Nasty (2 page)

Nicola hung her head as low as it would go. It didn’t take a rocket scientist or years of psychoanalysis for her to figure out that her real purpose for coming all the way to “do or die” Bedford-Stuyvesant was to, in some way, punish the building for providing her mother sanctuary on that fateful night twentytwo years ago.
Now that her plan to do God knows what to the building had failed, Nicola paced back and forth. She needed to perform some ritual to help dim the sadness growing inside her. And then it hit her. Fire! Fire had always helped her in the past.

Armed with a new, quickly forming idea, Nicola bolted across the street and opened the passenger door of a salmon-pink BMW sports coupe. She reached inside the glove compartment and pulled out a cigarette lighter and the old news clipping that revealed the tragic details of her birth.

Slamming the door behind her, Nicola walked over to the nearest garbage can. Hands trembling, she tried to ignite the article. The wind kept blowing out the flame.

“Just burn, dammit!” she yelled out loud.

The few people, who were still out on an evening that promised to be the coldest night of the year, looked at the beautiful woman and how she desperately tried to encourage the flame from her cigarette lighter. Some brave passersby even stopped to ask if anything was wrong. Nicola couldn’t hear or see them. The only thing that concerned her, at that moment, was the news about her parents.

She could still hear the portly private investigator with the funny high-pitched voice beg not to make him reveal all of his findings. He’d even offered to return the cash.

“You sure you wanna hear all of this, Ms. Martin? It ain’t a pretty story.”

But she had insisted. She was marrying Harrison James, the love of her life. A man who believed that family meant everything. Though he had gone out of his way to convince her that she’d become a member of his clan with full privileges, she still wanted her own. How bad could her parents have been? At the worst, they’d been a couple of teenagers who were too young to cope with the responsibilities of raising an infant.
She had listened intently as the PI talked about her father, a brilliant chemist from Kenya, who had met and married her mother while he was teaching at New York University. Nicola could still feel the pride of knowing her father had been an accomplished individual. All her fears about a tragic beginning had been in error, she had thought. But just as she was about to stamp her parents as “normal,” the PI’s story took a dismal turn.

Her mother had been pregnant when her parents tied the knot. She had been enjoying an uneventful second trimester when she learned that her husband had been killed in a freak laboratory accident.

“Well, that’s kinda when things got, uh, confusing for your mother.”

“Confusing?”

“Yeah, well, they had to send her to the ‘G’ building.”

“‘G’ Building?”

“Sorry; you gotta be a Brooklynite to know what that means. Uh, well, what it means is your mother lost it. You know, mentally, and, well, the ‘G’ building is for the mentals. You know, when you lose it.”

“So she went crazy?”

“Yeah, and that ain’t the half of it.”

The PI reluctantly pulled a news clipping out of a manila envelope.

“This is the last info that I have on your parents, and it’s not great; not even a little bit.”

Nicola’s heart beat wildly. How bad could this information be? Anxious to know the entire story, she grabbed the article out of the PI’s hand. Her eyes filled with disappointment and horror as she read the details of how her mother had committed two despicable acts: suicide and attempted infanticide.

Something snapped inside of Nicola. She wanted nothing to
do with this newly discovered past. She hurriedly wrote out a check and threw it at the investigator. Never comfortable with giving people bad news, he tried to soften the blow by revealing information about her other relatives.

Uninterested in anything but amnesia for the entire story, she yelled back at the PI as she stormed out of his office. “Throw that info in the garbage. I have no one, no one, but Harrison James. You hear that. Nobody! Just throw it all away!”

“
At last
.” Nicola smiled when she saw that the winds had died down enough to let the weak flame ignite the newspaper article. The orange glow intensified, causing the corners of the page to curl up. The slow moving flame destroyed all the information in its path. When the trail of burning embers met up with the picture of a pretty, smiling student nurse holding a tiny baby in her arms with the caption: “Infant survives near-fatal attack at the hands of her late mother.” Nicola dropped the clipping into the garbage can.

“It never happened.”

