Trigger

I lived in that tall, grey-stoned orphanage for thirteen years before someone finally came in and decided they wanted to adopt the detached kid. Thirteen years of watching little children get taken, sometimes two at a time, to homes where people would give them all of the vital necessities a child needed: A bed to sleep in, a roof over their head, clothes on their back, food in their stomach, and unconditional love and affection.

Yeah, I had all of that. Ms. Melanie treated me differently than all of the other children, but it wasn’t because I was special to her, holding a little loving spot on her heart, even though it felt that way sometimes. It was because she watched me get abused on camera without figuring out who my mother was to incriminate her, but that was okay with me. That would mean I would someday have to conclude that she was the person who birthed me—the one person in this world who was supposed to love me more than her next heroin fix—and then threw me away on the doorstep to a mysterious building in a mysterious town so that she could have no cares, no worries.

Everyone in the orphanage knew it too, little Nick’s mama wanted drugs and sex more than she wanted him. It was like all of the kids could sense I was different because of it, detached from life and emotions and reality. During recess, they didn’t want to play with me, acting as if I had cooties. During any meal time, they didn’t want to sit beside me, acting as if I had the plague. And during bedtime, no one ever wanted the bed beside mine, acting as if they could smell the neglect wafting from the pores of my skin.

I heard stories about my childhood drifting all around the orphanage as I got older, as if I was some sort of urban legend, or gruesome ghost story. Stories like: “Hey, you know that Nick kid? I heard he was a heroin addict before he got dropped by his whore-dancer mother.” And people would usually reply with, “What? No way. That’s impossible for a three-year-old to be addicted to heroin!” and that person would usually shoot back at them, “Really? Well, what about babies born addicted to drugs? He could have been born off drugs and then, she had to keep feeding him the heroin until she got greedy and dumped him on the orphanage steps.”

Stories like rumors of a past that I wasn’t aware about. People said all kinds of things. Stupid things like that I was born addicted to heroin or that I was some type of Satanic spawn and, instead of sacrificing me, my mother had placed me on the steps as if she were some noble saint. But, I knew the truth; whether people tell me I was too young to remember that far back or not. I knew the truth.

A couple weeks after my sixteenth birthday (counted on October 23rd, the night I wound up on the orphanage steps) a man with a chocolate brown fedora and a chocolate brown trench coat to match walked up the steps. I remember sitting in my room that I shared with three other boys, leaning against the windowsill with my elbow propped up by the ledge and my chin propped up by the heel of my hand. My eyes were staring down the street towards the playground that I used to sneak off to when I wanted a cigarette. I had a hidden pack under the slide that was tucked into a small sandwich baggie, buried beneath a mound of mulch and dirt. He was tall—the tallest man I’d ever seen walk up those steps, and when he rang the doorbell, he lifted his pallid hand to take his hat off, unsheathing dark blonde hair. I remember him taking a step back and looking straight up at me. When our eyes connected, his hazel eyes narrowed and I stood up straighter, my shoulders pulling back and my spinal cord aligning perfectly.

When he was ushered in through the door, I remember walking to my bedroom door and leaning against the wall, staring through the crack as Ms. Melanie folded her hands in front of her and took a step back to stare the man in the eye with a leveled gaze.

“Hello, I’m Ms. Melanie, the caretaker.” she said to him, a smile in her voice and on her lips, “What can I do for you today?”

He nodded to her, his mouth twitching into a smile, one that I could see through a little too easily. Behind his grin, I could detect anger and rigid resentment, because it was something that I saw in myself daily. “Hello, I’m Vick Anderson. I’ve come to adopt.”

“Oh, that’s great!” Ms. Melanie smiled wider, taking him toward the living area and out of eyesight. This caused my feet, on their own accord, to travel out of the room, following the railing until I was in the corridor parallel to my room, and able to see into the living area. “Have you adopted before?”

Vick Anderson placed his fedora on the coffee table as Ms. Melanie handed him a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “No, this would be the first for me.” Vick Anderson shrugged halfheartedly, picking up the cup with gratitude.

“Oh,” her voice flattened with disappointment, yet livened with enthusiasm. “Well, are you married then? Been trying for a couple years?”

“I’m not married.” He said with a snap, his neck inclining slightly towards my guardian. When she just stared at him in response, he cleared his throat and took a hearty glug of plain coffee. “And I’m not looking for a baby, or even a toddler. I want a boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen—a young adult, if you will.”

“Oh,” Ms. Melanie said quite audibly, taken back like I was, her eyebrows furrowing together as she sat back in her seat with a rigid spinal cord, just as mine was. “Well, we only have two boys that fit your criteria.”

