The Sin, The Sun, & The Shame

by Leigh Mcknight

  Sophia’s eyes became very angry but she didn’t respond. She knew when she left the baby with Mitch and his wife that she only brought his birth certificate, his medical records, a few diapers, and outfits. She didn’t bring any formula. How was Mitch to know what the baby was supposed to eat?

  “How could you do that?” he lashed out. “How could you treat the baby that way?”

  “I could ask how you could’ve treated me the way you did. You treated me like crap, I understood it and I didn’t hold it against you,” Sophia spat out, but suddenly her eyes became very sad.

  Mitch saw the sadness in Sophia’s eyes and he didn’t care. He looked away. He didn’t answer that question. He knew he treated Sophia badly that last day when they saw each other there in Myrtle Beach. He didn’t have to be so cruel to her so he didn’t have an answer for her. Instead, he would let Miss Sophia know that they didn’t need her, that they’d done just fine without her all these years.

  “To answer your question earlier, Mitch Jr. is fine. He’s great. He’s a bright little boy. He’s in kindergarten right now but will be entering the first grade this fall. Merlin Academy.” When Mitch looked at Sophia again, he saw a smile touching her beautiful bee stung lips. “You’re smiling,” he said.

  “Mitch Junior. You allowed him to keep your name.”

  “Of course, I did. Why wouldn’t I?” Sophia noticed that Mitch’s voice had softened. There wasn’t as much animosity. “Mitch Junior is my son. He should have my name.” He shrugged and looked away. There was a moment’s silence, and when he turned back to her, his face had changed. “He looks a lot like you. Some of his mannerisms even remind me of you. Now, his hair and his eyes, those are mine, all mine.” He smiled.

  “Those eyes. Your eyes. I fell in love with those eyes the moment I met them.”

  “The moment you met them, huh?” he said. He looked around and saw that everyone had left the room except him and Sophia. “Can we get out of here and go someplace where we can talk?”

  Sophia nodded her head affirmatively. “Sure. Where would you like to go?”

  “There’s a little bar restaurant downstairs. They have really good food.”

  “Okay. You haven’t eaten?”

  “I don’t remember whether I ate or not. I went with others from the group, but…” he stopped short of completing his statement. When Sophia giggled again, Mitch’s mind went back to the night when they met and how she giggled most of the evening at things that were funny and some of which were not so much.

  They walked down the plush brown carpeted corridor to the elevator and took it to the lobby. As they walked to the end of the hallway that opened into a restaurant with a small bar area, they entered and took a seat at the bar since all the tables in the restaurant were occupied.

  “You didn’t appear surprised to see me back there,” Mitch said.

  “I was surprised when you poked your head into the room earlier.”

  “You saw me?”

  “Yes, I did and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was so happy that I was almost at the end of my speech. I really got nervous seeing you after all these years.”

  Sophia got up from her seat and began to remove her jacket. Mitch assisted her with it and hung it across the back of her stool. She looked breathtaking in the sleeveless white blouse tucked neatly tucked inside the pink linen skirt. His eyes moved slowly over her long lean and curvy body before she took her seat again. When she crossed her legs, he knew his eyes lingered on the perfectly shaped legs much too long, so long that he was embarrassed when his eyes returned to her face.

  The bartender approached them dressed in sleek black slacks, a crisp white shirt, and a black string bow tie to take their drink orders.

  “What would you like?” he asked Sophia.

  “May I?” she asked.

  Mitch lifted his shoulders and replied, “Sure.”

  Sophia directed her attention back to the bartender. “He’ll have a White Russian and I’ll have a virgin Cosmo.” She turned back to Mitch. “Am I right?” She looked challengingly at him.

  Mitch’s lips curled at the corners in a smile. He was drinking White Russian the night he and Sophia met and she’d bought him a drink that night.

  “You remembered.”

