Chapter Forty-One Clinging Part One: To A Life 1 страница

I couldn’t sleep that night, and really, I didn’t even feel tired. It was odd how my body could release endorphins in such a surge that it left my mind feeling wide awake, but my limbs and torso weighted. It was as if I had taken e (a drug I knew a little about, but had never actually consumed), but while draining my spinal fluid, replaced it with lead. I was heavy, indolent, and lethargic, though I could not be willed into sleep. It was like being in a coma, hearing and being apart of everything around you, but never actually having a say in anything. I was on mute; trapped. Everything was in my parents hands now. I was merely a spectator.

I was not even sure if I could say parents anymore; should I have only been saying parent? My father had after all resigned his parental rights in my raising, at least for that night. Even if it was just a temporary thing on his part, I was fairly certain that my smashing of his legacy removed all doubts from our minds. There was Anthony, and then there was my mother. Two separate entities, and two separate rolls, but they were still working together. Anthony had always been Anthony to my mother, so she saw no reason to part ways with him. Through the paper thin walls of my house, only made stronger by layers of paint, I could hear my parents talking and arguing in their room late into the night. The arrest and the fight seemed to take off years of my life, but when I grabbed my clock from out of my bedside table, I saw it wasn’t even early morning yet. It was about three am, too late to have not gone to bed, but still too early to be up and wandering around.

With eager ears, I caught little tid-bits of their conversation. I heard Anthony tell my mother, demand to her, actually, that I was to never, ever see that artist again. His words hurt, but I couldn’t expect anything else from his at that point in my life. The incident that stung my already open and filtering wounds was that my mother said yes in response. There was no hesitation, there was no confrontation. It was just a simple yes. I didn’t know what I had expected her to do, but I had wanted her to defend me in some regard. Wasn’t she still my parent? Wasn’t she still that mom character I had befriended even after coming into the house so late at night? I couldn’t even remember her first name off the top of my head. She couldn’t be just a person to me, she had to be my defender. My mother.

I started to review our relationship in my head, and I realized she had been. She had let me get away with skipping curfew all those nights, showing up late, and deciding not to tell my father before. She had always been a mother, a mom. But had I been the proper child right back to her?

The answer was clear in my head, and my insides fell out of me when I drew the simple solid word together. No. No, I hadn’t been a good son at all right back to her. Coming home late had been expected of me. I was a teenager. But I had lied to her, profusely, continuously. It was just like she had told me in the car. She didn’t need to know everything about my life, but she was sick of my lies. I was sick of my lies, but they were the only thing keeping myself alive. Now, they were falling through, and I felt dead.

My mother was not denouncing her parental roles, but she was changing them. She was making herself stronger, more militant, just like my father had been. She would not revolt to brutality by any means, but she had to stop being so passive. She needed to step up and make sure her son was safe, rather than happy. She knew the truth, or what people were telling her was the truth, of why I had been gone those nights. She thought I was in pain, that I was being hurt, and I knew she blamed herself for that. She blamed herself for not seeing and stopping her little boy from being abused by the pedophile who lived down the street. She blamed herself for my rage and my spite, and even her own partner’s violence. My mother wanted to make everyone happy, but it only left herself feeling unfulfilled and drained. She had let me slip through her fingers; it wasn’t going to happen again.

In her small voice, she spoke up. She began to make plans with my father, figuring out ways that I could stay home and away from the ‘public eye’ so other people would not get wind of the situation. She didn’t want me to go to school, and if I did, she wanted me to be under tight supervision so I didn’t skip and go to his place again. I heard Anthony nod and agree with her, sitting on the squeaky bed and devising plans for the rest of the week. She wanted to make sure I was safe, I knew, so I tried not to be mad. As the night went on, I heard her voice getting weaker and weaker, while my father’s only got stronger and stronger. He was no longer clouded by fear, indignation, and desolation that he was thinking as clear as he could into the situation.

Eventually, I gave up and stopped listening.

