Kind Hearted

Bailey’s mother had been gone again for five days. Her name was Luna Bianca, and like the moon, she lived the nightlife, going out to bars, or wherever, staying out for days on end. He never knew where she was or what she did or when she would call.

He lived with his Aunt Lily who was older and kept to herself, reading in her room. She kept the apartment clean and made sure he had clean clothes, but she was a little difficult to talk with, and when she was not working at Johan’s fashion boutique, she was playing bridge or mahjong. Aunt Lily would never discuss his mother, or where she was. She just said, “She loves you. That’s all you need to know.”

He loved his mother with all his heart and worried for her, fretting and pacing as he made himself another package of macaroni and cheese for dinner. The middle of his back got to itching as it did when she was gone and he scratched it on the corner of the doorway into the kitchen. He fretted that she might never come back, that she would die in a car wreck, be kidnapped by some crazy, or actually climb a ladder to the moon and disappear forever as she once said she had been tempted to do.

His mother was so attentive and sweet when she finally wold return home. Her short-cropped hair, brunette and blond and black, with maroon highlights, like a crazy calico cat, would be all wild. Sometimes she smelled of cigarette smoke. Sometimes she smelled of woodsmoke. And sometimes she smelled of fresh air, like cotton. Sometimes she smelled of exotic spices or perfume and she would stroke his blond hair and rub his strong, large forearms, curious about his teachers and his school assignments.

They would talk late into the night at the wooden table in the kitchen overlooking the alley. He told her about school and his dreams, which she would analyze. She always found a way to make his nightmares about her disappearing better, pointing out the positive meanings of his nightlife, that the dreams were multiple reflections of his psyche as he continued to grow into a fine young man who was in charge of his own life. This always made him feel better and proud for dreaming so creatively, instead of so psychotically as he often feared.

She laughed riotously as she told him fabulously detailed stories of places she might have been on her latest outing, and though he could never get a straight story from her, he was so happy to see her that he forgot his torment and fretting. Someday, she explained with a broad smile, she would reveal where she would disappear to, but it was not time yet, and she drifted off to another topic such as the secrets of the quantum physics of love. She would explain how he could create a prom date with the popular high school beauty, Jessica Livingston by just imagining her saying yes. Bailey told her that he couldn’t imagine himself actually asking her out because she was too beautiful. Luna hunched her shoulders and said, “Don’t limit yourself, Bailey, my beautiful, kind-hearted and too shy boy,” she said getting up to warm up a can of Spaghetti O’s.
In their small apartment, Bailey now sorted through a peach crate filled with his mother’s old cassette tapes. He had homework to do for his advanced writing class at high school– a short autobiographical sketch.

He flipped through the cassettes, clicking through them one by one for inspiration – Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson. He stopped at Run DMC. It was her first cassette, bought when she was eleven, only four years before she delivered him into the world like a magical mackerel, slick, shimmering and glistening.

He had grown into a towering, stocky, freckled-faced young man. He had no idea who his father was, but she described him as a big-boned Swede, a pensive Viking, who was a foreign exchange student for one semester at the university where she would go to listen to classes that she sneaked into.
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Bailey was thinking of writing his essay about that lonely night when he emerged in his unbroken birthsack – “You are a special, spiritual boy, so kind-hearted,” she always said. According to one of the hundreds stories of his birth, this one told last year on Christmas eve: When her contractions began, she was sipping Bailey’s Irish Cream (that was how he got his name) at Mickey’s tavern. The bartender allowed her to sneak in because she looked and acted old enough. The bartender’s girlfriend who was leaning back agianst the pool table, said, “You’re going to have a baby, girl!” She placed the cue stick in the rack and took her by the hand, driving her to St. Joseph’s Hospital in a Camaro that blew thick streams of oil smoke. He had no idea if the story was true. She had also told him he was born in a dirt floor cabin during a blizzard in Leadville, delivered by a Mexican mid-wife who had given her herbs that made the birth painless. She also said she delivered him at Smiley’s Laundromat in a basket of satin bedsheets. Always, in any story, she would say that he was born in his unbroken birthsack, so that much, he figured, was true.

