Chapter Three: A Heart Walking Around Outside Its Body

Yvette

Yvette Medina sits in the ratty, green recliner staring out of the smudged window in her living room on South Salina Street. It is 4:04 AM and her son, Nico, still isn’t home. He told her that he would be here almost eight hours ago. She had fought with her husband, Rick, for days, trying to convince him to let Nico come stay for a while. He finally relented and now Nico hadn’t shown. Rick would be mad. There would be no end to the “I told you so” comments. Hopefully there would be no more abuse, but Yvette isn’t going to count on that. There is always abuse.

Yvette takes a long, slow drag of her Pall Mall, exhaling the smoke at the window. The smoke hits the window, and the plume roils back into her face, stinging her already grit filled eyes. She needs sleep, but she is fully aware that she isn't going to get it.

Nico had grown up witnessing all of the violence that Rick inflicted on his mother. When Nico got to the age of ten, he tried to jump in to save his mother on occasion, his skinny little arms swinging like a windmill as he came at Rick. More often than not, he didn’t do much damage, but came out of it all bruised and swollen along with his mother.

This killed Yvette inside. It shattered her already fragile heart. She could take it. She was an adult, and she was used to it, but her precious son should have never had to grow up that way, in constant fear. That’s why Yvette has always been so adamant about letting Nico come back home to sober up. It was her fault that Nico had turned to drugs. She was all Nico had, unless you counted that two-bit whore he was running around with. Sparrow Glenn… Yvette had heard of her, and she was trouble.

Yvette never was certain who Nico’s biological father was. For a while after she turned twelve, she would go out drinking and get as fucked up as she could. She didn’t like to stay home at night. Her mother brought home a lot of different men and after her mother had passed out for the night, a lot of them liked to sneak into her bedroom and get handsy with her, but never all the way. She would scream before that happened and most of the time the men would get scared and go away. There was one though that hit her in the mouth so hard when she tried to scream that her front tooth came out. She had then preceded to kick him in the nose with the heel of her foot and he eventually stumbled back into her mother’s room. So, although she had still thought that she was a virgin when she got pregnant with Nico, it was very possible that something happened when she ran away to one of the many seedy locations where she put as many chemicals into her body as possible to try and drown her pain. She had blacked out on many times and probably wouldn’t have woken up no matter what was done to her. So, she really didn't know who Nico’s real father was. When she found out that she was pregnant with Nico, she quit drinking and doing drugs, she even quit smoking and drinking caffeine. There was someone growing inside of her that would actually love her now, and she could love them back.

At the age of fifteen she took herself to social services and reported her mother. She was put into foster care, which kind of sucked, but she was given the medical attention that she needed for the baby growing inside of her.

She gave birth at the age of sixteen and became emancipated. That was rough. She had nowhere to go and a baby to take care of. That's when she met Rick. He was twenty-seven years old at the time, but he had a beat-up old pickup truck and a one room apartment with heat and running water. He thought that she was pretty and didn’t seem to care too much that she had a baby.

She should have left Rick, but she didn’t, and she didn’t understand why it was so hard. Rick would get drunk every night and yell and hit and kick and bite at her. When Nico was a child, he usually got it too. After all of the mayhem and chaos, every single time, Rick would apologize and hold Yvette in his arms stroking her hair and kissing the bruises he had made on her face and body. Nico never once got an apology from Rick. After all of the high emotions and the pain and the drag-out brawls, Yvette wanted nothing more than to be comforted and held. She had no one else that she could call, no family and no friends. Rick made sure that she had no one but him. So, Yvette always let herself be comforted by Rick, just to stop the unbearable turmoil of her emotions. It was a vicious cycle and deep down Yvette knew that she was being a fucking idiot.

Twenty-four years after giving birth to Nico, Yvette gave birth to a daughter, Oaklyn Cosette Medina. Oaklyn was now two years old and looked the opposite of her half-brother. Oaklyn had jet black hair and eyes like coal, her skin a deep tan. Nico, the light and Oaklyn, the dark. Oaklyn was the spitting image of Rick.

Nico was the only Mullinax in the family because Yvette had given him her maiden name when he was born. She couldn’t do to Oaklyn what she had done to Nico. She refused to let Oaklyn grow up amidst all of the violence that her dad doled out daily. Yvette knew that she had to leave, but she was terrified. Where would she go? She wasn’t allowed to have a job or money. What the hell do you do in this world with no money and no family?

Yvette had once heard a saying and it stuck with her. “Having a child is like having your heart walk around outside of your body.” She thought it was the perfect way to describe what it felt like to have children. She had two hearts outside of her body and she had to protect them. She had to be strong. She just prayed that she had the strength to get strong.

Rick would be up at 6 AM to get ready for work at the local grocery store where he unloaded the trucks. Nico had a little under two hours to get here, in order to save his poor mother from hours of name-calling, kicks, punches and (in her mind) evil incarnate.

Yvette heard Oaklyn start to cry and she stood up and ran on her tiptoes to the crib, praying that it wouldn’t wake Rick up.