Sleeping Awake (23 page)

“Cienna, listen to me.”

 “Don’t you touch me!”
She slapped his hand away. “Don’t you come near me, Philippe Saint Clair. I
hate you, do you hear me? You are the literal contents of a cesspool!”

He froze.

“I’m angry all the time. I’m
so fucking angry, and it’s because of you!”

I could see the tears welling
in Philippe’s eyes.

 “Why didn’t you stay?”
Cienna continued. “You could have told Grand-mère to go to hell and fought for
us. Everyone is screwed up because of you, and I hate you for that! There is a
perfectly sane guy, who for some reason, puts up with my shit, and I’m scared
to like him, because I’m waiting for time to run out and for him to leave like
you did! You were entrusted with my heart and you ripped it out and smashed it
into a million pieces. And then you have the gall to come here and expect me to
just receive you with open arms! How dare you?!”

Cienna kicked the end table as
she finished. The vase that was on it crashed to the floor. She began to
scream. The years of frustration and deep, resounding pain came rushing out of
her and into the open where they belonged. Had I not been crying, I would have
screamed along with her.

Philippe closed the gap
between them and suddenly, Cienna was in his arms. It had been eleven years
since I’d seen them in that position. She tried to push him away, but he held
on, stuck to her like sap.

“Désolé,”
he murmured. He brushed away
her hair and kissed her forehead. She didn’t push him away again.
“Je suis très,
très, très désolé.”

I was sorry as well. Sorry
that life hadn’t been the fairytale that I’d imagined. Sorry for Cienna, and
for Camelea and for Maman. And so very sorry that I was no longer one of
daddy’s little girls. He took her away when he left, and she would never come
back.

“Je suis tellement désolé.”

I sensed that he knew all
along that he’d lost us. I wondered if it tore him up at night knowing that his
relationship with us would never be the same. Knowing that if he’d only done
what was right, everything would have been fine and we would have never gotten
to this point. Maman would still have gotten cancer, but everything else would
have been different.

 “Désolé,”
he murmured for the last
time.

Cienna pulled away. He
stumbled a bit as she struggled to get out of his grip. He looked so innocent,
like a little boy. For the first time, I saw him for what he really was; a
scared little boy who didn’t know any better at the time and still didn’t know
what to do in order to repair the damage that he’d done. I decided to hold his
hand and help him.

“Stop crying,” Cienna
whispered, demanded really.

The sniffling stopped; he
looked as miserable as a man who’d been to Hell and back.

“I accept you,” Cienna said.

“What?”

“I don’t forgive you, but I accept
you for the person you are and the amends that you’re trying to make.”

As I had done earlier, Cienna finally
released herself from the burden of hate.

After a moment, he nodded.
“Je
comprends.”                    

With trembling hands, she
wiped away the tears from his stained cheeks and leaned forward. She kissed his
cheek.

“Je t’aimerai toujours,” 
he said.

“Je sais,”
she replied.

As foolish as he was, my
father still loved her…loved us. As he said, he’d love her forever. I wondered
if we’d ever get to a place where we could coexist without being plagued by the
shadows of the memories of our mistakes. The pain of what he did wasn’t gone,
but in that moment, I knew that I could start to forgive him.

I went back to my bedroom and
opened the bedside table. Gently, I opened the gold box and removed the
necklace. The heart-shaped pendant was ice cold against my skin. I closed my
eyes, remembering Nicolaas walking away from me time and time again. He always
came back. It had been almost three weeks. He hadn’t called, emailed or texted
me. Bryn insisted that there was still a possibility, but I wasn’t sure if that
was the case. I held on to the pendant knowing that when my heart stopped,
Nicolaas would be the first to know.

**~*~*~**~*~*~**

There used to be a Japanese cherry tree by my bedroom
window. In the spring, the pink flowers blossomed. I liked to pretend that I
was in an enchanted forest as the pink rained from the sky and set the ground
on fire. The tree was my favourite in our garden.

One weekend, Bryn and I went to Martha’s Vineyard with
his mother and grandmother. When I returned, my tree was gone. On the outside, it
had looked healthy, but in reality, it was marred, eaten alive by a fungus that
had gone undetected. There was no way to save it.

Maman was
going to die; the treatment
in Switzerland had done nothing for her cancer. The doctors had predicted two
months before she would be gone.

I wasn’t going to cry. Crying
was exhausting, and my eyes stung after a while. I didn't need any more pain
than the one that I was feeling. Outside, the faintest breeze blew and the
trees sighed. By the same time the following week, I wouldn’t be able to
appreciate the beauty of Maman’s work in our garden. She had wasted no time in
preparing a list of things to do before she died. The first thing on the
countdown to death was to visit Jamaica, the place that she loved most. Next,
we’d be on a one-way flight to Paris, where Maman planned to draw her last
breath.

