Tell Me No Lies

by Nikki- Michelle

  I looked behind me when Kay rounded the corner with her things.

  “I’m going to leave now, Chy. I’ll call you later,” she said, dismissing herself.

  She kissed AJ’s cheeks and spoke to Jamie before leaving. Jamie didn’t even acknowledge her. His eyes never left mine.

  I placed AJ on his feet. “AJ, go to the front room and play with your new toys for a while.”

  I didn’t say anything to Jamie until I was sure AJ was out of the kitchen.

  “So you told Kay?” he asked me. “You told her what happened to me?”

  Judging by the low volume and cold nature of his voice, I wasn’t sure if I should answer that question, but since he more than likely already knew the answer, I decided to do so. “Jamie, it was only because I needed someone to talk to about what was going on with us.”

  He was standing between the counter and the kitchen island. His long arms were outstretched, and he pressed one palm down on the counter and the other on the island as he grimaced at me. “If I had wanted anybody to fucking know what I told you, I would have just broadcast the shit myself,” he spat out.

  I was about to say something else when he punched one of the cabinets. Glasses came crashing down out of the cabinet. I jumped, then cringed, and almost wanted to run when he turned back around to face me. My heart was beating rapidly. Jamie’s eyes were as red as fire, and he was biting down on his bottom lip. His fists were still balled, and when his chest heaved up and down rapidly, I backed away a bit.

  “Jamie, calm down, please. It is not that serious—”

  “Don’t fucking tell me to calm down, and don’t tell me what isn’t that serious, Chyanne. That shit was personal to me, to my fucking life. And you had no right, none, to tell anybody about what the fuck I told you.” He was almost foaming at the mouth.

  “Jamie, watch your language. AJ is in the front room. And I told Kay only because I—”

  “I don’t give a damn about your reason, Chyanne,” he said sternly as he pointed at his chest. “You need to learn loyalty, because you know none. I’m your man. I felt the need to tell you in confidence what happened to me, and what do you do?” He turned, then punched the cabinet again. “You know no fucking loyalty,” he yelled at me.

  My heart was thumping so hard against my rib cage that it had started to hurt. I was beginning to feel sick to my stomach. I placed a hand on my head just to stave off the light- headed feeling.

  “First, it’s you putting your lips on a nigga that could care less about your heart or your feelings. And now this shit? I’m done on this shit right now and you. Fuck you right now, Chyanne.” He turned and kicked one of the Toys“R”Us bags out of his way.

  “Don’t you take that tone of voice with me, Jamie. And don’t you dare accuse me of being disloyal to you, either,” I snapped, then took a few paces toward him.

  He whipped around so quickly that it stopped me in my tracks and made me stumble back.

  “Not only are you disloyal, but you’re a liar too, a fucking liar who looked me in my eyes and lied to me about kissing another man. Leave me alone right now, Chyanne. Just leave me alone before I say some shit I can’t take back. And for the record, you don’t have to watch me around AJ. I would never do anything to him, and you know that. Still, you didn’t say much of any damn thing to let that be known. Then you want to sit in there and compare me to this motherfucker too?” he stormed, frowning, his brow knit. He was looking at me as if he didn’t know who was standing in front of him.

  I felt a deep need to defend myself, but my heart told me to remain silent. He was angry, and whether I felt he had a right to be or not, part of me did feel bad for telling Kay about what had happened to him. That didn’t mean that I liked all the mess that he’d said to me, but I let him walk away and storm up the stairs, anyway. I was worried about what AJ had heard. Before I cleaned up the broken glass, I walked into the front room to check on him.

  I was happy to see that he was totally engrossed in a TV program. The volume was high enough to drown out the noise that had been made. I left him there for the time being, while I tried to figure out just what the hell to do to fix me and Jamie. He’d called me dishonest and disloyal. Yes, I’d lied by omission, by not telling him about the kiss between me and Aric, but it was only because I didn’t want to hurt him. Besides, Aric had kissed me. It wasn’t like I went to seek out the kiss for myself. And I’d felt guilty afterward. I had felt like I cheated, and that in turn had had me feeling all kinds of messed up.

