Boyfriend (2 page)

“Stand by the line,” she said.

“Right here?” I pointed to a red line on the striped floor.

“That one.” She motioned to a blue stripe to her left.  I moved to the other line.  “Look up.”

I did.

Snap.

“And I’m blind,” I said trying to focus my eyes from the bright flash.

Phil laughed.  “So, do you want to go get your stuff and head over to the room?”

“This
is
my stuff.” I nodded to the duffel bag hanging from my arm.  Phil looked at me surprised.

The small woman handed me my ID. “NEXT!”

Phil pointed to his ear. “I’m right here.”

The woman yawned, rolled her eyes and extended her hand for his paperwork.  He handed it to her.

“Okay, well I left my car up on North Campus, but if you don’t mind, we can head up and get it and…”

“Here is your schedule, stand by the line,” the woman interrupted.

“Which line?” Phil asked taking the schedule.  I pointed to the blue one.  He moved to the line. “We can head up…”

“Look up,” the small woman shouted.

Snap.

“I’m down,” I replied before he finished. 

“There’s a party off campus that a girl I met at orientation invited me to.  A couple of her friends are supposed to be there.”

“Down for that too.”

Phil and I got close quickly.  At first glance, most people would wonder why that was. 

“You looked scary as fuck when I first met you, man,” Phil admitted a few months into rooming together.

“You did, too,” I said remembering his pressed khaki shorts. 

The first eighteen years of our lives couldn’t have been more different.  Phil grew up in central Maryland, the only child of two loving parents.  His father was a successful real estate developer and his mother, a homemaker.  His mother called, at least, three times our first day in the dorm, and by the end of our first semester, she was sending both of us care packages. 

Phil and I bonded over our affection for weed, alcohol and girls.  With girls being at the top of the list.  Despite his mostly shady intentions, girls dug Phil.  He was good looking but made fun of himself in a way that made even the most self-conscious girl feel totally at ease.  He had a way of making awkward situations more comfortable and the wrong seem right.  His smile and hearty laugh were like chick magnets.  All he had to do was buy a round of drinks and start talking, and the girls around him would be hooked.  Watching him get girls was like watching a white LeBron James score fifty points and get a triple double before the third quarter.  He was that good.

While I lacked Phil’s pretty boy good looks, I pulled just as many chicks.  Something even the girls I was with didn’t always understand.  One night after a party, I went home with a girl from a neighboring college.  She was petite with long jet-black hair and bangs that framed her face.  When we entered her apartment, I took in the lavender walls and candy scent.  A black picture frame of her in the embrace of an older man sat on a mahogany coffee table, the words “Daddy’s Girl” embedded in silver on the frame.   As I sat on her couch, smoking the blunt she had rolled, she undressed in front of me.  She stripped completely naked and ran her hands through her hair watching me take her in. 

“I don’t know what it is about you,” she had murmured, straddling me and running her hands over my tattooed arms.

I didn’t either. 

While Phil plotted, I often waited.  I learned quickly that girls enjoyed a challenge just as much as men did.  Inevitably, while Phil was chatting up one girl, her friend would spend the evening trying to figure me out, asking probing questions and sharing a little too much about herself.  I didn’t share much and that seemed to be a turn on.  I played the role, something I had become good at in my three years since entering college.  Unlike Phil, my nights ended with the sobering sun.  More often than not, I was the walk on the wild side.  The secret “Daddy” could never find out about.  Phil was part of the plan. 

CHAPTER TWO

At about 1 am shortly after the second semester of my junior year, my mother called to tell me that my father had been in an accident.    Phil and I were drunk and playing a sloppy game of poker with our neighbors from across the hall. 

“Fold.” I tossed my cards down just before my cell phone rang.

“Butt-call!” Phil grinned as I pulled my phone out of my pocket. 

“
Booty
-call. Shit, Phil, just don’t speak when you’re drunk,” I said laughing as I answered. 

My mother’s voice was the last thing I expected.  

***

I arrived at the hospital at about 9:30 am, sober and nervous.  I hadn’t been back much in the three years since I started school.  I stayed in D.C. through the summer and as Phil and I grew closer, I was able to weasel my way into holidays with his family.  My life in New York felt further and further away, and I preferred it that way.  D.C. was my fresh start.  I was finally able to move without the past shackled to my wrists. 

My father was hit by a car and knocked into a small ditch just a few miles from our apartment.  According to my mother, she and my father had gotten into what I was sure was another epic fight, and she had thrown him out.  Knowing he had no problems driving drunk, she hid the car keys and he set out on foot, stumbling down an unlit road.  My mother said simply, “Get here.”  So, I knew it was pretty bad.

It felt like a dream as I drifted down the hallways.  All was silent but for the sounds of the monitors, beeping again and again in a rhythm-less song.  The nurses darted from room to room carrying charts and medication.  No one looked up as I made my way down the hall.  It seemed as though it took forever to get to my mother, who sat in a chair outside of my father’s room, her face buried in her hands, her shoulders shaking up and down.  My mother was a large woman, tall and wide, but despite her stature, she looked small beside the threshold of my father’s hospital room.  My sister, Natalie, stood a few feet in front of her, staring down at her, her unruly raven curls cascading around her shoulders, holding her fingers in the air as if holding an imaginary cigarette.  She noticed me first, staring at me as I made my way toward them.  The sleepy brown eyes we shared, emotionless.  I felt a small shudder through my body, preparing myself to hear that the old man was dead. 

“Oh, Junior…” My mother stood noticing I was approaching, tears staining her midnight skin. 

My sister walked away, peeking out the window at the end of the hall, playing with her imaginary cigarette in her fingertips.  My mother dropped her arms around me, pulling me to her in a way she hadn’t done since I was a child.

“He’s going to be fine.”  Her tears wet the side of my face and she held me tighter. 