She watched the flames dance and engage in a wild, tribal ritual. Her smile broadened across her chiseled face and totally replaced the gloomed hopeless expression that had inhabited it since she’d left the PI’s office. She loved watching fires. They calmed her down. She took pleasure in how the flames destroyed everything in their path; especially the bad things.

Watching the fire build, Nicola massaged her neck, caressing the ever-present scarf she wore to cover the thick linear scar that was her only physical imperfection. Neither her adopted parents, nor the counselors at the residential unit she’d lived in after they died, could ever explain exactly what had happened
to her. The best explanation was that it was a rare birth defect that had destroyed her voice box. The scar, they all guessed, was probably a result of corrective surgery performed when she was an infant.

She now understood that the real defect was having an insane lunatic for a mother. Using the deep, sultry voice that she had cultivated after years of speech therapy, a voice that drove all the men she had ignored in college wild, Nicola yelled out unanswerable questions into the freezing night.

“God, why me? WHY ME?”

The smiles had all vanished. Staring at the fire, Nicola now felt terribly alone. It was almost as if she missed parents she’d never known. All week long she had tried to hate the woman who’d attempted to kill her. But even she could figure out that her mother’s only crime had been loving a man way too much.

What if her dad had lived? What if her mother hadn’t loved her father so intensely? What if she hadn’t lost her mind? For all the what-ifs in her life, Nicola began to sob like a brand-new baby. She collapsed on the ground. The freezing air hugged her tightly in a bear-like grip. Through the tears, Nicola’s body trembled with epileptic fervor.

And then, as if Mother Nature wanted to console her, Nicola could no longer feel the sub-zero blistering January winds. Instead, she felt bathed in a gathering of cleansing, healing spirits. Almost immediately, an exhilaration of courage swelled within her deepest core, warming her soul.

Liberated, she pulled herself up and ripped off the pink Hermès scarf that hid her scar and the horror of a past that had recently revealed itself. Into the fire it went, joining the newspaper clippings. Hot red sparks spit out at the freezing night as flames consumed the silk fibers.
Since her adolescence, thoughts that she was not good enough often haunted Nicola. Blessed with dark creamy cocoa, flawless skin, she had amazing brown eyes that sparkled so brilliantly, jealous stars in the skies hated it when she came out at night. She’d been told by many that she was exquisitely beautiful. She chose to ignore these compliments and, instead, saw only an ugly, dirty, unfit young woman staring back at her whenever she looked into the mirror to adjust the scarf around her neck, trying to hide what she felt was a hideous scar.

It wasn’t until she’d met Harrison that she began to doubt her self-assessment. Her fiancé had spent the last year coaxing her out of a shell of lies that had become her emotional prison.

Well
, thought Nicola,
the turtle has finally emerged
. She’d never try to hide or cover her neck again. Never entertain thoughts that she was less than anyone. The lesion would forever be a reminder to her that she was not only a beautiful woman but a strong, beautiful black woman. She had survived her mother’s unfortunate attack. And with Harrison by her side, her best friend, the love and light of her life, she’d never be a victim again.

Nicola flipped her thick, waist-length hair out of her face and hopped into the car Harrison had surprised her with on her birthday. No longer a casualty of events she had no control over, she now focused on the future.

Pushing down heavy and hard on the accelerator, she pulled away from the bad memories that lay in the ashes behind. Nicola was glad she’d ordered the PI to trash the information about her Southern roots. She had no desire to contact her grandmother. Pleased with the decision, she glanced at the rearview mirror and smiled as the image of the burning garbage can quickly morphed into an indistinguishable red dot.

Like a queen exiles the malcontents in her realm, the protective
muses within Nicola banished the memory of her family to a place her conscious mind never visited. It was the same site she put all of the other horrors she’d encountered in her short life.

She could actually hear a door slam shut as the picture and story of her insane birth were safely tucked away in the “never to be opened” section of her brain.

Blessed and cursed with the gift of selective amnesia, from that moment forward, Nicola had no active memory of her birth.

Nicola headed for the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. This would be her last night working at Riker’s Island jail, or anywhere else, for that matter. Her short career as a medical technologist was about to end. Harrison had insisted that she retire and stay home after their honeymoon, to supervise the renovation of the Harlem brownstone he’d purchased for them. Never happy about her chosen profession in the health field, she’d eagerly agreed with Harrison’s plan.

