“Ahh…” Dreads tugged at the nape of his neck under the dreads in his hair. “Pipsqueak, come on. You know I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be.” His straight teeth contrasted against his tanned face when he smiled. “And Jacques has been up to his neck with club shit. He barely sleeps. He’ll make it up here when he can. He told me to tell you that, actually.” He pulled a half-ass folded piece of paper from his back pocket and handed it to me. “He said for you to read this when the doc leaves.” After Dreads looked from side to side, his brow furrowed. “Wait, ain’t we supposed to be talking with a doc here? This is like AA, right? That’s what Clutch said.”
I couldn’t cut my eyes at the man any harder. “No. This isn’t AA. AA is like AA. This is therapy for all the bullshit I’ve been dragged through! This is for my shitty childhood and my even shittier adulthood! This is because I’m fucking twenty-seven years old and the only thing I have to my name besides the car I drive is the unclaimed child inside my womb! Not ’cause I’m addicted to alcohol! And this shit does NOT sit well with me! None of it!” I shook the piece of paper he’d handed in my raised fist. “And THIS does NOT sit well with me! Why didn’t he fucking come?!” I shrieked when I felt my heart swell just before the dam broke and the tears fell.
Dreads’ arms surrounded me, and his smell enveloped me. Leather and fuel and something mechanical that reminded me of Jacques mixed and caused my heart to squeeze and shatter at the same time. I sank my nose closer into the crook of my friend’s neck and cried, sobbing around every stupid muttered confession that never should have left my lips. “Why can’t he just be normal, Dreads? Why can’t I just love someone normal?” I sobbed ’cause of the pain, and then I sobbed ’cause of the embarrassment of the words caused by the pain, and then I just couldn’t fucking stop.
Have you ever sobbed because you’re sobbing and you can’t stop?
“Shh…” he whispered into my hair and cradled me until we were close enough to sit on the little loveseat by the window in the room. “He’s remembering, Vagabond. Okay? Is that what you want to hear? Because I’ll tell you if it’ll help you chill out. He’s remembering, and it’s fucking killing him. Not only the migraines that happen when he remembers, but the fact that they happened...that you happened. And, instead of fighting for you, he listened to Rox and not you. Let him figure this shit out first, okay, Pipsqueak? Then he’ll be ready to figure y’all’s shit out, yeah?” He winked as his hands cupped my face. “Remember I once told you you’re his Jacqueline? I was serious, and one day, when you realize how big of a deal that is, then you’ll know everything you need to know. But I can’t explain it if you can’t grasp it. Do you understand?”
Did I understand? Did I understand WHAT?
I shook my head back and forth, pissed, “No. No, I don’t. I never understand any of you! ’Cause all you fucking do is speak in riddles, the whole lot of you!” I slapped at him even though he was still sweetly cupping my face until he raised both hands and stepped away. “Get the hell away from me!” I shouted, tearing the note into pieces and shoving it at him. “And take this shit with you! Tell him I said I’m done. I don’t want him to remember. I don’t want him in my life. I don’t want YOU in my life! I don’t even know you!” I shrieked at him, allowing that anger and that fury to swell and gain momentum underneath my very being. “Get the hell out, Dreads. I don’t want anything to do with any of you! Ever again!”
The doctor and a few security officers rushed in behind Dreads, shoving the door open behind him. It slammed into his back. His hands came out almost like he was trying to usher me away from the people intruding, but I ducked and stepped out of his reach, off to the side of the room.
Finally, everyone in the room was still. Dreads’ hands remained in the air when one of the security officers unsnapped the holster at his gun.
“I was just leaving,” Dreads said. “I don’t want any trouble. I didn’t want to fucking come here in the first place. I told Jacques this was a bad damn idea!” He finished scanning the other people in the room and then landed his gaze on mine. “Pipsqueak—”
“Don’t call me that. It’s not my name,” I growled, stepping closer to the doctor.
