Keeper of Keys

by Bernice McFadden

  Chapter One

  I found out about my condition a full four years before Journey came into my life. Journey, a fix-it man from Kingston who had come into my home to repair my roof and stayed to reconstruct my soul. Four years three months and two days to be exact. The afternoon the words rolled off of my doctor's tongue and dropped down to the floor, I was thirty-two years old.

  I say the words dropped down to the floor because that's where my eyes went right after he told me. My eyes left his mouth and went straight to the floor and so that's where I figured the words must have gone too.

  Doctor Tate allowed me to sit there for a moment, to sit there and stare at the words on the floor. I remember him handing me a tissue even though there were no tears. I remember him touching my shoulder, even though there was medication and new developments everyday that could prolong my life.

  If that was the case, I thought, why did he sound so sad?

  An hour passed before I was able to lift my eyes from the floor, another fifteen minutes before I could stand. Doctor Tate had been nice enough not to hurry me, or ask me to stare at the floor in the waiting area. He'd probably been just as nice to my mother eighteen years earlier. Doctor Tate was just a nice man.

  "Call me if you have any questions, any questions at all." He said as I walked out of his office and into the hallway. I just nodded my head. I couldn't speak.

  I don't remember the drive home or even the fear that always seemed to grip me when I navigated my Range Rover across the high narrow bridge that led to the subdivision I lived in. I must have been on auto pilot when I let my two Bull Mastifs, Ying and Yang, out of the house and into the yard and I don't even remember ordering Chinese food, but I must have because why else would Otis, the delivery boy from Lucky Mings, be standing on my front step, ringing my door bell?

  I do remember sitting down and attempting to draw up a list. Well that's what Doctor Tate suggested I do. "All of the men you've ever been intimate with. All of them." He said and I was thankful that his tone wasn't condescending, accusing or judgmental. I wouldn't have been able to take that, not then, and not now.

  I lit the logs in the fireplace, even though it was August, turned the air on and set the thermostat to forty degrees. I pulled on my favorite Shetland sweater and poured a glass of red wine. I remember all of that quite clearly, I can still feel the heat of the fire against my skin, the warmth of the wine as it slipped down my throat. I thought I was calm as I tapped the top of the pen against my teeth and looked down at the clean white sheet of paper that lay on the floor before me. I thought I was poised and ready to begin the task Dr. Tate had requested of me. I thought I was a rock until I placed the tip of my pen against the paper and began to write. I looked down and saw nothing but scraggly, zig-zaggy lines that meant nothing at all. I thought I had it all together until I saw that the paper was soaked through with my tears and I could see the soft camel colored designs of my Berber carpet looking back at me.

  "How could this have happened to me?" I said aloud to the walls that were waiting to be adorned with Charles Bibbs, Paul Nzalamba and Leroy Campbell.

  What a stupid question. I knew how it had happened.

  I wiped my tears away and finished my wine in one long swallow. "Get it together girl," I told myself and tore a fresh piece of paper from the legal pad.

  I began again.

  This time a name formed beneath the short, quick pen strokes. He was my first and I was eighteen years old. Lawrence.

  I could see his face as clear as if he was standing right in front of me. Long, lanky Lawrence, always smiling and bouncing a basketball. I smiled at the memory of him, and how his sweaty hands felt on my back as he fumbled with the hook of my bra.

  "Let me," I remember saying, hoping I didn't make him feel like less of a man by saying it. He said I was his second, but I believe I was his first, like he was mine. When my bra fell away from my body, his eyes went wide and his bottom lip began to tremble. His hands shook as he reached out for my breast. I flinched a bit when he rubbed his thumbs against my nipples. They were tender because I was a few days away from getting my period.

  "Does it hurt? I'm sorry." He said and his eyes were excited and apologetic all at once.

  I let him hold them and caress them for a long time; so long it seemed as though he had forgotten why he had brought me to his uncle's apartment, to his uncle's bed. But then his uncle yelled up from the street and his voice shattered the afternoon sunlight that covered our trembling, eager bodies. "Larry!" his name being called so loud from the street startled us and reminded me that I should feel ashamed of my naked breasts and the act I had come there to commit.

  "Gimme ten more minutes!" He yelled back down to his uncle and a chorus of baritone laughter floated up to us.

  We got naked quickly and he kissed me on my lips, filling my mouth with the taste of juicy fruit gum. My nails, painted red for the occasion, dug deep into his back when the thin pleasure finally snaked through my abdomen.

  It was over in five minutes even though he had asked for ten, but I didn't know then that I should feel cheated, I was too young and it was my first time.

