Blackout

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

I’m sitting at home on a Saturday morning, watching old sitcoms and eating ice cream, when the doorbell rings unexpectedly. Marc is out shopping with Rita, and I’m not expecting anyone, so I’m instantly suspicious. For some reason, I’m guessing it’s Clarisa, somehow knowing where I live, coming to finish our argument. But just in case it’s someone with more sinister intentions, I grab a bat from in the closet under the stairs before going to the door.

I look through the peephole, working to be as quiet as possible in case I decide not to open the door. Through the warped little window, I see someone with light brown skin; it’s a woman. She looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t tell for sure because the view is so distorted. But the woman doesn’t look threatening, and her hands look empty, and since I’ve got this bat handy, I figure if anything gets out of hand, I’ll be able to defend myself. So I unlock the deadbolt and open the door a few inches, and then immediately close it out of shock. Standing at the door is a woman who looks exactly like my mother.

Once my heart rate has calmed down, I open the door again slowly. The woman is still standing there with an apologetic expression on her face.

“Who are you?” I ask, although I already know the answer.

“Baby, it’s me. Your mama.”

There is a long pause where we consider each other. She looks almost exactly the same as she did when she dropped me off at my grandmother’s house twenty years ago; the only difference is that her hair has small amount of gray around her temples, and she has a few new wrinkles. Other than that, she’s still the same size, and she’s even wearing the same hairstyle I remember.

I don’t make any move to allow her to enter. “What are you doing here?” I whisper. “How did you know where I live?”

She sighs, and says, “I know I’ve got a lot of explaining to do, but can we talk about this inside, maybe over some coffee?”

“No, we cannot,” I hiss, rubbing my eyes before the tears can brim over. “You can either explain how you found me and what you’re doing showing up here twenty years after you abandoned me, or you can leave and never bother me again. Now… what’s your choice?” I am trying to retain my annoyed expression, but it’s difficult, because all I want to do is retreat into the house and curl into a ball in a dark corner. But I have to get my answers first.

“Well, it’s hard to explain...” she flounders, wringing her hands together nervously.

“Cut the s**t! Tell me!”

She awkwardly stares at her feet. “Well, someone called me from a private number a few weeks ago, and they wouldn’t tell me who they was,” she mumbles. “But they asked if I wanted to get in touch with you. When I said yes, they gave me your address.”

“You’re lying,” I shout angrily, and I am just beginning to slam the door in her face when she yells, “Wait! Please, hear me out! I’m telling the truth!”

I catch the door before it closes, but it’s only left open an inch. Leaning back against the wall next to the door, I ask, “Where have you been? And why are you coming here now? What do you want?”

“I was living in Coral Springs, down there by Miami. I’ve been there for fifteen years almost. I been seeing you on the news a lot lately, and I had been wanting to find you for a while, anyway. I knew you had gone away to… to the hospital… But I didn’t know which one. And then, I saw it on the news that they were letting you go. But when you got out, I couldn’t find out where you went. So when I got that call… Well, I had to come see you.”

“You didn’t have to do anything. You’ve been gone since I was six years old. There’s no point trying to reconnect. You shouldn’t have brought your ass here after all this time.”

She moves closer to the door. “I deserve that,” she whispers, “I truly do. But I just want to talk to you, baby. I just… I just want to sit down and talk.”

I glare at her, wanting so badly to just shout nasty things at her until she leaves. I want her to go back to wherever she came from and never darken this doorstep again. But after a few minutes of tense silence, I know that I am going to let her inside. Because, while my anger is fresh, the curiosity is burning so intensely through me that I can’t turn her away.

I open the door wider and move away from her, walking towards the kitchen, and I can hear her close the door behind us and follow me. We walk quietly, not speaking; I don’t look at her because I’m sure she’s watching me.

Once in the kitchen, I gesture for her to have a seat at the table, and I begin to prepare some coffee. She waits patiently as I pour the grounds into the filter and start the machine. Once the drops begin dripping into the pot, I turn slowly to face her.

“I have questions for you,” I say slowly, “And I want them answered.”

“Of course, baby.”

“Why did you never come see me, or even call, after you left?”

She gathers her thoughts for a moment before she answers in a shamed tone. “I… Well, I figured that it would be best for you if I stayed away.” I scoff, but she continues, “I know you won’t understand, but after your brother died, I was real f****d up. I met Richard while I was on a coke binge that last weekend you stayed with your grandma before I… before I left you. He told me he made good money and that I could come with him and get all the coke I wanted. I had felt like that would be best, because trying to raise you while I was high all the time- well, I didn’t want you to end up like your brother.”

“Yeah,” I say heatedly, “that was your excuse in that pathetic letter you left in my pocket that day. You didn’t want me to end up like Carter. Where you on a coke binge when he died, too?”

