Teaching Willow: Session Four

by James, Paige

  So, here I am. Staring at my very own front door. I slide my key into my knob and walk into my apartment. And I don’t stop smiling.

  I flip on the overhead light switch by the door. The only lamp I have at the moment is in the bedroom. The place is kind of bare bones, but I’m making do. In fact, I’m kind of proud that I’m making it without help or luxury. Yes, my living room furniture consists of a futon couch, two crates as a coffee table and two more on which the television sits, but it’s home and it’s mine, and that’s all that matters. I brought my own bedroom furniture. A guy that worked at the restaurant where I waited tables helped move me. I played up the “weak little girl” stereotype so that I wouldn’t get stuck lifting a bunch of heavy stuff and risking my baby. My family has always thought I was the weak one of the herd. Although they will never know how far I’ve come, I can’t help but think If only they could see me now!

  I drop down onto one end of the futon and resume my perusal of the mail. My fingers stop when I get to a small padded manila envelope. I stare at it, my heart beating wildly right behind my ribs, as my focus narrows on the return address. Ebon Daniels. 4721 Harmony Place, Apartment 1, Jacksonville, FL.

  My fingers relax around everything except this one item, letting all the other correspondence I’m holding fall to the floor. Suddenly, the air feels thick, too thick for my meager lungs to inhale. Suddenly, my blood feels sticky, too sticky for my racing heart to pump. Suddenly my head…my head is spinning, my solid, comfortable existence instantly turned upside down.

  With shaking fingers, I tear open the envelope. Inside is a thumb drive. No note, no explanation, just the small, black rectangle.

  I slide off the couch, dropping to my knees to fish my laptop out from under one of the two coffee table crates. I don’t even bother to move back onto the futon. I just open it across my knees and plug the drive into the first USB port I come to.

  In the My Computer screen, I click the unnamed drive and see that there’s a single document contained on it. It’s simply named Willow. With a numb index finger, I tap the icon to open it and I begin to read.

  It’s a story. It’s his story. It’s our story.

  TWENTY-FOUR- EBON

  I trudge through the rain, not really caring that I’m getting soaked as I haul my two grocery bags to the door. My head is down as I search for the blue apartment key. My muscles move my legs up the three steps in perfect coordination despite my preoccupation. I’ve been here long enough that they remember and could get me to my door even if I was blindfolded.

  What they weren’t anticipating, what I wasn’t anticipating, was to see a dark form huddled against my front door, very obviously trying to stay out of the rain.

  I’m not sure which takes longer–my eyes to adjust, my head to understand or my heart to start beating again. There, crouching under her dripping hair, is Willow.

  Of the thousand and one questions that come to mind, I don’t ask any of them. I can only focus on two things–getting her inside and how, in the blink of an eye, life seems to have meaning again.

  My movements are slow and deliberate. Measured. In a way, I feel as though I’m trying not to spook a deer. Or cause a ghost to disappear.

  I say nothing as I step around her to unlock the door. She straightens beside me, her arms still wrapped around herself as though she’s cold. She watches me, waiting. I push open the door and turn to her.

  “Can you come in?” It’s the only question I can ask yet. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. I can feel it.

  Her liquid eyes search mine for long seconds before she nods. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath until I let it out in one relieved huff.

  I sweep my arm in front of me, indicating she should go in first, which she does. As she passes, I inhale her scent, the sweet mixture that’s uniquely Willow. The sweet mixture that has never stopped haunting me.

  Kicking the door shut behind me, I set the groceries on the counter and go straight to the fridge. I pull out two bottles of Budweiser. I pop the top on the first one, but before I can open the second, I hear the voice that I’ve missed so much.

  “None for me, thanks.”

  Wordlessly, I stick the other bottle back in the fridge and head for the living room. I know I should say something. She probably thinks I’m being a complete asshole. The thing is, after all this time, after all the waiting, I don’t really know what to say. I don’t want to risk ruining whatever it was that brought her here. I suspect it was my book, but I can’t be sure. I figure, until I am sure, it’s best to just keep quiet.

