CHAPTER 27: THE ACCIDENT
Shortly after eating our peach-cobbler, everyone says “goodnight” before breaking into our separate quarters. Jason adds in a wink and then says "catch you later" before going into his room. My insomnia still haunts me. All I can think about is my mother and her safety. It takes me about another hour to fall asleep.
My eyes open for the fifth time in the middle of the night. There's a faint noise somewhere outside my bedroom that keeps me from sleeping. It’s an unfamiliar voice of a man and it sounds very distant. I walk across the room and peep through my cracked bedroom door. All I can see is a glimmer of light coming from downstairs.
I exit my room and quietly make my way downstairs. All of the kitchen lights seem to be on. I then walk into the living room to find Kenya sitting on the sofa watching television. She then looks up at me with a surprised look upon her chocolate face.
"Hi,” I greet her halfheartedly.
She then turns her head and smiles at me with sleepless eyes.
"Hello, Iva. You can't sleep?"
"Not much.”
"Did you come down here wishing to find someone else?" she looks at me with a smirk, gesturing something that makes me blush.
I let out a smile with ease.
"You don’t need to say a word. I already know your answer,” she tells me.
There’s a slight pause between the two of us. I look over at the large flat-screen on the wall and see a green field displayed with people running to and fro.
"What are you watching?"
"Soccer. Do you watch sports?"
"I’m not into sports, at all,” I make sure she hears the words “at all” clearly. “I never was in the position to try one.”
"I watch it occasionally,” she continues. “I'm not an athlete, but I’ve been to a game before with my husband. It’s very entertaining.”
She looks at the television while thinking deeply.
"You have to admire them, the humans. They’re so carefree,” she says.
"Ignorance is bliss,” I say to myself, but the words are loud enough for her to hear.
A gentle whistling coming from the kitchen interrupts our conversation. She grabs the remote and switches off the television.
"The water is ready. You made it just in time,” she says and then stands to her feet. "Keep me company. Have tea with me.”
I follow her into the dining room and sit down at the table as she walks into the kitchen.
"Do you like tea?"
"Do I? That’s all I ever drink.”
I hear the sound of closing cabinets, followed by the sound of water being poured into cups. She then walks into the dining room with a mug in each hand. She places one down in front of me and takes a seat across from me.
"Thanks,” I say as I take a tiny sip of the hot, freshly-brewed, tea.
I never tasted this blend of tea before, but it most definitely has a unique flavor, in a good way. We marinate together in silence while sipping on the steaming sweetness inside of our cups. The silence is starting to become bothersome, so I decide to break the ice with a question I've been dying to ask.
"If you don’t mind me asking…what happened to Mane? He’s different. It’s like he’s been traumatized or something,” I ask, realizing I shouldn’t when I see her face flatten.
She places her cup of tea down on the table top and looks into it, unsure of how to answer my question.
“My son has always been that way.”
She lifts her eyes off the cup and into mine.
“He was born with Alexithymia. It’s a disorder. He was born with no emotion. This caused him to seclude himself when he was a kid. He got picked-on often. His father mentored him very well. They were close,” she stops to break a smile when mentioning his father. “I miss Miguel every day. Our family wasn’t perfect but we made it work. He was a soccer player. I traveled to Spain with some friends of mine on a vacation and saw him and then fell in love almost instantly.”
Kenya snaps out of her love trance and then blushes and chuckles.
“Sorry, I got completely off topic.”
“No, it’s fine. That’s a great love story; finding a man from a foreign land and falling in love. I wish I was so lucky.”
`“Not luck; destiny. But his father is the one who figured out that Mane was…….different. He knew he could train Daniel to feel and find his emotions. He snapped his fingers when he wants to be happy. He rubs his arm…”
“To calm himself down,” I finishes the sentence for her. “I see him do that before.”
“Right,” she agrees. “I remember the time we took him to a park…”
As Kenya proceeds with her story, I can’t help but slip back in time with her. Her description of everything is so detailed, that she pulls me into her story and now I find myself with a very young Daniel staring at a man with olive skin. My imagination runs wild as she continues with her story. The entire dining area has disappeared and now we’re at a playground. The man is in a kneeling position so he can be at Daniel’s eye level. The middle-aged Spanish man is his father, Miguel Cruz.
