For some reason, he and I never quite saw eye to eye. We were like water and oil, and though we tried to get along, in the end, we couldn’t stomach the other and left it at that. I know that fucker was overjoyed to see me and Tirza break up, but I guess I had some degree of vicious glee within myself as well. Whenever I thought of his smug smile at the news his daughter and I were no more. My next thought was always… Yeah, but it was me that popped her cherry!
I know, I know, it’s not the nicest thing to think, but what the fuck the old man hated me, so fuck him. Besides, I’m not fucking monument to goodness, so sue me.
“Maybe about ten minutes later,” began Tirza, “he looked over at me and asked me if I had heard anything from my mother. I shook my head, because other than me, there hadn’t been a single noise in the house the whole day. He just nodded and went back to staring at the mirror.
“I don’t know how long we stayed like, in silence, together, so isolated from one another we could have been stranded on separate desert islands a thousand miles apart. The sun had long set and I was getting hungry, but I ignored the pain in my stomach, because I knew Lisa was going through much worse. I could feel it in my heart, in the center of my soul. Something bad was happening to my baby sister. I knew whatever it was; it was something she didn’t have the capacity to understand. Something evil, because it was being visited upon innocence…” She trailed off into silence, from my vantage I had only a partial view of her face, but I had come to know her methods of expression so well. I knew the cast of her face was haunted. She would look sallow and drawn with tightness about her eyes, her eyes flashing with anxiety, abhorrence and fright. She was envisioning her sister’s rape.
I guess, when I look back on it and try to make sense of how things turned out the way they did. And this is despite the fact, I am irrevocably addicted to women and all the pleasure they can give, when they open themselves, ask for help without restraint, they are irresistible. I should’ve figured my heart would stir for Tirza. Truthfully, though we had fought like a pair of stung assholes, I had never really stopped feeling something special for her. I often think if I hadn’t said Katie’s name aloud that day when her and I were fucking like wild hogs on the floor of the Loft. What could things have been like? What kind of life would I have lived if her and I had stayed together? It was a stupid notion really, because the only realistic answer to that question is death. We’d have both ended up dead.
Sometimes late at night, I wonder as I try to figure out a way to bring back my innocence, as I try to wash the blood from my hands. I know it is no more than a vain mental attempt at absolution that will never come.
I am, without a doubt, going to hell, because my next thoughts are utterly predictable.
I think of Ramona…
…And Katie…
…And Sandy…
…And Leda…
…And I know things cannot be changed. I am bound to my past and the deeds that have filled my life – right, wrong or indifferent, they comprise me. I fucking am who and what I fucking am; there are no bones about it.
Total tangent there, sorry!
“Sometime later,” Tirza began suddenly, her voice was shaky now. Her grip about my body just a wee bit tighter.
Something bad was coming.
“My mother stepped through the screen door, locked it. She closed the main door next and locked that as well. She turned to my dad and asked if there was anything new. He said something along the lines of ‘not a god damned thing’, which made my mom frown, because she hated it when any of us cussed. She let it go though, and looked over at me. I shook my head ‘no’, because, like my dad, I had nothing to report. She let her chin fall to her chest and began to cry. Quietly and in the middle of the room with her shoulders bouncing up and down, she cried. I was going to go to her, but my dad was so fast, I didn’t even see him move. I just stood there and watched them embrace as my mother cried and my father looked over her shoulder, facing the front door. His face kept turning uglier and uglier with every sob that escaped my mom. He looked so mean. I sat back down on the love seat, hoping he wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t want to see that expression poised in my direction. It was murderous.
“Then someone knocked on the front door real hard and insistent, loud enough, if we’d been asleep, it would’ve awakened us all. My parents broke apart and looked into each other’s eyes asking without speaking, if they were expecting anyone. Both of them shook their heads and just stood there rooted in place. The knocking came again. This time my dad stepped around my mom, placing her behind him. This confused me, because they were acting like something dangerous was about to happen.
