Mama Killed A Man

It didn’t upset me to leave Nora. When she arrived on our doorstep that miserable January night, she said she hoped to be a constructive addition to our family. She said she wanted to help mum out, to act as a positive role model for me. She’d heard from Aunt Denise that I’d run into some trouble and she claimed she knew exactly what I was going through. After all, she’d battled adolescence at one point and was now a perfectly respectable twenty-something year old, with no qualifications, no valuable experiences and no promising career. When I pointed this out, she started crying and mum locked me outside.

Six weeks earlier mum had made an urgent call to Aunt Denise regarding her pregnant teenage daughter and what the fuck she was meant to do now. At the time I was curled up on the bathroom floor with my head resting against the shower screen and my legs hanging over the lip of the bath tub, wondering why, of all the people on earth, mum had called Denise.

Denise was my Uncle Keith’s widow and the closest thing we had to family. She was the kind of woman that attended luncheons and coffee mornings with delicate cucumber sandwiches, and thought she knew the ways of the world because she’d finished watching all twenty-six seasons of The Bold & The Beautiful. She loved to tell my mother how to raise me even though she’d never had children herself, and mum grappled on to her every word like a rubber float in a cess pool of iniquity.

So I guess that made me the iniquity.

Mum missed her big brother and Denise was all she had left of him, so when she told mum the best thing to do was to abort her potential grandchild, that’s what she did.

And that’s when we started falling apart.

I didn’t talk to mum for weeks after the surgery. I didn’t go out, and I disowned my friends because their laughter made me sick. Mum thought it was because of some hormonal imbalance I was suffering, and maybe it was, but the internal battle of love and hate for the people close to me burned on well after her death. They had become a callous congregation of strangers that thought they loved me, and I felt abandoned.

I couldn’t make sense of the sour resentment I felt around them, and the shallow ache I felt being alone.

As I watched her casket disappear beneath the soil, I couldn’t help wondering if she’d be going to hell for what she’d done to me, or if that place was reserved for me alone. I then began wondering if hell had room for reasoning and if I’d be able to blame my consent on the tortured look my mother gave me as she slid the abortion forms across the reception desk.

Then I thought that if anyone should be going to hell, it should be Denise; as she placed her chilling fingers around my wrist, I was tempted to fling her into the gaping hole before us and bury her alive. She was the worst of them all. Worse than the council, and the cleanup crew and Nora; she’d pushed my mother away from me three years prematurely.

And now mum was gone, and I’d never get that time back.

I had three days to pack a suitcase of vitals, with vitals ruling out three-quarters of my shoe collection as well as my iPod speakers. I wasn’t moving to a backbeat, one-horse town, Mrs. McCredie, my allocated social worker, tutted; I was going to live in Tempe, Arizona. It was in the United States of America, in case I didn’t know. Whatever I couldn’t bring my father would buy me over there, she was sure.

I told her I didn’t know I had a father, let alone one that would buy me things, and she chuckled before flashing me a patronizing grin.

“Everyone has a father,” she smiled. Then she scolded me for packing too many socks.

I had never been outside Australia before but after a fifteen-hour-and-thirty-five minute flight I had made a few assumptions on what Tempe might be like. The travel booklets assured me that it would be hot due to its desert climate, so hot and dry was about as far as my ideas went.

As for my father, I didn’t know what to expect. Mum never liked talking about him so I figured he must have just upped and left us one day. With mum’s passing and the sudden news that I was being uprooted from my home, I’d never had the chance to analyse the situation properly.

“How are you feeling?” Nora had asked me softly, “Are you nervous?”

I shrugged because I really didn’t know.

I didn’t know what my father looked like. I didn’t know if he’d be nice, what he worked as, or if he even worked at all. I didn’t expect him to love me, or be ready for me; I didn’t even expect him to want me. And as I struggled through the gate with my trolley and scanned the crowd for someone, anyone, who was looking for me too, I certainly didn’t expect my father to be over sixty years old.

“Amberlyn Cross?” said the man, as I approached him cautiously. He was holding a whiteboard with my name scrawled across it in green marker.

I gave him a once, twice, thrice over before I replied. He was a short man, slightly shorter than me, with white hair and deep green eyes. His determined jaw and confident stance told me he was fit for a man his age, and he wore a simple brown t-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. His smile was kind and his gestures soft.

“Um, yeah, that’s me,” I replied quietly, my voice squeaking a little.

The man grinned, “It’s very nice to meet you Amberlyn, I’m Graeme,” he held out his hand.

I took it a little half-heartedly. My brain wasn’t ready for this kind of confusion, “Where’s my-“

“Your father had to be at an important meeting so he sent me to come get you, with his apologies.” He moved to take my trolley, “The car’s just over there.”

I took a deep breath and released the trolley, shoving my hands into my pockets to stop them shaking. As we strode through the sliding doors, a rush of hot air whacked me in the gut and I stumbled about, disoriented at the sudden bright light.

“You alright, Amberlyn?” Graeme called, a few paces ahead of me, “the car’s this way,” he jerked his head to the left. I nodded and scrambled to catch up.

I cleared my throat, “You can call me Amber if you like.”

“Am-bah?” Graeme chuckled, “I like your accent, kid.”

And I knew this place was far from home.