Chapter 15 #2
That was the only time he’d ever seen Papa get truly angry.
Oscar still remembered the sharp snatch, the way Papa’s gentle hand had closed around that doll, swiping it from his mother’s grip and handing it back to him.
They hadn’t talked about it in his room, but later that night, Oscar had heard his papa say that if his mother ever called Spike ugly again, he’d…
Papa had never finished that sentence, but Oscar guessed the one half was enough because his mother had never called him ugly with Papa in the house again.
And Oscar had never told him about the other times.
Because Papa hadn’t said what he would do. What if he left?
“Can I have one?” a small voice asked.
Oscar looked down at the kid who’d stopped in front of his stand, no older than eight.
The store had only been open an hour and a half, but it was already teeming with customers, chattering happily as they walked out with their full-sized bottles and palettes of whatever samples they’d taken from Oscar.
“Daniel, those are for grownups.” Oscar looked up at the woman. She gave him an apologetic smile, tugging on Daniel’s hand. “Come on, let’s go.”
“It’s no bother. They’re free,” Oscar said, shrugging. “You can have whatever you want. Most people are taking the face cream, but the blush looks quite nice, to be honest.”
He passed the woman a small round plastic tin of cream blush, tinted a shade of coral Oscar thought would complement her skin.
“Can I have this too, Mom?” Daniel wrapped a hand around a mini eye-shadow palette of glittery blues. “Please? I want to make my eyes look pretty, like yours.”
“The man has already given us a gift,” the woman said, smiling down at her child.
Oscar wished he had no cause to envy them.
But there was no bitterness around the green that settled in his chest. As the woman sighed and put the blush down on the stall edge, something lit up in Oscar, something that wished all the children in the world could have someone like Daniel did. Someone like Papa.
“We’ll take the eyeshadow, then.” She smiled at the sight of Daniel’s widening grin, then turned to nod at Oscar. “Thank you.”
“I’ll put it in a bag for you,” he said, reaching for the palette. “You have very good taste, Daniel. Do you want to see all the colors or are you settled on blue?”
“Blue’s my favorite color,” Daniel said.
“Then blue it is.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Oscar couldn’t see any of the cashiers, the counters crowded with people waiting in line, so it was far easier to take the paper bag and put both the eyeshadow palette and the cream blush in for the two of them.
“You don’t…” the woman started to say, eyes widening.
“Nice people deserve to have nice things,” Oscar replied. “Have a wonderful day.”
He watched them go, Daniel bouncing beside her, twirling around while the two of them chatted, peeking into the bag together as they walked away. The next person to stop by his stall was a teenage girl. By the time she picked a tub of face cream, the woman and Daniel had disappeared.
The next three hours were a nightmare. Oscar could barely keep up with all the people swarming to his stall for samples, hands grabbing at products, each person trying to take far more than was reasonable, but he managed to calm them, to shut them up by offering two things instead of one, spritzing sweet perfume on strips of paper that drove them into the store to spend their money.
Oscar wondered how these people were paying for their expensive makeup, given none of them were at work on a Monday morning, but then he earned a living, and he never stepped foot outside the house to earn a cent. So who was he to talk?
The tidal wave of eager shoppers ebbed at lunchtime, and with the calm came hunger. Oscar’s stomach grumbled, but he hadn’t brought anything to eat, and there was no chance he’d be allowed to leave his stall long enough to buy and eat something.
Oscar busied himself with rearranging the stall, realizing as he restocked his display that he would have to slow down if he wanted to earn at least eight hours’ pay for Aaron.
He handed out the next few samples more conservatively, smiling politely at each passerby and offering the items that hadn’t been too popular, keeping the face creams and the blushes hidden in the bags beside his feet.
Maybe Oscar should have spent the next few minutes crouched down on the ground lining them up like ducks, like the dolls in his childhood room back home.
Maybe then, he would have been invisible enough.
Maybe then, he would have skirted past the chaos waiting to unfold, the chaos he could smell as surely as the fresh baguettes from across the street as her breath caught in her throat.
Oscar knew that gasp.
And still, his eyes shot up to blue. But this was not the ocean he had come to rest in every night, nor the soft calm sky of Lina’s joy. This was Arctic frost, and Oscar was stark naked in its path.
The last time he’d seen his mother was on that cold rainy evening when he’d gathered whatever he could slide off the surfaces of his bedroom furniture and stormed out of their home, never looking back.
He’d made it his life’s mission to steer clear of her haunts, to deny himself his favorite cake because she liked the apple pie the same place made, to stick to his own apartment on the side of town too dodgy for her standards.
Oscar swallowed, unable to tear his gaze from hers. Four years.
His mind wandered to Aaron, sitting in bed with his knitting, Lu curled up at his feet, purring away the agony of missing a mother. He thought about Gemma, the breaking vase, the son who loved her but couldn’t have her.
“Hi,” he said.
He wished Lina were here. He wished he could freeze time and whip out his phone, that he could text her and interrupt whatever class she must be in to ask her whether she remembered words. Lina always knew just what to say.
Oscar had no such powers.
But maybe what he lacked in time manipulation, Oscar had in premonition. As his mother’s mouth began to form the letters, her voice lilting up her throat, Oscar’s stomach roiled.
This was not Gemma. And he was not Aaron.
