An hour. An hour has passed by on the dot without a singe text or call. I debate on calling Miranda and telling her everything I overheard. I know she would tell me I am sane because she knew my dad. She knew he would never turn into what my mother was.
I have not thought about my mother in quite some time, and my dad never spoke of her. I no longer know her whereabouts. Last I knew, she was staying with a new boyfriend fifty minutes away from our home. Her new boyfriend equally appeared as if he was on drugs. The only reason I found her was because Miranda and I figured out her mom’s Facebook account password when we were only eight years old. I sent her a message to say hello and told her I was her daughter using her friend’s mom’s account, but she never replied. I was too dumb to delete the message, so Wendy found out we used her account and told my dad. The only time I ever became angry with my dad is the day he told me to never contact her again. I didn’t understand why he would want to keep his daughter’s birth mother away until I was old enough to understand.
A cold gust of air blows through the park and makes the tree branches dance an interpretive rendition of movements. The sky was fading to gorgeous shades of pink and orange through their limbs. A single light pole casts a glow on the grass several yards away, and I watch the pesky gnats that were late for hibernation as they swarm around the globe of light, expecting it to zap them any time now. Unlike home, the air carries an absence of noise. I want a dog to bark or a car horn to blare to trick me into a delusion that I am home and not in a lonely park an hour away from my front door. I begin to cry at the thought of a stranger residing in my house, unknowingly ripping me from the memories of my childhood as they paint over my walls and carry their furniture inside to replace ours with a stupid smile on their face.
I want to go home.
I shift my leg to pull it up onto the splintery picnic table that I am seated upon and my heel catches the bar on one of my crutches, knocking it to the dirt below me.
“Shit,” I huff and I’m about to brush it off and make note that I will retrieve it later when I begin to leave, but a voice cuts through my thoughts like a sudden swing of a blade.
“Allow me.”
My head snaps to the side and my dark hair wisps into my face by the air’s touch, and I use a hand to pull it back behind my ear. A shadow figure appears from around one of the dancing trees and he swiftly strides over towards me, and I wonder if I should have brought any sort of weapon with me. He has a red t-shirt on and blue jeans complete with white tennis shoes. His build is skinny, but I can see a hint of his muscles as the sleeves of his shirt hug around them. His hair seems almost black in this lighting, but as he approaches, I could see a tinge of dark brown poking through his strands and it is longer on top than it is on the side, styled into a faded haircut.
I shake my head and insist on grabbing it myself, but he completes a few strides before I am able to stand up off of the table and he reaches down anyway, insisting on being the one to retrieve it. His hand grasps the metal of a crutch and raises it before he grabs the other one that was leaning against the table, and then he lifts them higher before laying them gently behind me.
I mutter my thanks and eye him questioningly, and then he catches me off guard when he hops onto the table and sits next to me. I scoot awkwardly away from him and watch him look around the park, turning his head as he scans the grounds. My eyebrows furrow and he folds his hands in his lap, and I wait for him to speak. He keeps his eyes away from me and I see the single light of the post illuminating them to reveal his icy blue irises.
When he does not meet my eyes or speak up, I break the silence.
“Are you looking for someone?” I ask slowly. His head snaps to the side like he just noticed I am here, and his eyes finally meet mine.
He shakes his head and snaps it away, scanning the dancing trees again. “Nope,” he answers while popping the ‘p’ with his lips.
I raise my eyebrows and squeeze my arms to my torso, attempting to block out the cold like my worst enemy. I shiver and look down at his bare arms. Not a single goosebump in sight.
“You seem to be looking for someone.”
He chuckles and I move backwards when his back straightens, and he lays backwards onto the table top. He interlocks his fingers behind his head to cushion the back of his head on the wood. “I’m not looking for someone. I just like coming here to watch the sunset.”
I’m not sure if he’s trying to convince me that he is an aesthete as a way of flirting or if he is a pretentious creep. My hand slithers towards my crutches and I inch them off of the table, still staring at him cautiously. “Well, you have fun with that. I’m going home now.”
“Did you know that when a sun sets, the blue gets scattered out through the atmosphere and only leaves longer wavelength colors? That’s why we see pretty colors during this time.”
His eyes are fixated on the sky and I feel another breeze rush by. He stays still on the table and I wonder when he is going to suddenly turn into a psychopath that drags me back to his white van. But he remains still.
“So you like science. Great,” I retort sarcastically. “My aunt made dinner. I should really be going home. They will be expecting me.” I hoist my crutches up and slide off the table, but his body stops me as he stretches out his hand.
“I’m sorry. I’m not being polite. My name is James.”
