Wake up. Fight back. Live through god-awful scene after god-awful scene and finally leave the person to whom you are married to try to scrape back together some semblance of a sane life for yourself and your two daughters. Know they are learning from you to place no trust in themselves or their own instincts by watching you put up with one atrocity after another from the person to whom you are married. Know they are being asked to deny what they hear and see.
Stand in the kitchen with the person to whom you are married after he arrives at your new house from the house you’ve moved out of while it’s still dark outside. Make a pot of coffee. Go with him out the front door of the house you have rented for yourself and your two daughters so that he will not wake them up.
Realize you never should have let him in the door. Realize you should’ve been calling the police all this time but also realize they probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything about his crazy ass since he is the person to whom you are married. Cringe when he grabs you by the arm just above your wrist. The bruise his grasp leaves will provide a few clues about what happened when one of your daughters orders the autopsy reports thirty years later.
Bleed to death, from a gunshot wound to the chest delivered by the person to whom you are married, in the front yard of the house you have rented. But know that at least your daughters are not lying there—or even with a hair on their heads touched—beside you. Breathe your last breath praying that they’ll be all right without you, and know that at least they can’t be hurt anymore by the person to whom you are married.
Be Still and Hear
And there it was. As clear as the blackest night you swear you can see through. When black becomes translucent and shimmery because of the stars or moonlight. When it becomes see-through and layered.
Black isn’t always opaque.
And I felt a fool, for doubting. I felt a fool for my questions. For wrestling.
There aren’t any questions worth asking. My mind has to get used to that. My heart tells me that some things just are. No need to look any further. I can, but I won’t find anything. No prizes, no consolations, no magic potions, no keys.
It is wild. It is untamed. It knows better than I do what it is supposed to be. What I don’t know, I’m not supposed to know.
Now. No comfort, but at least less of a buzz between the ears.
I SHOWERED AND GOT DRESSED. THEN I GOT SOME CLOTHES in a suitcase, taking care to include the dresses and coordinating shoes I’d need for the wakes and funerals. I don’t know how I could think in such a way, but I was practical even then and the brain is resilient. It’s capable of throwing you into action rather than letting you start to process something before you’re ready. It lets you look out rather than in when looking out is what you need to do to get through a thing. That’s how my brain works, in any case. I’m lucky.
I knew that I’d have to go to a total of four death events. Two for Mama and two for Daddy. I packed the periwinkle-blue linen drop-waist dress with the white cotton lace-trimmed bib collar that Mama had made for me to wear to Easter service at church that year, and also a turquoise-and-white plaid cotton shirtwaist with a wide elastic belt and kick pleats that Mammy had bought me at Mary Lynn Williams’s dress shop in Chatom a month or so before. It was my favorite dress. I’d stayed a few days with Mammy and Dandy that summer. Dandy always called me his dress-up baby. My white flats would go with everything and I remembered that I could still wear them because Labor Day hadn’t yet come. I packed my navy blue ones as well.
I slept for most of the eighty-mile drive from Mobile to Jackson in the backseat of Bobo and Don’s car. I woke when I heard the familiar sound of gravel underneath the tires. I knew we’d arrived at Bridle Path Road, where Nanny and PawPaw had lived for thirty years.
I unfolded my body and sat up. I’m surprised now that I hadn’t forgotten for just that moment what had happened earlier that morning and that it had already somehow sunk into my brain, but it had. A sixty-minute nap hadn’t allowed me to forget that the world had changed. It had and so had I. Every bit of me had begun to morph into an orphan. I was a cool customer, though, and had been stiff-upper-lipping my way through some sort of chaos or another for as long as I could remember. I knew how to navigate turbulence, so I tried to ready, or at least steady, myself for what I was about to walk into. It was going to be hard to see Nanny and PawPaw and the rest of the family. There would be crying. There would be sadness and anger. There would be God knows what. We pulled into the long red-dirt driveway. There were cars parked on either side of it—there were even some pulled up into the yard and everywhere else a car could go. We stopped behind the carport.
I got out of Bobo and Don’s car ahead of them, walked onto the green indoor/outdoor-carpet-covered porch with wrought iron railings, and up to the door of the red brick house where I’d taken my first steps as a baby. I avoided eye contact with the people who were milling about outside. I was wearing a peach sweatshirt even though it was August in South Alabama.
There had been a family reunion just the summer before that was a full-on, all-day party. The piano had even been pulled out onto the porch so we could all sing around it. It was the piano I played under on a summer day when I was almost four and sang, in a perfect chromatic scale, the tag to “Heart of My Heart” when Nanny and Mama rehearsed for their group’s performance at the 1976 Bicentennial celebration. Mama had danced on that porch with her uncle Ralph, keeping time with that little noise she would make out of the corner of her mouth whenever she was doing some kind of jig. I put my hand on the doorknob and told myself that she was gone, that she would not be meeting me at the door.
Nanny did. She was waiting, surrounded by her family, the family that always gathered at her house whenever there was a happening, whether it was a reunion, a singing, or a death.
I remember everything and nothing about that day. August 12, 1986.
