by Bri Stone
Mommy is about to say something before the doorbell rings. We get visitors sometimes because the neighbors like us, and I play with Joey across the street sometimes.
“Oh, daddy probably forgot his keys again. Long shift.”
I follow her to the front door, it takes a bit because the house is so big. It’s new, we moved in last year and I got to pick my own room, so I didn’t mind changing schools. And daddy doesn’t work long anymore, I remember him being at work for almost two days, now it’s normal. It’s because he’s an attending, he says.
The front door is big and dark wood, mommy holds my hand as she opens it up, and she holds me too tight once she sees the men on the other side. In police uniforms, one is fat, the other is regular and black like us, he smiles at me but it looks fake. I don’t smile back.
“Mrs. Charles?”
“Yes,” her voice is normal. I tuck myself into her side and listen to her breathing change.
“May we come inside? Somewhere we could sit?”
She slumps beside me and I look up at her, she is frowning and she never frowns. Always happy, smiling, daddy says it’s why she’s her sunshine and always makes him happy.
“Y-yes.” Mommy nods and lets them in, they smell like the outside. She crouches to me and tucks my hair behind my ear. “Wait in your room, okay Mel?”
I want to say that I want to stay but I think I shouldn’t. I don’t want to get in real trouble for talking back. I go to my room and play with my suture kit daddy got me. I want to be good at it like he is. Fixing broken bones is his specialty, I want to do the same thing. I sigh when I can’t get it right because I wish he were home to show me.
When I hear mommy scream I think something has gone wrong, but I’m afraid to check. I try to listen, but I can’t hear from my room. I should wait, I tell myself.
Soon, she comes inside my room. She looks… I don’t know the right word yet.
“We have to go to the hospital, Mel. Put your shoes on.” She talks fast and gets my shoes for me.
I hop off the bed, “why?”
“To see daddy. Let’s go.” She answers, but it isn’t like she is happy, or like when we visit him and bring food for the other doctors. I put my shoes on quickly and she tugs me out with her. The police car is in the driveway, but they slowly peel away. We go to the garage, where her car is, it is bigger than daddy’s, I like riding in it better.
“Why are we going, mommy?” I ask when we get to the fast part of the highway.
“Mommy?” she doesn’t respond.
She drives normal, I think. I can’t see her face from here, only her hands around the steering wheel, so tight, her brown skin gets lighter. I stay quiet until we reach the hospital, and park. But we don’t use the same entrance.
She asks the nurse at the station where to find him by name, ‘where is Richard Charles, yes he’s my husband.’ We never do that when we visit.
“Mommy what is it?”
She holds my hand tighter, and she rushes down the hall with me trying to keep up.
“Mommy?” I tug at her and she is still quiet. I want to cry, it makes me scared, because she is never like this.
We stop at one of the big brown doors with the silver handle, it’s open, and she peeks inside the room and tries to hide me. A doctor exits—wait I know this one, daddy’s friend.
“Miranda, I’m so sorry.” He hugs her, his is tall and has muscles, when he comes to the house for dinner, he always gives me helicopter rides. Eric, he went to school with daddy, they got awards.
“Thank you. Is he— Melinda is here.” She lets go and moves aside.
He looks down at me and I see his eyes are red from crying, but why? Eric is always happy, he tells jokes when he sees me. But he doesn’t say one now.
“It’s okay,” he nods to her, “hey munchkin, I’m—I’m sorry.” He hugs me, and it’s too tight, I can’t ask him why he is saying that.
“I’ll leave you two.” He walks away.
Mommy crouches down and grips my shoulders, I look in her eyes and she cry, tears make dark lines run down her cheeks.
“Something happened to daddy,” she croaks.
“W-what?” my lips shake, I reach out and wipe her tears away so I don’t cry. But it doesn’t work. I don’t even know what happened yet.
“He got in an accident. And he got hurt. Very hurt.”
“Mommy just tell me, I can handle it.” I shake my legs. I’m twelve now, I’m not little anymore.
Her lips shake too, and she starts and stops talking over and over. Then she stands and we go inside the room. I don’t—it’s hard to see through the tears in my eyes.
“Daddy!” I run to him, on the side of the bed, his face is somehow pale even though he has dark skin, his body is patched up on the legs, his arms, under the blanket. I take his hand and shake him, he won’t move.
“Mommy wake him!”
She just stands in the corner and shakes her head. She comes to the other side of the bed, next to me, and pulls me away. Why!
“He’s sleeping?”
“No, Mel. Daddy… he’s not going to wake up.”
“Why?”
She holds his hand for a moment, and then she kisses him like she always does on the mouth, but he still doesn’t move, he doesn’t hold her close for longer or make her laugh. She just pulls away.
Then she leans down and looks at me. So many tears, I don’t think either of us can really see each other.
“Daddy is… is broken. Okay? And he can’t be fixed anymore.”
“Even in the hospital?”
“Yes. He was already hurt before he got here. And now he’s gone.”
“No—” I shake my head fast, it makes me dizzy.
“He wouldn’t want you to be sad, remember daddy always wants you to be happy.”
“But he’s gone?”
She takes time before she says anything else.