Our God really was an awesome
God. He giveth and He taketh with absolutely no regard for the feelings of
others and how they would survive without their loved ones.

*~*

I stood in the parlour of
Bryn’s house waiting for him to tell me that it was all a joke. He hadn’t lied
to get me out of my house that night.

“I decided to give you a few
days to get over yourself,” he’d said when I answered my phone. “You know that
I would never really abandon you.”

I’d smiled, so relieved that I
still had my best friend. I didn’t notice that his voice had taken on the
casual tone that it usually had whenever he tried to lie.

“Come over to my house and
let’s makeup,” he said. “It’ll just be the two of us.”

“I’m on my way.”

Bryn was all smiles when he
answered the door. I let him lead me to the parlour. As Nicolaas’ eyes went
wide in an alarm that replicated mine, I knew that the both of us had been deceived.

“You two need to make up,”
Bryn announced. He then proceeded to grab a bottle of wine.

I stood in the entryway,
paralyzed by my fear. I wasn’t sure what Nicolaas thought as he watched me
unashamedly watching him. He had an amazing gift of deciphering my emotions and
masking his from me. It was an unfair advantage that I could do nothing about.

“Noira get over here and stop acting
as if you left your brain behind you in the car!” Bryn barked. “Now who’s in
the mood for some music?” Bryn asked. Without anyone replying, he turned a
remote towards the surround sound system. Astrud Gilberto began swooning about
the gentle rain. There was a torrential downpour in my stomach as I took a sip
of my water.

“Oh for fuck’s sake! Do I have
to tell you everything? Go and sit Noira.” Bryn waived me away like an annoying
fly.

I knew where he wanted me to
sit, but I sat on the other end of the couch. Even with the distance between
us, I could still feel the heat radiating from Nicolaas’ skin, beckoning me
over to bask in his warmth. I took another sip. Whoever said that cold water
was good for lowering body temperatures was a blasted liar.

Bryn went over to the
bookshelf and took up a book. Low and behold, there were no pages, just neatly
rolled joints waiting to be smoked.

“I figure that it would help
with the tension, you know?” Bryn announced, passing one to Nicolaas.

“I didn’t know that you
smoked,” I commented, watching as Nicolaas lit up.

He took his time puffing away
and making circles that any stoner would envy as he exhaled. “There’s a lot
that we don’t know about each other.”

It was as if he had punched me
and broken a rib. I closed my eyes as I tried to ignore the pain.

“Now, now.” Bryn waved his
finger at Nicolaas. “Let’s play nice.”

Nicolaas took another pull and
handed it to me.
“Tiens.”

I took my time running my lips
over it, absorbing what little of Nicolaas had remained. Between us, we smoked
three joints and Nicolaas and Bryn consumed two bottles of wine while I stuck
to water. The more that I smoked was the more beautiful that Nicolaas looked to
me until finally, I pulled him off the couch and asked him to dance as “Fly Me
to the Moon” started to play.

“Dance the tango of love!”
Bryn shouted, falling backwards. Red wine replaced white linen on the chaise.

“That’s going to leave a
mark,” I observed.

“Oh well,” Bryn said,
struggling to sit up. “Toss the fucking thing. I don’t know who told Nina to
have a ‘white room.’ She knows the kind of son that she has.”

“Do you know how beautiful you
are?” I asked Nicolaas, looking up at him.

“How?” he replied, dipping me.

“You are exquisite.” I pressed
myself firmly against him. “You should be a sculpture, moulded out of the
finest clay and naked in all your breath-taking glory.”

“Really?” he murmured. His
lips pressed against my neck and lingered for a bit. His breath against my face
made me flushed.

“Mais si,”
I replied. “And they
shouldn’t put you in a museum either.”

“Non?”

“Non.”
I leaned my head back so that
he could kiss my shoulder.

“Is that a moan I hear?” Bryn
asked, sitting up with a look of intrigue on his face.

Guilty.

“They should sell you to me so
that I could look at you and touch you whenever I want to,” I continued.

“You can look at me and touch
me right now,” Nicolaas replied.

I took his hand, and I started
walking.

“Where are you two going?”
Bryn called.

“He’s mine,” I replied. “I’m
going to look at him and touch him for as long as I want to.”

“Use a condom,” Bryn called.
“I don’t want any grandchildren.”

I didn’t realised how much I
had missed Nicolaas until he took me into his arms. It was as if I was finally
resurfacing from a long period of time spent underground. He felt the same way
as well. I could feel it in the way that he held me, and even more in the way
that he kissed me.

“Do you trust me?” he asked,
pulling away.

“Yes.”

“Close your eyes.”

I did as he asked. I heard a
drawer open and something slid over my face, resting on my eyes. I felt the
handcuffs as he locked them around my wrists. Being unable to see, I could on
only feel. His fingers and his tongue worshipped my body in more ways than one.
Prayers spilled out of them as they traced the holy terrains of my most
sensitive areas. The sought after fluids of my temple were thick.

