Guardian of Eden (4 page)

"Garrett, baby, I'm so sorry. I'm
gonna
be a better mother. I promise." My mother hugged me and Eden, but I didn't really feel like hugging her back. "Don't you believe me? I'm
gonna
take care of you. I am. Don't you know I love you?" She pleaded. I stared into her green eyes. The eyes that were exactly like mine. I tried to believe her. I wanted to believe her, but I just couldn't.

***

After the incident with Jimmy, Eden and I went to live with Ms. Brooks for a while. My social worker forced me to see Richard every week instead of every month. Richard Fielding was my psychologist. He was supposed to rehabilitate me even though there was nothing wrong with me.

"So you don't see how attacking a man three times your size is dangerous?" he asked while cleaning his glasses with a tissue.

"Of course, I see the danger in it. I'm not an idiot. But I had to do it. He was hurting my mother. Holly can't take care of herself sometimes."

"Don't you know he could have killed you?"

"That's why I had the knife." I was quickly tiring of Richard's stupid questions.

"But he's bigger and stronger than you."

"Well, maybe next time, I'll need to use a gun instead." Richard sighed and rubbed his temple. I think I was giving him a headache. I frustrated him. He would never be able to convince me that it wasn't my duty to protect my family.

“
Holly tells me you’re still having headaches and throwing up at night. Is that true, Garrett?” Richard asked, trying to change the subject somewhat. I shrugged. I didn’t like to consider myself sickly, but since I had started living with Holly, I did suffer from headaches and stomach aches a lot. And now, on top of that, I also had nightmares. On the rare occasions that I could actually sleep, I dreamt of monsters coming to attack my family. Some nights I ended up in the bathroom vomiting for hours.

Richard thought I had some sort of nervous disorder due to the stress of my home life. I tried not to talk about it with him too much. I didn’t want him to take me away from Eden and Holly to put me in some sort of hospital for evaluation.

“Garrett, I would like an answer,” he said when I hadn’t provided any additional information along with the shrug.

“I’m fine. My head’s fine, my stomach’s fine, I’m fine.” I folded my arms and waited for his next question, but I think he’d given up.

"We're done for the day, Garrett. Why don't you go play in the waiting room?" Richard ushered me out of the door and signaled for Holly to enter. Eden was in the waiting room engrossed with the dolls they provided. She smiled at me hoping I would go play with her. I didn't feel like playing dolls. Even at that age I realized my role in the family. I was the man of the house. Men didn’t play with dolls. Instead, I sat by Richard's door and listened to what he told Holly.

"I'm really concerned about his temper," Richard was saying. "He's nine years old and he's getting into knife fights. This violent streak is going to land him in jail or worse."

"It’s not a temper. He doesn’t have a violent streak. He just wants to protect me. Just like his father. He's
gonna
end up just like his father. I can't go through that again."

***

When Eden and I went back to live with my mother, my social worker went through the house and removed all knives and sharp objects. We didn't even have pens or pencils in the house, only crayons and markers. It was ridiculous.
As if I didn't know where to find a knife if I needed one.
And I really did need one when Joel came back.

My mother had a textbook case of low self-esteem. I read about it once while I waited for Eden to finish her appointment with Richard. That was the only explanation I could come up with for why she would let Joel back into her life.

When I was about 11 years old, we lived in an apartment on Sunny Lane in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Life was anything but sunny, however. The constant sound of police sirens or girlfriends yelling at unfaithful boyfriends in the middle of the night didn’t bother me too much. I could even live with the scratching sounds that came from inside the walls and the ceiling which I hoped were mice but I
knew
were rats. We had lived in worse places. What
did
bother me was Joel. I never got any sleep with Joel in our home. I didn’t trust him. I lay awake in bed at night listening and waiting for him to do something violent just like Jimmy did.

I remember there used to be a man with a saxophone that played on the street corner late at night. He would open his case and let people throw in money. I never had any money, but I did like to add words to the sounds that drifted up to our apartment.

Black is dark and dark is night

A welcome dark for rest and respite

Where dreams are made to fill the empty road of life

A trail traveled alone with no end in sight

Or maybe the end is near and I haven’t got it right

Maybe death isn’t as hard as this empty life

“What the hell are you
writin
’ over there?” Joel slurred. He sat on the couch drinking beer and smoking. I’d found a place in the corner of the living room and scrawled my nonsensical saxophone lyrics. “Are you
writin
’
somethin
’ about me? You better not be
writin
’ about me, boy.”

I ignored him and continued writing. Maybe the lyrics weren’t nonsensical. Maybe they revealed what I really felt. Not to say I wanted to kill myself or anything. I just felt more at ease, less anxious inside by getting these words out on paper. Maybe I would make this kind of writing a regular habit.