  "I love you, I love you." He said the whole time he was inside of me and the brief moment afterwards when he breathed heavily into the pillow my head rested on. He didn't love me at all. I found that out two days later when I spotted him taking, Timeka, my cousin and confidant, up to his uncle's apartment.

  I could laugh at it now, but only for a moment because what had carried me back to that long ago memory was the same thing that had inaugurated it.

  I tried to remember Larry's last name, but it just wouldn't come to me. Well it was so long ago.

  I went on to the next one.

  Johnny. Cal. Luther. Thomas. Frederick. Hassain. Preacher. Ian. Samuel.

  The first names flowed as easily and as quickly as the wine that spilled from the bottle of Merlot that was making my head swim.

  I could see the scar on Johnny's shoulder, the space between Cal's teeth, the sixth finger on Luther's left hand, Frederick's bow legs, Hassan's thin mustache, Preacher's long arms, Ian's gray eyes and Samuel's bald head. I could see all of these things, as clearly as if I'd been in their company yesterday - but their last names remained a mystery to me. Afterall, last names weren't used in bed.

  Worse yet, who did I not wear a condom with?

  Who knew, who knew in deed? The voice inside my head asked me.

  I agreed. Who knew? It was the eighties, but as far as I was concerned it could have been the era of free love.

  It's not free now is it?

  No, it wasn't free at all; it was costing me my life.

  "Slut! Slut! Slut!"

  The words bounced off the wall, toppling over the empty wine bottle. I jumped at the sound of my voice, and snatched up the bottle before the tiny red teardrop of wine could escape over the green glass rim.

  Ying and Yang wandered in and cocked their heads.

  "I don't know who said that." I spoke to them as if they were human.

  "It wasn't me," I lied.

  Ying and Yang hesitated before moving closer. I had only had them for a month; we were still getting to know one another.

  "C'mon." I slurred, patting my thighs. "Come here boys." I beckoned, transforming my tone from adult to child and then gurgling toddler.

  They trotted over, sniffed my arms and legs and licked my face.

  I fell apart then, completely and entirely.

  Would this be the only type of affection I could safely allow myself? I would never be loved by another man, ever.

  It was the saddest thought I'd ever had in my life.

  I began to wail, and Ying and Yang howled as I wept and then curled up beside me when I fell into an une
asy sleep.

  We connected for good that night, and the love they would develop for me would be unconditional and everlasting.

  If only that could have been the case with the men I'd been with before Journey.

  Chapter Two

  The days that followed are a blur and I would share that fact with him. I would explain how ashamed I'd felt later on when I realized that I had drank and cried for four days and how I'd even thought of killing myself before I even remembered that I had a child. She was spending the summer in Sandersville with her cousins. I was planning to use those six weeks she would be away to have the house renovated.

  "Selfish of me," I would inject between thoughts.

  "No, not selfish, distressed." He would say and rub the back of my hand. It had been a month by then, and I still didn't trust him. Well he had lied about the stairs. "It should take a few days," he said to me and there he was a month later and I was grateful.

  I think I was still drunk when I backed out of my driveway. I know I had tucked the list of names beneath the windshield wiper of the car, so that it could remain in my view as a reminder of why I was going to die.

  I had drawn large red X's behind the first names I could remember, and double red X's for entire names I couldn't.

  I parked my jeep on the tracks, turned off the engine and waited. There was a 12:56 heading for Manhattan due to come along in less than ten minutes. I told myself that I would be dead before 1PM, just as Meredith the housekeeper was putting her key in my door. The dogs would greet her; she would pat their heads and then call out to me.

  "Ms. Chandler?"

  My not answering would not alarm her. The jeep was gone, so that meant so was I. Meredith would head to the kitchen, to start on the dishes I'd left there and afterwards she would go to the refrigerator and see the note I left there for her.

  Meredith,

  I've been killed by the 12:56 to Manhattan.

  Kai

  She might laugh thinking it was joke but the phone call from the police, the noisy neighbor that just happened to be coming from little league with his six year old when the train ripped through my vehicle, the newscasters voice coming across the radio; anyone of them would make it true for her and the laughter would stop. I turned on the wipers and watched as the names moved back and forth across my windshield and I found myself wishing for rain and then wishing for my mother. "Alice, is such a simple name," She would say on Saturday mornings as she pulled the hot comb through my thick mass of hair. "It doesn't make a statement and know one ever asks what it means or where it came from. Alice is plain. It's an old lady's name."

  It was an old lady's' name. She had inherited it from her great-grandmother. But my mother was far from old and even further away from plain. She was tall, shapely and colorful, like the strokes of paint she placed on the canvases that filled every room of the tiny apartment we shared.

