Baltimore. They had met in Baltimore, Antwone remembered.
Back then, he was a deckhand on a freighter ship and, after he and the deck crew had handled the mooring lines as they docked in the harbor late in the night, he had run ashore for a few free hours to breathe in the city before the ship set sail for another long journey. They had been going along most of the East Coast, hitting port after port and sometimes for no longer than half a day. He had not slept much during the transits. There was always some pending job to do in the deck department or on the bridge. The kind of job you didn’t particularly look forward to. But being out to sea afterwards was a good tradeoff. It was the thing that made the whole exertion worthwhile. And he was always looking forward to that. But this was going to be his last journey out, for his contract was coming to its term. At that point, Antwone had been circumnavigating the world for nearly six years.
He’d been to Baltimore on past layovers, so he knew his way around the city fairly well. He’d met Liv really by chance. He was heading to a shop to buy some ink ribbons for his typewriter, which he used aboard the ship in his leisure time – not to write per say, but to practice his writing – when he came upon her. She had been abused, both physically and mentally, by some hoodlumy-looking guy, name of Harlan, if memory served. And when he had met the pair in a dim-lit, littered gangway, he gathered from instinct that the abuse was probably carried out on a regular basis. She was just a kid and Harlan was old enough to be her father. But he’d never known who he was to her.
He remembered that Liv was sitting on the curb and Harlan was towering above her and grinning like a wolf that has just had his fill. She was just a kid yet she’d dressed up to appear older. Her leg stockings, heavy makeup, naked belly and gilded anklet could’ve fooled anyone in the night, especially if they didn’t take a closer look. Her face was pallid; her eyes were wet. She’d been holding back cries and Harlan had been taunting her. Antwone had hesitated to interfere. Harlan looked like he could be the scum of the earth. But by the look of things, Liv and he seemed to go way back.
When Antwone’s presence was finally noticed, Harlan looked his way and, after asking Antwone what he was looking at, and after grinning his wolf grin because Antwone was a man and there were circumstances in which men naturally understood each other regardless of their qualms, Harlan had shrugged, told Liv not to wait for him and had rolled away, whistling a song in the air as he pulled out of sight.
Liv had remained seated and Antwone had handed her a hankie because she was sobbing and each sob shook her chest with the force of an earthquake and she had to fling her arms around it like in a fetal position not to show how deeply upset she was. Antwone had reckoned that she didn’t look too healthy. And maybe her racy wardrobe was a camouflage to hide the fact that people had used her before and left her in poor shape.
However, there was something about her, something he could not easily pinpoint that had touched him. And so Antwone had seated himself next to her and they had had a very brief exchange, it’d been mostly one-sided for she had barely uttered a word and had kept her head down for the most part.
Antwone had left her shortly afterwards. He couldn’t remember what it was he had told her to make his words memorable to her. But he was glad she looked fine now, healthy-looking and even a little rosy. But in his mind, she was still that poor, mistreated little girl he’d met on the street that night. Yet to people who met her for the first time now, no doubt she was a fine young woman.
She looked like she had turned her life around…
As he worked on his manuscript till late into the morning, never stopping to try to catch up on his sleep, Antwone thought it was funny the way two strangers’ paths intersected in life. The serendipity of his encounter with Liv here had been the surprising highlight of his stay. And her expressed gratitude was touching. Even flattering…
Antwone wrote with a new drive, a new impetus in his fingertips and his writing benefited from it and took an interesting shape.
A little later on that day, Antwone got another surprise. This time, it was one he could have lived without.
As he walked out of the hotel lobby, he ran into his long lost sister.
It was just one of those things one could not imagine happening, and yet it still happened. Antwone hadn’t seen her for such a long time that he couldn’t believe his eyes.
It was her who had recognized him first and it was her who had called him as he was exiting the hotel. In reaction, Antwone had spent a good minute staring at her with his eyes wide open and his hands dangling heavily at his sides because it didn’t even occur to him to hug her. And there had been no attempt to hug him on her part, too.
So they stood staring at each other like that... .
She was with a man when that had happened. And since the shock of their sudden encounter had left the both of them speechless, the man had broken their stupor by introducing himself to Antwone with a proffered hand.
“Hi, I’m Marc,” he said. “Marc Tesselman. How’d you do?”
“Good, good,” Antwone mumbled, shaking the hand of the other, but hardly looking his way. He was still trading looks with his sister. Her lips were slightly stirring, as if whatever words which were inside her head were coming out muted through her mouth. The man took no offense and turned to her.
“Honey, are you alright?”
“Yes,” she said. She pursed her lips. Took a tentative step toward Antwone and didn’t take a second one. Antwone thought that the proper thing to do was perhaps to bear hug one another. That’s what people did whenever they saw a next of kin, especially if they saw them only once every other year... But it’d been twenty years since they’d last spoken to one another. That certainly skewed the figure.
“You look good,” Antwone finally said. And he meant it.
Her heart-shaped face was full with good cheeks, good chin and a broad pug-nose. He remembered she didn’t like her nose as a kid. And he wondered if she’d done something about it.
Her eyes hadn’t changed much. They were harder and sharper, more focused in a way that exuded self-assurance and a little bit of pride, something she’d probably picked up later in her adult life. Or was it arrogance? There was color in them though, her eyes, and the wardrobe she had on was matched to them. She also had thin, bloodless lips that never closed all the way. It gave her a childlike expression. And there was still an echo of that childishness in the way she looked at things, in the way she looked at him now, as if she was daydreaming. He suddenly felt strange inside…
“You too, you look good,” she dared say. Then, after another awkward moment, she added, “You live in this neighborhood?”
“I stay up here,” Antwone said nodding toward the hotel.
“How long have you been out here?”
“I don’t know––about a month… You?”
“Three years…”
“Three years,” Antwone repeated under his breath.
Marc slipped his arm around her waist and she added, “Marc and I were living in Atlanta before that.”
“It was my idea to move out here,” Marc cut in. “Mostly for the work.”
“Is that right?” Antwone said just to be conversational.
“Yeah, I’m an interior designer. Recently started up a small company. Oh, when I say small I just mean to say it’s got room to grow of course. And this one here”— he gently nudged at her—“is the heart of it. The smartest woman I’ve ever met.”
It was only then that Antwone saw that she was wearing a ring.
“Yeah,” he said. “She was always smarter than most.”
A blip twisted the corners of her mouth. She didn’t like it when someone talked about her in the third person while she was around.
“Were you going somewhere?” she asked him.
Ava had called him earlier to set up a lunch date at a restaurant someone had recommended to her. He was heading there now. Before he could answer, Marc said again, “I’ve got to say it’s really ni
ce to … um … make your acquaintance. Mary often talks about you and––”
“—Marc,” she said, “why don’t you go without me? Antwone and I have some catching up to do.”
“You sure? I mean we can cancel—”
“—No,” she shook her head. And some of her black hair covered up one third of her face. “One of us needs to be there. You know how they get when someone misses these things.”
Marc kissed her on the forehead and turned to Antwone. “I’m glad we met. But I’ve got to run off.”
And he ran off. Mary and Antwone stood staring at each for a little while longer before mutually deciding to go grab a cup of coffee somewhere … and catch up.
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