Ghost Writer (Raven Maxim Book 1) (42 page)

“Mama, you went all out of your way. That room is so nice… looks like something from one of those home tours.”

Emerald leaned back in her seat and briefly closed her eyes, feeling satisfied. “I’m glad you like it. I wanted you to have somewhere nice to rest your head, even if it’s only for two nights.”

Nikki nodded and let her smile slowly fade. Her brows bunched and her lips tensed tight, as if she were suddenly aware of something awful. “Mama, I uh..” She ran her finger nervously over her upper lip, just as she used to do when she’d study for her school exams. “I want to tell you that I’m not happy about the tension we’ve had between us, on and off, over the years. I can’t make any sense of it half the time. Sometimes I understand it; and other times, I… I wish you were close by so I could hug you…’cause I miss you, Mom.” She hung her head. “I appreciate you more now that I’m gone.”

She exhaled deeply and looked into her mother’s eyes. “The mother of a good friend of mine died a couple of weeks ago. He was devastated. He didn’t know about it until it was too late. I keep hearing about stuff like that, and all I can do is sit and think. When it’s quiet, so quiet I can hear my own self breathing, Mom… in a foreign place, walking on foreign land, hearing a foreign language, and risking my life for people I don’t know, I feel this more… I realize I’ve disrespected the one person that’s had my back. The one person I
do
know, and that’s
you
.”

Emerald stared at her across the table. She kept folding a napkin in various shapes, bunching it up tight, then loosening her hold. The thoughts in her head underwent pretty much the same treatment.

“Neither of us is completely guilty. Neither of us is completely innocent, either. Nikki,” she said, stretching her legs out and crossing her ankles, “when you were a little girl, I believed in letting you have your childhood. I didn’t want it robbed, corrupted with whatever I or your father had goin’ on. I felt like my upbringing was a bit unorthodox, and I wanted you to have all my love, even when I was hurting and didn’t have much to give. I kept a lot of things from you, a lot of secrets. Not because I enjoy lying, but to spare you the truth so you could live in peace!”

Her eyes glossed with tears that she quickly blinked away. “My secrets have caused you pain though…and I’m sorry about that. But I thought I was doing the best thing by my child. In some ways, I still feel it was right to keep you away from the ugliness of the world; in other ways, it wasn’t… because you never really saw me as real, as truly in love with you… but I was. And I am.”

“Damn.” Nikki shook her head and chuckled sadly. “How’d you know all of that was in my mind?”

Emerald smirked and shrugged. “Sugar says we’re too much alike.”

Nikki nodded. “Each day I get a bit older, I’m realizing that, you know? I used to think we were so different, but that’s not really true. Not true at all… Ma, can I ask you a favor?”

“What is it?”

“Are you willing to tell me your secrets? Now that I’m grown and can handle it?”

Smiling, Emerald slowly got to her feet and made her way towards the bottle of wine on the counter. Grabbing two clean glasses from the cabinet above, she brought everything to the table, sat back down, and poured herself and her daughter a glass of red liquid silk. She passed her the drink, then she took a sip from her own. Emerald looked down into the glass she’d now placed back on the table, noting her reflection…

Her eyes looked larger than usual, warped by the mildly sloshing cabernet as she handled the glass. Then, the image settled. The liquid no longer moved, no longer made magic or tricks out of reality. Her real self looked back at her, at last. Searching for her daughter’s gaze, drowning in her eyes, she let all her love pour through and did not try to hide the tears strolling down her cheeks.

“Yeah, I’ve got a secret to confess, baby. I may need the rest of this wine to get it out, but through slurred words, I will confess it to you. And all I ask is that you keep an open mind, and an open heart…”

Through the Eyes of a Child

T
here was a
five-year-old boy who’d shot his father dead, right between the eyes.

Sloan recalled reading the bizarre tale when he’d been a mere thirteen or so, and worst of all, he remembered how he’d admired that toddler, for he’d certainly had more courage than him. Sloan dove into crashing waves of choppy thoughts from his childhood. Broken fragments in time with periods of light and lucidity, but more times than not, hidden in dark corners of his psyche. He sat on the edge of his bed, his blue and gray striped pajama pants touching the sensitive skin at his ankles, which stung from his compulsive scratching. The itch had plagued him the last few nights.

It was an odd winter, barely any snowfall, yet, the temperatures dipped to arctic lows. But, there was an advantage to this. The weather made for great writing. He was typing at a speed that he found a bit alarming, but the ideas flowed and the more information he uncovered while he researched the life of Peter Jones, dug around his own home for clues and spoke to well-read historians, the more he felt at peace. That was until the previous evening, when he’d happened upon an old family album of himself and his family—his mother, father, two brothers, and sister.

Some of the ugliest memories he’d tucked away for so long, kept buried like bones beneath the soil, came to light, no matter how he struggled to keep them hidden, where they belonged. Hence, the memory he’d just unearthed: the little boy who’d bravely put an end to his patriarchal terror and, in doing so, had become Sloan, as a boy’s hero. But thoughts such as these gave him a sense of loss, perhaps even abandonment. These days he no longer craved isolation; someone had shown him what being loved and cared for truly felt like. He was no longer used to an empty bed, for Emerald often kept him fantastic company, but this weekend she had visitors of her own, and he was left there to once again tend to his warped and twisted thoughts.

