“After my mother died, I apologized to her for those bad thoughts I had of her.” He tiptoed his fingertips along his knee as his internal battle for redemption continued. “Hell.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know her story; she never told me. And the way she grew up, that was grown people business, you know? Maybe she didn’t know he was married, and even if she did, that was a long ass time ago. She used bad judgment, I guess. There was no sense in getting all upset about it. She still was a good person and she loved me, and was good to me. She was a real good mother, a damn good mother, and all I did was break her heart, just like my father had.” He’d had enough. One tear budded in his eye, and when he went to swipe it away, Taryn grabbed his arm in a firm grip. He slowly turned to her as she forced him to let it fall. No, this time, he was not allowed to escape. He felt the slow trickle baptizing his cheek.
Am I now saved?
They simply stared at one another. She forced him to stay in the moment, stood by his side as it happened, but blocked his exit—made him feel it, accept it, release it, and watch it fly away.
“Nick…”
“Yeah.”
“I need to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Have you ever met your father?”
“You just… you just don’t stop, do you?” He shook his head and smirked, looked away from her. “Taryn, you’re doin’ too much. I’m not really tryna get into all that right now.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause it’s not a good time, that’s why not.” He couldn’t hide his anger; it oozed forward, soon to cover them both in tar.
“It’s the right time. You’re already talking about him. Do it now while the iron is still hot.”
“How can I like you so much and hate you right now?” He grinned sadly.
“I must be on the right track then.” She laughed lightly.
“I have no idea where my father is, Taryn, but I suspect I saw him one day.” He turned away from her, took a deep breath. “I’ve never told anyone about this…nobody, Taryn. You’re the first. It was the last straw for me, I believe.” He clasped his hands together. “I was in the seventy-third precinct, still fairly new, and sitting at my desk. These two men walk in, right? And one is tall and thin. He stands there talking about he had parked on a street, I forget which one, but then he went into some establishment and when he came back out, his car had been stripped to the bare bones, the goddamn frame.” He chuckled.
“We’re talking car assembly style, baby! I look into this motherfucker’s eyes, and they were just like mine, Taryn… just like mine.” He paused. “Some say my eyes are blue, some say they are gray, but they are a combination of both and depending on how the sun hits ’em, they’ll look more like one or the other. He had those same eyes. The same color, same shape, everything.”
“They’re beautiful, your best feature.”
“Thank you. Anyway, my curiosity got the best of me. After a minute or two, real cool and nonchalant, I get up and look down at the paperwork being filled out by another officer taking his statement and uh… I look down, Taryn and…” He shut his eyes real tight. His brain felt like it was swelling in his goddamn skull and threatened to shatter like the currently fragile thing that it was. Suddenly, he burst into tears.
“Oh no…” He groaned.
The torrential outburst completely took him off guard. He quickly shielded his eyes with his palm, heaved uncontrollably, and leaned forward—dying… dying… dying…
He heard his own sobs, but internally blamed them on someone else. It couldn’t be him! No way! Her loving empathy surrounded him as she no longer gave a damn about his warnings and embraced him, threw her sparse but warm weight upon him, wrapping him up in her arms, giving him exactly what he needed. After a few moments, he composed himself, caught his breath, and continued.
“I’m fine… I’m fine… It uh, it said on the paper that his name was Franco…and his last name was Vitale, just like mine.”
He sighed and sat back up. She let him go, but she stared at him with such intensity, holding on to him in a different sort of way. “For a moment, I would’ve liked to pretend I’d never seen him. My heart was racing, Taryn. Even if he wasn’t my father, I knew that man was some kind of kin to me, he had to have been. I never even knew my father’s address, or where he lived, nothing. I’d ask, my mother wouldn’t answer. I only knew his name. I don’t think it was ’cause she didn’t want me to know, but because she knew I’d go looking for him and then get my heart broken. Little did she know I’d already tried to find him. I was happy that I hadn’t… She didn’t trust me though, wanted to protect me. I loved hide-and-seek too much.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Regardless, the eyes don’t lie, Taryn. I knew it as soon as I looked in his face. All my mother gave me was her hair and lips; the rest was all Vitale! He had all of his hair, but most of it was threaded with silver. I could have said something right then, maybe solved the mystery, but I chose not to.
“I preferred to not know, because he’d never come for me and whoever this bastard was that had been robbed, his car picked apart until there was nothing left, he probably knew where my father was if it wasn’t him—and whatever he had to say, I was certain I probably didn’t want to hear it, you know? Shit, maybe you don’t know.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to take the risk ’cause it could go wrong. He could reject me all over again, Taryn. And then, I’d be rejected in front of all those people, all of my peers! The same people that looked up to me, treated me like I was the greatest!”
“You were afraid you’d lose their respect. It’s amazing the tricks our minds play on us when we seek to protect.”
“Yeah… like this entire conversation shouldn’t be happening, but it is, because maybe like you said, it needed to happen. But yeah.” He shrugged. “I needed their admiration. I couldn’t risk it. I’d be fuckin’ mortified if he stood there and told me he was not related to me, had no kids in B-Ville. Everyone in that place would know I didn’t know who the fuck my father was but more importantly, that I still cared.”
