by lesley,allyn
She doesn’t say a word, but I can tell she’s interested, because she tilts her head my way.
A grin flits over my face, remembering it was also the same side, one pew behind, where one of her favorite people sat. I look back. “Behind us is where Ms. Clarke sat. She was MeMaw’s best friend.” Those two. I slap my thigh lightly, warmth radiating and spreading from my belly to my chest. “MeMaw and Ms. Clarke were the sweetest, but they loved to gossip.” Never maliciously though. “They both kept spare prayer cloths for the young females who wanted to buck church tradition and enter the sanctuary with uncovered hair, and were quick to speak with a parent whose teenaged child was inappropriately dressed.”
Chels’s shoulders shake with mine. Memories flitter back to me.
“This is the Lord’s house, Dyllan. You always wear your best to His house,” MeMaw’d say, straightening my tie. “And when someone says something you don’t like, just smile and thank them, you hear, baby?”
I’d nod, not really understanding. “MeMaw was a strange one. We never left church until she spoke to every member and all the visitors. Even the undesirables, as some of her church sisters would say.”
“Mother Tennyson stay talking to these bums,” others would remark.
I’d overheard things like that more than once as I saw MeMaw approach men and women who never dressed in their Sunday best.
“They were probably homeless, Dyllan,” Chels says, pulling me back to the present.
I’m trying to recall faces, voices, anything, but all I remember is MeMaw bending near them and inviting them over to her apartment anytime for something to eat. I’m pulled out of my one-way memory trip when Chels bumps her shoulder to mine. A few faces turn their heads toward us, but none approach or kick us out. My fingers grip the plush padding on the pew in front of me.
“I had no idea this would hit me so hard.” Everything here reminds me of the woman who showed me a better life. Tears trickle down. I’m too caught up to remind myself I’m a man and not a sissy who cries about old, dead shit.
“Dy-Dyllan?”
I feel Chels’s hesitancy and her desire to be brought up to speed, for me to explain the tears. It takes a minute before logic wins out. I do the only thing I feel is right.
“MeMaw’s real name was Helen Tennyson.” That’s all I can say for now. I shift my body, getting a comfortable spot then opening my coat. “She was like no one I’d ever met in my life.” I smile wistfully, remembering how we came up with her name over cookies and milk. “She was our next-door neighbor when my mom and I moved to The Spry.”
“What’s The Spry?”
I’m surprised she hasn’t heard of the project building that used to make the front pages of the New York papers back in the 1990s, but then again, why would she? All I can tell her is my truth, the one I lived for five years. “It’s a place where everyone is forgotten.”
“Oh.” Her lips pull down into a frown. “Would you... do you mind telling me more about MeMaw?” She tries out the name, and it doesn’t sound bad coming from her lips.
“My very first memory of MeMaw is when she gave me candy. I just remember being so hungry and crying, but Jess—”
“Who’s that?”
I forgot. She really knows nothing, because I’ve never shared anything about my past with her. “Jessica Parker. My birth mom. She liked it better when she was called Jess. Anyway, I was hungry, and she kept shushing me inside the elevator. Maybe she was embarrassed.” I shrug. “That didn’t stop MeMaw from digging into her bag for something she just ‘knew would put a smile on my handsome face’.” I air quote the part of MeMaw’s words that have stuck with me all through the years. “Then MeMaw said something to Jess, and whatever it was made her laugh out loud. It was the first genuine smile I’d seen on...” It’s like I’m back in the elevator as my mother’s boisterous sound filled the small space.
Chels’s warm hand lands on mine, encouraging me onward even before the words leave her mouth. “Go on.”
“It was her first real one since my father’s death.” It’s amazing how kindness, death, sadness, and random memories had marked my then two-year-old mind. I swallow the nervousness stuck in my throat. “But that was MeMaw. She’d help you, even when you said you didn’t need it. And most time, you didn’t even know you’d been helped.” I twist my upper body toward hers.
“She sounds like a very special lady.”
“She was the best.”
