by Leanne Davis
I’m not sure why, but he just stands there and I realize he came here tonight for me. Not for him. He saw me. He saw me when no one else did and knew he finally could help me, so he did. Like Ireena would have.
Is he strictly here because he thinks Ireena would have wanted that? To take care of me?
If the answer is yes and that’s his motivation, does it even matter?
But then, no. That’s not fully true. Last night he completely needed me.
I finally suck in my gasping sobs. I don’t talk yet, but take several deep breaths. The repetition of in and out with long inhales and exhales allow me to regain control of my body and tears and words. My throat is raw and irritated and it hurts as I finally mutter while still whispering, “You… came here… for me.”
He leans back far enough to smile down at me. I blink in surprise. It’s such a casual, easy, almost smirking smile. Like he’d give to Devon or Ireena when he used to kid around with us and before it all went so wrong. Kidding around now? Of all times? After my intense crying jag? “Yeah. I know you have no one. I know it was all Ireena. She’d kick my ass if she thought I wasn’t taking care of you.”
“I don’t need you to take care of me.” I almost push him off me. But his arms tighten around my back, and I’m essentially body-hugging him.
“You do. I do. I call it more like us taking care of each other,” he says, all seriousness back in his tone. He shuts his eyes. I’m staring at his face, and much closer than I’ve ever been before. I can see his pores, and the way his nose flares and scrunches when he shuts his eyes, and how nicely his bow-shaped lips stretch to a grimace. “I sat in the apartment for an hour and fought the urge to set it on fire. It’s so quiet. Stupid quiet. Evil quiet. So… yeah, we need each other.”
I’ll accept that, the needing each other. I might need Ireena, but no one else. Never. I’m not weak or welcoming or needy with anyone else.
He doesn’t let go of me. So I don’t let go of him. I let my head fall on his chest and we stand there. Quietly there. Hugging. Time keeps getting lost for both of us. Finally, his shoulders wilt under my arms. “Can I stay then?”
“Dayshia’s already in bed. Of course.”
He nods and we finally let each other go. His expression clouds and I keep mine neutral until I understand his hesitation. It’s hard to see. Ireena’s dead. We’re here. And now we hug? And he and his daughter intend to sleep at my house?
But without a word, I pass around him and he follows. We don’t have to speak. I don’t turn on the light. He stands on the same side of my bed he slept on last night… crap. Until two this afternoon. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. I sit on my side. He slips his dressy black shoes off and sits too. We don’t look at each other, but fall back. We don’t do anything. We’re just there. It’s better. Better than a few hours ago. Better than being alone on the floor and hurting with zero relief and thoughts of pain.
“Do you have that smelly stuff?”
“Lavender? The diffuser?”
“Yeah.”
Chuckling, after the entire day of horror, is a welcome relief. Sliding out of bed to start the lavender aromatherapy for the big, tough dockworker, I am amused for the few minutes it takes me to set up. I flop back down, this time without the odd feeling that it’s wrong. Maybe it’s… weird. Crawling in bed with Damion, my best friend’s husband, when she was still alive would have been flat out wrong and unheard of, not to mention a huge problem. It’s hard to reconsider now that she’s dead.
No, I’m not trying to have sex with him. I’m just trying to survive. I think he finds the same comfort in me. Yet we haven’t discussed why he’s here. Or why I allow him to stay. Why he walked into my bedroom as if it were totally normal and usual for us. When God, no. Never was this the norm. Perhaps we should try to define this. Explain it. But putting the question out there, giving it validation with sounds and words makes more of it then it truly is. Saying something about it almost taints it. Right now? Being together feels like the only thing that isn’t ominous or ready to suck me under until I can’t breathe.
My life has been flipped liked a car, lying on top of itself, crushing the metal that’s supposed to hold the frame up… With no framework for my life or emotions, I think that’s how Damion feels too.
When I settle back, he’s on his side and says, “How did she tell you about me? Did she mention me before Club X or just after that?” Club X is where they met. They were alone for the first time and that night led to the sex that ripped him and Devon apart after conceiving Dayshia.