  Now I had to deal with my feelings for Gabe. I sighed, then shook my head after sweeping the broken glass into a pile. I couldn’t believe I’d just admitted to having feelings for Gabe. Oh my God, what in hell was wrong with me? I loved Jamie with everything in me, but ever since Gabe and I had gone to lunch, something had changed between us. Reliving those secrets we shared, the stolen late-night text messages, the flowers he’d sent me, the way he would speak to me when we spoke on the phone, all had a hand in the way I was feeling. All I knew was I didn’t want to be that woman. I didn’t want to be the woman that had a good man at home but was still searching for something on the outside. So how did I fix it? Was it even broken?

  Those were the questions that bombarded my mind until a movement by my window caught my attention. I quickly dumped the last of the broken glass into the stainless-steel trash can. There was a woman walking up my driveway. Her wild, curly auburn-colored hair blew in the wind as she blew smoke from her lips. She was my height or maybe an inch taller. Her skin was lighter than mine; paper sack brown was what the country folk down South called it. She’d gained a little weight, but not enough to obscure her perfect hourglass shape. She’d matured, but not to the point where you could tell her natural age. She had on jeans and a sweater that was way too thin to wear in the weather we were having, and worn sneakers covered her feet. A long, brown, thin-strapped purse hung from her shoulders.

  I watched the woman until I could see her no more, and knew she was heading for my front door. I rushed from my dining room and made a beeline for the same door. Before the woman could make her presence known by ringing the doorbell, I swiftly opened the door and looked into a face that was so similar to mine, we could pass for twins.

  A slow and easy smile stretched across her plum-colored lips. “Chyanne?” she asked, saying my name, and then gave a light chuckle. “Baby, look at you. You’re all grown up,” she said.

  My whole body started to shake, and I became light-headed. “Mom . . .”

  “Yes, in the flesh. Took me forever to find you, but I found you.”

  Chyanne

  My hands shook uncontrollably as my mother held them in hers. She’d kept that same pleasant and soft smile on her face as she looked at me. It was like I was staring into the eyes of a ghost. Her teeth were as perfect as the last time I’d seen her. Only there was no red blood covering them. There were no marks and bruises scarring her silklike skin. Her face wasn’t swollen, and neither were her lips. Her eyes had a vibrancy, not blood clots and fist prints. Her wild mane was identical to mine, just a different color. Once the shock of seeing her at my door had worn off, we both walked into my living room to have a seat on my sofa.

  “I know it’s been a while, Chyanne, but I suspect you still have manners, don’t you? It’s not polite to just stare, honey,” she said to me.

  That Southern belle charm of a voice was still there.

  “I . . . I know. I just can’t believe . . . ” I was barely able to make my words coherent, let alone speak them.

  “Well, believe it. I’m here,” she said and used a soft hand to caress my face.

  We stared at each other again in silence. She brushed my hair back from my face, just as she used to do when I was a kid.

  “You look so much like Chyron.”

  I flinched when she said my father’s name. I hadn’t heard it in years. I’d gotten the first half of my name from him, the second half from my mother.

  “What . . . Why
didn’t you call to let me know you were out?” I asked her.

  “I guess the same reason you never responded to any of my letters or came to see me.”

  I dropped my head, ashamed of my actions. To be honest, now that I knew she was out, I couldn’t pinpoint the many reasons I hadn’t gone to see her.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I was—”

  She stopped me. “Shh. Don’t explain anything, Chyanne. Your life was turned upside down. Well, hell, to be honest, your father and I did a horrible damn job of giving you stability to begin with,” she said, squeezing my hand tightly. “I just want you to know that I didn’t murder your father. Not the way they say I did. I did what I did because he was going to kill me that day, baby. It was either him or me, and I chose me.”

  I mean, I’d figured she was defending herself, but couldn’t she have done something else? Couldn’t she just have shot him and then run? Why did she let it get to the point of no return?

