Loving a Bad Boy (36 page)

Pam wrapped her arms around her waist
tightly as her knees buckled. Strong arms encircled her, and walked
her to one of the rattan chairs in the room. She tried to thank the
nurse, but couldn’t speak. Water filled her eyes as she continued
to stare at the woman in her father’s arms. A gaggle of emotions
ran rampant, short-circuiting her ability to think. Tears ran down
her face as her father sat down and pulled the woman, no mama, she
corrected herself, onto his lap, holding her tight. His palm cupped
the side of her mom’s face, turning her to meet his eyes.

“
Pamela is here. I
promised you I’d bring her. That’s her over there.”

Pain, searing in its intensity, lashed
across Pam’s chest at the vacant look in her mom’s eyes. She’d
dealt with the sick long enough to know her mama had no idea who
she was. Unable to deal with the visual in front of her, Pam closed
her eyes tight. Forcing back the anger, forcing back the pain and
disillusionment, she fought to think. To understand. She’d wanted
answers about her mama’s disappearance but wasn’t prepared for
this. She wasn’t ready to see her mom on the brink of collapse, not
when she’d just discovered that she was alive.

Alive
. That reality slammed into her. Oh my God, Mama was
alive.

Her body shook under the force of her tears
as she slid to the floor. All these years, no one had told her
anything. It didn’t matter that her mom was sick. Someone should
have allowed her to see her mama regardless of her condition.

“
Pam?” A warm palm rubbed
her back.

She flinched and shrugged it off. “Don’t…”
She steadied herself. “Don’t touch me.” A few tissues were stuffed
into her hand, a pat on her shoulder, and then the steps
retreated.

“
Come on Nora, let me get
you something to drink,” the nurse’s voice and shuffling of feet
faded as her mother left the room.

Lying on the floor, Pam’s heart bled as she
cried for all the years of uncertainty. All the years she'd wanted,
no needed, her mother. She’d thought her mama had abandoned her,
left her callously to make it without her, and while no one had
ever told her that directly, they'd never corrected her erroneous
thoughts either. Her chest heaved as she attempted reconcile her
thoughts to this reality.

“
Pamela,” her daddy called
out.

Anger, hot red and pulsing, washed over her.
He had done this. He’d kept her from her mama. Rising up on her
arms, jaw clenched as she glared at him, hoping he felt the hate
she had in her heart for him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He stared at her for moment, and then hung
his head. “She made me promise I wouldn’t.”

Pam buckled under the blow of those words.
“What?” she whispered, unable to believe mama hadn’t wanted her.
No, that’s not what he'd said, was it?

“
You gotta
understand—”

“
No, I don’t,” she
snapped. Her pain justified her unreasonable stance. “You took my
mama from me! You knew…you knew I thought she was dead. Maybe as a
child I wouldn’t have understood, but I’ve been grown for
years.”

“
It’s not—”

“
Yes, it is that simple. I
take care of sick people every day and my…” she choked back a sob,
“my mama is sick and no one told me.” She pointed at her chest.
“Taking care of sick people is what I do and somebody else is
taking care of my mama?” her voice rose on the edge of hysteria.
She leaned back offering him her best are-you-crazy look. “What the
hell is that? And nobody…nobody told me. Me, her only child,” she
hissed. Pushing up from the floor, she stood and faced her
parent.

“
What’s her diagnosis?”
She ignored the look of surprise on his face as she braced herself
for the information.

“
Huntington’s.” He focused
on the wall beside her as he spoke.

That one word plunged like a dagger into
her, and once again her knees buckled. “Oh noooooo……” Of all the
diseases, Huntington’s was one of the worse. It attacked the brain,
and there was no cure. Worse, it was passed from generation to
generation. That meant someone in her family had carried the
defective gene. Wait a minute. She paused as a tidbit from her
nursing studies resurfaced. That disease typically attacked
Caucasians.

In slow motion, she looked at him. Seeing
him in an entirely different light. What else had they been keeping
from her? “How?”