Vick Anderson nodded, his voice coming out in heady demand. “Good, show them to me.”

I could see it all in her eyes. She wanted to tell him to leave, to find some other orphanage to adopt from, to get off her private property before she had the police rip him from the premises. Instead, she just nodded once and stood up, walking toward the stairs that were just to the left of where I was crouching.

Walking smoothly and quickly, I made it around the railing and back to my bedroom before they could see me. Sitting on my bed with my feet propped up on the footboard, my head inclined toward the door. My eyes darted to Evan, who was walking out of the bathroom attached to our bedroom, a towel patting his ash-blonde hair dry.

“What were you doing?” he asked, his blue eyes connecting to my greyer ones. He turned toward the door just at the opportune time to watch Ms. Melanie and Vick Anderson walk in just a few feet from him. “Hi.”

Ms. Melanie gave us each a smile in turn, her hand reaching back and hovering over Vick Anderson’s shoulder. “Evan, Nick, this is Vick Anderson. He’s looking to adopt.”

I looked him from his dogshit brown shoes all the way up to his dark blonde hair. “What’s he want with a couple teenage boys?” I asked in my deep voice, my throat vibrating with the want of salivation, but still running dry.

Vick Anderson narrowed his eyes on me like an eagle narrows its eyes on a snake, like I’d somehow become his prey. “And who might you be?” he said to me.

Slowly, I climbed to my feet, my eyes almost level with his from my spot across from him. “Nick.”

“Nick is our special little gift.” Ms. Melanie smiled toward me, her eyes going back to Vick Anderson’s, avoiding the painful glare I was sending her at this moment. “His mother left him here for us.”

“Is that so?” Vick Anderson’s even darker voice purred as he took two steps toward me. I wanted to scurry back by those same two steps, but couldn’t allow intimidation to overcome my stability.

I nodded just once, my eyes never dragging away or wavering from his own, my tone challenging him, “Yes. She was an abusive, heroin whore. She dumped me on the steps here at two-thirty in the morning.”

I wanted to flick my gaze to Evan’s or even Ms. Melanie’s, just to see what reaction I gouged from them, but my eyes were glued to Vick Anderson and his eyes were glued to mine. Through unmoving lips, Vick Anderson said, “How old are you, Nick?”

“Sixteen.” I said through the same unmoving lips, my palms tingling with a sensation that made me want to slam a fist so hard into his cheekbone, just to feel the crunch of it beneath my knuckles. “Answer the question.”

“I want a son, Nick. I want a boy that I can teach to be a suitable young man. I want what any father would want for his son.” Vick Anderson’s arms spread out around him, yet his eyes never wavered in the slightest. “What do you say, my boy?”

I wanted to tell him to go to hell. I wanted to tell him to shove that cliché so far up his ass that he’d be able to taste how corny it sounded to my ears. I wanted to tell him to take Evan; one less person in my room would be nice. I wanted to say all of these things at the same time, but the only thing that came from my mouth was, “Let me gather my things.”

Finally releasing me as I released him from our locking glares, we both turned to Ms. Melanie. She smiled sadly, the kind of smile that would make you shed a tear if you ever saw it the way she wore it. “Um, let me just go get the—err¬—paperwork for you to fill out. It’ll only take a minute.”

Vick Anderson walked up to me, clapping his hand on my shoulder with an artificial smile so fake it nearly made me cringe away from him. “Alright, son, get your stuff together. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

I nodded, my eyes following him out as Ms. Melanie stared at me with that stare before she, too, turned her back on me and walked out. I wanted to reach out to her, embrace her like she’d so often embraced me, thank her, but none of that surfaced far enough for it to become tangible.

“Wow.” Evan said, blowing out a sigh and scratching the back of his neck, “You’re really getting out of here, Nick. How do you feel?”

Swiveling my head toward him, I stared at him for a moment. Evan was the only one who ever dared to look at me long enough to see past the heroin whore, but that didn’t mean we were friends, or even acquaintances. He understood me on some level, having been born to a mother who was addicted to crack shortly after he was born. When she found that she couldn’t get out of the slums of it, though, she brought him here. Knocked on the door, she did, cradling him in a raggedy old plaid blanket with jittering hands touching his face, until Ms. Melanie opened the door.