“Do you remember what this means?” his father asked and started to snap his fingers repeatedly.
“It means happy,” young Daniel replied.
“And why should we be happy?” he asked young Daniel.
“Because we’re at the park and the park is fun.”
“Correct. Now, go and have fun.”
Young Daniel ignored all of the jungle-gym fun and sat down in the sandbox and started to make a small mound of sand with his hands. His father studied him as he sat at a bench with a young Kenya at his side. She hugged his arm and together they watched Daniel play by himself in the sandbox. Maria was just three at the time and Daniel was eight years-old. Maria was too busy asleep in the baby stroller and way too young to remember all of this. I’m pretty sure Kenya has told her this story a thousand times though.
“He always plays with the sand,” his father said with disappointment.
“He’ll grow out of it,” Kenya reminded him.
“No, he came to the playground to play. He’s gotta learn, Shiva.”
Miguel stood to his feet and called out to his son. Young Daniel stood up, brushed off the sand from his pants, and then walks over to him with a blank stare on his face. His father knelt down again. This time the look in his father eyes were stern; the same look his son carries now.
“Son, we came to the playground to play. You can’t have fun sitting down. Right?”
Daniel glanced over at the line of kids racing to climb a flight of steps that reaches a slide. He then shifted back at his father.
“Okay,” he replied.
His father nodded at him as he sat back down and watched Daniel walk over to the shrinking line. He waited patiently and watched kids disappear down a blue tunnel and reappeared at the bottom. Not long after, it was his turn to climb the steps and go down the slide.
“Move creep,” a snotty, shitfaced, red-headed boy says to Daniel as she pushes him to the side.
I seriously can imagine how annoying this kid looked. He probably had big gums, a freckled face, and a printer-paper complexion. Also, he probably wore the same clothes every day.
The boy was bigger than Daniel, so Kenya tells me. Kenya couldn’t estimate the boy’s age. He had to be at least three years older than Daniel at the time. A push from the boy sent Daniel on his bottom; however, young Daniel, unsure of what to feel about it, just sat there and stared as the boy went down the slide.
“Daniel,” his father called to him.
His father was frustrated and you could hear it in his voice. He walked over to his mother and father and stood in front of them with a blank expression.
“That boy pushed me,” he told them.
“We saw it son.”
“You okay baby?” Kenya asked him.
He nodded his head for yes with a blank expression.
His dad then looked his mother in her eyes.
“We’ll come back tomorrow.”
“But we just got here...”
“Let’s go,” his father interrupted her and began to gather their belongings.
Confused and closed-mouthed, Kenya held her tongue until they were in the car heading home.
“What was that all about?” Kenya asked him.
His father looks at her then back at the road.
“Miguel?”
His father sighed before answering her question…
“I’m teaching him anger as soon as we get in,” he says firmly.
“Don’t do that. That won’t solve anything.”
“He needs to learn how to defend himself Shiva. He needs to learn,” he says firmly and then remains quiet all the way back home.
Kenya kept her mouth sealed, unwilling to start an argument in front of their kids. But she couldn’t lie to herself either. Children can be just as evil as adults. Sometimes the child and the parents are both evil. Anger is an emotion Daniel had to learn in order to stand up against people like that boy.
In no time, they were back at their newly purchased home. The living room wasn’t fully furnished yet. His father grabbed him by the hand and hurried young Daniel into his room and shut the door close. He stood in place and pressed both his hands together, contemplating about how he would teach anger to his son.
“Daniel. You need to listen, very carefully, to what I’m about to tell you. You don’t let people push you. If you let them push you now, they will push you around for the rest of your life. Look,” he paused and started to hit the back of his hand against his palm. “This is anger. You will use this on anyone who hurt you, or anyone who tries to hurt your mom, sister, and friends.”
“What’s anger?”
“It’s like when…a person gets loud when they don’t like something.”
“Anger is yelling?”
