The lights in your house are finally out. I look at my watch, it says 8:37. I’m so glad that the people taking care of you are country folk. They get up early, they go to bed early. I tap my companion’s shoulder and cross the street to your front door. I take out my key and gently unlock the heavy carved door of the bungalow where you live.
I take a left to the corridor where the bedrooms are. Yours is painted stark white, with Spartan furnishings. I kept it that way because I don’t want you to feel at home in here, in this suburb in this poor country.
I place secondhand books in your shelf, more of them about British folklore and King Arthur’s knights. You seemed to enjoy reading them at the library.
My companion is a pediatrician, he comes with me every week to inject you with a sedative and refill your vitamins because they spend your medicine money on gambling.
I was at your twelfth birthday at the modest restaurant where you and your friends ate your favorite fried chicken, spaghetti and chocolate cake. You looked so happy even if not everyone brought you a present.
I rummage through your schoolbag and place a new bug in its pocket. The old one broke when you accidentally dropped the bag in your classroom earlier today. You hate it when you are a bit clumsy because your foster mother does not tolerate it in her household.
I put new batteries in your luminous green alarm clock. But it’s not like you need it. You sleep and wake up like clockwork even on weekends it scares me. Sometimes because you are so efficient with your movements and you have this uncanny sense of time, I imagine you to be less human and more automaton.
I even count the number of times I see you smile when you are with your friends and it is not often. It makes me sad because you used to be spontaneous and jolly. I could not figure out what changed in the year that I have been away.
You also started having nightmares and talking in your sleep, which is why I asked a doctor on the other side of town to give you something to calm you down.
You don’t know this but there are bodyguards who walk behind you and before you whenever you are outdoors.
You are the first person who made me resent my money and power, and my position in society. I know that had things been different, had my family been other than what it is, I’d have had the courage to bring you up on my own, even as a single father. I wouldn’t have been so afraid that the interracial relationship that brought you to being would be discovered.
But I was afraid and I will now admit I was a coward for ever considering that I should give you up, as I did.
And now I regret the decision that landed you in the hands of uncouth folk who cannot appreciate your intellectual inclinations and your sweet nature, your forgiving soul.
And my new fear is that you, with your strong sense of duty, will hate me if you knew that I am the one responsible for you and yet I chose to turn my back on you when it mattered the most.
