Chapter 57
Chapter Fifty-Seven
I never liked Christmas.
There’s this age old belief that the worst person to buy gifts for is a person who has everything. All my life, come holidays like Christmas, people loved to make excuses for their clearly last minute gifts, by saying things like, ‘Well, Kain, you have everything.’
Did I, though?
I was at Sanaa’s today.
Sanaa loved Christmas.
Well, actually, Sanaa loved any occasion she could throw a party for.
This year, however, she wasn’t throwing a Christmas party.
My guess was that this was because our father wasn’t going to be here this year.
The holidays last year had a way of making the fact that Silas was locked up more real to my sisters.
They’d skipped out on grand gestures for the past two holiday seasons.
Thanksgiving dinner at Monique’s last month had been smaller in comparison to the previous years.
Less people were invited, and less effort went into planning.
Even considering the already small guest list, eleven people just “forgot” to show up—myself included.
I had the excuse of being at the prison that night, but the other ten people just didn’t feel compelled to come if Silas wasn’t going to be there.
That’s the way things were going to be now.
Not that my father was ever the life of any party.
It’s just that people in our extended family took invitations from him more seriously.
Nobody wanted to be the person who Silas called up the next day, offended, because they’d missed one of his daughters’ holiday parties.
I guess it could be said that when it came to the whole family—uncles, aunts, cousins—Silas was the glue that kept them together.
Or, more appropriately, he was the threat that kept them in line.
Christmas this year, as usual, was at Sanaa’s.
She didn’t let the smaller guest list keep her from being extra.
The house was decked out in multiple shades of red and green, and she’d said the word “festive” at least thirty-one times since I got here this morning.
In attendance this year were my other two older sisters, Cierra and Monique.
Monique brought her family. Cierra brought her attitude. And I brought impatience.
We didn’t get each other gifts in my family.
We’d stopped all that when I was about fifteen because it got to be predictable.
Every year until the day we stopped, I would get all of my sister’s gift cards, Monique would get everyone something personalized and heartfelt, Sanaa would get everyone exactly what they wanted, and Cierra would give everyone slightly less attitude than usual.
Christmas morning would always end with Monique feeling some kind of way because Sanaa’s gifts were better received than hers.
So we just stopped.
It was half-passed noon when Sanaa caught me checking my watch for the hundredth time that day.
“You got someplace to be, K?”
If she was trying to shame me for coming off uninterested, it didn’t work. “Yeah, I do.”
“You meeting up with a girl?” Cierra asked curiously.
Over the past year and a half, our relationship operated on a fine mix of cordial and tolerance.
Every once and a while, she’d be neither and actually take interest. It might take years for Cierra and I to get to the way we were before, but we weren’t as bad as we were last year.
When I didn’t deny it right away, Sanaa immediately perked up. “Ooh, and who might that be?”
“You guys, leave Kain alone,” Monique encouraged. I could think of a couple reasons why Monique would want to avoid discussing anyone I might be seeing. The last time she got involved with one of my relationships, she was dubbed an accomplice to a murder plot.
“It’s not Eden, is it?” Cierra asked, her face twisting up like she was grossed out.
“Ewwuh,” Sanaa interjected, denying the relationship for me. “Eden is practically family. Besides… Kain clearly has a type.”
I checked my watch again. Damn, only six minutes had gone by.
“You got a lil’ Christmas date with a lady scheduled? You could double date with me and Micah,” Sanaa offered, not only to be nice, but because her ass was nosy and she wanted to be introduced.
Little did Sanaa know that her boyfriend, Micah, had visited Silas in prison months ago, asking for his blessing.
I only knew this because Silas told Vance, and Vance told me in October.
The proposal had yet to come even though Sanaa’s birthday had come and gone in the first week of December.
One could only assume that Micah was saving the question for Christmas or New Years.
Either way, I wasn’t trying to be there.
“I pass.”
“You must not like her all that much, then,” Sanaa concluded immediately. “When you like a girl, you bring her around.”
