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“My mother did not work, though she told stories of when she’d cleaned houses before I was born. There were no nannies or housekeepers. I took care of myself.” That look on her face made him feel something like claws inside his chest, so he pushed on. “But that day, I followed my father. I followed him up into the hills where the houses were bigger. Prettier.”
Nicodemus found himself moving without meaning to do it, ranging toward the windows and pausing there, his back to the bed, because he wasn’t sure what he’d do if she kept looking at him with all that softness in her gaze. He didn’t know what would become of his conviction, his purpose. Of him.
“And when I peeked in the windows of the big house he’d gone inside,” he said quietly, as much to the sea as to the woman behind him, as much to his memory as anything, “I found he had a whole other family.” There was no sound from behind him, not even a breath against the air in the room. “I didn’t understand at first. I couldn’t make sense of it. There was a woman, three children. One was a boy who looked about my age. And they all called my father Babá.”
He had never said that out loud. And even now, he refused to admit that it tore at him, like knives into flesh. That he could still feel such an old betrayal so keenly, even after all these years.
“That is the word for Dad,” he clarified. And he heard her then. She breathed out, long and hard, like she hurt for him, and his curse was, he wished she did.
“I don’t know how long I watched them through their big windows.” He remembered it being a long time—months, even—though he supposed that could have been the vagaries of memory, playing tricks on him. “I went back day after day. And watching them, I learned to want. I wanted all of it. The parties that seemed to bore them. The fancy toys they never seemed grateful for. The great big house with whole rooms they didn’t enter for days at a time, if at all.”
He turned back to face her then, leaning one shoulder against the wall to the side of the window. She hadn’t moved. She still sat where he’d left her, more beautiful now than any woman had the right to be. Her hair was a tousled mess, tumbling down her back in its midnight glory. Her mouth looked ravaged and her eyes gleamed with emotion. And he wanted her. God, how he wanted her. The way he’d always wanted her. The same way he’d wanted that other life he’d glimpsed through his father’s windows.
He should have known better then. He did know better now, and still, here he was. It was as if he’d learned nothing, after all.
“The next time my father beat me for my supposed lies, I asked him about his.” Mattie frowned, as if she could see what was coming in that small, sharp-edged curve of his mouth he allowed himself. “I knew it was a secret, but you see, I had no secrets of my own. He’d seen to that. So it never crossed my mind to consider the reasons secrets like his might be better kept hidden.”
“Nicodemus,” she said softly, like she could see straight through him to his guilt. His lingering fury. “Whatever happened, you were a child.”
“I was twelve,” he corrected her. “Not quite a child, not where I grew up. And certainly man enough to receive the vicious beating my father gave me for questioning him, following him, calling him out. I was his sin, you see. The living, breathing emblem of his betrayal of his wife with the low class servant girl who had cleaned his house. He was very self-righteous when he told me that he had come to us all these years purely in an effort to wash the stain from my soul. To help me become a better man, because left to my own devices, I’d no doubt become a whore like my mother.” Nicodemus didn’t look away from Mattie as he said this, laying out the history he never spoke of so matter-of-factly. And he didn’t crack when she winced at that ugly word. “He made me thank him as I lay there, bloody on the floor. And then he walked out the door and he never returned.”
“Never?” Mattie asked, shock coloring her voice, her gaze. “But he was your father!”
“Worse, he stopped supporting us,” Nicodemus said. “That meant I had to leave school to work wherever I could, and it meant my dreamy, useless, fragile mother had to work in the factories. Thread, mostly. And it killed her.”
Mattie didn’t say his name again, but she made a small noise that sounded almost too rough, too raw. It made him want to touch her, hold her, almost more than he could bear.
“When I went back to my father’s great big house on its sparkling hill, to ask him to help once my mother had collapsed, he had me arrested.”
