Guardian of Eden

by Leslie DuBois

  “I’m fine. My head’s fine, my stomach’s fine, I’m fine.” I folded my arms and waited for his next question, but I think he’d given up.

  "We're done for the day, Garrett. Why don't you go play in the waiting room?" Richard ushered me out of the door and signaled for Holly to enter. Eden was in the waiting room engrossed with the dolls they provided. She smiled at me hoping I would go play with her. I didn't feel like playing dolls. Even at that age I realized my role in the family. I was the man of the house. Men didn’t play with dolls. Instead, I sat by Richard's door and listened to what he told Holly.

  "I'm really concerned about his temper," Richard was saying. "He's nine years old and he's getting into knife fights. This violent streak is going to land him in jail or worse."

  "It’s not a temper. He doesn’t have a violent streak. He just wants to protect me. Just like his father. He's gonna end up just like his father. I can't go through that again."

  ***

  When Eden and I went back to live with my mother, my social worker went through the house and removed all knives and sharp objects. We didn't even have pens or pencils in the house, only crayons and markers. It was ridiculous. As if I didn't know where to find a knife if I needed one. And I really did need one when Joel came back.

  Chapter 3: Let There Be Light

  My mother had a textbook case of low self-esteem. I read about it once while I waited for Eden to finish her appointment with Richard. That was the only explanation I could come up with for why she would let Joel back into her life.

  When I was about 11 years old, we lived in an apartment on Sunny Lane in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Life was anything but sunny, however. The constant sound of police sirens or girlfriends yelling at unfaithful boyfriends in the middle of the night didn’t bother me too much. I could even live with the scratching sounds that came from inside the walls and the ceiling which I hoped were mice but I knew were rats. We had lived in worse places. What did bother me was Joel. I never got any sleep with Joel in our home. I didn’t trust him. I lay awake in bed at night listening and waiting for him to do something violent just like Jimmy did.

  I remember there used to be a man with a saxophone that played on the street corner late at night. He would open his case and let people throw in money. I never had any money, but I did like to add words to the sounds that drifted up to our apartment.

  Black is dark and dark is night

  A welcome dark for rest and respite

  Where dreams are made to fill the empty road of life

  A trail traveled alone with no end in sight

  Or maybe the end is near and I haven’t got it right

  Maybe death isn’t as hard as this empty life

  “What the hell are you writin’ over there?” Joel slurred. He sat on the couch drinking beer and smoking. I’d found a place in the corner of the living room and scrawled my nonsensical saxophone lyrics. “Are you writin’ somethin’ about me? You better not be writin’ about me, boy.”

  I ignored him and continued writing. Maybe the lyrics weren’t nonsensical. Maybe they revealed what I really felt. Not to say I wanted to kill myself or anything. I just felt more at ease, less anxious inside by getting these words out on paper. Maybe I would make this kind of writing a regular habit.

  I looked over at my almost six-year-old baby sister sleeping on the couch next to Joel. How could she stand to be so near to him? I knew he was her father, but he treated her just as bad as he did Holly. He never hit them or anything, not in front of me anyway, but he constantly insulted them and brought them to tears. Still, both Holly and Eden flocked to him as if they needed him.

  I put my pencil down and continued to stare at my sister curled up on the couch in a tight little ball. She was so beautiful I smiled to myself. I did everything in my power to take care of her and make her happy, but I wasn’t enough. She still needed the love and attention of a father.

  Suddenly Joel screamed, “Are you laughing at me?” I shook my head no, but he didn’t believe me. What happened next, I’d rather not talk about. Not yet anyway.

  That same year, Eden lost her two front teeth. I assured her this was normal and that they would come back, but she was convinced she was a hideous monster. She refused to look at herself in the mirror and cried pitiful tears if she got an accidental glance.

  “I’m so ugly. That’s why nobody wants me,” she cried one day after brushing her remaining teeth in the mirror.

  “What do you mean? Who doesn’t want you?”

  “My father doesn’t want me. Is that why he left again? Because I’m ugly?”

  “No, Eden, of course not. He left because…” I wanted to say he left because he was a disgusting cretin that didn’t deserve to live with us in the first place, but I wanted to respect the fact that he was her father. “He left because he and Holly didn’t get along anymore. It had nothing to do with you.”

  “Does mommy love you more than me because you’re more beautiful? Why can’t I be pretty too?”

  “Mommy doesn’t love me more than you. She loves us the same.” I had no idea where Eden would come up with such an idea.

  “She does, she does. You should hear how she talks about you to other people. She brags about how smart you are and how you help around the house so much and how she doesn’t know if she’d be able to make it without you in her life. She never says anything like that about me.”

  I learned to be very careful when talking with Eden about beauty and self-image. I didn’t want her to grow up and have the same problems our mother did. Every chance I could I tried to convince her how beautiful she was. It completely confused me how she could think otherwise.

