Our First Love (22 page)

Nigel looked up in time to catch the rambling pass.

“And, Nigel Greene catches it for a touchdown and the district championship!” I exclaimed.

Nigel welcomed this unannounced visit by one of his long forgotten happy moments with a wide grin and a touchdown ballet. As we danced, I couldn't help noticing a foreboding glare in Nigel's eyes that stayed transfixed on the horizon.

I hadn't forgotten about Karen. Every now and then, I slipped away to be with her. Right now, I had something more pressing on my mind. My search for Lil' Daddy.

I had never wanted to write a blog as much as I wanted to write the one I wrote today. I was excited because this week's blog was the first one based on a real memory. And for that reason, I changed the title of the blog for this week's column. I'd changed the name of the blog before. The last time I changed the blog's name, I wasn't writing about a real memory. I was falling in love with Karen. This time, however, I was hoping it's a permanent change. It probably wouldn't be; I only had a handful of actual memories. But, I was thankful for those few.

The Way I Remember It – by Caleb Greene

“A Cure for Everything”

An aspirin and a hug.

A Coke and a smile.

And, my daddy's belt.

Back in the day, these were my mother's cures for everything that ailed us.

It didn't matter what kind of ailment we were suffering from, one of my mother's cures made it all better. I don't know how she developed these cures, but they all worked. Living with two rambunctious boys, they had to.

There were three types of ailments: physical, emotional, and really bad behavior.

When the ailment was a physical one, an aspirin and a hug was the cure. For minor cuts, scrapes, and bruises, she cleaned the affected area, applied first-aid cream, a Band-Aid, then she dispensed the thing that really made it all better—an aspirin and a hug. For major injuries, she jetted us over to the doctor's office or hospital for professional medical care. Before we left the doctor's office or hospital, we felt better, but we knew the real cure was coming once we got home.

I was around nine when my brother, Nigel, blindsided me during a
game of kung-fu and sent me, him, my mother, and father racing to the hospital. We had gone to the movies the night before and seen a Bruce Lee movie. While reenacting some of the scenes from the movie, Nigel decided to improvise and dropkicked me from behind. I landed on a metal can that cut a deep gash in my knee.

Fourteen stitches and four hours later, I hobbled into the house on a pair of crutches and fell out for near-dead on the sofa. “Help me,” I moaned as I tried to pull myself up on the sofa.

Nigel raced over to sofa and pulled me up in a sitting position. “Is that good?” he asked in the most piteous of tones.

I groaned and stretched, “Y---e---a---h,” into a four-syllable word.

My mother knew exactly what I needed.

“Get me a glass of water,” she told Nigel. She rushed to the medicine cabinet and grabbed the bottle of Bayer aspirin, and Nigel ran into the kitchen and filled a glass with water.

Upon their return, my mother could tell I was hurting too bad to hold the glass or the aspirin, so she said, “Try to open your mouth.”

Opening my mouth was a Herculean effort. At least, that's what the look on my face hinted. She then placed an aspirin in my mouth and held the glass to my lips while I sipped the water. After swallowing the aspirin, I sighed. That's when she threw her arms around me and hugged me really, really tight and whispered, “Everything's going to be okay now.”

And it was. For me at least. But, the look on Nigel's face indicated he was still hurting.

My mother walked out of the living room toward the kitchen. As soon as she was gone, Nigel began stealing glances at me, but he didn't say anything. Finally, he looked directly at me and said, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cause you to get cut.”

Before I could reply, my mother walked back into the living room
.

“Here you are,” she said to Nigel and handed him a glass of Coke.
“Caleb knows you're sorry.” Then she handed me a glass. “We all know.”

Nigel looked up at her and she smiled. He looked at me and I smiled. And the world was okay again for both of us. We were both cured.

As for that other cure of hers—my daddy's belt, I try not to think about it too much. “I don't know what's gotten into you, but don't make me use this belt to beat it out you,” she would say and then do.

When it does cross my mind, even now, I can still use an aspirin and a hug.

That really happened, and I had the scar on my knee to prove it.

It was that time of year again. Spring cleaning. Well, to be precise, late-spring cleaning. We usually shake off the previous year's cinders the week before Easter, but this year we waited until the start of dead week, the week before final exams, because there were no classes.

Nigel spent the first day of our pseudo-vacation trimming the hedges, mowing the lawn, and being mimicked by Professor Childers, who pulled out his trimmers and riding mower as soon as he saw Nigel open the garage door.

I tackled the inside. But unlike past years, this year, I was way too excited about dusting, sweeping, and doing laundry. There was something—a scent, a utensil, an ashtray, a feeling—in every occupied space inside 207 Circle Drive that transported me back to the world I inhabited before this one.

I was changing the faded thread on Mom's sewing machine in the den when I remembered Mom sitting at the sewing machine working on a wedding gown. She was putting the finishing touches on a gown for Frankie, who was marrying my cousin, Jerry. I opened the thread drawer and put the black thread back in the drawer and took out a spool of white thread. I threaded the sewing machine and
watched Mom inspect the gown as Frankie stared in the mirror and marveled at the beautiful woman wearing her wedding gown.

I walked inside Mom and Dad's bedroom for the first time since last year's spring cleaning and took the curtains down and opened the blinds. As I pulled the patchwork quilt and ivory sheets off the bed, I was back in their bedroom years ago. It was morning. Mother's Day. Mom and Dad were in bed reading the Sunday newspaper when Nigel and I walked into the room carrying breakfast trays. Nigel placed his tray in front of Mom and we yelled, “Happy Mother's Day!” Then I set my tray on the bed in front of Dad and we both said, “That will be five dollars. For me. And for him.”

