Silent Innocence-Ch 2

Chapter 2


While in the shower the image of that girl was etched in my brain. The vision was so vivid if I had been wearing shoes it would be impossible to distinguish dream from reality. Since no footwear was involved the fact that it was a dream was apparent from the moment I noticed. I’m not a brave or foolish person. It wouldn’t be like me to wander in the forest near nightfall, much less throw myself headlong into a dangerous situation without first thinking through every possible move. The cleansing rituals finished I turned off the shower and heard the sink go on.

“Is that you?”

“Of course it’s me. Who else would walk in on you in the shower?”

She was right of course. Samantha always came in during my shower to brush her teeth. When asked why she doesn’t just wait her turn she always justifies it by saying she can’t stand the film like feeling in the morning. I like to think she needs to see me naked just to get through the day. When I slid the shower door aside she stood there in a plain white tank top and short pink shorts. Her red hair flowed to just below her shoulders. When the sight of her eyes reached me through the mirror I felt a surge of tingles run through my chest. She must have used her woman’s intuition to sense that I was feeling a bit off this morning.

“You feeling ok?”

“I had a dream.”

“So did Dr. King.”

“Do you know anything else but sarcasm?”

“What?” she laughed looking not a bit apologetic.

Samantha was one of the few who I have told, and actually believed, that I had prophetic dreams. Not all my dreams are prophetic but this one had me worried. Only dreams that are remembered the next day ever come to fruition. Sometimes it comes soon, sometimes not for months. Almost all of these dreams have been benign in nature. There was the time when in fourth grade I dreamed that Kyle Landon would fall and break his arm during recess. There was also the dream about the big rig jackknifing and killing an elderly couple that convinced Sam of my psychic attribute. However, most of the time I can merely only predict with great accuracy where Sam and her sister would have lunch sometime in the future. That wouldn’t seem special in and of its self if not for the details that come with it.

“Was it another car wreck?” she asked with genuine concern.

“No” I could hear my voice falling flat.

“So what was it?”

“Nothing.”

“For something that is nothing it sure seems to have you worked up.”

On that note I made my exit from our now crowded bathroom. I didn’t want to ruin her day with the details of my night time reverie. I walked through the living room of our one bedroom apartment. The apartment was lit by only a small lamp acquired from the local secondhand store. Most of the furniture while not shabby was handed down to us from friends and family. For what we lacked in material possession, we made up for with people who cared about us.

My father, James Parker, had worked hard all his life. He started out in the coal mine that fed the economy of this town for a few decades while the mineral wealth held out. When the veins dried up he became a laborer at one of the three metal shops here in town. He welded together steel frames and doors that would become the skeletons and portals of schools and hospitals being built around the country. It wasn’t easy work but he did it anyway. My mother, Henrietta Figueroa is a bank teller for a major national chain that parks itself here. She spends all day sifting through other people’s money.

It was at this bank where my parents met. My father went in to open an account and they hit it off. They got married in 1974 when the impending birth of my brother James Jr. seemed all but written in stone. Eleven years later I arrived to join the clan and five years after me our little brother Derrick joined us to complete the circle. My parents divorced when I was seven. I don’t delve into the details of the split but apparently they just grew tired of each other. I wasn’t kept up late nights by big arguments like some children, so it came as more of a surprise. In a great back flipping of the society norm we lived with my father.

My father had been diagnosed with diabetes when he was 30 and it came to pass 20 years later when I was eleven years old that the disease finally caught up with him. It started out slow at first and to look at him you wouldn’t notice. The first thing to go was his eyesight. I remember first noticing a big problem when on a dark road my dad failed to recognize a curve in the road and drove the El Ranchero straight into an embankment. Soon he was driving 40 on the highway and soon enough not at all. Later that year I dialed 911 for the first time when my father became unresponsive. The docs say his sugar was up around six hundred or about five hundred past normal.

Being legally blind my father could no longer work. We lived of his disability payments from the government. Three years after his first hospital visit my father was back in with an infected cut on his foot. Two weeks later his leg count was down to one. It wasn’t long before my father ended up in an assisted living facility. He wasn’t watching his sugar like someone with diabetes should. He was getting sent to the hospital four or five times a year. It seems that each time he went he was in worse and worse shape. Responsibility of my 12 year old brother fell to me. My mother had remarried and moved to Albuquerque and had taken him in for a short time, but he was a little more than unruly and eventually came back to live with me. I had a job at a fast food joint and my father gave me most of the money from the disability payments to pay for rent and bills. Not more than a year later my old man had to be placed on dialysis. After this his health deteriorated quicker than I expected.

I had a hard time visiting my father at the hospital after that. It was too hard to see the man who raised two boys alone in that condition. In February of 2003 my older brother came to the house to tell us that dad was back at the hospital in pretty bad shape. I was getting ready to go when his cell phone rang and brought us news that our father was dead. He had succumbed to upper gastrointestinal rupture from the years he was wracked by acid reflux disease, a common side effect of diabetes. After the funeral my mother took my brother to live with her again. I now had no income from the government to sustain us. My job was fine for me, but it wasn’t enough for both of us. I took to rooming with friends.

One of the friends had a friend named Samantha. She is a few years older than me and our courtship has taken time, but we ended up together. We’ve been co-habitating for a few years now. I got a steadier job as a convenience store clerk and we’ve been able to survive.

After getting dressed in my uniform I went back to the bathroom to finish grooming. Sam was already in the shower.

“You’re gonna be late.” She called over the sound of the spray.

“Nah, Paul is opening up today” I replied, “and I’m not waiting out there for him again.”

She knew Paul well enough to know I didn’t need to rush myself. I got on with the combing of the hair and the shaving of the face. When I was finished I took one more look in the mirror, making sure to be neat enough for public viewing.

“I should be home around two thirty. Did you need me to pick anything up?”

“Some lunch would be nice”

“Anything special?”

“No just go ahead and surprise me.”

I made a mental note not to forget some food on the way home. I grabbed my jacket, and with a glance to the clock, headed out into the world of commercial bliss to earn my keep.