Abomination Page 5

  He was a sucker. He loved her. Or thought he did. He wanted to marry her. Or thought he did. And he knew that if he never actually discovered proof of cheating, that if all he had were gut-feelings and suspicions, he would marry her someday. If she didn’t dump him for someone else. She had that type of control over him. It was embarrassing but he couldn’t help it.

  She had him wrapped around her finger.

  “Bitch,” he said to no one in particular.

  A phone rang somewhere else in the house. Jamie ignored it. It wouldn’t be for him. All of his friends called him on his cell. Instead, he turned on his TV and fired up Madden on his Xbox. Nothing distracted him from life’s issues more than a couple hours of football.

  Jamie had played a scant ten minutes when he heard a gentle knock on the door. “Come in,” he said, not turning from the television screen. He whipped a forty yard pass from Eli Manning into the waiting arms of one of his wide receivers, who was promptly tackled at the ten yard line by a Cowboy safety. He heard the door open, then his mother’s voice, barely a whisper.

  “Jamie?”

  Jamie turned and what he saw broke his heart. His mother stood in the doorway, her delicate features tear-stained. What little make-up she wore had run, adding to the swollen appearance of her dark eyes. Her lips quivered slightly. His first thought was that something had happened between her and Steve, but he quickly dismissed that thought. They were as strong together as any two people on this earth. Then he remembered the ringing phone.

  “What happened, mom?” Jamie asked, tossing down the controller and standing. “Who called?”

  “You’re grandfather,” his mother said, sniffling. “It’s Anna. She’s dead.”

  Abomination

  Part 2

  Chapter 5

  The plane left Newark, New Jersey for Fort Lauderdale, Florida at ten-thirty the following morning. Jamie spent most of the two and a half hour flight thinking about his grandmother. He could tell his mother was, too, by the way she fidgeted and wept quietly in the seat next to him. Steve spent most of the flight whispering to his wife, stroking her hair and her head gently, trying to divert her thoughts to anything else. Or simply trying to distract her. His stepfather was upset of course, but he didn’t share the same emotional attachment to the now deceased Anna Whitman that Jamie and his mother did. Steve had liked Anna, of course; everyone who came into contact with Anna was better off for that relationship, regardless of how brief. She had been a truly special woman in that regard, profoundly touching the lives of many of the people who met her, sometimes with nothing more than a handful of words of advice. But Steve was more upset by how the death had affected his wife than by the passing of the woman herself.

  Jamie attempted to read the book he had brought with him, attempted to read the Skymall catalogue in the pocket in the back of the seat in front of him, attempted to play his Gameboy, tried desperately to distract himself from this newest tragedy, but his mind continued to conjure images of his grandmother, the woman vibrant and full of life even in her dotage. He remembered trips to Carvel when he was little, chocolate and vanilla ice cream dripping down his hands in the summer sun. He remembered sitting on her lap when he was five, reading nonsensical lines from an oversized Dr. Suess book for her entertainment. He remembered private conversations and words of wisdom she had shared with him over the years, all of which had helped mold him into the man he was today. He remembered the pride he saw in her face when he graduated from high school and then college and finally from dental school. His mom and Grandma Anna and Grandpa Hal were all the true family he had, and every memory, no matter how insignificant, was etched onto his mind.

  While the death was a blow to the stomach for Jamie, it was a vicious pummeling for his mother. The irony was, Anna wasn’t his mom’s mother. She was his father’s mother, the mother of the man who had spent the better part of thirteen years beating her and raping her. His mother’s own parents had died when she was eighteen years old in a car accident. When she married Brian Whitman at the age of twenty one, she adopted his parents as her own, using them to fill the massive void in her own life created by a drunk driver. In return, they had treated her like their own flesh and blood, and Jamie sometimes wondered if her fear of losing them had played a role in his mother’s refusal to flee from an emotionally and physically abusive relationship. But even after Jamie’s father disappeared—the very same night his mother was brought to the hospital for treatment of a broken nose, broken orbit, several facial lacerations, two broken ribs and internal bleeding—his grandparents continued to treat her like the daughter they never had, and in some ways, without Brian Whitman in the picture, their relationship grew stronger.

  Three years after his father vanished, when Jamie was sixteen, Jamie’s grandparents relocated from Northern Jersey to Fort Lauderdale. They waited until his mother had remarried, refusing to leave her alone to raise a troubled teenager who had suffered his fair share of trauma without any family to help. But once Steve said I Do, they bolted, choosing to spend the rest of their years in the humid swamp that was Florida instead of suffering through another bitter northeast winter. The twenty-five hundred miles that separated his mother and grandmother proved to be no obstacle to their relationship, though; they spoke on the phone five days a week at minimum, gossiping like chatty magpies. His grandparents would also visit often, returning to Jersey during the summer months for a week or two every year. His own winter vacations during high school and college became synonymous with trips to his grandparent’s house and Disney. Even when he started dental school five years ago and stopped traveling with his parents, he continued to join them for their yearly trek to the sunshine state.