That had been just before the phone rang. My adrenaline rush was calming down, and the bed was calling to me. I knew I probably wouldn’t sleep for the first hour I lay in it, but since I apparently wasn’t going to school for a little while, I saw no issue of my sleeping habits. The noise of the ring jolted me awake, and I used what was left of my brain power to sneak out and down the stairs, grabbing the receiver to listen in. I held the receiver away from my mouth, so they couldn’t hear my elusive breaths on the other side. It was the police, informing us that they had brought Gerard into the station for questioning shortly after I had left. He stated that their meeting was brief, and done mostly for intimidation. They were at least charging him for giving alcohol to a minor, a charge which he admitted freely too, but all other areas were inconclusive. He asked for a lawyer shortly after he had been brought in, and since it was so late, after setting up another meeting, they let him go. I let out a sigh of relief hearing that, nearly forgetting that I was listening in secretly on the other end.

The conversation between my father and the mysterious male voice, probably the officer who arrested me, seemed to go on forever and ever, detailing every last thing. Gerard had no priors on his wrap sheet, except for a speeding ticket in the early nineties. Judging from the records, he even appeared to be safe. It was a startling concept for the two older men on the phone to face, when I had known it all along.

“I mean,” the officer tried to explain his thoughts in greater detail, as if he needed any more. “He doesn’t even have any complaints lodged against him.”

“ I want to lodge a complaint against him,” my dad spat back into the phone. I could practically hear and feel the frothy spit coming through the other line.

“We know that,” the officer sympathized, trying not to get too personal and failing. “I would like to lodge a complaint as well. We have nothing to prove just yet. For now, he has specific bail requirements that make sure he stays away from school yards, parks – any place where minors inhabit. He is not allowed to be alone with a minor, and it has been advised that he stay in doors as much as possible. If people hear of what he’s been questioned for, who knows what could happen. If he were sent to jail, he would be one of the first pegged off.”

“Then send him to jail,” my father interrupted urgently.

“I wish I could, but it is not fair to put him in jail for something he may or may not have done, especially when he has nothing prior on his record.”

“He did it,” my dad spat again, ignoring the previous statement. “I fucking know he did.”

“Do you have proof?” the officer asked, removing himself from the situation. His voice sounded tired; graveyard shift must have been hard work. “You need proof and then we can charge him. Who knows? This could really be a huge misunderstanding.”

I wanted to reach out and hug the officer on the phone, squeeze the life out of him, and just yell from the highest treetops that Yes! This was just a mistake. A confusion. A complete and utter misunderstanding. I just wanted to be charged for the things that I had done wrong, and then charge Gerard for the things that he did wrong, treating us as two separate people, two separate cases. I didn’t want our life outside the cruel walls of the station to blend together. For this one instant, I wanted us to be strangers. Those two people who passed each other at the liquor store that one Sunday, and nothing else.

“But if you ask me, something is definitely wrong here.”

My heart sank, just when it was starting to beat again, but I still wanted to hug the officer, if to only literally squeeze the life out of him and then toss him to the side. Anthony did not need fucking encouragement.

“Thank you. I knew I was onto something,” he oozed, actually happy at the situation. I couldn’t fathom why the fuck he was happy he was right about these things. If I thought my child was raped, I would want to be proven wrong every second of every day. Not my father, no, he was a special kind.

“I don’t know how you’re handling this,” the officer abruptly mentioned over the phone, failing at leaving the personal element out of this. “It takes a strong kind of person.”

I wanted to gag. My father was strong all right. So strong he had to hit his own fucking child to cope.

“Thank you,” he oozed again, loving the sympathy almost as much as being right. “In all honesty, I just want to kill the fucker and have this be over with.”

I gasped, totally forgetting and not caring that I was listening in on the phone. The words had literally knocked the breath out of me. My father said he wanted to kill Gerard; surely that had to be an empty threat. He was saying it to a police officer; he wasn’t completely dumb. It would be like me walking right up to the cops and confessing everything. I had to be discrete about things, not blunt and in-your-face like he was being. There was no way he was serious about killing Gerard. He couldn’t be. He wasn’t a killer; he may have hit me, but that was hitting, and that had only been once. There was no way he could actually hurt someone to inflict death on them. I always knew he was tall and menacing, but a murderer was something entirely different. Murdering someone took a lot of guts, surprisingly. You had be become aware that you fucking held life in your hands and that you had the power to take it away; no mistakes, no regrets. He couldn’t be like that. He just couldn’t.

