My Gift To You

Chapter Nineteen: I Always Find Someone to Bruise and Leave Behind

The stinging of his lip made him bring his hand to his face and tentatively touch his bottom lip, pulled his hand away and looked down to see a small amount of blood on his middle finger. Maybe if Benji stood just outside the kitchen long enough he’d devour the rest of his face, that would certainly take a long time and any second spent not doing what he was trying to work up his nerve to do was time spent well. Fuck it all. What was he even trying to prove again? If he couldn’t remember why he was hovering around the doorjamb watching his mother try to make some tea, then apparently it wasn’t worth a destroyed lip.

So he was watching his mother like some kind of sick freak, what a great son he was not helping her. Benji really needed an award for this, he was the only son in the world who kept so many secrets from his poor mother, he might as well lock her up in the attic because that would be the icing on the lopsided, bug infested cake. Secrets. Yes, that was why he was leaning again the doorway, trying to think up something good to say to start the ball rolling, or at least he had been before he found his own flesh quite tasty.

He was stalling and he’d better stop or else he’d walk away and miss the perfect moment for coming out. If he didn’t do this now it was pretty much written in stone that he would fly off to New York City and never tell his mother, when she should have been the first person he ever came to. The woman had two sons ripped from her loins five minutes apart from each other and had worked so hard to raise three children right in this decaying world and without a father, the least Benji could do was give her a little insight to who he was. Seriously, someone give him his award right away, he more than deserved it.

Rolling his eyes at himself, Benji straightened up and walked into the kitchen with a forced smile on his face. “Do you need any help with that?” He didn’t wait for an answer, he took the kettle from his mother and poured it into the mug already set out on the counter, the tea bag bobbing for several seconds. Setting the half-empty kettle back on the stove so the water could be re-boiled at a later date, Benji stirred the tea bag around the cup by its string.

“Thank you, Benjamin, but I could have done that myself. I’m not an invalid in case you haven’t noticed,” Ms. Madden replied, but kissed her son’s cheek anyway.

“I know, Ma,” Benji replied softly, “but I feel like helping you.”

His mother laughed gently and took the mug, holding it in both of her hands and looked at her son. “What did you do this time?”

Suddenly, Benji felt horribly nauseous. “It’s not what I’ve done….”

Ms. Madden got just as serious as her son just as quickly. “Honey, is something wrong? Did something happen at work or in the band? Are you all right?”

“Fine. I’m fine. I just…. It’s something I need to talk to you about.”

His mother frowned slightly. “You know you can be completely honest with me. What is it you need to talk about?”

“I think you might need to sit down for this, Ma,” Benji said faintly.

Ms. Madden nodded and sat down at the table with her son, her worried expression even more prominent than it was before. She didn’t touch her tea, just held the mug with her hands and stared at her son like she was expecting him to blow up at any minute. “Honey, what’s wrong? I haven’t seen you act this distraught since the day your father left…. Please, tell me you’re all right.”

Benji kept his eyes on the tablecloth, mentally unraveling a small patch of fraying fabric. “I’m fine, I promise. Nothing’s wrong with me or anything else, it’s just something that you need to know and I don’t know how to tell you to save my soul.”

“Take your time, sweetheart,” the woman said kindly. She tried not to show just how worked up she was, but it wasn’t going so well. Something had been bothering Benjamin for quite some time, that much was obvious, but Robin had to force herself to wait patiently for her son to come up to her and speak with her about what was wrong. This was now that moment she had been waiting for, she had no idea what to do even though she had been preparing for the absolute worst. Her motherly instinct was working overdrive, convinced that Benji had a terminal illness or something else just as horrible.

So Ms. Madden sat in her chair and let her tea grow cold as she watched her son stare intently at the one spot on the tablecloth. Every second that ticked by made her more uneasy, she wanted to rip that clock right off the wall. The room was too silent for her taste, she welcomed with open arms the occasional noise from the living room caused by Joel’s cleaning. It was wrong, but she wanted to scream at her older son to get a move on, to say even one word. Thankfully, Robin was able to control that urge and kept on studying Benjamin with unmoving eyes.

Normally the mother was a very patient one, but a situation like this drained that away and left behind anxiety and slight annoyance. It was as bad to Benji, the silence and the looming sense of doom that was making its home above the room, choking the two people who sat there. While Robin was waiting for the words to come out of the man’s throat, Benji was trying to find those words in the black lake that was surrounding him.

Fifty million possible sentences were fished from that body of water in the six agonizing minutes of deafening silence, each one more unacceptable than the last. At one point in time Benji had a whole speech planned out in his mind, everything thought through down to how he moved when he spoke the words. Of course, like anything drawn out before the event actually happened it flew out of his mind like a bat out of Hell and he was left trying to figure out what to do. If his mother was going crazy then Benji had already gone to Insane Town USA the first few seconds of this meeting. He knew it wouldn’t go over as smooth as silk, but he had planned on it not going as bad as it currently was.

