Our First Love (4 page)

Nigel had not stepped inside a cemetery since his parents were buried. He knew attending Barney's funeral would mean having to relive that day thirteen years ago, so he wasn't surprised when the memory of that day met him at the gate. As he walked inside the wrought iron gates of Springhill Cemetery, he remembered his uncle, Walter, and his aunt, Girlie, standing beside him as he
stared at his mother's and father's coffins. His cousin Jerry and his wife, Frankie, stood behind him. He could still feel the loneliness he felt that day because Caleb was in a coma at a hospital four blocks from the cemetery and couldn't be there to say goodbye to their parents.

Nigel managed to cloud the memories of that day by focusing on Richard Aman and Frances during Barney's funeral and burial. But now, sitting alone in his car with the keys in his hands, the memories would not let him think of anything else. He remembered staring into the distance to avoid looking at the two flower-draped coffins. Snow covered the cemetery, which strangely made it appear more inviting. A trio of birds playfully hopped from one headstone to another. An elderly man placed flowers on the snow at the base of a headstone, then he seemed to have found something to smile about. Nigel remembered hearing the preacher speaking, but he couldn't recall anything that he had said. His uncle's arm was around him. His aunt leaned over on him; her tears soaked the jacket of his suit. He remembered the last words his mother had said to him, “Take care of your brother.”

“Caleb,” he said out loud to vanquish the memories and to remind himself that Caleb was home waiting for him. Nigel took a few deep breaths as he ushered the past back to its proper place. Then, he put the key in the ignition, cranked the car, and drove away.

CHAPTER 4
CALEB

That night saw another first.

I was sitting in Dad's recliner by the window when Nigel pulled in the driveway. I waited until Nigel got out the car before I went to my bedroom and closed the door. When I heard the front door open and close, I walked out of my bedroom and asked, “How was our day?” Without responding, Nigel marched through the living room, squeezed by me in the hallway, and retreated to his bedroom. “Was it that bad?” I asked.

It wasn't the first time Nigel had come home and locked up in his bedroom without saying a word. He's done it several times before. I usually got upset when Nigel didn't want to share his day. But, I wasn't mad on this day of firsts because I was aware our day was spent burying a man whose death changed our lives.

It was Thursday and I cooked pork chops like I do every Thursday. Today, it was stuffed pork chops. Last Thursday, it was fried pork chops. The week before that, grilled pork chops. And the Thursday before that, baked pork chops covered with tomatoes and onions. So, pork chops for dinner on Thursday wasn't a first, nor was eating dinner in the living room while watching
Wheel of Fortune
and
Jeopardy
. Both were part of our Thursday night routine.

I placed the last dish in the dishwasher, turned it on, then walked in the living room where Nigel had the remote in his hand channel surfing.

“Richard Aman lives in a gated section of Charleston Estates,” Nigel said before he laid the remote on the sofa beside him. “There's a guard shack at the entrance. Maybe, I shouldn't call it a shack. It's almost as big as our house.”

My eyes lit up. I raced across the living room and jumped in the recliner.

“Richard wanted us to ride in the limo with him, but I told him we'd rather drive our car because we had an appointment after the funeral,” Nigel recounted.

“What kind of appointment?” I asked.

“There wasn't an appointment,” Nigel responded. “I told him that to keep from riding in the limo. Anyway, we followed the limo to First Baptist Church,”

As Nigel continued recounting our day, I stared at the ceiling and imagined that Nigel and I were walking out the doors of First Baptist Church behind Richard Aman and a mahogany coffin. We lowered our heads and placed our hands in front of our faces to avoid Lillian's apathetic stare and the barrage of cameras lenses closing in on us. The scene shifted, and we now stood behind Richard Aman at Springhill Cemetery. A woman sang an operatic version of “Amazing Grace” while another woman that no one noticed drowned in her tears. Her name was Frances Pelt, and the earth was shifting beneath Frances' feet. She tried to run but she slipped and fell on the ground beside Barney's grave. Frances had forgotten she was alive, so we walked over to Frances and let her know she wasn't dead. We led her past the stares and whispers, through the wrought-iron gates, to a blue Bonneville parked on the curb a block away. We waved bye as Frances began the lonely
and regretful journey back to her dispirited life in Jacksonville. Nigel's day became my day.

Nigel pulled the remote out from between the sofa pillows, then turned to The Weather Channel. For eleven years, since I came home from the hospital, Nigel's life had been my life. But that night, for the first time, Nigel swallowed the acrid guilt curdling in his mouth and selfishly kept the woman whose name he didn't know to himself.

CHAPTER 5
NIGEL

C
aleb was trying to make me get out of bed. That's why he and Tupac were in the living room headlining a concert for the entire neighborhood. I must have lucked out and won a front-row ticket. My head, like my house shoes which were on the floor beside the bed, tap danced as the walls, floor, and ceiling palpitated to a thunderous bass that suffocated Caleb's and Pac's vocals.

Yesterday, it was Caleb and Will Smith. That spectacle started around seven-thirty with Caleb bellowing “Brothers Just Don't Understand,” his version of Smith's ode to parental cluelessness. It ended at four minutes 'til ten when I was tired of hearing them “Gettin' Jiggy Wit It.” I jumped out of bed, charged out the room, and stumbled over Caleb, who was in the hallway spinning, kicking, and grabbing his crotch.