“
Her biological father
died from it not long after she was born.” He opened his mouth,
then pursed his lips before speaking. “They didn’t call it that
then. Everybody just thought he went crazy. When he died a few
years later, nobody said why.”

Still, Huntington’s disease didn’t normally
hit black folks. “Mama’s daddy was white?”

His eyes narrowed disdainfully into slits
for a second or two. And then he released a pent up breath.
“Yeah.”

She reeled from that bit of information. No
one had ever mentioned a white granddaddy. Frowning, she tried to
remember her mom’s journal writings, had there been a clue in the
book? Frustrated that she couldn’t remember, she pushed that
information aside for now. Moistening her lips, she pushed back her
hurt to focus on the situation. The whys and what-fors could be,
definitely would be, dealt with later. “When was she
diagnosed?”

“
When you turned nine.” He
studied his hands, which lay across his knees.

Pam swallowed around the large lump in her
throat. Her mom had been sick and she hadn’t noticed. Try as she
might, she couldn’t remember ever seeing her mom down, let alone
ill. “I hate I didn’t know. That I can’t recall her sick.”

“
You probably don’t
remember, but she started having trouble remembering t’ings. Keys,
money, appointments, those kinda t’ings. When she couldn’t focus
and remember, she’d get depressed. Lay in bed for days not wanting
to get up.”

Pam’s brows knitted. “I don’t…I don’t
remember that. I remember her always laughing and singing.”

“
Good.” He nodded a few
times as though he was having a conversation to himself. “That’d
make her happy to know that’s how you remember her.” He released a
long sigh and rubbed the back of his neck.

Pam tensed. As much as she wanted to know,
she didn’t want to know. For years, her memories of her mama’s joy
and laughter had kept her rooted to her past and gave her a sense
of identity. To know her memories were flawed skewed her
reality.

Beads of sweat covered her forehead as she
tried with everything in her to hear what had happened to the woman
she admired most in the world. Without thinking, she clutched her
hands tight to keep them from shaking.

Her father’s voice lowered and she leaned
forward to catch his words. “T’ings were okay at first, then one
day, she forgot she’d turned on the stove. When I came home, the
house was full of burnt food and smoke. Both of you were asleep in
your rooms. She was scared to death, thought she was losing her
mind. The next day we went to the doctor.”

“
Where was I?” It was a
strange question, but she needed to find her place in this bizarre
turn of events.

“
School... anyway, the
doctors round here didn’t know what was wrong. They kept giving her
pain pills, but it didn’t help.”

Her heart lurched. Pills may have blunted
her mom’s pain, but nothing would’ve changed her downward spiral.
“How long before you found out it was Huntington’s?” She did a
mental checklist of everything she knew about the disease, which
wasn’t much. But now that she knew her mama was alive, even sick,
she made plans to help in any way she could.

“
You remember that trip we
went on to Miami? It was just the three of us…”

Pam pushed into her meager store of good
memories and found that one. It had been right before school and
he’d made a big deal of the trip. She’d been so excited about the
airplane ride to the big city that she had lain awake for nights
thinking about it. “Yeah, we stayed at that big hotel downtown. You
took me shopping while mama went…” she frowned. “Where’d mama go?
She wasn’t with us, right?”

“
She was at the doctor’s
for tests. Found out a week later she had the disease. The doctors
discovered that her father'd had Huntington’s and passed it on to
her.”

Pam nodded. A doctor would’ve been able to
get information on her grandfather. A chill ran down her spine. Her
grandfather'd had Huntington’s disease.

Her father had been talking while she’d been
trying to visualize her Caucasian relative. “What? What’d you
say?”

“
I said we had you tested
early on – before you left. You don’t carry the gene. Your kids
won’t have it either.”

To say she was giddy with relief was an
understatement. Still, she planned to get re-tested when she
returned home. “I have to research it again, I’ve only had one
patient with the disease, but I thought it hit adults later, like
around their forties.”

He shrugged. “It hit her when it did.”

