Chapter 9
A few days later, on that Saturday afternoon, at 3:55 PM, Nicole was on the outside of Ivan’s house, sitting on her power chair, playing with Bella. Bella saw something in her eyes that she liked and she adored her from the moment that she approached her. Bella couldn’t stop trying to jump her and licking her hands. Ivan had trained her to never lick people’s faces, but she couldn’t help showing her love the way only dogs could when she saw this sweet young lady who just loved dogs. Nicole always wanted a dog of her own, but she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to feed him because she would have to bend over in her chair and put the dog dish on the floor, and although that was the only thing that she couldn’t do while taking care of her dog, she felt that if she couldn’t do that, she couldn’t have a dog. She didn’t know that if she got a dog, Aubrey would help her feed him or her. As a matter of fact, Aubrey was at the pet shop right now, shopping for a baby pit bull! A boy. Oh, bummer. Then, Aubrey decided to buy two baby pit bulls, the one she came to buy for Nicole, and another one for herself. She had four thousand dollars to spend on these dogs, at the maximum. It wasn’t a waste of money because when these two boy dogs would grow up, they would protect Aubrey and Nicole’s house, and them, every time that they had to go outside, both alone, and together. After getting help from an associate, Aubrey opted for two adorable pit bulls, one completely white and one white and brown, with the white chest and the rest of the body brown. He looked just like Bella, and the reason for that was that he was Bella’s son. Bella had given birth to puppies one month before, and rather than selling the puppies to people, thus he would have compassion for people and wind up giving them away to them, Ivan sold them to the pet shop, and Aubrey bought Bella’s baby son without knowing any of this. Bella’s puppies were pure-breed pit bulls because Ivan made sure to breed her, a pure-breed, with another pure-breed pit bull, when he noticed that she was in heat. He bred her with Emmanuel’s dog, Todd, named after a bully who had made his life a living hell in middle school and in high school. Todd was neutered when those puppies were born to ensure he wouldn’t get any other female dogs in the neighborhood pregnant, causing births of mutts, because Todd was the only pit bull in the entire neighborhood, and although mutts were more accepted and loved, today than yesterday, Emmanuel was sure that the last thing that his neighbors wanted was for Todd to get their dogs pregnant, and if that happened, they would hate Todd and Emmanuel. Sure, the neighbors knew that their females would get pregnant one day. They just didn’t want them getting pregnant with the pups of a pit bull. Bella also got fixed two weeks after the puppies were born. Ivan heard, when Bella was in heat for the first time, that every time a female dog gave birth, seven dog years would be added to her age, and she would get weaker and weaker every time, and she could even get sick, have complications while giving birth, or before, and die, and he didn’t want that for Bella. Bella was a rare one. She gave birth to ten pups and Ivan sold them to the pet store for big bucks. He made so much money, he bought a laptop for him, one for Emmanuel, and since each of his parents had new laptops and didn’t want newer ones, he even bought a brand-new Kia Rio Cinco station wagon with that money, blue-green color, beautiful. It cost him $12,648, and he bought it in cash. He never knew these puppies would give him so much, but he didn’t want to do that again, and he wouldn’t, just for the sake of Bella, to keep her good health and strength. He’d had that dog for one and a half years and he loved her as much as he loved his family and friends, and she worshiped him. Every day, when he would come home from work, he would take his work-clothes off, take a shower, change his clothes, go outside and play with her for the next forty-five minutes to one hour. Then, he would take another shower, change into his pajamas, no matter how early it was in the afternoon or in the night, make dinner for himself and for Aaron, and then they would watch TV together for a little while, in the family room and finally, they would go to sleep, each one in his own room. Aaron loved Nicole. All this time, since he started living with his dad, he’d heard wonderful things about Nicole, but he was thrilled now that he finally met her. He told his father that there was something in her eyes, that he liked what he saw in her, that she had an angelic soul and she was an outstanding person. Although Aaron was young and couldn’t be more innocent, he noticed the way Nicole would look at Ivan and Ivan would look at her. Nicole would look at Ivan like she was her favorite movie or pop star, someone outstanding that she couldn’t love more. Aaron knew that they’d only known one another for six months, and that Nicole would never even be his girlfriend after knowing him for so little time, same thing with him, but Aaron couldn’t help thinking that Nicole was the perfect woman for his dad, and he would love it for her to marry his dad and adopt him because he no longer had a true mother. His grandmother was just that, a grandmother, and there were certain things a mother could give him that his grandmother couldn’t give him, like her youth. Aaron knew that even if his grandparents survived their cancer, because of their age, forty-four years old, they wouldn’t probably live to know his children. Aaron wanted what he never had, a true family. He’d always had his mother or his father, never both, and every night, he dreamt of having a mother and a father, as well as a few brothers and sisters, like two or three of them. That would be awesome.