  After watching my mother struggle through relationships, I vowed that I would never do the same. Not only would I never treat a woman the way Holly’s boyfriends treated her, but I would make sure that I was only with someone that loved me as much as I loved them. And I wanted to make sure Eden grew up with a confidence that demanded respect from the opposite sex. She needed to know she deserved the best.

  Holly tried to be a better mother. She did the best she could. After Joel tired of being a parent, he moved out and our lives began to improve. She stayed away from men completely for about six months. I think it was part of one of her rehab programs.

  We moved to a better neighborhood and Holly got a real job as a secretary at a beauty salon. They did her hair and make up for free sometimes and made her even more beautiful than she was naturally, thus, enhancing her attractiveness to men. Men were more of a weakness for her than drugs or alcohol and she slowly slipped into old habits. As the years went by, I didn’t like strange men being around my little sister all the time.

  “Garrett, I swear, you’re gonna give yourself an ulcer one day,” my mother said blithely after I’d expressed my concerns to her. I was fifteen and worried about the attention my ten-year-old sister started to attract from the opposite sex. Eden was 5’5” with waist-long dark blond hair, perfect fairy like features and an angelic smile. One of my friends even commented on how gorgeous she was and how she didn’t look ten years old. After the broken nose I gave him healed, though, he never said anything else about her.

  “I’m serious, Holly. I don’t want all these random men hanging around the house anymore. It’s not safe. What if one of them tries something with Eden?”

  My mother continued trimming some flowers over the kitchen sink as she said, “Really, Garrett, do you have to call me Holly? What about ma or mom? I’ll even go with mother.”

  I’d tried to call her mother for a while. It didn’t work. Besides the fact that it just didn’t feel natural to me, I got tired of the strange looks from people when we were in public. She looked too young, I looked too old. She was white, and I was not. It was just too much to explain. I’m sure people just assumed we were boyfriend and girlfriend sometimes.

  I sighed and said, “I would like to meet the men before you bring them into the house. Before they meet Eden. Can we just be i
n concurrence about the matter?”

  “Concurrence? Is that the word of the day?” she teased. I ran my fingers through my shoulder length hair. She could be so frustrating sometimes. “Is that how you talk to the girls your age? No wonder you don’t have a girlfriend. And you should have a girlfriend. You’re such a handsome young man.” She turned to me, looked into my eyes and caressed my cheek. “Beautiful green eyes, strong masculine jaw, broad shoulders. I swear to God, it’s like you just went shopping for genes and picked out the best features between me and your dad.” She went back to trimming her flowers. I paused and stared at the back of her golden hair. She’d never mentioned my father to me before.

  For some reason, he was a taboo topic. I wanted to ask her to go on, but I figured she would clam up and end the conversation like always. Fortunately, she seemed ready to talk without any prodding. She took a vase out of the cabinet under the sink and filled it with water as she said, “He was the sexiest man I’d ever seen in my life. He was 6’5”, muscles everywhere, dark chocolate skin, and a smile that made me weak in the knees. We were only sixteen when we had you.” My mother took the vase, put the flowers in it then walked toward the living room.

  “Did you love him?” I asked, following her. She nodded.

  “I still do,” she said wistfully as she stared at nothing.

  “Why did he go to jail? What did he do?”

  “Gary, I need help with my homework,” Eden called from her bedroom.

  “Garrett, help your sister, then get changed for dinner,” my mother said, snapping out of her reverie and nervously wiping her hands on her skirt. She tried to sound authoritative and motherly. She didn’t have to tell me to help my sister. I always did it anyway. “We’re having a visitor for dinner.” She smiled and bounced into the kitchen. It was like she just flipped a switch and reverted back to her carefree demeanor without a second thought about my father or the conversation we were just having.

  “Hol…Mother! What did we just talk about?” I followed her back into the kitchen. “You can’t just bring some guy into our home.”

  “He’s not just some guy. He’s the guy. I really like this one. He’s different, I swear,” she exclaimed clasping her hands like an infatuated teenager. “I met him at the salon. He’s a photographer. He has his own studio and everything. And best of all, he treats me real good.”

  “Well,” I corrected her.

  “Well, what?”

  “He treats you well not…oh never mind.” I wanted to scream and punch the wall, but I had to control my temper. Richard and my social worker were still concerned about my anger level. I took a deep breath then went to help Eden with her homework.

  ***

  “So, do you like this one?” Richard asked in reference to my mother’s new boyfriend, Corbin. Before I could even answer he took the cap off of his pen and started writing. I hated when he did that. It made me feel like my answer didn’t matter.

  “He’s okay.” I shifted uncomfortably in the miniscule chair. All of the furniture in his office was too small. He was a child psychologist and I was no longer a child. I was fifteen and over six feet tall, but my social worker still wanted me to see him every month.

