by Hazel Mills
Chapter 28
Shannon
My mother is dead? How did this happen and why didn’t my sisters let me know? Well, I guess I really have no one to blame for that but myself. I mean, look at me. I’m a mess. For two years, I’ve been living on the streets of New Orleans. If it weren’t for one of my home girls, who lived there and volunteered at one of the shelters where I sometimes go for a hot meal and a goodnight’s rest, I still wouldn’t know what was going on with my family.
Look at Aliyah. She’s absolutely gorgeous. She looks so happy and healthy. I wish I could take the credit for that but I can’t. I tried to do everything in my power to hurt her. Ahmad and Nikki have done all of the hard work, I just gave birth to her. Leaving Aliyah with them was the only sane decision that I have made throughout my entire life. Oh, how I would love to go and hold her in my arms but I can’t. I would love to feel the love of both of my sister’s arms around me. Instead, I’m reduced to mourning my mother in a phone booth across the street from the cemetery. How pitiful is that?
I’m angry with myself because I know that it didn’t have to be this way. My life could have been about something but I threw away every opportunity given to me with both hands. I allowed the ghosts of my past to get in the way of a promising future. Why did I do that? How did I get stuck there but Nikki and Jessica was able to move on? It seems that they were only scarred by our father’s abuse but I was the one that got broken. Were they able to feel more loved than I was? I don’t see how they could but something was different for them. I have to believe that. Maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe they were just able to find the love inside themselves and that’s what is different.
I looked for love and acceptance everywhere except for inside of myself. I looked for it in every type of drug imaginable and in sex with a lot of different men and a few women. For a while, I thought that going away to college would somehow cure me but all that did was present more opportunities for me to fuck my life up even further.
Oh my! Look at Aliyah. She is so big. I wonder if Ahmad and Nikki have told her anything about me. I hope not. I would hate her to know that her mother just abandoned her. Yeah, I read the notices that were put in the newspaper about the adoption but there was nothing for me to contest. No judge in his right mind would have allowed me, a crack whore, to take Aliyah home. No, I knew it was best for me to do what I do best. Stay away.
My father looks so old with his receding gray hair and bent back. I can see that he is still The Right Reverend Gigaho. He has brought a date disguised as the church secretary to his wife’s funeral. Some things never change. He should be the one in the casket not my mother. What was my mother thinking staying married to that man? Couldn’t she see him for what he really was? Why didn’t she kill him when she realized that he was fucking her daughters? I still remember the first time he touched me like it was yesterday. He didn’t even have the decency to be subtle about it. He just grabbed me right there in the pastor’s study and made me suck his dick. I was only seven years old and too scared to raise an objection to anything my parents said. To object would have been disrespectful, my father taught. “Children must obey their parents.” He even went so far as to show me the scripture in the Bible that said as much. My mother knocked on the door and I thought that I had been saved. He told her that he was disciplining me for chewing gum during church service and he needed her to go away and she just left, without questioning him. By the time I was older and understood that what he was doing was wrong, it didn’t matter anymore because I was already dead inside.
So many times, I’d wish that I’d had the power to kill him but instead, I chose to kill myself, literally and figuratively. My irresponsible lifestyle has cost me my life. I don’t know how much longer I have before this disease leaves me in one of the wooden boxes that my mother is lying in. I’ve lost so much weight. When I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize the face looking back at me. I didn’t think this could happen to me. I guess no one ever does. It’s the chance you take believing that you’re invincible and putting yourself out there like I have.
After I left Aliyah at the hospital that day, I ran back to Bone. He said that I could stay with him but that I would have to earn my keep so I hit the streets, selling my body. I didn’t have a problem with it. I thought that after all, who could suck dick better than I could. I’d been doing that shit since I was seven. I know now that I should have gone back to school or someplace where I could get my life together. In order to work as much as Bone wanted me to, I had to have a little something to keep me going and I got hooked on that hard shit. I relied on it to numb the pain inside so that I could do what I had to do. I wasn’t careful about it at all. If I needed to get high, it didn’t matter where the needle came from. When one of my tricks literally kicked me from his car without paying for his blowjob, Bone accused me of stealing and beat me within an inch of my life. I roamed the streets of DC for a while, fucking whomever I could for a fix and a warm bed.
It looks like the service is over. Everyone is leaving the cemetery. Jessica has certainly put on quite a bit of weight. Looks good though. Jessica and Nikki both look like everything is going well for them. I’m happy for them. I really am. Ahmad is just as fine as he ever was. I wish that I could apologize for what I did to him. He didn’t deserve that. I was just being selfish. I wanted everyone around me to hurt because I was hurting. Would he and Nikki forgive me? Will God?
There is Sabrina. I wonder if she is still working at the hospital in Maryland. Nikki is lucky to have found such a great friend. I wish now that I had listened to Sabrina that day in the car. Her words were harsh but she was speaking the truth only I wouldn’t or couldn’t hear her. At the time, I thought nobody knew more than I did. It is clear to me now that I was delusional about so many things.
I wish I could cross the street and be closer to my family. I’d love to hear my sister’s voices one more time.
Let me take one last look at Aliyah. She’s the only thing that I have done right my entire life.