  I walk to the couch and look back at Willow. She’s still standing in the kitchen, her arms still folded protectively over her middle.

  “Have a seat, Willow,” I say softly. Her name feels like honey on my lips, warm and welcome. I wasn’t sure I’d ever utter it aloud again.

  Hesitantly, she makes her way to one of the two armchairs that face the couch and she sits primly on the end. It’s such a ladylike thing to do, so pure and innocent, that it only makes me ache for the little vixen that I know hides just beneath that innocuous surface.

  “What brings you here?” I finally ask when it’s clear that she’s not going to volunteer anything.

  She stares at me, her expression anxious. “Are you upset that I came?” she asks, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth.

  “I’m glad that you came. I…I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again.”

  “Did you want to see me again?”

  My answer is immediate. I don’t think I could lie convincingly, or that I should even try. “Yes, I did.”

  On her beautiful face, I see both relief and consternation. “Then why did you leave? Why did you just disappear? I tried to find you for weeks.”

  “You put a restraining order on me. There wasn’t much I could do.”

  “I didn’t do that, Ebon. I swear. It was my father. When you’re in the hospital like I was, in the…well, when you’re detained like that, they appoint someone to look after your best interests. But it wasn’t me. I would never do that!”

  Relief. God, it feels so good. It even drowns out the frustration that I feel over Willow’s fucking asshole of a dad.

  I frown. “How long have you been out? Of the hospital, I mean.”

  “They didn’t keep me very long. Once Detective Arnold came and sort of corroborated my story, my doctor realized that I was telling the truth, that I wasn’t delusional or suicidal.”

  I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees and letting my beer dangle between them. “What the hell was that all about anyway?”

  I see her take a deep breath. We both know it’s time to show our hand. No bluffing anymore. This is the gamble. Come clean and love each other anyway… or die trying.

  “When I was fifteen, I fell in love with an older man. His name was Gray and he was charming and witty, and he made me feel beautiful, something that I had never felt living in Sage’s shadow. My parents didn’t approve, of course, but I didn’t care. I loved him. And he loved me.”

  “You told me about some of this, right? When I thought you were Sage.”

  Her smile is sad and bitter. “Even then, I wanted so much for you to know me, to see me, to understand me.”

  “I’ve always seen you, Willow. Just you. You’re the only one I wanted to see. Even when I thought you were Sage, I was seeing you. Feeling you.”

  She bites her lip again, looking down at where her hands now rest in her lap. “I didn’t know that. I only knew that I…I was falling in love with you. I never meant to deceive you. It just sort of happened. I was trying to fix things, but then…then…I saw a chance, a chance to be with you and…and I took it. Ebon, I’m so sorry,” she whispers, her voice breaking as a single tear slips from the corner of her eye and slides slowly down her cheek.

  Abruptly, I stand, running my fingers through my shaggy hair and walking to the window that overlooks a drab empty parking lot next door. I want to go to Willow so badly, to draw
her into my arms, to kiss her and hold her tight, to tell her that none of it matters now. I want her to know that the only thing that matters is that she’s here, that she came back. But I can’t tell her that yet. I still have too much to confess. I need to say it all before I get lost in her again. I owe her that much.

  “Finish your story,” I tell her quietly, still facing away, holding onto my control with every ounce of my strength.

  “Oh,” she says in a small voice, no doubt feeling rejected. “Okay. Sorry.”

  “Please don’t apologize to me again. You have nothing to be sorry for. I just…I need to get all this out before…” I let the sentence dangle, partly because everything after that is merely hope on my part.

  When I don’t finish, she clears her throat and continues. “Well, he…Gray…was my first. Sexually, I mean. Being with him was like being awakened. He showed me that it’s okay to like different things, not to hide behind someone else’s ideas. So I opened up to him. I was myself with him in ways that I could never be with my family.”

