IA: Initiate (15 page)

Now, Naz stood facing Bearn.

“Oh, I’ve been waiting for this. There’s nothing special about you,” Bearn sneered at Naz with a smile.

Naz looked puzzled, and Bearn rounded on him in a second. Naz actually made Bearn miss twice, but his mistake came when he tried to block Bearn’s punch. He hit Naz on the side of the jaw with a glancing blow that sent him flying back and up into the air. Naz landed on his back and immediately jumped to his feet, only to fall back down again. He lay there with his eyes closed. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. When he opened his eyes, the world looked slightly fractured, and he saw two of everything. He closed his eyes and shook his head, but when he opened them again nothing had changed so he closed them once again.

But then finally, someone was there to help them. Naz couldn’t see them, but he could hear them,
or was it just one person?
he thought. It didn’t matter. It was a man’s voice, a voice he wasn’t sure he recognized, but the man arrived just in time.

“
What are you doing? I’ll kill you!”
the voice said.

Relieved, Naz opened his eyes to his fractured world again to see his mother on Bearn’s back. She was hitting him on his shoulders and in the back of his head, and screaming all the while. Meri was screaming again, too.
But where’s the man? Why isn’t he helping?
wondered Naz.

“
I’ll kill you!”
the voice said again.

Well, get on with it,
Naz thought.

“
Somebody help, somebody help,”
the voice kept saying.

Naz started to realize, just as he could feel himself losing consciousness that no one was really there. No one was there to help him or Meri. No one was there to save his mother. Just before his eyes closed, he saw his mother flying through the air, and he heard a crash and glass breaking. He loved his mother a lot but hated Bearn even more, and now he wanted him dead. What would he and Meri do without their mother? He imagined himself as a giant, even bigger than Bearn. He put his huge hands around Bearn’s pitiful neck, and with all the love, anger, and fear he could muster, he squeezed the life out of Bearn. There was a loud thud, and then Naz was awake again.

He opened his eyes to find Meri sitting on the steps. He walked over to her and focused his eyes only on her. He was afraid to look around. He reached up to touch the side of his head. His face was numb and horribly swollen. He was thinking his jaw at the very least must be broken, and he could hear a constant ringing in his ear. When he was close enough, he could see Meri’s eyes were red, but there were no more tears. When he tried to speak, the pain was unbearable. With no emotion, she gave an almost imperceptible nod, directing him to turn around. Bearn lay there motionless on his back, his head to the side. He had one hand around his own neck, and foam coming from his mouth. Unmoved by this scene, Naz turned slowly to see first his mother’s legs, then the rest of her in a bed of blood and glass. She had been thrown through the dining room table.

“Ma!” Naz gave a strangled yell, as he sat up and saw Meri sitting at the foot of his bed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MA’

“What
are you doing?” Naz asked, sitting up disoriented. “How’d you get in here?”

“It wasn’t locked,” said Meri, looking at his bedroom door.

“I forgot to lock it.”

“Momma?”

Naz nodded, looking at the clock on his nightstand. “Why are you up anyway? You should be asleep. You worried about the test?”

“No,” she shook her head.

“Is it Momma?”

“Uh-huh,” she nodded in camaraderie.

“So, what do you wanna do?”

She smiled, jumped off the bed, and then returned a second later from under his bed with his chess set.

“Now?” he asked.

“We have time,” she said, looking at his clock. “Why is this still under your bed anyway?”

“I was hoping that if I left it there, you would forget about it.”

“Not likely,” she said, smiling deviously.

“I should’ve never taught you how to play. I really don’t feel like playing.”

“I think, you’re just scared.”

“Your little mind games don’t work on me. You’ll have to do better than that if you wanna get me to play.” He paused in shallow thought for a few seconds, then nodded his head and continued. “Actually, I could work off some stress. Maybe I will beat up on you again.”

“You’re gonna lose, ’cause you’re already rattled from your little nightmare, but not yet, we have to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ first.”

“We what?” he asked, baffled.

“‘Happy Birthday.’ Today would’ve been momma’s birthday and …”

“Yesterday would’ve been Momma’s birthday.”

“Look,” she said, pointing to the window. “The sun hasn’t come up yet, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a new day. Anyway, every year we go through this and never say anything about it. You end up having nightmares, and I can’t sleep.”

“And you think this will help?”

“I think if we don’t talk about it, it’ll just keep building up. We need to purge.”

“Purge? You read too much.”

“You don’t read enough.”

“Says who?” He put his head down again for a moment, then looked up and conceded. “OK, I’ll make a deal with you. We get to take turns asking each other questions—any questions we want—and the other one has to answer, or the deal’s off and no birthday song.”

“How many questions?”

“As many as it takes until we’re both satisfied.”

“Only if I get to go first,” Meri said excitedly.

“So let it be written. So let it be done.”

“And when we’re
done
, we sing.”

“I guess.”

“No. We have to shake on it. Deal,” she said.

They shook hands the old-fashioned way.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

REVELATIONS

She
set up the chess set placing the white pieces on her side, made her first move, and then said, “Tell me about your nightmare.”