“Va—”
“Neither is Vagabond. Dreads, it’s time you leave. Tell Jacques it’s fine. Tell him, as far as he needs to be concerned…” The words momentarily got hung up in my throat as the pain, a pain I’d not felt before, not once in my twenty-seven years, shredded the rest of its way through my heart. “This child died. I died the moment he wasn’t there when we needed him.”
I’ll probably witness plenty of things in this life, plenty of poignant moments in time or sideways glances that will always stick with me.
But I’ll never remember them as sharply as I’ll remember the sad smile that crossed Dreads’ face before he nodded and said over his shoulder on his way out, “Yeah...that’s what he said you’d say. Jacques knew you were pissed. I guess I just hoped…” His smile brightened a bit, but not much, and then he left, but not before finishing his words. “I just hoped you were different, I guess.”
After Dreads left, there was a follow-up counseling session, where I described how the entire situation made me feel. I mainly focused on my anger when I described it. Not ’cause I was afraid of the pain and the hurt. I’d felt pain. I could handle it.
I just didn’t see the point at the time. Not when I was so busy trying to heal before this baby was born. So, this time, to be a better mother, I focused on my anger versus my pain.
I hope you can understand my decision.
It was a Monday—the hottest day of the year, so I was told by my father—when I woke up and knew a baby was going to be born that day. And I would be the one doing the birthing. It was the same old labor pains I remembered having in the middle of Ben Cain’s RV floor, only they weren’t just crippling pain on top of crippling pain. Not this time. This time, the pain never fucking stopped.
And the next thing I knew, there was blood fucking everywhere.
Blood. Running down my legs in rivulets. After somehow stumbling into the bathroom—I think I may have been headed to clean myself up—I felt the first dose of fear. Fear that decapitated my anger and shook me so violently that my hands trembled. For a moment, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to use them much longer. What if the fucking fear froze me up and no one knew I’d started bleeding? Then what?
Without thinking much beyond the horrid thought, I grasped the call bell hanging next to the toilet with one hand while I grasped the crucifix around my neck with the other. I hardly remember much as the first few words of my longtime favorite prayer began filtering through my waning consciousness. I just remember being cold and in pain.
Now, I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. May angels stay with me through the night. And wake me with the morning light. But, if I should die before I wake…
This time as I finished my prayer...I didn’t automatically say, “Amen.” I added a silent prayer as the nurses and doctors transferred me onto a stretcher and yelled out orders about an operating room.
“She’s bleeding out. We don’t have time for a spinal. Just sleep her…”
I couldn’t focus too much on what was being said, not that I could understand a damn thing they were saying. I was trying so hard to concentrate on my words, on the last part of my prayer. I had to ask God, ’cause if I didn’t, he wouldn’t know. That’s what Grams always told me.
I repeated the last bit of the prayer, hoping it would remind me what was so vital. There was something important, and I had to ask him…For reasons I can’t explain, I suddenly needed something of a little higher power. I couldn’t keep fighting this invisible war inside me alone. I couldn’t.
But, if I should die before I wake...I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Please, Lord...keep this baby safe. If I should die, you don’t have to take my soul...just please, take hers. Don’t take care of me, just make sure my baby is safe. Make
sure she’s safe. If not with me, then with you.
I’m not sure how I knew, but something told me. Maybe it was Grams; maybe it was Eden. Maybe it was that higher power I desperately searched for as they wheeled me down the hall of the hospital towards the OR. But something told me I was having a baby girl that day…
On that hot-as-hell day in the middle of September, I’ll be damned—I had a baby girl. Her name was Apple Of’May O’Malley, and she weighed five pounds and one ounce and had hair as dark as coal, eyes as blue as the sea, and the sweetest pouty, little, red lips I’d ever seen.
And she was healthy. She was perfect. And, on the day she was born, I devoted the rest of my life to making her an awesome human being. And, of course, everyone else also fell in love with her too as soon as they met her.