  “Why’d you stay? Why did you wait so long before you got out?” I asked her.

  “Well, baby, why’d you stay with a married man until his wife tried to damn near kill you?”

  Her question caught me off guard. It was like that sucker punch Stephanie had given me to the face when she and I first fought.

  She saw the look on my face, but she didn’t waver.

  “Oftentimes the questions we ask one woman are the same questions we need to answer ourselves. I stayed because I took my vows seriously, for better or worse, through sickness and health, ’til . . . Death . . . is only when we parted. It made more sense for me to stay with my husband than it did for you to stay with a man who was someone else’s husband.”

  Her words hurt, cut like a razor to the jugular. I dropped my head, then quickly looked back up at her.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t mean it like that,” I tried to explain.

  “Doesn’t matter, Chyanne. That’s the way it came out. Never ask a question you’re not prepared to get the truth to,” she said as she pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims cigarettes.

  She hadn’t been a smoker before she went to prison. I had to tell her she couldn’t smoke in the house because of AJ. I wasn’t surprised that she already knew I had a son. It seemed as if she’d already done her homework on what her only child had been doing while she was locked away. She told me it was because she followed the news and was allowed to use the Internet while in prison.

  Nothing could have prepared me for my mom showing up at my house. I had so many questions, and according to her, she’d been looking for me so she could see me in person. I’d planned to take the whole “coming face-to-face” thing as slowly as possible when she was finally released. I hadn’t been expecting her to just show up on her own, but I guess God had other plans. There was a lot more that we needed to talk about, but we both knew that we needed this breather. I thought about how I would introduce her to AJ and Jamie. Hell, even to Aric, for that matter. I wanted to ask her where she had been staying. How she’d been surviving, how and when she’d been released.

  She told me that she’d taken a cab from her hotel and that with the help of a friend, the Internet, and my home phone number, she’d found my address. My mom and I sat there making small talk. I was trying to relax as much as I could. I could tell there were still things she didn’t want to talk about when it came to her time in prison. She told me prison had changed her in a way. She told me it had hardened her internally because she had to survive. It was clear that she wasn’t the same docile woman that she had been before. We kept the conversation flowing. It wasn’t as deep as some conversations we’d had before. We kind of lightened the mood by talking about our hair and how wild it was. She told me about how people didn’t believe it was all her hair. We both laughed a little when I told her I had the same problem.

  She asked me if I had kept in contact with any of my father’s people. I answered honestly and told her no. I told her that none of her people had wanted anything to do with me, either. That saddened her a little bit. Her eyes watered, and she shook her head, as if she was fighting with the words she wanted to say next. When she leaned in to hug me out of the blue, my world stood still. It had been so long since I’d felt her arms around me. She smelled of the popular perfume from Avon called Far Away. Her hold was tight, and we sat that way for I didn’t remember how long. All I knew was that my mother was home, and while she embraced me with open arms, my guilt about not ever going to see her devoured my conscience.

  I looked up when Jamie rounded the corner with AJ in his arms. Jamie’s eyes had that glazed-over look, which meant he’d taken some of his medicine. I pulled away from my mother and quickly wiped my tears away. Jamie wasn’t wearing a shirt, and AJ was still asleep on his shoulder. I stood when my mom stood up. She wiped her own tears away, then smiled when she saw AJ.

  I walked over to stand next to Jamie. “Jamie . . . this is my mother,” I said, barely above a whisper.

  I’d never even mentioned her to Jamie, and for some reason I was so ashamed of that.

  “Mom, this is Jamie and AJ, my son,” I continued.

  My mother’s eyes brightened as she walked forward and laid a hand on AJ’s back. “Hello, Jamie. It’s so good to meet you,” she greeted him.