  The bartender bowed and left to get their drinks. Sophia smiled. Her smile was so white and bright and so damn alluring that one could become mesmerized by those luscious lips. He quickly looked away. He wouldn’t be taken in by that smile again. Never! He had other things on his mind, questions he wanted answer to.

  “Yes. I remember everything about you, Mitch.”

  Mitch was surprised by that statement, and all he could do was stare at Sophia. The trance wasn’t broken until the bartender returned with their drinks.

  Just as the bartender brought their drinks over and was about to place them on the bar in front of them, Mitch saw a couple leaving a nearby table in the restaurant.

  “Hey, can you please bring those drinks over to that table?” he said, lifting Sophia’s jacket from the back of the stool.

  “Absolutely, Sir,” the bartender replied and followed them to the table and placed the drinks there for them. “A waitress should be with you in a moment.”

  “Thank you,” Sophia replied. Mitch nodded his approval.

  When they were seated at the table, Mitch looked at Sophia.

  “So,” he loosened his tie, “how long are you here?”

  “I did my first speech today and I have one more tomorrow. After that, I will be flying back to New York. What about you? When do you go back to Pennsylvania? You do still live in Pennsylvania, don’t you?”

  Mitch stared unblinkingly at her. “Yep. Same state, same city, different home.” The bartender placed their drinks in front of them. Mitch picked up his drink, lifted it to Sophia, and took a sip from his glass before saying, “but why do I think you already know that?”

  “She couldn’t handle it, huh?”

  “That would be a lot for anyone to handle, don’t you think?”

  “I would have.” Sophia looked Mitch squarely in the eyes. “I wouldn’t have liked it, but I would’ve found a way to work through it.

  Mitch looked at the beautiful young woman sitting on the stool next to his. Why was it that he believed her? Why indeed. It was simple because he knew she was telling the truth.

  “You didn’t say how long you will be here.”

  “I leave day after tomorrow.”

  “I see.”

  A waitress came to their table. She placed menus on the table. “You okay with your drinks?” she asked.

  Mitch looked at Sophia who nodded affirmatively. “Yes, we’re fine,” he replied.

  “I know you have a lot of unanswered questions, Mitch.”

  “You damn right I do.”

  “Well, before you start in on me, please let me explain. This may be hard for you to believe but I am in love with you. I’ve been in love with you from the moment I laid eyes on you and I’ve never stopped. I fell in love with your heart.” Sophia paused a moment. “The cliché, love at first sight really is true. Well, let me start from the beginning. I was sixteen and my parents allowed me to go to Myrtle Beach with the daughters of my father’s partner at his company. One daughter was twenty-two and the sister was my age. You know how young girls like to play dress up, wearing the older girls’ clothes and makeup. People already told me I was mature for my age and I suppose I was but I was never attractive to boys my age. They were silly and immature. Anyway, dressing up with makeup and all, it was never hard for me to go to a nightclub or a bar and enter. I always fit in, looking the part. When I was at Myrtle Beach, I never got any questions about my age or thrown out of a club or any adult venue. So it was easy enough to deceive people. I’m not saying that’s a good thing but I was young and when you are young, some of your decisions are not the best.” She looked at Mitch for what seemed like a long time. “When I saw you in that club, whatever it was that first night,
I knew right then that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. I felt it was destiny at least until you told me where to go the following morning.”

  “I know I was harsh with you and I’m sorry,” he said. “That was not my normal behavior, but you could have gotten me thrown under the jail house.”

  Sophia continued as if Mitch had not spoken. “Several weeks after I returned home I became ill. My mom took me to the doctor and to my surprise or shock, I learned that I was pregnant with your child. Let me paint this picture for you, Mitch. I was a sixteen-year-old girl who is an only child to high society parents who wouldn’t be caught dead having their snooty rich friends know about me and embarrass them. When they learned that I was in,” she used her fingers to make quotation marks, “ ‘trouble,’ they threw me out of the house or rather, my father did. My mother put me into one of those upscale private homes for unwed mothers where I did chores and took care of the baby and myself by making sure I saw the doctor regularly, I ate properly, took my vitamins and all. Then in my fifth month of pregnancy, I was told I had cancer of the uterus and it was pretty aggressive, it was spreading through my body.” Sophia heard Mitch’s gasp. That gasp was much more pronounced than when she told him her parents had thrown her out the house when they learned of her pregnancy.