I was notified, if that’s what you want to call it, the day I became a father. The doctor, though it wasn’t in her scope of practice and it went against everything she believed in morally and ethically, called my office number, interrupting me in the middle of breaking down the last of the No Name No Color bikes we’d picked up. She let me know there was a baby girl named Apple Of’May O’Malley on the fourth floor of Mt. Sinai. And, after the mother had initially had some emergent circumstances that had led to the method of delivery changing from what was originally planned, both mother and infant made it out of the delivery and both were healthy.
And fuck you. Before you call me an asshole, she didn’t offer that information. The only reason I know it is because I asked. However, the part I didn’t realize she hadn’t answered at the time because I was so busy thanking God they were both okay was if they were both healthy and happy. She’d only alluded to the healthy part of my question. But she’d already hung up. And I’d already started praying to God, praising him and telling him, “Thank you.”
It didn’t even dawn on me that I never heard that part of the story. And I wondered if I’d ever know. I wondered if the pain from the new memories I had would ever be so difficult to live through that I decided to find out if my Vagabond and our little girl were happy.
I guess things like happiness in the end are all vague assumptions. At least that’s where I’ve settled it within my soul. And my ma never told me that it had to settle well, just that it had to settle.
“Jacques, my sweet boy... If it’s good with God, then it’s well with your soul…”
I shut off the over head lights hanging over the ten bikes in the garage and head out to meet with King and the rest of the DDDs members before they drive out. And I mutter the most recent part I’ve added to my mother's remembered words, wiping the grease caked into my hands. “And if it’s well with my soul, then it’s well with the Lord. And it never happened—I’ve been forgiven by the blood of Jesus Christ—It never happened. A-fucking-men.’”
Right? I pray to fuck so, because I don’t know how I’m gonna get through hunting down my own cousin and then killing him. Not with the birth of my recent child stirring up all of this nostalgia and shit that’s better left unstirred.
“How’s a motherfucker supposed to kill his last fucking family member with all this goddamn nostalgia in the fucking air?!” I holler as I throw the door open and step through the hidden nook.
As I slam the door closed behind the bar, Slim and Dreads silently step aside and make room. Dreads is holding a beer out to me, and as soon as the ice-cold bottle touches my lips, I hear Slims’ old lady whisper something about a baby and the color pink. Then a fucking migraine slashes through my frontal cortex for the first time in days.
I swallow half the contents in the bottle and slam it on the bar before growling, “Stop! Until we know what’s going on, until I’ve talked to this one”—I point at Dreads—“I don’t want anyone discussing anything that’s not Ben Cain! Is that understood? One thing at a goddamn time!”
I’ve recently stumbled across memories. For so long, I fought them, and I didn’t even know I was doing it. I thought they were dreams, wishes, or I don’t know. I just know the feeling I had every time I remembered her. It was worth the headache and migraines that accompanied it. And the faster I figured that out, the quicker the memory of Eve O’Malley came back to me. The memory of her in the tree the first time I met her. The time I found her in the bus station at baggage claims in Chicago. And her smartass mouth. Then the night I spotted her in my club and I was already drunker than shit—I knew I should have stayed away from her, especially after all of that damn coke Ben was shoving in front of me and I was coincidentally shoving up my nose. But I didn’t fucking know who she was then! I just remembered who she reminded me of. Besides, she didn’t fucking look six-fucking-teen that night!
Shit, you were there. I may not remember exactly what it was she was wearing, but even now, I know that it wasn’t something a young girl should be wearing! And, as far as I knew, we were all following the main rule that night. The one involving underage girls not being allowed on club grounds after curfew! I swear to God Eve looked every bit of twenty-one to my drunken eyes that night.
I should have known that Ben was more than off his rocker then. I really should have. And I probably would have had I listened to Dreads, but I wanted so badly to think Ben was different than his dad.
