Chapter Three
Ian
I made it out of the ring alive, but not before Dean gave me a twenty-minute lecture on how fighting wasn’t about getting mad. It was about staying in control. If I wanted to act like an animal, he said, I should be fighting in the street. He actually told me if I couldn’t control myself then I may as well join a gang. I laughed at that, but that only netted me an extra five-minute lecture on respect. Before I left, I conceded he was right about it all and that I was just having a bad day. I saw the shift in his eyes when he suddenly remembered Emma. I hated that shit. I’d rather have him beat the shit out of me like Vic, than pity me. Dean didn’t say anything about that though, which made me grateful. He just clapped the side of my face with his hand…as a show of support, I guess.
I hibernated in the apartment the rest of that day. I played video games and watched television and slept way too much. Sleep was an escape. I didn’t have to think about Alexa or Emma or feel anything like the emotions that tore through me every hour of the day when I was awake. I woke up at six in the morning the next day and realized that talking about Emma to Alexa must have been keeping these feelings at bay. It felt like there was something sitting on my chest and as each hour went by it got harder to breathe instead of easier. Finally, feeling like I couldn’t stand it any longer, I drove over to see my mom and dad. Maybe it would help just to talk about her for a while with people who loved her as much as I did.
As soon as I walked in the front door I knew I had made a mistake. That pall that hung over the house since Emma died was still there. I stop by nearly every day and I keep hoping things will change and I’ll walk in and find my own parents here. I found my mom in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in her hand, staring at a spot on the wall.
“Hi Mom.”
“Ian!” She jumped up to hug me and spilled the coffee all over the table. “Shit!” I realized then that Mom was not having a good day. She rarely ever cussed.
“It’s okay, Mom. Here, I’ll get a towel.” I went to grab a towel and when I got back, she was still standing in the same spot, staring at the coffee as it dripped down off the table. “Mom?”
“Oh you got a towel, thank you. I can’t believe how clumsy I am lately.”
“It’s okay, Mom. It’s really not a big deal.” I started mopping up the coffee on the table and she grabbed some paper towels and got down on her knees on the floor. She wiped up the spots the coffee had reached but she stayed down there like that, looking down at the floor for way too long. “You need help up old lady?” I asked her. Before Emma died, she and I used to joke about her turning forty-five and how I was going to put her in a home soon. It was funny then, because she always seemed so young to me. Looking at her now, it was like Emma’s death had taken decades off her life. I sadly realized it wasn’t funny any longer. She finally pushed herself up and said, “Thank you. Have you eaten?”
“No, you want me to run and get us something?” I usually brought them something but I’d been so damned distracted today. “Is Dad at work?”
“No, he’s here somewhere. He’s probably out in the shop in the backyard. That’s where I keep finding him.”
“He didn’t go to work? Is he okay?” I knew when Dad didn’t go to work it meant he was having one of his bad days.
She shrugged. “He won’t talk to me about how he’s feeling. I think he’s getting a little tired of me talking to him so he spends all of his time out there, avoiding me.”
“I’m sure he’s not avoiding you Mom. He probably just needs to grieve his own way.”
She nodded and said, “I’m going to fix you something to eat.”
“I don’t mind grabbing something and bringing it back…”
“Nonsense! I have groceries; I can cook for my son. What do you want?”
“Whatever you have is fine,” I told her. I wasn’t really even hungry, but she seemed to need something to do. “If you insist on cooking, I’ll go out back and see Dad until it’s ready…unless you need any help?”
“No, you go on,” she said kissing me on the cheek. “Maybe you can snap him out of his funk.”
I doubted it. I could barely manage my own. I made my way out to the backyard and the little shop my dad built there. He liked to make things out of wood so he’d built the shop when I was in high school. For a few years there I think he was too wrapped up in my crap to find time to work in it. When I finally got my shit together though and he had more time and less stress, he started making some pretty cool stuff. He’d made a welcome sign for the front of the house and some bird feeders that he put in the trees out front. He had built a bookshelf for Emma’s room and I had an end table at my place that he’d made for me.
