Saint Nicholas (5 page)

“Yeah?”

“Definitely. And hey, any friend of Saint Nicholas is a friend of mine, right?”

I rolled my eyes. Saint Nicholas. It was what all my buddies called me because I was on the straight and narrow. They’d all been experimenting lately with booze and weed, but I didn’t want anything to do with any of that shit. I’d seen firsthand the effects alcohol can have on someone’s life, and the last thing I needed was to end up like my father, wherever the hell he was.

“So where is she?”

“I dunno,” I checked my watch. It was half past noon, thirty-minutes later than our agreed upon meeting time. Her tardiness didn’t necessarily bother me, I was just itching to get a look at her again. While my friends might have been messing around with some of that wacky tobaccy, I had my own drug to get high on, which was the sight and smell of my girl, Sarah.

My girl
, I smiled.
Man, Mom’s right. You got it bad, buddy.

“C’mon,” Shakes slapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s go inside, I’m thirsty.”

I followed him into Carmine’s. The big guy was behind the counter, and he eyeballed me for a moment before he realized who I was: the kid from two weeks ago who’d been talking to Sarah. I followed Shakes around the store, saying nothing. He got a Coke and a bag of Combos and went up to pay. When we got to the counter, Carmine leaned over so he could look me in the eyes as I stood behind my friend.

“She okay?” he asked.

It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Sarah, and when I figured it out, I pushed past Shakes. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What happened?”

I figured a car accident, or maybe she got jumped or something. There were all kinds of scum bags in Hell’s Kitchen who would lie in wait for a girl like her to walk by. Young, vulnerable, there was no telling what they’d do, and I played over every worst case scenario in my mind, never taking my eyes off Carmine, who sighed and looked away, lightly shaking his head. Whatever it was, he must’ve thought I knew, and regretted saying anything to me at all.

“C’mon, man. Tell me. Please.”

“I shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s not my place.”

“Yo, Saint Nicky, what’s going on?” Shakes asked.

I ignored him and looked pleadingly at Carmine. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what he was talking about when he’d asked me if Sarah was okay. Was it serious? Was she in the hospital?

“It’s her dad,” he said. “You know where she lives?”

Her father? What did he have to do with this? Was he the one who was sick? Was he in an accident? I shook my head. I had no idea where Sarah lived—she hadn’t let me walk her all the way home—but I wanted to know more than anything else in the world, and I wasn’t leaving until Carmine told me, but apparently he’d gotten a case of the shutups.

“Cliffy’ll kill me. I can’t,” he told me.

“Look,” I said, pacing around his store nervously. “I know you don’t know me, but I’m a good kid, and I care about her. If she’s in trouble, I wanna help her.”

“It’s true,” Shakes added. “He’s one of the good guys. We call him Saint Nicholas, cause he’s a freakin’ angel.”

Carmine seemed to be wrestling with himself, and I wasn’t going to interrupt him with words. I just let him see the pain in my eyes over how worried I was over Sarah. Two weeks I’d known this girl, and already I was willing to do anything in my power to protect her and make sure she was okay. If her dad was involved, maybe I could—

And then something awful hit me. A punch in the gut that left an acidic taste in my mouth, and I had to double over and clutch my knees to keep myself steady.

“He…he doesn’t, you know,
do stuff
to her, does he?”

I braced myself for an answer I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.

“Depends what you mean by stuff,” Carmine said.

“Tell me where she lives!” I screamed.

With further reluctance, he wrote Sarah’s address down on a piece of paper. She was on 45
^th
, three blocks away. I grabbed Shakes by the arm and pulled him from the counter.

“Hey, what about my drink?”

“You’re gonna be drinking my fist if you don’t come with me. Let’s go.”

I beat feet out of Carmine’s and heard him yell after us before the shop door closed. “Watch yourself!”

Those were the same words he’d said to Sarah, and all they made me do was quicken my pace, with Shakes bringing up the rear.

FIVE

-
Sarah
-

I laid in bed drying my eyes when I heard a knock at the front door. All I’d wanted to do was go and meet up with Nicholas, but Dad had been keeping a close eye on me when he’d found out we were together, and had forbid me to leave the house. Mom, by proxy, was left to enforce the rule today, since he’d gone out somewhere and nobody knew when he was coming back.

