Read Online Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus - Free Book Online Page B

tingling and losing sensation, I yanked up my pajama boxer shorts and jabbed the pen against my thigh. The pain was immediate. Stinging medicine flowed hot up my leg toward my heart. I massaged the spot of injection to sooth what I was sure would become a bruise.
    Within seconds, my hives subsided. I could breathe again.
    But I couldn’t stay awake. I fell asleep. I slept and slept. And slept some more. Lurid images of explosions filled my dreamless brain. Everything was too much. Everything. I simply didn’t want to be awake anymore.
    “What in God’s name is wrong with you?” my mother asked when she got home.
    “I used the pen. I’m sleepy,” I said.
    After a few more days of my endless sleep, my mother— my sole physician and guardian—reached into her bag of tricks, diagnosed me with mononucleosis, told me to stay in bed, wrote a letter withdrawing me from school indefinitely for medical reasons, disconnected my phone line, told my friends who stopped by that I couldn’t come to the door, and said I’d enroll at a private middle school once I was better.
    And I was the sick one?
    I was thirteen and I was angry, and being angry made me brave. Memories came back to me from the deep haze they’d hidden in. Simultaneously numb and scared, I told my mother what Chip had done to me. She listened, looked at me with blank eyes, and forbade me to tell anyone else.
    “Don’t complicate the situation, Francisca,” she said. “We risk losing too much, especially now.”
    Central to my required “proactive cooperation,” as she called it, was maintaining all appearances of loyalty to Chip as my father.
    “The court needs to know you miss him, that you think of him as your father. Your only father,” she said.
    I was forbidden from reinitiating contact with Francisco.
    “When you turn eighteen, you can make your own decisions on this matter. But honestly, I don’t know why you would want to associate with such trash,” she said.
    And so, just like that, I became the kid she wished she’d never taught to speak. She said this often, as an aside, as if I was a mouthy brat, which I wasn’t. She said it with a smile and slight laugh—to her colleagues, to her patients, to the gas attendant dude, to whomever would listen to her supposedly innocent maternal teasing. They’d laugh with her, charmed by her as they always were.
    During the divorce proceedings my mother fought for the house—the house I’d been repeatedly raped in. I told her I wanted to move. “Don’t you want to move?” I asked. I pleaded. Blind fury, she fought tooth and nail for her society-marriage-expensive-house-wronged-wife martyrdom.
    “I absolutely refused to let him have the house, for Francisca’s sake,” she later liked to say. “I wasn’t going to let him rob our baby of her home.”
    Years and years of bullshit and lies, but still, when my father died, some part of me wanted nothing more than to sit on my mother’s living room couch and rub elbows with her—of course, even that fantasy wasn’t untainted by reality. Even if she had let me inside her house to sit down, I hated the couch in her living room. When I was fifteen, two of her rich patients had delivered that particular hand-me-down from their garage.
    Why? Because we had no furniture.
    Two years post-divorce, Prince Charm had come to the house with a court order permitting him to select and claim possession of items he’d left behind in his frenzied departure when insufficient blood was reaching his brain. He strolled through the house with his young-nurse-fake-tits-trophy-wife and pointed to things for moving guys to carry out to trucks parked in the carport. Total asshole, Chip didn’t even need any of the stuff he took. He’d been gone for two years, he already had a new house with all new things. That day was pure power trip.
    A man who wouldn’t know how to prepare a meal to save his life, Chip took the ice-cube-dispensing refrigerator from the kitchen, the