I looked up at my sister who stared at me, the anger in her eyes apparent.  My shoulders slumped in my mother’s arms and for the first time in a long time, I felt like crying. 

***

I decided to spend the evening at my parents’ house and catch the bus back to school the next day.  My father had managed to fracture his left lower leg, left arm, and left orbital bone.  He was still unconscious from a concussion with bleeding on the brain, but the doctors were able to stop the hemorrhage.   The doctors said my father would have to stay in the hospital for at least another couple of weeks, so I knew it would give me a chance to rummage through some of my old things without my father’s interference.  Sitting on a folding chair in my old bedroom, I allowed myself to wonder what life would be like without him in it.  If he had died in the accident and not been given another chance.

For as long as I could remember, my father had been an alcoholic.  He drank just a few beers during the day to get through work, but by evening, he was usually belligerent and incoherent.  Good days were days where he came home and passed out, only waking in the middle of the night to eat dinner and drink some more.  Bad days were days when he would come home in a rage, throwing objects and hitting walls. 

When we were little, my mother tried hard to hold the family together.  She would give my father ultimatums and take him back and forth to AA meetings.  When things got really bad, she would send us to stay with her aunt, Laura, in North Carolina.  Inevitably, my parents would come and get us after a few weeks, draped in each other’s arms with big smiles spread across their faces.  My father would apologize for his behavior and charm us all, hugging and kissing us.  He’d ask us about the toys we wanted or the vacations we wanted to take.  My mother would watch him and smile, wanting to believe him.  Those moments grew further and further apart until eventually, they didn’t happen at all.  When I was accepted to college, I counted down the days until I could leave that house and everyone in it.  Leaving was the subject of my college application essay.

***

I was rummaging through an old box of comic books and lost in thought when I looked up and noticed Natalie standing at the threshold to my old bedroom with her head cocked to the side and arms crossed.  She took a breath as if to begin a thought and then paused as her eyes darted around the room.

“What’s up, kid?”

She smiled walking in.  “You’re going to be calling me that when I’m 30.”

“Probably.” I chuckled.  “I’m surprised you never moved in here after I moved out.” I looked around at the pukey peach walls and dingy blue carpet.  My old brass bed frame was barely visible beneath the piles of junk now crowding the room.  It wasn’t glamourous but it was bigger than her room, and a little further away from our parents.

“It smells like boy,” she said wrinkling her nose.

“It should remind you of me.”

“Ick.”

I laughed.

She leaned against the wall beside me and slid down, sitting on the floor with her legs stretched out in front of her.  She played with ends of her long curls, twirling them in her fingertips.

“How’s D.C.?”  She asked after a moment, in a tone that seemed more eager than I expected. 

“It is what it is.” Sensing her disappointment, I elaborated, “Weather is nicer.  It’s cool to finally be on my own.”  I pulled a comic book out of its plastic wrapper and began flipping through the pages.  She nodded.  “How’re things here?” I asked putting the comic back in the box and looking at her.

“Can’t you guess?” She rested her head against the wall and gazed up at the ceiling.

I nodded. “I mean, aside from the bullshit.”

“There’s only bullshit, Nate.” She looked at me then stared at the floor.  Her fingers tugging at frayed carpet hairs.  “I’m thinking about dropping out of school.” Natalie was seventeen and in her senior year of high school. 

“What? To do what?”

“I don’t know.  I’m not as smart as you so I’m probably not going to college.  Probably just get a job. D.C. isn’t that expensive, right?”

I laughed, but my heart began to pound
.  D.C. was mine.

“I’m kidding.”  I knew she wasn’t. “I don’t know.  Maybe go to California.”

“What?” I laughed.  “What’s in California?”

“Forget it.” She stood and placed her hand on the door preparing to leave the room.  “I’m just being dramatic.” She tried to laugh and return the lightness to the room but the tears were already pooling in her eyes. 

I stood up and reached for her arm.  “What’s going on, Nat?”

She looked into my eyes, her eyes growing red. “Daddy.”

I shook my head in disbelief.  How could she possibly be upset about an accident
he
caused? “The doctor’s said he’ll be fine.”

She shook her head.  “Things have gotten really bad, Nate.”

I was quiet, wondering how they could be any worse.

“He barely works now.  He just stays home drinking,” she started.  “The night before his accident while Ma was at work, I came home and he was just sitting there.  In the dark.  Holding one of those damn bottles in his hand.  Like he had never gotten up.  Like he had been sitting there for hours.”  She took a deep breath and continued, “He asked me to bring him something to eat and when I went to take off my coat, he threw the bottle at me.  For no fucking reason, Nate.  Just threw it at me.  It barely missed my head but hit the wall shattered on the floor.  The glass flew everywhere.”  The tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Then he laughed, Nate.  He sat in that dirty ass sofa that he’s always on and just laughed.  Like it was fucking funny.”

I look at her seething, wishing my father was in front of me so I could beat the shit out of him.  He’d thrown things before but never at her.  Never at Natalie.

“I wish he had died in that accident, Nate.  I wish he was fucking dead.”  She began to sob audibly.  The tears running down her face and dripping from her chin.  I stood beside her with my hand on her shoulder waiting until her sobs subsided.  I thought of all the times I had wished the same thing.  The times I wished he would have one drink too many, fall asleep and never wake up.

“You need to get out of here,” I said.

She looked up, her eyes filled with hope. I pictured packing her up and leaving that house.  Giving her my room in D.C. while I slept on the couch.  I wouldn’t be perfect but Phil would understand and I could watch her.  I could make sure she was safe.  We met eyes and she pleaded with me without words.  She wanted me to rescue her but something stopped me from saying the words.  Taking her with me would be like taking all of them.  It would be like taking what I had waited 18 years to escape.