“Oh! I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’m staring. I don’t mean to stare. I’m doing an article for you about the newspaper.” I raised an eyebrow in confusion and relaxed in the knowledge that she was just as nervous and had a harder time hiding it. “No, I mean,” she giggled. “I’m doing an article about you for the newspaper.”
“Me? Why are you writing an article about me?”
Her mouth flew open. I could read the shock and bewilderment in her eyes. They overflowed with honesty and expression betraying any emotion she could possibly feel.
“Are you kidding me?” She swallowed hard and licked her lips. My God, she had beautiful lips. They were so full and red and just plain succulent. I didn’t even know the girl’s name and I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to kiss her so badly my chest began to ache. “You earned a perfect score on the SATs and you took them in the ninth grade! You finished the entrance exam to get into this school in record time. I heard that the admissions department wanted you to come here so badly that they didn’t even ask you to cut your hair.”
I touched my ponytail as I inspected the students passing by. They looked like white clean-cut robots - an army of future Ivy-leaguers preparing to start their today in preparation for bright, powerful tomorrows. I really didn’t fit in. How did I end up going from foster homes and psychologists to Barton Arms Preparatory School? It was a tenuous dream wrought upon a bubble of uncertainty. And I knew the bubble would soon burst.
“You’re not going to print that are you?” The last thing I needed was for them to change their mind and decide to make me cut my hair.
“Don’t worry. It won’t matter. No one reads my articles anyway.”
“I’d read them.” The beautiful blue-eyed creature turned red and stared at her shoes while adjusting her overloaded backpack. I think I embarrassed her.
“Well, anyway,” she said as the first bell rang, “Can I interview you for my story?”
“Yeah sure. Of course.”
“Okay, great.”
“Okay.”
“It was nice to meet you, Garrett,” she said as she backed away while still embracing me with her eyes. Suddenly, she stopped short and ran back to me, her blond curls bouncing all the way. “I’m Madison, like the president. Not the current president, like the fourth president of this country, but, of course, you would know that since you’re a genius.” She blushed again and looked down at her shoes. “Um, anyway, everyone calls me Maddie.”
***
Over the years, I’d discovered something about myself. Inside, I felt angry, unsure, and alone. These feelings manifested in one of three illogical ways. Either I found some unsuspecting victim and took out my frustration on his face, I locked myself in the bathroom and puked until I was empty inside, or I wrote a poem then set it on fire so no one would ever see it. After meeting Maddie, I settled on option number three.
I had never seen a blue
so deep
so wide
so all consuming
Eyes that seize
my air
my thoughts
Eyes that entomb me
With one look I died
a sweet death
from the passion that
overwhelmed my soul
Her eyes had
captured my spirit
and swallowed me
whole
“Who’s Maddie?” Eden asked as we rode the metro home after school.
“Just a girl.”
“What’s so special about her? Why are you writing a poem about her? Why do you have her name written all over your notebook? I thought only girls did that.”
“She’s just a girl from school,” I responded, covering my notebook with my Latin book.
“Oh, come on, Gary. You can tell me the truth. We tell each other everything. I told you when I was in love with Brendan.”
“You were eight. And you got over it when you found out he still wet the bed.”
“So, I still told you.” Eden crossed her arms and sulked in her seat. I felt a little guilty about excluding her. She was right, we did tell each other everything, but this was different.
“Look, Eden-bug, I just met her. I don’t know how I feel about her. But when I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know, all right?” Eden smiled that smile that melted my heart. The smile that I’d seen every day for the past 11-and-a- half years. I swear, she smiled that smile at me the day she was born.
Eden hopped out of her seat on the train and started dancing around chanting, “Gary’s in love, Gary’s in love.” It was a ridiculous showing, but Eden’s beauty allowed people to ignore her silliness. They were mesmerized by her. A few people even clapped. Eden had a different way of dealing with her inner demons. She became somewhat of a theatrical genius. Sometimes even I had a hard time reading her true emotions and I knew her better than anyone in the world. The shy six-year-old who once thought she was too ugly to look at herself in the mirror now loved to dress up and prance around the house as if she walked a runway in Europe. I guess it was a girl thing.
Eden took a bow, basking in the attention, before returning to her seat next to me.
“I hope you’re finished,” I said, pretending to be upset with her.
“For now.” She smiled slyly as I tousled her long dark blonde hair.
“You want to play our game to pass the time?” I asked.
She nodded excitedly.
“Okay, we’re on the letter H, right?” I said, just trying to make sure she’d been paying attention.
“Unh-uh, we’re on I. We did H last Wednesday on our way home from the library,” she said shaking her head.