  The last time he and his parents had seen Grandma Anna was in August when she and Grandpa Hal had visited. Three months ago. Even at eighty-five, she was healthy and hale and sharp of mind, always with a smile on her face and a quick word of advice on her tongue.

  And now she was dead, the magic stolen, the candle snuffed.

  Jamie checked his watch, impatience beginning to gnaw at him. Almost half an hour left. He wanted to be on the ground. He wanted to be off the plane. He wanted this whole experience to be over with as soon as possible. He normally enjoyed air travel, using the dead time to catch up on reading and studying and video game playing. But this was different. There was a corpse waiting for him at the other end. Not an anonymous gross-anatomy corpse reeking of formaldehyde waiting to be opened up and studied, but his grandmother’s body, waiting for her friends and loved ones to offer their tears and their prayers and to say goodbye.

  It was almost too much for him.

  The plane landed in Fort Lauderdale a little past one. Jamie and his parents waited almost half an hour for their checked luggage to slide down the conveyer belt at baggage claim before they took a shuttle to the car rental facility. Stock was limited—Thanksgiving weekend was one of the busiest times of the year—and they were forced to settle for a two door Chevy Cobalt from Avis, a dependable though unremarkable and small vehicle. The size of the car didn’t really matter, though; they would only be staying until the following night. Their flight back to Newark left Florida at six the next day.

  “So where to first?” Jamie asked from the back seat as Steve maneuvered the car out of the lot and into traffic.

  “I’d like to check in at the hotel first. Shower and change. Your grandfather’s not getting food delivered until five-thirty so I don’t see any reason to go over earlier than that.” He turned to Leslie. Her eyes were fixed on the road ahead of them. “That is, unless you want to go over now, sweetheart.”

  She shook her head. “I’m hungry. Find some fast food place to get lunch. Then we’ll go to the hotel. I could use a shower, too.”

  They found a McDonalds not five minutes from the airport. It wasn’t a restaurant his parents would have chosen given options, but it was there, the Golden Arches a beacon shining in the air, drawing in the hungry like flies to manure. It
would be quick and easy and that was what mattered most at the moment.

  The restaurant wasn’t busy despite the lunch hour and the holiday weekend. In a matter of minutes, Jamie and Steve were each carrying a tray laden with food to a four-person table where Leslie was waiting. They sat on uncomfortable plastic seats which swiveled frustratingly at even the smallest movement, chairs that children loved to plant their bottom’s on because of their loose rotation but adults hated for the same reason.

  Jamie watched as his parents opened their salads. Not the healthiest of salads because of the fat content of the dressings, but the healthiest food one was able to purchase at a restaurant like this. The two of them were health nuts and rarely dined on fast food. They both exercised religiously, and Jamie’s mother generally served only the healthiest of fare at home, except on holidays and special occasions when splurging was accepted.

  As for Jamie, he dined on a Big Mac and a large order of fries drenched in salt. He could put greasy food away like no one else. While in college and dental school, where a home cooked meal was a luxury he rarely indulged in because of the cost and time involved, he, like most of his peers, kept his stomach full with cheap, easy, fatty foods: pizza and burgers, candy bars and Little Debby snack cakes, ice cream and potato chips. There were evenings in his past where he had guiltily gorged on a whole deep dish pizza pie loaded with pepperoni. But unlike his friends who shared his eating habits, he never gained weight. While he watched his friends and colleagues slowly swell over the years (even those who exercised daily), he maintained his lean, hard physique despite the thousands of calories he could ingest on a daily basis. He had the metabolism of an Olympic athlete, allowing him to regularly enjoy the greasy, fatty, salty foods that saturated American culture and American streets. He was sure that all of the shit he ate was hardening and clogging his arteries, but according to the physical he had last month, all of his numbers were all well within the healthy range.

  Jamie watched his mother and Steve speared at their salads with plastic forks and sipped tall cups of water with straws while he polished off his burger and fries. For all of her insistence that she was hungry, Jamie noticed that his mother wasn’t eating all that much, playing and teasing her food more than actually putting it in her mouth. His heart broke as he watched her, a destitute child trying to find something, anything, to make her happy again, to fill this new void, but failing because there simply wasn’t anything which could fix this newest offense to her soul except for time. He felt guilty for enjoying his own repast while his mother suffered.

  They ate in a bubble of silence, the raucous screams and giggles of a pair of young children echoing loudly around them muted by the weight of personal tragedy. The hush was finally broken when Steve finished his lunch. Jamie was mindlessly picking at the small shards of broken fries spread before him when his stepfather looked at him and asked, “Have you given any thought to what you want to say at the funeral?”

  Jamie stopped playing with the remnants of his food, his fingers freezing. He looked up slowly, his mind churning. “I didn’t even consider it,” he said slowly. And he hadn’t. The thought of getting up before a small group of geriatric strangers to deliver a eulogy had never crossed his mind.

  “You really should,” Steve said. “It would mean a lot to your grandfather.”

  “Did he ask me to?”

  “No. But I think it would be nice if you did. You were close, after all.”

