Keisha
I sighed with hopelessness.
I looked at my watch for what seemed the hundredth time that evening. Then I looked at my phone.
It was official. He wasn't coming. I'd been stood up.
I think I knew this all the way back when it had only been five minutes past eight. Then ten minutes. Then fifteen.
I'd experienced this enough by now to know when there was no point in hoping. It didn't really stop me from getting all starry-eyed and optimistic, and inevitably being disappointed, but if I was really honest with myself, I could always, always recognize the signs.
I waited for another five minutes, sipping on my glass of wine. Then another ten minutes. And then, finally, I threw in the towel. Or the cloth napkin, to be more specific.
I stepped from the dim light of Dimitri's and into the brighter neon of the city, illuminated pink and blue and green against the hazy black-yellow of the night sky. It was unseasonably cool tonight on top of everything else, and my breath clouded out in front of me as I stood outside the entryway to the restaurant, trying to decide what I wanted to do.
I really didn't want to be done with this evening just yet. But as far as I could tell, this evening seemed to be done with me.
And so I just started walking. Walking, in the hope that my feet might prove to show better judgment than I did, and take me to somewhere I actually wanted to be.
I was feeling depressed. My life felt empty. Pointless. That was the fourth date I'd tried and failed to go on in the past two weeks. I mean, sure, I'd at least managed to get clear through the other ones. But by the time the night was over, the guys always had their hands all over me, trying to take things a hell of a lot faster than I wanted them to go.
It felt like every man I met was like that. Hasty. Immature.
Shallow, and even emptier than I felt.
Not just every man. Everybody. Period.
Maybe I just had a bad case of affluenza, I don't know. But I'd gotten so bored with life. So over the world, I saw around me. People seemed so unhappy all the time, and they seemed to look for the cure to their unhappiness in all the wrong places.
Hurting people seemed to be foremost among them, whether it was emotionally, or physically.
Honestly, I was afraid to date nowadays, because men always ended up breaking up with me in the end. Some other, prettier girl would turn their heads and they would end up cheating on me.
Or I wouldn't do what they wanted me to do, or else they would just get tired of me. And that would be the end of things.
It was like the same old story, over and over and over again.
But it was like I never got tired of reading it.
For the longest time, I fell into the trap of believing that there was something wrong with me. That there was a reason for this pattern, and it wasn't all just some coincidence.
But then I started rethinking things a little bit. It made me feel a hell of a lot better to think that it was the other way around. That the world was the one that had all of the problems, and not me.
And to be totally fair, the world was a pretty screwed up place. I could hardly be faulted for using its problems as a justification for my own failures in relationships, or my general aimlessness in life.
Seeing my reflection in the mirror across from my table frightened me. What would my college friends think of me if they'd ever known who I actually was?
Candice helped bring clean water to cities with lead pipes. Henrietta ran for mayor in that small Southern town where she lived. Even Bella was doing something meaningful with her life.
What the hell had I done lately to help make the world a better place?
At best, I was a neutral party to it. At worst, I was an accomplice to all of its evils- and this I suspected more and more, with each and every new passing day.
I mean, I was the daughter of Marlon Hillary, who just so happened to be about the most transparently evil corporate bigwig this side of the Prime Meridian. And sure, you can't choose who your parents are, or what your lot is in life. But I'd spent my whole childhood and adolescence turning a blind eye to my father's corruption, his evil deeds.
And now I was an adult, and I should have known better.
I really, really should have known better.
The older I got, the more and more I saw of what I'd tried so hard, for so long, not to see.
Growing up, I'd always thought Daddy was just a run of the mill businessman. Like the kind you see on TV, wearing a suit and tie, smiling, shaking hands with other well-pressed, nice, clean businessman. I was proud of him. He'd made it big and he'd won every award you could imagine, not just as a businessman but an African American businessman.
My grandma always used to tell me how lucky I was to have Daddy in my life, looking after me and making sure I didn't have to grow up like he did.
Once I got a little bit older, I started learning more about the world, and I started wondering whether Daddy was really so nice after all.
I learned about how people like him, in charge of big corporations, could hurt people without ever laying a finger on him. Which, I guess if you squint hard enough, you could still make it out to be something of a moral grey area. And so I kept on trying to ignore it.
But then I got a little bit older still. And I saw a little bit more. And I began to understand that the way my father hurt people wasn't so metaphorical after all.
It was the way people talked about him, I think, that made it start to click. I started recognizing the innuendos, the doublespeak people would start to use, whenever the subject of my father arose.
Like, just for an example, when I started dating in college, I would overhear the boys I would date being ribbed by their friends about me.
“Hey, McCallister! You better watch where you're putting that thing when you're out with Keisha on Saturday night. If you knock her up, old man Hillary might just have you knocked off!”