My eyes flick between his hand and his face, and he flashes me a toothy grin. I wonder to myself if this is some sort of trick due to the amount of horror movies I have seen in my lifetime. My brain imagines his fingernails extending into claws and grasping my hand until it rips clean off, my body crawling away desperately like Georgie to escape the sewer clown. I wanted so badly to run full speed to the safety of my aunt and uncle’s house, to barricade the door and pray that he would not follow me.
“I’m not going to hurt you. It’s just a handshake. You do it when you meet someone and introduce yourself.” His voice is calm and joking, and the vision of the sewer clown encapsulating my mind fades as I begin to notice his sincerity.
Remaining cautious, I lift a hand from one of my crutches and take his hand in mine, thankful that my flesh stays intact instead of melting off the bone from invisible poison.
“I’m Kristen, with a K,” I introduce myself as.
The handshake seems uncomfortably long and his skin feels cold to match mine, and I drop my hand when the awkwardness returns. I look at his hand when he drops it back down to the wood and contemplate how his hand is like a brick of ice, but the rest of his body does not contain a single goosebump and he is without a jacket.
“Aren’t you cold?” The words spew from my mouth involuntarily, seeming as if I care.
Air escape from his nose as he chuckles and he looks down towards his knees that are bent in his seated position. “I like the cold. Sometimes it’s good to feel something.”
I remember the psychiatrist who had intruded when she entered my hospital room just a few days ago and how she had said a similar thing. She had droned on about the stages of grief and how having feelings make us human and show that we are capable of love. She told me that, contrary to belief, grief does not have an expiration date and that it comes in stages and a bunch of other consoling words that I ignored as I tuned her out. I did not want to speak to a psychiatrist. I did not want to speak to anyone, but I was underage and did not have a say in who I wanted in my room. But I could control who has the key to the locked mansion of my mind.
James startles me when he pops up from his position and steps onto the table, his frame now much taller than I am. The table wobbles from his weight due to the rusty screws that work to hold the pieces together, but he keeps his balance and reaches upwards to touch his fingertips to a low hanging branch until he pulls the limb down to him. His shirt rides up and I catch a glimpse of the skin above his belt line and it disappears when he lowers his arms once he catches the limb that tries to escape towards the sky. He inspects it like a jeweler appraising a diamond, his hand cradling the bark against his calluses and plucking the dead leaves that grow off of it that turn to tiny bits as gravity sinks them to the earth floor.
“Do you live around here?”
I want to answer with a no. I want to tell him that I live many cities away and describe my city with every detail I can muster after knowing my city like the back of my hand for seventeen years, but my lips defy me as I tell him the truth. “I just moved here with my aunt and uncle.” I pause for a second and clarify, “Well, they already lived here. I moved in with them.”
“Which house?”
My head turns and I point towards the street that would eventually lead me to their house. “The old green Victorian down the street. Stafford Lane.”
He lets go of the branch, letting it smack the others as it flops back to its original state. He gives me a quizzical glance before he slumps back down onto the picnic table. “Hawthornes’ house?”
“You know them?”
“Not personally, but when you get to know the town, you get to know everyone. Your aunt has quite a knack for flowers. I’ve never seen so many peony bushes in front of a house before.”
A giggle escapes my mouth and it surprises me how well he knows his flowers considering any other man would have said they are rose bushes. “If you think that’s a lot, you should see her collection of lilies around the side of the house.”
I hold back a shiver as I notice the temperature beginning to grow colder as the sun hides behind the horizon. The light post flickers in my peripheral vision and his bright red t-shirt is fading to a deeper blood red as the daylight slowly disappears.
“So why are you living with them?” he asks as he hops off of the picnic table to stand before me. He can’t be any shorter than six feet tall and he tilts his chin downwards as he speaks to me. The question lingers on my brain for a moment before I reluctantly decide to toss every excuse I had rehearsed in front of the mirror out the window, hating the idea of pretending. I am not a child anymore. It’s time to stop playing pretend.
“They have temporary guardianship until I turn eighteen.” I bite my lip and use the toes of my shoe to dig a crater into the dirt. “My father passed away last week, so I’m finishing school out here.”
“Oh.” He purses his lips and shoves his hands into his pockets with his head lowered, and then he begins to mimic me as he digs his foot in the loose dirt and swipes it in random directions. “I’m sorry.”
I am not going to reply with some pathetic, “It’s okay,” because I know it’s a lie, so I stand there as we both trace paths into the earth.
“And your leg?”
I sigh and halt my foot. “I broke it in the wreck. We were hit head on and the dash caved in. It trapped my leg and they had a hell of a time pulling me from the car. The only thing I’m grateful for was that I was not conscious enough to feel anything immediately.”
Dismissive. I’m being dismissive because I am not about to cry in front of a complete stranger.