“That’s not a question, and this is gonna be a short game if that’s your best move,” said Naz.

“OK, what did you dream about?”

“That’s a wasted question. You know what I dreamed about. It’s always the same. Although, I am different in the dream now.”

“How?”

He made his first move and then replied, “I’m older, like I am now, and everyone else is the same, but it doesn’t make a difference. She still dies.”

“She was murdered. He killed her.”

“The coroner said both causes of death were accidents. He was your dad. Do you really think he meant to kill her? It’s your move by the way.” Naz loved his mother, but blamed her for something that he could not explain. It was just a feeling. If nothing else, he resented her for the years that he couldn’t remember and for her absence from them.

“I know,” she said, frustrated. “And he wasn’t my dad. I don’t have a dad. And how can you say that? She was your mother, too. You didn’t see what I saw. Your eyes were closed.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me what you saw, Meri. I mean, what did you see that day? Tell me everything.”

She moved one of her chess pieces then swallowed hard. “You sure you wanna know?”

He nodded, countering her move immediately.

Meri stared at the board and took a deep breath. “After he hit you, Momma jumped on his back and started hitting him on his shoulders and head.” Meri closed her eyes as the images flashed through her mind. She then continued, “He reached up, grabbed her by her arms, and flung her over his head onto the dining room table.”

Naz knew all of this from what she had told the police, but he also knew there was more she hadn’t told the police, something she kept from them and everyone else.   

“What else, Meri? Do you remember what happened after I passed out?”

“Like it was yesterday. And … you never passed out,” she said, making her next move.

“Slow down and concentrate. You’re gonna make a careless mistake in a minute.”

“I know what I’m doing. Anyway, you were sitting there with your eyes closed, but you weren’t unconscious. What were you doing?”

“It was the first time I heard the voices … well, voice. I thought that somebody had come to help. That’s when I think I passed out,” he said, sliding one of his pieces across the board.

“After he threw Momma, he turned toward me. I looked at you just sitting there with your eyes closed, and I knew he would kill me next, and then you. That’s when I cried. I cried every tear I had, and I prayed the way Momma taught me. Then something happened. ‘He’ grabbed his throat, and for a long time he tried to cough or talk or something, but nothing came out. Then he fell flat on his back and never moved again. I wiped my eyes, and that’s when you got up and walked over to me.”

Naz was silent for a while as he pondered her words.

She picked up one of her white pieces and put it in the place of one of his black pieces. Removing his black piece from the board, she added, “And it wasn’t the first time I saw you do that, either.”

“Do what? What do you mean? What did I do?”

“It’s my turn.”

“Wait, hold up …”

“No, it’s my turn!”

Naz nodded his head as he relented.

“What do you remember about your dad?” she asked.

“That’s not fair. We’re talkin’ about Momma.”

“So what? Our deal wasn’t limited to Momma. You said we could ask whatever we wanted. You came up with the rules.”

“But …”

“But nothin’.”

He nodded again, studied the chessboard for a moment, jumped up to grab his guitar, sat back on the bed, and made his move. “I haven’t played this in a long time,” he said, tuning his guitar.

“You’re stalling.”

“OK, I don’t remember … anything … maybe shadows … and emotions, but not him, not how he looked or sounded. Sometimes I hear those oldies when you’re listening to the radio, and I can remember all the words. And while the music is playing, I can see rooms and even make out furniture. I can even remember lines to movies that I can’t remember ever watching. That happens all the time.”

“Trust me. I know,” she said sarcastically.

“When I’m outside sometimes, and I smell certain plants or flowers, I get excited and content at the same time, because I imagine parks, beautiful parks that you could never find in the Exclave, and I know that I’ve been there before. But there are never people, never my dad in those places. It’s like a puzzle of my life, but some of the pieces are missing. It’s hard to figure out what goes where, and it gets frustrating. So now when those feelings come, I do my best to ignore them. I think that’s why Dr. Gwen calls them repressed memories, a type of retrograde amnesia, because I consciously reject the memories.” He resisted getting frustrated because talking to Meri like this had a calming effect on him. He could never talk this openly and freely with anyone else, not even Dr. Gwen.

“Do you remember the car accident?” she asked, advancing a harmless pawn.

“Not at all, I only know what they told me, that I was thrown from the car, and my dad wasn’t, and that he likely died on impact. I only remember waking up in a hospital to a stranger that said she was my mother.”

“Do you know what he looked like? Do you have any pictures?”

“I asked Momma if I could see a picture when we got home from the hospital, but she said she didn’t have any … no surprise there. ‘He’ wouldn’t even let her mention his name.”

“And his name was Cory?”

“Yep, Cory Andersen, and that’s all I know about him,” he said, moving one of his pieces and taking one of hers in the process. He stuck his tongue out at her. “Now, how many questions was that? Time to pay up with some answers of your own. When was the last time you cried, about anything?”

“The last time you saw me cry … that day … when he killed her and you …,” she paused.

“And I what?”

“And you saved me,” she said, countering his move and taking another one of his pieces.

“What do you mean? How did I save you?”