“Right, right. Okay, minimum length is six letters. I’ll start with…indolent.”
“Iconic.”
“Impasse.”
“Information,” she said with a sly grin.
“Oh come on, Eden. That’s cheap.”
“What? It’s more than six letters,” she responded innocently.
“You know the rules. You have to use words not common in everyday language. Sophisticated words.”
“Okay, okay. What about…indigenous?”
“That’s my girl.”
***
“Why don’t you tell me about that fight you were in when you lived with Ms. Brooks?” Richard asked me this question about three times a year since it happened when I was nine-years-old. You would think by now I would have a suitable answer, but I didn’t.
When Eden and I went to live with Ms. Brooks after my fight with Jimmy, there was this kid named Elias Castillo. He was two years older than me but he looked my size maybe smaller. Elias stuttered, twitched uncontrollably and sometimes wet his pants at the slightest provocation. All of his problems came from the fact that his mother used drugs when she was pregnant with him. The other kids would taunt him by asking him a simple question. When the slow stuttering response came, they would laugh and call him ‘crack baby’ which would trigger the twitching and the pants wetting. It was a vicious cycle. One day I got tired of it.
“Hey, Elias, what day is it?” twelve-year-old DeMarcus asked, stepping in front of the television where Eli had been watching cartoons.
Immediately his partner in crime, Terence, started laughing and said, “By the time he answers it’ll be tomorrow.
“I asked you a question, retard. Now what day is it?”
“Tu…Tu…Tu…,” was all that came from Eli.
I tried to ignore the scene at first. I sat in the corner and concentrated on the hand-held electronic Scrabble game that Mr. Jeffries had sent me in the mail. But when DeMarcus pushed him down, I decided I had to do something.
“Does terrorizing an innocent make you feel particularly stalwart?” I asked still sitting in my corner of the living room. Stalwart was my word for that day. I had found it in the newspaper then asked my teacher what it meant when I went to school.
“What the hell are you talking about?” DeMarcus probably didn’t un
derstand a single syllable I’d said.
“I’ll say it again, but this time slowly and with smaller words.” I stood up and approached the bully. He was a good three inches taller than me, but for some reason I wasn’t afraid. Maybe I should have been. “Beating up on people who can’t defend themselves only makes you look stupid.”
DeMarcus stared at me utterly surprised that I would call him stupid to his face. He opened his mouth to say something then closed it again. I could see his jaw tightening in anger. Then, without another word, he punched me in the face so hard I fell backwards right on top of where Eli had just wet himself. Even though the room was spinning, I still managed to see DeMarcus and Terence laughing. Then I heard him say, “Who looks stupid now?”
What happened next is a little hazy. All I remember is sitting in my room holding my cracked electronic Scrabble game. Eli told me later that I tackled DeMarcus and bashed his head in with my game.
Seven years later, I still didn’t remember what I did to DeMarcus. What did that mean?
“What does that mean?” I asked Richard when I’d finished recounting as much as I could.
Richard stopped writing and looked at me. I think it surprised him that I actually asked him a question as if I wanted to engage him in conversation. Our sessions usually consisted of him asking all the questions and me giving as many one word responses as possible.
“Um, I don’t know.”
“How can I send a boy to the hospital to get seven stitches in his head and not remember? What’s wrong with me?”
Richard cleared his throat, cleaned his glasses, then said, “I think you’ve had an extremely difficult life and you don’t quite know how to deal with your emotions. You’re angry over the hardships you and Eden have suffered and rightfully so, but you have to learn an appropriate release for that anger or else it will consume you.”
His psycho babble didn’t answer my question. What did anger have to do with memory lapse? I could only take solace in the fact that it hadn’t happened again since. Or, if it did, I didn’t remember.
***
“Get dressed,” my mother said to me one Saturday morning as I read the newspaper. It was seven o’clock in the morning. A full three hours before my mother usually awakened.
“Why? Where are we going?”
“I’ll explain in the car. Just put on something nice. Do you still have that suit you wore for your eighth grade graduation?”
“Holly, that was three years ago. It won’t fit me.”
“Well, borrow a shirt and tie from Corbin.” I stared at my mother trying to read her emotions. Her eyes were red and puffy with the obvious remnants of tears.
“Holly, what’s wrong? Did Corbin hurt you?” I sat upright in my chair.
“No, of course not.” She sighed. “This is not about me. Not exactly, anyway. It’s about you. Now get dressed. We have a long drive.”
“Did I do something wrong? Are you sending me back to foster care? What about Eden? Is she coming too?” I stood up from the table in a panic.