  I hate the spike of jealousy that I feel as I listen to her talk about a guy from so long ago. “What happened?”

  “He, uh…he liked to take pictures of me. And, honestly, I liked it when he did. We would look at them together and then we’d…do things. Ahem, unfortunately, my father found two of the pictures that I’d hidden in my room. One was of just me, naked, but the other was of Gray…with me.”

  I grind my teeth together, the mental imagery of someone else loving and touching and kissing and fucking Willow nearly unbearable.

  I know that I have to listen to this, despite how much I hate it, but the sigh she gives me carries so much regret, so much sadness that I almost ask her to stop. She’s been through so much already. But, bravely, she continues before I can.

  “Dad didn’t ask me about the pictures. He just took them to the police and filed charges against Gray for child pornography and statutory rape. I tried to explain that I was willing, I tried to take some of the blame, but no one would listen. Not one person. In the end, he was convicted on both counts and sent to prison.”

  Her words sound as though they’re coming from some place that’s so bruised that it’s numb now, her voice very robotic and detached. My guess is that it has taken her years to overcome the guilt and heartbreak.

  “A man went to prison. Because of me. Because I loved him and I wanted to be with him.” Her pause is long and pointed. “Kind of like I loved you and wanted to be with you. I don’t know why I can’t just learn to be alone, to shut off my emotions.”

  It’s hard for me to imagine what Willow has been through, and at such a young age, too. But I know that I don’t want her to regret sharing herself with me.

  “Never say that. Never regret what happened between us. I don’t.” When she says nothing, I offer a lame, “I’m just sorry that happened to you, Willow.”

  “My parents were so humiliated, like I did it on purpose, like it did it to them, to humiliate them. And that wasn’t all either,” she says quietly. “It was all my fault. My decisions. My weakness. The blame went on me. And for a long time, I didn’t know how to carry it. I was so upset, so lonely. So devastated at what had happened to Gray and how my family was handling it. I got so dejected, so depressed that I just felt like I was drowning. Right on dry land. I just felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. So I tried to kill myself. Twice.”

  “Fuck,” I breathe, closing my eyes and dropping my head. Thinking of her experiencing such sadness, such brokenness that she’d try to harm herself… Thinking of the world without her, of my life without her…

  I hear the rustle of her movements, but I don’t turn around. I can’t face her yet. Not until she knows.

  “My parents never got over it. They never saw me as competent, as anything other than that wounded, scared, tortured little girl who caused them so much embarrassment. So when all this happened, when Sage told them about you and what I did, then the…the stuff with your mom, they drew their own conclusions. They didn’t care what I had to say, what I thought or how I felt. It was just like before. They were reacting. Trying to control the damage before they got splattered with mud from poor little Willow’s life.”

  Bitterness. So much bitterness. And rightly so.

  “In some situations, families can destroy us if we let them,” I mutter, my own demons filling the room around me.

  “But that’s the thing, Ebon, this time was different. Yes, what I did to you was horrible, but I’m not that little girl anymore. I know I made an awful mistake by misleading you. But I can deal with the consequences. I am dealing with the consequences. That’s why I wanted so badly to tell you that I’m sorry. I never, never wanted to hurt you. I should never have lied. That was unforgivable. But I swear, I’ve only ever loved you, Ebon. I swear.”

  My heart aches when I hear her crying softly behind me.

  “That was my fatal mistake, too,” I confess.

  I hear her sniff before her wobbly voice asks, “What? What was your mistake?”

  “Loving you. I fell in love with you long before your deception, Willow. I was looking so desperately for hints of you inside Sage that when I found them, loving her–loving you–was effortless.”

  There is absolute silence behind me, but still yet, I don’t turn. Because there’s more.

  TWENTY-FIVE- WILLOW

  His words are music to my ears, but my heart hesitates. I feel reluctant because he hasn’t come to me, hasn’t turned to face me yet. There’s still something there, something hanging in the space between us. He’s holding back.

