This woman/prisoner in PRISON is claiming to be one Charlotte St. May, formally from West Palm Beach, Florida, where she is the mother (HA!) of one Conner Caldwell St. May and one Cecilia St. May, Ex-wife of one Mr. Caldwell St. May. She goes on to ask about my father (THE NERVE) and to tell me she is coming back to Florida after her release (FROM PRISON PEOPLE… PRISON!) Immediately I start counting aloud and somewhere around breath seventy-five one-thousand I fall into a deep and fitful sleep.
Startling awake hours later I panic when I remember the reason I fell asleep counting. I pick up the phone and text my brother this message:
Come.
Mom is jail-bird, true story.
Found me.
Need u.
C
“Cee, it’s me, where are you? CEE! Cecilia!” I can hear Connor walking in and out of my bedroom, bathroom and living room trying to find me but I can’t make my mouth move for the giant fear I have of vomiting or crying or worse still, both in tandem.
“CEE!? GOD DAMNIT! ANSWER ME!” He’s frantic by the time he throws my closet door open and finds me curled up on the floor, wrapped in my comforter like a baby in swaddling.
“Cee? Come here.” He’s never seen me like this, this was Ashton’s territory. He’d have known right where to find me and then he’d do the thing where he holds me or plays me music or kisses my hair but it would have been easy for him. This? This is not easy for my brother. My behavior has him shook up, close to tears and maybe like he’s about to call the looney police to come and collect me.
“How long have you been in here?”
“I don’t know. Ever since I opened that email from the prisoner I guess and, I really have to pee pretty badly.”
“You guess? And when was that? And why haven’t you peed?” I look at the bottom right of the computer monitor and see it says 2:00 pm and I remember that I opened the email at about 2:15 am. I’ve been in here for a solid twelve hours in some kind of shocked, sleepy, stupor unable to figure out how to fit an underwear model into the algorithm for inmate/prisoner. Do they even get to wear underwear?
“Um, sometime last night?” I’ll play dumb.
“When last night?” He’s going to make me say it, he’s one of those deal with things head-on kind of people. He says that’s why he can go outside. I say whatever.
“Two-ish?”
“Get up. Get up now. We’re going to get food and coffee in you. You’re going to shower and then I’m going to look into this. Give me your laptop.” NO WAY!
“NO WAY! Everything is on here. No one touches this but me.” I say while clutching the computer to my chest like he’s some kind of computer thief.
“Okay. Let’s just do all the other stuff I mentioned first and then we’ll both deal with this. Together, okay?”
“Okay.” He pulls me and my laptop into a cumbersome hug doing his best to give me the comfort I’m after, but he’s no Ashton. With the memory of his easy reassurance assaulting me I pull back and end this futile attempt at intimacy. It’s not the same, nevertheless it is sweet that he’s trying.
“I’ll hop in the shower if you make the coffee for us. Give me ten.” I jump across the room unwilling to drop my comforter until I reach the confines of my bathroom. I fold it up and set it on the counter where it will remain clean and dry. Then take the quickest shower of my adult life eager to see what my brother and I can find out about this “mother” person.
***
The day goes by in a blur of fact checking. Liddy joins the research committee and bonus, brings over Chinese food for dinner. It’s from a place I’ve never been to before and that’s when it dawns on me that there are probably a lot of new places that I don’t even know exist.
For example, this place we just had, Hi-Nu’s, before this we always got Chinese from Bamboo Empire, which was an awesome place right around the corner from our dad’s house. Since Dad passed however, I haven’t had Chinese food for many reasons, the biggest being that Ashton refused to bring it over on account of my complaining about the high salt content and forthright refusal to eat “that garbage”. If I’ve not been clear, my health concerns are ever changing and growing rapidly. So, now I have a mom in prison and a new Chinese restaurant to learn about. What’s the universe going to throw at me next I wonder? Oh… My… Gosh! What if Victoria Secret’s is ugly inside now!?!?!?
