Eighteen March 1998
EIGHTEEN
On a cold night in March, there was a knock on the front door that scared me awake.
I had fallen asleep in the chair by the stove, a book in my lap, my tea cold beside me.
I wiped the spittle from the corner of my mouth and got up to answer it.
The bottom hinge creaked as it opened and I made a note to pick up some grease.
When I raised my head, my heart fell into my stomach.
I tried to close the door, but a hand reached up and stopped me.
I pushed, but the hand pushed back. Even after all these years, and the changes that age and hardship can bring, I recognized him at once.
“I’m not here to hurt you, Aliet. I just wanna talk.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Okay then, maybe just listen.”
“I thought you were in prison, or dead or something.”
The door stood half-open, my hands pushing on one side and Kenneth’s on the other. The chill was helping me to cope with the heat on my face, the fire in every nerve I possessed.
“I was. I got out. I’m different now, and I want to apologize to you.”
I didn’t slack on my side. I pushed, and I felt him give a little. “I don’t want your apology.”
“I know that might be true, but I gotta give it anyway, so here I am, saying I’m sorry.
And it’s not a pretend sorry, it’s a real and genuine sorry.
I had a lot of thinking to do in the years since .
. .” His voice trailed off and I could feel the cold of a knife against my skin, the snow when it started to fall and melt into me.
“You did this!” I stopped pushing against the door and Kenneth fell forward, grabbing the door frame to steady himself. I pointed at my face, at the scar that had caused so many unwanted discussions in my life. The scar that led me to dismiss so much potential happiness.
He stood up to face me. He was taller than me by more than a foot, still skinny, but he’d had his teeth fixed, or dentures at least. His hair was clean and cut. He wore a look of resignation on his face.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me something idiotic like you found God in prison, or this is part of your steps to something.
” I hadn’t moved and my finger still pointed to the scar.
He stayed quiet and stared at the damage he’d done.
My heart beat faster, but my body was heavy as stone as I realized that Kenneth was standing in my house and I was the only one there.
There would be no one to save me this time.
I reached down instinctively to my belly.
“I have not found God,” he said softly. “Although I think He has something to do with this. He must. I did take part in some programming in prison, programming that made me see myself for who I was, and it wasn’t nice. My father . . .” He trailed off. “My father wasn’t a kind man.”
“You can’t blame other people for everything.”
He ignored me. “I’m older now, I guess, and with age comes some understanding of the world and your place in it. And my place in it hasn’t been good. And I want to make amends.”
“You dying?”
“Nope, just came to an understanding that I have not been the person I could’ve been. I let the hate in my house sour me and I took it out on you.”
“So this apology has nothing to do with me. You just want to make yourself feel better for what you did.”
“Maybe, but I wanted to say it either way. And I have this for you. Found it in my father’s things after he died.”
Kenneth reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and handed me a photo. In it, a young woman, no older than fifteen, was sitting in front of a fire, her hands wrapped around a mug, smiling into the camera.
“That’s your mom, there.”
I ran my fingers over the photo, stunned to finally see that nose I had inherited on the woman I had inherited it from.
I turned it over and there on the back, in messy cursive, Maggie, 1954.
My throat constricted and I could feel the tears welling inside, but I was determined not to cry in front of Kenneth, not to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he was giving me the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world.
He turned to leave.
“Wait.”
He stopped but didn’t turn to look at me. His hands hung at his sides and his shoulders fell, but he didn’t turn around.
“What did I ever do to make you hate me so much?”
He sighed and turned around. I don’t know what I expected, maybe tears, but his face was still blank, it hadn’t changed.
“You were you. You were loved and I wasn’t. You never had to deal with him, and I was there all the time. I was there, taking the beatings, I was there, trying to protect my little brother. And I hated that you escaped it all and I couldn’t.”
I was confused, unsure how to respond.
He moved toward me and I stepped back, cradling my belly with one hand, the photo in the other. He moved so close I could smell his aftershave and see the dim light from the lamp glint off his green eyes.
“He was your father too, you know.”
“What?” It’s all I could think to say.
“He was your father too. Good luck with the little one.”
Kenneth pointed to my pregnant belly and then turned to leave, but the realization of what he was saying began to dawn on me.
“You are a goddamn liar. A liar!”
“Then why would he have a photo of her? Ask Ben, he’ll tell you.”
I stepped back from the door. “Ben would never . . .” I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.