  “I figured grandpa would say something. And mom. And maybe Great Aunt Barbara.” Barbara Jackson was his grandmother’s youngest sister (and now the only living Blackwell child out of five); a spry seventy year old widow who had her hair professionally dyed a reddish-orange color every other month and still walked four miles every day on a pair of artificial hips. His grandmother and Aunt Barb hadn’t always been close, Anna being the oldest and Barbara the youngest, but when their only brother died of a cerebral aneurism seven years ago, leaving just the two of them (the two other sisters had died over a decade earlier), their relationship found a new life.

  “I’m sure they’ll all say something,” Steve said, “but you should, too. You’re the last of the bloodline. I know your grandfather would appreciate hearing you say some nice, heartfelt things about your grandmother.”

  Jamie opened his mouth to argue but thought better of it. Steve was right. Of course he was right: he was a licensed therapist specializing in marriage therapy and grief counseling. Besides, Jamie didn’t want to come off as a petulant child. He was twenty-six years old, a doctor, and a loving grandson who owed his existence to his grandmother. He wasn’t being asked to stand in front of hundreds of his fellow dentists and give a professional lecture. He was being asked to spend five minutes sharing memories of a woman he loved very much. That much he could do.

  “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  His mother looked up and smiled at him. Thank you, it said.

  They piled back into the car and continued their trip towards Boca Raton, where two rooms at a Best Western had been reserved for them. Steve found a single classic rock station on the radio, the only station not playing rap or Spanish music, and the jovial voice of Paul McCartney and his fellow Beatles filled the car.

  Jamie’s eyes drifted beyond the window as the upbeat Penny Lane played in the background. He watched as an endless parade of palm trees rolled by under a perfect blue sky dotted by wisps of clouds. He sighed as the magical state of Florida transformed before him. Ever since his grandparents moved to Boca ten years ago, his family had taken a yearly sojourn down to the sunshine state. Sometimes they drove, sometimes they flew. But every year they came. Every year. Sometimes they would go to Disney World and Epcot in Orlando, other times they would go to Miami and shop and sit on the beach. But they always took at least two days of their vacation and spent it at his grandparents’ house. To Jamie, coming to Florida was like stepping into another world, a beautiful and mystical land of sunshine and enchantment where the cares of everyday life just vanished.

  That façade faded as Jamie watched the miles disappear before him. The magic was gone and suddenly Florida felt like a flat, alien place to him, a somber land where the elderly went to get sick and die.

  Half an hour after leaving McDonald’s they arrived at the motel. It was a squat, three-floor L-shaped complex with the doors that emptied directly to external hallways and metal stairs that climbed up to the second and third floors. The type of lodging where there was no real lobby, no elevators, no gift shop, just a pair of vending machines on each floor, one dispensing candy and chips, the other cans of soda, and an ice machine. Jamie and his parents had stayed at many motels like this over the years because they were cheap, but when Steven and his money entered their lives, they graduated from cheaper places to nicer hotels, where you stepped out of your door onto carpet and not concrete.

  “I know this isn’t what you’re used to,” Steve said, as if reading Jamie’s mind. He pulled the car into a parking space in front of the office. “But it’s Thanksgiving weekend and you take what you can get. I think we can survive for one night.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Jamie said. “It’s quaint.”

  Steve snorted. “Quaint.” He nodded as he opened his door. “Stay here with your mom while I get us checked in, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  His mother had been quiet since leaving the restaurant. Jamie wanted to say something to her, but he knew that whatever he said would be trite, forced. Talking for the sake of talking. Part of him wanted to comfort her with his words as best as possible and try to break the cloud that hung over her. Part of him wanted to stay silent, allowing her to wallow in her private grieving. He debated for several seconds, went back and forth, but the burden of making the decision was yanked from him when his mother spoke. “How are you doing back there, Jamie?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

  Jamie nodded almost imperceptibly, a slight bow of the head. “I’m doing okay.”

  “
I knew you would,” she returned, and for a moment he thought his mother was implying that he didn’t love Grandma Anna as much as she did, that he wouldn’t miss her as much, that he simply didn’t care. He opened his mouth to amend his answer when his mother spoke again. “You were always so strong, Jamie, so tough. You got that from your father, you know. You push your feelings down and throw up a wall to protect yourself. So it won’t hurt as much when life throws things like this at you.” She paused a moment, then added, “But it’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to hurt. It’s okay to show the world your tears. It’s healthy.”

  And Jamie suddenly understood what his mother was truly implying. Don’t repress everything. Don’t grow into a man who only knows how to express himself with silence or a fist. Don’t become your father.

  But that wasn’t the case. He was saddened and shocked by his grandmother’s sudden passing, angry even, but his grief paled to what his mother was feeling: utter devastation. He had lost a grandmother, a warm and wonderful woman to be sure, but his mother had lost a mother, and that sudden emptiness cut much deeper. He would recover more quickly. He had cried last night. And he was sure he would cry again. But at the moment, he was just empty. He had nothing to show. And when he did want to express himself, he would do so alone. Away from prying eyes. That was just the way he was. A private man. The world didn’t need to see him grieve.