“What about your mom? Where is she?” He stops tracing paths and falls back onto the bench to the picnic table, so I do the same to relieve the pain in my leg.
“To hell if I know,” I reply with a shrug. “She left when I was five. She was addicted to heroin and painkillers. I guess she thought throwing her money away in the drug market was much more worthy of her time than spending it with her daughter.” I pick up a bit of the leaf that James had crumpled up and play with it between my fingers as I stare at the swarm of gnats that are still clinging to the light post. He follows my gaze and he also stares at the gnats as if waiting for the light to zap them.
My mind retreats away from the thought and I snap my head towards him. “So what about you? How far away do you live?”
“I’m not from here. I live in a town a few miles away.”
“So you walked all the way here?” I gasp, dropping the leaf so it floats down to my feet. A few minutes in this cold is turning me into an icy statue. I couldn’t bear to walk for over one mile in this weather.
“It’s not bad, he states. “I’ve run track for years. This is nothing.” The same toothy grin appears on his face and I find myself battling a flutter feeling that tickles my internal organs. My cheeks begin to redden and I struggle to differentiate whether the cold is altering their shades or whether the cause is something else. “Our coach would make us practice no matter what weather we were having. We’ve had snow in March before. A lot of the kids would complain about it, but my coach was not a sympathetic man. No,” he adds as he wags a finger in front of his face. “Complaining shows weakness, but it’s a life lesson.”
I cock my head to the side and cross my arms in front of my chest, my hair leaving the back of my ear and falling to the side of my face. “What do you mean? Sometimes it’s good to vent, though.” Complaining is a natural human habit.
“Within reason,” James replies with his pointer finger held up in front of my face. He perks one shaped eyebrow up and I find it impressive that he has a skill that not many can possess. “You can’t complain about something that can’t be fixed or you have no intention to fix. Why complain about the weather? You can’t change it. The way I see it,” he lets out with a sigh and he leans back until the table of the picnic table is perpendicular with his spine, “is that if you have enough time to think about something that bothers you, then you have enough time to think of a solution.”
Although I am reluctant to admit it, his words resonate through my body and I feel them drip down my throat like poison as if I said them myself. The venom trickles through my veins and necrotizes every path that carries blood to my heart. Since the accident, I have been closed off and do not speak of my father, and I do understand now that complaining about his death will not bring him back. In the locked mansion of my mind, I complain about why it wasn’t me that had to go, and I pity myself despite the not spoken truth that James has been so forward about.
I realize a tear is pricking my eye and I jerk my head away from him, thankful that he seems to not notice as I blink repeatedly. The sun has completely set by now and the sky is a painted canvas of blues and blacks with a hint of purple. It reminds me of an Artis Brugge painting I have seen before, and I think about the hallway that leads me to the mental prison in the Victorian house just down the street. An exaggerated sigh escapes my lips as a single car drives by, a sign that this town has some sort of life in the silence that overcame it. I do not want to go back, but the numbness in my toes and fingers and the absence of another home beckons me to do what I am told.
My head turns to face James and I see that he had already sat straight up and was staring at me. His eyes grew darker as the light in the atmosphere faded to night and the corner of his lips are curved slightly into a smile. His eyes are enchanting, and I catch myself from looking for too long. I shake my head and put my hand on my crutches.
“Well,” I start, the words burning my throat like alcohol, “I should really get home. My aunt will freak out if I’m out too late.”
“I can walk you home if you want.” He jumps to his feet and pulls a crutch off of the wooden table before handing it to me.
My gut screams at me to eagerly say yes, but my brain has built a wall to keep out solicitors. “No,” my mouth forms. I want to change my mind and take his offer, but my goal here was never to make friends. I never wanted to become close enough to someone here that would prevent me from going back to my true home. “It’s okay. It’s just down the street, and you need to get home where it’s warm,” I joke with a small laugh, an expression that I have not possessed in awhile, and I playfully shove him by pushing his arm with no strength put into it. He laughs as well when his body does not move an inch, indicating just how strong he is.
“Well, it was nice meeting you, Kristen with a K.” His smile remains on his face as he coltishly bows in front of me, a silly gesture that makes me bite the inside of my cheek and tuck my head into my shoulder to hide my blush. He raises to stand straight up and I look back to him, failing to hide my smile. “I’ll see you around?”
I sheepishly tuck my hair behind my ear and place my crutches under my arms. “You know where to find me.”
And with how quickly he had appeared from the trees across the park, he disappears into the darkness of them as well. Despite the cold, I take in as much of his presence that lingers there for a minute and listen to the low hum of the park light. My head tilts upward and through the canvas of the sky that paints my life now, I see a single star shine through the blue and make a wish that I will see him tomorrow.
ns 15.158.61.42da2