Nicole came inside after playing with Bella for over three hours. She went to the family room to watch a rated-G, non-animated Disney movie with Aaron. She loved this child like the little brother she never had, and she already loved spending time with him because she’d been with him practically all day. Aubrey dropped her sister off at Ivan’s house at seven o’clock in the morning because she had to take her best friend, Jordan, and her best friend’s baby, to the hospital because Jordan woke up that morning having problems breathing at five fifteen in the morning, and since Jordan’s child wasn’t disabled, and therefore she didn’t have the kind of medical insurance that would pay for almost everything, Jordan didn’t dare to dial 911 and have an ambulance come over, but fortunately, Aubrey was there to help. At five thirty in the morning, Aubrey arrived at Jordan’s house, and by five forty-five, the two women were racing to the hospital with the two-year-old angel. Aubrey left them at the hospital for a few moments, went back home, and when she arrived, her sister was ready to go to Ivan’s house, so Aubrey picked her up and left her at Ivan’s house. Ivan had never woken up to such a marvelous surprise. Of course, he made himself, his best friend and his son some breakfast. Around noon, he made them some lunch because Nicole’s meals were always four hours apart or more, and when the clock hit six o’clock in the afternoon, she wouldn’t eat anything for the rest of the day. She would just drink water, and that would help her keep her weight in check and her cholesterol, thyroid, and everything of that sort healthy. Every meal would be in small portions and the only sweets that she would have, for desserts or snacks, would be fruit. She avoided candy and she avoided cakes and every other kind of sweets at all costs because when she was fifteen, she would eat anything and everything, although still in small portions, and Dr. Hamilton warned her to watch what she was eating because her thyroid had become a little unstable, and if she lost total control of her thyroid, there was no going back, and it would’ve been sad to see an incredible woman having a problem like this at such a young age. She would only eat pastas and other kinds of starches, foods that the doctor told her to eat of as little as possible, once every two months, and that would be only when she would go to Italian restaurants, her favorite, and eat the very-best pastas. However, she would always ask the waiter to try to get the cooks to make her portions a little smaller than everybody else’s, and since everyone at the restaurant loved her for being a fantastic customer, the cooks and the waiter would always comply with her simple request. Conscious of this, Ivan prepared for everyone the healthiest meals he could think of, meals that would do his patient, and now best friend, very well, when it came to her health. In reality, Nicole had always been thin framed and that’s why she would enjoy every food under the sun when she was younger, because she knew her metabolism was a ray of light, and from birth to age thirty, she would never get fat, but now, she followed Dr. Hamilton’s directions to the tee and even ask him for more advice when she wasn’t sure about something, and ask him questions. Every time she would visit his office, she had questions for him, and he appreciated that because that meant that she really cared about herself and her health. Aubrey and Ashley were the same way, thin-framed, although not too skinny, and they would never get fat. They inherited that from their grandmother, Alison, and their mother, Aubrey. That was the reason why Dalton Ward fell in love with her at first sight, because she had a shapely, perfect and at the same time voluptuous body in all the right places that the first time he saw her, he went insane. She was never interested in him because although he was drop-dead gorgeous, she was always hearing that he was a playboy, but he relentlessly pursued her, sending her flowers, candy, postcards, showing up at her workplace to recite poems to her, writing love songs for her and then having his friends perform them for her, on live radio, and he would even serenade her in front of her window, almost every day. She saw no other option but to give him a chance, and at the end of the day, she was glad she did, and she married him and gave him three beautiful daughters, having no idea that one of them, the oldest one, would turn out to be their murderer.
