Judas Kiss PART 3
As soon as I placed the phone on the coffee table, my mind went blank. I felt contempt for the cold, half-eaten French fries and chicken on the white plate, how ironical considering how greedily I’d munched the food just minutes before. My entire body was sweating and shivering. My heart was racing like a cheetah out in the wild. And finally, I felt strangulated.
I’d been ambushed from my nap on the sofa just minutes before with a call. A call that had abruptly come to an omega. As I stepped my wobbly feet down, I simultaneously cupped my ears to keep off the loud Amanpour on CNN who was clearly irritating my ears. Shortly after, my feet regained their strength and I rose up without further ado and called back. The phone was now sandwiched between my left ear and my left shoulder, even as the left hand held the glass of water against my lips as the right one frantically tossed throw pillows here and there in an attempt to find the elusive TV remote control.
The call bore bad good news. It was Eric talking about Jordan; something to do with drowning.
It had been several months after that fateful kitchen encounter with Francis and a lot of what he said was now water under the bridge. Really. Why would I put my brother in that situation? Or why would Eric, for that matter? Frankly writing, we were being unfair to him. Both Eric and me. If at all he knew something and didn’t say, it was only because it was in my best interest not to know. I had since accepted that my husband was a philandering douchebag and it was only a matter of time before Helen got fed up with him if at all he wasn’t fed up with her first. Now my allegiance was only to myself and to my son. These two lives were of the most import and I’d fight tooth and nail to preserve that.
This new found attitude did not just show up on my doorstep one morning like manna in the wilderness. It had taken months of effort from my therapist and my family, mostly my therapist, whom I always referred to as the good therapist. Several months later, what had looked like fortified mountains were just simple anthills after all. The good therapist had been successful in walking me through my emotions and most importantly past the anger that was eating me up causing me to spit fire onto everyone around me. I would always laugh whenever she would tried to extrapolate chamber after chamber of the history of my anger you know. An unhappy childhood, she speculated. Divorced parents. Abusive parents. Poverty. It was kind of comic you know. I suspected that this was a prognosis he pulled on everyone who walked through his door. Why wouldn’t the good therapist just accept that I was having issues due to my looming divorce and nothing else? Or maybe menopause? Stuff that had shown up in my adult life? Not like I want all therapists to be shot before sunrise, but, seriously, why must it always have to be about an unresolved childhood?
The good therapist had recommended that I keep “a feelings journal”. Here, I would write down my feelings every single day. She even recommended a yoga class too. I didn’t even know that people do yoga in Nairobi! I though yoga was something you traveled to India or Los Angeles to find! Every day, he insisted, write at least a page in the journal. So I did that. Page one of the journal was recounting the morning I woke up by myself with the empty bottle of whiskey and scarlet eyes. The rest was easy to recall. He told me time and again that writing my issues down would help me in the recovery. That I would be, in his words, “become a wholesomely happy being”. If positive energy was hiding somewhere inside me, damn straight up I’d find it whatever it took.
With time, my divorce lawyer Philip began to appear like negative energy because he encouraged all the things that my good therapist discouraged, yet these two individuals were supposed to be both working for my good and I was paying them handsomely for it. It was confusing beyond measure.
Eric and I had arrived at an amicable agreement; putting our differences aside for the sake of our son and our respective careers. I was still his boss remember? But mostly because of our son. For Jordan I would do anything, including being a ‘civilized human being’.
Jordan would spend all his weekends and part of his vacations with his father. With his upcoming august leave, Eric wanted Jordan to accompany him to Diani for three weeks. That meant an extra week from the agreed two. I did not see any reason disallow it. If anything, it would relieve me of the load of mothering a little.
A load which included evenings of listening to my son go on and on about how cool his aunt Helen was. Helen― who had since moved in with the father ― would today buy Jordan a bike, tomorrow a tablet. She would take him to Panari Sky Center for skiing one weekend and the next they’d head to ride horses at the Ngong Racecourse. It was treat after treat. She was his Santa in every sense of the word. Couldn’t the woman just get kids of her own and leave mine alone for Christ’s sake! She was always doing something for my son (as if to seek Eric’s approval) and my feeling about this? Heh! Nauseating at best. Or flat out murderous at worst. The woman had since transferred from our ministry to teach at the university. My friends at the university would tell me that she was a philandering eye and that soon Eric would be relegated to history seeing how the hot professors were always on her radar. Maybe they were just massaging my ego. After some time it didn’t matter to me who she looked at or who looked at her. In fact I decided not to lend an ear to all the theories (in regard to Helen) bore by the Toms, Dicks and Harrys.
