by April Lust
“Mama? Is that you?”
I burst into tears, shaking. “It’s me, baby. I’m coming home.” I felt Eli’s arms circle me, and the sound of George’s excitement rang in my ears.
# # #
Pulling up at the apartment building was the sweetest moment of my life. Better than my wedding day, better than the moment I first held George in my arms. Even as it happened, even in the middle of my numerous emotions, one thing rang clear: it felt like the first moment of my new life.
We walked through the main doors together, followed by Eli’s crew. All of them wanted to hang out, decompress. I could understand that—exhausted though I was, I doubted I could sleep a wink. I understood, finally, their need to party after an exciting night like the one they’d had. There was too much adrenaline still pumping, though the effects were slowly starting to wear off. I had started to feel the pain from hitting my head, and there was pain in my arm from where Vitaly had twisted it. Vitaly the dead man. Well, he was better off where he was. Probably happier, too. I would never understand why he did what he did, not really. He had his reasons, though none of them made sense to a person whose heart hadn’t fallen apart in grief.
The moment I first saw my son, asleep on the couch, filled my heart with more joy than I thought I could stand. I didn’t want to wake him, but I couldn’t help myself. I crouched beside him, stroking his hair, needing to touch him.
His eyes fluttered open. “Mama? Am I dreaming?”
I heard chuckles all around me. “No, baby, you’re not dreaming. I’m right here.” He nearly launched himself off the couch and into my arms. I held him tight, trying not to weep but failing miserably. Carla sat beside him, and I held her hand.
“I love you, big guy. You know that, right? I did everything I could to come home.”
“You made it, Mama. Eli found you, didn’t he?”
“He did.” I looked up at him through my tears.
Then, a familiar face entered the room. I hadn’t thought to ask about him, so sure he was dead.
“Daniel!” A fresh wave of tears flooded me. “I thought…” I couldn’t go on. It was all too much.
“What, you thought they killed me or somethin’? Don’t you know me? I ain’t that easy to get rid of, kid.” I stood, George in my arms—I didn’t think he would let go anytime soon—and wrapped one arm around Daniel. He squeezed me tight.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t stop ’em,” he mumbled.
“Oh, Tone, don’t say that. There was nothing you could have done.” I was just too happy to see him alive. I’d been so certain he was gone.
The rest of Eli’s men shuffled their feet, looking around. “I guess we’d better leave you guys alone,” one of them said.
“Yeah. Come on, Daniel. We’ll get you to the hospital.”
I looked up at him. “You mean you haven’t been to the hospital? What’s the matter with you? You have to get a head scan, at least! I saw how hard they hit you! Oh, Daniel. I thought you had more sense than that.”
Everybody laughed as I went on, railing against him. I had to laugh, too, after a little while. How quickly I’d fallen into my old role of his know-it-all sister.
“Okay, okay. I wouldn’t go until they brought you back, if you need to know. But that’s fine. Gimme a raft of shit because I was waitin’ on you. Jeez.” He walked out with the guys, most of them still smiling. I resolved to know them all better than thank them personally for coming out to save me. But later. After I put my baby to bed and had a long talk with his daddy.
Carla sat up with me for a long time, while George dozed on and off in my lap. He’d locked his arms around my neck, and something told me that while I wanted nothing more than to sleep in Eli’s arms that night, my bedmate would be a much younger man. Not that I minded. I needed to be close to George just as much as he needed to cling to me.
“I can’t believe you got yourself out of that,” Carla marveled from her curled-up position on the couch. “I would have lost my mind. Nobody would ever have found me, because I would have panicked.”
“I did what I had to do. And I wouldn’t discredit myself if I were you. You’re pretty smart. You would have figured something out. Besides…” I looked across the room to where Eli fixed us something to eat. “I didn’t save you myself. I had a lot of help.” He met my gaze and grinned softly.
“And him? He’s…?” I nodded, leaving it at that. I couldn’t talk about Vitaly in front of my boy. I didn’t want to talk about him if I could help it. To think, Axel’s reign of terror, reaching us all those years later. The past was never really in the past, especially when dealing with an already crazy person like Vitaly.
Carla breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad.”
“Me, too.” I never thought I would be glad for a person’s death before, but I’d never been kidnapped and nearly spirited away before. Things like that had a strange way of putting life into perspective. He was a mad dog who’d needed putting down before he hurt anybody else.
“Well, I guess I’d better go.” Carla hauled herself off the couch, stretching. “I know you’ll need some rest, and God knows I do. Call me when you wake up, okay?”
“Will do.” I managed to get George to let go of me long enough to stand and hug my friend. “Thank you for being here with him. I know it meant a lot to have somebody he knew around him.”