Later that evening, after I remade Mom and Dad's bed and put everything back in place in the room, I walked over to the window to close the blinds and curtains. As the blinds folded in on top of each other, I glanced outside and saw Nigel standing at the edge of Flatley Creek. He was younger; twenty, maybe twenty-one. As Nigel stared at something in the rankled creek, fear chiseled away the look of uncertainty frozen on his face. I closed the blinds, pulled the curtains and tried to forget what I had remembered.

That night I dreamed I was on the other side of these walls. Outside 207 Circle Drive. I should've woken up feeling elated, but in my dream, Nigel and I were beside Flatley Creek. I was wet and lying in the snow. I was dying. Nigel was kneeling beside me, staring frightfully at something in the creek. He was trying to speak, to yell, but he was unable to wrench any sounds from his mouth. Nigel's morbid gaze and my incapacitating pain jabbed me until I woke up, right before I died. I couldn't go back to sleep and I didn't want to.

I was falling inside myself. Plummeting deeper and deeper into an obscure past that, until a few weeks ago, I wasn't sure ever existed. Pray for me.

CHAPTER 24

God help me.

Caleb didn't tell Nigel what he saw outside their parents' bedroom window, because he wasn't sure what it was he saw. Maybe it was a fume-induced hallucination or an emancipated memory replaying itself. If he had witnessed an actual memory, he determined without question it was a scene from that tragic December night fourteen years ago. Whatever it was, before walking out of the room and closing the door until next spring, he deemed it a mirage, which he figured was more probable considering all the cleansers he'd used that day.

It was almost nine when they sat down to eat dinner—soy chicken and Chinese vegetables—after spending all day Monday sprucing up the house and yard. While they were eating, Nigel looked over at Caleb, who was sitting in their dad's recliner, and asked, “Why did you change the thread?”

Caleb answered, “Mom sewed wedding gowns. I'm assuming that she rarely used black thread. How many wedding gowns call for black stitching?”

“None, if Mom had anything to do with it. The black thread was my doing.”

“Why?”

“For no reason,” Nigel responded. “One day I walked in the den and changed it.”

“Before or after I came home from the hospital?”

“The day before you came home.”

Caleb glanced around the living room. “What else did you change?”

“Nothing else. Just the thread.”

I'd been telling myself that I'd be ready. That we would be ready. We knew it was coming. So we had to be ready.

The day before Caleb home from the hospital, Nigel stopped by their parents' house. He fumbled with the keys as he unlocked the front door. He turned the doorknob, but several laborious minutes passed before he shoved the door open. Then he stood steadfast in the doorway and waited for the final contractions of his former life to impel him into his new life. He stepped inside and closed the door. He had been inside the house four months earlier installing new storm windows with his uncle and cousin, but it was the first time in two years—since that tragic December evening when he ran inside to call for help—that he was alone in the house.

Nigel had thought about this moment since that December evening. He knew that one day he would have to go back to the house, but it would be after Caleb came out of the coma. Inside, nothing had changed. Their dad's black leather recliner was still by the window. The sofa, the other furniture, and even the what-nots were right where they left them. Their mother's sewing room still shared the den with the family office. Their happy moments were still framed and hanging on the walls and posted on the mantle. Even the air, which should have been stale, was unchanged. Nigel
needed to do something to remind him that, although this was still their home, their world was different. Their parents were dead and Caleb had no recollection of their life with them. Nigel knew that if he they were going to stay there, something needed to be different. So, without thinking, he walked into the sewing room, took the white thread off the sewing machine, and replaced it with a spool of black thread. The next day, he and Caleb moved back into the house and began their new life.

These walls, doors, and windows couldn't protect us anymore; the villain was never on the other side. The real threat was hibernating in 207 Circle Drive. Dormant. And waiting. Inside of us. All this time.

Caleb was a sound sleeper until a few days ago when their former life invaded his dreams.

Although it was an unseasonably warm night in May, he was balled up in his blanket trying to ward off the vicious cold of a December evening fourteen years ago. The wind and snow gnawed through time, through the blanket, through Caleb's T-shirt and boxers, to his soul. He knew this was not a dream. Nor was it a mirage. What he saw and felt was the end and beginning of his life.

Nigel's blanket was half on and half off his bed, and he was as sound asleep as he was capable of being since his nightly visits to Flatley Creek resumed. His eyelids were taped opened to keep his dreams from projecting onto them. That was why he didn't feel the scathing cold.

Thursday, December 3rd. The holiday season was in full swing at the Greenes'. Nigel, their oldest son, was a junior at Howard University. He finished his last final exam ten minutes before noon and jumped in his packed car and drove straight to Richmond.
Caleb, the Greenes' sixteen-year-old son, ran barefoot outside in the snow when he saw Nigel's car turn in the driveway a day earlier than expected. Mrs. Greene, carrying Caleb's shoes and coat, rushed outside too. The merry reception in the driveway might have lasted longer than the holidays if Mr. Greene hadn't opened the front door and yelled, “He was home for Thanksgiving, two weeks ago, and you two clowns are acting like you haven't seen him in years. Nigel, come on inside.”

Nigel was awakened by the plunging temperature in his bedroom. He double wrapped the flimsy blanket around him and tried to silence his chattering teeth by covering his face with a pillow.