Chapter 60 #2
When a grown ass man tells you something like that in that tone of voice, he’s confessing something about himself as well.
Vance laid this new information at my feet as though they were confessions, and that’s because—for him—they were confessions.
I didn’t say anything. In truth, I had no words to give.
Vance continued to unleash.
“I was nineteen years old. She was nineteen, too. Her name was Kiana, and she was…” Vance paused, something that looked like pain flashing in his eyes, “perfect.”
I was in a daze. This had to be a vivid dream. A nightmare.
“She came from this bougie-ass family up in Memphis, but she was having a bit of a rebellious streak—trying to get out from under the watchful eye of her pastor father. Yeah… she was a pastor’s kid. Her father lead the church that your grandmother went to for years. Her parents were strict
“It was October. Silas was having this costume party for Halloween at one of his old clubs in Memphis and she walked in…
dressed as the devil, of all things. Silas took one look at her and marked his territory.
She was his before he even talked to her, just because he wanted her.
But while he was watching her, she was watching me.
“Kiana was young, immature—na?ve at times—in some ways. Not too different from your Lauren, oddly enough. There’s this age old saying that men marry women who are just like their mothers. You never even met yours, and yet… Let’s just say I’m inclined to believe that saying now.
“Your mother liked me, but she loved the attention of being Silas’ girl.
So she tried to have both, and I, being the young dumbass that I was, didn’t care so long as I still got to fuck.
There was no feelings attached—not at first. And when she got pregnant by November, I grappled with the knowledge that the baby inside her might’ve been mine, but I was nineteen…
So I took a step back, most of me hoping it would be Silas’ kid.
“The months went by and Kiana got more and more pregnant, so of course Silas started cheating. After the first couple of black eyes, she learned to stop complaining about it. She was four months along—it was March—when I was over the house in Miami for Spring Break. I wasn’t thinking about Kiana at this point, but we bumped shoulders once or twice during my stay.
“Towards the end of the break, she pulled me aside one day, and told me that the baby inside her was definitely mine.
For her own sake, she asked that I keep it a secret.
Honestly, I did as she asked for both her sake and mine.
We had this long ass conversation about how she regretted so much, about how she wished she could go back home to Memphis, about how she missed her parents.
“Kiana wanted to be regular again. She wanted her baby to be regular. For the first time since I’d met her, she was vulnerable—she let me see the real her.
And that was the most beautiful I’d ever seen her.
I didn’t go back to school after that Spring Break.
I stayed behind to keep watch over her. Silas’ house is a dangerous place for any woman to be, so I refused to leave her there alone.
In five short months, I fell in love with her.
I would’ve killed for her. Without hesitation.
Much like the way you did last summer for yours.
“It was a bright July afternoon when her water broke—about two weeks before she was due. Silas was out of town, so I took her to the hospital. I held her hand as she pushed. She passed out from the pain, and so I was the first to hold you. I looked at you, and it didn’t take much for me to know.
I didn’t need a DNA test to tell me what I felt in my bones.
People would go on to say you looked like Silas, but…
so do I. You see my point? When Kiana finally did wake up, she fell in love with you instantly.
She named you Tariq, and never let you out of her sight.
“We had a great two months, just living as three. When Silas finally did come around to coming back to Miami, he took one look at you and knew. Whatever it was that made me feel it in my bones that you were mine the moment I saw you… Silas must’ve felt the opposite of that feeling.
Despite the resemblance, he knew automatically that you weren’t his.
It didn’t take long for him to figure it out, and he was angry with me…
but Kiana… he was beyond angry with her.
In a fit of anger, Silas pulled his gun out of his waistband, and pointed it at her, telling her she fucked up.
I had to think fast and there was a struggle for the gun.
“When I felt it in my grasp, I put my finger through the trigger. Silas’ knee drew up and slammed into my stomach, and out of reflex, I pulled.
A single shot rang through the air, and the only sound we heard after that was the sound of her body hitting the floor.
Silas would go on to swear that he had no intention of actually killing her, claiming he’d just wanted to teach her a lesson by scaring her. ”
Vance shook his head at the memory. My skin grew clammy.
“I don’t know if that’s true. I guess I’ll never really know.
In hindsight, we were both to blame. But at that time, the possibility that it was actually my fault she was dead…
I shut down. For months, I couldn’t even look at you.
I ultimately left, re-enrolling myself back in school as a means to just forget.
This went on for years. I buried myself into my school work and tried my best to never have to come home for any reason.
Silas never told anyone you were mine—it was a source of embarrassment for him.
“Kiana’s death went cold. And Silas changed your name to Kain and had some other woman claim you, so that investigators wouldn’t come around asking questions.