“Alright” Connor starts. “After talking to the women’s prison in Louisiana these are the facts we now have: 1. They do have a Charlotte St. May in custody. 2. She is due for release in a month. And, 3. Her file names us as her only next of kin. We also know that there are visiting hours on the weekends and that there is no record of her having a single visitor over the last twenty years. We can pull up a picture of her mug shot but it’s old so I say we don’t. That will only be upsetting and besides, there’s no way she still looks the same after all of this time behind bars. “Okay, anything else?” I’m thinking, Nope! He’s good. I can’t remember my own birthday right now or tell you where the nearest McDonald’s is (That’s no exaggeration. After the Hi-Nu incident there could be a McDonald’s on my street and I wouldn’t even know it.).
“Should we fly up there honey? I can get us flights for this weekend?” Liddy is the best girlfriend. She sticks when the going gets weird, unlike someone else I know who I thought stuck but instead just goes and gets a whole new life. Unsticky Bastard!
“Are you sure you’d want to do that? You know? Actually meet her? She did abandon Dad and us without ever once making any sort of contact over the years other than those vague emails from time to time. It’s not like we ever moved and she couldn’t find us. Besides, we don’t even know if Dad knew where she was while he was still alive. Do you think he knew?”
This has been the troubling thought working its way around my mind for the last hour. Could dad have known where she was? Was he protecting us from the knowledge that maybe our mom was worse than we even could have imagined? One one-thousand… Two one-thousand… Three one-thousand…
“Make the flight arrangements would you Lid? You and me, we’re going to meet my mom.” Holy Mary Mother of Jesus, my brother’s going to meet our mom….
***
When you’re a young child you consider the age of twenty-six to be pretty old, maybe even ancient. You assume people of this advanced age are logical, level –headed thinkers, with a sensible life-strategy set in place. In your young mind, you imagine yourself to maybe have a family started by this time, or at least a hunky guy to eat your meals with. Certainly you’ll be set in a career you love and possibly even own a home to plant a beautiful garden around, hang gorgeous clothes inside and, of course, drawers full of unimaginable underwear. You know? You have it together. But, then there’s the reality, and often times that reality is a painful thing to face. In it the sole box you’ve checked to date is the one marked unimaginable underwear. I suppose it would be possible to plant a garden around my house but we all know that I don’t go out front, and out back is the poop square. The hunky guy box is empty, no check to be seen for miles (you know the gory details to that). Job, well I’m working on that, and clothes? All I can say about that one is I’m sure I would do better if I could actually go to the store and try them on.
What you don’t think, however, is that you’ll grow up and never have a life outside your home. It’s the unimaginable for a dream-focused young mind. This thought would simply never occur in the beautiful, pure world of possibility that a child can so easily create. Why would it? Life for them is about nothing more than learning, feeling, discovering. It’s full of anything and everything other than giving up.
Sometimes if I listen real hard I can hear the little girl inside of my mind screaming at the top of her lungs to stand up, open the front door and go meet her mother, go plant a flower, go get her boy! She’s desperate, crying and demanding in her outbursts but I’m afraid she’s fighting a losing battle. The fire breathing dragon known as anxiety has her cornered in her very o
wn miniature castle and there will be no Shrek coming to save this Fiona from the flames. She’s bound and held captive within these impenetrable concrete walls without any chance of change or rescue.
Lately I’ve found that by keeping busy I can quiet the negative voices that are trying to hijack any of my positive thoughts. By day I research behavioral therapy techniques and by night I draw lingerie designs for the line I’m venturing into with Liddy. So far it’s working, and I’m beyond thrilled when Liddy finally sees my first set of drawings and is dumbstruck by my “flipping awesome” – her words, not mine - ideas. Her reactions are just what I was hoping for, and all of her supportive critiques are appreciated and stored away under the heading of negative-thought destroyers.
