The Misbegotten

“I had been home all day, because my parents had gone out. They’ve been going crazy, trying to find out anything related to what happened to my sister. I waited by the phone for some – any – kind of news. My mom had gone out driving the neighborhood again. My dad went back to the NIA sub-station to see if the troopers had discovered anything new,” Tirza was saying.

This was about a quarter of an hour after she had stopped crying. She was finally calm enough to put words together, form a proper sentence.

We hadn’t pumped her for information. We’d just waited patiently for the wracking sobs to subside, for the sniffles and hiccups to stop. Though it took hours, we let the emotions burn through her until at last they flamed out.

She just started talking and we hadn’t stopped that either.

We were all curious what was horrible enough to bring her here, to my house – of all places – in the middle of the night. But, we were tactful too. It was better to let things run their course.

We were all sitting on the bed now, Ramona and Katie before Tirza. She was still sitting in my lap, holding me around the waist, the side of her head still plastered to my chest.

She continued telling us her tale. “Of course, nothing was happening. There were no phone calls and no visitors – nothing. The house had been quiet all day, which was unbearable for me. All I could do was think about Lisa, wonder about the awful person that took her, agonize over the horrible things he might be doing to her. It was so much, at one point, I was even sick.”

The girls and I shared a knowing look. Tirza’s bout with sickness had nothing to do with the situation. She was a Muto too.

Unheeding of us, my ex-girlfriend went on. “It was around sundown, I guess, when my father came home. He came in muttering to himself like he does when he’s super mad. I came out of my room to talk to him, but he just stormed passed me and went to the kitchen. He yanked the frig open and grabbed a beer and almost polished it off in like one… f-freakin’ gulp.”

I could almost picture him with his stocky frame in jeans and a t-shirt, wearing the black sneakers he always wore. His head tilted back as he downed the beer. His medium-length hair would hang down toward the floor of Tirza’s parents’ small kitchen. He was not an ugly man, just plain with a broad face, swarthy complexion, a wide bulbous nose and dark seedy eyes. He could be quite intimidating at times.

“I knew it was going to be a long night, because whenever he drinks like that - all angry and fast - he’s not drinking to get refreshed. He’s drinking to get drunk.” She paused for a moment to take a few breaths, wiping at her nose with half a mind. To my surprise, she wrapped her arms back around me again.

I looked at Katie uneasy, but she only raised her eyebrows and give me an “oh well” sort of look back. That made me frown more.

“I knew then,” began Tirza once more, “he hadn’t found out anything about Lisa. His anger he directed at that, not at me. So, after he took a second can from the frig, I followed him into the front room. I sat down on the love seat next to the couch where had plopped himself down. He finished off the first beer and opened the second, but didn’t take a drink. He just sat there staring across the room at the big mirror we have hanging on the opposite wall.

“I just waited, not saying a word. I knew if I disturbed him, he’d start to yell at me, so I waited.”

I nodded, agreeing, knowing how much of a dick Tirza’s father could be at times.

For some reason, he and I never quite saw eye to eye. We were like water and oil, though we tried to get along at first. In the end, we couldn’t stand the sight of the other and left it at that.

I know that fucker was overjoyed to see me and Tirza break up, but I guess I had some degree of vicious glee within myself as well. Whenever I thought of his smug smile at the news his daughter and I were no more. My next thought was always, Yeah, but it was me that popped her cherry!

I know, I know, it’s not the nicest thing to think, but what the fuck the old man hated me, so fuck him. Besides, I’m not fucking monument to goodness, so sue me.

“Maybe about ten minutes later,” forged on Tirza, “he looked over at me and asked me if I had heard anything from my mother. I shook my head, because other than me, there hadn’t been a single noise in the house the whole day. He just nodded and went back to staring at the mirror.

“I don’t know how long we stayed like, in silence, together. We were so isolated from one another we were like marooned on separate desert islands a thousand miles apart. The sun had long set. I was getting hungry, but I ignored the pain in my stomach, because I knew Lisa was going through much worse. I could feel it in my heart, in the center of my soul. Something bad was happening to my baby sister. I knew whatever it was; it was something she didn’t have the capacity to understand. Something evil, because it was visiting pure innocence…” She trailed off into silence.

From my vantage I had only a partial view of her face, but I had come to know her methods of expression so well. I knew the cast of her face looked haunted. She would seem sallow and drawn with tightness about her eyes. Her orbs would flash with anxiety, abhorrence and fright. She was envisioning her sister’s rape.

I guess, when I look back on it and try to make sense of how things turned out the way they did. And this is despite the fact, I’m irrevocably addicted to women. All the pleasure they can give, when they open themselves, ask for help without restraint, they are irresistible. I should’ve figured my heart would stir for Tirza.

In truth, though we’d fought like a pair of stung assholes, I hadn’t stopped feeling something special for her. I often think about things if I hadn’t said Katie’s name aloud that day when her and I were fucking like wild hogs on the floor of the Loft. What could things have been like? What kind of life would I have lived if her and I had stayed together? It was a stupid notion I know, because the only realistic answer to that question is death. We’d have both ended up dead.