When Eric and Jordan left for Diani, I was relieved. This would give me ample in the evenings to work on my paper due to be presented at UNHRC at the end of August. I would talk to Jordan at least twice daily. He would tell me about his new friends, the swimming expeditions in the ocean, the boat-rides, the ice cream, the camel rides and the likes. He would tell me about all the awesome stuff his daddy had bought for him and all the promises he had made to him if he topped his class again. The little man was having such a great time and I couldn’t have been happier.
On this particular day, we were skyping. He was by the hotel pool and clad in white shorts and a plum red singlet.
“Where is your daddy young man?”
“He is having a meeting inside the hotel. Said I should talk go for a swim while he’s at it.” He said, then scratched his neck. “And I’m in no mood for swimming. I thought I should talk to you.” he said. I thought I spotted a red pimple on the neck, but maybe I didn’t, because when he moved the tablet closer to the spot seconds later, I saw nothing.
“Nice! So where are your friends today? Lesly and Pierre” I suspected he liked Lesly (the ten year old Briton vacationing with her mom) a little more since he would always tell go on and on about her. Lesly this; Lesly that. Pierre was French, almost the same age but stories about him were scanty. He had never talked this much about any other girl before. I was a bit taken aback, wasn’t he too young to like girls already?
“Ah, Diani.” He paused and rose up. I could see the breeze was swaying the tall palm trees behind him as he moved to the lie on one of the pool beds. “Daddy didn’t want me to be alone. But I told him I wouldn’t; that I would be fine with Lesly and her mom!” Aha, Lesly again! He concluded, shrugging his shoulders.
“Oh, and where are you right now?”
“At White Sands. Mommy, why don’t you join us here? It’s so boring without you!”
“I’m working son. But you and I can do something similar over the December holidays, what do you say?”
“Sounds Cool!”
I wanted to add that maybe it won’t be as cool because Lesly won’t be there anymore.
He was having an amazing time with his dad. The blue pool was abandoned but sparkly, but not as close as the deep blueness of the Indian Ocean which I could spot in the near distance from the tablet. His dark complexion made him appear like a fine jewel under the bright sun. I was so proud of how fast he was growing and even better was that he was the spitting image of his father. I could tell that it was only a matter of time before he caught up with Eric. For the first time since the trip, I yearned for his physical presence. Right then in my office. At that very moment. I wanted to do all the things that I had relinquished over the past few years like nonstop hugs and kisses. He was like mercury on my hand. I was too scared that he would slip from my hands and that I’d never experience the joy of being ‘the mom’.
That’s why Eric’s call that evening on the sofa disturbed me so much. It was because I had been all mushy and emotional the entire day. I had even left work earlier than usual just to go home and be in my son’s room and look at his toys and pictures and rearrange his wardrobe and the like. I thought of even having the walls repainted before he came back. The timing was so wrong.
“What do you mean Jordan drowned?”
“Drowned. In the hotel pool.” He paused. “We are in the ambulance. To the hospital.”
“Tell me what happened, damn it Eric.” I yelled across the phone and straightened my back. My hand kept tapping all over the seat in search for the TV’s remote control which was clearly MIA now that I wanted Amanpour’s voice down.
It didn’t make any sense. But where? My mind went straight conversation we’d had via the tablet earlier. I remembered the sound of my son’s chuckling and the sight of his spaced out small white teeth against the light pink gums as he smiled. That was my son. This motionless kid, drowned or whatever, probably with tubes running through his mouth and nose was not my son. There had to be an error of sorts. This was plain unfathomable.
“We’ve just had dinner. He brushes his teeth then changes into his pajamas. He’s on the bed watching TV. I step in to take a shower, the next, I’m out and Jordan is nowhere to be found. Then I call the lobby. They haven’t seen him either. So the hotel starts a search―” he paused, “―are you there?”
“Where else can I be Eric?” I placed my feet down but they were numb and wobbly. “And then what happened? What happened after?”
“He’s found floating in the pool!”
