Free Keeper of Keys by Bernice L. McFadden

Chapter One

    I found out about my condition a full four years before Journey came into my life. Journey, a fix-it man from Kingston who had come into my home to repair my roof and stayed to reconstruct my soul. Four years three months and two days to be exact. The afternoon the words rolled off of my doctor's tongue and dropped down to the floor, I was thirty-two years old.

    I say the words dropped down to the floor because that's where my eyes went right after he told me. My eyes left his mouth and went straight to the floor and so that's where I figured the words must have gone too.

    Doctor Tate allowed me to sit there for a moment, to sit there and stare at the words on the floor. I remember him handing me a tissue even though there were no tears. I remember him touching my shoulder, even though there was medication and new developments everyday that could prolong my life.

    If that was the case, I thought, why did he sound so sad?

    An hour passed before I was able to lift my eyes from the floor, another fifteen minutes before I could stand. Doctor Tate had been nice enough not to hurry me, or ask me to stare at the floor in the waiting area. He'd probably been just as nice to my mother eighteen years earlier. Doctor Tate was just a nice man.

    "Call me if you have any questions, any questions at all." He said as I walked out of his office and into the hallway. I just nodded my head. I couldn't speak.

    I don't remember the drive home or even the fear that always seemed to grip me when I navigated my Range Rover across the high narrow bridge that led to the subdivision I lived in. I must have been on auto pilot when I let my two Bull Mastifs, Ying and Yang, out of the house and into the yard and I don't even remember ordering Chinese food, but I must have because why else would Otis, the delivery boy from Lucky Mings, be standing on my front step, ringing my door bell?

    I do remember sitting down and attempting to draw up a list. Well that's what Doctor Tate suggested I do. "All of the men you've ever been intimate with. All of them." He said and I was thankful that his tone wasn't condescending, accusing or judgmental. I wouldn't have been able to take that, not then, and not now.

    I lit the logs in the fireplace, even though it was August, turned the air on and set the thermostat to forty degrees. I pulled on my favorite Shetland sweater and poured a glass of red wine. I remember all of that quite clearly, I can still feel the heat of the fire against my skin, the warmth of the wine as it slipped down my throat. 
I thought I was calm as I tapped the top of the pen against my teeth and looked down at the clean white sheet of paper that lay on the floor before me. I thought I was poised and ready to begin the task Dr. Tate had requested of me. I thought I was a rock until I placed the tip of my pen against the paper and began to write. 
I looked down and saw nothing but scraggly, zig-zaggy lines that meant nothing at all. I thought I had it all together until I saw that the paper was soaked through with my tears and I could see the soft camel colored designs of my Berber carpet looking back at me.

    "How could this have happened to me?" I said aloud to the walls that were waiting to be adorned with Charles Bibbs, Paul Nzalamba and Leroy Campbell.

    What a stupid question. I knew how it had happened.

    I wiped my tears away and finished my wine in one long swallow. "Get it together girl," I told myself and tore a fresh piece of paper from the legal pad.

    I began again.

    This time a name formed beneath the short, quick pen strokes. He was my first and I was eighteen years old. Lawrence.

    I could see his face as clear as if he was standing right in front of me. Long, lanky Lawrence, always smiling and bouncing a basketball. I smiled at the memory of him, and how his sweaty hands felt on my back as he fumbled with the hook of my bra.

    "Let me," I remember saying, hoping I didn't make him feel like less of a man by