I could hear the circular saw running when I got close. I looked in the small window to make sure he wasn’t near the door with it before I went in. What I saw nearly made me turn around and leave and keep going. That weight was back on my chest and crushing down even heavier now. He had a wooden sign he’d made for my sister. He showed it to me a few weeks before she died. It was for her dorm room and he’d put her name on it and burned flowers into it. He was planning on giving it to her when she came home for winter break. Now he was cutting it up into little pieces. It looked like he was trying to make mulch out of it as he fed it through the saw over and over again. The worst part was that he was sobbing as he did it. In twenty-two years, until my sister died I‘d never seen him cry. I still wasn’t used to it. I stood there, battling with myself. Did he need me to go in there, or did he want to be left alone? I didn’t have to wonder too long before there was a big crash in the kitchen. I had to go check on Mom. I went running into the house and I found my mother sitting in the floor, surrounded by spaghetti noodles and an upside down pot. There was water all over the floor around her.
“Mom! Are you okay? What happened?” I knelt down to feel the water with my hand and make sure it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t, thank God. She was sobbing again. “Mom?”
She finally looked up at me. Her eyes were so swollen it looked like she could barely see out of them. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t do anything right anymore.”
“Oh Mom,” I sat all the way down in the water on the floor next to her and put my arms around her. We sat there for a really long time while she cried and I decided that no matter how much time passed they were never going to be the same. I felt like I’d lost my sister and my parents.
I spent a few more hours there. I got Mom cleaned up and tucked her into her bed. Then I cleaned up the kitchen and checked on Dad again. He wasn’t crying any longer, but I still didn’t go in. Now he was burning Emma’s name into a new piece of wood. I had no idea what for and I wasn’t going to ask. I went back inside and got out some more spaghetti noodles. I cooked them and made some sauce with what I could find in the pantry. I looked in on Mom. She was asleep. I went out to finally talk to Dad and I found him with his head down on his workbench, asleep as well. I doubted either of them had been getting much sleep at night. I left him alone again and just left a note for them on the chalkboard in the kitchen, letting them know that dinner was ready. I locked the front door on my way out, but I realized that the pain locked in there with them was probably worse than anything that could walk in the door.
I picked up my own dinner on the way home and when I got there, I locked myself in the apartment with my own grief. I ate about two bites but nothing tasted good, so I threw it all away. I found a mindless comedy on HBO and lay down on the couch to watch it. About half an hour into the movie my text message alert went off. I nearly kicked myself in the ass for hoping it was Alexa when I reached for it. It wasn’t. It was Kristie. Surprise.
She must have been in “sane” mode because the text said, “I’m sorry for bothering you. I just want to make sure you’re doing okay. I feel so bad about Emma and can’t stop thinking about how hard it must be on you.”
I guess her sanity brought out the insanity in me because I texted her back: “Thanks, Kristie. I miss her so bad.”
“I know baby,” she texted back. “You shouldn’t be alone. You should let me come over and just hold you.”
As good as that sounded at the moment, I wasn’t quite that insane yet. I tried to avoid answering by saying, “How are you doing?”
“I’m good. I got a new personal trainer though. I was having nothing but problems with Jose. I gained five pounds last week.” I read that and laughed out loud. Poor Jose, she blamed him for everything.
“So who are you going to now?” I asked. I wasn’t sure why I was feeding into this…any of it. I just desperately didn’t want to be alone right now.
“I got a female trainer. Her name is Violet March. Do you know her?”
“Not personally, but I’ve heard good things.”
I heard she was a ball-buster, but that’s what Kristie needed, Someone to stand up to her and not take her crap. She was quite the snob when she wanted to be.
“So how is the fighting going?”
In Kristie language that translated to: Are you still raking in the bucks? Kristie liked the finer things in life. Unfortunately for her she hadn’t found a sugar daddy that she was okay with being seen with in public. So, she settled for me because she thought there was a chance I’d be famous someday.
“Good, I’m winning, a lot,” I texted back. “I have one tomorrow night.”
“Oh yay!” she replied. Then there was a pause between texts for about fifteen minutes. The one that came then said, “Can I go?”
I told myself that at least she was asking now and not just showing up. That was an improvement, right?
“Yeah. How about we have dinner after?”
What the hell? Did I just ask my crazy ex-girlfriend to dinner? I guess I was the one that just said you shouldn’t hold people’s past against them. Everyone can change.
“I’d love to,” she texted back. We made arrangements to meet after the fight. I ended the conversation feeling better. It was something to look forward to…I think.