I stare up at the ceiling. I am unwilling to fully turn and engage him. It would create this perfect, tiny pocket around us that would be intimate, dark, and reserved for only us. I don’t want that. I just want to get through the night. “Before Club X, she mentioned you but only in passing…” I try to describe the elaborate and complicated feelings Ireena had for Devon, which she later turned toward Damion.
“She never met black men like you two before. So middle class in your values and lifestyle. So damn nice. You have to understand, where we came from, that wasn’t our experience. Home nearly found me joining a gang, and when we went off to private school, we were the only black students. We came to Portland and there was Devon. She met him first. She went after him or I would have. We just didn’t know any guys like you. Then she met you… after already going with Devon. I don’t think it occurred to her that you would be different. I know it sounds crazy but…”
On I go with all the facts he already knows. He just wants to hear them again. He wants to steep in the knowledge he won her love. He longs to sense Ireena’s presence still. I talk for an hour before his eyes finally grow heavy and he nods off. Only then, do I surrender to the exhaustion that I feel down to my pores.
Damion’s presence is the only reason I manage to get through that horrible night.
Chapter 3
DAMION
I tried. I tried so hard to resist the sharp, overwhelming urge to return to Kaeja’s house. And sleep in her bed. I wake up to light filling her airy bedroom. She’s asleep next to me. I glance over and it seems odd, weird and even startling to be next to her. She’s lying on her side, with her head turned into the pillow so her eyebrow, half of one closed eye, her cheek, and half of her mouth are visible to my scrutiny.
Normally, she wears her hair loose and free. She occasionally twists a scarf around it or pulls it back into a tight bun. Right now, she has streaks of platinum highlighting it. She’s earthy beautiful where Ireena had more of an ethereal, classic beauty. Ireena was like a fairy with small, delicate features that matched her tininess. Kaeja is bold and sharp-featured with angled cheekbones and a wide, flat mouth. Ireena wasn’t much of a smiler. She didn’t show much feeling in her expressions. Kaeja was reserved most of the time, but around Ireena, and me later on, as she got more comfortable with me, she let loose with deep belly laughs and flashed irresistible grins to match. Her eyes would sparkle and tease. Her animation made her startling in her attractiveness and impossible to turn away from.
I noticed Kaeja when Devon was dating Ireena. We talked and flirted and liked each other. A harmless banter back and forth. It never stopped, to be honest, even after Ireena and I moved into our relationship. I don’t really know why I never asked Kaeja out. She was on my horizon, and in my field of view. But I never intended for my life to spin out of control. I had a wife and a child on the way right after losing my brother; and all of it happened in the few weeks after I met Ireena for drinks.
Lying here now, I can’t fathom why I am beside Kaeja. Or how I even got here. My wife died. Yesterday replays through my head like a Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow. Disjointed images. No logical context for any of it. Devon is near me. Clinging to Claudia. What was that for? Claudia went full team Devon after what I did. It surprised me to witness all the fervor she displayed when she sided with him. I thought we were pretty damn good friends and all that. But I couldn’t get mad or judge her
decision when everything I did was wrong. Even using her to get to Devon and asking her to persuade him to start seeing me again. That was before Ireena died. Claudia finally yelled at me to quit using her as a vehicle and she was right. She’d been totally there for Devon… and as a byproduct, for me.
Fuck. I flip over on my side. Away from Kaeja. I’m feeling weird. I’m also feeling pretty damn comfortable. How could I be so damn bold as to show up here? Walk into her bedroom and get into her bed as if we were some old, comfortable couple? No. Not even.
