Guardian of Eden (7 page)

“She’s
gonna
go on a photo shoot with Corbin instead.”

“
But…but…” I had studied countless words and phrases. I’d studied Latin, Greek and French to become more acquainted with word origins and the true complexities of language. My word obsession proved fruitless in this instance. For no words could describe what I felt. I made a mental note to create a poem about it later.

Even though my mother promised to explain along the way, we drove in silence. I think there were things she wanted to tell me, but she didn’t know how. Several times she inhaled sharply like she wanted to start a sentence. Then seconds later she’d exhale and shake her head.

The deafening silence slowly drove me insane. Questions bounced around my mind with spasmodic frequency. What would he look like? Why did he go to jail? Why hadn’t I ever met him? Why after so many years of never even mentioning his name did my mother suddenly want to take me to him? All these questions might soon be answered when I met my father for the first time.

“We’re leaving Virginia?” I asked, as we passed the state line. It was the first time either of us had said a word in almost two hours.

“Your dad’s in a prison in North Carolina.” I hoped she would continue, but she didn’t. The silence returned and allowed my mind to wander back to the unanswered questions that engulfed my life.

 
When we reached the institution, my mother turned off the engine, gripped the steering wheel with both hands, and stared straight ahead.

“I can’t do this. I can’t see him.” She turned to me and said, “You’re
gonna
have to go alone.”

“Alone?” I asked terrified. I wasn’t afraid of the prison. I’d been inside one before. In the sixth grade, after I’d been suspended for fighting for the fifth time, my social worker took me to a jail in Arlington to try to scare me straight. I remember thinking that I’d slept in much worse places than the Arlington County Jail.

No, prisons, prison life, not even prisoners scared me. What terrified me was the prospect of meeting my biological father. For some reason, even though I’d never met the man before, I felt as though I needed his approval. What would I be if I didn’t get it?

“Holly, I’m under eighteen. I seriously doubt they’ll let me in there alone,” I said, hoping the statement was true.

“Well, I’ll get you in there, but you have to visit him by yourself. I mean, I haven’t seen him since I married Corbin.” My mother pulled out her makeup bag and began to reapply her lipstick. I stared at her dumbfounded.

“You married Corbin three months ago. You saw my father three months ago?” My mother closed her eyes tightly and clasped the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.

“I can’t talk about this right now, Garrett. Let’s just go and get this over with.” My mother opened her door.

“No!” I grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward me. “I want to know why you saw my father three months ago but I don’t even know his name.”

My mother’s eyes bulged as she said, “Garrett, calm down, okay. Let me go, baby, please.” I saw fear in my mother’s eyes. I looked down and saw how violently I clutched her wrist. Shame stifled the anger that had erupted in me and I instantly let her go.

“I’m sorry mother.” I slouched in my seat and clasped my hands.

My mother breathed deeply and rubbed the soreness out of her wrist.

“His name is Gregory Baker. I’m sorry I never told you that before, but that’s the way he wanted it. He wouldn’t even let Grandma Jean tell you.”

“Why were you here three months ago?”

“I…I wanted to tell him I was getting married. I wanted…I just thought that he should know.”

I didn’t press the matter any further.

Catolby
Correction Institution was a medium security prison reserved for violent convicts on good behavior. Or so I read from the informational packet. Now I at least knew that my father’s crime or crimes were violent. I’m not sure if I wanted to know more. Is that where I got my so-called violent streak? Had I inherited it from my biological father? Of course, I never considered myself violent. In my mind, I just did what I had to do when it had to be done. And if what needed to be done included violence, so be it.

True to her word, Holly did not go any further into the facility than she needed to. I wandered the visitor’s courtyard alone searching for a man I didn’t know. I found him seconds later. Or at least I assumed it was him. It had to be. The man was a taller, darker, more muscular version of me.

“Would you like to play a game of chess?” My father smiled at me and gestured toward a table where he’d already set up the game. I imagined meeting my father several times in my head. I imagined what he’d look like since I’d never even seen a picture, what he’d sound like, and what his first words to me would be. Never, in all my imaginings, were his first words asking to play a game.

I nodded at the man who was easily 6’6” and 300 pounds of solid muscle. Then we both sat down at the picnic-style table. I looked around at the other tables in the courtyard and saw sons, daughters, wives, maybe even brothers and sisters hugging their incarcerated loved ones, sharing pictures, or relating family stories. We were the only ones playing a board game.

“You can tell a lot about a man by the way he plays a game of chess,” my father said as he made his first move. He adjusted his round glasses and waited for me to take my turn.