  We lived in a basement apartment. She painted the water pipes that ran across our ceiling, blue and white, the colors of the sky. Grinning tigers and laughing bears played beneath the Banyan trees that covered our walls and a mural depicting the characters of the Wizard of Oz skipping down the yellow brick road took up one full wall of my bedroom.

  The neighborhood we lived in was crime and drug infested, the streets were always littered with garbage, gun shots and sirens punctuated the night and bright yellow police tape blocked the entrance to the playground five or six times out of every month.

  There was always music in my house, Jazz, Rocker's, Calypso, Soul. Always music and always dancing and laughing. We would dance and sing along to the records until we were soaked through with sweat.

  Eve, my mother's friend, worked in a record store and she would bring a new album to the house almost everyday. My mother's eyes would light up every time Eve pulled it from behind her back and yelled, "Surprise!"

  My mother always seemed to be surprised, even though it was something that happened quite often. She would throw her arms around Eve's neck, hug her tight and kiss her on her cheek.

  Twice, I saw them kiss the way Joni kissed Chachi on Happy Days. When they saw me looking, my mother smiled and fluffed the small afro she sported while Eve, who looked so much like my mother except for her wider shoulders and thicker legs, shuffled her feet, blushed and dropped her head.

  If my outside world was hell, then the haven my mother created within the bowels of the five story apartment building we lived in, was paradise, filled with all of the love and happiness that Al Green crooned about from the speaker of our record player.

  "Where did my name come from mama?" I would ask even though I had heard the story every single Saturday I could remember. But it had become a ritual of sorts between us. She would laugh as she parted my hair and smeared my scalp with pressing oil.

  "Well I said to your father one day, just before you were born, I said Harold,"

  That was the only part of the story that ever changed - the name of my father. Sometimes it was Henry, sometimes James. Other times, Robert or Clifton. The fact of the matter was she didn't know who my father was and if she did, she never told me.

  I did question her once.

  "Mama, why you always change my daddy's name?"

  "Do I?" was her response and she offered nothing else and I never asked again.

  "…this child that's coming need to have a special name, I said. A name that will make people stand up and take notice of him or her. Something that rings out, like the bells of St. Patrick's Cathedral."

  "Your daddy, well he had a plain name too and little imagination."

  She would laugh then, a hearty Alice laugh that made men smile and women wonder.

  "Well, he said, let's call her Bell. Can you believe that? Bell is just as old and plain as Alice! Men have no right at all naming babies, none at all."

  She would laugh again and ask me if I wanted bangs. I always did.

  "Well I picked up a book one day. Someone had left it out in the hall on the ledge near the mailboxes. It was battered old book with a picture of a beautiful green mountain and the prettiest blue water I had ever seen in my life. It was a picture of Hawaii!"

  She would get excited then and have to put down the straightening comb, because her hands would shake at that part and I already had two tiny brown marks on the back of my neck from the times she told the story, got excited and forgot herself.

  "Hawaii. Well I'd never really thought much about traveling, you know planes and all. Money and things. But I took the book because I thought I might like to paint that picture of the green mountain and blue water.

  And when I picked it up you just started moving around in my belly like one of them hula dancers. You know the ones with the grass skirts and the flowers around their necks?

  Well I said, Alice, there must be something special about this book 'cause this baby is acting like it wants to get here now!"

  I always got excited during that part of the story. I had to turn around and face her, because even though Alice smiled all of the time, she did more than smiled when she told this story, she glowed.

  "Well I didn't even get a chance to set up my paints and things, you were just going to town inside of me and all I could do is sit down and wait for you to calm down.

  So I did and while I was waiting, I started flipping through the book and reading about all of those beautiful Islands - more than 300 hundred of them! Black sand, white sand. Volcanoes, coconuts, pineapples! Oh, all sorts of wonderful things.

  And then I read a story about a volcano that erupted back in the 1800's and spewed lava all over an island that wasn't no bigger than Queens. But this island was special because it held the original keys to the palace of the first king of Hawaii."

  Her voice dropped an octave or two, building the drama.

  "The volcano erupted to everyone's surprise because they all thought it was just a mountain. Just a plain 'ole mountain!

  It happened so quickly that no one was able to get into the temple to save the
kings keys.

  Amazingly, everyone on the island got away unharmed. Not one person was hurt or killed. Not one. It was just amazing."

  And mama was amazed, I could tell by the way her eyes widened.

  "The natives believed that the volcano got mad because no one recognized it as a volcano and so to teach them a lesson, it erupted and took away the only thing that made their island special; the kings keys."

  My eyes would be just as wide as her's by then, not because it was a mystical tale, but because my favorite part was coming up.

  "So the natives named the volcano Kai…"

  "…Keeper of keys!" I would shout out and finish the story for her.

  "Yes, Kai keeper of keys." Alice would say and then cover me in kisses.