But when I left that damn memorial service, and suffered through the reception part with just my close family, I couldn’t wait to escape from everyone and go home. Back to quiet. And torture. I tried to concentrate on my beautiful daughter, who remains so clueless our lives have been blown apart and morphed beyond recognition. It makes my heart rip with a thousand small tears to picture all Dayshia lost and yet, she doesn’t even know it. I try to imagine the million or more ways that any girl would need advice from her mother. The big ones, sure, how to wear their hair, how to cultivate their first friends or avoid fights of peer pressure… What do I know of girl cliques and their known but unwritten rules? What do I know about first periods and boys and later on, sex? But those things can wait… The smiles and love and singing when putting her to bed and giving her lunch and driving her to school and all the damn things that bond a child to a parent are keeping me alive now. So much was snuffed out with Ireena’s death. We lost her. The person and all the scenes and memories that should have been ours to make.
My daughter is already unlike others who have two loving parents. Fuck. Like her conception wasn’t a big enough stain on her. I hoped it wouldn’t follow her, but there are still plenty of people who know the story in this area, and it’s a small town full of gossip. I have no doubt the circumstances around her conception will eventually emerge someday. Her mother and I cheated on her uncle and we accidentally conceived her. Now add to that: and her mother is dead so I’m all she has. I’m all that stands between Dayshia and the judgmental public. I’m her last resort? I know I’m not. Being in the dark inside our apartment last night nearly suffocated me. I simply lifted Dayshia up out of her crib and tucked her sleeping body into her car seat before automatically seeking the one person who seems to get this.
Who feels safe.
Kaeja.
It was as much of a surprise to me as her. But she seems to get it. The energy between us is understood without the bother of words. It was best left a silent agreement, or so it seemed, because words would make this much more than it is. And telling anyone would make it weirder and odder, as if we’re doing something wrong. We are not. By not talking about it or mentioning it or finding a reason why I’m here, it’s okay. But any words or the eyes of strangers on it would only taint and tarnish it.
Like how my relationship with Ireena started.
I wonder if this is my karma for making such terrible choices? It’s so cruel to believe, but it does keep crossing my mind. Have I done this to Ireena? Dayshia?
When Kaeja was near, it feels like no. We just lost a loved one. In a terrible, freak tragedy that wasn’t all my fault.
I saw Kaeja and the grief inside her was underestimated by other people. She truly looked shell-shocked. Lost. Broken and so alone. It hurt my heart to watch her stare at the inner sanctuary of the church when she found what was left of Ireena in an urn. I understood the unexpected punch to the chest. I could not picture the vibrant, crazy, feisty, tough woman that Ireena was, in there. No more than dust and ashes now, inside that thing. Gone. It hammered the nightmare home. It felt like someone took a crowbar and swiped my feet out from under me. But Kaeja? I swear to God, she nearly dropped to her knees. I feared she’d truly break into a million pieces right before the crowd’s unforgiving eyes.
I saw her expression, the rounding of her mouth, the rubbing of her fingers together and the small shake of her head that told me how much she was hurting. As much as I, but for very different reasons. We loved Ireena differently, but we loved her abundantly. At least I get some credit from the world for that love, but she doesn’t. Sitting in my house alone, staring at my daughter and imagining all she lost and how easily I might screw her whole life up, the pressure feltlike an elephant straddling my torso. Panic. Anxiety. Depression. Both natural and very likely after this day, this week, and the horror show that has become my life. The only relief I’ve gotten was when I was at Kaeja’s.
Like a lost dog, I return to the kind hand that gave me what I needed. I go to Kaeja.
I am with Kaeja. In her bed. But then again… not.
I’m staring at her when her eyelids flutter open to find my eyes riveted on her.
KAEJA
He’s staring at me. I sigh. This is strange. In the darkness, only our clothes and pillows separate us but sharing the space and covers, we talk about Ireena. I tell him everything I remember in a disjointed and skewed history of our early lives together. It comes to me piecemeal so I can’t fully narrate a cohesive, compelling tale, but he takes the various snippets and seems to find comfort in just talking, remembering, and commiserating about her. He did not know the younger Ireena I described but he’s the only one who would understand the real person I speak of.
“Two little lost girls. That’s what we were and would have become. She got us out of it. She pulled us out of what would have been a dark destiny. Damion… you know all this.”
