The Birth of Bane (16 page)

I came around
the fireplace and peered through the twin, wood-framed, glass doors
with their gossamer curtains and saw her. She was sitting a rocking
chair, one I had never seen before. She was staring out at the
darkening day, over the deck and rest of the side yard, her eyes
locked on the distant tree-line. She wore simple grey sweats, top
and bottom. I couldn’t see her feet, because she had her favorite
white and red-colored afghan over the lower regions of her
body.

I stopped cold.
The lighting was, from left to right, illuminant to dark and cast a
shadow beginning at the front of her cheek bones and grew
progressively intense toward the back of her head. Her hair was in
near-darkness. Though she was only thirty-eight at the time, it was
like seeing her through a wormhole. As plain as if were written in
the sky, I knew I was looking at the future. This would be my
mother in forty years – old and frail, tiny and worn, especially if
nothing changed. If I didn’t get her away from my father, this is
what she’d become, a husk of the vibrant woman I had known as a
child. The very woman I’d seen traipsing about the house almost
form the moment we’d moved here would be dead.

She turned to
look at me.

I was
astonished.

The woman I
thought I was seeing was entirely different. She wasn’t broken or
fragile. She wasn’t overburdened by a grueling life, downtrodden by
a brute of a husband. Yes, she was crying. Yes, she looked small to
me, but my mom was a petite woman. I’d grown bigger than her over
the course of my thirteen year. I passed her in height right before
my fourteenth.

When her eyes
met mine, when those dark, warm pools looked into me, there was
nothing but strength within. There was nothing but
resolve.

“
Mommy?” I
ventured, my voice more like the boy I’d been than the man I was on
the verge of being.

“
My marriage is
over, son.” She said it succinctly as if her mouth needed less
movement to utter the correct amount of syllables.

I felt icy dread
grip the center of my chest. It was suddenly hard to
breathe.

She noticed at
once. “Nothing happened… well, outwardly that is.” She shook with a
chortle, a weary, yet confident resonance of her
mid-section.

I was confused.
“How do you -?” I tried.

She finished, “I
know?”

“
Yeah.”

“
I think I’ve
known for some time. I just needed someone to tell me what I was
thinking was the right thing to do.” She pushed herself straighter
in the rocking chair. “And not just for you kids, but for myself as
well.”

I was thrown off
kilter as the import of what she’d said sunk in. I wasn’t always
this slow on the uptake, but there was a lot of emotion to wade
through. I know for a fact she’d talked with her close friends
about my father. I know she confided in some of my uncles over the
years, but none of those conversions had borne any viable fruit.
What had changed? Who had she…?

The thought
burned away like film left to long on a projector. It dwindled into
nothing, leaving only a clean slate, bathed in white.

Our eyes
locked.

“
When?” I asked,
certainty growing like weeds.

“
Within the last
hour,” she began. “I can’t be more specific than that. I was
keeping track of the time.”

“
How?”

She looked back
toward the horizon made ragged by the tops of the trees. “On the
sunlight.” Her voice was miniature. “I was watching the clouds
change color, asking myself what I was going to do different this
year.”

I came forward,
kneeling, putting a hand on her knee. It looked huge. “She told
you?”

“
Not in the way
you’re thinking, Jer.” Her hand came to rest upon mine. “I was
staring at the world out there, thinking about things in here.” She
brought her other hand to her chest. “And suddenly, she was with
me.”

“
Just like
that?” It seemed too simple to be true. Yet, I had no issue with
the fact I was referring to a woman who’d been dead for more than
fifteen years.

It was a
mothers’ knowing smile I received in return. “Yes, my beautiful
boy, just like that.”

“
And now you
know what you have to do?”

She nodded,
reaching out to stroke the stubble on the side of my head like she
used to do when I was much younger and had longer hair.

I grabbed her
hand after a time, intent on kissing the back of it. Her scent
registered before my lips made contact. She smelled different. I
stopped to look up at her.