My very core filled with heat
that burnt at the touch but was ever so warm and inviting. Strokes towards
heaven started slowly and became more and more frenzied as the destination drew
nearer.

Hymns erupted once the
precious gates were reached and utopia became genuine, no longer a figment of
my imagination. But it wasn’t enough.

“Please,” I begged.

“Please what?” His voice was
hoarse, his breath every bit as frenzied as mine.

“I need you…”

I wanted to lose my sanity in
his arms and never regain sensibility. I yearned to cry out until I could
scream no more. I longed to feel the salty sweat that glued our bodies together
as we moved to the same sultry beat.

“Please…”

In one fluid motion, Nicolaas
had entered my gates. I arched my back to take all of him in.

Suddenly, the blindfold was
off, and I was staring into Nicolaas’ eyes.

“You belong to me,” he said.

I held his gaze, sealing my
fate. “Yes.”

I was bound to him. Dead and
reborn that night in his hard arms. His Lady Lazarus. I no longer ran from my
fate.

*~*

Hours later, a loud pounding
on the door abruptly pulled me from my sleep.

“Are you fuckers up as yet?
It’s past noon, you know!”

“Ta gueule!”
Nicolaas groaned. He pulled a
pillow over his head.

“Shut up indeed!” Bryn yelled.
“I’m coming in, so cover up your naked
derrières
.”

The door opened a few seconds
later, and Bryn entered the room with a tray in hand. “Oh good.” He grinned. “You’re
up.”

“No thanks to you,” I replied.
It felt as if someone had spent the better part of the night trying to break
into my head.

“One for you.” Bryn handed
Nicolaas his famous hangover concoction. “And green tea for you.”

“Thank you, darling,” I said.
I immediately took a sip; it was jasmine.

“So have you kids made up as
yet?” Bryn asked sitting down on the bed. With his red velvet smoking jacket
on, all that he needed to look like Hugh Hefner was a pipe.

“When would we have gotten the
chance to?” I inquired.

“So you fucked before fixing
the problem?”

“Go away, Bryn,” Nicolaas
said.

“Fine.” Bryn sniffed. “I’m
hungry. I’m giving you both an hour to fix whatever’s broken and get
downstairs. I’ll call a car.”

Slowly, I finished the rest of
my tea without daring to look at Nicolaas and set the cup on the side table.
When I turned around, Nicolaas was staring at me with an unreadable expression
on his face.

“Please don’t tell me that
last night happened solely because you were high,” I said.

“It didn’t.”

I sighed, relieved. The look
was still on his face. Finally, after a long pause, he began. “What happened to
you?”

“I was bouncing between mania
and depression,” I replied. “You just came at a bad time.”

I figured that there was no
need for silly questions and beating around the bush. I was just going to tell
him everything and hope that he could somehow forgive me.

“Because of your mother?”

“I was depressed long before I
found out about
Maman
, but yes, that added to my depression. I
have Bipolar Disorder; I was diagnosed when I was fourteen.”

“And why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t want you to
think that I was crazy,” I said.

“Noira, I wouldn’t have
thought that.”

“And how was I supposed to
know? Everyone else thought so. It seems as if my entire time in the States has
been spent with one psychiatrist or the next.”

“Stop being defensive,” he
said. “I just wish that you would have told me. I would have been better
prepared to handle the problems that arose.”

“Fine,” I said. “Most people
just think that I’m crazy, so I decided not to tell you.”

“I never thought that you were
crazy,” he said. “But I knew that something was wrong.”

“How?”

“Whenever you seemed happy,
everything would be fine and we’d be great. But then it would be like someone
flipped a switch and you would turn into someone else. You’d get angry for no
reason and push me away from you. You have no idea how frustrating it was
dealing with that. I never knew which Noira I would be greeted by.”

“Well now you know,” I said,
leaning against the headboard.

“Stop trying to brush it off
as if it’s something casual.” Nicolaas pulled me towards him. “It’s not.”

“Why do we have to make such a
big deal about it?” I whined. I snuggled into his chest, glad to be that much
closer to him.

“Because it is a big deal,
Noira,” he said. “You get so depressed that it consumes your entire life and
prevents you from functioning like a normal person. Then sometimes it’s as if
you’re on your own personal high, and it scares me. Isn’t that a big deal?”

I said nothing. I had
discussed my problems at Golden Ridge so much that I was sick of it.

“Noira,” Nicolaas said. He
tilted my head so that I had no choice but to look up at him. “I’m not trying
to patronize you and pretend that the Bipolar Disorder is more important than
who you are, but it would have helped me a lot if you’d told me in the
beginning. Do you have any idea how frustrating it was trying to be in a
relationship with you sometimes?”

I pulled away. “Then why
didn’t you walk away?”

“Because you’ve ruined me for
others, woman!”

“I didn’t ruin…” I sat up.