This week she’s brought over some of her newest samples of clothing, and my own reactions have been similar. “Frigging fantastic!” is what I call them. Her eye for what makes a woman’s body beautiful is on point. She dresses for shape. Breasts, hips, butts are no problem for her. Whether you have them or not she’ll make you look your personal best. There are pieces in her collection that add shape if you’re lacking and pieces that highlight the shapes that we should all love and be proud of. Simply put, I love her work and am completely confident that the two of us can create the perfect pairing for her clothes with this new lingerie line of ours.
After Liddy leaves for the evening, I realize that not once this week have I gone online to play or stalk my now ex-boyfriend, MrnotsoCoolatall. However, I did notice that he left me a private message in my inbox, but no way am I opening it. No doubt he’s left me a lengthy goodbye asking me, the stalker, to please lose his game-tag and for the love of god find someone else to play with from now on. But, I will ignore that message because no way can I handle that kind of rejection right now. My ego is struggling enough as it is without adding yet another issue to the already-full abandonment-issue playlist I have running through my head. Instead I choose to flag the message as “read” and ignore it. Sounds simple, but no. Hardest… Flag…. EVER!
Liddy calls to check in before going to bed later that night loaded with reassurances and reminders about her and Connor’s plans for tomorrow.
“Okay. Our flight is at noon and is scheduled to arrive in the evening. We’ll call you as soon as we get settled at the hotel and then in the morning we’ll go and meet your mom.”
She goes through the itinerary for the rest of their trip like she’s reading through the phone book… like what she just said, “We’ll go and meet your mom”, was no big deal. She mistook my silence to mean that I was listening and continued on with the details of their trip all the way through to their departure on Sunday evening. All I can hope is that I didn’t missed too much between the words, “then in the morning we’ll go and meet your mom,” and “Love you CeeCee,” because after the shocking reminder of what they were doing, my mind ran off.
***
Following that conversation, I spent several futile hours at my desk drawing in an attempt to create something worthy of consideration for our new collection. It didn’t take long before I gave up and instead gave in to a much-needed quiet time of reflection, where I gave myself permission to dream of what my actual mom may be like. It’s incredibly difficult to re-imagine and rewrite the many years of stored up images and stories that I’d painstakingly created from nothing.
When I was in preschool I often imagined she looked like all the other moms I saw running around at the playground. She’d have ready-to-wear short hair and wear shorts that were disguised as a skirt paired with a flouncy t-shirt that was lovingly adorned with a mystery stain across the breast. When I started kindergarten the imagery changed and she became a sweet mom with long, pretty, flowing hair that always had on a pair of time faded mom jeans and a baggy t-shirt.
Now, after all these years, here I am again lying here on my bed trying to add my mom’s face atop of one of those kid friendly images of my youth and it’s proving to be an impossible task. Because with every pair of mom jeans and skorts I imagine, Play-woman strikes again and all I’m left with in my mind’s eye are stilettos, miniskirts and corset tops all of varying colors, shapes, and fabrics, not a pair of mom-jeans insight.
Until I see her for myself (IF, I repeat IF I see her myself) I will continue to hold onto the images I’ve grown attached to and created in my head. It seems impossible that my subconscious could change the number of invented lingerie moms that I’ve dreamt up in my memory bank over the years. In computer talk, the folder is in storage overload and the system is full. Until I lay eyes on her myself (IF) the memory’s cannot be erased and she will be who I want her to be, because honestly, I’m terrified of who she may actually be.
Oddly enough all this mom pondering isn’t helping my mental state any so instead I make the smart decision to close my eyes in what will likely be the first attempt of many at falling asleep tonight. As I lay here staring at the interior of my eyelids, listening to music that’s quietly being piped out from the phone beside me, I am struck with the thought that Ashton is clueless to the fact that I could have a living, breathing, mom.