“No problem. You know I love you.” Then, in a surprising move, Carla went to Eli. “I love you too, you big, scary biker. I don’t even know you, but I love you. Thank you for bringing her back.” She threw her arms around him, and the surprised smile on his face said a thousand words.
Then it was just the three of us. A family. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and we both looked at George. I knew, without exchanging a word with Eli, that this was the time.
“Honey, there’s something I want to talk with you about.” I sat down on one side, and Eli sat on the other. I noticed the distance he put between himself and George, like he didn’t want to crowd him. That single gesture meant so much to me. It told me he would always do what was best for his son, even though he might have wanted something different. He might have wanted to sit closer to him, to be near him, but he would wait for George to decide that that was what he wanted, too.
“What, Mama?” George looked at me, eyes wide. In that exact moment, I saw the man he would become. Strange, but true. That moment comes to all of us, I guess, when our children show us who they’ll be. For one breathtaking moment, he wasn’t a little boy anymore. He was a big boy, capable of understanding what I was about to say. He was capable and smart, and strong, and wise. Compassionate. Understanding of the faults of others. Probably more patient than his father or I would ever be.
“So, you remember how sometimes you would ask about your daddy. Right? Where is he, what does he do, how come he doesn’t live with us.”
“Right.” He didn’t get it yet. Well, I didn’t expect him to put it together. I mean, why would I happen to be talking about his daddy in the presence of a man who looked just like him?
“Well, here’s what happened. Your daddy and I were married, and we were very happy. But a bad man came along and tried to hurt your daddy, and I got scared. I thought it would be better if I left, because if I didn’t, the bad man would try to hurt me, too.” I looked at Eli, and he nodded understandingly. I was so sure he would never forgive me, but he already had.
“Daniel told me about it. I knew when I went in,” he said. “We can talk about it later.” I nodded. So Daniel had told him, the fink. I would let him have an earful.
I turned my attention back to George, who hung on my every word. All kids want to know who their daddies are, I guessed. “So I ran away. You were in my belly then. I wanted to make sure you were safe, and I wanted to make sure Daddy was safe, too. I hope you’ll be able to understand all of this one day. It’s pretty confusing right now.”
George waited. “Who is my daddy?” he asked.
“It’s E
li, sweetie.” I pointed to the man sitting to his right. “Eli is your daddy. He was my husband.”
George looked at him. “You said you were Mama’s friend!” I almost burst out laughing.
Eli’s mouth twitched, and he cleared his throat. “Well, I am your mama’s friend, George. People can be lots of things to each other. I mean, you and me, we’re already friends, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And now you know I’m your daddy, too. So we’re more than one thing.”
“I guess so.” He didn’t look like he knew what to make of the news. I had expected that. It was a lot for a kid to handle all at once.
He looked straight ahead like he was putting it together. “So you and Eli got married and now you’re not married anymore?”
“That’s right.”
“How come, though? How come you had to not be married anymore?”
I sighed. “It’s very hard to explain, honey. Back then, when I was scared of the bad man, I didn’t know what I was doing. Sometimes grownups make bad choices. Like you know how sometimes I tell you you’ve got to make a choice. Like if you want to stay up late, but you have school in the morning, what do I tell you?”
“That I have to make a choice if I wanna be tired in the morning, or go to bed on time,” George said, repeating the words I’d spoken a hundred times.
“Right. That’s a choice. I made a bad one because I was scared. I thought I was doing the right thing, though. I thought I was keeping us all safe. And I did for a long time,” I pointed out. “But that’s all a story for another time. When you’re a little older, you’ll understand it better.”
He sighed. “I hope so. I don’t understand it now.”
Eli chuckled. “I don’t understand it all, either,” he admitted. “Maybe, I don’t know, maybe we can figure it out together? You know, like if you wanna talk about it. We can do that.”
George looked up at his father, all shyness. “Okay. We can do that.” My heart just about exploded.
“It is okay that I’m your daddy? Are you unhappy about it?” Eli asked.
George appeared to think it over—he was always so serious. He wasn’t like some kids, who would rush to judgment. He always appeared to think things through. “No,” he finally decided. “I like it. You’re funny and nice. And you saved Mama like you said you would.” It was a start. I wished I could go back to being a kid, when everything was that simple. You’re funny, you’re nice, and you kept your promise. That was all George needed. Why did the rest of us have to make things so complicated?
“Okay, big guy, I think that’s enough talking for one night. We’ll talk about it more in the morning. I just wanted you to know who your daddy was. I didn’t want you not to know anymore. You understand?”
“I understand.” I picked him up with the intent of putting him to bed. He stopped me.
“Can Eli come, too?” Eli’s smile, reminiscent of the one on his face when Carla hugged him, told me everything I needed to know.
Epilogue I
Eli
“Come on, already,” I muttered, while Daniel fumbled with my bowtie. “I thought you said you knew how to do this.”