  Jamie smiled, and it warmed my heart. He hadn’t smiled for me in weeks. Even though his eyes darted back and forth between me and my mother, I was glad he didn’t say what I was sure he was thinking. More than likely his first reaction had been “Who the hell are you?” His locks waved back and forth against his broad mocha shoulders. The sweats he had on showcased all of the muscled physique I’d become used to enjoying during intimacy. I could tell it was a little awkward for him, because he had no idea what her name was or anything.

  “It’s good to meet you too,” he replied.

  “My name is Anne, by the way.”

  It was as if she already knew I had all but erased her and my father from my life.

  “Anne, it’s nice to finally know something about the woman who is Chyanne’s mother.”

  My mother smiled, then proceeded to take AJ from Jamie’s arms. “She had her reasons for keeping me a secret, I’m sure,” she said, but I heard an indication of hurt in her voice. “Can I wake him?” she asked Jamie.

  He nodded. “Sure. I went to the front room to get him, and he’d fallen asleep. I was about to wake him, anyway, so he could eat. I’m going to find a shirt to put on. I’ll be back down.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I watched in silence as my mom sat down with AJ cradled in her arms. She tickled him until he opened his eyes. For a long while AJ just stared up at my mother.

  She looked over at me with tear-filled eyes. “So, I guess little AJ doesn’t know a thing about me, either, huh?”

  She quickly looked back down at him, like she wasn’t really asking me the question, but was being sarcastic or rhetorical. AJ looked at her, then back over at me. We looked so much alike that I figured my son was trying to figure out what was going on. Once he did, he started to cry and reached for me. I sat down next to my mother, then took him into my arms.

  I’d been so angry at her after she was sentenced to prison. I had been so angry because I had no one, no one at all. I was a grown orphan in a sense. I’d been so mad at her, so disappointed in what she’d chosen to do. I had felt as if we could have done anything to get away other than her killing him. We could have snuck away while he was at work or something. We could have done anything else. I’d blamed her for me being left alone fresh out of high school, with no one to help me and nowhere to go. I’d been forced to stay in that house until I had a stable job and money from financial aid to move out.

  Once I calmed AJ down, I told him who she was. He didn’t want her to hold him again, but at least he stopped crying.

  “I take it this is your married lover’s child, since he looks nothing like Jamie and every bit the man I’ve seen in papers and on TV,” she stated.

  “No, he’s not Jamie’s.
He’s Aric’s.”

  In that instant I remembered I was pregnant again, but I decided against telling her right then, since Jamie and I hadn’t even really discussed it yet.

  She stood and grabbed her purse. “I’m going outside to take a smoke. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay around a little longer.”

  “Yeah, that’s no problem, Mom,” I said, almost too eager to please her since I knew that I had hurt her by omitting her from my life.

  “Okay, and then will one of you take me back to my hotel? I don’t have any more cash on me for a taxi.”

  “Yes . . . yeah, I’ll take you back.”

  For a long while she just stood there, looking at me and AJ. Then she finally walked out the front door. I didn’t want to keep sitting there and feeling sorry for myself. So I got up and started to reheat the food. Then I went upstairs to wash AJ up. He was ready to play, so I sat down to play with him for a few minutes before walking back downstairs to check on the food. I could hear Jamie and my mother downstairs, talking. He was laughing, and so was she. They seemed to be getting along just great, and I was on the outside, looking in. If words could explain how I was feeling at that moment, it would be that I felt as if I was the stranger in my own home.

  After we’d all eaten dinner, I got prepared to take my mother back to her hotel room. AJ had finally warmed up to her, and she had him eating out of her hands. He loved to play and pull her hair, and she let him. Jamie and I talked to one another. No fussing or snide remarks, just talked. I didn’t know if it was because he was trying to keep calm in front of my mother or what, but I was glad for it. Aric crossed my mind several times. He’d have to meet my mother soon too.

  Gabe was a constant on my mind. When I went to the bathroom, I texted him just to see how he was holding up. I didn’t get around to checking my phone again, though, because once I got back to the dining room, my mom wanted to know what I’d been doing all those years she was locked away. There was still unspoken pain between the two of us, but since that was her way of extending an olive branch, I took it.