“Oh my God! My son! My poor baby!” I screamed across the phone.
“They’ve done several CPR’s already. He is unconscious. We’re on our way to the hospital―” he stopped immediately and hang up the call.
The call ripped my heart out of my chest. So I called and called and called. He did not pick. How could he not pick after giving me such chilling news?
All my attempts afterwards were futile. He neither picked the calls nor answered my text messages. I didn’t even know which hospital they were going to. I didn’t even know where the accident had occurred. Was it at White Sands or at Leisure Lodge Resort in Diani where they had been staying the entire week? If it was the latter, then which hospital were they going to?
I couldn’t just sit still and wait for the cows to come home. First I called Leisure. Eric hadn’t checked back in that evening. So it had to be White Sands. I paced in my living room back and forth googling the websites of some of the hospitals in Mombasa city. First I rang Aga khan Mombasa. The nice lady across the phone wouldn’t give me any information. I just felt so helpless. I checked inside my purse (which had been lying on the floor all along) for my ATM card and insurance cards. They were there. I went to the bedroom, came back changed into jeans and a t-shirt before tossing an extra set of clothing inside the same purse. My black trench coat hang on my arm next to the purse as I locked the front door, destination, Mombasa. I was determined to be in Mombasa by morning whatever it took. I didn’t have a shot at a flight so it would be by road. Ken would have to drive me to the coastal city overnight. My clock was reading twenty three hundred hours and I approximated seven more hours before I saw my son again.
Shortly after leaving the house, Eric called. His voice was filmed with tears. I wanted to tell him to calm down and get to the point about my son already. Of course this was just as hard on him as it was on me, but c’mon, where was the common sense to think that way, then?
“Which hospital did you go to? What are the doctors saying? Is he out of danger?” I was spitting questions without thinking. I wasn’t thinking.
“We’ve―” he said mumbling some words after the ‘we’ve’ that I couldn’t quite figure. The tears in his words were shielding everything.
“Sorry I think the network is unclear, what is it?” I said pressing the idle ear with my thumb and gesturing Ken to stop the engine with an index of the same hand. Ken pulled over on some parking space in on Uhuru Highway. “Eric, can you hear me now? What are you saying?” my heart was racing.
“I’m sorry Mama Jordan. Our son is dead.”
I was lost for words. I was lost for every possible emotion. The only thing that kept ringing in my ear was our son is dead. Our son is dead. Our son is dead. What had I done to deserve such a cruel punishment from the heavens?
“What do you mean he’s dead?”
“He didn’t make it to the Aga Khan.”
*****
For a moment there I was in denial. Nothing made sense. Nothing! Eric hang up but the phone didn’t leave my ear. The sound of the quiet engine was the only real thing here. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. Was I supposed to run out to the streets of Nairobi and scream my guts out? Let the whole world know that I’d lost a son or what? He was my baby, my life.
*****
It has been a month since I buried my son, and with his burial, so did my dreams. This journal contains all that. Readers will read; nonreaders will hear. You admired me. You thought I was feisty. An achiever. My face radiated happiness. You called me blessed and many would have wanted to have my life.
After reading this journal, though, you will change your mind. You will all describe me with different mean adjectives. That I’m a coward. That I’m selfish. That I’m an ungrateful bitch. A murderer, definitely. But what I will do tonight, I think, is the greatest act of bravery. We all fear death, but what of those who, like me, would rather confront it?
This journal was an initiative of my therapist, intended to get me well and happy, but my last words in it indicate otherwise. I never imagined my last page in the journal would read something like this. This is not a story of love, but that of betrayal.
I recently bought a gun. I intent to use it tonight. I intend to take away two lives, mine included.
As I make this last journal entry, I hope my son will forgive me for not finding meaning in my life after his death. I hope Eric will forgive me for blaming him for my son’s death and not sparing his life in the process.
Now all that’s remaining is for Eric to walk through that door like he promised in his text five minutes ago. He will be here. And he will pay. He will pay for being careless my life and with my son’s. He will pay with his life, literally. I can’t see any other reason to live, or he, for that matter.
This is a story of ultimate betrayal; that of self. That much I admit.
―THE END―
PS: The above piece is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are a work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Catherine Amayi is a Scientist and an Author
I invite you to follow me on Twitter @catherine_amayi or write to me at ccamayi@yahoo.com