I should have stopped there but, stupidly, I kept right on speaking.
“The one thing I wanted more than anything in the whole world was to go to the zoo and see the animals. The year before in school there was a field trip to the zoo and I didn’t get to go because she refused to pay for it and wouldn’t sign the permission slip. I’d wanted to go so bad. I told Thomas I wanted to go to the zoo and he took me. We spent hours at the zoo and I had the time of my life. We’d gone late enough in the day so my mother had already gone to work and we certainly weren’t expecting her to be home when we got back. But she was and when Thomas made the mistake of telling her he’d taken me to the zoo for my birthday she got angry. So very, very angry. I don’t think Thomas noticed because her anger first appeared as a dark look on her face. When Thomas asked why she wasn’t at work she lied and told him she’d come home because she wasn’t feeling well. Then she sent him home. I didn’t realize what was coming or I probably would have begged him to take me with him.
“After he left I tried to tell her I was tired and wanted to go to bed, I wanted to go to my room so I could escape her. I never made it to my bedroom and on the night of my ninth birthday, after the best day of my life, she broke my arm, two of my ribs and blackened both my eyes. She didn’t even take me to the hospital. Instead she went out to a bar and didn’t bother coming home until the next day. Thomas found me on the floor in the hallway where she’d left me and he was the one to take me to the hospital. He left me at the emergency room and I never saw him again.” I shrugged off the memory as I pulled my hand free of Tyson’s. “It was the only time I’ve ever seen a bear that wasn’t on tv and I thought it was one of the most beautifully fierce creatures I have ever seen. I wasn’t expecting… I’m sorry, Tyson.”
“Ariel, Ariel,” he whispered. “That’s so fucked up and sad that I don’t even know what to say.”
I didn’t want him to say anything because he was right, it was fucked up and sad and what were you supposed to say to something like that?
I shrugged like it was no big thing, like I hadn’t just told him some horrible thing from my past. “I’m sorry, Tyson, it just brought up a bad memory is all.”
“I will put it away in the closet,” he whispered as he wrapped his arms around my shoulders and pulled me into his body. I buried my face in his chest as he hugged me tightly against him.
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how badly I had needed that hug.
“You don’t have to put it in the closet,” I said. “It’s not going to bother me again, I promise. Honestly, I’d forgotten about the zoo until I saw the bear hide.”
His hand cupped the back of my head as his lips brushed against my forehead. “Sweetheart, you don’t simply forget something like that.”
I wanted to ask how the hell he would know, but I didn’t because it didn’t sound very nice. Instead of being a rude A-hole, I wrapped my arms around his middle and clung to him. He smelled nice, like some kind of rich, earthy incense.
His lips moved across my forehead as he spoke. “Let’s go sit down and I’ll show you something cool. You’ll like it, I promise.”
I wished he’d stop promising me things. The more he promised the more I worried the day would come where he’d break those promises.
He moved back and I got to see the rest of his bedroom. It was just as burgundy and black as the first half of the room I’d seen, but with some other touches of color thrown in.
Unlike the twin’s bedroom Tyson didn’t have a couch. There was another large, circular rug, this one burgundy and unlike the other one it had no chalk markings on it and it seemed relatively new. There were massive square shaped body pillows in orange and black piled on the rug. It resembled a cozy nest. In front of the rug and up against the wall there was a short, black television stand with a flat screen tv sitting on it. It was about half the size as the tv in the informal living room off of the kitchen.
There were four tall windows along one wall that faced the backyard. They were bare and curtain-less like every other window I’d seen so far in this house. Did these boys not believe in curtains, or what?
The wall behind the tv had four framed posters of what looked like blown up black and white tarot cards. I moved closer to get a better view and, sure enough, I’d been right. They were tarot cards.
The Hanged Man.
The Magician.
The Emperor.
And, The Fool.
I moved even closer to get a better look and realized they weren’t mass market posters but were what looked like original black and white ink drawings. The details were impressive, the artwork beautiful.
“Did you do these?” I asked in quiet awe.
“No,” he laughed at me. “I can’t draw a straight line. They’ve belonged to my family for about three hundred years now. Once we owned a full deck, but we lost most of them in a fire years ago. All that’s left now are these four and the four in Quint’s room.”
“What four does he have?” I couldn’t help but ask out of curiosity.
“Death, The Wheel of Fortune, Justice and The moon.”
“Can you read Tarot cards?”
I hoped he said yes because tarot cards fascinated me ever since I’d gone to this carnival last summer on a date with some boy whose name I no longer remembered. There had been a fortune tellers tent that I had to drag my date into with me. He hadn’t wanted to go in, claiming the whole thing to be a hoax.
Inside the tent had looked exactly like what you’d expect some traveling gypsy fortune tellers tent to look like. Scarves tossed all over everything. Candles burning in every corner. A table sat in the center of the tent draped with a gauzy piece of vibrant purple fabric. On top of the table sat a large crystal ball, a white ceramic bowl filled half way with water, and a deck of what had looked like hand painted tarot cards. Trunks covered in bright scarves sat on the floor lined against the walls of the tent. The dirt floor had been covered in bright, eccentric rugs.
I had wanted so badly for that gypsy woman to read her cards for me but never got the chance. It had cost twenty dollars, I’d had no money of my own and my date had flat out refused to pay money for some bogus bullshit.