourish and live a happy life, even after tragedy and unimaginable heart-break.
The final layer chipped away.
Max
I had hoped that bringing Chloe back to the site wouldn’t throw her into another tail spin. I knew her reaction would be traumatic, but I also knew how freeing and liberating it would be to see it come down right before her eyes. I don’t think she ever thought about that house, but I didn’t want it to be an unanswered question some time down the road for her.
My woman sits on my hog, in her sexy as hell purple getup, looking as fine as can be, and I snap a picture. Looking at the screen, it instantly becomes my favorite picture of her. The peaceful look and the love in her eyes shine so fucking bright. I wrap my woman’s arms around my chest and we ride back to my office. Savvy is up, but she’s not talking to anyone about what happened. Not even to Chloe.
All we know is she hasn’t been able to work since the bar burned down. She’s been living in a run-down house with Reno while getting the shit beat out of her on a regular basis. I can’t believe I never saw the signs before. I take full responsibility for what happened to her. I should have seen it.
Chloe’s been gently trying to get her to open up for over an hour now. I’ve been out in the hallway listening if she can get some answers.
“I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t go back to Reno’s house. I know Max said he’s not coming back, but it’s not my house. What am I going to do?” she cries to Chloe.
I can’t believe I’m about to do this, sometimes women are a pain in the ass. I walk in the room and my blood boils at the sight of her black eye. “You can stay here in the office until you find a place of your own. My receptionist just quit, I’m hiring,” I say and walk back out of the room. I head towards my office, but I’m stopped by a gentle hand on the center of my back.
“Thank you,” Chloe says. I turn around and look into the eyes of the woman that I’d do absolutely anything for. Even hire a woman that annoys the piss out of me. But, no man, under any circumstance, will ever raise a hand to Savvy again.
I nod my head at Chloe and walk into my office and close the door. I open the safe and stare at the two files that I haven’t touched in over fifteen years. The tab on one of the files simply reads ‘Dead Beat’. The name Jimmy Jones would never be worth the paper it was printed on, so therefore didn’t deserve it. There’s another file right under his that just has my birth certificate in it. It has the name of the woman who gave birth to me filled in the spot that says mother, but that’s all I’ve ever know of her. A name. I’ve never seen a photo of her, and being only two days old when she left, I don’t remember the sound of her voice either. Did she talk to me and coo in my ear like all the mothers do at Chloe’s work? Did she cradle me and hug me to her chest right after I was born? I was always told she was a strung out loser, and that she probably died in a gutter with a needle sticking out of her arm. The pictures my dad portrayed of her were evil and hateful. But then again those words are the exact definition of my dad.
Where are these feelings coming from? I always swore I didn’t care where either of them ended up. I always thought the gutter was too good a place for parents who treated their kids the way they treated me. I wasn’t good enough for my mom to stick around. Why my dad stuck around, I may never know. All I know is that I was his personal slave.
Sharla Jones is a name I try to forget. But just like for Chloe and that house, the unknown haunts me. I guess for me, I don’t really care where good old Jimmy ended up. I knew him for too many years as it was. Leaving him was my choice. Not knowing why my mother left me is something that’s bugged me my whole life.
I take out the file with my birth certificate in it and close the safe. Jimmy Jones doesn’t deserve another second of my life.
I take a seat at my desk and the file burns holes in my heart. A soft knock at the door breaks my stare. Chloe walks in and instantly the heavy room lightens. She enters like a ray of sunlight in a cracked window. With every step she brightens my world.
She sits in the chair in front of my desk and glances at the file in my hand. “Savvy’s sleeping, so I thought I’d come in here and see what you were up to. Is that a case you’re working on right now?” she asks.
“This? No,” I answer and bury it under the mounding piles of paperwork to my left. She eyes the folder with suspicion, but chooses not to pursue the issue. She gets up from her chair and walks around my desk. Her knees straddle my thighs and she rests her ass on the edge of the desk in front of me. She leans in, places her hands on my face, and nuzzles the side of my head. She whispers in my ear, “I know you better than that. The way you were staring at that file when I walked in here, I know it’s important to you. What is it?” The smell of her hair and the closeness of her lips leave me speechless.
She leans back and pulls the file from the pile. I don’t stop her. She opens it and examines the one piece of paper inside. She closes the folder, lifts her ass off the desk and presses her body to mine. The chair leans back and her eyes lock an inch from mine. She nuzzles her cheek to mine.
“Who is it you’re looking for? Jimmy or Sharla?” she whispers in my ear. She’s not playing fair. I can only think with my dick and not my brain right now with her body pressed to mine.
“Sharla,” I whisper.
She backs away slightly to look in my eyes and says, “I can give it to a friend in records at the hospital and have them look into it if you want me to.”
“I’m a licensed private investigator, I can do more than a clerk in a records room at a hospital,” I remind her.
“Oh, yeah, right.”