  Suddenly, Mitch began to feel some of his anger he’d felt for years towards Sophia peel away. “You have cancer?” he said incredulously, a stunned expression on his handsome face.

  Again, Sophia spoke as if Mitch hadn’t spoken. “Against my doctor’s advice, I put off the treatments until after the baby was born. My oncologist told me where I was physically and that I needed aggressive treatments but because I wanted to give my baby the best possible chance to be healthy, I delayed treatments. I didn’t want to do anything that would harm him. My mother kept tabs on me from afar the entire time. She saw to it that I had the best doctors and everything, but my dad, well, he wanted nothing to do with me.”

  Sophia paused a moment. “After the baby was born, they started my treatments. They gave me rounds of radiation. My hair fell out, I couldn’t eat, and I lost a lot of weight. Radiation has some severe side effects, but not as severe as chemo. I have some great friends and their support has meant so much to me. So much.” Sophia looked away thinking of the many late night, early morning calls she placed to Afrika. “When I thought I was getting better, my white cell count became elevated. Needless to say, my hope took a plunge into despair. So I was required to have surgery and even with that, the cancer was still present. That was when they started the chemotherapy.

  “The first treatments were the easiest because even though I had had the baby, my body was at its strongest. But after a few treatments, I was tired all the time. I was feverish, had a burning sensation, I was just worn out all the time. Then one day after getting test results showing that I was cancer free, I can’t tell you what that did for me.”

  She paused a moment. “During all that I went through, I never stopped thinking about my baby, our baby….or you. I wasn’t in a position to care for him because of the treatments and the illness but I thought of Mitch Jr. every single day and I am certain that one day I will reunite with him. I love him very much, but at the time, I just did what I had to do.”

  For the first time Mitch saw Sophia differently. Although he still had reservations about her, he also realized that he had a newfound respect for the young woman. She’d been through a lot and she did so much on her own but she’d grown into an intelligent, responsible young woman and he couldn’t help being impressed by her. When he spoke again, he asked as gently as he was feeling, “Why didn’t you tell me that, Sophia? When you dropped the baby off. Why didn’t you just tell me what was going on with you?”

  “What could you have done?”

  Mitch looked helpless. In retrospect, there wasn’t a thing that he could’ve done for Sophia. He was just grateful now that she left the baby with him even though it ended his marriage to a woman he’d loved deeply and had wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

  “I suppose the situation was far too much to carry alone yet it was impossible to share at that time. Do you understand?”

  Mitch looked at Sophia a moment before he replied, “Yeah, I do. Absolutely I do.” He looked down at his hands on the table.

  “I am sure that for years you’ve been angry at me for one reason or another. The things I did to you the night we met, how forward I was, all those things I did to you when I was just a child, getting pregnant, and the fatal blow by looking you up and confronting you and your wife at your home. What I did was unforgivable but,” she paused a moment and casted her eyes towards the ceiling a moment before completing her statement. “I hope that in time you will be able to forgive me.” Sophia paused again. “My therapist drilled into my head that I should forgive myself and although it took years, I finally got there. Mitch, what I am about to say is simply for your information. I did some terrible things and I am not going to place blame on anyone for my wrongdoing. At sixteen, I was buck wild; I didn’t have any real role models in my life. The home that I grew up in, the home where I was supposed to be loved, protected and where I was supposed to be safe, well in that home, I was exposed to the most deviant behaviors any child my age or any child for that matter, should’ve had to go through.