“What are you even basing that off of?” Monique squinted at Sanaa, as if to say there wasn’t nearly enough evidence to back up that claim. “Kain has only ever brought around one girl.”
“Yeah, I know,” my sister nodded, placing her hand on her heart thoughtfully. “And she was my best friend.”
Sanaa was definitely one for the theatrics.
“Oh, please.” Cierra rolled her eyes. “That girl was not your best friend, Sanaa.”
Sanaa met Cierra’s face with a scowl, throwing up a hand for her to talk to.
“Well, now she’s nobody’s friend ‘cause you told Daddy about her, and he had somebody shoot her,” Sanaa countered, effectively killing the mood.
Cierra looked down at her lap, the slightest bit of guilt crossing her features.
It got quiet. Sanaa was still irritated, clearly still not over about what happened to Lauren last year.
None of my sisters knew what I knew. Like everyone else, they bought into the story that Lauren’s shooting had something to do with Silas. The evidence lined up too well for it to have not been Silas.
The actual truth was a very hard to believe story.
Given the choice between Lauren’s father and Silas, no one would ever not assume Silas.
Maybe I could’ve tried a little harder to get the word out, but—being completely honest—there was a very small part of me that liked my father better behind bars.
I don’t think I was the only one who felt that way.
Even though Vance knew the truth as well, it didn’t escape my notice that he wasn’t talking either.
Silas spent his days locked away, awaiting trial for a crime he didn’t commit. Though, in the grand scheme of things, it was nothing compared to the time he never served for the crimes he did commit.
I wondered if Vance kept quiet as a form of quiet revenge. After spending twelve years in prison for a crime that Silas committed, it wasn’t shocking that Vance wasn’t doing everything he could to see Silas freed.
In light of new information, though, I no longer felt sorry for the years Vance spent in prison. If Silas’ words about who killed my mother were to be believed, Vance got off easy in life with the time he’d served. At least now I knew what Silas used to get his brother to confess to his crime.
I wasn’t angry as much as I was disillusioned.
I couldn’t say this enough—I didn’t know my mother.
For me to get enraged over the possibility that Vance might’ve killed her just wasn’t realistic.
What the new information did do, however, was make it very hard for me to look at my uncle the same way.
I hadn’t spoken to him in days, and I didn’t have plans on getting in touch any time soon.
I checked my watch again. Only fifteen minutes had gone by. Today was going to be a long one.
***
When I was a little girl, I used to love Christmas.
Christmas used to be one of the only days of the year where my sister and I had the full attention of my mom and dad. Mom would put away her teacher hat, Dad would stop talking about convictions for a change, and we would all just wake up early and spend the whole day as a family.
Last year’s Christmas had been bad. Waking up from the hospital with one lung, a lost baby, and a hideous scar had pretty much set the tone for the rest of the year.
I was hooked up to an oxygen tank for about six months after getting discharged.
It was a loud machine that beeped and called unwanted attention, so I found myself hiding in my room a lot while I was on it.
When Christmas Eve came around last year, my parents threw a Christmas party.
I was hooked up to my machine when my dad pulled me aside and suggested that I might be more comfortable in my room that night.
According to him, he didn’t want me to grow uncomfortable under the stares of his party guests.
It wasn’t hard to see that my father didn’t want the beeping and whirring of my oxygen machine reminding his Beauvais friends about the year our family had.
It was fucked up, but I’d somehow convinced myself that I deserved it.
I sat in my room that night and told myself that next year, Christmas wouldn’t be so depressing.
I was wrong. It was more depressing.
There’s just something about knowing that your parents were ready to bury you that makes you look at them differently.
There was no Christmas party with Beauvais guests this year.
With Dad running for governor, he was trying to slowly separate himself a little from the elite social club.
Dad was trying to come off more “of the people” by staying away from things that might make him look too rich.
Christmas this year was more of a family affair, but I was kind of out of it.
I had a lot on my mind. Later that night, I would be meeting up with Kain so that he could tell me some big dark secret that he’d been withholding for more than a year now.