He was quiet, watching the minutes dance and spin around until he’d caught the next train holding a bounty of ‘speak now or forever hold your broken pieces of a heart’…
“Here I was, this grown man still wanting his daddy, Taryn. Standing there in my uniform, still wanting my fucking father to love me.” A tear streamed down his face, and then another.
Ain’t no use in wiping them away anymore. I’ve blubbered in front of this woman, nose all snotty like some little kid forced to go to bed early… Jesus Christ!
“The damage was done. When I looked in that man’s eyes, I could see he wasn’t going to give me what I needed. It was too late to be loved. There would be nothing that could make it alright, Taryn. Because he knew he had two sons. He had to have known one died. He knew the other one was alive… But to him, we were both one and the same.”
His heart was a pine box, and that’s where Nick and Marco lived!
“…And he never came to get me. No ballgames, nothing. He did NOTHING!”
He never came to tell me everything would be okay.
He never loved me… and that’s the hardest part of all.
“Holidays.” He shrugged and laughed sadly. “I hated holidays because they’d show those commercials of families all piled around tables for dinner, a big, brown turkey in the middle and smiling faces everywhere. Christmas trees with fancy ornaments passed down from generation to generation… I never had any of that shit, Taryn. Family, huh?” He shook his head, wiped another tear away. “The damn holidays… yeah, great. He never came around at all. He didn’t respect my existence. He didn’t even acknowledge me, and that’s the worst kind of disrespect a man can ever receive. Is there an expiration date on love? Probably not, but none of us are promised tomorrow.” He sucked his teeth, pulled back from the pain, and continued his trek down the lonely road that had turned his world inside out.
“So, did you just let h
im walk out of there? Not say a word?”
He shook his head. “Not quite. That man was filing a report, worried about his fucking car being stripped but not about where the fuck his son was, or how I was doing… Shit.” He looked away. “He filed a report about his fuckin’ car, Taryn. Was mad as hell, too, isn’t that something?” He clicked his tongue against his teeth, and braved through the hurt. “He cared more about that hunk of metal than his own flesh and blood. Let me uh…” He leaned back in his seat for a spell, and looked up at the ceiling. “Let me move on from that… Yeah, so, this happened, and right after that … is when I first tried cocaine. I didn’t take it again until many years later though.” At the mention of the word, he sniffed, his nostril identifying with his past, wanting to partake just one…more…time…
“I stole his information before I left work, the documents. And I looked at his number and address, memorized them, but then threw it away,” he said, fading away from himself. “I threw away his report, too, as an act of revenge. It was petty, but I did it anyway. Because I couldn’t punish him, and because it was just too much for me to take, I got high that night… Matter of fact, it was less than twenty-four hours after that encounter that I got lit the fuck up. The alcohol didn’t cut it that evening, so I ventured out and looked for a pain reliever…
“I wasn’t thinking clearly…but it happened.” He shrugged. “I grew up around drugs; most of my friends either used or sold them, so it was a part of my life in some shape or form, from an early age. Ironically, seeing all the homicides I had viewed and investigated up until that point hadn’t made me shy away. I’m sure that didn’t help, all the mayhem and craziness, but it hadn’t pushed me over the edge just yet. My life became like a sea of colorful, wooden building blocks.” He raised his hand in the air, emphasizing his words. “Some were larger than others, but they were all toppling over on top of me. And I lay right there underneath them, suffocating, my life slowly fading away…disappearing.”
“And yet here you are.” She smiled wide at him, patted his back. “Alive, breathing, and making it.”
“Hmm, making it?” He sniffed and smiled as he leaned forward and looked down at the ground. “You messed me up. I came outside to talk to you, flirt a little bit, get a hug or two and this is the thanks I get!” He cracked up, tossed her a glance from over his shoulder.
“Yup, it is the thanks you get, because you just gave yourself a gift. Unwrap that shit and try it on, honey. I bet it will look good on you…”
Chapter Seven
“Can I talk to you about something you mentioned the other day in group?” He picked up his glass of pink grapefruit juice, the pulp swimming atop it, and took a small sip. Then, he set it back down on the table as the sound of forks and spoons clinked and clanked against plates and bowls and mixed with swirls of discussion, and small bursts of chatter erupted throughout the small cafeteria.
“Yeah, sure.” She ran her hand along the edge of her napkin, sat a bit taller.
“You’re so young to have had breast cancer.” The man picked at his spicy sausage link while glancing down at the butter-drenched grits, two slices of crisp bacon and small pancake on his plate. He then looked back into her eyes. “It struck me as a rare thing, you know? I mean, like, what are you, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight, tops?” They’d been sitting there, huddled up close in the modest cafeteria, as they ate their first meal of the day.