Rolling over, I still felt every ache, every bruise left from the beating I’d taken. I’d woken up that night in a haze on my bed, wondering what country I was in, while Mom sat next to me on the mattress brushing strands of hair of from my sweaty forehead as I sobbed uncontrollably not only because of the pain, but because it had been caused by my own father, the one person who was supposed to love me unconditionally.

“Why?” I asked over and over, but Mom didn’t have an answer for me. All she could do was shake her head and give me a Percocet for the pain, and somehow that made me hurt even more.

I thought for sure it was one of dad’s friends knocking. No one ever came to visit us unless they wanted to pop in and speak with him, but when I heard Nicholas’ voice coming from down the hall, my throat clenched up, making it hard to breathe.

He knows.

Mom was trying to tell him that I wasn’t feeling well, an excuse she’d used often to make up for my absences. School, family gatherings…they were all interchangeable, but Nicholas was having none of it.

Without even thinking about what I was doing, I came out of my room and stood at the end of the hallway. I had to see him. No matter what. He stood there, pleading with my mom as best he could, trying to get her to understand that he was just a friend and he was worried about me. His eyes were red, like he’d been crying, and it was all I could do to keep myself from sprinting down the hall and into his arms. No one had ever cared for me that much, not even my mother. Maybe in her own way she did, but it wasn’t enough for me. Not anymore. Not after seeing the way Nicholas was reacting.

I crept slowly down the hall, sneaking up behind mom so she wouldn’t see me there. Nicholas took one look over her shoulder and screamed my name in a panic, bringing tears to my eyes.

“Sarah! Sarah! It’s me, Nicky. Please tell me you’re okay.”

He was stretching out his hand but Mom forced him back, turning to glare at me. She wasn’t a small woman by any means, and she did a good job of holding Nicholas off until some other guy that was with him gave her a wet willie, breaking her resolve.

Nicholas stormed past her and I stumbled into his arms. He held me close, and he held me tight. I cried into his shirt fighting for air as he rubbed my back in a calming effort that made me tremble all the more because all I’d wanted to do all week was feel him next to me. It was all I could think about. He was my buoy in the storm that was my life, and now that I’d gotten my wish it was a complete disaster. I was a mess. A battered, worthless mess. I couldn’t expect any person to love me for who I was, yet somehow there he was, wrapped around me like a bandage trying to fix what was broken.

Mom, seeing the way Nicholas consoled me, didn’t say anything else. She stood and watched, letting someone else do the job she should’ve been doing. When I’d calmed down enough to pull away and look at him, he wiped the tears from my eyes with his thumb.

“What did they do to you?” he whispered.

I almost started crying again, but I caught my breath before I could lose it.

Nicholas looked over at my mother, whose features had softened. I thought for sure he was going to rip into her, and braced myself for his rage, but when he asked politely if he could please take me away from here for a couple of hours, I flinched, never expecting that in a million years.

Mom pursed her lips, never taking her eyes off me. I pleaded with a look, letting her know it was the only thing that would make me feel better, but deep down knowing there was no way she’d agree to it. My father had us all under his thumb. Our home wasn’t a democracy, it was a dictatorship.

So I just stood there, taking in as much of Nicholas as I could before he’d be forced to leave. Which is why when she nodded, I nearly collapsed to the floor in a fit of more tears, only this time they were brought on by sheer joy. Mom was doing it, she was defying my father, and it was the first of many steps throughout the years that would mend the broken fences between us.

“Go,” she said softly, nodding toward the door. “Two hours, Sarah, and you better hope your father doesn’t come back because I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop what happens if he does.”

Nicholas took me by the hand and led me toward the door, which his friend was holding open for us. I glanced at mom on the way by her, and she absentmindedly patted my hair in a gesture of understanding. She knew what I was going through. Knew how much pain I was in, but here was this boy, wanting to help me through it. How could she say no?

“Thanks Mrs. Danniels,” he said to her. “Thank you so much.”