We sit in silence, neither feeling the need for words. I don’t feel judged. I don’t feel pressed to say anymore either. After a while, I find myself opening up to the woman beside me, unearthing memories I’ve only shared with my family. I tell some more about my four years with MeMaw.
“What made your mom, um, Jess leave you with MeMaw?”
“She didn’t really have a choice I don’t think. It was getting so bad that we got evicted from our apartment, and ended up staying with MeMaw. Jess tried to take me to a shelter once, but MeMaw made it clear that she could leave, but I’d be staying with her.” I guess, in the end, my mother knew MeMaw could and would take better care of me. “I don’t think anything was, like, written on paper or was made official, but MeMaw was my guardian right after I met her in ’89.”
“Th-that must have hurt,” Chels says.
I’d never considered that. Now, I’m confused, and my features say so. “How?”
“I mean, what mom gives up their child without being sorry to have to make that kind of choice?”
It sounds like Chels empathizes with Jess, but I can’t. It’s pretty cut and dry for me. She could’ve stuck around, beat whatever it is she was on, and chosen to remain my mom. Jess didn’t, because she didn’t care enough.
“That’s pretty harsh, Dyllan,” she tells me, and that’s when I realize I shared my rant.
“But true.” So damn true. I crack my knuckles, facing forward. “Sometimes, Jess would get so bad she’d come to MeMaw’s looking so raggedy like she hadn’t slept in days or smelled like she hadn’t bathed in weeks. No matter how late or what condition she’d arrive at MeMaw’s doorsteps, Jess was never turned away. Sometimes through our paper for walls, I would hear her crying to MeMaw. Next thing I knew, Jess was just there. Eating with us, going to church services with MeMaw and me, living life, and actually being a pretty decent parent.”
Time rewinds right before me.
Jess is looking healthy and strong.
Jess holding my hand while we grocery shop or watch television.
“I’d forgotten that we had some good times.” Her vibrant image pops in front of me: thick, dark brown hair that’s just at her shoulders, and a face with a strong jawline and hazel eyes—all three traits I share with her. Then, my lips twist, just as my gut’s doing, as other memories resurface as well. “But...” It hurts to finish my thought, so I stop, even now as a grown man who should be unaffected.
“But what, Dyllan?”
“All those ‘good times’ would end after a while, no matter what.” I don’t get the hold of addiction. It changes good people into fucked up, lying, warped versions of themselves who’ll do and say anything to feed the thing they believe they need most in life. Chels rubs my hand, and I realize I’ve stopped talking. “Maybe Jess would go a month, a month and a half, until the desire to get a hit became too overwhelming.”
She comes real close after that. I concentrate on my story, because this needs to come off my chest. If I tell her, maybe she’ll understand me better... maybe I’ll understand me better.
“It was November 11, 1994, a day after we’d celebrated MeMaw’s sixty-ninth birthday. It was just a regular day, you know?” My shoulders quake, seeing MeMaw as she was. “She was yelling from the kitchen for me to hurry, because she had this and that to do.” I make a loop with my hands, because that’s truly how my seven-year-old brain most likely brushed her off too.
“Merry Christmas,” a gentleman says to us on his way out the door.
Chels’s res
ponse is more vocal than mine. I’m stuck. My tongue refuses to unlatch itself from the roof of my mouth. I feel her shake me. “You okay?”
I don’t know, but I can’t tell her that. The story and myself are both back there, back on that day, too fearful to share, just in the sick case it’ll happen again. Realistically, I know it won’t, but right now, I’m seven years old and fear is all I can feel.
“Y-you can stop if you want to,” she whispers.
Could I? Could I really? I take courage from her words that give me an out. “No.” I need to tell this. My voice is low, not as strong as it was before. “I’m in MeMaw’s son’s bedroom—”
She butts in with a question. “Where’s her son?”