  Richard stopped writing and looked up from his notepad. “Did you say ‘he’s okay’?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You’ve never described one of your mother’s boyfriends as ‘okay’.” I shrugged as Richard began flipping through his notes. “According to my records, Tom was insipid, Brian was asinine, Larry was intolerable, Jimmy was virulent. I don’t even know what that means.”

  "Virulent - adjective. Intensely bitter, spiteful or malicious."

  “Buster was inadequately compensating for his intellectual and physical deficiencies,” Richard continued reading from his notes and ignored my interjection. “And Joel was the Devil incarnate.” He looked up and waited for me to respond. When I didn’t he said, “You must really like this guy.”

  “He’s okay,” I repeated while folding my arms over my chest. Honestly, he was more than okay. He was wonderful. My mother was right. He was different. That first night he came for dinner, he not only brought my mother flowers, but he brought Eden a doll and brought me an exquisite antique thesaurus. No man had ever brought my mother flowers let alone gifts for me and Eden. I’d tried for six months to find fault with him and I couldn’t. He was like a light that had entered our dark lives.

  “Well, according to Eden, he’s the best thing to ever happen to your family.” I didn’t say anything, but Richard started scribbling furiously.

  “What are you writing?” I yelled.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “No, I don’t want to know. I’m just asking because I enjoy the docile tone of my own voice.” Richard rolled his eyes at my sarcasm and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. Large wet circles were forming under his armpits. Even though I’d known him for over ten years, I think he was afraid of me. I think my intelligence made him nervous.

  “Simply stated, I think you have a Superman complex.” Here we go again. Richard tried to relate everything to comic books. I think it came from him being a child psychologist for too long. “You’re not happy unless you’re rescuing someone. You need to be needed. If you’re saving your mother or Eden, you know where you belong, you know what to do. Now that Corbin has come along and proven to be a good guy, there’s no one for you to save. And you don’t know what to do.” Richard sat back and waited for my smart aleck retort, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. He was so shocked by my silence, his formidable ass nearly fell out of the chair.

  What if he was right? Up until that point, the events in my life had fashioned me into the hero of the family. I made sure food was in the house. I made sure Eden went to school every day and that Holly got up for work. I was the one that chased away old boyfriends at knife point in the middle of the night or threw away my mother’s drugs or alcohol in order to keep her sober. Now there was Corbin.

  ***

  "I wrote you a poem," Eden said to Corbin one night while we were having dinner. I'd infused my love of words into Eden and she slowly developed into a talented poetess. She stood up from the table and took a sheet of pink paper out of her pocket. She cleared her throat and read:

  With the flash of a camera

  A new picture has begun

  The dark clouds have parted

  Here comes the sun

  No need for fear as our plight has ended

  Our hope has come

  A new family transcended

  Let there be joy

  Let there be light

  Let there be emotion

  With no more fright

  Let there be peace

  Let there be light

  Let our mistaken path

  Become right

  Corbin cried and a week later, he proposed to my mother.

  Now that we were safe and happy, I guess, in a way I felt less relevant. I felt like less of a man. That was until I met Maddie.

  Chapter 4: Swallowed Soul

  I’ll never forget the feeling I had the first time I took in her enchanting blue eyes. My heart pounded in my throat. I leaned against my locker to portray an air of aloofness when in reality I needed a solid object for support. Immediately the words for my next poem came to mind. I didn’t write poetry too often, only when I was truly inspired.

  “You must be Garrett Anthony,” she said.

  “No…,”

  “You’re not?” Her eyes widened with disappointment. She really wanted me to be Garrett Anthony. Looking at her little round face, I wanted to be anything she wanted me to be. Then, suddenly, I remembered, I was Garrett Anthony. I had to get used to going by Corbin’s last name. The adoption wasn’t final. He still had to get Eden’s father and my father to sign away their parental rights. Both men were making the situation difficult.

  After the wedding, Corbin decided to send us both to Barton Arms Preparatory School. I didn’t
want to go. I didn’t like the idea of wearing a uniform everyday or riding the metro for forty-five minutes into D.C. each morning and afternoon. I also didn’t think I’d fit in at this school. I’m surprised they even accepted me given my “propensity for violent outbursts” as Richard put it, but they did. The only reason I agreed to go was because it meant Eden and I could go to the same school. I think deep down I liked the idea of getting such a good education from such a reputable school, but I just didn’t feel like I deserved it or that it would last.

  “I mean, yes, I am Garrett Anthony. I’m just not used to the name, yet.” She smiled broadly and stared up into my eyes. I waited for her to keep talking and explain how she knew my name, but she didn’t. She just smiled and stared at me. I didn’t mind really. I enjoyed looking at her. I could’ve stared into her eyes all day.