Seize the Day (28 page)

I later learned to deal with it; Maya resembled her so much. But if there was such a thing as disliking someone to the brink of hate, that's how I felt about Skylar.

But she was a far cry from where my mind was as Moses and I pulled up at the airport. I was about to see my daughter, my soul, my lifeblood. I missed her the few days I was away. We had a daddy-daughter love affair that held both of us together.

It was amazing how something so wonderful could come from a relationship so toxic. My baby was pure and sweet and genuine—all the opposite traits of her mother.

I called her to let her know we had arrived at the airport. She was at baggage claim, retrieving her suitcase. “I'm at door N-three,” she said. I was parked right there, ironically enough.

After a few moments, Maya emerged from the sliding doors, smiling a smile so wide that my world lit up.

We embraced long and tight, and Moses looked from the backseat window as I held back tears. I loved her beyond description, and all I had been through since leaving D.C.—helping save the bus driver, finding Moses, making love to Kathy, protecting the woman who was being abused, meeting Venus, helping the homeless man, riding the motorcycle—rushed to my heart. I had those experiences and moved on, but some were bigger than others and truly emotional.

But I composed myself. Maya looked at me with those eyes I loved. The look was strange, though. She said, “Now, Daddy…”

My attention was averted. I saw an image over her left shoulder and glanced up. What I saw made me wish I were dreaming. The reality was a horror show. It was Syklar, Maya's mother.

I pulled away from my daughter. “What?”

“Daddy, I need you to be calm. Daddy…”

I didn't answer. I just stared at this demon walking toward me.

“What the hell is she doing here, Maya?”

“Calvin,” Skylar interjected, “I'm here to help. I—”

“Help? Help what? Kill me? Maya? What's going on?”

“Daddy, calm down. Mom wanted to help, to be here for you.”

“Baby, I love you, but this should never have happened. I have done my best to shield you from all the drama your mother took me through. The last thing I need, especially now, is to see her. Period.”

“Calvin, that was a long time ago,” Skylar said. “It does no good to hold on to so much anger.”

“I'm not holding onto anything—it's embedded in me.”

“Daddy, please.”

“Please what?”

“Please give her a chance.”

“She had plenty of chances, and all she did was wreck my life, almost ruin my career and land me in jail.”

“What?” Maya said.

“I'm telling you, I have tried to not expose her because she's your mother. But you're old enough to hear the truth. And I guess that's what she wants because there's no way she could have thought I was going to continue to protect her.”

“Cal—,” Skylar said.

“Don't call me that,” I snapped.

“OK, Calvin, please. Can we just get in the car and talk about this in private?”

“I don't want you in my car, even if it is a rental.”

“Daddy,
please
.”

I was disappointed in Maya, but she never knew the level of my animus toward her mother. I hated when parents would meet with me and bad-mouth the husband or the father of their children—right there in front of the kid. That was misguided and selfish. Misguided because it served no good purpose to belittle the child's parent. He was still her father. And selfish because it always seemed to me a way of the mother (or father, if that was the case) boosting herself by stepping on the man she laid up with to have this child.

But all gloves were off. Maya's innocence and my love for her allowed me to open the door for my daughter, place her bag in the trunk and get into the car. I left Skylar's bag on the curb and didn't consider opening the door for her.

She struggled getting her bag in the trunk and then got in the backseat with Moses. I liked that because she hated and was afraid of dogs. “What's this? Can we do something about this…this dog?”

I immediately thought about Richard Pryor in his 1975 album,
Is It Something I Said?,
when he told the story of Mudbone entering the home of Miss Rudolph, the local witch. Mudbone asked Ms. Rudolph if she could do something about the three-legged money she had in the house. She said, “I don't have to do shit about the monkey. The monkey lives here, nigga, you're visiting.”

“This is Moses' car as much as it is mine, nigga. You're just visiting,” I said. “Deal with it.”

“Daddy!” Maya said, mortified.