“Yes, but his spirit will be with us all the time. So, we have to say goodbye now.”
I try to understand, and I do. Mommy wants to cry and she doesn’t, because of me. I want her to do whatever she needs to. I want to cry too.
But I have to listen and be good. I say goodbye like she told me to. I hold his hand, it isn’t cold or warm, I wish I could smell his cinnamon cologne like I always do, but I can’t. I have to imagine it. Forever. Until I die too.
“Bye daddy. I’ll miss you. But I promise to make you happy all the time. And when I become a surgeon too, I’ll be the best there is. I promise.” I whisper in his ear and stand next to mommy again.
She says some things too, but then a nurse comes, or someone else in gray scrubs, and says we have to go. I don’t think I’m ready, I hang on, and mommy hangs on. We cry together, mommy even more, I notice her ring shining as she hangs on to daddy. The other people understand, but they still try to take us away.
I am sad to listen to mommy still cry, so I hold her tight and pull her away too. It distracts me, to take care of her.
“Mommy, we have to go now. We said goodbye.”
She looks at me, and I look in her eyes, but she is not the same. Daddy is not the same either, he is dead and our family is broken now. I think I will be this sad forever.
“Let’s go, mommy.” I hold her hand, tight and tighter. The other woman pats her shoulder, and then she walks with me as she slumps over.
We leave the hospital completely and Mommy was right. I do feel him with me now, even as we have stopped crying and drive home. Daddy is still here. I can still talk to him.
I promise to become the best person I can be, Daddy, just like you.
PETE
* * *
I deducted a lot of things myself, choosing what I thought I’d accept as a reason for why we have lost all these years. And that if I ever heard the truth, how easy it may be to fall back in line with her. Now, I’m not exactly sure.
Knowing what I had about Melinda, I didn’t expect what I got, but at the same time it made
perfect sense. Hard, understandable sense. Somehow, I even feel guilty.
She had loving parents, before her father died when she was twelve. He was an orthopedic surgeon, making her dedication to becoming a doctor more understandable. Her mother, who was a homemaker, spiraled when her father died. Getting into anything and everything to numb the pain, effectively landing herself in jail and Melinda in foster care until she went to high school early and eventually she was in college at age sixteen. I met her when she was only twenty.
Her mother, whom she hadn’t seen since she was thirteen, showed up the day of our wedding. Supposedly clean and sober, asking for help.
Melinda was blindsided, and all I can do is wonder how afraid she must have been. I get this story, in fragments, broken up by wine and thick silence, and deduct my own reasoning from how well I know her.
In her eyes, that could have been her.
It is her—madly in love with me and about to get married, we’d have happy lives together and, in her luck, that she expected, ending up like her mother was worse than taking that final chance with me. Love so deep that the loss of it sent her over the edge.
I wish I had been there, to tell her I would never let that happen but even I know that those things can’t be controlled. For all I know, we could have. Her father died in a car accident, hit by a semi, it could have been anyone.
“Where is she now?” I ask, breaking the silence that falls after she tells me about leaving with her mother, intending to drop her back at the group home she was in, and then come back. I often wondered why she had that job at the gas station when her room and board were covered and she had a research stipend, it was to send money back to her mom. The only way she was able to find her.
“Dead. She was sick with liver cancer when she found me. I didn’t know until I had gotten her back to Compton. I was going to come back, I swear, but after I left I didn’t know what I would say to you, what would be right. Then too much time passed… it’s why I enrolled at UCSF instead. It was… I thought I was too late, Pete.” She pulls at her bottom lip, fidgeting with her fingers over her crossed legs.
Inhaling sharply, my eyes train on her as I find the right words. Such a grave misunderstanding led to all this—why didn’t she call me? At any point; that’s what I want to ask her.
But I know the answer to that question is minute.
“Where did your family live before?”
She furrows her brow at the question. “Calabasas.”
“Just curious.”
She nods at me, our eyes meet, I fight a sad smile for her and fall short.
“If she hadn’t come, would you still have—”
“No. I was ready to marry you Pete. I spent all this time regretting that, not being brave enough. I was young then too, I’m older now.”
“Lonelier?”
“Sure.” She smiles at the corner of her mouth.
“You could have told me that you were afraid. At the dinner, or the hospital. Instead you wait until the wrath of my sisters and come all the way out here…” stopping midsentence I swallow the turning lump in my throat as I stare into her eyes.
Wide and caught in my gaze.
Melinda met me here, she was most courageous here, with me.
If she wants to win me back, it would happen here.
“Pete, I’m so sorry.” Melinda whispers, blinking as she averts my gaze.
“Thank you for telling me the truth.” I clear my throat, suffocated by the depth of our conversation. For an excuse to walk away for a moment, I clear our plates from the table and go over to the sink.
Melinda follows me, with the wine glasses and bottle she dumps in the trash can. In silence, we clear everything away. Washing and drying like we used to back in college, like no time has passed.
It becomes evident that it hasn’t.
Two souls never leave each other.
And though I wished every day to hold her again, kiss her, taste her—she had never really left me. It didn’t matter who came along and filled my bed for a night or two, it was always only her.
My one.