Content and happy about her future, she thought nothing of volunteering to stay and help out when a large group of incoming inmates arrived at the end of her shift. Her colleagues tried to encourage her to go home. They begged her. She smiled and ignored them. It was her last time.

I’ll never have to work like this again
, she thought.
A few extra hours won’t kill me
.

Exhausted and drained from the previous events of the day, she pitched in and helped the crew draw blood.

“Hey, Nicola! I got one of your people! Can’t get this man’s blood! A junkie! You know you’re the only one who can get their damn veins working! I don’t know what we’re going to do when you leave!”

Nicola looked up at the new inmate her soon to be excoworker had dragged over to her station. She could tell that
he’d been on the streets. He was scruffier than most. He had that “I live in a cardboard box home and ain’t had a bath since I was a baby” kind of smell. “Her people,” the folks called them. Just because she volunteered at the homeless shelter every now and then.

He held his head low, avoiding all eye contact. Nicola knew this man was ashamed. His voice barely audible, it was obvious that he was educated.

“What’s your name, sir?” Unlike her colleagues, Nicola always spoke to the inmates with respect.

Never lifting his head, he responded, “Eli…Eli Griffith.”

She glanced at his sheet and saw that he was in for larceny and murder. Nicola shuddered. She had a soft spot in her heart for folks down on their luck. That was why she had volunteered. But murder? That was where she drew the line.

Drawing his blood was impossible. He had so many old scarred tracks on his arms and legs, he didn’t have a single viable vein in his body. She tried everywhere: arms, feet, hands; even his neck veins.

“Uh, sir, where do you, uh, shoot up? What veins are you using?”

He looked at her face for the first time and smiled when he saw how beautiful she was and remarked, “Pretty lady, you don’t even want to know.”

She tried his foot again. This time she was successful.

“I’m impressed. The lady is not only beautiful, but extremely talented.”

Accustomed to inmates’ compliments, and usually ignoring them, for some reason she took exception to this one. Though accused of a heinous crime, Nicola smiled back at Eli. It was a smile that he’d never forget. It was the last one he would see
for many years to come. She placed a Band-Aid on his foot and motioned for the officer to drag him back to a line where other inmates awaited their fate.

Before she had a chance to catch her breath, they put another inmate in Eli’s spot. She picked up his sheet and saw that he was a notorious bigamist. Nicola had had enough.

“Hey, that’s it, guys. I’m out of here. I can’t do this one.”

Overwhelmed with fatigue and a desire to get the hell off of Riker’s Island and back to her new life with Harrison James, she hastily labeled the blood specimens, dropped them off at the laboratory, and said good-bye to her colleagues.

When the guards let her pass through the steel-gated doors, she ran out with all intentions of never looking back. Never realizing that, all night long, she had mislabeled several blood specimens, including Eli Griffith’s.

E
li’s body curled up into itself. Images of the son he hadn’t seen in years haunted him. His beloved ex-wife, Ophelia, taunted him as the waves of withdrawal swallowed every cell in his body and regurgitated back in to the belly of the one toilet bowl in the cell. This was the worst withdrawal he’d ever experienced, but then again, that’s what he said every time he couldn’t get a hold of Lady H. It always seemed as if the devil had finally successfully chased his Godless, worthless soul to hell.

Where was that methadone? He’d been there for over a week and he had missed more than one of his doses because of administrative glitches. Sweat poured out of his pores, creating tiny mud puddles in the cracks and crevices of his skin folds. He was so funky, he couldn’t stand his own damned self. This was nasty. He hadn’t had a shower since he’d arrived there. He was scared of the showers. Terrible things happened to men there.

For a split second, the waves of pain subsided. He sneaked a look at his arms and legs. They were covered with swollen tracks. He checked out his penis. He had used it more times than a few to bring his beloved heroin closer to home. Thick, musky smelling, rusty-tinged fluid seeped out of the newest injection
sites. Funny, he never had infected tracks before. Seemed like his body was turning against him in his old age. Yeah. Imagine that. Old and he wasn’t even fifty yet.