“Look, I don’t have shit to do with that, and I’m not coming over there for them to haul me off to jail.”
Bella heard nothing she said. “Look, just tell them you were young and scared. I will be here the entire time, and everything will be okay.”
“I’m not going to jail for no bullshit that I didn’t do.” Bianca had lowered her voice by now.
Bella, with her one-track mind, had no type of understanding of the matter. “Again, sis, I love you, but what you did was wrong. And if you don’t hurry up and get over here and face the music, I will have to tell them where you at.”
Bianca took a breath. She couldn’t believe her ears. How dare she? she thought. She was going to hang up the phone, but caught herself before she did. Instead, she robotically replied, “Okay.”
Hell, no. That wasn’t her final decision, but she knew that was what she had to say to at least appease her sister for the moment, to kill time, to think. She had to play this thing out right, until she figured out what to do, and there was only one person’s advice that she truly trusted.
“Someone’s coming.” Bella’s voice got lower. “I gotta go. I love you. I’m here for you. Please, just do the right thing.”
The phone clicked in Bianca’s ear. She looked down at the phone and hit the END button. She turned her head, facing the mirror. She hadn’t felt the tear running down her cheek, but now she saw it. For a moment, the reflection staring back at her in the mirror was her fourteen-year-old self. The same fourteen-year-old who was scared to death and had no one in the world to lean on or to protect her.
At that moment, she could vividly hear her grandmother’s voice in her head, the day she brought the baby home from the hospital. That bastard was born as a punishment to your hot red ass. You shame your mother! And I promise you, it’s going to make your life a living hell. She spit those words like balls of fire, and they burned like hell.
“Babe?”
“Oh God!” Bianca turned to see Caesar standing in the bathroom doorway. There had to have been a hole in her chest from where her heart jumped out and landed on the floor. She looked up into Caesar’s concerned eyes, and without saying a word, he took her in his arms.
A wailing sound escaped her throat as she balled into his chest. She didn’t feel like the independent young woman he had fallen in love with anymore. She felt like a scared fourteen-year-old who needed her daddy, a father she never even knew.
In that second, she imagined that she was a girl in her daddy’s arms and that he was her father, the superman who would make everything all right.
Caesar tightened his arms around her. “What’s the matter, baby?”
Bianca couldn’t even speak. She trembled in his arms.
“What’s wrong? Talk to me.”
Bianca’s phone slid out of her hand and onto the floor, cracking the screen. Next, Bianca began to slide to the bathroom floor.
Caesar was able to scoop her up into his arms before she hit the tile. “Come on, baby, you gotta talk to me.” Caesar carried Bianca into their bedroom and laid her on the bed.
Bianca’s limp body didn’t even have the strength to sit up. Caesar had to sit down and lean her against him. “You’re scaring me, sweetie. Please talk to me.” He kissed her on the forehead. “Who was that on the phone? Did something bad happen?”
Bianca was unresponsive to anything Caesar said.
“I want to help you, but I can’t if you don’t talk to me,” Caesar told her desperately.
Bianca wanted to talk to him. She really did. She just couldn’t get her brain to react. She felt like a mute, and that she’d have to end up communicating by blinking her eyes, once for no and twice for yes. She opened her mouth and tried to talk, but only another wailing sound came out. It sounded like she was in physical pain, and she was. It had nothing to do with the way Caesar had worked her body out either. This had to do with all the pain that she had been concealing for her entire life. Finally it was coming crashing down on her like a skyscraper falling. All the secrets she’d harbored had been like a low-grade infection that had grown into a full-blown case of AIDS.
Caesar decided that all he could do was hold her until she was ready to talk, so that’s what he did for the next five minutes. Finally, Bianca was able to muster up the strength to at least lift her head.
“The police are at my mother’s house. They want to question me. They think I killed my baby.”
“I thought you took the baby to the firehouse,” he said, recalling the story that she had told him and everyone else.
Bianca felt awful. She looked into his eyes. “That’s the only thing that I lied to you about.”
Caesar rubbed her back the entire time, coaxing her, at the same time letting her know he was there for her. It was almost the same feeling that a child would get from its mother. That thought alone made Bianca’s shoulders begin to heave up and down. Her mother would never be there for her like this, no more than she’d been there for her own child she’d given birth to.
The thoughts that Bianca had been able to sweep under the rug and cover with her and Caesar’s blissful relationship were now exposed. The cover had been pulled off of the messy bed she’d made, and now she’d have to lie in it. If she was ever going to share what was going on in her mind with anybody, it would be Caesar. She was afraid, but she still had to come clean.