“Well.” She turned away and folded her napkin over a time or two, toying with the thing. “I’m actually thirty-one but there are a lot of misconceptions about breast cancer. It is more common than some may realize. For instance, there is about a one in eight chance that a woman under the age of forty-five will develop the disease. Unfortunately, I was that one.” She sighed as she casually looked back up at him. “Also, that one in eight is usually a minority, despite the fact that white women are more at risk for the disease. But there are other risk factors that contributed, not just my race.”
“Such as?” He plucked his carton of milk from the table, opened it, and took a generous gulp without bothering to pour it into a glass.
“I have a family history of it. My grandmother and aunt had breast cancer, too.”
He nodded in understanding.
“You’re a survivor.” In that moment, he scanned the beautiful creature up and down, and her strength made her all the more sexy in his eyes.
“Nah, I’m a warrior.” She grinned before popping a biteful of thick French toast into her mouth. The damn thing was drenched in sweet syrup and a dollop of the light brown sticky stuff adhered to her lower lip. She quickly swiped it away with a slow glide of her pink tongue, and he watched the entire episode, turned on by the imagery of it all.
“I like that.” He laughed lightly, leaned back a bit as he focused even more on her. “You’re a warrior…Yeah, that’s nice… real nice.” Just then, Frieda walked past and gave them both a gentle, ‘Hello,’ accompanied by a nod of her head. They simultaneously returned the greeting, and he could’ve sworn a slight smirk lined the lady’s face before she’d finished her trek.
“I don’t trust her…” He watched the woman move about the cafeteria, then finally exit the area.
“Why? You don’t like Frieda?” Taryn said in astonishment behind a hard swallow of scrambled eggs.
“No, it’s not that I don’t like her; it’s just something about her.” He looked back at the door from which she’d exited, then faced Taryn once more. “I can’t put my finger on it quite yet. I just get a vibe from her that rubs me the wrong way, you know? I mean, I think she’s sincere in some regard… but, I dunno.” He shook his head. “You know that I should’ve been kicked out.” He paused, looked at her. “It clearly states in the handbook that there is no tolerance for physical violence in this facility. It’s almost like she wanted me to kick Oliver’s ass… Strange.”
“Not strange to me, and other people have gotten into fights in here and not been kicked out, either. Trust me. I’ve seen it. Also, you didn’t punch him. You shook the living shit out of him, but you didn’t punch him.”
They both burst out laughing.
“Anyway, we were talking about something else.” He took another gulp of his milk. “Sorry for my ignorance. You’d think I’d know more because of my mom’s death but her cancer came and happened so quickly, that uh, we didn’t have time to research, get educated. It was ‘BAM!’” He clapped his hands, imitating the sound of a lightning strike. “She was sick, then in the hospital for a few weeks, then gone.” He hung his head for a spell or two. “I never got to really say goodbye to her, at least not in the way I wanted to. It happened so suddenly, like it wasn’t even real. I couldn’t even catch up to what was happening, you know?”
“Yeah…that had to have been hard,” Taryn said solemnly as she sipped on her cranberry juice. She lightly patted his hand, then stared off into space. “I suppose it is a bit easier if you know in advance, can prepare and deal with it. Sounds like you had time for none of that, making it all the worse. It’s quite obvious that you loved her very much.” She offered him a sad smile.
Nodding, he turned away, not wanting to travel too far down that miserable road again. The damn thing was covered in overgrown weeds, creepy crawly things, and alarming apparitions that threatened to call him by name. No, he needed to stay right in the here and now, devoted to getting to know this woman he found himself clinging to more and more each day.
“I bet you have a lot of her qualities, Nick.” Her voice broke his tranquility, pushed the grief back into the forefront.
“Yeah? I hope so.” He picked up his fork and played around with his now cold scrambled eggs. “She was a good woman…a real good woman. I miss her each and every day.” He thought about his mother so much while in treatment as of late, it seemed as if she stood right there in the mornings, shouting his name to get up and get ready for school…
Lo siento, Mamá… He would prefer to say sorry in person, though…
; “Good; those memories will keep you whole. Do you believe she watches over you?” She pushed her plate away and began work on her sliced strawberries neatly piled into a white bowl.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I kinda hope not.”
“Really?” She laughed lightly, slight confusion in her expression. “Why is that?”
“If she saw the shit I’ve been doing, Taryn, she’d crawl out of her grave and try to beat me over the head with some footwear.”
They both burst out laughing again.
“I’m serious. She had this old shoe, right? Brown and chunky.” He chuckled. “I don’t even think it was hers. She’d hit me on the ass with it sometimes. Damn, that thing hurt. She was a little woman but could beat the green off a blade of grass.”
That had them both in stitches again; and then, he felt her brush against him, ever so subtly. A brief touch that filled him with indescribable elation.
“I was always getting into trouble. She’d say, ‘Nicky’ a million times a day. It was my nickname from her.” He took a quick sip of his juice and drifted in the land of mother-laced memories, an unbreakable smile on his face. “She’d say, ‘Nicky, es un pequeño muchacho malo.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I was a bad ass little boy; that’s what the hell it means!”
After another bout of laughter, they quieted down, and found themselves staring at each other…
You’re the most beautiful woman in the motherfucking world, Taryn…
In the Nick of Time Page 17