Even though he didn’t say, I felt like it had something to do with my father.
For sixteen months, life with my father had just felt…
off. At first I thought it was because of my relationship with Kain, and the implications that came with it.
I expected Dad to have gotten over it by now, especially now that it was looking like he just might win the Democratic ticket for his governor run.
Still, long after Mom seemed to have gotten over my transgressions of the year before, Dad still treated me like some red headed stepchild.
Whatever Kain was going to tell me tonight, part of me felt like it would explain where the strange behavior from Dad was really coming from.
“Do you think you might go to visit Rashad at the hospital tomorrow?” my mother asked me as we ate Christmas dinner as a family.
About three days ago, members of The Beauvais country club were devastated to discover that young Rashad Bordeaux had been making his way back to his Overtown condo when he’d gotten caught up in a dangerous situation.
The Overtown community was in the middle of a controversial gentrification project.
The poor people of the neighborhood were being pushed out by rising rent rates and rich people like Rashad.
Overtown had become the kind of neighborhood where millionaires lived alongside crack fiends.
Income disparities like that are just violent robberies waiting to happen.
And that’s what everyone said happened to Rashad—a violent robbery brought on by residents of Overtown’s past. He’d been beaten within an inch of his life, and according to most, was lucky to be alive.
And from what I heard, as he laid bleeding in the streets, it took hours for someone to call him an ambulance.
By the time medics arrived, passersby had already emptied his pockets, and even stolen his shoes.
Somehow, I got the feeling that Rashad’s attack had not been as random as everyone else was so keen to believe.
Even though many people would have been there to see the attack, no one came forward with evidence.
Whoever attacked Rashad clearly had the respect of the entire Overtown community, and they were keeping quiet for him.
“Mom, Rashad and I aren’t together anymore,” I reminded. I’d sent him a break up text message exactly three days before he was attacked. I would not be visiting him in the hospital. “And I think I’m going to be busy tomorrow.”
“You should visit him,” my father pressed. “Maybe there’s still a chance for you two to reconcile.”
“There isn’t,” I replied tersely, looking down at my dinner plate.
Across from me, Morgan bit back a smile, a sign that she was pleased with my decision.
My father was visibly annoyed, but it was Christmas, so he kept his cool, simply asking, “What’s going on tomorrow?”
“She has an appointment with Dr. Eloise at three,” my mother reminded, which was odd because putting me in therapy was supposed to have been my father’s decision.
“Right,” he remembered. You could almost hear him rolling his eyes from his tone alone. “How long are you going to keep going to those things?”
“Until I feel better, I guess.” I shrugged my shoulders, wondering, “Why? Is it getting too expensive?”
Dad cleared his throat, setting his fork down on his plate with a loud clanging noise. “No, not at all. I just don’t see how talking to a stranger, and telling them all our business is supposed to make you feel better.”
“Then why did you put me in therapy?” What a weird contradiction of behavior. “Was that an image thing, too? Did you want all your friends and political colleagues to see that you got your troubled daughter a shrink, so that you could make yourself look like a concerned par—”
“Lauren,” my mother interrupted before I could finish. “It’s Christmas.”
She said that like a warning, as if I’d been nothing but trouble all year and tonight was just the one night she wanted some peace and quiet. But I hadn’t been trouble this year.
All this time, I’d been on my best behavior.
I got the right grades.
I dated the right boy.
I said as little as possible.
They still weren’t satisfied. I was beginning to doubt that they would ever be satisfied. I was their daughter who had the nerve to defy them once upon a time, and even after sixteen months of well-behaved silence, they would never let it go.
I pushed myself out of my seat, announcing to the room, “I’m going out.”
“Are you going to Lux’s?” my mother called from behind me. One of the caveats of not having many friends is that your parents can automatically narrow down the possible places you might go. I wasn’t going to Lux’s, but if I told them that, the alarm bells would start ringing.
So I simply grabbed my jacket, keys, and left without a word.