“Pete, I—”
Melinda faces me and I cut her off by kissing her instead. I don’t want any more words, anymore filler to the box that used to contain us, edges creeping open to case us back in.
My lips coax over hers, parting her open and taking her plush lips between mine. I cup her face and draw my fingers through the nape of her curly hair, holding her to me, as her hands fall to the cusp of my shoulders and she rises up on her toes. After a few seconds, she pulls away.
“Pete, listen—”
“Stop talking, Melinda.” My lips hover over hers before I deepen the kiss, swiping my tongue against hers and onto her tongue, sliding together and tasting her once again.
I inhale sharply through my nose as I lift her up, shucking her legs open and around my waist to carry her off. Blindly, in the direction of my bedroom down the hall, a left turn—I pause and press her into the wall.
Her fingers lace in my hair as she turns into the kiss, I pour my soul out into hers through it, her lips becoming keys to the doors holding it off.
The embers of my body come alive, reaching out to hers as my cock hardens against the sweltering heat of her sex. I’m dying for her—I don’t care what I’ve said before, I need her like this again, I need her with me—I need to be inside of her.
When I take the opportunity to breathe I continue my journey to my bed, tossing her on it when I get there. Breathing heavily, she looks around my room for a moment before her eyes focus back on me.
My bed is raised on the ground, I wrap my hands around her soft knees and drag her body down the bed to me, her ankles wrap around my hips as her breath hitches. I lick my lips as I look down at her, biting her bottom lip as her eyes flutter. The lights are barely on, the dark hue of her face is gold pressed under the light, the twinkle in her brown eyes coming through.
I run my palms over the skin of her thigh, along the outside until I reach the hem of her dress, pulling it up and up to reveal her purple cotton panties and matching bra. Pulling her legs apart, I see the moisture between her legs seeping the fabric, her breathing halts further when I do.
Leaning forward, I tug her dress off over her arms and kiss her.
Soft and short, before I travel down to her neck, inhaling her scent pooling just under her ear. My tongue presses to her before I close my lips around her and suck. Her mewls fill my ear, the nimble pads of her fingers edge under my shirt as she moves it away.
I break away from her as I move her back up the bed and take off my pants, then I kneel between her and go back to running my hands along the softness of her skin to feel her heating under me.
“You are so beautiful, Melinda. I’m still crazy about you.” With my hands by her waist, I crouch down to kiss up her body. From the lining of her panties, the stretched lines along the side of her hips graze my lips as I travel across.
Her fingers slide in my hair then around to cup my face as I continue. Kissing at her naval and sternum, then the swells of each her breasts fighting the lining of her bra. Her moans come out when I cup her through her bra with both my hands, continuing up to kiss her again.
My lips cover her chin, then over to her jaw and corner of her mouth before I kiss her fully. She sighs into my mouth, writhing beneath me, her arms coming around my shoulders to hold me close. I press my body to hers but there is still too much in the way. I
I’m not able to stop myself when I practically rip her garments away, doing the same to my boxers. We roll onto our sides, facing each other, as I kiss her over and over. Relishing the taste of her, how lax her body gets, how hard she breathes.
Her hands leave a trail of fire as they dance across my chest, down my abs to the apex of my thighs, running through my trimmed hair before she wraps around my cock. The pang of desire floods my spine and my lips relax against hers, sliding down to her jaw and neck instead. My palms weigh down her breasts, circling
her nipples as they harden.
“I missed the way you touched me, Pete,” She rasps.
I move my hands and squeeze her flesh, roving down to her hips and round ass.
“Like this?” I gravel, her hand tightens around my cock and my fingers swipe her pulsing clit between her slick folds.
“Yes,” She moans, her head lolling back. I rise up to watch her, as I drive my finger through her throbbing sex and enter her, curling my finger as my palm puts pressure on her clit.
“I missed it too. The way you feel. You’re perfect.”
I turn her over quickly, sudden when I land between her legs and inhale her feminine scent. My eyes memorize the puckered flesh of her sex, curling around like a delicate flower and her clit blooming with her desire. Parting her thighs with my hands, I dive into her.
Tasting her sweet, tangy moisture spilling out as I go on. My tongue parting her, finding her clit, as I continue to tease and work her as I move around. Melinda cries out, her fingers lacing my hair and holding me tight to her, the flesh of her thighs trapping me inside. She rides her hips towards me, chasing her climax as I work equally hard to get her there. She moans my name, over and over among other things until she stops; growing silent before her exclaim with her orgasm. Coming onto my face, shuddering underneath me.
I rise back up her body, kissing her, stopping at her breasts to worship them so much they grow wet with my kisses until I reach her mouth. She kisses me back, hungrily, as our tongues swipe together.
My self-control only reaches so far before I work for my cock at her entrance, still dripping for me. I inch toward her, not thinking of anything else.
Her lips part from mine, “I haven’t been with—it’s been a long time.” Her lips tremble and I stare back into the depths of her brown eyes.
“It’s been months.” I sigh. Her fingers tuck around my ear as she fades into a timid smile.
“Pete—”
“I don’t care about what happened between, sweetness.” I smirk. Her smile widens before it fades away.