Figuring that it was better to just say something rather than nothing at all for another ten minutes, Benji opened his mouth and starting speaking even though his brain had shut down. “I really don’t know how to say this, Mom, and Lord knows I’ve tried to come up with something that will be good enough, but I’ve forgotten it. I’m just winging this right now so bear with me and I’ll try to make this a clear as possible, though I can’t guarantee that I won’t be talking faster than a race car driven at top speed.”

Benji’s mother nodded silently, giving her unspoken word that she wouldn’t speak until he was ready for her to.

“There’s a reason why I’ve been acting strangely for the longest time now and I’ll tell you in a minute, but first I need you to promise me something. I need you to swear to me that you won’t interrupt me, that you won’t get really worked up about what I’m going to be telling you, that you’ll still love me no matter how badly this goes,” Benji pleaded rather than asked.

Robin nodded again. “I promise, Benjamin. Why on earth would I ever stop loving you?”

The son took the question as a rhetorical one and moved on, still not looking up at the woman who had brought him into this world. “I…. Keep in mind that I never intended to hurt you or anyone else, I never meant for all of this to happen and I’ll understand if you want to kick me off the family tree. I love you, you’re my mother, but I just can’t help being this way. I never did any of this on purpose and I’m in no way trying to punish you for anything you’ve ever done, if anything I want to stop being like this so I can reward you for being the greatest mother in the world. It’s just…. I’ve….” Benji paused and tried to regain the words. Eventually they came bringing an overload of emotion with them. “I’m not doing this to spite anyone, Ma, I’m really not. The way I’ve turned out, don’t blame it on yourself. I know you’ve worked so hard to raise us right and words can’t ever convey how thankful I am for that. I know how hard all of this has been and it’s not my wish to give you one more thing to ask ‘why?’ to, but….” His voice was cracking. It wasn’t suppose to go this way, he wasn’t suppose to stretch this out and not remain strong.

Ms. Madden put a hand on top of one of her sons, held it and squeezed it gently.

It took everything he had to look his mother in the eyes. “I didn’t want any of this to happen, Ma, I didn’t mean to make Dad and Josh leave and for us to have to live this way. I never wanted you to see me turn out this way, I’ve tried desperately to be a good son, but I just can’t do it. For the love of God, I’d take it all back, I’d have been born the way I was meant to be born so that none of this would have ever happened, but that can’t ever be. I never wanted to be this way, you did nothing wrong. I just want you to keep loving me, Mom, I can’t bear losing you too. I don’t want you to stop looking at me like you do, I don’t want you to stop caring about me so much it makes me crazy and if I didn’t have to say this I wouldn’t. I couldn’t live with myself if you didn’t love me anyone like Dad stopped loving me, I just couldn’t. I never wanted to be…. I’m…gay. I’m gay.”

Benji held his breath, waiting for the screaming fit that never came to be. Instead of looking at an irate mother, he was staring at a marble statue with no expression on its face. The longer he waited for a response, the more his vision blurred from tears. He was crying by now, just watching a still frame of the one person in the world he never wanted to hurt more than anything. “Please, Mommy, say something, say anything. Please, say you still love me. Please, don’t tell me you’ve stopped loving me like Daddy has,” he begged, though his voice was wavering too much to understand most of what he had said. “I don’t want to be like this if it means you’re not my mother anymore. I’m sorry, Mommy, I’m so sorry.”

Another two minutes passed before Robin Madden got over her shock and she rose to her feet, causing Benji to break down even more than he already was. Instead of walking away just like her husband had and like Benji thought she was going to do, she walked over to the other side of the table and wrapped her arms around her son, holding him and rocking him back and forth while he sobbed into her shoulder. She had never seen him like this before, not even since he was a small child. He had never cried in public when her husband and her oldest son left, she almost didn’t know what to do or say.

“It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s okay. I still love you, I always will. Everything’s all right,” she told him softly, but strongly. “I’ve known all along, Benjamin, it’s okay. Honey, it’s okay.”

Knowing that the recurring nightmares he had were true made Benji cry harder. Neither mother nor son had noticed Joel and Sarah standing in the doorway, drawn there when they had heard Benji from the living room, his voice getting higher as he continued to get more upset. Benji struggled to get the words to form. “I didn’t want him to leave, I thought he’d understand. I didn’t mean to make him do it, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever put you thought, I’m sorry for breaking the pact, I’m just so sorry for everything.”

“I forgive you, sweetheart, there’s no need to apologize. You didn’t make your father leave, Benjamin, you did nothing wrong, it’s all right.”