  “My parents socialized…. a lot. They went on fabulous vacations, wonderful shopping trips, parties. It was what happened during the parties that changed my life forever. Yes, that was when it all started.” Again, Sophia paused and looked away. Mitch remained quiet. Then Sophia looked at Mitch. “One night my parents were throwing one of their famous parties downstairs and I was asleep in my bed upstairs. At some point during the night, I was awakened by someone’s hands touching me on my private parts. The lights were off and I couldn’t see who was there with me. All I could hear was a man’s voice whispering that I was to keep quiet, he wasn’t going to hurt me, I was his pretty big girl. While my parents were going off to do naughty things, one of their friends was in the bedroom of their underage daughter and doing naughty things to her. Me. I told my parents what had happened to me but they discarded what I said, assuring me that I had an overactive imagination or that I was having bad dreams.”

  Mitch looked at Sophia in complete disbelief but he remained quiet.

  “Although this awful thing kept happening to me and I kept telling my parents, they didn’t believe me. It was either that or they were too inebriated or engrossed in their own affairs to pay attention to what was going on with me, their only child, a female child. There were times when I would see my dad going off into one of the bedrooms with someone’s wife and wouldn’t come out until much later. I didn’t know at the time what was going on but after a while, a lot of things made sense. As it turned out, I became familiar with Mr. Benjamin Mason’s cologne. He used to wear a strong, repugnant cologne. When the folks would have friends over, Mr. Mason always wanted me to sit on his lap and believe it or not, my parents would encourage me to do it, not knowing that every chance he got when my parents’ backs were turned, he was feeling me up. I remembered that same scent on him when he came into my bedroom at night. The abuse went on a couple of years and it only got worse.”

  Mitch exploded. He could no longer keep quiet, listening to how his beautiful Sophia was violated for years when she was a child.

  “What were your parents thinking? How could they not know what was happening to you? They had to have noticed the change in you. Well, when did the abuse stop and I hope your father kicked Mason’s ass before having him thrown in jail,” Mitch said, heatedly.

  “No daddy didn’t kick his ass nor did he have Mr. Mason arrested. He and Mom swept it under the rug and remained in a state of denial about that as they did most things that they refuse to face or would ruin their image in the community.” Rubbing her hands together, Sophia looked at Mitch. “I don’t know how long the molestation would have continued had Mr. Mason continued to put his mouth on
me, but he went from that act to using his fingers to penetrate me. One day when Mom was giving me a bath and she was washing me there I began to scream. She took me to the doctor but she refused to name my perpetrator. After that, I never saw Mr. Mason from that time until last year when I was going into a drug store as he was leaving. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost.”

  “Did your parents get you some therapy to help you work through that terrible ordeal as much as possible?” Mitch wanted to know.

  “No. As I said, they wanted to keep it under the rug where they’d swept it.”

  “This just blows my mind.”

  “I know but when I turned 18, I put myself in therapy. I have a wonderful therapist who I’ve been seeing for years. I wanted to know why I behaved the way that I did; wild, loving the party life, but I wasn’t promiscuous. I don’t know what you think, but you were my first.”

  Mitch didn’t say anything, but he knew that. He knew it the night he made love to Sophia.

  “My therapist has been helping me to work through a lot of my issues and I am completely in touch with exactly who I am, I no longer blame myself solely for all the mistakes I made, and I’ve given myself permission to forgive myself.”

  “You should forgive yourself, considering all that you been through.”

  “So, what about your personal life?”

  “My personal life. You assume that I have one.”

  “Well, everyone has a personal life. It may not be all that we might want it to be. Well, is there someone special in your life? Are you married? Other kids?”

  “By special I assume you mean do I have a significant other in my life. Well, the answer is no. I haven’t had time to do fun. After having the baby, I got my high school diploma, and then I went to New York University where I majored in Fashion and Psychology. Because I was so sick at times, I missed classes but I managed to graduate at the top of my class. So as you can see, I really didn’t have time for extracurricular activities.” She paused. “I know I caused problems in your marriage and I am sorry about that. I have read things about her in the paper from time, but she has never been a real focus for me.”