“I still like to hear it. What a fucking warrior she was… and you. You guys make the rest of us look like fragile porcelain figurines that need to be protected and sheltered.”
“You were. That’s what she liked about you guys. But most of all, she didn’t want Dayshia to know the kind of life we had. You have to do everything for her, Damion. Whatever happens, and whoever enters your life from here on out, Dayshia has to always come first.”
He clears his throat. “Yeah. That’s my goal and intent… can I admit something?”
“Yes,” I reply. The cocoon of where we are makes it more intimate and unreal.
“I’m so scared. What if I mess it up? Just like how she came to be? My judgment sucks. All alone now? I was barely wading through it and Ireena and I were still as clueless as when we were kids, so we’d consult each other and talk through almost everything we did. As sure as Ireena was with herself at school and work, hell! In every transaction she ever had, she found Dayshia a bit of a challenge. She doubted and muddled and rechecked everything. She hesitated. Can you imagine Ireena hesitating on decisions? She doubted her decisions. I’d walk in and find her sitting on the floor, staring down at Dayshia, unsure of which brand of baby wipes to use. Or running to the doctor because Dayshia had a red mark and then worrying someone might think she did something to Dayshia. Cutting her fingernails for the first time nearly set Ireena over the edge.” It makes him chuckle at the memory.
To picture her getting scared over cutting fingernails? It is pretty funny. If you knew her.
God, it’s nice to exchange light-hearted stories. The magnitude of our loss lessens for a second, and I feel like I can breathe again.
We both hear Dayshia stirring and Damion pushes the covers back to head toward her cries. The noises stop and in walks Damion with Dayshia. He slips back into bed with her and she nuzzles his chest, burying her face against his neck and curling her little legs under her. She cuddles on his wide chest like a little bird snuggling into its nest. Yeah, it makes my heart melt.
“There’s nothing to do. Think we could just hibernate in here?”
“Until your squirrelly, squirmy, barely one year old wakes up.” Quirking my eyebrows at him, I point out the reason quite logically.
He sighs. “Fine. Fine. Then… what? What do we do the day after we say goodbye to Ireena? Go about our routine? Wash our cars? Run some errands? What do we do, Kaeja?” He mutters hotly, sitting up and grasping Dayshia’s little body more tightly to his chest. He’s annoyed and suddenly angry as he gets on his feet. He�
�s pacing my bedroom. But his tone is quiet in reverence to the baby in his arms.
Slower, I untangle the covers off me and rise to my feet. I stand still. “Yes. That’s the kind of stuff you do. You act normal and face your life, I think. Nothing could stop Ireena from doing what’s necessary, of all the people I know. She’d run her errands, clean her car and mostly, make everything about Dayshia. So yeah, that’s what we do.”
He stops dead and stares at me. Eyes as big as quarters heighten the alarm in his face. It makes my heart thump at seeing his distress. Damn this pain. “Even if it hurts so much it feels like knives on my skin?”
“Even then. There’s no choice. She’s dead. We’re alive. At least you have Dayshia.”
He tilts his head. “You… I mean… yeah, I have her and you don’t really have anyone, do you?”
“No.” I turn away.
“Why, Kaeja?” It’s still a whisper, but the anger is gone. Now it’s soft, caring, curious. He’s confused why I have no one.
“It’s always been my choice. By design.”
“You said she saved you. From monsters. What monsters?”
“Not the ones you’re probably assuming. I wasn’t abused or raped. I got into crack.”
I hear him shuffle onto his feet. “You… you’re for real?”
I stifle a laugh at his surprised tone and turn fully, and face him. “Yeah. I got into crack. For real.”
His gaze starts on my hair, which I’m sure is huge with bright streaks. He glances over my scrubbed free face to my torso and looks down at my feet. What’s he looking for?
His mouth snaps open. Then shuts. “I honest to God, had no idea. Your monsters were drugs?”
“Drugs and all that came with them. Which I did for a time to procure them.”
“Crack?”
“Too old school for you?”
“Too nothing. I’m just shocked. You’re so… natural.”
