The Nightlife: New York - Chapter 11

They rested in the magic afterglow of magnificent sex, Michelle spooned up against Aaron. They were a good fit, his build seemed to match her. She hated to ruin their perfect moment and almost didn’t, but she needed to know. She needed to be certain there were no strings attached to his former life.

She interrupted their beautiful moment of peace. “Mon chér, I am waiting patiently to hear your story. Tell me.”

Looking over her shoulder at him, she caught the smile splitting his face. He knew her well enough to understand the limits of her patience had been reached. Then he laughed out loud, at her.

She flipped around to face him, her ferocity barely contained. She bared teeth and hissed at his smartass smile, daring him to break his promise. She read his sense of obligation, even though she’d extorted his promise with his cock in hand.

His arrogant grin gradually faded and his face become somber.

“Okay … My father died … six years ago. It was probably the worst time of my life.” A searing avalanche of his pain accompanied his words. His grief burned all the way through their psychic bond. She sat up, shying away, trying to shut down their connection. No one should have to share that kind of pain, so intense, so personal.

It was pointless. She had stirred him up, and now the only thing to do was accept his pain, ride it out to the other side.

After a moment of shock and a couple quick gasps, she dived into his pain headfirst. She wrapped her arms around his waist to hug him close. She had forced the issue, at the very least she could offer comfort.

He instantly calmed under her embrace. And then his mind opened wide to her as he spoke. She could actually feel and experience his memories; far more depth of imagery and emotion than any words. She flowed down into the pain-filled recesses of his memories––to the time of his father’s funeral and an overwhelming sense of loss and grief. The pain was still strong as ever, suffocating. She felt her own throat constrict with it. A pain she understood well, the loss of a father. She couldn’t help but think of her own father, in a time and place long removed from here. Her memory still carried its share of pain. Perhaps it’s something you never really get over. You just learn to live with it.

His memories were most painful at the wake, standing in front of his father’s coffin. Aaron didn’t want to see the shiny box with the corpse all painted up by a mortuary makeup artist who’d never known his father in life. That wasn’t his father lying there, but the image had branded into his memory. He couldn’t get rid of it. Aaron turned away quickly, preferring to look at the collage assembled by the entry to the chapel. The collage held a much truer representation of his father, not that dead thing in a box. He spent a good amount of time staring at the photographs, trying to overwrite the painted corpse image.

Michelle immediately noticed the telltale signs of family resemblance. Aaron had his father’s smile and other small details like the shape of his jawline and set of his shoulders. She recognized something in his father’s face, a solemnity, a quiet strength that she’d seen glimpses of in Aaron’s demeanor. The kind of strength one doesn’t notice at first. A subtle quality.

Some of the pictures sparked corresponding memories of the times and places they were taken. A picture of Aaron in his early teens sitting next to his father holding up a fish triggered the memory of his father’s voice urging him on. His father, Lucas Pilan, Luke, encouraged him. “Give her a fight. Don’t let up. Keep the rod solid in your hand. Pull back, steady … steady … reel her in, slow and easy.” Aaron was so excited and yet afraid to lose the fish. He didn’t even like fish, but he wanted this one for his dad, who loved pan-fried trout with beer batter.

Focus shifted to another picture of his father in a hospital bed, looking embarrassed but still smiling. Aaron recalled how his dad maintained his good humor to the very end, even as the chemotherapy treatments and medications brought on recurring bouts of nausea, making him so tired he slept through most of the day. Though his body was frail, Luke’s spirit held strong. He smiled and laughed constantly, as if the discomfort was merely a distraction. At times his father would make light of the situation, “I’m catching an early retirement out of this one … don’t you worry, it’s no big deal. You can’t keep a good man down.” He’d spout off ridiculous things while bedridden, in extreme pain. Aaron had often wondered if it was the pain meds talking, or his father trying to smooth it over, keeping up appearances for his family, or perhaps lying to himself.

Aaron recalled his problems in school. How he was held back in the tenth grade to repeat the year because he’d spent so much time with his father in the hospital. And then, again, he missed an entire month of school after his father died. Ironically it wasn’t the cancer that killed his dad, but complications of internal bleeding after removing the tumor in surgery.

Another photo in the collage was Aaron at sixteen, just before his father’s diagnosis of cancer. He sat with both parents at his birthday party; all three of them smiling with faces pressed together side by side and cheek to cheek. Aaron’s mother, Angela, was a slight woman of dark brown hair, so dark, almost black, and sad brown eyes. Aaron obviously inherited something of Angela’s cheek bones and the sad tilt of her eyes. They seemed happy. An average American family living day by day, blissfully unaware of how death would irrevocably change their lives, robbing Aaron of all his joy for years to come.

And then his mother had changed in the blink of an eye. Almost overnight his mother had disappeared, replaced with a complete stranger. Aaron’s only warning of her desire to start dating again had been an off-hand comment about how they had to go on with their lives and Luke wouldn’t have wanted them to be lonely. Before he knew it, she was out late on Friday and Saturday nights, two-three-four in the morning. Sometimes she didn’t bother coming home until the next day. Angela’s behavior immediately after his father’s death seemed a horrible betrayal of everything Aaron held sacred.