But then again, I never thought he could have hit me either. I touched my jaw, tracing my fingers back up to where he had hit my cheek. The pain swelled back and over my body again. He had hit me, when I least suspected. Could he really kill, too?

This wasn’t my father I was talking about anymore. This was Anthony. I had never really met that man until tonight. Who knew what he was capable of?

I shook my head, not wanting to think about it. Gerard was safe anyway, I told myself. He was under strict bail conditions, and probably wasn’t going to be leaving his house. I didn’t really know what bail conditions meant; I had heard it repeated loosely on cop TV shows and dramas, but I didn’t know of anyone who had actually put it into use. The closest thing I could relate it to in my own mind was a house arrest. Gerard was going to have to stay away from minors, stay inside most of the time, and hey, that wasn’t much of a stretch for him. I knew he definitely couldn’t come outside and see minors, but what if minors went in? What if other people went inside? Like Vivian and myself? Fuck, I wasn’t sure. Though I wanted to hope, I knew I probably wasn’t allowed to. My parents were determined to put me under my own house arrest. If I managed to by pass their own security and make it the fifteen minutes to Gerard’s place, then we would both be screwed if we were caught. It would only corroborate as evidence. My heart ached that I couldn’t visit him, but I prayed that Gerard wouldn’t be alone. Vivian had to go and see him – he would need her in a time like this. He would need all the friends he could get, which pretty much just consisted of she and I. His brother may come by and see him, but probably not with all this legal drama. His brother, from what he had told me about him, was a straight-edge guy, not wanting to take too many risks. He was also very skittish, and would be perturbed by the smallest mess or noise inside Gerard’s house.

“You should have seen him when he tried to visit me in New York!” Gerard roars with laughter one day when he recounted what limited information I had of his past. “He had only been inside fifteen minutes, two sips of his cup of coffee, saw a mouse run across the floor, and was out of there in two seconds flat. He spilled his coffee and screamed like a woman though, before he left, of course.”

I smiled at the memory, though bittersweet. I knew Gerard’s brother wouldn’t want to be involved in the drama, and his domineering wife wouldn’t either. His brother had kids, too. They were too much to lose, and if he had to take his kids with him, then it was a no-go. No minors around Gerard. I somehow didn’t think Gerard would miss the little hellions his brother carried around.

As I drew to a close on Gerard’s directory of friends, I began to wonder if his phones would work, or if they would be tapped. If he couldn’t be around minors, what did that imply? Could I phone him and have it be okay? Could anyone phone him? He did have my number, I remembered from that time he had phoned me at home to bring in the beer, but if his phones were tapped, he couldn’t call me. Whoever was listening in would know. Wasn’t phone tapping illegal though? Maybe not if he knew about it… And if he did call me, which would have been unlikely, one of my parents could have answered it and then I would have been even more fucked. We would have been even more fucked. We were both screwed in the scenario, and I felt farther away from Gerard than I ever had in my entire life. Even when I didn’t know what he was thinking, he was off in his own world, and when we were fighting, I had never felt this lost. We really were strangers.

The only saving grace in the entire situation was the fact that if no one could get into Gerard’s place, my father could not hurt him.

I gave up on the officer and Anthony’s conversation shortly thereafter, not wanting to hear them carrying on a witty banter about something frivolous. I slunk back into my room to mope, still listening to the paper thin walls. When he finally came back to talk to my mother, he had calmed down significantly, but he still had some final words to get out about my hospital visit the next morning. The cop had advised him that it was a good course of action, and the sooner it was done, the better. He tried to get my mother to take me in that very second, but they were both tired. Instead, they settled on phoning to figure out arrangements, and then they went to bed.

I was still awake.