She was still
smiling. “It’s her. I know.”

“
Is she still
here?”

My mom shook her
head.

“
You smell like
great grandma,” I concluded, kissing her hand all the
same.

Another
miniscule chuckle escaped her. “I love you, Jerry.”

“
I love you too,
mama.”

“
Things are
going to get dicey around here in the next few months.” Her hand
gripped me for a moment.

I nodded. I knew
my father wasn’t going to take her leaving him without a
fight.

“
But, I’ll wait
until after your birthday before I do anything drastic. I wouldn’t
want to mess up your party. Turning eighteen is an important
milestone in anyone’s life. It should be experienced, celebrated.”
She patted my hand a few times. “After, Jerry, after I will make
the necessary moves to get us away from him.”

“
You sure you
don’t want to do something right away?” I was already feeling
anxious. If that asshole caught so much as fart on the wind of what
she intended, he would make her life a living hell. He was such a
vindictive sonofabitch, there was no telling what he’d
do.

“
He’s got
Roxanna to keep him busy.” She actually sniggered.

“
And you’re ok
with that?”

There was
moisture at the corner of each eye. “My god, son, you have no idea
how ‘ok’ I am with that.” She sounded so “hip” when she spoke those
words, in the fashion she’d uttered them. In my ears, she was
decades younger.

On the vestiges
of being sexually active myself, the innuendo of her statement
wasn’t lost on me. I shook my head with mild nausea not sure I
wanted to delve too deep into
that
particular subject,
especially when it involved my parents.

“
Ok, well, you
let me know when.”

“
Absolutely!”

I stood, peering
about the room. “Thank you, Mrs. Gates,” I said aloud.

“
She doesn’t
need you to say it, son. She already knows.” She trailed off, then,
as quiet as a mouse: “Call her Florence. She prefers it, you
know.”

I left my mother
in her rocking chair. When I looked back, over my shoulder, she had
resumed her vigil of the setting sun. There were only long streaks
of indigo in the sky by then. The branches of the trees were
weaving this way and that in the play of the wind.

Again, I saw her
as I would any years in the future, but not like before. This woman
was old, but strong, proud of what she’d accomplished with her time
on earth.

I realized, Mrs.
Gates – Florence - hadn’t left. She was still there. The moment I
turned away, she and my mother were speaking to one another once
more.

They looked
peaceful at first, sharing a single body. Yet, as my stare
lingered, I could see something else, something I couldn’t quit
place. I was too young to understand to the true depth of a woman’s
heart at the time. I didn’t know plans could be laid and buried as
if they’d never been.

I had no
comprehension that a woman’s heart can oftimes be a deep, deep
well, where sometimes, awful things can be hidden as if they never
were. You could know her for scores of years, her entire life
possibly, and still not know what lies in those murky waters in the
nethermost regions of her soul. They can be hidden so
thoroughly.