“That move was Michael's,” I yelled, “not Will's!”

Caleb saw the anger in my eyes and he knew where I was headed. He tried to hold me down to keep me from getting up. Dragging him behind me, I crawled into the living room and over to the front door. I reached up and grabbed the doorknob, then yanked the front door open. I let the world inside. Caleb took off to his bedroom and I closed the door and locked it. I unplugged the CD player, the television, the phone and the answering machine, everything that could make a sound. Then I went back to my bedroom, remade my bed, and hid under the covers until the sun began to set.

This morning's show started at seven-thirty. Around eight-thirty, Caleb and Pac were still performing songs from Pac's early years. I knew why Caleb was pissed off. That's why I lay in bed and promised not to say a word unless “Keep Your Head Up” was on his playlist. There was no way I was going to let him desecrate my favorite Pac song.

Memories were killing me. Not all memories…only the uninvited ones.

I tried not to think about Flatley Creek or the thin membrane of ice covering it that ominous December evening thirteen years ago, but it's getting harder and harder for me to choose which memories replay and when. Flatley Creek was a narrow but deep stream that bordered the backyard of the house we grew up in. The creek, a stone's throw from every house in the neighborhood, was about fifty feet across at its widest point and over seven feet deep in the middle. Caleb and I bought this house because the creek outside my window reminded me of Flatley Creek.

When I didn't want to see the creek outside my window, I closed the curtains and blinds. I was still searching for a shade that can obscure the memory of Flatley Creek on that ineffaceable winter evening. Closing my eyes doesn't work because the inside of my eyelids turn into Imax projection screens. Some nights the memories are so vivid that I have to tape my eyelids and sleep with my eyes wide open. The paper tape is loose enough for me to blink but too tight for my eyes to stay closed. I used regular tape for a while, but after a few nights, I looked kind of funny without any eyebrows or lashes.

Caleb was able to forget that December night and everything about our life before that night. He didn't have to deal with the
tragedy because he slipped into a coma and was spared the heartbreak of knowing what had transpired. Every day, I sat next to Caleb's bed and prayed for him to wake up. I was relieved when he didn't. When he awoke from the coma two years and six days later, he was diagnosed with psychogenic amnesia. His entire life had been erased. He didn't know who he was or who I was. And he didn't ask about Mom or Dad. He never even questioned why he was in the hospital. Two weeks passed before Uncle Walter and I told him that Mom and Dad were dead. We didn't tell him how they died because his eyes were uninhabited, which meant it was hard to gauge his response to the knowledge that they were dead.

Why was I remembering this?

I was by his side every waking moment for several weeks after he came out of the coma. At first, we barely spoke, which in hindsight was a good thing because I didn't know what to say to him. When we did converse, it was because I had asked a question or made a comment and he responded.

That was also when we discovered that Caleb had developed an acute case of agoraphobia. His fear of the world outside the hospital room was virulently crippling. He couldn't even stand to be in the room with the windows open, so, the loss of his memory was the least of our problems. However, it turned out that his memory loss was an asset when it came time to move on with our life. We were both starting with a clean slate. I wasn't sure how I was going to make our new life work, but I knew I had to find a way to take care of Caleb and to help him move into our new life.

Three weeks after Caleb woke up from the coma, his doctors felt he was ready to be released. They suggested that Caleb and I both seek counseling to help us deal with the emotional impact of the past two years, but neither of us thought counseling was
necessary. However, when it came time for us to leave the hospital, Caleb became extremely anxious. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he was nervous because he couldn't remember his life before the accident, which meant he had no idea what life was like outside of his hospital room. I assured him that life was no different outside the hospital and he calmed down. An hour before we left the hospital, doctors sedated Caleb so that an ambulance could transport him home. Uncle Walter and Aunt Girlie were against us moving back into our parents' house, but we moved in anyway.

When Caleb woke up in his bedroom at our parents' house, he lay in bed staring around at his unfamiliar surroundings. He knew he was in his bedroom at our parents' house, but he could not remember ever being there. He asked, “Where am I?”

“You're home,” I answered.

“Home?” he asked.

“Our home.”

A lasting vestige of that December night was my brother's inability to remember our life with Mom and Dad. He saw their pictures on the walls; sat in Dad's recliner every day; cooked in Mom's cast iron skillet; and thoroughly cleaned their bedroom once a year. He even wrote about them, well at least a made-up version of them, in a blog, “The (not so true) Way I Remember It.” But to this day, neither one of us had ever said a word to each other about Mom or Dad.

The woman I met at Barney's funeral had become my guilty pleasure. I didn't know her name or anything about her, but I could still hear her saying, “Just doing my part.” I could still see her graceful smile. Her brown eyes, they were mesmerizing.
I was trying not to obsess about her, but it'd been a long time since I met someone I really wanted to get to know personally. For the past nine years, I'd been a journalist and the first rule of being a reporter was to remain objective. Stay outside the story and don't get too close to the people you're writing about. This rule, which I applied to my personal life, was never a problem. I didn't want to get too acquainted with anyone I interviewed or met. But it's not like that with her. I'd been dying to see her and to talk to her. I want to know who she is. Know her favorite color. Her favorite food. Her favorite song. I want to know what makes her smile. I really, really want to know what makes her smile. One day soon, I hope to know everything about her, but until then, I'll settle for just knowing her name.