Rowena Raven: Chapter Ten

       Four PM, I wake up, Jog till five. Eat breakfast. Leftovers, probably. Something Daisy has made and left in my fridge, or something I brought home from a restaurant if it’s Monday.

Five thirty PM, I shower. At six I walk to the hospital where I work and have time to spare, because it’s closer now that I’ve moved to Sugar Valley.
It took less than a year after she left for my mental practice to go under, if only because I was just barely qualified to run it.
I keep track of our lost time by silently celebrating Velvet’s birthdays.

I feel some sort of male responsibility to care about him, because she was my responsibility nearly the entire time she was pregnant.
Six of them have gone by, now. In two months, It’ll be seven.
Nearly seven years since the last time I’ve seen her. I’ve managed to keep myself from checking up on her records to see if she’s gotten Velvet back, but I’m pretty confident. It’s taken all of my self control not to keep track of every little thing the state knows about her, even though I easily have the power.

When I get home at four in the morning, I check my email and eat something. There’s no time for dating. Daisy’s work has been kinder to her, but she’s not a surgeon.
Saturdays are my grocery days. I like Saturdays. There is something totally Zen about having all the money I could possibly need to buy gourmet cheese puffs, or organic cheese whiz.
                                                            ~o~

I woke up on Saturday “morning” with a sort of spring in my step. It felt like my life was wasting away, one week of work at a time, fifty two weeks of work in a year, and I don’t even think about leap days. I did get vacation time, but where would I possibly spend it? I could just see it now, sitting on the shores of some sandy beach in egypt, drink in hand. There’s an empty seat beside me, a table between us and on that table is another drink. There’s supposed to be someone there, but she’s missing. I know who she is, but I’ve forbidden her name to myself.
Names hold certain power, right? If she hasn’t got a name, she doesn’t exist and I can’t be sad about never seeing her again. User not found.
So I’ll still punish myself for thinking about her as my hands hover over this one container of jam, when I put juice into my basket and wonder what sort of juice Velvet drinks.

Does she make him breakfast in the morning? How many snacks does he get to eat? Does he pack a lunch, or does he buy one at school?
Has she turned into the mother hers was?

I punish myself for thinking about the things she’s said of her mother, just to me. Our secrets. She was never home, and when she was it was like she wasn’t there anyway. She was concerned, but not motherly love concerned, more like concerned the way she treated her child might get her in trouble with the law. Thankful that through her fuck ups her child had learned to take care of herself.
My scorn for a mother like that did not even compete with my love for the woman who could have possibly turned out to be a mother like that.
The juice is heavy in my basket, so when I turn around and catch the shape of her nose and the glint of her hair, I drop it.

I pause for a moment, acknowledging my hallucination, and lean to pick up my juice. But when I cast another casual glance back up, she’s sighted me, and she’s still there. She’s speaking with someone. My hallucinations don’t interact with other people. If I was hallucinating this, I wouldn’t have included Velvet because god only knows what I’d do to the woman after missing her for this long.

She shakes her head a bit and turns back to the woman she was talking with. I pick my things up and put them into my basket, I leave to check out even though I’ve still got quite a few things to pick up here. Amazing how my reaction was completely different than I thought it would be if I ever saw her again. I’m still have convinced she’s a hallucination. Did I even pay for my groceries? I could still be standing there dumbstruck blind by the sight of her.

I’m sitting on the bench out front of the store when she walks out through the sliding doors. Velvet’s in front of her, and he’s the first to see me. She stands there for a moment, just looking at the road in front of the supermarket, or maybe the stores across the street. Velvet tugs on her hand and says to her, “Mommy, do we know him?” he points to me. “He seems familiar.”
Her gaze follows her childs’, and her eyes catch mine. We share a look and I am completely unsure of what it means. She doesn’t answer him, but she does make sure he follows her over when she comes to stand in front of me.
“Hey,” she says. She’s satan and I’m Jesus, starving in the desert. I imagine my throat catching, too dry to speak. Not nearly satiated enough with the human contact I’ve been getting lately to reply. So instead I just sit up a bit and say something intelligent.

“Rowena.” And, I could be wrong, but I think the word sets me free.


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Rowena Raven: Chapter Nine

“It feels uncomfortable.” I told Daisy, smoothing down the fabric covering my chest.

I had told her I needed to borrow some clothes to go to work in, and had apparently forgotten the way she dressed all the time. But I did need something appropriate to work in, and this was my last resort. It wasn’t like Vanilla’s clothes would fit me or anything.
“Yeah, I don’t wear it that much, so the fabric is probably itchy and stuff.”
“No, it just feels wrong.” I interjected, and she realized she’d completely missed my point.

“I mean, it’s just so yellow.” I made a face at myself, and she laughed a little bit. When I looked at her she stopped, and I felt bad.
“Listen, Daisy.” I started, “I don’t hate you. Loosen up a bit, okay?”