Nicole wanted to stay on her power chair as she was watching the movie with Aaron, but when Ivan joined them in the family room, he noticed that she was starting to get uncomfortable from sitting in her chair all day, starting to feel a little pain in her lower back. Then, he had Aaron sit on the other side of the long sofa and helped her transfer to the side of the sofa that her chair was closest to, far enough from Aaron for them not to have any physical contact. It was more than clear that Nicole and Aaron loved each other only as siblings, and they showed it, but visitors would always show up without calling or texting first, and Ivan didn’t want any of his visitors to get the wrong idea about Nicole and Aaron, although Ivan knew for sure that Nicole would be incapable of hurting a child. If Nicole was never affectionate to adult men, she would much less be physically-affectionate to children. She would never kiss or hug a man or a child, only her sisters and her aunts, and when Nicole was introduced to a man for the first time, the only physical contact she would have with him for the rest of the lives of both of them would be a five-second handshake. Men who knew Nicole were very puzzled with her attitude towards them. They’d never met a woman like her. They wondered why she acted this way, if she’d been raped or even molested. The truth was that she hadn’t, and now that she had Ivan in her life, forever, whether they would be husband and wife in the future or not, she would never be molested or raped. Nicole’s mother always raised their daughters to be as distant from men as they could possibly be, not to be affectionate even to their own father, because that kind of behavior would be widely open to misinterpretations, even if it was clearly well-meant, and misinterpretations could lead to making mistakes they would regret, or even worse—rape. The Ward Sisters never forgot or ignored their mother’s advice, and that caused her problems with some men, because those men thought that they were lesbians or that they hated men, although they weren’t lesbians, but most of the time it was beneficial to them to be this way because the other men that didn’t feel this way, they respected them for being like this, admired them, and knew that they could trust them, that they were good, decent young women. Ashley was married twice in her thirty-three years of life. Her first marriage only lasted for seven years and her second, only for three. Ashley got married for the first time when she was twenty, and for the second time when she was twenty-eight, and now, she was thirty-three. She hadn’t had a man for a few years, and after all that happened recently, she felt she shouldn’t have one until she got her life back together and became a completely-sane, stable person, after relearning to have healthy relationships with people. Now she knew why both her previous marriages had failed, and why God hadn’t blessed her with children. If she was never a good daughter or sister, she could never be a good wife or mother. She needed to learn empathy and compassion for herself and others again, to learn how to love all over again, like she did when she was a child. She needed professional help. She realized this and she was planning to go to her new physician, Dr. Costas, the next day, so he could refer her to a psychiatrist and she could have her first session with him or her as soon as possible.
Ivan sat right beside Nicole, but not too close to her. Once again, Aaron noticed the connection between them. They were more than friends, although they didn’t know it.
“You like this movie?”
“Yes, I like all Disney movies. I’m corny, if you will. I go crazy for romance. I don’t like terror, but I like romance, not the stuff you see in rated-R movies. That’s not romance, and let’s just leave it like that.”
“I like all kinds of movies. The only movies I am not a big fan of are NC-17.”
It was amazing, but since they were saying that they disliked these movies, they were both adults, and Ivan was his father, Aaron didn’t bother to ask them why they didn’t like those movies and he just continued to watch the movie, acting like they were talking about the weather.
They looked at him both at the same time. Any other child his age would start asking questions when they would hear conversations like these. Aaron just continued to watch the movie. They started texting one another right beside each other instead of getting up to go talk in a different room because they didn’t want Aaron to think they were going to talk about things he shouldn’t hear or that they were simply talking behind his back.
YOU SEE THAT? HE’S NOT ASKING QUESTIONS, IVAN!
THAT’S THE WAY HE IS. I NOTICED THAT SINCE THE DAY WE MET AND I BROUGHT HIM HOME. I WAS TALKING TO BARRY THAT DAY AND AS SOON AS WE STARTED TALKING, HE GOT UP AND WENT TO HIS ROOM. HE DOESN’T GET INTO OTHER PEOPLE’S CONVERSATIONS, MUCH LESS ADULTS.
THAT’S GOOD. MAYBE HIS GRANDPARENTS TAUGHT HIM THAT.
I USED TO BE THAT WAY WHEN I WAS A CHILD AND EVEN WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER. IF MY PARENTS WEREN’T TALKING TO ME, THAT MEANT I WASN’T PART OF THE CONVERSATION, SO I WOULD JUST LEAVE THE ROOM.
THAT’S INTERESTING BECAUSE MOST KIDS DON’T LEARN THAT ON THEIR OWN. ACTUALLY, YOU AND AARON ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE I’VE MET THAT ARE LIKE THIS.
THEY COULD BE TALKING ABOUT ME, EVEN, AND I WOULD LEAVE. I DIDN’T CARE.
WOW.
YEP, I HAVE AN AMAZING CHILD, AND I WILL ALWAYS THANK GOD FOR HIM.
YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN. DON’T TAKE THIS THE WRONG WAY, BUT I LOVE YOUR SON.