I didn’t want to play chess. I wanted some answers. I wanted him to tell me all the things that Holly refused to reveal. I made two or three hasty moves in a row and within seconds he had me in check. When I tried to move my king to a safe place he said, “You can’t move there. My knight is on g6.”

“Well then, game over. You win.”

“No, it’s not over. There’s a way out. You’re just not seeing it. You’re being blinded by emotion.” I wanted to slam my fist on the table and clear the insipid chessboard. “You’re angry with me. I can see it in your eyes. You can’t let anger choose for you. You have to control it.”

“You’re a convicted felon and you’re giving me advice about controlling my anger?”

“Maybe I’m
exactly
who should be giving you advice. I’ve gone down your path and it brought me to this place. Hindsight is clearer than foresight, my son.”

“Don’t call me your son. I didn’t even know your name before a few minutes ago. I know nothing about you and you know nothing about me.” My father calmly pushed the chessboard to the side. He clasped his hands in front of him and sighed.

“I know more about you than you’ll ever know. I know you’re a scared little boy trying to be a man. I know you lash out at anything remotely threatening. I know you’re highly intelligent, but you insist on using your fist instead of your mind.” My father pointed to his temple for emphasis. “I know you’re a sensitive soul who loves completely and who needs to be loved and needed in return. I know you love your mother and your baby sister more than yourself and you would give your life for them. And I know all these things, Garrett, because I was exactly the same way at your age. Do you know how much it pains your mother to see history repeating itself? To see my sins passed on to you? Do you know how many times she’s told me that you remind her of me?”
“No, I
don’t
know. Since I had no idea my mother was communicating with you I had no way of knowing.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“Don’t be mad at your mother. I told her to keep it from you. I didn’t want you to know who or what I was.”

“So you don’t want me, but you still want Holly.”

My father bolted out of his seat causing several heads to turn in his direction.

“That’s enough for today, Garrett. I’ll see you next Saturday.” He turned to walk away.

“Who says I’m coming back next Saturday?” My father turned back, rested his hands on the table, and in a calm, controlled voice said,

“You’re coming back every Saturday or I’m not letting Corbin adopt you.”

***

“How was it?” My mother asked when I got into the car.

“Strange.”

“Yeah, he can be that way sometimes.” My mother smiled wistfully. She lost herself in a memory of some sort.
A happy memory.
It wasn’t fair. I didn’t have happy memories in which to lose myself. I was momentarily jealous of her reverie and wanted to snatch it away.

“
Hol
…mother, please. No more lies and mystery. Just tell me why he’s in jail.”

My mother’s eyes glistened and her lips trembled as she said, “Murder.”

“Murder?
Whose murder? Whom did he kill?”

Before bursting into tears she said, “My father.”

My father killed my grandfather? That’s why he was in jail? I was the child of a murderer. I felt my stomach twist and tighten. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter. It didn’t change who I was.

It shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise, right? I knew he had to have committed some sort of felony to be serving a life sentence. Why did the fact that it was murder affect me so much? Why did the idea that he had murdered my grandfather make me so sick to my stomach?

“Are you all right, Garrett?” my mother asked after taking her eyes off the road for a moment. I nodded weakly unable to open my mouth to utter a sound. “You really don’t look so good, baby. Do you need me to pull over?”

Holly didn’t wait for a response. Instead, she crossed two lanes of traffic and pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway. I opened the door and let the bile that had been churning in my stomach flow out of me.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she said as she rubbed my back and held my hair out of my face. “I didn’t think…I didn’t want…” My mother buried her face in my shoulder and wept softly.

I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “Why do you still talk to him and visit him? How can you stand to look at him? He killed your father, your flesh and blood.”

“Things aren’t always that simple, Garrett. Not everything is just black and white.”

I tried to imagine what it would be like to lose your father at the hand of your lover. Or what kind of circumstances would cause you to murder your girlfriend’s parent. My mother obviously still loved my father. There had to be an explanation, some key to unraveling the tangled web that was my parents’ history. I needed to talk to someone, maybe someone in the family. But there was no one. As far as I knew, my parents didn’t have siblings. My father’s mother was dead and my mother’s mother refused to even look at me.

I remember once when I was 12 and Eden was seven, my mother sent me to buy a few groceries. Nothing was strange in that alone, but I found it odd that Holly wouldn’t let Eden come with me. Eden always went to the store with me. I used it as a time to quiz her on percents and proportions. I didn’t argue, though. I just figured my mother wanted to do Eden’s hair or something. As I walked back to the two bedroom duplex we rented at the time, I noticed a black Cadillac pulling away.

“Who was in the car?” I asked when I entered the house, setting the groceries on the kitchen table.