“No, it’s….” he paused again to gather his thoughts. “It’s a fire that swells within your chest. When you feel that son, grab it, latch onto it. But not right now. Only use it when someone is trying to hurt you. Never use this on your mom, sister, and friends. This is to protect yourself and others.”
“Okay.”
His father starts to rub his arm with his fingertips as if he’s playing the violin on his forearm.
“Remember this right?” he asked Daniel.
Daniel unconsciously begins to mimic what his father is doing.
“It means to relax,” Daniel replied.
“That’s right. That’s because we don’t want you to be really, really, angry. We want to control our anger and not let it control us.”
“But dad...”
“Yes son.”
“What is fear?” he asked with curiosity.
His father pauses and looks off. He then looked deeply into Daniels adolescent eyes and leaned closer to him so he could feel the seriousness behind his words.
“Son, I lived a rough life. You don’t want to know fear. And I love you son. I never want you to fear anything, not even me. Evil men feed off of it. One day, I assure you, that someone will come your way, trying to bestow fear. Others may fear him, but you won’t. Others may run from him, but you won’t. Men like this are everywhere son. Being born without fear is a gift.”
That wasn’t quite the answer he was looking for. However, Daniel kept his obedience to his father and nodded his head.
The next day, they went to the park again. It started similar. His sister Maria was in the stroller, sleeping, and the playground was crowded with hyper children. After the incident that happened the day prior, Daniel stayed away from the slide. He did run around with other kids from time to time. His father remained very observant and attentive from a distance. He also watched as the red-headed boy went around and being rough with other kids and taunt them.
He even went as far as taking a kid’s cap and tossed it up into a tree. Periodically, young Daniel would look at the other kids going down the slide, growing more curious and eager. Eventually, other kids in the park started getting bored of the slide and moved onto the monkey bars. His father and mother watched him as he walked to the slide. He watched the last boy in line disappear into the blue tunnel. Before he was able to get in, the red-headed bully came out of nowhere and created a wall between him and the tunnel, cutting off his moment of opportunity.
“Hold on one second. You can’t go down without the password.”
Daniel had to tilt his head back to look the boy in his black, soulless, eyes.
“He doesn’t speak,” another older boy joins in.
He was one of the bully’s friends that would help him do his bidding and torture other people’s kids at the playground.
“He’s a mute,” the bully’s friend said.
“Well, no password, no go Roberto,” the bully told him.
Daniel just stared him in the face with a blank expression, unsure of what to do. The bully then chuckled at him.
“This is only for normal people Roberto,” the bully told Daniel. “And you’re retarded, so….”
Even through all of the insults, Daniel just stood there staring at the boy’s face, unmoving. The boy then started throwing up fake sign language and began to mimic a mute person’s voice.
“Get out of here, Roberto,” he told Daniel and began to laugh with his friend.
Kenya, who watched everything unfold, was about to stand but her husband stopped her.
“No, let’s see what he does,” his father replied.
As they continued to laugh their hardest, young Daniel hits his palm with the back of his hand. They suddenly stop laughing.
“What the hell? What was that? Did you just clap backwards?” the bully said and then snickers.
Daniel did it again, but harder.
“This boy is retarded as fuck,” the bully said with confusion on his face.
Daniel does it again and then again and keeps a slowly steady pace.
“What the hell are you doing?” the bully asks.
Daniel, quiet and still as ever, kept his ground and stared the bully in his eyes while hitting his palm.
“Stop doing that. You’re bugging me out,” the bully warned him.
As the pounding slowly increases, the tension in the bully’s eyes increases as well. It’s as if the bully could feel Daniel’s anger growing. The more Daniel continued, the angrier he became. The tension in the boy eyes were growing just as much as Daniel’s anger. A stern expression formed on young Daniel's face.
The tables gradually started to turn. Every time Daniel’s skin touched, his brain is sending adrenaline into Daniel’s system; fueling his rage. The boy couldn’t figure out what to do.
“Stop it, stupi…!’ the bully couldn’t finish the word.