She sits her ass down in my lap and places her hand on my heart. “You have such a soft heart. If you want to find out what happened to Sharla, then I think you should. I’ll be here every step of the way, if you want me to.”
It didn’t escape me that she didn’t refer to Sharla as my mother. A mother raises her child, not abandons them when they’re a newborn helpless baby.
“Alright, I will.” I grab her by the waist, pick her up and place her ass fully on the desk. I turn to my computer and enter in the social security number that has been burned in my brain since the day I found my birth certificate. It’s magic what nine little numbers can tell you. Sharla Jones lives in a quiet modest suburb not far from the house I grew up in. She’s not dead. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that asshole Jimmy lied to me.
I scribble the address on a scrap piece of paper and shove it in my pocket. “Not yet, soon. Give me a little time to process some of this,” I say, looking i
nto Chloe’s loving eyes.
She smiles and nods her head. She gets a goofy grin on her face and bites her bottom lip.
“What?” I ask.
“Your middle name is, Aloysius,” she says in a fit of giggles.
First, I admire the unrestrained happiness that she exudes. Second, I stand up and tickle her relentlessly until she has tears running down her cheeks. She lays back on the desk begging for me to stop. Lying on top of her I take her giggling lips in a kiss that stops them dead in their tracks. She grabs and pulls at my shirt until she has it almost all the way off. I stand and pull it off over my head. I unbutton and unzip her pants and pull them clean off inside out and throw them toward the door. She sits up and undoes my pants. I pull them down low on my thighs. Bending over, I frame her face with my forearms and kiss her while holding the side of her head. With one hand, I take myself in my hands and run my dick up and down her slick entrance.
“I need you now, Max,” she begs. Her hands are wild on my back grabbing and pulling me closer. Files and papers scatter all around the desk onto the floor. I enter her slowly and take my time with this goddess on my desk. I’ll never work at this desk the same ever again.
“Harder,” she begs.
I take both of her hands and raise them above her head as I take her harder. She sighs as I feel her on the edge.
“Max,” she breathes, as she comes undone. I bury my nose in her hair and whisper her name as I follow right along with her.
I pull up my jeans and walk to the other side of the room to retrieve her pants. Standing back in front of her behind my desk, I hold them hostage. She grabs for them as I hold them just out of reach. She gets a twinkle in her eyes and grabs me by my front pockets. Gently pressing her lips to mine, she intoxicates me. A knock at the door startles us both. She grabs her pants out of my hands and falls to the floor, and then ducks under my desk just as the door opens.
“Oh, sorry, I thought Chloe would be in here with you. Have you seen her?” Savvy asks. Meanwhile Chloe is struggling to get her pants on in the small space under my desk. Chloe crawls out from under my desk on all fours, which reminds me, that position will definitely be used tonight. She pokes her head around the corner of the desk and waves at Savvy.
“Oh,” Savvy says. “Ooohh,” she repeats, getting just why Chloe is on the floor under my desk. “Sorry, you two kids have at it. I’ll just be back in my room. Come find me later.”
“Max and I are…done,” she says looking at me with flushed cheeks. She walks to the door and wraps Savvy around the shoulders and leads her back to her room.
“Savvy, your first job assignment is to refile all of these papers on the floor,” I tell her with a grin.
Closing the door, I reach in my pocket and take out the little piece of paper that could change the rest of my life. Do I just walk up to the door and knock, and then say, hi, I’m the son you abandoned and left with a piece of shit abusive alcoholic for a dad to raise me. Or, do I knock on the door and say, hi mom, it’s me your son. Why haven’t you looked for me all these years? Or, do I not even bother at all. Maybe she’s not even worth my time. But, what if she is? How can you live with such an unknown hanging over your head for the rest of your life? Chloe’s busy with Savvy, so I decide to go for a ride, to clear my head.
My bike leads me on its own to the address in my pocket. I haven’t been back in this neighborhood in ages. It still looks the same, just different faces with different cars parked in the driveways. I park across the street and see a woman wearing a straw hat on her knees, elbow deep in her flower beds. She doesn’t look like the type of person who would abandon her child. But then again, what exactly does that type look like?
She stands with a terracotta pot in her hand, and sees me sitting on my bike across the street. She cocks her head to the side but stands frozen. She can’t see what I look like decked out in black leathers and a full face blacked out helmet.
Just like my bike had a mind of its own, so do my hands. I remove the helmet and place it on the handle bars. I run my fingers through my hair and I instantly see the resemblance, and know right away that this woman is my mother. I swing my right leg over the side of my bike and just stand there. Just as I see the resemblance, so does she. The pot in her hand falls to the ground and shatters into pieces. Tears fill her eyes as my body takes the steps I never intended to take toward her.
I’m only setting myself up for disappointment. If she wanted to find me, she had decades to do so. She never did. She doesn’t want me in her life. I don’t understand this sudden need to know answers that were better off locked away in a safe.