I can see anger shoot through her expression, but her voice is calm, maybe a little testy, when she says, “I don’t know what happened when your brother died; I was sober, that was before I had ever been on any drugs. I didn’t start with the coke till after his funeral. But your brother, he had been crying that night… And… And I had put him to bed in his crib- and… and when I woke up the next morning, he was… dead.”

A tear falls down her cheek, but I am far too gone to feel any sympathy for her. “Well, turns out that it didn’t matter whether you left or not. I still ended up f****d up. And grandma did what she could, but there were days I went to bed hungry because the last money she had went to some bill. My sperm donor rarely helped us, and after I blacked out and smashed up his car when I was fourteen, I never saw his ass again, either.”

“I’m so, so, sorry, Iris. I was messed up back then. When your brother died, it tore me apart. It’s not a good excuse for me leaving you, but I couldn’t help my depression. If I would have stayed, you probably would have ended up worse.”

“What’s worse than killing ten people in homicidal rages, Lari?”

She flinches when I use her first name. “Well… that’s the reason I wanted to come talk to you today.”

My anger is temporarily replaced by confusion. “What are you talking about?”

She glances away, a deep shame running down her face. “I don’t know how to say this.”

“Say what?”

“Your.. Your blackouts…. Well, the night your brother died, I don’t remember anything after I laid down in my bed.”

She cannot be saying what I think she is.

“And after I left you, there were times where I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten different places or why I was there or where the time had gone…”

“What the f**k are you saying?”

“After one of those times, I had woken up on a bus stop bench a few miles from the last place I remembered being. I went back to the apartment I lived in with Richard... And when I opened the door… he was laying on the living room floor… with a knife in his neck.” And she bursts into tears.

And I am speechless. Because I realize what she is trying to tell me.

My mother has had blackouts, too.

Marc gets home from work around six and I hear him rummaging around downstairs, probably in the refrigerator trying to find something to eat; but I can’t make myself get out of bed to greet him. I really don’t want to do anything but lay here and think.

It’s difficult for me to come to any conclusions, or to even settle on a single emotion. One second, I am drowning in despair, and the next, I’m so confused that I’m mentally stuttering on words, trying to force my thoughts to make sense. I move from extreme to extreme, from quiet tears to insane shrieks of laughter, to silent, lethargic motionlessness. When Marc finally comes upstairs to find me, I am staring at the ceiling, unable to even look in his direction.

When he realizes this, his voice gets anxious as he calls my name repeatedly, but I barely notice until he gently shakes my shoulders, and my eyes automatically find his face. When I realize it’s him, I shake my head and sit up, rubbing my tired, red eyes.

“What’s the matter, babe?” he asks apprehensively.

Suddenly, I burst into frantic sobs and fall into his arms.

He is comforting me, rubbing my back and hair and face, whispering soothing words in my ear, but it takes about twenty minutes before I can stop hiccupping long enough to explain to him all that happened today. How my mother showed up at the front door, how she claimed that an anonymous number had called her and given her my information, and how, before I had kicked her out of the house in shock, she told me that she had suffered from the same blackouts that had changed my life all those years ago. When I tell him this, he gasps involuntarily, clapping his hand over his mouth, which brings on another round of frenzied tears. He quickly composes himself and begins stroking my face, murmuring, “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.”

But all the thoughts that have been swirling around in my head since my mother left are coming to the surface quickly now. And the most important one springs to my lips before I can stop it. “Marc, if my mother had blackouts and I did too, how can we ever have children?” And my weeping becomes louder and more frantic until Marc gives up trying to calm me down and just climbs under the covers with me, holding me as I cry myself to sleep.

In my dreams, Marc is in another room as I am strapped to a gurney, and he is speaking to someone, though his words are incomprehensible. And I am flailing around against the restraints, trying to get to him, but my shouts are ignored, and what he is saying still eludes me. Then, the dream abruptly shifts, and I am in some sort of desert cave being held down by men with bushy beards as my father places a rag over my face. And suddenly, I am drowning…

I spring up in bed, throwing Marc’s arm off of me, gasping for air. And for the second night in as many weeks, I run to the toilet and vomit noisily into the bowl.

Just as the last time, Marc hurries to the bathroom behind me, his eyes alert. But this time, he holds my hair back and wipes the perspiration off of my forehead with a rag. I hate that he has to deal with this. I hate that he’s such an amazing man that he’s just taking all of my drama in stride, accepting it rather than running out of my life like he should be. I hate that he’s sacrificing for me, but I know he will not heed any advice to leave me, because he truly loves me. And I can’t bring myself to even form the words to tell him he should go. How selfish of me.