A left hook connected to the boy’s right jaw. Most fighters call it the sweet-spot. One punched was all it took to knockout the bully. He collapsed and landed on the side of his face with his arms dead at his sides. A newly detached tooth was resting next to the bully’s head. Young Daniel came over and turned him onto his back, exploding with furious rage, and sat on top of the boy and began throwing jabs that would normally come from a grown man. Blood burst from the bully’s mouth as Daniel unleashed a tight fist across his face repeatedly.
Luckily for the bully, Daniel’s father grabbed him and pulled him away before he was about to break his nose or do permanent damage. Still, as Daniel was being pulled away, he then began to stomp on the bully’s face. Miguel takes his son’s kicking body away from the playground and into the grass area.
He quickly shifted Daniel’s attention toward him. His father started to rub his forearm with his fingers. Daniel’s hard eyes began to settle down almost immediately. And then he too began to rub his own arm to calm himself down.
After it was all said and done, the parents of the bully pressed charges. Already Daniel was growing up with a bad name. He was a misunderstood child with a bad reputation. Nevertheless, his father loved him and wouldn’t give up on him so easily. More than often, he would try to teach Daniel what love is. They would often go fishing together and his father would tell him about the feelings associated with love. He told him that love is the thing that keeps everything balanced and how everyone needs it. Sadly, Daniel never understood what love meant, still to this day. He slowly became a hallow shell of a person.
My imagination runs out of fuel. I break away from the past to ask Kenya another question. This question is bugging me but at the same time, I’m scared to ask. I know it may be rude to ask but if I don’t, I will be up all night thinking about it.
“What happened to their father?”
Kenya looks down in her half drunken cup of tea and a tinge of remorse can be seen in her eyes. She looks up at me, ever so silent. She waits until she has her emotions under control before replying.
"Their father died in a car crash about a year after that; on this day. I never sleep right around this time of year.”
"I’m sorry.”
"No, it’s fine. Don’t be sorry. One day they were going fishing. On the way back, the car went off a bridge and into the water. An eighteen wheeler crushed the passenger’s side of the car. My son was stuck in there. He told me that all he could remember was water everywhere. He remembered his dad opening his door. His father saved his life just in time. As my son went to the surface, someone helped pull him to safety. It was your Uncle.”
“My Uncle saved him?”
“Yes. He was a rookie then. Strangely, he never liked your Uncle after that. I believed it’s because he thinks he should’ve died there with his father. We all have a purpose Iva. Mane believe his purpose was to die with his father. That’s why he lives like he has no purpose.”
“Wow, Uncle Frank never told me about that. So, did his father drown?”
“They found his body underneath the car at the bottom of the lake,” her breathing collapses as she explains the ordeal. "I was in the kitchen when I felt this pain in my chest. That’s when I knew something terrible had happened.”
"Hold on, you felt him dying?"
"Yes. We are a lot different from humans, spiritually. Sometimes, if you love someone unconditionally, you become spiritually bonded to that person like a twin. It doesn't matter where you are. If you are bonded to that person, when they are in grave danger, you will find them. It’s a very rare occurrence. That is how the Sustainer built us.”
“The Sustainer?”
“Yes, the natives called him The Great Spirit.”
“Oh, I get it.”
“I was heartbroken when I lost him, but feeling him suffer to death was the worst pain of all.”
“I can’t imagine going through that.”
The thought alone saddens me.
“When my son returned home, it was like staring at a wall. He didn’t speak for a very long time after that. He grew to be very isolated and angry. I spent so much money sending him to several doctors and psychologists. But nothing worked,” she pauses to wipe a tear from her eye. “One day, months later, he spoke while we were eating at the table. He said he wanted to be alone. And now that’s all he ever wants,” she clears the hoarse from her throat. “He's trapped in his room, waiting for his father to come back.”
She pauses to reminisce on the tragedy. After giving herself a moment, she breaks a modest smile.
“Well, I’m heading back to bed. Have a goodnight.”
She goes in the kitchen and places her cup into the sink.
“Try to get some sleep,” she tells me. “You have a long day ahead of you.”
“What’s happening tomorrow?”
She chuckles and says…
“You have a lot of people to meet, silly-girl.”
She then walks out of the dining room and up the steps…