“I thought I did,” he muttered back, and I felt his fingers on the tie. He cursed, sighed, then tried again.
“Oh, my God. You’re gonna strangle me before you’re finished. Let me try.” I pulled away, looking in the mirror as I tried to fix it. “Can somebody please look up how to tie to bow tie online? It can’t be this hard. Come on. Somebody get my back today, huh?”
“Jesus,” Marco joked. “You’d think you never got married before.”
I shot him a look. “That was different back then. We didn’t do it right.”
“Seems to me you just get a license, have a ceremony, and you’re married.” Marco shrugged.
“Yeah, well, that’s how we did it before. I don’t know, I always felt like she might have missed out on something. Like she wanted to have a big wedding, even if she pretended like it didn’t matter. It did. I want her to have everything she wants from now on, even if that means I have to wear one of these fucking tuxedos.” I felt more uncomfortable than I ever had in my life. I didn’t think I ever wore so much clothing at one time, either. I had to fight the urge to pull at my collar. I felt like it was strangling me.
“I don’t see why you couldn’t have gotten married in your kutte,” Daniel grumbled.
“You’re only pissed because she made you wear a tux, too,” I laughed.
“Whatever. She didn’t make me do shit.” We all waited for maybe three seconds before we burst out laughing. Daniel’s big, round face went red. Tori hadn’t exactly been quiet in her insistence that Daniel fall in line with what she wanted. She’d marched into the clubhouse with an order form in hand and told him if he didn’t go to the store to get fitted for a tux, she would take the measurements herself. He had lasted maybe ten minutes before he got on his bike, with her following in her car to make sure he actually went.
I looked around the room, at my crew. It meant a lot to me that they would all be there, watching me marry the woman I loved for the second time. When I was a kid, it had mattered, but I hadn’t understood a lot of what it meant to get married. I thought it was something people did, especially when they loved each other the way Tori and I had. I didn’t understand back then that there was more to it. It was a family thing, too, as much as it was between the two of us. We were joining our lives together. The guys were part of my life, and I wanted them to be there to watch me make the second best decision I never made. The first was marrying her the first time.
One of the guys finally found a YouTube video on how to do a bow tie, and I watched two or three times before I followed along with him. By the time I finished, it looked pretty good. “See? That wasn’t so hard,” I said, even though I felt a little sweaty. It was nerves, I told myself, or the restrictive fucking clothes I was wearing.
Daniel muttered something about how he couldn’t wait to get out of his tux. “Come on, brother. It’s not that bad. I mean, you can’t stand it for a few hours? If that?”
“A few hours! I thought I could take it off after the ceremony! Oh, this is getting better and better.”
“I dare you to take that off after the ceremony and put on your regular clothes. If you think she would keep from clawing you because she didn’t want to get blood on her dress, think again.” Daniel glared at me. “And if you don’t stop being a bitch about it, I’m gonna tell her that you whined the whole day.”
A knock at the door. “Come in.” Carla stepped in, wearing her bridesmaid dress. She got a lot of whistles and catcalls, even though it was totally modest and down to the floor.
She smirked. “Nice example, guys. I wanted to bring George in. He said he wanted to be with the guys instead of the girls.” I looked around the room, and everybody knew from my face that they had to be on their best behavior.
George came in, looking pretty sharp in a matching tux. “Hey, your bow tie looks better than mine does, buddy.”
“It’s easy. See?” He showed me how the tie only clipped in place.
“What? You mean we could do that if we wanted to?” Daniel asked.
“Yeah, if you’re eight years old, you can do that.” I rolled my eyes, then turned my attention back to my son. “How you holding up today, big guy? You look great.”
“Thanks. Mama helped me. You look good, too, Dad.”
“Thanks, buddy.” I gave him a hug. It still sounded weird, him calling me Dad. He had started with it maybe a few weeks after we told him who I was. Before then, he called me Eli. Tori had worried about it, but I gave him time to get used to it. I wasn’t in any hurry. I knew I was his father, and that was what mattered. When he first called me “Dad,” it was off-hand. Like he didn’t mean to do it, but it just came out. He didn’t even seem to notice that he said it. But I did. And so did his mother, who ran into another room and cried her eyes out.
In the six months since
then, it had gotten easier for him to say, and easier for me to hear. I loved him, but it was still a big mental jump to go from an outlaw to a father overnight.
“How’s your mom doing?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes, then whispered behind his hand. “She’s crazy.” He rolled the tip of his finger in a circle on the side of his head. I didn’t know where he got that one from, but it took a lot of self-control not to laugh.
“I think all women are crazy on their wedding day,” I explained.
“But you already did this before,” he pointed out.
“Exactly what I said,” Daniel agreed.
“Yeah, but it’s different this time,” I explained, shooting Daniel another look. “Now, it’s for real. And now we’re already a family, right?”