Bessie Smith, Whitney Houston, Beyonce, Celone Dion. He pulled a cassette by Aretha from the crate and slid it into the boom box with his meaty fingers. He moved around the apartment, bobbing his head to the music. He looked at the alarm clock on his mother’s nightstand. He patted her bed and soft white bedspread that was always made neatly before she disappeared again, before he came home from school.

He looked at the perfume bottles aligned on her dresser. He looked at a photo of him and her at the aquarium where she took him every Sunday when he was younger. In the photo, he was two years old in a backpack with his chubby, smiling face peering around her shoulder, smiling through her hair that was long and black at the time. She was only seventeen, the same age as he was now.

He looked at her alarm clock. It was only five o’clock, and he thought he would take the bus to the aquarium to watch the fish. Maybe he would get inspiration for the essay there, he thought. He didn’t feel like writing anything. He was sure his mother would not show up that evening. He wanted to cry. He closed his eyes and moaned, “Mother, where are you?”
He grabbed his hooded sweatshirt. He only had a B+ in Mrs. McMillan’s writing class. She was tough and he was determined to write an essay that would finally impress her. It would somehow collapse upon itself when it ended. He loved the idea of self-referential writing, stumbling across old writers from the 60s in the library.

The baseball, basketball, and even the football coaches had encouraged him to go out for sports since he was a natural athlete with giant, powerful forearms, but he shook his head. He was determined to get into college with straight A’s, and to become a marine biologist, adventuring around the world, diving for big bucks. He had finally concluded that he was going to have to leave his mother. He was going to have to stop worrying about her. He put an MC Hammer tape in his pocket. He pulled the Aretha cassette from the boombox and put it in his pocket too. He didn’t have an iPod like everyone else, or even a CD player, only a cassette Walkman. He put on the headphones, grabbed his skateboard, and walked out the door and down the dim hallway to the elevator, thinking of how to do it.

At the aquarium, he stood in the great underwater gallery, gazing at the schools of fish. Small colorful fish flickered by. Jellyfish hovered like diaphanous parachutes. Stingrays flew past like great birds and he kept thinking of the stories of his birth, looking for the mackerels. The fish swirled like liquid diamonds to the music, now that he was high, and he could not imagine where his mother could possibly be and what her life was like.
He pulled out his spiral notebook and began scribbling, “His mother’s name was Luna, and like the moon, she lived the nightlife….” As he wrote, he became vaguely aware of a crying child.

He looked up and there was a little boy walking in circles, looking completely lost. Bailey folded his notebook and approached the boy, who looked up at him tentatively. The boy tugged at Bailey’s shirtsleeve, and whispered, “I don’t know where my mom is,” gulping air, trying to be brave. The boy looked toward the dark opening of the nocturnal fish exhibit and started to sob quietly and hopelessly, just shaking, holding it in, squeezing his eyes closed. Bailey swallowed. He knew what it was like to be away from your mother, the life-giver not to know where your lifeline is, your history.
“Hey, kid, I’ll help you find your mom.” The boy put out his hand and nodded. “Hold my hand.” He placed his headphones over the boy’s ears, Aretha booming it out. That’s how he got along, listening to her cassettes. He grinned looking at the boy smiling. He looked out the huge atrium window, as if he were one of the fish in the aquarium.

For a second, he thought he saw his own mother outside by the fountain. It was only for a second. She was walking arm-in-arm with a dashing man wearing a white fedora and using a walking cane…just another hallucination he had frequently. He shook his head, and gazed at the rising moon, wondering where his mother really was, holding the hand of a boy who, like him, didn’t know where is mother was, which is where he figured he would end his autobiographical sketch, the first chapter of his first novel, in third person, for Ms. McMillan.