Standing in front of her, she raises her hand to my cheek and runs it down my rough stubble. The soft touch of her hand on my cheek is something, until this very moment, I never knew I craved. Her touch is soft and loving. I can see decades of a life hard lived written in her eyes, just as I’m sure she can see it in mine. I lean into her hand and close my eyes.
“Maxwell, is it really you? It just can’t be. It…it just can’t,” she cries shaking her head back and forth. I just don’t understand. How can I not be me? I want to scream at her at the top of my lungs, ‘How could you leave me, with him?’ Yet, I want so desperately for her to wrap her arms around me and make it all better. There’s such a strong divide between wanting to hate and needing to be loved.
I’ve not been called Maxwell since roll call in grade school. My brain is screaming at me to run and never come back, but the soft hearted woman standing in front of me could never do what I was told all my life. I didn’t notice until just now, but the right side of her face has at some point in her life, been severely burned. I look at her wrist and arm and see similar healed burns. She removes her hand from my face and tugs her long sleeved shirt down in an attempt to cover the burns on her wrist and hand.
“You died. He told me you died. You were dead. I saw the death certificate. He showed me the death certificate while I was in the hospital. I tried to protect you, I did… but…but I failed. Oh my God in heaven, he told me you died,” she cries. I’m more confused than ever. I was told she was dead.
She takes my hand, and like a little schoolboy, she leads me to the front steps and tells me a story I never imagined possible. The anger I have in my chest toward Jimmy multiplies tenfold, if that’s even possible. To go so far as to fake a death certificate is incomprehensible. The only truth to his story was the number, two. But I wasn’t two days old, I was two months old. And her story wasn’t at all as he made me believe.
There had been a fire in the house where we lived. It was only one block from the house that I grew up in with Jimmy. Jimmy came into her life and had swept her off her feet. Things between my mother and Jimmy were picture perfect. By the slight sparkle in her eye, I believe her. They were married six months later.
When she got pregnant though something changed and he started drinking. He also started to become abusive. The first time he hit her he apologized and genuinely swore he’d never do it again. He made her believe that he couldn’t live without her and that he loved her. But the next time he got drunk and hit her, he only had empty apologies and excuses. She felt she had nowhere to go and talked herself into believing that it really wasn’t that bad. He once loved her; maybe she just needed to give him some time to accept the pregnancy. She thought for sure things would change once I was born, but they only got worse. Some nights he wouldn’t even come home and others she wished that he hadn’t. She used to pray for a sign or a miracle to make her life better. Silently she prayed something would happen to Jimmy, and one night he’d just never come home for good, freeing her from his abusive dominance. She got the answer to her prayer, but it wasn’t at all the answer she wanted.
One night Jimmy had fallen asleep drunk in his recliner with a lit cigarette. My mother had been asleep with me in her bed, she was so afraid of Jimmy and what he was capable of that she never let me sleep alone in my crib. She’d put a chair under the door knob to lock us in the r
oom. She’d have hell to pay if she got caught but the punishment was worth the peaceful sleep. When she woke up the house was already engulfed in flames. My mother screamed for Jimmy but he never came. She cradled me in her body in the center of the bed to protect me from the flames. When the fire department finally came and rescued us, my mother had been severely burned. She had been burned over sixty-five percent of her body. She was unconscious when they found her charred body, but tucked underneath her, protected from the flames, was me.
Jimmy did come to see her in the hospital, once. He said that she was a terrible mother and that I had died in the fire. He threw a bogus death certificate in her face and said he never wanted to see her again. He said he could never love someone as hideous looking and irresponsible as her. It took her years and countless surgeries to recover physically, but she would never recover emotionally. She’s lived her entire life thinking she was a terrible mother. She could never remarry and never had any more children. She didn’t think it was fair to the child she so painfully lost.
“The fire explains why I’ve never seen a picture of you,” I whisper. Without saying a word, she reaches behind her neck and removes the locket she’s wearing, then clasps it closed. She places it in my hand, and then closes my fingers around it. Opening my hand, I look at it as if it holds every unanswered question I’ve ever had. I couldn’t move a muscle if my life depended on it. She picks up the gold heart shaped locket, opens it, and then sets it back in my hand. I look at the locket, and inside there are two small photos. One is of a newborn baby. The other is a young picture of my mother holding a baby with a huge proud smile on her face. The baby’s fingers are wrapped around her index finger. The smile on her face says that this baby was loved and wanted. The baby in the photos is me. I was loved. I was wanted, and I was lied to my entire life.
I feel so robbed. I feel deprived of a lifetime of love. I never experienced a mother’s love the first time I had a skinned knee. Or the praise that very first time I rode a bike without training wheels. Or, the first day of kindergarten, or the loving words the first time a girl broke my heart. No. Instead I was told to suck it up, and be a man when I skinned my knee. I never had a bike to even learn how to ride without training wheels. I was dropped off by my drunken dad with a kick in the rear on the first day of kindergarten. And that girl that broke my heart, she never existed either. I never opened myself up to a relationship.
A Fighting Chance Page 13