And it hits me again that I’ve been intimate with Chels, and I think I’m ready to take a permanent step with her, but she doesn’t know me. I clear my throat so I don’t dwell on how convoluted that is. “He died before I came into MeMaw’s life.” I blink back my tears. “So there I am, getting dressed, but taking my time. Being a real piece of work, I’m sure, because what kid likes school at that age, right?” She nods as if agreeing with my last statement. “As I was finishing, I heard a bang. It sounded close, and being from The Spry, it could’ve been anything.” Gunshots, a door being kicked in by the police, people fist-fighting, whatever. “I remember looking out the window, but not seeing anything. I called out to MeMaw so she’d know I was about to come eat breakfast. But she never answered.” I wish my story could stop here, but it doesn’t.
“Maybe she heard the same noise too? Went to see what was going on?” she offers up. Her hopefulness clutches my heart, and my voice stops working again.
Only thing is, no one ever interferes in situations like those. No one. My story bubbles up in my throat, and all I want to do is get it out in the open. I continue on as if she’d never spoken. “I headed to the kitchen, probably dragging my book bag so we could eat.” Some of the details of that day is fuzzy; some, not so much. “The creamy grits and scrambled eggs she’d promised me were cooling on a plate, but she was lying on the floor.”
“Oh no.” Her shaky hand lifts from her away from mine to cover her mouth, smother down her distress.
I’m speaking just above a whisper, but I think she hears me, because her eyes water as I continue. “I didn’t know what to do. Nothing I did woke her up. I screamed. I pinched. I even tickled her. MeMaw hated being tickled.” I swipe at a stray tear. “I figured she was tired, so I sat and ate my food. I waited for her to get up.” Instead of going to school, I stuck around the apartment. “It wasn’t until her beautiful mocha skin turned blue-black that I knew she was never, ever coming back to me.” I can hear Chels’s low “Oh nos” and “Oh mys.” “I never left that kitchen. I held onto her stiff, ice-cold fingers just like any other time, and kept pretending they were as soft as they used to be. She and I slept side-by-side on that uncomfortable kitchen floor until the NYPD broke down the front door.”
I couldn’t leave her by herself. For seven days, I was with MeMaw’s decaying body. The smell never bothered me, because this was my MeMaw, my entire world lying right beside me.
“Dyllan,” she breathes out, her voice kind of hitching, as if she doesn’t know quite what else to say to me.
“I didn’t go willingly. It took three officers to drag me out of apartment 10B. I was able to grab a picture of MeMaw she’d kept near the front door.” That same picture is now tattooed on inside of my right arm. “Since we weren’t family and MeMaw didn’t have legal guardianship of me, I was placed in the foster care system.”
“What about your mom? No one tried to contact her, find her?” Disbelief elevates Chels’s voice.
Head down, all I can think is how naïve she is to the world of abuse. “Where do you go to find a dead woman?” I don’t know if Jess is dead, but for all intents and purposes, she might as well have been. Who’s going to award an addicted mother a kid? She’d have to clean herself up first, prove to the courts she could care for me. Either way, foster care would be my destination for a good while. “The screams that followed me toward the back of the police car were my last sounds. I didn’t say one word until I was seventeen and opened my mouth to save Chuck’s business.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
A weight’s been lifted now that she knows my history... knows me, but I’m also tired. A weariness I’ve never experienced enters my soul. I think about Caren dying so young, and her son, who’s hooked up to God knows what. I sag down on the pew, facing the empty, wooden cross in front.
“Peace is there, Dyllan. I know, ‘cause I got mine from that cross and the Man who hung there,” she’d tell me often.
I’m not sure how long Chels sits there, just breathing, not pestering me for more before I’m opening up again to her. “MeMaw would tell anyone who’d listen how she’d first stumbled into this church on a night when all she felt was despair and hopelessness.” I close my eyes, and am back inside 10B on my fifth birthday.
“I wanna tell you a story.” MeMaw held me close to her chest while I’d sat on her lap on the couch.
I’d come home expecting to see Jess, so we could go to the park like she said we would.
“I ever told you how I gave myself to the Lord?” she asked.
“No.” I sniffed. All I’d kept thinking about was Jess and my messed up birthday. I mean, how’d she keep her promise to come get me when it was getting so dark outside? She knew MeMaw didn’t like me out so late.