Sometimes late at night, I wonder as I try to figure out a way to bring back my innocence, as I try to wash the blood from my hands. I know it is no more than a vain mental attempt at absolution that will never come.

I am, without a doubt, going to hell, because my next thoughts are predictable, beyond reproach.

I think of Ramona…

…And Katie…

…And Sandy…

…And Leda…

…And I know I cannot change things. I am bound to my past and the deeds that have filled my life. Right, wrong or indifferent, they comprise me. I fucking am who and what I fucking am; there are no bones about it.

Yeah, yeah, total tangent, sorry!

“Sometime later,” Tirza began, shattering the silence, her voice was shaky now. Her grip about my body just a wee bit tighter.

Something bad was coming.

“My mother stepped through the screen door, locked it. She closed the main door next and locked that as well. She turned to my dad and asked if there was anything new. He said something like ‘not a god damned thing’. This made my mom frown, because she hated it when any of us cussed. She let it go though, and looked over at me. I shook my head ‘no’, because, like my dad, I had nothing to report. She let her chin fall to her chest and began to cry. Quiet and in the middle of the room with her shoulders bouncing up and down, she cried. I was going to go to her, but my dad was so fast, I didn’t even see him move. I just stood there and watched them embrace. My mother cried and my father looked over her shoulder, facing the front door. His face kept turning uglier and uglier with every sob escaping my mom. He looked so mean.

“I sat back down on the love seat, hoping he wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t want to see that expression poised in my direction. It was murderous.

“Then someone knocked on the front door real hard and insistent. In fact, it was loud enough, if we’d been asleep, it would’ve awakened us all. My parents broke apart. They looked into each other’s eyes asking without speaking, if they were expecting anyone. Both of them shook their heads and just stood there rooted in place. The knocking came again. This time my dad stepped around my mom, placing her behind him. This confused me, because they were acting like something dangerous was about to happen.

“My mom glanced at me and motioned for me to get out of sight. For a second, I didn’t know what to do. She did it again. I looked around, trying to figure out what to do. The knocking came for a third time, even louder and accompanied by a stern, authoritative voice.” Tirza unlatched her arms from around my waist and sat up. Still, she was leaning against me, light, unconscious, her entire focus upon her story.

“Open the door! This is the Los Angeles Policing Division of the Northern Intercontinental Alliance. We need you to open the door now,’” she mimicked, making her voice as deep as it could go.

Then she did the most outlandish thing I could imagine her doing in a moment like this. She clucked her tongue. Her expression turned derisive. “But he didn’t sound that way,” she clarified. “He had an accent and rolled his r’s. His words sounded clipped as if he could only speak in short rapid bursts.”

“He was from the Asian Sector, huh?” I asked, knowing it for truth as I spoke the words.

Tirza gazed up at me with penetrating eyes. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Why do they always send so many from the Asian Sector?” asked my girlfriend, more than a pinch of exasperation in her tone.

The girls peered at one another in question.

“It makes things easier,” I announced to their bewilderment.

“What you do mean, Effy?” asked Katie, her brows knitting.

“Because they are far away from home, that’s why. It makes it easier to follow orders you would otherwise question, if you were looking at people you could relate to. We are not like them. So, it makes it easier for them to take us from our families or to hurt us or detain us without cause, because we are different.” I answered disdainful of the NIA troops. The assholes were saturating the neighborhood. Those men were so much shorter than me, and yet had the power of the world’s strongest government behind them. The strongest that had ever existed on earth no less.

“For real?” asked Katie.

“It makes sense when you think about it,” interjected Ramona. “It makes it easier for them to fuck with us.” Her gaze was hard. Her eyes were glossy.

“So, what happened next, Teezee?” I implored. I used my pet name for her, prodding her, but doing so with the softest instrument I had in my employ – our past.

She stared back at me with a guarded expression.

I could see something behind those deep, brown eyes of hers.

Whatever it was, she masked it behind the bastion of protectiveness she had built up and shored since our break-up. It was a look about her I had come to despise, because she was hiding the truth behind it.

Yet, she plowed on. “My dad shouted then, something like, ‘what the hell do you guys want?’ Just as I made it to the archway, leading to the hallway bisecting our house, I hear this booming crash. I spun around just in time to see the front door come flying open; splinters of wood showering my dad as the Police come storming in.” She paused and swallowed hard. “Only… they weren’t the Police.” She paused again, glancing at each of us before she went on, tears reforming in her eyes. “They were NIA Shock-troopers in full gear. I mean loaded with it – body armor, tactical belts, helmets, headsets, grenades and wrist-comms… and machine guns. Every single one of them had a machine gun.” She took a shuddering breath. Just as sudden as it appeared, the protective wall she had built around herself vanished. She gazed up at me, shutting out the others in the room.

“They shot him, Estefan -.” She burst into tears and buried her face in the crook of my armpit, shouting with muffled indignity and sorrow. “They came through the door and shot my dad so many times. I could see he was dead, even before he hit the ground! They shot him! They killed my father! In our house! They killed him like a dog!”