I looked over at my almost six-year-old baby sister sleeping on the couch next to Joel. How could she stand to be so near to him? I knew he was her father, but he treated her just as bad as he did Holly. He never hit them or anything, not in front of me anyway, but he constantly insulted them and brought them to tears. Still, both Holly and Eden flocked to him as if they needed him.

I put my pencil down and continued to stare at my sister curled up on the couch in a tight little ball. She was so beautiful I smiled to myself. I did everything in my power to take care of her and make her happy, but I wasn’t enough. She still needed the love and attention of a father.

Suddenly Joel screamed, “Are you laughing at me?” I shook my head no, but he didn’t believe me. What happened next, I’d rather not talk about. Not yet anyway.

That same year, Eden lost her two front teeth. I assured her this was normal and that they would come back, but she was convinced she was a hideous monster. She refused to look at herself in the mirror and cried pitiful tears if she got an accidental glance.

“I’m so ugly. That’s why nobody wants me,” she cried one day after brushing her remaining teeth in the mirror.

“What do you mean? Who doesn’t want you?”

“My father doesn’t want me. Is that why he left again?
Because I’m ugly?”

“No, Eden, of course not.
He left because…” I wanted to say he left because he was a disgusting cretin that didn’t deserve to live with us in the first place, but I wanted to respect the fact that he was her father. “He left because he and Holly didn’t get along anymore. It had nothing to do with you.”

“Does mommy love you more than me because you’re more beautiful? Why can’t I be pretty too?”

“Mommy doesn’t love me more than you. She loves us the same.” I had no idea where Eden would come up with such an idea.

“She does, she does. You should hear how she talks about you to other people. She brags about how smart you are and how you help around the house so much and how she doesn’t know if she’d be able to make it without you in her life. She never says anything like that about me.”

I learned to be very careful when talking with Eden about beauty and self-image. I didn’t want her to grow up and have the same problems our mother did. Every chance I could I tried to convince her how beautiful she was. It completely confused me how she could think otherwise.

After watching my mother struggle through relationships, I vowed that I would never do the same. Not only would I never treat a woman the way Holly’s boyfriends treated her, but I would make sure that I was only with someone that loved me as much as I loved them. And I wanted to make sure Eden grew up with a confidence that demanded respect from the opposite sex. She needed to know she deserved the best.

 Holly tried to be a better mother. She did the best she could. After Joel tired of being a parent, he moved out and our lives began to improve. She stayed away from men completely for about six months. I think it was part of one of her rehab programs.

We moved to a better neighborhood and Holly got a real job as a secretary at a beauty salon. They did her hair and make up for free sometimes and made her even more beautiful than she was naturally, thus, enhancing her attractiveness to men. Men were more of a weakness for her than drugs or alcohol and she slowly slipped into old habits. As the years went by, I didn’t like strange men being around my little sister all the time.

“
Garrett, I swear, you’re
gonna
give yourself an ulcer one day,” my mother said blithely after I’d expressed my concerns to her. I was fifteen and worried about the attention my ten-year-old sister started to attract from the opposite sex. Eden was 5’5” with waist-long dark blond hair, perfect fairy like features and an angelic smile. One of my friends even commented on how gorgeous she was and how she didn’t look ten years old. After the broken nose I gave him healed, though, he never said anything else about her.

“I’m serious, Holly. I don’t want all these random men hanging around the house anymore. It’s not safe.
What if one of them tries something with Eden?”

My mother continued trimming some flowers over the kitchen sink as she said, “Really, Garrett, do you have to call me Holly? What about ma or mom? I’ll even go with mother.”

I’d tried to call her mother for a while. It didn’t work. Besides the fact that it just didn’t feel natural to me, I got tired of the strange looks from people when we were in public. She looked too young, I looked too old. She was white, and I was not. It was just too much to explain. I’m sure people just assumed we were boyfriend and girlfriend sometimes.

I sighed and said, “I would like to meet the men before you bring them into the house.
Before they meet Eden.
Can we just be in concurrence about the matter?”

“Concurrence?
Is that the word of the day?” she teased. I ran my fingers through my shoulder length hair. She could be so frustrating sometimes. “Is that how you talk to the girls your age? No wonder you don’t have a girlfriend. And you should have a girlfriend. You’re such a handsome young man.” She turned to me, looked into my eyes and caressed my cheek.
“Beautiful green eyes, strong masculine jaw, broad shoulders.
I swear to God, it’s like you just went shopping for genes and picked out the best features between me and your dad.” She went back to trimming her flowers. I paused and stared at the back of her golden hair. She’d never mentioned my father to me before.