When I learned
this - learned this for
real
- I think I was leery
of all females for a time, even my Myra. I was never able to look
at them the way I had before.

~~~~~~~<<<
ᴥ
>>>~~~~~~~

Chapter Ten:
Secrets

I heard a noise
in the middle of the night, not quite a month after my eighteenth
birthday party. It had awakened me in my bed. It was late, on a
Saturday; I knew this because I myself had come home late, after an
exceptionally good date with Myra.

Now, it was a
few hours later.

I glanced out
windows of my room, facing the side of the house where the noises
had originated, and saw nothing but darkness. I lay there, silent,
waiting to see if I’d hear anything further.

I didn’t have to
wait long.

A high-pitched
squeal came out of the night, followed by a deeper, huskier laugh.
Both had come from the side yard, most likely the deck. It was man
and a woman, stumbling, laughing, on the ground floor right outside
my windows. I frowned. There shouldn’t have been anyone lurking
about. My mom and my siblings had left for Corona to spend the
weekend with my mother’s side of the family. My father told me when
he awoke me for school on Friday that he wouldn’t be around either.
Something about a company retreat to Mandalay Beach. This was a
Hotel and Spa on the coast, west of Oxnard, California. It was a
place his company went for quarterly meetings, but he’d never gone
at this time of the year in the past.

I knew he was
talking bullshit again. I knew the only retreat he was going to
visit was the one between Roxanna’s legs. But, after the
conversation with my mom at the beginning of the month, it didn’t
bother like it would’ve before. Instead, I felt sorry and disgusted
of him at the same time. Though he had worked hard to get himself
where he was in life from a professional standpoint, he was a
pathetic failure when it came to his personal existence. The way he
conducted himself on a daily basis was crass. And, so was his
dalliance with this other woman.

I could say it
had something to do with my love for Myra. Maybe I was so wrapped
up in our relationship at the time that the idea of cheating was
abhorrent. Though Myra and I have had a good marriage, it isn’t
perfect. It’s just like the thousands of others out there in the
world. We’re human. We have human needs, desires and moods.
Sometimes, in the past, we’ve been out of sync. There have been
times when one of us has flirted with the idea of being with
someone else.

And, let me say
this, it’s not about time vested or children involved. It’s
about
knowing
the moment, understanding what the
other is going through, unearthing resentment and finding it false.
It is a journey, a long, winding, curling journey. Some people
don’t have the fortitude to deal with it. Some folks don’t look at
marriage in the same fashion. Maybe to them it’s a status symbol or
a corporate merging.

When I look
back, twenty-twenty being operative, I know my inability to
understand what my father was doing was grounded on the basic
incongruity of our minds. The thought of him being with that other
woman made me writhe, made my skin crawl. I know I asked myself
many times, how could he look at his reflection in the mirror and
not be appalled by his own behavior.

The answer is
always fast upon the heels of that question. He didn’t give a damn
one way or another. He wasn’t a sharp enough intellect to peruse
such metaphysical musings. Those thoughts just didn’t elude him.
They were virtually invisible to him. He had no capacity to think
on that level.

But, that still
didn’t reveal who was outside…

I crept from my
bed, tip-toeing to the window sill. I remember I shivered
violently, because I’d forgotten to turn up the thermostat. The
downstairs gauge was something my mom had always monitored. It not
being a regular part of my routine, caused it to slip my mind. I
had gone to bed, and all the while the air within the house had
chilled.

I had just
pushed those thoughts from my mind when I saw them. Only it wasn’t
a man and a woman, it was a woman and two men.
Who in the f-,
had been on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t vocalize it,
because I suddenly recognized my father as one of the party down
below. That focused me immediately. I craned my neck, turned my
head, trying, from my limited vantage to see more.

The woman turned
and said something to the other man. He replied. She laughed, her
hand coming to her neck as she tilted her head back with mirth.
There was no mistaking her. It was Roxanna.

If there was an
animal in the entire animal kingdom she resembled, it would be a
raven. Everything about her was dark – her eyes, her hair, the cast
of her face, her demeanor – all of it. She was a couple of inches
shorter than me, making her an inch taller than my dad. She was big
breasted and wide-hipped, what men would’ve termed ripe for mating
back in the Renaissance. My father’s generation would’ve called her
voluptuous. To me, she was the epitome of what
Kool and the Gang
would’ve said about a woman like her. She was a
“
Brick House
”. She had pouting lips and big eyes, a broad
forehead framed with big, looping curls of the deepest obsidian.
She was wearing a leotard of some sort, skin-tight, as black as the
night with four-inch heels, also black, though the soles were
bright red. She had an elastic or spandex-type belt around her,
which was purely cosmetic. She was using it to amplify the inches
between her hips, her waist and her breasts. I could see that
spongy flesh from where I stood. The leotard was cut with a
plunging neckline, rounded along the upper edge of her bra, leaving
very little to the imagination.