He said the new name was to honor your late mother, but that was bullshit.
Silas changed your name to fuck with me, naming you after a goddamn biblical representation of brotherly betrayal.
“By the time you were three, you’d grown on him.
I was graduating from college when I realized he really saw you as his son.
After four daughters, God knows he wanted one.
It didn’t bother me. Why? Because I didn’t want you.
You reminded me of her. You… You have her eyes.
Every time I looked at you, I had flashbacks of her lifeless body on the dining room floor, gunshot to her head. So I let him have you.
“And then in my last year of law school, I was interning at a firm in Miami, so I was around a little more often. It didn’t bother me to hear you call Silas ‘Dad’.
At the time, he was more of a father to you than I ever chose to be.
You called me Uncle Vance, we had our times, and I felt like I could live with that.
“But one morning—you were six years old, I think—you and your friend Marlon were in the backyard playing a game where you were pretending to be Silas and he was pretending to be some gang member or something. For six years old, you had such a foul-ass mouth, talking about how when you grew up you were going to be even scarier than Silas.”
Vance pinched the skin between his eyes, evidently still infuriated by the memory. I remembered that day as well. It was the memory I shared with Lauren the night I finally let my guard down.
“I snapped,” Vance revealed. “Two reasons— one, if your mother could have heard that, it would have broken her heart. And two, because I had an epiphany in that moment—you are my son. And I was letting my brother ruin you because I was too indifferent to raise you. So from that moment—that’s what I started to do.
I raised you. For two years, I did my best to be an involved father.
You never missed a homework assignment. Nobody taught you how to tie your shoes, so I taught you.
With me, you had chores and responsibilities, you said please and thank you, and you learned right from wrong.
All that and then some. Silas quietly took a step back, and didn’t get in my way.
You were really mine, after all. I knew he hated the reminder, but he stood down.
“And then one night we were coming back from some party—I don’t remember.
What I do remember was that Silas was driving, and I was not.
We’d ended up hitting a group of white girls, and just before the police came, Silas turned to me and said, ‘I can’t go down for this, Vance.
’ I was just short of telling him to go fuck himself, when he simply said, ‘But what about Kain?’ and I understood then that he was using you to threaten me.
To this day, I don’t know what Silas wanted more—to stay out of prison, or to keep me away from you. He got both, though.”
My eyes narrowed, and for what felt like hours, I could only stare at my unc—
I swallowed hard, my feet taking a single step backward.
The distance between Vance and I continued to grow as no words were exchanged.
I had nothing to say to this man. Even as he said his peace as though he had all the reason in the world to make the decisions he chose to make, I lost a significant amount of respect for Vance that day.
Lauren was the love of my life—I understood love perfectly.
I understood how runaway emotions could influence brash decisions, but…
My life as I knew it was a lie. An astronomical lie kept alive by the man standing before me who could do nothing but make excuses and blame broken hearts and love.
I put myself in Vance’s shoes. If I lost Lauren in a tragic incident, would I allow my grief to make me abandon our child?
Would he or she look like her? If so, would I find it unbearable to raise a child who was a constant reminder of the love I lost? Could I ever use that to justify saying to that child, ‘I don’t want you.’?
No.
The answer was no.
Actually, the answer was fuck no. Especially if the alternative was giving my baby away to someone like Silas. Why was Vance talking to me as if he wanted me to understand? Who the hell could understand a choice like this? Was there sense being made that I simply could not see?
No…
No—what Vance did was fucked up. I couldn’t imagine abandoning my own. Not for healing, not for convenience—not for anything. I often thought about the child Lauren and I lost that summer. He or she would’ve been almost one year old right now.
The image in my head was that of a baby girl who was an equal distribution of her mother and I.
Had she ever gotten a chance to come into this world, I would’ve celebrated her.
In my head, she had her mother’s big, dark eyes and dimples, but got just about everything else from me.
I had a clear picture of her in my mind as if I’d already seen her, an image so vivid that I’d given her a name.
I mourned her even considering that by the time I found out about her, she was already gone.
I loved a child I never even got to see.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that if Lauren had died that summer, and our baby had somehow survived, that I would’ve loved that child no matter how much he or she looked like their mother.
And yet, for Vance, it was all too easy to leave me behind. Despite how I felt about Silas, I wasn’t happy to learn Vance was my father. All the comradery and respect I had for this man was cast aside now that my memories of him were paired with this new information.
The whole time.
He knew I was his son the whole time.
When I finally did find my voice again, it was to offer up a non-negotiable warning. “You need to get the fuck up outta my house.”