They grew distant quickly. Aaron wasn’t assertive enough to let her know how he felt. Long accustomed to the quiet, unobtrusive temperaments of Aaron and his father, Angela didn’t bother to ask what Aaron thought. Had she asked, it would’ve been purely courtesy. Angela Pilan had been bowling over her boys for years. She’d always found a way to get exactly what she wanted. Luke never set limits or argued with his wife. The Pilan men were long-suffering. Luke taught Aaron to go with the flow when it came to the whims of his mother.

In going with the flow, Aaron withdrew from Angela. He found solace in his friends, Kyle and a couple other buddies. His plans for college and career were shelved to pursue girls and enjoy parties, movies, and music. It worked. Kept his mind off things at home he’d rather not deal with. Aaron stopped talking to his mother about anything he thought or felt. About anything at all. She didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe she preferred it that way. She never tried to reconnect with her son. Angela pursued the single life, and Aaron took care of himself, rarely requiring anything from her.

Angela made up for lost time, making new friends and jumping from boyfriend to boyfriend. During their family years, when Luke was still alive, Angela had attended mass at the Church of The Ascension, sometimes both English and Spanish versions. After his death, all pretenses of a Christian lifestyle were dropped. Aaron wondered that maybe he’d never truly known his mother all these years. As if she’d maintained appearances for Luke’s sake, and now the real Angela showed her face for the first time.

As he spent more time with Kyle, making plans to get their own apartment, it seemed the life he’d once known with a mother and a father was something experienced in a dream.

The final episode between him and this woman Angela, this stranger he called mother, happened the day he met Charles Miller. An insurance salesman, Charles and Angela had hooked up three months prior. Somewhere during these three months, in which Aaron hadn’t known the man existed, Charles and Angela had fallen in love and decided to marry.

This day was clear in Aaron’s mind, labeled as the day he lost whatever remained of the mother Angela had once been. The man showed up at the house––the first time Aaron had ever seen him. Aaron realized right away his mother was serious about Charles.

He gave an honest effort to talk with Charles, to accept him into his life. Their limited conversations ranged over sports and religion, subjects on which Aaron had little comment or interest. Apparently, Angela had been miraculously restored in her faith by the divine hand of Charles Miller. All the two of them did was preach Jesus and salvation. It was painfully obvious they had no common ground. Turned out it wasn’t necessary for Aaron to welcome Charles into their home.

After sharing a meal together as though they were now a family, this strange woman inhabiting his mother’s body pulled Aaron aside to talk privately. She told him you’re nineteen years old, and its time you moved out and became an adult, and that she wanted to live her life with Charles without the weirdness of another adult male in the house. Aaron listened to her in a daze of shock, simply nodding at the proper moments to indicate understanding. Understanding was the furthest thing from his mind. He didn’t get it. Where was his mother? Had she been invaded by body snatchers? Was she one of those pod people? Who was this woman telling him to leave the only home he’d ever known? How could she toss him out on the street like the spring-cleaning trash?

He didn’t recall if he had spoken to Angela beyond his dumbstruck nods of acknowledgement. He was too numbed with shock. He packed his clothes and stuff and moved into Kyle’s apartment that evening. When Kyle and friends asked about his mother, Aaron answered simply, “It’s the right time.”

Until this moment, lying in bed with Michelle wrapped around him tightly, Aaron never had a reason to look back on the past.

Delia had never cared about Aaron’s past, and Kyle seemed to understand in a silent agreement that there was nothing to discuss regarding Aaron’s mother. Aaron and Angela’s relationship degenerated to bare bones minimum contact. He spoke to her over the phone on the required holidays. They exchanged gifts through the mail at Christmas and birthdays. Beyond that, neither one existed to the other.

Aaron kept pushing forward, forgetting those bygone days when he’d once known what it was like to have a family. He blocked the old painful memories away, buried beneath the riverbed of his life. It was easy to fill the empty hours of his days with friends and work.

He lived cheerfully ignorant of the rest of the world outside Kyle and Delia until the day Michelle stepped into his path. Fate had gifted him––or cursed him––with this new turn of events. Aaron lay in bed holding his lover, baring his soul through their mutual psychic bond, tears of blood streaming down his face from the remembrance of grief, pain and frustration he’d suppressed for years.

Michelle now knew the darkest secrets of his soul: his past, his pain, his grief, his loneliness, and his little shoebox life before she took control of his world. She was his confessional, his priest, his savior, his own personal Jesus Christ, laying his demons to rest with her touch, presence, and silent acceptance.

Purged of his sadness, he allowed the memories to drift away to return to the vault of things better forgotten. Michelle agreed silently this would never be spoken of again. Happy, limbs tangled together, they rested, content. She felt the satisfaction of problems resolved, demons conquered, and the comfort of a deeply rewarding connection. As dawn peeked over the horizon she drifted off to sleep like the dead in his embrace.