Saving Ace, kk [distant reading .txt] 📗

I was actually running in the right direction. In only about 45 minutes I would be at my mother’s doorstep. I wondered what her house would be like, what my room would look like, what kind of food she’d make, and what kind of mother she’d be. What would she think of me? Her son, the one she left at a rundown orphanage, at her doorstep. She called, so she must want me.
“She has to…” I thought, looking down at the dusty stone that I have been kicking for the last five minutes. What about Adam? What about all of them? They’ll be fine I thought to myself again. Adam offered to help me, so I’m sure he’ll do his part to help everyone while I'm gone.
I lose myself in my thoughts, until I notice the numbers painted on the mailboxes of random houses. “I'm so close,” I say excitedly. My pace quickens until I make my way the road a bit further.
“There it is.” My gaze settles on a medium sized house painted light yellow with cream colored shutters with ivy climbing up the side of the house, just above a tiny garden.
“I’m here.”
As I stand there, looking at the house, I try to gather enough nerve to walk up the driveway. I sigh and walk the paved pathway leading to the front door. After ringing the doorbell, I think about her reaction, then when I heard her voice say “Hold on a second... be right there.” I suddenly get scared. That is, until she opens the door…
“Hi… Mom.”
“What do you …” she starts to say, then interrupts herself and says “Ace?”
“Yes. It’s me”
“How did you…?” she asks looking around for a car.
“I walked.”
“In the middle of New Jersey? You could’ve been run over… or worse.”
“I know, I just couldn’t take living in that terrible place anymore. I'm sorry.”
“Who’s that Mommy?” a little girl with blonde hair to match mine and mom’s hair with my hazel eyes, wearing a pink dress with her hair in matching pigtails.
“No one… Just go back with Daddy.” Mom says.
“Okay.” The little girl says.
“Why did you tell her?” I asked, feeling like I was going to cry, feeling unwanted.
“Because she and your father don’t even know you exist.”
“Why?”
Mom sighs and yells “Jack!!!!” A tall man with dark hair and hazel eyes came up behind her and asked what she needed.
“We need to talk.” She says to him.
“What’s wrong? Who is this boy?”
“His name is Ace, he’s our son.”
“What do you mean?” the man who is my father asks.
“15 years ago, when I told you I was a France for the year… I was pregnant, and …”
“How could you do this to me?!”
Mom sighs and asks me to come in out of the cold and to sit in the living room, while they go in the kitchen. As soon as they enter the kitchen my father starts to yell at my mother.
“How could you?”
“I was scared, 17 and pregnant…what was I supposed to do? Neither of us was ready.”
“How do you know that?”
“I'm so sorry… I never wanted to hurt you, but he’s here now… we can’t just throw him out in the streets.”
“What. Like you did?”
“I did what I thought was best for him! I love him!”
“You don’t know him!”
“He’s out boy!”
“How do we know that?”
“Look at him!”
“How do I know that he’s mine?” After hearing a slapping sound, and the front door slam shut I follow my mom, only to see her trying to wipe her eyes and cross the street. She wasn’t paying attention. The car is going at least 15 miles over the limit. I try to yell at her to get her to move out of the way as I run to her. She turns around and smiles at me, and starts walking towards me, but she doesn’t get out of the way soon enough. When the car hits her I can’t look. I close my eyes and let tears fall.
When my father comes outside he screams when he sees. He runs to her and tries to save her with CPR, but deep down, he knows it’s too late. He sits and cries on her limp body. I sit with him and cry silently. When he stops crying enough to talk, my father calls the ambulance to get her. As he is doing this the little girl comes outside. When she sees her mother she runs to our father and asked him why mommy was sleeping in the middle of the road, that it isn’t safe. When he gets off the phone, he explains to her that mommy has died.
When the ambulance gets our mother, the girl starts to cry on her father’s leg.
“W-w-what do I do now? I can’t go back to the Angle’s Corner… it’s too horrible.” I ask my father, hoping for him to say I can stay with him.
“You can’t stay with us. I just lost my wife, and Isabella just lost her mother. I can’t deal with another child.”
“You say that she little girl has lost a mother… well so have I !!!!” I scream the turn around and run as fast as I can away from what I just witnessed. I run until I can’t run anymore. I just want to disappear, to have never have existed.


It’s been a couple of days, I can’t believe what’s happened. I try to sleep so I can think it’s a bad dream, that if I sleep long enough, maybe I’ll wake up from the horrible nightmare that is my live. I stop at a little roadside diner. As soon as I step into the diner, the smell of fresh coffee and apple pie overwhelm me. I'm not here to eat I think to myself. I'm here to rest so I can leave. I sit at a booth in front of an old man about 60 or so he is reading a newspaper. As I sit down a waitress walks up to my table and sets a cup of hot coffee on it then says while popping her gum “It’s on the house.”
“Thank you.” I say to her. After sipping on the coffee I hear the waitress that gave me my coffee talking to another waitress “… it’s a shame really, the man kills himself after he wife died last week. I read it in the paper… so sad.”
I do a mental double take. Then I get up and get a newspaper form the stand next to the front door. The head line reads “Man Preformed Suicide after Wife’s tragic Death” the article said he hung himself in his backyard and that he didn’t have any other family but my sister and mother… but he did, he had me I think to myself. It’s all too much to bear.

After reading the graphic details on my father’s death, I start to get dizzy, like u do when you stand up too quickly… only I knew it wasn’t from standing up to quickly… it was from shock. I run out of the diner before I had a chance to cry right there in the booth. I run as fast as I could to the nearest park where I sat and cried until all I had left was little hiccups. As I sit there thinking…wondering what was going to happen to Isabella, was she going to Angle’s Corner? Or another family member? As I try to come to a conclusion as to what I'm going to do, I decide I will never see Isabella again. I will leave her alone, she won’t remember me.
As I walk to my mother’s grave I think about all the things I'm never going to have… that I never had. Before I can cry I pick up a red rose from a bush and set it on my mother’s grave. I hope she still loves me, I think to myself as I walk away forever. Never to return.

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Publication Date: 01-28-2012

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