The word hospital sent chills up my spine. I fucking hated the place, even without the added negative connotation it had this time. Their environment was always so stale and pungent, death creeping around each hallway. I had broken my arm pretty bad when I was in grade seven, so much so that they had to use pins to keep the bone healing properly. I was forced to stay over night in the hospital until the surgery to fix my arm. I never slept a wink. The whole place creeped me the fuck out. I kept thinking that people had died in the very bed I was in, in the very room I was in, and probably were dying in the room next to mine. It was really the first time I had come in such close contact with the death of myself, the first time I actually realized I was living and it wasn’t always going to be that way. The daytime wasn’t too bad, those thoughts only coming to me every once in awhile after the nurses left me alone, and after I had finished my horrid hospital food. It was the night, when I heard the creaking of wheelchairs, the clanking of nurses’ carts, and the low dull beep of heart monitors in the room that I nearly lost it, and died myself. I swore there were ghosts all around me, tapping out beats to a song or a message I had never heard before. The stiff and decayed hospital sheets didn’t nothing to protect me, and smelled like two AM – dry, dirty, and yet bleakly cool – as I pulled it over my head and willed the night away. I had only stayed in the hospital for a day or two, most of it being knocked out by the pain killers they had given me for my arm, but it had been enough to permanently sour me on the experience from then on. And I had only been twelve years old.

Even when my dad hurt his back again in the beginning of the school year and had to have surgery again for it, I had stayed at home. I didn’t want to go into the fucking building, even if I wasn’t the one being operated on. The waiting rooms were probably the worst too, people just sitting and listening for bad news while wishing they were some place else. No, there was no way in hell I liked hospitals.

Now, tomorrow I would be going to that Godforsaken place. I had little time to dwell on that however, my heart still raced for other reasons. I didn’t want them to know anything. My father had said that they could find proof. Could they really? Could they just tell from looking at me, poking and prodding me, that Gerard and I had had sex? And fuck, I didn’t want to have an STD either. I hadn’t felt anything particularly wrong with me; I didn’t have a rash and it didn’t burn when I peed, but some STDS have no symptoms. And AIDS was HIV before it became a threat, and sometimes it even laid dormant in the system for years before it killed. That was the things too – AIDS killed. An STD was just aggravating and embarrassing. It would eventually go away. But AIDS killed people. It slowly broke down their immune system until the common cold took care of them. I didn’t want to die. I was just starting to live my life. How could it be over so soon?

My breath started to quicken in my throat and I began to compulsive search my body for any kind of marking, any kind of welt or wart that could have been caused from having sex. I had only stared at myself in the kitchen previously, now that I was in my room alone, I could do whatever I needed to do. I twisted and bent all around, using the mirror in to scope out my body like I never had before. I tore off my clothing until it was just me, a pair of socks, and boxers halfway down my knees. And I looked. I searched and investigated and explored. I did everything I could think of in a paranoid fashion for what felt like hours, and the only thing I came up with was a slight hickey on the left side of my chest, fading fast. I prayed that it would be gone by morning, but if it wasn’t, that still didn’t mean Gerard had made it. I had to keep telling myself over and over again that I had not only had sex with Gerard. I had been with Jasmine, too. If they questioned me, I could blame it on her. If I had AIDS, I could blame it on her. I didn’t want to, but it was necessary. I had to make sacrifices. I just hoped my life wasn’t one of them.

Still studying myself in my mirror, I turned around and glanced at my back. There were no marks there, but my eyes wanted to my backside and I realized there was still one thing I could not just shrug off on the girl I fucked at the cottage. She did not have a dick to fuck me in the ass with. Gerard did. I felt myself loose all hope again, falling onto my bed and burying my hands in my face. I listened to the soft murmurs coming from my parents’ room until finally, there was nothing left but my father’s loud and obnoxious snoring. I didn’t know how my mother stood it some days, and I began to realize why she always complained about being tired. I laid on my bed, watching the glowing red numbers from my clock in the depth of the drawer tick out of the midnight gray area. It was becoming early morning, and soon I would have to face my fate. I tried to collect myself, and I realized that there was still something I could do to hopefully save myself. I still had time before I went to the clinic, and I was going to use that to cover up everything and not be afraid anymore. Gerard had taught me how to answer people’s questions; I was going to meet them halfway with an explanation. But before all that could happen, I needed to shower.