“My mom glanced at me and motioned earnestly for me to get out of sight. For a second, I didn’t know what to do. She did it again. I looked around, trying to figure out what to do when the knocking came for a third time, even louder and accompanied by a stern, authoritative voice.” Tirza unlatched her arms from around my waist and sat up, though she was still leaning against me, slightly, unconsciously, her entire focus upon her story.
“’Please open the door, this is the Los Angeles Policing Division of the Northern Intercontinental Alliance. We need you to open the door now,’” she mimicked, making her voice as deep as it could go. Then she did the most outlandish thing I could imagine her doing in a moment like this – she clucked her tongue. Her expression turned derisive. “But he didn’t sound that way,” she clarified, “He had an accent and rolled his r’s. His words were clipped short as if he could only speak in short rapid bursts.”
“He was from the Asian Sector, huh?” I asked, knowing it for truth as I spoke the words.
Tirza gazed up at me with penetrating eyes. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Why do they always send so many from the Asian Sector?” asked my girlfriend, more than a pinch of exasperation in her tone.
The girls peered at one another in question.
“It makes things easier,” I announced into their bewilderment.
“What you do mean, Effy?” asked Katie, her brows knitting.
“Because they are far away from home, that’s why. It makes it easier to follow orders you would otherwise question, if you were looking at people you could relate to. We are not like them. So, it makes it easier for them to take us from our families or to hurt us or detain us without cause, because we are different.” I answered disdainful of the NIA troops. The assholes were saturating the neighborhood. Those men were so much more shorted than me, and yet had the power of the world’s strongest government behind them – the strongest that had ever existed on earth no less.
“For real?” asked Katie.
“It makes sense when you think about it,” interjected Ramona. “It makes it easier for them to fuck with us.” Her gaze was hard. Her eyes were glossy.
“So, what happened next, Teezee?” I implored. I used my pet name for her, prodding her, but doing so with the softest instrument I had in my employ – our past.
She stared back at me with a guarded expression. I could see something behind those deep, brown eyes of hers. Whatever it was, she masked it behind the bastion of protectiveness she had built up and shored, since our break-up. It was a look about her I had come to despise, because she was hiding the truth behind it.
Yet, she forged on. “My dad shouts then, something like, ‘what the hell do you guys want?’ and just as I make it to the archway, leading to the hallway bisecting our house, I hear this booming crash. I spun around just in time to see the front door come flying open; splinters of wood showering my dad as the Police come storming in…” She paused and swallowed hard. “Only… they weren’t the Police.” She paused again, glancing at each of us before she went on, tears reforming in her eyes. “They were NIA Troopers in full gear. I mean loaded with it – body armor, tactical belts, helmets, headsets, grenades and wrist-comms… and machine guns. Every single one of them had a machine gun.” She took a shuddering breath and just as suddenly as it appeared, the pro
tective wall she had built around herself vanished. She gazed up at me, shutting out the others in the room.
“They shot him, Estefan - .” Then she burst into tears and buried her face in the crook of my armpit, nearly shouting with muffled indignity and sorrow. “They came through the door and shot my dad so many times, I could see he was dead, even before he hit the ground! They shot him! They killed my father! In our house! They killed him like a dog!”
I reached down and put my hand upon her head, looking up at Ramona, whose face mirroring how I felt – stricken to the point of nausea.
“My mom screamed, so loud, Effy… so loud, it hurt my ears,” she continued, her voice garbled and rough as she turned her head slightly to one side. She laid it more squarely against me. “I couldn’t watch. I just couldn’t, because I knew what was going to happen next. I backed into the hallway. I felt for the door to my bedroom with my hand when a second set of shots rang out. My mother’s screams stopped at once. I swear I heard her hit the floor. I probably would’ve done something stupid right then, but I heard the Asian trooper say something like, ‘They have another daughter. Find her and neutralize the situation, the latest Inhaler readouts are indicating this entire area will go Muto in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Command wants them all anesthetized by then.’