“Kiju too. She knew.”
I was stunned into silence.
“When I saw you and the love you had, I got angry. I had no control over it. When I saw you, I just felt hate. Hate for you being you and me being me. In the end, my anger controlled me.”
He still didn’t understand how his violence had changed my life, how it filled me with fear, how it made me hard.
“And when you let my brother, our brother, be blamed for stealing . . . it ignited something in me. Something not natural. I’d seen you get everything, and you just let him be blamed. Let the little brown boy be blamed. You took their side over your own brother.”
“My brother,” I whispered.
“Your brother.”
“But I didn’t know. I didn’t know. No one told me.”
“Does that matter? He was a little kid, Aliet. You knew he didn’t do it.”
His voice was getting louder, not loud with rage but loud with justification. He wasn’t wrong.
“And what I did by the river—I hardly remember it. I was so full of rage. I just wanted to hurt you.”
“Well, I remember everything. I remember it when I’m in the garden, I remember it when I’m at the grocery store, each time someone points to my scar or I look in the mirror. I remember it when I’m awake and in my dreams.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
As we stood there looking at one another, the black of the evening began to envelop him, his features dark and illegible, so that I had a hard time believing he was even there.
“You are not forgiven. You can maybe feel better now that you’ve apologized, but you are not forgiven. You will never be forgiven. Never. It doesn’t matter if you’re my brother or not. Do you understand?”
He nodded before he turned and stepped off the same steps where I’d sat so many summers ago, carving an acorn, a maple leaf.
I closed the door. I didn’t look out the window to watch him go, I would not give him the satisfaction of my attention.
I closed the door and turned the deadbolt.
Hearing the click, I fell to the floor, cradling my belly.
The adrenalin that had been coursing through my body abated and I slept there on the floor, the locked door at my back.
When I woke up later, I felt disoriented.
Had he been real? Had I imagined him at my doorway, in my house?
Then I remembered the photo, still in my hand.
I looked down at it to see her face finally looking back at me.
The truth had been so close to me for so many years.
And it hurt more deeply than I could ever have imagined.
I could not push my feelings away as I did for most things.
I needed to confront this new truth about my life. I started to panic.
I called Susan. It was late, and she answered the phone with a groggy voice.
“Can you come?” I whispered into the phone.
“Are you okay? Is it the baby?”
“No, baby is fine. I just need someone here right now.”
“Okay, I’m on my way.”
Ten minutes later, Susan was at the door, two takeout cups of camomile tea in hand and a look of concern. She walked past me into the kitchen and placed the tea on the table before taking off her jacket and placing it over the back of the chair.
“Kenneth was here.”
“What the fuck? Are you serious? When? Should I call the police?”
“No, he’s gone.” I choked back a sob.
“I thought he was dead.”
“So did I, but there he was, at my door.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to call the police?”
“I’m sure.”
“What did he want?”
“To apologize. But then—” My voice trailed off. I wasn’t sure I could say the next part out loud. Somehow, vocalizing it would give it legitimacy. “He told me that his father was also my father.”
“Well, I knew he was cruel, but that’s another level of cruelty.”
I reached into the pocket of my robe and placed the photo of my mother on the table. Susan reached over and pulled it toward her, puzzled.
“That’s my mother. Reg had it in his belongings when he died.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. He could have gotten it anywhere.” Susan slid the photo back over to me. I picked it up once again and marvelled at my mother’s face.
That vile man, the man my Kiju hated, the man Ben told me to stay away from, couldn’t be my father. I still did not want to believe it, despite the sense it was beginning to make.
“He’s probably just trying to toy with you,” Susan said, as she got up and came around the table, putting her arms around me and kissing the top of my head.
I heard Susan, but my own thoughts drowned out her eagerness to prove him wrong.
“He told me that Kiju knew, that Ben knows. That they hid it from me.”
Susan unwrapped herself and returned to her seat. She reached across and took both my hands in hers. The photo sat off to the side, and we both looked at it, maybe looking for something that wasn’t there, something that would make this all make sense.
“I think you need to talk to Ben.”
Susan held my hands for a few more minutes until the fire needed tending and she released herself from me to place another log on it.
The air rushed out of the stove, and I let it warm me.
That night she stayed with me, curled up against my back, sleeping, while I watched the dark walls and listened for the slightest of noises.
I fell asleep as the first light of dawn made its way to my window.