She nodded curtly at him and watched as he led me down the stairs until we were out of sight, and then I heard the apartment door shut, and the locks engage.

* * *

“It started when I was five.”

We sat atop Nicholas’ roof once more, only this time we were joined by his friend, whose nickname was Shakes. He sat on the other side of Nicholas, who refused to let go of my hand while I told him the story of how my life came to be in the state it was in.

“I’d swiped a pack of gum from Carmine’s, who at that time didn’t know our family. No one saw me until we got home. I’d tried to hide it, but I was five, what the hell did I know? I sat on my bed trying to blow bubbles, and dad caught me. He immediately questioned where I’d gotten the gum, and I panicked. Told him that Mom gave it to me, but when he confronted her about it, she didn’t know where it came from. Finally I had to confess that I’d stolen it from the store, and Dad marched me back down there to apologize, which I did with tears in my eyes. Carmine was cool about it. Said it happens all the time and that if every kid didn’t try something like that at least once in their life, then they wouldn’t be kids.

“Dad wasn’t so forgiving. I thought it was over, you know? I’d learned my lesson. Don’t steal, respect others’ property…stuff like that, but when we got home I got the ass whooping of a lifetime. I like to think that since I was just a little kid he went easy on me, but I’ve come to learn that his punches hurt just as much today as they did back then.

“It didn’t stop there, though. Every single thing I did wrong caught me a beating. Dad would go on and on about how I had the spirit of misguidance in me, and that if he didn’t beat it out of me I’d fall off the righteous path God had planned for my life. It was scary, because I really did believe that I had a demon in me there for a while. I could feel it, crawling under my skin, whispering behind my eyeballs to do things that defied my father, but really the only demon in my life is him. Along with misguidance, he told me I had a thousand other spirits leading me astray. Fornication, lust, greed, gluttony. You name it, and I’ve had it beaten out of me at some point in my life.”

I swiped a tear from my eye as I recalled all the nasty things my father had said to me over the years. Lately he’d been fixated on sex, and though I was still a virgin and had never kissed a boy before in my life, he insisted that I was dirty. Funny, since he’s so blatantly open about how unfaithful he is to my mother. Sometimes I think he takes his own inequities out on me, because he doesn’t want to deal with his own sins.

Glancing over at Nicolas, I saw the pain in his eyes, and it melted me. All of this—everything that I’d told him—I was used to it, but for him it was brand new, and for someone to hear it for the first time it must seem like a horror movie to them. For me, it was everyday life.

“Don’t,” I said, reaching out to cup his face in my hand. He was trying to be strong for me, but when I touched him a single tear fell from his eyes and landed on my fingers.

“What about your mother?” Shakes asked. “Can’t she do anything?”

“No,” I said. “She’s too scared, and I don’t really blame her. If you’d seen my father, you’d know. He’s a brute. Imagine Carmine, just with more muscles. He’s threatened her time and time again. Says if she does anything or goes to the police, he’ll kill her. Not just her, but me, too. What’s she supposed to do with that? All she can do is give me Percocet for the pain, to help take some of it away.”

“Where does she get those?”

“She has fibromyalgia. The doctor gives them to her, and she gives them to me.”

“Tell me what I can do,” Nicholas said, cupping his hand over mine.

His words tugged at my heart. For years I’d suspected that other people in the neighborhood knew what went on at home, but none of them ever bothered to intervene, but him? A guy I’d barely known for two weeks? It didn’t make sense to me, but I welcomed the confusion. I welcomed him and the beacon he’d become in the fog of heartbreak. Just knowing he genuinely cared was good enough for me, but I could tell he wanted more. A purpose, something to do so he wouldn’t feel helpless.

The tears flowed freely then as I looked deep into his eyes and held on to him. “Just…hold me,” I whispered.

He didn’t have to think twice. Nicholas got up from his chair and crouched down in front of me and I threw my arms around his neck while he buried his nose in my hair. I let it all out. The years of torture, loneliness, and pain; it was like the dam holding all those things back finally broke and I was free to be myself in front of another person for the first time in my life, and the fact that Nicholas was accepting of who I was meant the world to me, and mixed with those tears of sorrow were tears of relief.