I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN. YOU’RE NOT LIKE THAT. YOU ARE SANE AND HEALTHY IN THE HEAD. YOU’RE NOT A SEXUAL PREDATOR OR ANYTHING OF THAT SORT. YOU’RE THE ONLY WOMAN BESIDES MY MOTHER AND MY CHILD’S GRANDMOTHER THAT I TRUST WITH AND AROUND MY CHILD.
THANK YOU.
The conversation ended and they left their phones alone. Aaron didn’t even know that they were talking about him.
* * * *
Someone rang the bell two hours later. The movie was over, Ivan was sleeping in the sofa, and Nicole was sitting by the front door, far away from Ivan, at the end of the hallway that led to the front door, waiting for her sister to pick her up. Aubrey told her that she would pick her up within fifteen minutes and that she was on her way to Ivan’s house. Problem was that Aubrey’s transmission had failed on the way there and she couldn’t do any of the things that she was planning to do tonight. She couldn’t pick up her sister and bring her to the hospital to see Jordan and Jordan’s baby, Jayden, and she couldn’t go to sleep early tonight. She was in the middle of the road, waiting for someone to help her out of this deep whole she’d gotten into. She never considered for a second, when she bought this piece of junk of a car, upon arriving at Florida, that the transmission was bad. She bought the car as it was, but the original owner promised her that despite its deplorable cosmetic condition, the cars parts were great, that before selling the car, he’d gotten new parts from a friend, who was the owner of an auto-part store. His friend would’ve gladly given him the parts if this had been true, but this man was known for ripping people off. She had to do the unthinkable. She had to call Ivan back to see if he could take Nicole out of the house with him, go pick her up where she was, and take them home, so that Aubrey could go back to the hospital to be by Jordan and Jayden’s side tomorrow in the early morning.
Ivan’s home phone rang, and as asleep as he was, he didn’t miss it because the ringtone was loud, with rock music that would’ve woken up even a dead person if the phone had been right beside them. He didn’t recognize the number, but it was someone that he knew if he or she was calling at this hour. “Hello.”
“Ivan, I’m in trouble!” Aubrey cried. She wasn’t just upset because she was stuck, but also because she’d been ripped off, and if she saw that son of a bitch again, she would yank his eyes out from his sockets in the time it took someone to take one breath.
“Aubrey?”
The sound of her sister’s name made Nicole rush back to the family room, one of the farthest rooms from the front door of the house, in a matter of seconds, setting her chair at the highest speed, something she’d never do at home for fear of breaking all the walls and hurting herself bad in the process. “What happened to my sister?”
“This son of a bitch that sold me this worthless piece of shit! Oh, my God, the transmission turned out to be bad as expired milk!”
“Calm down. Though you’re healthy and you are not hypertensive or have heart problems, you could easily have a heart attack and drop dead. I should know. I had to train myself to keep calm even in the worst of situations because the last time this happened to me at age fourteen, I had to be rushed to the hospital and I almost died. I know you got as angry as a person could be, and even a thousand times more so. Just take a deep breath.”
“You think you can bring my sister, pick me up here and take us home?”
“Sure. Where are you?”
“I don’t know exactly. I don’t know if by turning on my GPS utility you could track me.”
Within a few minutes, when they turned on their GPS programs and got connected, Ivan knew Aubrey’s exact location from where he was right now. “Ok, I found you.” He got up from the sofa and exited the family room, leaving the house in a matter of minutes, without taking a shower and changing his clothes first, for the first time in his life, although he’d taken a shower five hours before. He put Aubrey on hold and called Langston to bring his pick-up truck over to transport Nicole’s wheelchair. Aubrey also had a pick-up truck and that’s how she was able to transport her sister with her wheelchair and take her to places, in her wheelchair. She would do this all the time, until now. Langston responded immediately, learned the situation, and got up from bed, picked up his keys from the nightstand, and storm out of the house to help his brother and his new friend, Nicole—in his pajamas! Luckily, this didn’t wake Diana who was sleeping right beside him, snoring, unaware of everything.
Just twenty minutes later, Langston arrived and Ivan accommodated Nicole in the passenger’s seat of her car. Then, he lifted the power chair like lifting a baby, and loaded it on the back of Langston’s truck. Finally, he got into the driver’s seat of his car and the brothers headed to Aubrey’s current location. Aubrey gasped when, less than a half an hour after Ivan told her on the phone that he called his brother to use his pick- up truck to transport Nicole’s power chair, she saw the Kia Rio and the 2009 burgundy-colored Chevy Silverado approaching her pick-up truck. She recognized the twin brothers. Then, Ivan asked her a question that shocked her because she couldn’t believe that he could be thinking about this right now. “Hey, Aubrey, are you planning to go anywhere before going home tonight?”