She looked our guardian straight in the face, Evan said, and said to her, “I can’t.” and put baby Evan in her arms and ran down the steps in tears. He always tried to sympathize with me, but I always wanted to tell him that it wasn’t the same thing. She loved him, genuinely loved him. Maybe not enough to get herself clean, or maybe she wasn’t strong enough to do it, but she had affection and maternal love for him enough to hand him off to better care. My mother threw me on the doorstep and threatened me. There was no love. She dumped me here because she probably thought the cops would trace the body back to her if she left me for dead.

It just wasn’t the same thing, but I never cared enough to tell Evan that.

So, as he stared at me with a hopeful gleam filling his gaze, I merely shrugged and turned my back on him, pulling a duffle bag from under my bed and threw the few outfits I possessed into the bag. “No different, really.”

“You don’t feel,” Evan struggled for words, his hands rising over his head for a moment, “I don’t know, liberated, free, happy?”

Without looking up from folding my clothes into my bag, I shrugged halfheartedly with a smirk twitching up the left side of my mouth. “Kid, you know I don’t know the meaning to that word.”

He shrugged, “Maybe now you will.”

“Evan,” I said with an incredulous undertone, “It’s not going to be any different than living here and you know it.”

“It doesn’t matter, Nick.” Evan snapped at me, his voice biting to break at the feel of rejection. “You get to leave this place. Whether or not it’s different, it doesn’t matter, you get to leave. You get to be free.”

“Get the fuck over it, Evan.” I said, “You’ll get your family, but you can’t have this one. This one doesn’t deserve you.”

Evan stared at me as I stabbed his Achilles heel, ripping it from his ankle mercilessly. He stormed towards me with a tear in his eye, “What’s that even supposed to mean? I’ve never been anything but nice to you, and you—you—you go and say this shit?”

I pushed him back by two steps, keeping my hand up, ready to push him down if I had to. “No,” I stressed the word, “You don’t want this one, kid. Trust me when I say that.”

Shaking his head, he pressed the back of his hand to his tear stricken eye, trying to cover it with dignity. “Just… just go fuck yourself, Nick.”

Just before Evan could make it out the door, I called, “Hey, Evan,” and when he turned to me, I licked my bottom lip before saying in the most sincere tone I could muster, whatever sincere truly felt like, “You’ll know when the right one’s for you, kid. It’ll be the one with the storybook parents and that little sister you always wanted. Just take care of yourself until then.”

All he gave me was a cool nod, his eyes going to the floor and closed the door once he was past the threshold. I stared at the wood until it opened again two minutes later. This time, a kind face with sad eyes came in with her braid spilling over her shoulder and her arms crossed over her chest. Ms. Melanie walked toward me, slow like I was a wild beast she was trying to back calmly into a corner.

“You know,” she began as she turned her body away from me and angled her head to look out the window, “I would have adopted you the day you came in here if I was allowed to.”

I nodded, mumbling, “I know.”

“I wanted to. I wanted to be that mother you deserved, Nick, I really did.” She whispered as her throat clogged up with tears thick enough to suffocate her.

I nodded again, looking over my shoulder at the back of her head, “I know.”

She looked over her shoulder at me as tears streamed down her cheeks without regret, “But this’ll be good for you, won’t it?” I stayed silent for a moment, just staring at her, until she sniffled, “Tell me it will be, Nick. Tell me this’ll be good for you.”

Robotically, I mumbled as my eyes searched through her glassy ones, “This’ll be good me.”

Through a quick sob, Ms. Melanie spun around on the pad of her foot and gathered me into her arms, one snaking around my upper back and her hand pressing against my head, like she’d held me when I was small child. “Oh, I’m really going to miss you, my poor, sad Nick.” All that was heard for a minute was her sobs and deep inhales before she barely whispered, “Promise me you’ll try to be happy.”

“I…” I began but stopped. I didn’t know if I could keep good on this promise, vowing to attempt to be something I didn’t even understand. But, I gulped as I said strongly, “I promise.”

She pulled back, pressing a kiss to my cheek. I was taller than her by nearly a head, but in this moment I felt smaller than her by half her height. I suddenly was that scared three-year-old, crying for mama to come back. Thirteen years of my life I was walking away from, and I didn’t really know if it was going to be exactly like this, but a small part of me hoped it would be.

“Go,” she whispered as she sat down on my bed and spread her hand across my quilt before gripping handfuls of it in her hands and lowering her torso onto it, holding it like she was holding my frail three-year-old body.

Looking down at the ashen floorboards, I whispered more to myself than to her, “You’ll always be my true parent, my real guardian. Thank you for picking up the scared child with cuts and bruises covering his body and wrapping a blanket around his shoulders to make him feel safe again.”