“Oh, my poor baby,” she said embracing me. “No, it’s nothing like that.” She pulled away from me and wiped tears away from her face with the back of her hand. “We’re going to see your father.”
Chapter 5: Sins of the Father
“My father? What…why…where…” I took a step back and stared into my mother’s tear swollen eyes.
“I’ll explain in the car, Garrett,” she said turning away so I couldn’t read her emotions.
“What about Eden? I promised to take her to the Air and Space Museum today.”
“She’s gonna go on a photo shoot with Corbin instead.”
“But…but…” I had studied countless words and phrases. I’d studied Latin, Greek and French to become more acquainted with word origins and the true complexities of language. My word obsession proved fruitless in this instance. For no words could describe what I felt. I made a mental note to create a poem about it later.
Even though my mother promised to explain along the way, we drove in silence. I think there were things she wanted to tell me, but she didn’t know how. Several times she inhaled sharply like she wanted to start a sentence. Then seconds later she’d exhale and shake her head.
The deafening silence slowly drove me insane. Questions bounced around my mind with spasmodic frequency. What would he look like? Why did he go to jail? Why hadn’t I ever met him? Why after so many years of never even mentioning his name did my mother suddenly want to take me to him? All these questions might soon be answered when I met my father for the first time.
“We’re leaving Virginia?” I asked, as we passed the state line. It was the first time either of us had said a word in almost two hours.
“Your dad’s in a prison in North Carolina.” I hoped she would continue, but she didn’t. The silence returned and allowed my mind to wander back to the unanswered questions that engulfed my life.
When we reached the institution, my mother turned off the engine, gripped the steering wheel with both hands, and stared straight ahead.
“I can’t do this. I can’t see him.” She turned to me and said, “You’re gonna have to go alone.”
“Alone?” I asked terrified. I wasn’t afraid of the prison. I’d been inside one before. In the sixth grade, after I’d been suspended for fighting for the fifth time, my social worker took me to a jail in Arlington to try to scare me straight. I remember thinking that I’d slept in much worse places than the Arlington County Jail.
No, prisons, prison life, not even prisoners scared me. What terrified me was the prospect of meeting my biological father. For some reason, even though I’d never met the man before, I felt as though I needed his approval. What would I be if I didn’t get it?
“Holly, I’m under eighteen. I seriously doubt they’ll let me in there alone,” I said, hoping the statement was true.
“Well, I’ll get you in there, but you have to visit him by yourself. I mean, I haven’t seen him since I married Corbin.” My mother pulled out her makeup bag and began to reapply her lipstick. I stared at her dumbfounded.
“You married Corbin three months ago. You saw my father three months ago?” My mother closed her eyes tightly and clasped the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.
“I can’t talk about this right now, Garrett. Let’s just go and get this over with.” My mother opened her door.
“No!” I grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward me. “I want to know why you saw my father three months ago but I don’t even know his name.”
My mother’s eyes bulged as she said, “Garrett, calm down, okay. Let me go, baby, please.” I saw fear in my mother’s eyes. I looked down and saw how violently I clutched her wrist. Shame stifled the anger that had erupted in me and I instantly let her go.
“I’m sorry mother.” I slouched in my seat and clasped my hands.
My mother breathed deeply and rubbed the soreness out of her wrist.
“His name is Gregory Baker. I’m sorry I never told you that before, but that’s the way he wanted it. He wouldn’t even let Grandma Jean tell you.”
“Why were you here three months ago?”
“I…I wanted to tell him I was getting married. I wanted…I just thought that he should know.”
I didn’t press the matter any further.
Catolby Correction Institution was a medium security prison reserved for violent convicts on good behavior. Or so I read from the informational packet. Now I at least knew that my father’s crime or crimes were violent. I’m not sure if I wanted to know more. Is that where I got my so-called violent streak? Had I inherited it from my biological father? Of course, I never considered myself violent. In my mind, I just did what I had to do when it had to be done. And if what needed to be done included violence, so be it.
True to her word, Holly did not go any further into the facility than she needed to. I wandered the visitor’s courtyard alone searching for a man I didn’t know. I found him seconds later.
Or at least I assumed it was him. It had to be. The man was a taller, darker, more muscular version of me.
“Would you like to play a game of chess?” My father smiled at me and gestured toward a table where he’d already set up the game. I imagined meeting my father several times in my head. I imagined what he’d look like since I’d never even seen a picture, what he’d sound like, and what his first words to me would be. Never, in all my imaginings, were his first words asking to play a game.
Guardian of Eden Page 4