Pam tallied the years and if memory served
her correctly, a person typically lived ten to twenty years after
the disease struck. That’d put her mom in her sixteenth year. If
everything she’d read was true, her mom had four more years. A
sharp pain lanced her chest. She struggled to bat down the hurt and
anger. She’d missed a lot. “Is she on meds for chorea?”

He frowned. “Chorea? What’s that?”

“
It’s what makes her arms
or hands jerk and fly around.”

“
Oh. Yeah, but she doesn’t
take it a lot. It makes her feel sick. Leeann’s been with her for
three years and is careful on how much she gives her. Actually,
she’s been walking pretty good, its just recently she started
tipping over and falling.”

“
She recognizes
you?”

He paused and then shook his head slowly.
“Not all the time. It’s worse now. It’s like she sees, but don’t
see. She barely remembers one minute from the next. It’s hard
getting her to eat. Some days she won’t talk, she just sits and
stares out at the water.”

Pam didn’t want to sound like a medical
professional, but the degenerative aspects of the disease made it
hard on everyone around. “That’s common.”

He whipped around. “You treated somebody
with this?

She exhaled. “Treated? No. I…” she coughed
not wanting to admit that she took care of them when they reached
their final stages, right before they died. “I had a patient or two
with the disease.”

“
Does it get bad?” There
was a hint of hopefulness in his voice that rocked her. Huntington
was a horrible disease that siphoned the life from its carriers
over time. She had no positive words. No upbeat promises. And no
news that her doctor’s hadn’t told him. There simply was no
cure.

Most Huntington victims suffered with some
type of dementia, lost the ability to speak, became unable to eat
or speak. Her dad was lucky her mom still could recognize him on
occasion; many lost that and other cognitive abilities.

Straightening her shoulders, she decided to
give him what he hadn’t given her - honesty. “Yeah, it gets real
bad.” Her stomach dropped, knowing how bad it would get.

His shoulders slumped as his chin hit his
chest. For a moment neither of them spoke. She had been so caught
up on missing time with her mom that she hadn’t thought about him.
It was apparent he had been with his wife the entire time, watching
her decline. What had it been like for him to sit and watch her
body betray her for no other reason than genetics? That was an
enemy that couldn’t be fought.

“
It’s getting worse,” he
whispered, as though saying it out loud might combat the truth. His
chuckle was bittersweet. “I’ve known all this time, loved her all
this time, and still I need more time with her.” He chuckled, it
was bittersweet. “She started calling me her bad boy,” he said
wistfully. He inhaled and looked away, but not before she saw the
sheen of tears in his eyes. “I’m not ready to let her
go.”

Bad boy?
Pam didn’t know what to say, and remained silent.
This was way more than she’d imagined.

He cleared his throat. “I told her you had
returned to the island. At first she thought I had betrayed our
agreement and told you about her illness.” He squeezed his fists
and then opened them. “She was angry, wouldn’t talk to me for a day
or two. Then she demanded I bring you to see her. She wanted to see
you again. Scared me. Thought she was giving up, ready to cut us
loose. Say goodbye or somet’ing like that.” He balled his fists
again and looked away. His shoulders hunched against the truth.

Pam’s throat tightened. She tried to slow
down her fast heartbeat. What was he saying? Had her mom entered
the last phase or something? She shook off the disturbing thought.
Did Huntington have phases? She couldn’t remember. “You should’ve
told me.”

“
I promised her I
wouldn’t. It was the only way to get her to undergo treatment.” He
met her eyes. The bleakness robbed her of breath. “When the doctors
explained the disease, she did a search online and saw her future.
The Huntington dance, the wheelchairs, not being able to talk. All
of it scared her so bad, she was ready to go back to the Dominica.
That night, the smoke, the near fire, just the thought of putting
your life in danger sent her over the edge. She never wanted you to
see her like this. To see her die. She agreed to get treatment if I
made sure you never saw her like this.”

Numb, Pam wiped the tears from her face. It
hurt. It hurt knowing she had been denied those years with her mom.
She wrapped her arms around her waist and bent forward, willing
herself not to cry again. She wanted Julio. She needed his strength
to lean on. “I need to make a call,” she whispered searching wildly
for her purse.