“My mind went haywire. I think I sort of blacked out, because all I remember was falling out of my window, hitting my head on that stupid rock by the fence. Then I was scrambling through the tunnel,” she said, stopping momentarily to look more directly at me and gave me an embarrassed half-shrug.
“The tunnel? You have a tunnel right outside your bedroom window?” asked Katie, her thin eyebrows coming together.
I let out a disdainful line of air through a gap in my teeth. “She’s talking about this sort of long hole or absence of growth in the bushes on that side of her house. It is just large enough to crawl through and the bushes are large enough to conceal the fact that it is even there and it extends all the way to the alley behind Tirza’s house,” I explained, so that Tirza wouldn’t have to.
Katie’s frown deepened in thought, but I knew it would be Ramona who divined that which was left unsaid.
“You used to use that passage to sneak into her bedroom, huh?” asked my infuriatingly insightful girlfriend.
Tirza went board-like for a second, and then she pushed away from me, as if I’d suddenly contracted the plague. Her face went crimson with humiliation.
“From what I understand, the ‘tunnel’ was there years before the time Tirza and I were together,” was my diplomatic response. It was ridiculous to make Tirza have to endure anything more than she had already.
“But still…,” added Ramona, leaving her implication hanging without being said.
“As a matter of fact, he did use it to get into my bedroom, just as I used to sneak out to come here, OK?!?”
I felt my face transfix with a mixture of awe and puzzlement. It was Tirza speaking, her previous uneasiness apparently gone.
“You weren’t the first girl to know how to climb up the tree and which window to step through, Ramona.”
My girlfriend and ex-girlfriend stared at one another levelly. I could feel the very air itself thicken.
Silence ensued; a long, stale and uncomfortable sort of quiet.
I tried my damnedest to put those errant thoughts of Tirza coming through my window with nothing on underneath her sweater, but the skin she was born with. She had a knack for deliberately shedding her clothing before she would climb the tree on the side of the house, preferring instead to give me one of her a cute, little shows. These typically involved her seductively disrobing that last garment before she would jump into my arms and we would begin to make out wildly. Some of our best love making had followed those routines. Sometimes we would make love until we couldn’t any longer. We’d just fall asleep wherever we happened to be at the time – the bathroom, on my bed, even on the floor. Tirza might come across as Little Miss Fucking Goody-Two-Shoes to the world around her. But, get her to fall in love with you, then get her alone - she too was a teeny-tiny fuck toy.
Oh god, and could she ever spin on a cock! Dude, stop!
“So from there, you made you way here?” asked my cousin, obviously tired of the awkward situation.
Tirza continued to gaze at Ramona for few more moments. “Yeah, I really didn’t know what I was doing,” she retorted, her eyes reverted to Katie now, as if my girlfriend didn’t exist. “I don’t really even remember how my clothes got all torn up or how I got so dirty. Shit, I don’t even remember when I actually made the decision to come here. I just did. I just wanted to get away from those jerks that killed my parents. I just wanted to get away...” Her voice lost whatever edge it had gained while she’d confronted my girlfriend. The tears began to fill within her eyelids once more.
Ramona – out of nowhere – released an exasperated sigh.
Automatically, my expression darkened. Fucking bitch, what’s your god damned problem!
Yet, my girlfriend proved my reaction false. “Tirza?” she prodded quietly.
My ex-girl peered up at her through what had to be blurred vision.
“All of this change hadn’t been so sudden and so… so… so, fucking mind-blowing that I’m not quite sure how to ‘be’, you know?”
Tirza started to shake her head that she didn’t know what the other girl was talking about.
Ramona continued. “I’m sorry.”
Now, my mouth gaped as wide as one of those fucked up mummies in that old-school Brendon Frasier movie¹. It had to have been hanging down below my pectoral muscles after hearing what I had just heard.