Like winding, hellacious weeds without a caretaker, they grew up and around with no one to tend to them, whack them back down to nubs, or kill them altogether. Sloan understood literature, the intimate creation of books and the reading of prose. He comprehended music of all sorts. He accepted the tedious yet necessary steps regarding research. He’d mastered how to create compelling yet factual articles, but one thing eluded him: the human condition as it pertained to love and broken hearts.

How did it happen? Why did heartbreak linger and how was one to get rid of the emotions it left behind? No, there was no shrink or best friend who could wave a magic wand and make sense of it all. This was a world he couldn’t quite wrap his brain around. It had proved hard to accept that the first people to break his heart had been his parents and, worst of all, the wound had never mended. Perhaps for that reason he’d picked a woman who had truly never loved him. He was used to it…

There was comfort in familiarity, regardless of how dysfunctional it might be. His father was predictable; his work at the paper, too. When he shook his own apple cart, at that point his life changed, subject to his pursuit of dreams—fears and comfort be damned.
Comfort.
Such a harsh word that resembled a slap across the face. The pain tasted chalky going down. Oh, how his entire body would pulse when his ex-wife would berate him… and yet, pieces of his father dwelled within her, so he withstood the hurt, let it pass the test of time. Isn’t that what people do when they love you?

TEAR. YOU. DOWN.

Some people could blame their parents’ wayward ways, including their alcohol abuse, a drug addiction, and things of that sort. Sloan couldn’t do such a thing, which made it all the worse when it finally dawned on him that the hulking man in suspenders and white shirts smudged after a day of work had been nothing but a mean son of a bitch for no apparent reason, other than simply doing the Devil’s bidding. Bill Edger Steele had small sky blue eyes, crimped at the ends. His hands were massive, like deflated basketballs… leathery, worn and hard. Everything he said came out like a harsh reprimand; even his simplest requests were seasoned with abhorrence.

‘Pass the goddamn salt!’

‘Go to fucking bed!’

These were every day requests. Rebecca, the eldest, would conveniently find ways to rid herself from their father’s presence until, one day, she was gone for good. Sloan had never found out where she’d gone until he was well into his teenage years. She’d run away with a man ten years her senior, who, unfortunately, ended up being quite similar to their father.

His two younger brothers, Davis and Benjamin, were just as afraid as he was, if not more so. He couldn’t explain to his first grade teacher why he—his father’s second eldest—never wanted to go home, the only child wandering about the empty school halls trying to find new things to explore.

Bill left no bruises on his body, no marks or drawn blood. That wasn’t his style. No, he simply used his mouth, and those hits stung like wasp asses jammed in the side of a tender neck. From the outside looking in, Dad had been a wonderful hardworking man. But inside of that home, he ignited emotional flames, then spread them with his own special verbal blend of tears-inducing gasoline.

Sloan glanced over at his dresser. The large, bulky photo album sat there, beckoning him. He turned away from it, shoved his feet into his worn black slippers, and stormed away to fix a pot of coffee.

I can’t look at you today, Bill, and probably not tomorrow, either. You being dead doesn’t stop me from wishing I’d killed you first. I hate that I still hate you, because you’re just not worth it…

Blinking red lights
from across the street proved a distraction for Emerald. She closed and opened her eyes, sleep not quite prevailing. It was three in the morning and the new jazz bar welcomed patrons. The place kept strangely quiet as if secret jazzy séances were being conducted within its walls, but the annoying light would filter through her blinds if she didn’t draw the dark curtains closed. Tonight she’d forgotten to do that, but she refused to move one muscle to get the task done.

“I think it might snow…” Emerald murmured as she sat Indian style on the living room floor, her daughter’s head in her lap.

Nikki reminded her of a little girl, her knees curled up to her chest and a peaceful smile across her face. The dried tear stains remained visible, as a reminder of the emotional connection they shared, reignited through communal secrets and confidences.

She hoped her daughter’s weren’t just tears of sadness, but ones of joy and relief, too. She nestled her child a bit closer, lifting her knee in such a way as to bring her baby’s huddled body closer to her own heart. Stroking her braids with soothing caresses, she etched this moment forever in her mind. In twenty-four hours, Nikki would be gone, off to California and then back in Afghanistan a month later. She paid close attention to the thick, velvety texture of her child’s hair, the strands intertwined and flowing across her thighs, pulsing with a reddened glow radiating from the windows.

The color of her flawless skin reminded Emerald of her ex husband. How much Nikki looked like her father! Content, she enjoyed the moment, thanking God for another day with her child. She planned to take her and Mya to a wonderful raw oyster bar for lunch, indulge in a bit of shopping in town, and perhaps she’d drive past Sloan’s home, too, to give them all an informal introduction. Her leg fell asleep but she didn’t dare move; she could hear faint music from across the way.

The notes sounded familiar. Emerald bobbed her head to the tune, a sense of comfort coming over her, one she’d not felt in a mighty long time. Nothing in this crazy world was perfect, but a sense of perfection dwelled in the tiny kernels of her home-grown insanity—for, to know oneself, one could simply look at their child. The fruit never fell too far from the tree, even if that tree dwelled in the Garden of Eden, sun-baked in judgment, condemned yet tempting, as it wound and danced to the music of the seductive serpent’s hiss…