I know differently now though. I know correctly. I know, unfortunately, that my uncle was always off. I know all the shit about the dealings he had in the skin biz. The dealings that started back in the ’80s, when he and some new gang named NNNC out of Seattle started hanging out. I know that’s the main rift King was having trouble getting around with my father. When my father refused to give up information and was forced by New Orleans’s MC to pay the fee that was required for withholding said information. My father and King settled their matters over a poker game involving Eve’s mother.
Eve’s mother wasn’t born into this life. No more than Eve or Eden were. She was a rich bitch who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time and found herself being handed over like a present to a big MC prez instead of being sold. By Chase Cain and to fucking Renee O’Malley. My father was just there to save her. Just like he saved my ma ten years earlier. But not from King. He took Ilsa from King to keep a better eye on her since she came back on Chase’s radar ten years later. My pops was only at that poker table to clean up my uncle’s fucking mess. And there was Ben, always getting caught up in it.
I knew when we were kids. Sometimes, the shit he’d say or do—I knew the kid was thrown off then. I just didn’t know the extent. I didn’t know how far into the dark side he’d traveled. Now that I realize just how bad he’d gotten…
It scares the living hell out of me.
It’s been hard to come to grips with the fact, but it’s still the fact. At some point, I will find my only living family relative: the kid who pushed plastic toy bikes up and down the boneyard dirt and gravel driveway when we were kids. I’m gonna have to find him and then fucking kill him. And it kills me. Almost as much as the thought of my child being born today and I wasn’t there when it happened. I wasn’t there to see her.
Because I can’t have a life with her. I can’t provide one that will shelter her from the real and the ugly that cloaks the lifestyle I live in. The life Uncle Chase reinforced unwillingly in my life. But I know my Vagabond can…
As long as I act as though I couldn’t care less about her or our child, the more Ben will leave them both alone. Ben doesn’t want them. He wants me.
And I know that Vagabond can do this without me because I know her.
Finally, I know her. And I know she can.
She’s smart. And funny. And strong. And she has the love and the support of a family run by a man like King. A man who’s never had to deal with the sins of his father’s past. A man who’s in charge of an MC that’s a different type than mine. DDDs has never been linked, even remotely to anyone in the business of trading young women and children. Never. The only reason he had Ilsa in the first place was by accident. There was some mix-up between the different clubs an
d the drug lords. Wrong package was shipped, and apparently, my good ol’ uncle Chase decided to unload the seventeen-year-old Ilsa AND clear out some old debt of the club’s. Trying to make his damn older brother proud, no doubt. It happened. It still happens. Just not in my club. Not any more. And, hell, today, even in the drug trade, if King’s voice is whispered, it’s whispered. And whoever is whispering won’t talk if you corner him. And I’ve tried, believe me. On numerous occasions.
Nah… Vagabond is better off without me. I’m not sure what happened when Dreads talked to her the day before he had to go down South to double-check that Ben wasn’t there. But, now that he’s back and Eve is where she needs to be, or at least headed there, I can finally breathe. Talk to the motherfucker and find out what she said after she’d read my note when the docs weren’t around. And find out if she was hurting anywhere near as bad as I am. Especially since she had my kid less than a week ago.
I’ve chugged three beers in the time it takes for my mind to process my next few options and which problem I should address first when I set the last one down and lock eyes with Dreads, ready to cut to the most painful subject of the present night. “Her and the kid been discharged yet?” I ask him, knowing that the rest of the people in the room will know enough to answer for him.
Behind the bar, Lynette steps forward with another beer held out for me. “Yes, darlin’, they were discharged this morning. Eve and the baby are doing great. Eve’s going to follow up with a doctor down in New Orleans. I think King and Ty finally got her talked into settling down there with her dad. At least until the baby is older. Or Ben is found. She’s ready to open a hair salon up and get back to working. King said…”
Before I Wake: A Kimber S. Dawn MC Novel Page 16