I got out of my bed and tip-toed down the hall to the bathroom, where I stripped all of my clothes off in a hurry and jumped under the warm steaming jet. The bathroom was at the other end of the upstairs from my parents’ room so I had no fear that they would wake up. If they did, they couldn’t stop me from taking a shower. This was my house too, despite what Anthony had said. I had a right to be clean, and fuck, was I ever going to be clean. As much as it hurt me, I needed to get rid of every single trace of Gerard from my body. We had had sex that night, and at least I could cover up that, if I couldn’t cover up the past times marks on my body.

I washed every single nook, cranny, ridge, and hidden surface of my body. There were some places I didn’t even think had ever been clean before. They were awkward to reach, and I had never had time before. This was going to be more than a fifteen minute shower before school, I was going to do a thorough job. Starting from my head, I scrubbed the shampoo into my brown locks much rougher than Gerard’s gentle fingers ever did, and moving down to my toes, stopping many places in between to remove even more evidence. I scrubbed my pubic hair incessantly, even putting shampoo down there, but only a little. I was tempted to shave, to remove all hair and everything from my body for a safe bet, but decided against it. I had heard it itched when it started to grow back and the last thing I needed was to sit in the waiting room of the doctors’ office, wanting to scratch at my crotch constantly. It would make me look like a pervert and like I had an STD. Besides, if I had no hair down there whatsoever, it would make me look even more like a child, and that would not help my case.

I washed my ass with special care, probably getting some soap up inside from the way it stung at one point. I needed to get all of Gerard out of my body, so they couldn’t prove a damn thing. They needed evidence, physical evidence to press charges, the cop had said on the phone. They weren’t going to press any kinds of charges because I wasn’t going to let them. I paused for a moment after I had scrubbed my ass for maybe the eighteenth time, wondering if my father had been right in the assumption that the doctors would be able to tell if I had just had anal sex in general. I felt around my hole, realizing it felt different. I didn’t exactly keep running tabs prior to Gerard on how my ass felt everyday, but I could tell, just from the ease in which I could finger myself that it was bigger, stretched. I crushed my eyes closed, hoping that I was getting too paranoid, and that the doctor wouldn’t be that invasive. Everyone’s asses were different, I was sure; maybe mine was just a little bigger than everyone else’s.

I really was starting to lose it, I thought bleakly.

As I turned the water off and headed to bed, my chest still felt heavy. It was nearly six in the morning and I was still wide awake, but I needed sleep. If not to rest up my tired and aching body for the long fucking day a head of me, and to cause a break in my mind. Sleeping always signaled a new day, a new start, at least for me. Anytime when I was younger and had a bad day, I would always have a nap, thinking I could just try it all over again in the morning. I needed that little lapse in time, a little moment where my brain could stop over-analyzing and I could maybe be quiet for awhile.

In my bed, I tossed and turned forever, the glowing red numbers and my thoughts taunting me, before I finally let myself go and fall asleep.

It felt like mere blinks before I woke up again, my mother’s light footsteps outside my door rousing me from sleep. I had slept in newly laundered street clothing, a pair of jeans and a t-shirt taken from a basket in my room after I hid the old pair I had worn to Gerard’s place in the back of my closet. I had no idea why I had slept in my daylight attire; it made me feel hot and stiff when I first woke up, and was certainly not the most comfortable thing when lined next to thick comforters. Perhaps I wanted to avoid undressing and redressing because I already knew I would be doing a lot of it at the clinic.

Anthony had left to go into work early, the first time in his nearly thirty years at the company. I was grateful for his lack of presence and tension inside the house, but annoyed that he had left my mother with all of the bidding. When I entered the kitchen, I could smell eggs cooking, and was surprised to see that she had made me breakfast. I would have thought that anger and distress would have consumed her too much to cook, but it was the opposite. As I put plastic wrap on the food and placed it into the fridge (I had no appetite or desire to eat at that moment), I saw last night’s dinner there as well.