“My name is Oscar,” he said, before she could even utter it. “Not any other.”
“Look at what you’ve done to yourself.” She looked from side to side, nostrils flaring on a face turning red with panic, eyes skittering as she no doubt checked whether anyone who knew her would glimpse her conversing with the likes of him.
Perhaps concluding that nobody of note was in the vicinity, she took a step forward, approaching his stall. “You never did know when to stop.”
“I guess I got that from my mother,” Oscar replied. “She also didn’t stop until she’d driven me out of the house.”
“You left because you wanted to.” Her finger shook as she whipped it out, pointing it in his direction. Her voice was scratched and raw, but there had been no screaming yet. Maybe her throat remembered what it felt like when the two of them crossed paths. “Nobody forced you to go.”
“I wanted to kill myself every day I lived under your roof,” Oscar replied. His skin prickled as the weight of his confession settled in his mouth, rusting his tongue with its bitterness. “Are you going to take a sample? Because I have work to do.”
“Is this what you’ve made of yourself then?” she asked, shaking her head. “Giving out free samples on the high street?”
“It’s hardly a high street,” Oscar replied.
He rolled his eyes, wondering how much of herself his mother could see in his expression, whether he also turned into a glacier every time he saw her face.
He wondered whether she found Papa in the brown of his eyes, whether she missed him.
As he prepared to rattle off all his achievements, to tell her about his beta testing and being in the second year of his degree, Oscar clamped his mouth shut.
Why should he? His mother was no longer in his life, and if Oscar wanted to give out free samples in the shopping district, then there was nothing for him to justify.
Aaron did it. And there was nothing Oscar was proud of the way he was of Aaron.
“Is this how you funded that monstrosity? At least we know you’re not starving. You’ll grow that chest right back if you keep eating this way.” It seemed her finger didn’t need to touch Oscar for him to feel its jab. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she hissed.
“If you knew anything about top surgery, you’d understand it doesn’t work that way, and nothing will grow back. And I’m proud to know I can feed myself. So, no, I’m not ashamed,” Oscar replied.
But a part of him still hated that his mother was.
No matter how much time passed, it seemed, and no matter his conviction as to the awful person she was, in the end, she was his mother, and a small part of Oscar wanted to curl up in the soft cotton scent of her dresses from his childhood, to feel her warm breath brushing the top of his head when she kissed him good night.
More than anything, Oscar wished that, just once, she’d call him her son. That she’d call him by his name.
His eyes burned, teeth grinding as he worked in overtime not to cry in front of her. Not again. Not now.
In the end, it was the victory settling in her eyes as she watched him labor not to break that did it.
His fist cracked against plastic, a guttural growl pushing out of him as he sprayed his hand and his mother’s white blouse in sparkly pink.
A time before, he would have drenched himself in boiling water to get rid of it.
But Oscar was no longer afraid of any color.
He’d worked hard enough, cried hard enough, screamed hard enough. Oscar had been hurt enough to watch his own blood turn pink beneath the running water. On his bedroom wall, there was a flag that bore this color.
And he was not afraid.
“Fuck you,” he said, nose curling as he spat it out.
His mother huffed, eyes darting down to his chest one more time before she turned on her heel and left.
Oscar swallowed hard, eyes fixed on her loose blonde hair as she swept through the crowd like a wind, her golden wedding ring glinting as it caught the sun, outliving the man who had put it on her finger.
“Sorry, can we have one?” Oscar turned to look at two girls waiting to approach his stall. They stood to the side, eyes on everything except his face, and he knew they’d heard at least a part of what had gone on between him and his mother.
“Yeah, of course. Take whatever you like,” Oscar mumbled.
“And then, please come inside,” a woman said.
Oscar turned, eyes snagging on the woman from earlier. Her eyebrows were low and tight, not a hair out of place. Oscar nodded. He swallowed what felt like glass, as eager for the girls to go as he was desperate for them to stay and spare him.
In any case, it would have done nothing to help him. Moments later, a younger cashier walked out of the shop and to the back of his pop-up stall, offering a kind smile as she informed him she would be taking over.
When Oscar walked in, the shop wasn’t as crowded as it had been the last time he’d checked, and the blonde woman with the pretty face and angry eyebrows was waiting for him beside the white door, which she now opened for him.
“Please return the shirt we’ve given you and go,” she said.
“I can explain,” Oscar replied, reaching out with his hands as though this would do anything to help him. “She—”
“I really don’t care to know.” The woman shook her head. “Even from behind the glass, your argument was visibly heated. You’re wearing a shirt with our logo on it, passing out items that represent our brand. It’s unprofessional to take your personal life to work.”
“I didn’t—”
“Please return the shirt, and tell your manager not to send you here again.” Before Oscar could reply, the woman had turned back to the counter. A moment later, she was helping a young couple with the massive bill they’d racked up.
Oscar wished he could advocate for himself, that he could somehow prove this wasn’t his fault; he wished he could play back to them everything his mother had said and how awful it was.
But as he played it over in his mind and tried to come up with the words that might explain it, Oscar remembered that the woman had told him she didn’t care.
And as her stony face turned into that of his mother in his mind’s eye, Oscar rumpled up the shirt into a ball and tossed it in the corner of the room, zipping up his hoodie and banging out the door and out the store without another word.