“The gloves are off. If she's going to be here, she's going to hear exactly what I feel. Sorry you will have to hear it. But I don't have time to be nice to people I can't stand.”

“Oh, my God. Maybe this was a bad idea,” Maya said.

“You think?” I fired back.

“No, it's going to be fine,” Skylar said. “Just tell the dog to stop staring at me.”

“Stop staring at her, Moses,” I said. “You might turn into stone.”

“Oh, boy. Is this how it's going to be?” Maya said.

“Bet on it,” I answered.

“Well, can we go somewhere and talk?” Skylar asked.

“Don't talk to me.”

“Baby, please ask your father if we can go somewhere and talk.”

“Daddy…”

“Talk about what? I don't understand this at all.”

Maya said, “I found a restaurant in Midtown we should go to and talk. It's called Negril Village. On North Avenue. You know where that is?”

“I don't and I definitely don't have an appetite.”

“We can just sit outside and talk then. Please, Daddy. Can you do this for me?”

“Why am I doing favors for you? You came here to be with me.”

“Daddy, we really need to talk as a family.”

“Family? I guess she gave you some spiked Kool-Aid and you drank it.”

“It was my idea, Daddy.”

“Well, now I'm really messed up. You know what's happening tomorrow? You think I need her around?”

“We need each other, Daddy. I know there has been tension—more tension than I ever guessed—but you all came together to create me. That's enough reason for us to be unified, especially now.”

My daughter was too rational for my anger. I didn't say a thing.

We went to Negril Village, the cool Caribbean restaurant with a great reputation. We got a table outside, and it pained me to sit across from Skylar.

They ordered and I had water. “So, what's there to talk about?”

“Well, Daddy, I have been doing a lot of reading and one of the things I read was that it is important, with what you're going through, to be at peace with the people close to you.”

“She's not close to me.”

“You're my parents and you
should
be close. That's the point.”

“Actually,
what's
the point? In three months, six months, I will be gone. What good would being close to her—which wasn't going to happen—have on my situation? All it's going to do is make her feel better about herself. Plus, I don't have that many acceptances of apologies to give.”

“Ain't nobody come here to apologize,” Skylar said.

“Then you should definitely go home.”

“OK, Calvin, I'm really sorry—for everything. I mean it. But you've heard that before. You just have chosen to be stubborn.”

“Don't come down here, where you are not welcomed, and call me names. Sometimes being stubborn is the best way to deal with ignorance.”

“Again, I want to apologize.”

“For what, Skylar? For what?”

“For everything.”

“What's that mean, exactly?”

“You know what it means, Calvin.”

“Yeah, but does Maya know? I guess it's time for her to know ‘We just outgrew each other' was a lie.”

“Daddy, do we have to do this?”

“I'm not a mean person—you know that, Maya. But I can't let her gallivant down here like she's saving the day, knowing her history.”

“So what do you hope to accomplish, Calvin?”

“I'd rather be hanging with my dog and Maya. But since you decided you would come here, I have to deal with you being here.”

“OK, go ahead. I can take it. Maya knows my heart.”

“If you had one, that would make sense.”

“Dad…”

“Maya, let's go back in time so I can tell you why I'm this close to hating her. I'll start when you were first born. I had already proposed to your mother. We were discussing wedding plans and living arrangements, everything. Then one day, I check my e-mail and there's a message from Delta Airlines asking about my experience on a trip to Chicago. She had used my credit card to buy a plane ticket, which I didn't mind. But she said she was flying to New York.

“So I asked her about the plane ticket. She insisted she went to New York. When I asked her to produce the boarding pass, she couldn't. We had had issues about her communicating with her old boyfriend in Chicago. So here she was engaged to me visiting another man.”

“Mom…”

“Baby, I was young and uncertain of myself and about getting married.” It was the same B.S. she said to me way back then. “It looked worse than it was. I wasn't going to see him. I was going to hang out with my close friend and her sister. I know what it looked like, but I didn't even see him that weekend.”

“Yeah, right. You might as well had because in my mind, you did,” I said. “And why wouldn't you just say that you were visiting girlfriends?”