The more and more it kept happening, the harder and harder it became to turn a blind eye to it. But I did keep on trying.
It didn't help matters much, either, when Jay Sampson started showing up at my father's office, either.
God, that man... He looked like a cross between Rambo and the Terminator, and there was no doubt in my mind whenever he happened to show up when I was there exactly what he was being called in for. He terrified me. He terrified everybody.
His arms were covered in tattoos, and probably the rest of him as well. And there was something in his eyes that kind of did something to me. Like, I could never really figure it out.
There was always this coldness to him. This harshness. This need to keep people away. But beneath that, far below what I thought for certain was a murderous exterior, I saw something much gentler. Far more vulnerable.
As well equipped physically as he surely was for his unspoken but obvious line of work, there was just something about that eyes that tried to cry out to the world that they were not the eyes of a killer.
Of course, I could never look at them for very long.
I wasn't going to let myself fall into that trap. My life was screwed up enough without me going and developing a hopeless crush on one of my old man's contract killers. And anyway, I was never around Jay Sampson enough to actually know anything about him, he's just an example.
I think I'd only ever spoken a single sentence or two in his company, and I could probably count the number of times we'd bumped into one another on both hands.
I was always in my father's office asking him or a favor or something when he would show up. Asking him to borrow money, or something like that. And by borrow, of course, I just mean “have.”
And anyway, that all kind of circles back around to my original point.
I may have disapproved of my father, and his blatant wickedness, and all the harm he did to the world. But that didn't stop me from accepting his support, well into my adult years. If anything, I was enabling his horrible lifestyle. Making it seem necessary for him to keep on doing what he was doing, in order to provide for his family.
But what the hell could I do?
I felt utterly lost in the world, completely hopeless. Even if I thought there was anywhere I could possibly go where I could escape my father's shadow, even for a second, I would be totally incapable of taking care of myself. Daddy had never let me learn how.
My existential crises had overshadowed my life for so long now, I wasn't sure what else was left of me, and I was terrified of taking that leap out into the open, saying “screw it all” without any kind of safety net, and then finding out that I was way deeper into hot water than I'd meant to sign up for.
And anyway, it's not like my father, Marlon Hillary of all people, was just going to up and quit doing what he was doing just because I asked him to. If anything, he would make up some bullshit to placate me, to make it seem like things weren't as bad as they really were, and then just keep doing what he was doing in greater secrecy.
Why even bother with the drama?
And so I just kept doing what I was doing. Accepting money from my criminal father, and pretending that he was no such thing.
Trying and failing to establish relationships, or connections, or anything to pull me out of the rut I'd been sinking further and further into, ever since I was a teenager.
You know that webcomic with the dog wearing a hat, and he's in the house that's burning down, and he has the little speech bubble, “This is Fine”?
I know, I know. A real original metaphor for a millennial to be pulling out of her hat. But I felt like I had a right to compare myself to that dog, a lot more than most of the people who try to.
And so now, I wandered through the cold city streets, hugging myself for warmth, not paying much attention as the blocks spanned on and on, getting darker and shadier with every one I traversed.
I really should have been more careful. I cared more about my life, or what happened to me, I probably would have been. But my body and mind were both just so tired. And I was so far beyond caring anymore that I might have walked into a war zone, without even thinking twice about it.
For all intents and purposes, that's exactly what I did.
I'd just taken a step forward, in front of an alleyway so dark that the street itself just seemed to fall into inky black shadow at the point where it intersected with the sidewalk. I'd just started yawning, thinking I should turn back toward the restaurant and drive home, when out of nowhere a hand shot out from the darkness, cupping hard across my mouth, interfering with any attempt I might have made to scream.
All of the sudden, I found the notion that I'd given up on my willingness to live challenged in a way that I couldn't have imagined.
My muffled cries rang out, and I realized that it wasn't just a hand cupped over my mouth, but a rag- soaked with a strong chemical.
I started kicking, and clawing at my captor's arms, and reaching for the mace that I kept in my purse, knowing all the while that it was almost certainly in vain.
“Sh, sh, sh! It's okay! You're okay! I'm not going to hurt you! I promise you, I'm not going to hurt you!”
A voice that sounded familiar whispered these words of would-be condolence into my ears, but I didn't believe them for a New York second. Instead, I just kept struggling harder, trying to kick him in the balls, and bite his fingers through the rag, and do anything and everything I could think of to try and break myself free of him.
But the chemical's effects were setting in, soaking deep and fast into my system. I could feel myself fading, and the world getting light, weightless around me, as my field of vision grew darker and darker.
And then I was out.
In spite of my efforts, I felt everything fade away. I was left in a pitch black darkness, incapable even of wondering whether I would ever wake.