For the very first time in the history of our friendship he will most certainly miss what has the potential to be a monumental moment in my life. Responding to this realization a tear drops unbidden from my right eye down past my firmly clasped hands and onto the pillow beneath them. Not to be outdone by the right, the left eye then releases a tear of its own that rolls from its interior corner down across the bridge of my small nose and into my right ear hole. This systematic draining of my facial fluids builds and continues until I can no longer lay here and breathe easily through the mucus clogging my sinuses, thus I’m forced from my cozy bed to go in search of the tissues that I know I have stored somewhere in this meticulously tidy place I call home.
After I’ve cleared my head (quite literally) and gotten some warm milk (its gross but it does seem to help) I head back to my room, laptop at the ready. Tonight I will not sit on the closet floor and crumble over the loss of my father because tonight I’ve decided who I need is my best friend. I need Ashton, and I’m betting Google can help me find him.
As soon as the internet pops up I’m hypnotized by the little blinking light in the search bar that’s urging me to make a choice. It mocks my indecision as it flickers on and off waiting for me to make a move. I think back to what my brother told me after he talked to Ash and I remember him saying that the band is based out of Phoenix, Arizona. So with that little bit of information and nothing left to lose I simply type in bars that play live music in Phoenix and guess what? I find him.
Someone posted a video of his band playing on a small, intimate stage at a place called The Lost leaf. It looks perfect. He looks perfect. I click on the image and am immediately overwhelmed by the sound of his voice. Hearing him sing soothes me instantly, like an infant hearing its mother’s smooth voice outside of the womb for the very first time. It’s perfection.
I can’t help but to be in awe of how at home he appears up on that stage, it’s clear that that’s where he belongs. Trying to categorize my feelings is useless because there are just too many happening at once. It’s quite possible that I could be experiencing the full variety of the human condition all in this one moment in time: love, hate, anger, jealousy, pride, envy, loss, happiness, sadness, worry (goes without saying really), and the one that strikes me the hardest, right between the eyes… fear. The reason is simple. Only because I know Ashton so well do I recognize the one thing I was hoping not to see on his face when I finally found a photo of him and that is… peace. I cannot even think it too loudly without it ripping me to shreds.
His peace has brought me to my knees. Here I am, stuck, clutching my phone tightly between my sweaty palms trying to decide if it would be selfish of me to contact him and share my mom woe’s or leave him to his perfect, fulfilled life where for the first time in probably forever he’s finally free of the heavy burden he carries of worrying about me. The answer is duh, of
course I should leave him be. It’s clear that he’s happy with these people. Maybe he’s even doing “the thing” with the beautiful girl standing next to him, the one with the colorful guitar casually slung over her slender, perfect shoulder. He never mentioned she looked like that. I mean, without a face for a visual I never imagined having competition for Ashton’s affection but after seeing her, I get it. It wasn’t just about the music for him or even about forcing my hand. He wanted to go and the reason appears to be standing beside him in the form of a tall, perfect, buxom blond that I never once anticipated coming between us. She’s the blond bomb.
When we were little kids Ashton used to tell me regularly, “One day, when we grow up, we’re going to move far away from here, Cee. I’m going to be a rock star and you’ll work at Victoria’s Secret and at night when I sing you’ll come and cheer for me. Then we’ll stay up until morning and instead of you cleaning up my boo-boo’s we’ll listen to music and play Monopoly. It’s going to be the best time of our lives, you’ll see.”
For as long as I can remember if Ashton wanted something he made it happen. Unfortunately, the dream he gave up on was the one that I was a part of. It’s obvious what I have to do. Where he’s concerned there’s no more room for selfishness. I have to let him go so that he can finally live his dream. Not the dream of a child but the dream of a grown man. If he needs a replacement Monopoly partner to be happy (we all know I’m not talking about board games anymore) then I’m glad he found one. He deserves that and if this girl and all the “Monopoly” he has with her can bring him joy, then I’ll back off and leave him be. That’s what a real friend should do. Should’a, could’a, would’a… I don’t know if that’s the friend I can be.
Maybe, I’m the douche.
ten
Single Player: Humor, Love, Breast Cancer and a Gaming Girl... Page 12