“It’s just hard to get over the whole jealousy thing,” confessed the girl that, a few seconds ago, I was certain was my girlfriend, but now sounded like an entirely different person. “Knowing you had him first has always sort of bothered me.”
“Well, he’s yours now,” began the small teenage girl. Then her gaze shifted to Katie. “And apparently yours as well…”
Katie had the decency to blush.
{ ¹”Brendon Frasier movie’’: refers to The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, wherein the mummies yell and scream with what seems like unhinged jaws. }
~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ Chapter 39 ~
(Summer – 2018)
Manifest Destiny
Tirza’s gaze was on me now. “So, it was her you were thinking about that day and not Katy Emerson from school, huh?” She paused, gesturing toward Katie. “Jesus, Estefan, your cousin? Are you crazy or something?”
I sighed, knowing the truth was too obvious to ignore. “I’m not crazy, Tirza. I’m just in love with her. I have been for as long as I can remember, and the funny thing, Teezee, is she’s in love with me too.”
If Ramona could grow as a person, then motherfuckers, so could I!
Tirza’s eyes slitted. “Is that true?” she demanded of my cousin.
Katie just shrugged nonchalantly and stared back at my ex- with a twisted grin on her face.
Tirza returned her gaze upon me. “She does! Sonofabitch, she does!” Disgusted exasperation was dripping from her tone. “And you’re ok with it?” came the abrupt question directed at Ramona. Tirza’s look altered again, incensed, astonished, mistrusting – all in one.
My girlfriend shrugged. “Just as I am ok with him calming you down, with you and him holding onto one another as you cried. I remained calm. What can I do? What can you do?” Tirza’s eyebrows rose. “You know damn well, at some point, you’re going to stop denying what you feel for him. You gonna take him to your bed. But,” Ramona began, raising her hand when Tirza started to interrupt, “before you say anything, I will give you this. Yeah, I may not be one hundred percent ok with this, but I’m accepting of it. I accept the inevitability of what is to come, so should you.”
“I will never take him ‘back into my bed!’” declared Tirza, which made me flush with embarrassment. She even used her fi
ngers to physically quote Ramona.
Both Katie and Ramona laughed at that.
“If he wants you, Tirza, you will go to him with open arms… and with open legs all the same,” countered my cousin.
“I will not! I’m not that kind of girl” Tirza crossed her arms under her pert breasts.
“You might think that now, but later, whether it is a few days or even a few months, you will think different. Trust me, you will,” rebutted my cousin.
My girlfriend preferred to stay quiet for the time being.
“I doubt it…,” my ex-girlfriend trailed off into silence when her eyes met mine. “I don’t mean to sound… well, mean, because you’ve been so nice to me when you didn’t have to be. It’s just… well, that’s how I feel,” she said to me. She was already blushing, probably at the recollection, scant minutes prior, she’d been hugging me fairly tight.
I hunched, non-committedly, mostly due to the fact, I wanted absolutely nothing more than out of this conversation. “That sort of stuff is always up to you, Tirza. I’m just your friend; therefore, I have no claim on you, other than civility and kindness. A while ago, you seemed to need just that, I was here – or rather, you came here, and that was that.” I chanced a quick glance at my cousin. “I think the gist of what they are trying to say to you, is just be cool and don’t judge. A lot has happened between the three of us, and though we know others might not understand or agree. If you want to hang around, then you’re gonna have to accept it for what it is. Right?” I asked the room.
“Right,” echoed Katie.
Ramona just nodded.
Tirza looked away, whatever sense of perversion she had over me and the girls seemed to dissipate, or rather, it was swallowed. Like bad tasting medicine, she took hers, whether she agreed or not. “It really doesn’t matter all that much in light of the way things are going now… after…”
Before yet another awkward moment could descend upon our beleaguered group, Katie asked, “So, guys – ah, what’s the plan?”
Shadow Seed 1: The Misbegotten Page 46