When and if I ever get out of this mess, I thought to myself, I’ll eat like a king.

“I’ll meet you in the car,” she told me after I filed away the food, and without skipping a beat, I ran up stairs to grab my old clothing, the ones I had worn to Gerard’s, and threw them in the load of laundry she had just started, erasing the final trace of the man I had been with the night before. I kept my shirt from it, however, clumped and rolled into a ball under my pillow. I needed to keep something from that night, no matter how dangerous it could have been. It may have been our last night together, I realized sullenly as I stepped out the door and into my mother’s car. I needed to keep the shirt to remind me, along with the other shirts tacked up to my wall and splattered with paint, of what a fucking incredible man I knew.

At that moment, everything was up in the air. I was driving to a hospital to get tests done, my charges were being processed, my father was mad as fuck, and Gerard was far, far away from me. I wondered if things would ever just go back to normal, if things would blow over, and if Gerard and I could ever just lay under the sky in the park again. It hurt my chest when I thought about it. This couldn’t be it. There was a chance that this would never happen again. The best that could probably happen in all of this would be him not getting charged. If I ever did get to see him again, it would be even more secret and harder than before when I was merely going to see him for art lessons, without anyone knowing the real deal. There would always be suspicion now, looming over our heads and we could never go back to the way we used to be. Maybe, in a few weeks, when I was eighteen, things would be better. It wouldn’t matter so much because at least we wouldn’t be breaking the law. We would still suffer masses and masses of unwanted scrutiny, but fuck, at least we would be together. Perhaps when I was eighteen and this all blew over, we could move away, start a new life where no one knew or cared about age differences, where souls reigned supreme, and we painted what the landscape looked like. We could move to Paris…

But just in case that all didn’t happen, I told myself, trying to be a realist and an optimist at the same time, which wasn’t working out too well, I was going to keep his shirt, add it to the collection, and just pray everything was going to be all right. I didn’t know who I was praying to; I had never been completely devoted in my faith, when and if I ever had one. Years later after not having to attend church any longer I found myself wondering about God even more. I didn’t understand how he could give me something so beautiful, so wonderful, and then have it be wrong. Have it taken away. Have everything turn to shit.

No, I wasn’t praying to God when I prayed. I couldn’t be. If he did exist and he was up there, I didn’t want his help, but he had been the one to screw me over. I needed something solid, something tangible, and believable to pray to. To believe in. I believed in Gerard. In a way, he had been like my deity. He was human, he was mortal, as much as I thought of him in an idol worship type of way. And he was gone from me. I couldn’t pray to him because I knew he wouldn’t hear.

As I got into the car, I saw something in the sky. It was white, and moving so fast I my mind went ahead of itself. I thought it was a bird, a dove, flying high in the wind. Maybe it was Gerard’s dove – the one that had gotten away the night before. Maybe it was alive, prevailing, flying free…But as my mother pulled out of the driveway, the sunlight blinded my vision, and when regained, I realized that the white object could never and would never be Gerard’s dove. It was garbage, a piece of lucid paper, flying above my head, out of reach. Like the God I had never known.

That was who I was praying too; I had a revelation. I was praying to Gerard’s dove. She was something beyond myself. She was something beyond everyone. She could fly. She was what I wanted to be, what I truly worshipped. Maybe if I asked her, she would know the answers, the questions and the actions I was supposed to do. The bird had always seemed to have a knowledge beyond its capacity before; maybe it applied to here as well.

I kept my eyes peeled to the sky, hoping and praying for something more than a paper, maybe a true divine purpose etching its way through the blue sky. My watching turned up nothing but hopes as my mother drove me to the clinic in silence. The quiet wasn’t as thick and nervous as it had been the night before. It was more like we didn’t have to talk, didn’t need to talk, and more often than not, didn’t want to talk. I looked over at her, when I could divert myself away from the sky, every once in awhile and just wondered what was going through her head. I remembered how she was blaming herself for everything and how much I had wanted to hug her. I couldn’t hug her then without crashing the car, but I could at least offer something.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14