“Dyllan, you listenin’?” she asked.
I wasn’t. I wanted cake that Jess had promised we’d eat together.
“Dyllan,” MeMaw said once more.
I nodded just to get her to talking because maybe after she was done, Jess would show up. I think she knew, because she chucked me under my chin and held my gaze for the longest time before she went on. “I was ‘bout your Momma’s age and I was feeling real awful. I was doing some bad things for a real long time.”
This made me forget about the park, the cake, and Jess. This was MeMaw. She’d never done a single bad thing. Ever. The whole world knows this.
“You? Bad?” I couldn’t believe that. “Like stole Jolly Ranchers?”
I was five, and that was pretty bad in my book.
“When you get older, I’ll tell you ‘bout that, ‘cause every one of us gots a story, baby. Don’t you go judging people too harshly, you hear?” I nodded, still not getting it, and she continued, “All you need to know is I was walking these Bronx streets, so cold and lost. I don’t know how I ended up in Harlem when I ain’t had two nickels to rub together. But, there I was outside Abyssinian, when I heard the most prettiest singing.” MeMaw’s calloused hand had fallen on my head, stroking my black hair. “I stumbled into that church. I didn’t know up from down. All I knew was I wanted a change.”
“What did she do? Was she shunned?” Chels asks, breaking me from my memory.
“No. She told me she came in, prayed, and gave her life to Christ. And, that was that. This place, the people, they became her family. She met her husband here and married him when she was nearing thirty-six years old. It was here she and her church family prayed that her womb would open at a time when it should’ve been impossible. She sat on these pews, receiving solace from her family when her husband died too young of heart failure and left her as a single mother with a teenage boy. It was this church, and the cross in front of us, where she was able to find the strength to forgive the man who shot her only child to death before his eighteenth birthday.”
I stare at the same cross now, hoping to find just a smidgen of what MeMaw found over and over.
I feel no peace.
I don’t expect a miracle.
I find no forgiveness or understanding.
These were the things MeMaw told me she’d found every moment she spent around ‘like-minded folk’, as she used to brag about with a twinkle in her eye. I was too young to understand, and even now, my twenty-six-year-old brain can’t piece together MeM
aw’s spiritual awakening, nor the harsh reality of what I’ll be facing when I go back to the hospital.
But, I have to try something. Standing abruptly, I head to the front.
A quick pan of the room shows me there’s only a few of us still inside: me, Chels, an older gentleman, and a woman with a bright red hat with some fancy feathers on the front. They look to be in deep conversation as I walk past them, intent on getting whatever MeMaw claimed was here. I stop short, in front of a table with a white table cloth and an open Bible. I look up again, wondering when it will happen.
When will bad shit stop happening to me?
When will I stop harboring resentment about Jess choosing herself over being my mom?
When will I stop being mad at the universe for taking away MeMaw?
I feel them again. Tears. They are flowing down my cheek, streaking it. The tears come from a deep part of my soul I’d used sex to hide behind. I hear feet coming toward my kneeled position. I refuse to get up until something, anything happens. Loud voices I don’t recognize join me in my silent prayer.
Then, something happens.
There aren’t any words I can use to describe it.
I’m not overly spiritual, but something happens. I feel it. A newness seeps into my bones, swims into my bloodstream, and settles my inner man.
“Amen,” I mutter, standing to my feet that are steady as ever. I wipe my face, turning to thank the unknown strangers who prayed me through, a saying MeMaw used to share, which I never understood until now.
I extend my hand to the man. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“He hears us all.” He shakes my hand.
Like sentiments can’t pass my lips with his level of sincerity, so I nod. Then, I turn to the hunched over woman with the fancy hat. “I’m so grateful—”
Her head lifts. Her dark brown eyes come alive and her lips twist into a hearty smile. “Dyllan, Dyllan Parker, is that you?” I feel her tugging me toward her, pulling on my chin so that my face lowers to hers. “Oh, Jesus. As I live and breathe.”