Earlier in the day when I’d come to confront her I’d almost spilled my heart out to her and told her everything and how I felt like such a cock to her and how sorry I was, but I just decided on acting like nothing had ever happened. I felt somehow that this was probably the wrong way to handle it, but I put that feeling behind me.
I was being honest, I didn’t hate her, but I couldn’t really understand why I pitied her instead.
I’ve never really gotten why everyone always thinks keeping your emotions to yourself is a male thing. Not telling anyone and just leaving it all in, hardening yourself while on the outside seeming mysterious and aloof. I’ve never had  much desire to go around complaining and whining about how bad my life has been and how hard it is to pick up the pieces. I just go on, and pick them up as best I can without telling anyone.
Hell, even with Vanilla I hardly ever strictly say “And it made me feel sad.” He’s just  good at deducing what I mean when I say “So I smoked a joint and walked home.”
So I’m sure he knew perfectly well what I meant with my silence when I went downstairs to eat lunch before I left for work. I didn’t start for two hours, but since I was a “special case,” I got all the info and the tour and I got to meet all the people before I put my time in.
Obviously, I was so looking forward to that. All I could imagine were a bunch of Pomegranate and Sea Melon type assholes walking all over. I shuddered in my stupid little yellow outfit.

  He laughed a bit when he saw me, and then apologized. “The kind of person you want to attract, eh?”
“And I’m totally going for “rich producer.” Don’t you know they like yellow dresses? I thought it was obvious.”

“Oh, certainly.” He said, very seriously.

I got up to put my dishes away, and happened to take a glance over my shoulder as I passed, and caught his lingering eyes. Honestly, it was very surprising to me, but then I realized that my eyes were lingering too, and I decided I didn't have anything to say about it.
                                                                            ~o~

“This has gotten very monotonous,” I said, sitting down in my chair the next morning.

He gave me a look, like “continue.”

“I mean it’s the same old song and dance every day, shit happens, I come in and recite it to you and we try to make sense of my feelings and all that, and then I leave.” While he considered it, I got daring.
“So I really don’t know what the fuck is up when all of a sudden a year later I look at you once, maybe when the room is particularly sunny, and I see your jawline, or maybe your eyelashes and I’m just like, ‘damn, what ever will I do without you for the rest of my life?’”
“Oh, Rowena,” He says, looking concerned and scooting forward. I get up and pace to his desk.

      “Fuck this, you know.” I say, exasperated. “You’ve turned me into a goddamned parasite. You know what’ll happen when I leave? Every day I’m going to wake up and I’m going to get all broken up about everything, I’m going to go ‘god, Vanilla should be here right now. I wish I could tell him what happened at work yesterday.’ And it’s gonna suck, because that’s not what I want my life to be like.”

He had been coming up behind me, I could feel his hands reaching out to me, their warmth. Men were always especially warm weren’t they? But before he got the chance to touch me he stopped suddenly and let his hands fall back to his sides. I relaxed and exhaled, chancing a glance back at him. He looked torn up, ran his hand through his hair.
“I know, I’m sorry.” I looked back down at the floor in front of my feet.
“I’ll feel it too,” He continued afterward, very quietly, but not so much so that I thought I wasn't supposed to hear it.

“I was supposed to tell you today,” He continued, clearing his throat. “That you’re cleared to go. Tomorrow, I mean. Not right away. After work I’ll pick you up and bring you to the apartment we’ve arranged for you. The state’s paying the first two months’ rent, and then you’ll be expected to come up with the rest.” He let out a short, curt laugh. “Took me a fucking arm and a leg to get them to do just that much.”

“Ha, thanks.” I said, almost painfully, turning around and touching his arm. We were caught there for a moment, suspended in space. I can honestly say that I have no idea which one of us moved first, but it didn’t take long for me to have nowhere to go, pressed up against his desk. We were in a hurry, frantically trying to touch each other everywhere in an effort to memorize each other, with the sort of desperation two people who know they won’t be seeing each other for a long time would have.

And the only thing I could think, beyond “this is wrong and I am eventually going to end up fucking myself over from this.” was “This is so amazingly right, and is something that has been missing from my life since the moment I was born.” My heart ached and called out for forever, to be smothered and absolutely devoured by Vanilla until there was nothing left of me.
And briefly, I wondered how I had ever made it through life without feeling like there was something missing, that there had been this inexplicable piece of my soul out there left for me to find.

And I might have wondered before why it was that we weren’t having sex yet, but I understood so well that that wasn’t what Vanilla wanted for me. Our hands were not moving to strip each other, our kisses weren’t hot and fiery, the touches were sad and lingering and meant to just know, just touch and know and remember the texture of his skin, of his tongue, the smell of him and how his clothes hid the muscles you wouldn’t think he had.
But finally we slowed down, we looked at each other and we were both crying, and we held each other and I told him how I could never keep in contact, because I needed to become my own person in a healthy way, and I felt his tears on the top of my head, and he said “I know.”

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