  When it doesn’t seem as though he’s going to speak or move, I try to find a way forward. But, simultaneously, he decides the same thing and our voices overlap.

  “Was the story you sent your story?”

  “There are things you need to know about me, Willow,” he says, just as I ask my question.

  I pause before I speak so that he knows I’m addressing his comment. “I told you this before, Ebon, and I meant it. You can tell me anything. Nothing you can say will ever change the way I feel about you.”

  My eyes roam his wide shoulders and strong back. He seems bigger than life since last I saw him, like he’s been very…physical these last months. His waist is as trim as ever, his butt as tight and round, his legs as long and lean, but his upper body is larger, more muscular.

  “You saw what my mother was like. Well, my father was very similar, only…nastier. It wasn’t so bad when I was really young, but the older I got, the worse it got. By the time I was sixteen, I realized that my parents dealt and used drugs, that my father pimped and often fucked other women, and that things were only getting in deeper and deeper as the years went by.

  “For the most part, I went to school, played sports and stayed the hell away from home as much as I could. I never drank or experimented with drugs, I had a nice girlfriend and I made good grades. I was a decent kid and, under different circumstances, I might’ve had a bright future. But that was before my father raped and killed a fourteen year old girl from my school. He overdosed her and had sex with her for almost an hour before he realized she was dead.”

  I’m speechless. I’m completely dumbstruck and my soul hurts as though from a physical wound as I imagine someone doing such awful things to my unborn daughter. My stomach squeezes uncomfortably and my chest gets tighter and tighter the longer he talks.

  His voice is somber as he continues. “I didn’t know any of this until I came home from baseball practice to find Talia, my girlfriend, tied naked to my bed, spaced out of her goddamned mind with some concoction my mother had given her. My mother…” he says, his voice dripping with disgust. “That fucking bitch gave me two choices: Confess to what my father had done and spend the rest of my youth in juvie or watch her overdose my girlfriend and probably go to juvie for it anyway. She was going to tell the cops that I did it, that I was experimenting with drugs and that I gave her too much. It was that or say that I’d been hav
ing sex with Ashley, the fourteen year old, and that she’d overdosed accidentally.” Ebon’s laugh is so bitter, it stings me to hear it, to hear the hurt. “She had it all thought out. Made it sound like she was looking out for me. It wouldn’t be murder one. It would be involuntary manslaughter. She promised that because it was an accident and because I was so young that they’d go easy on me. I guess that’s one thing I never thanked her for.” His laugh is anything but amused. “She was right. Thank God. Ashley’s death was ruled an accidental overdose because my parents testified that they were there and saw her earlier that night, bragging that she’d shot up her first kick of heroin. That was their idea of being supportive.”

  I can no longer stay seated. I can no longer watch Ebon relive this as he stands staring out the window, all alone, as though he’s a miserable island with no one in the world who cares.

  I stand and walk to him, setting my hands at his sides and resting my forehead between his shoulder blades.

  “Ebon, I’m so, so sorry,” I tell him, tears streaming down my face. “No child deserves that. They should never have done that to you. To her…” I can’t even finish. I thought my story was bad. I thought my scars were deep. I had no idea what bad even was until this. I had no idea that people, that family, could be so cruel.

  “That’s why I couldn’t feel any sadness when my mother killed herself.”

  “No one could blame you for that, Ebon. No one! Certainly not me.”

  “Maybe not for her, but what about for my father?” There’s a long, tense pause before he continues. “After I got fired, I flew to Vegas. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I just knew that I had to clean up my past. Somehow.

  “My father was at home. Half naked. Hung over. There was a hooker passed out on the couch. He told me that Mom had come for me. He hinted at what they expected. And what they’d do if I didn’t go along with it. I knew they meant you. You’re the only thing in the world they could use to hurt me, to manipulate me. But I also knew it would never end. Not as long as they were alive.”