“We’re done, Vivica.”
Her whole body flinched. Not at the words. At the name. I had never called her Vivica to her face. Not once in twenty-nine years. It was always mama, mommy, mom. Even when she was wrong, even when she was cruel, even when she was orchestrating the destruction of our family from a prison cell, she was still mama to me. Until right now.
“Don’t call me that,” she whispered.
“It’s your name.”
“I’m your mother.”
“You’re a woman who gave birth to me and then spent the next twenty-nine years using that fact to control me. That’s not a mother. That’s a warden.” I pushed the chair back and stood up. “Goodbye, Vivica.”
I turned and walked toward the door. Behind me I heard her stand, heard the chair scrape across the floor, heard the guard tell her to sit down.
“Where are you going?” Her voice was louder now, cracking at the edges. “Serenity. SERENITY. After everything I’ve done for you? AFTER EVERYTHING I’VE DONE FOR YOU?”
I kept walking. Through the door, down the hallway, past the security checkpoint, through the lobby, and out into the parking lot where the air hit my face and felt like the first clean breath I’d taken in years. The tears came then. Not for her. For me. For the little girl who loved her mother so much she let that love become a leash.
I sat in the car and gripped the steering wheel and let the tears run until they stopped on their own. And then I thought about the last secret. The one that had kept me tethered to Vivica for years. The one she held over me without ever saying it out loud because she didn’t have to. We both knew it was there, sitting between us like a loaded gun that only she had the safety on.
Mega wasn’t the first man I killed.
It was winter break of my sophomore year. I was six months pregnant and had taken a leave of absence from Ashford. I’d been on leave for three months by then, living alone in a cabin apartment my mother had set up for me about an hour outside of Ashford. The school thought I had a chronic illness, courtesy of the doctors my mother paid off. My brothers thought I was on a student exchange program. Nobody knew I was six months pregnant and watching my body change in a bathroom mirror every morning wondering how I got here. Mr. Jamison knew. And he’d stopped answering my calls the same week I told him.
I begged him to meet me. Called him from burner phones my mother gave me, left messages, wrote letters. He ignored all of it until I told him that if he didn’t meet me, I’d tell the headmaster everything. He agreed to come to the cabin my mother had rented nearby. Somewhere remote. Somewhere private. Somewhere we could talk without anyone hearing.
He showed up looking like a man who had already decided this conversation was beneath him. Sat across from me at the kitchen table with his arms crossed and his jaw tight and looked at my belly with disgust.
“You should have gotten the abortion,” he said. “I told you I would pay for it. This didn’t have to happen.”
“How could you say that? This is our child.”
“This is a mistake. And you’re compounding it by keeping it.”
“You said you loved me.”
“I said a lot of things, Serenity. I’m a teacher. Saying things is what I do. I cared for you. I really did. But I can’t be a father to your child. I got what I wanted from you.”
That was the sentence. Right there. That was the one that turned everything red. Not the months of silence. Not the coldness. Not the disgust on his face when he looked at my belly. It was “I got what I wanted from you.” He used my body and discarded it when I started carrying his seed.
The knife was on the counter behind me. It was a kitchen knife that came with the cabin rental. I don’t remember picking it up. I don’t remember crossing the three feet between us. I remember his eyes going wide and his hands coming up and then I remember blood on my shirt and him on the floor making sounds that got quieter and quieter until they stopped.
I was fifteen years old, soon to be sixteen, six months pregnant, standing over the body of my AP English teacher in a rented cabin in Connecticut with a kitchen knife in my hand and blood on the floor that I couldn’t stop looking at.
My mother arrived several hours later. She walked into that cabin and looked at the body and looked at me and didn’t say a word. She just pulled out her phone and called my father. Dante drove up from DC the same night. The two of them wrapped the body in plastic sheeting and put it in the trunk of Dante’s car and drove it somewhere I never asked about. They cleaned the cabin until it looked like nothing had happened. My mother burned my clothes in the fireplace and gave me new ones from a bag she’d packed before she left DC.
They made it look like Mr. Jamison had run away. Left his wife, left the school, left the state. His resignation letter was forged. His bank accounts were closed. Within a month, it was like he’d never existed. The school moved on. The students moved on. Everyone moved on except me because I was stillpregnant with his baby and still hearing his voice in my head every night.
I gave birth in hiding at a facility my mother arranged. The adoption was handled through a private agency with sealed records. I held my daughter for eleven minutes before they took her. I counted every one of those minutes and I remember every second of every one.
I went back to Ashford the next school year like nothing happened. New semester, new classes, new smile that I practiced in the mirror until it looked real. Nobody ever asked about Mr. Jamison. Nobody ever asked about my leave of absence. Nobody ever connected me to any of it because Vivica had buried the truth so deep that even God would need a search warrant to find it.
And that’s why I stayed loyal to her for so long. That’s why I visited her in prison and brought her commissary money and held her hand along the way and called her mama even when my brothers couldn’t stand the sound of her name. Because she held the biggest secret of my life in her hands and she never once threatened to use it. She just let it exist between us, unspoken, and that silence was its own kind of control.
But I was done being controlled. By Mega, by my mother, by the ghost of a man who read me poetry and stole my childhood and paid for it with his life. I was done with all of it.
I put my hand on my stomach. Eight weeks. Maybe nine. This baby was mine and nobody was taking it from me. Not adoption, not miscarriage, not cocaine, not Vivica. I was going to carry this child and deliver this child and raise this child with every ounce of love I had stored up from the two I lost. This baby was going to know its mother’s face and hear its mother’s voice and feel its mother’s hands every single day of its life.
I started the car and pulled out of the prison parking lot and drove toward Rita’s house. I was going home to the only familythat had never asked me to be anything other than exactly who I was.