I could tell she heard me, because her sobs stopped for a moment and my bed creaked as she leaned on her arm to gaze at the back of my head, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn around and send her one true smile. So, I sent it to the floorboards as I walked to my bedroom door and closed it for the last time softly behind me.

Leaning against the wall diagonal from the stairs was Evan with his arms crossed over his chest and his face turned to floor as well. When he flicked his eyes up for just one second, I saluted him and walked down the stairs with my duffle bag clapping against my back silently. Vick Anderson was standing beside the front door, his hand positioned over the knob, ready to turn it and usher me out to his dark blue Buick.

“Ready?” he said, his eyes traveling over me as I pulled a maroon jacket over my plain white V-neck, my hand deep in the pocket of my jeans, ripped at the knees.

I nodded, taking in his hulking figure again, his hazel eyes drinking me in the same way I did to him. “Yes.”

He nodded, twisting the knob and ushering me out to his dark blue Buick parked along the curb. He unlocked the doors and told me to throw my bag in the back, and after I did, I climbed into the passenger seat as he turned the engine over twice before it rumbled victoriously to life. An Eighties’ radio station hummed through the speakers as he pulled away from the curb and drove off down the street.

We sat in silence for three hours and twenty-seven minutes, neither one of us making small talk or even attempting to get into a real discussion about living arrangements or personal affairs. I watched as we drove over the border and into the next state over, long ways from being home. No words were spoken unless they were coming through speakers from the radio until Vick Anderson pulled off the highway and took a dirt road for two miles and stopped along a bend between two trees. His car was mostly hidden in crisp, cool shade, his back end hanging out, yet completely unnoticeable.

“Now, Nick, me and you have to get a couple things straight.” He began, “First of all, call me Vick or call me Anderson. I don’t care which, but whatever you start calling me, keep it that way. Second, I run a business, Nick, and I want you to be a part of it. Though, your particular role will be to do and say exactly what I tell you to. Is that going to be a problem between the two of us?”

I stared at him, the seatbelt rubbing my shirt against my chest in a scratchy-uncomfortable kind of way. He slowly reached beneath his seat and pulled out a black Glock 31 pistol, cocking it and balancing it in the palm of his hand. A part of my brain told me to hyperventilate, unbuckle the seatbelt, and make a mad dash for the woods, but a more sensible part of my mind told me to focus on the question and answer it as reasonably as I could.

A hitch in my breath caused it to lodge in my throat for half a second before I licked my lips and shook my head. “No, that won’t be a problem.”

Vick nodded once, and then breathed a sigh as he continued, “Good. And the last thing, Nick, is I’m not your father. I’m not your friend. I’m your boss, I’m your mentor, and for the time being, I’m your caretaker.”

“What does my job entail?” I whispered after a second.

Vick shrugged his left shoulder once, blowing another sigh, prolonging the answer to my question. “In my business, there are a lot of people who want to expose me and find me, Nick. I need someone to take them out, eliminate them from the equation. That’s where you come in.”

“So,” I began, hoping that I would be wrong when I got my answer back, “You want me to kill them?”

“Yes, but—oh, not for a while, dear boy. We have lots of training to accomplish and lots of practicing with different weapons and tactics before you’d be suitable to defend me, or even yourself.”

My eyes dragged closed for a long moment, somewhere deep inside me, I wanted to shed a tear for the lives I would take, but it never surfaced past the depths of my soul. My tongue flitted between my lips, wetting them quickly and darting back inside my mouth as I whispered, “Oh.”

“Your training will begin tomorrow, after you’ve had a good night’s rest and a nice meal, one fit for a king.” Vick paused for a moment, his eyes looking down to his hand before looking back at me. He offered his hand, sternly saying, “Here, take it.”

My fingers twitched, almost wanting to take it, hold it for my own, but I couldn’t bring myself to take it from his slacken grip. When I looked at him, his eyes held demand and a reserved anger, a silent threat saying a slew of things, all of them ending badly if I didn’t reach out and take the gun from his hand.

Reaching out, I picked it up, finger poised over the trigger. It wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t light either. It felt like it was weighted, but I didn’t know shit about guns then, so I couldn’t be reliable for anything I said about the pistol resting on safety in my hand. I had the urge to jump out of the car, jog into the woods a while, and shoot the loaded round off at tree trunks.

“How does it feel?” Vick asked in a whisper, so as not to scare me or cause me to pull the trigger back.

I looked at him, the poor souls of those I would take completely forgotten as a gleam shined from my eyes. My voice came out thick, hoarse, rough: “Fucking powerful.”