Messy Love(81)

Mostly, I wished for that moment before the Sunday morning that ranked in my worst moments in my life.

All my days were dark, no light in sight, not even a brief moment with sun rays. I didn’t let any of those. They’d lull me into a fake calm I couldn’t have. It was only a question of time when I’d be knocked sideways.

He was around. I knew it, felt it.

So, I hadn’t seen my family in weeks. Ava had left a sad voicemail the other day, and I still didn’t budge. They needed out of my life for now.

My eyes fell on the short list of job offers. Most of them were already scratched out on the paper. The lines angry and so deep they almost tore apart the paper in my haste to strike them out.

I was fuck out of luck.

Then, someone knocked on my door. I started in front of my laptop. My eyes snapped to the closed door, ears straining to hear any sound. Greeting my teeth, I waited and stopped breathing. My heart sped up with possibilities, with vain hopes that had nothing to do with my life and my present. Because the truth was, I hoped it was Marissa at the door, that it was her that knocked again with more insistence, the sound louder than before. But I knew it couldn’t be her.

She said she wouldn’t be coming back again and I let her go anyway.

My heart didn’t stop beating wildly in my chest. The fucker was on a mind of its own, messing with my head more than I was already.

But where it beat and pumped blood so hard through my whole body, it didn’t warm me. No, the ice seemed to envelop me fast, awakening a sentiment of dread.

I had no idea how I knew, but I knew then.

My hope flew out of the open window in the living room. My excitement, vanquished, was just a memory. I was left with dread and that same fear that I loathed and knew like the back of my hand.

He was there.

My stomach rolled as I stood up. I had lost any sensation in my legs, but I walked to the front door and stopped right there, bringing my ear closer to the wood panel.

Breathing, low and even. That’s all I heard, but it raised the hair on the back of my neck.

If I closed my eyes, I’d smell the stale tobacco mixed with cheap liquor in his breath. I’d remember the sweat permeating his skin along with some whore’s perfume.

Body coiled tight, I pushed away the little boy inside me screaming, and I twisted the locks open and pulled the door.

The first thing that staggered me was that I was taller and more muscular than him. Funny how, when you haven’t seen someone in so long you couldn’t picture them as in any other manner than what you used to see them as a kid.

He didn’t tower over me, if anything, I was the one towering over him. It was over the time when I had to look up to stare at his face. He was the one looking up while I looked him down my nose.

But then memories collided with the present in my mind and the distance I felt from the man who made my life a living hell was gone. It only took one raised bushy eyebrow from my biological father to reduce me to a quivering mess only held up on my feet by my grip on the door.

He used to raise his eyebrow just before he would slap me, punch me or pawn me off to one of his “friends’’ to fuck me up too. Bile rose in my throat.

“No hello?’’ He rasped, and his voice sounded viler than even in my darkest memory. He snapped like he had smoked two packs of cigarettes before he knocked at my door and smelled of whiskey as if it emanated from his flesh, flesh that appeared too white to be natural. His eyes, dull but calculating, went from my face to above my shoulder to get a glimpse of my apartment. “Hell, thought your new family would have taught you something. Guess when you’re trash you can’t do any better.’’

Nasty words. Old insults came back as if blurted just yesterday to my bruised face. And I stood there, frozen in front of a man who I used to want him to love me but who had always given me disdain, hatred, and violence instead.

I was a man now, but it took this one man to reduce me to a scared kid who waited for his father to unleash vileness without doing a single thing to stop him.

“Let me in, son.’’

Son.

That hurt more than the other words, more than the insults. I was this man’s son, a man who held more semblance to a monster than a person.

His eyes turned from dull to hard as he fixed me, ordering me silently to let him in. And what did I do then?

I let him in.

***





MARISSA


“Meet Paul Adam Thornton,’’ Jamie said as soon as I walked through the threshold of the maternity room and my eyes landed on a bundle of joy in my sister-in-law’s arms whose smile mirrored the ecstatic and completely in love ones that split my brother’s face in two.

Quietly, I marched to the bed and glanced at our parents that went in a few minutes before me to meet their first grandkid. The tears on their faces spoke volume of the monumental moment.

Then, when I reached my brother’s side, and he gave me a side hug as his dark eyes didn’t stray from his wife and son, I got my first real look at my nephew. He was all pink and with a scowl on his tiny little face. His eyes tightly shut made me wonder if he wasn’t hoping to be back in his mom’s belly, but the way he took hold of my finger when I touched his pudgy little hand and gripped tight, I knew he was well and truly in our world. His head, covered by a cute beanie made it difficult to know if he had any hair, but I would have ample time to discover that.