I reached down and put my hand upon her head, looking up at Ramona.

Her face mirrored what I felt – stricken to the point of nausea.

“My mom screamed, so loud, Effy… so loud, it hurt my ears,” she continued. Her voice became garbled, rough as she turned her head to one side. She laid it more square against me. “I couldn’t watch. I just couldn’t, because I knew what was going to happen next. I backed into the hallway. I felt for the door to my bedroom with my hand when a second set of shots rang out. My mother’s screams stopped at once. I swear I heard her hit the floor. I think I would’ve done something stupid right then. But, I heard the Asian trooper say something like, ‘They have another daughter. Find her and neutralize the situation. Inhaler readouts are indicating this entire area will go Muto in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Command wants them all anesthetized by then.

“My mind went haywire. I think I sort of blacked out, because all I remember was falling out of my window, hitting my head on that stupid rock by the fence. Then I was scrambling through the tunnel,” she said. She stopped for a moment to look at me and gave me an embarrassed half-shrug.

“The tunnel? You have a tunnel right outside your bedroom window?” asked Katie, her thin eyebrows coming together.

I let an irritated line of air through a gap in my teeth. “She’s talking about this sort of long hole or absence of growth in the bushes on that side of her house. It is just large enough to crawl through and the bushes are large enough to conceal the fact it’s even there. It extends the whole way to the alley behind Tirza’s house,” I explained, so that Tirza wouldn’t have to.

Katie’s frown deepened in thought, but I knew it would be Ramona who divined that which was left unsaid.

“You used to use that passage to sneak into her bedroom, huh?” asked my insightful girlfriend, oh so infuriating.

Tirza went board-like for a second. She pushed away from me as if I’d contracted the plague between heartbeats. Her face went crimson with humiliation.

“From what I understand, the ‘tunnel’ was there years before the time Tirza and I were together.” I was being diplomatic. It was ridiculous to make Tirza have to endure anything more than she had already.

“But still…,” added Ramona, leaving her implication hanging without saying it.

“As a matter of fact, he did use it to get into my bedroom, just as I used to sneak out to come here, OK?!?”

I felt my face transfix with a mixture of awe and puzzlement.

It was Tirza, her previous uneasiness disappeared. “You weren’t the first girl to know how to climb up the tree and which window to step through, Ramona.”

My girlfriend and ex-girlfriend stared at one another, level, old emotions returning.

I could feel the air itself thicken.

Silence ensued; a long, stale and uncomfortable sort of quiet.

I tried my damnedest to put errant thoughts of Tirza coming through my window. More often than not, she wore nothing underneath her sweater, but the skin she was born in. She had a knack for shedding her clothing before she would climb the tree on the side of the house. She loved to give me one of her a cute, little shows. These involved a seductive disrobing of that last garment before she would jump into my arms. We would begin to make out like wild monkeys. Some of our best love making had followed those routines. Sometimes we would make love until we couldn’t any longer. We’d just fall asleep wherever we happened to be at the time – the bathroom, on my bed, even on the floor.

Tirza might come across as Little-Miss-Fucking-Goody-Two-Shoes to the world around her. But, get her to fall in love with you, then get her alone - she was a teeny-tiny fuck toy.

Oh god, and could she ever spin on a cock!

Ok, ok I’ll stop.

“So from there, you made you way here?” asked my cousin, as tired of the awkward situation as I was.

Tirza continued to gaze at Ramona for few more moments. “Yeah, I didn’t know what I was doing,” she retorted. Her eyes reverted to Katie now, as if my girlfriend didn’t exist. “I don’t even remember how my clothes got all torn up or how I got so dirty. Shit, I don’t even remember when I made the decision to come here. I just did. I just wanted to get away from those jerks that killed my parents. I just wanted to get away...” Her voice lost whatever edge it had gained while she’d confronted my girlfriend. The tears began to fill within her eyelids once more.

Ramona – out of nowhere – released an exasperated sigh.

On automatic, my expression darkened.

Fucking bitch, what’s your god damned problem!

Yet, my girlfriend proved my reaction false. “Tirza?” she prodded, kind, soft.

My ex-girl peered up at her through her blurred vision.

“All this change has been so sudden and so… so… so, fucking mind-blowing I’m not quite sure how to ‘be’, you know? It’s confusing.”

Tirza started to shake her head that she didn’t know what the other girl was talking about.

Ramona continued. “I’m sorry.”

Now, my mouth gaped as wide as one of those fucked up mummies in that old-school Brendon Frasier movie¹. It had to have been hanging down below my pectoral muscles after hearing what I had just heard.

“It’s just hard to get over the whole jealousy thing,” confessed the girl that, a few seconds ago, I was certain was my girlfriend. Now, she sounded like a whole different person. “Knowing you had him first has always sort of bothered me.”

“Well, he’s yours now,” began the small teenage girl. Then her gaze shifted to Katie, “And apparently yours as well.”

Katie had the decency to blush.

{ ¹”Brendon Frasier movie’’: refers to The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, wherein the mummies yell and scream with what seems like unhinged jaws. }