“Ivan, I asked you to take me home. I was planning to go to the hospital back with Jordan and Jayden tonight, although I’ve practically been there all day, but you don’t have to go through that. I am not going to let you guys stay up all night just for me and Jordan.”
“It’s not about you and Jordan, it’s about the baby. It doesn’t bother us to lose sleep for one night, for taking you to the hospital and staying there with you.”
“Ivan…”
Langston commented, “It’s really not a problem, Aubrey,” and she turned her face to look at him. “We promised to be there in good times and in bad times, especially in bad times, no matter what, and we’ll do anything for you guys. I mean you, Nicole and the baby you’re expecting mean the world to us now, just like all our friends and our families do.”
“But Langston, you really don’t have to do this.”
“We think we do, and we’re going to. We’re not going to leave you by yourselves during this difficult time. Jayden’s sick. You don’t know if he’s going to live to see the sun rise tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, my God,” Nicole yelped.
“We refuse to take you guys home, go home and live our lives like everything’s ok, because it’s not. You need all the support you can get, and so does Jordan. We don’t know her, but it would make her feel so much better if she knew that two total strangers care about her and her child.”
“What about Aaron?”
“Aaron’s with his Uncle Wilbert right now. He just texted me to tell me he just got to my house,” Ivan said.
“So all this time you’ve lived incredibly close from one another, huh?”
“Yep, all this time we’ve only been a few minutes apart. Blood is blood, and the bond between two twin brothers who love each other is unbreakable, and the love between those brothers knows no bounds. So, you’re going, or do we go to the hospital without you, Langston, Nicole and I, huh?”
“I’m going,” she said and got on the back seat of Ivan’s Kia. Within minutes, they were gone.
* * * *
Shortly after, Jordan and Aubrey hugged in the hospital once again. A miracle had happened. Jayden pulled through, and he was in stable condition. He’d just undergone another operation and he had a seventy-percent survival rate. Jordan gasped when she saw Langston, Ivan and Nicole. She knew Nicole would be here, but not the men. “So this is your physical therapist, Nicole, and his brother?” she asked.
“Yes, Jordan, that’s right. Meet Ivan Northwood and his twin, Langston Ainsworth. Ivan was adopted. That’s why they have different last names.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” said Jordan, smiling.
“Yes, Ivan has a mother and I don’t,” commented Langston, and Ivan turned to look at him, awestruck at that remark, “but Mrs. Northwood said she’d gladly be a second mother to me because I am awesome. That made me feel great. I will never forget those words as long as I live, and you know what’s even more astonishing? For a moment, while Mrs. Northwood was talking to me for the first time, I thought I saw my mother’s face instead of hers, smiling at me.”
“That’s beautiful. Ivan told me what happened to the birth mother of both of you, and I am really sorry,” said Nicole. “Ivan told me when we started our session, when Aubrey had to pick me up early for my appointment with Dr. Hamilton. Don’t feel sad, Langston. Your mother’s with you at all times. She won’t let anything bad happen to you. You also commented to Ivan that your mother promised your father to be by your side at all times even after death.”
“Yes,” Langston said, tears in his eyes for a moment, and he wiped them away, “that’s right.”
“I believe that when someone makes a promise on their deathbed, they keep it, no matter how outrageous it may be, even when they vow to take revenge against someone that hurt them, or the very person who killed them, when those people die violent deaths. That’s the reason for haunted houses and other haunted places. Those people never rest in peace, until they keep their promises or their threats, which means, Langston, that your mother will be by your side until the day you die, and when you die, she’s going to take you with her.”
“That scares me, but I know it’s true because I saw it happen to a few of my friends I lost. Moving on, how’s Jayden doing?”
“Jayden’s doing a lot better. Doctors say he has a seventy-percent survival rate,” Jordan said.
“We’re glad. We’ll be praying for him together. You go into his room with him and we’ll stay in the waiting room because we’re not relatives,” said Ivan.
“You’re not relatives,” Jordan said, holding both the twins’ hands, “but you’re family, and I am grateful to you for being here and for showing your support, without knowing us just because you’re connected to Nicole. You don’t know how much that means to me. I’m a single mother, not just single because I don’t live with Jayden’s father, but because he’s not here. Look around you. Look in the waiting room. In the information desk downstairs, go on through