“Because you wouldn't have believed me.”

“You're right about.”

But I wasn't done. “There were other guys calling. There was her stealing money from my account. From my
wallet
.”

“It was a rough time for me, Maya. Your father was already teaching and doing great and I was trying to find my way. It would have been easy to just ask for the money, but I was embarrassed.”

“My mother used to say, ‘If you lie, you'll cheat. And if you cheat, you'll steal.' And you proved her right.”

Skylar looked embarrassed. “I never wanted this to come out. But you show up here like it's no big deal, knowing how I have felt about it all these years. But that's not the worst part.”

“What? There's more?” Maya asked. “I don't know if I want to hear any more. Mom, I'm so surprised.”

“Let's see if you're surprised by this: Your mother had me arrested.”

Maya turned to Skylar, who lowered her head.

“After all that, I tried to forgive her and move on. It made me angry a lot of times, but I tried to forgive and hang in there because of you. I wanted us to be a family. I believed in that and that once we were together, she'd feel what I was feeling.

“But Valentine's Day came and I had planned us a nice dinner. Guess who was missing in action. She was nowhere to be found. Wouldn't answer her phone. So, I finally catch up with her and she's arrogant about it all. I say, ‘Fine, give me my ring back. I'm done with you.'

“She starts talking about how she's going to keep it and I don't deserve it. She knew I was going to ask for it back because she had taken it off and hidden it. So I went out to find it. Once I threw a dresser drawer on the floor, she called the police. I kept searching. She finally got it but still wouldn't give it to me. So I took it from her, prying her fingers apart until I got it.

“I had some clothes there that I gathered and calmly took my stuff to my car, which was parked in her driveway. I was at my trunk when the police rolled up. She comes running out of the house, talking about I assaulted her.

“I said, ‘Officer, as you can see, I'm calm and I'm leaving. Nothing happened to this woman.'

“He asked her if she was OK, and she said, ‘No, he choked me. Look at my neck. You said you weren't going to hit me anymore.' There was nothing on her neck. And I had never hit her. But because she made the claim, the cop tells me to turn around and puts the cuffs on. It was a Friday. I was in jail for the weekend. Totally humiliating experience. If my job had found out, my career would have been over.”

“How could you do that, Mommy?”

“Evil,” I said.

“Evil?” Skylar said. “That's so mean.”

“Hey, it is what it is. I gave you every chance, stayed with you when I believed you were cheating. And what I got was you sending me to jail? I had to spend thousands of dollars getting that thing off my record, go into a diversion program and basically pray that no one in the school system found out. It wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't done anything.”

“Mom, we just talked about my friend doing something similar a few weeks ago. And you said nothing about what you did to Daddy.”

“What did you want me to say, Maya? I was young and hurt and scared. I didn't know what to do, so I tried to hurt him. I have apologized more than once.”

“Yeah, baby, she apologized after she reiterated her story to the judge hearing my case. Because the police did not see any marks on her neck and because her story was not consistent, he gave me a break and put me into a diversion program. If she had her way, I would have been prosecuted for simple assault and battery and gone to jail for up to three years.”

“Mommy…”

“You see why I haven't spoken to her but once in so many years?”

“That's a long time to be angry, Calvin,” Skylar said.

“And it's going to be longer…until the day I die.”

Seeing her did not lessen my rage. Actually, it only fueled it. Kathy was so important to me because she helped me get beyond it. I had dated and fallen in love with Kathy after Maya was born. When she moved to California, my friendship with Skylar grew into a relationship.

But I wasn't in love with her and my dad told me having a child with her did not mean I had to be in a relationship with her if I wasn't feeling it. I appreciated his voice because he was big on family. Years later, though, after Kathy and I fizzled out, I began thinking about my daughter growing up without me in her daily life and tried to make it work with Skylar, although my heart was not fully into it. I shared my anger about Skylar with Kathy, and she talked me out of choking Skylar for real. . and convinced me to move on with my life.