I remember that I almost choked on one of the sleeping pills that some relative or another left for us but eventually got it down my throat and I slept that night. I hadn’t eaten a bite of food all day. It would be several more days before I could.
The world was still turning the next morning when I woke, though ours had taken a twist. I wasn’t unprepared for what it all might feel like—no, not at all. I don’t imagine Sissy was either. I’d done plenty of thinking about just this very thing happening, concretely since the day I saw him through the window kick her and even the night before it finally did. I don’t remember not always having a sense of it in an abstract way, but it was still weird. I felt empty. I noticed the pit in my stomach, the bel hevi, was still there as it had been the day before. Even as I breathed a sigh of some strange kind of relief that it was all finally over and I didn’t have to worry about him hurting her anymore, I felt like a ghost too, like I imagined them both at that moment, hanging over everything. He had finally done it and she was gone. I knew I was going to miss my mama every day for the rest of my life. I wasn’t sure about Daddy yet but I certainly wasn’t glad he was gone.
There was part of me that understood this was always something Daddy would do, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept when it finally happened. All I could do that day and for many years was try to look straight ahead, stay out of the fray that had been and was still somehow all around me even though they were all of a sudden gone, and figure out how to sustain the least damage.
I wondered where we would land. I didn’t know yet. That feeling would never go away. But I put my feet on the floor and took my first steps into the next part of my life. The part that wouldn’t, ever again, include my parents as anything but spirits.
I HAVE REGRETTED, EVERY DAY SINCE I DID IT, TOUCHING Mama’s face at her wake. It was an instinctive impulse. I couldn’t help it. It was right there in front of me. My dead mama’s face.
I drew my hand back as if I’d touched something that was burning rather than something so frigid—I gasped and shook like I was standing there unclothed. I was
embarrassed at what I’d done and wished immediately that I could take it back. The sight of her—that slightly gray stillness—was more confirmation than I needed that she was gone. Closure isn’t anything I ever expect to get. You can’t really close a thing like your mama being shot to death in your front yard.
It was just all wrong. Wronger than anything had ever been. Her hair was all piled up and looked like a coonskin cap. Mama had gorgeous hair and she would’ve hated this tragedy in style. Her face was unmarred but the too-heavy makeup the funeral director had put on it made her look older than she was.
People say ridiculous shit when they see someone in a casket.
“She looks good.”
“She looks peaceful.”
Good God. What she looked like was dead.
Sissy flew into a grievous rage upon seeing Mama’s body in the casket and left through the side door of the funeral home. She stopped in the parking lot to smoke and scream and curse God as I stood by, helpless of course.
The definition of decimation is to kill one person in ten, as it is usually applied in a military situation. Every tenth man is selected by lot and executed. My family was more than decimated. Instead of nine-tenths of what we’d been we were suddenly one-half. Two left of four.
Mama made a will years before, when I was just a toddler. Sissy and I both knew that if something happened to her and Daddy that her sister, Jane, would be our guardian. Sissy was almost eighteen so there was no real way to make her do anything or go anywhere. And no one could. She was angry and displaced and bucked and reared at the notion of doing most things but sing. Jim gave her a job at his insurance agency in Monroeville and they talked her into enrolling in classes at the junior college, but neither thing stuck. She floated between Jane and Jim’s and Nanny and PawPaw’s, going to one when she got sick of the other.
I was fourteen and still in school, so I was going to Monroeville to live with Jane and Jim no matter what. I wanted nothing more than to stay with Nanny and PawPaw. Their house was home to me. It was where we spent every Christmas, lots of summer days, and lots of nights. Suffice to say we spent more time at their house than any other besides our own. It was where I wanted to be when I no longer had a mama to live with. But it was decided, and rightly so, that it was not where I would end up.
Jane and Jim had two children, Joey and Jaime, and a more normal, as most folks would describe it, existence than I’d ever had. They played golf and had a country club membership. They lived in a modern three-bedroom, two-bathroom house. Their children went to a private school. It was a foreign world to me, though I’d observed it for years. I was thankful to be wanted, but I wasn’t happy about going to live with them at first. During the days after Mama and Daddy were buried—it must’ve been the Friday—Jane took me to Monroeville, about forty miles or so from Nanny and PawPaw’s house in Jackson, to register at my new school, which was to start the following week. On the night of the Sunday after they died—I was counting the days since they died and that was the sixth one—I rode in the backseat of my aunt and uncle’s car to start over. The bel hevi ever present, I looked out the window into the night sky not even wondering how I was going to do it; I just got myself acquainted with the fact that I had to.
Monroeville, Alabama, is a small town that sits midway between Mobile and Montgomery. The seat of the county of Monroe. It’s a red-dirt place. I enrolled at the private school my cousins went to, Monroe Academy. These types of little exclusive institutions are liberally sprinkled throughout the Southeast. Most of them were established around the time segregation ended so there’s no need to do any math there.
I’d been the new girl before. But this was different. Obviously. As was everything else in my life. I didn’t know what to say when I started getting the questions.
“Where did you move here from?”
“Where do you live?”
“When did you move here?”
“Where does your daddy work?”
I set my jaw and determined to just tell the truth. I couldn’t avoid it anyway.
“Mobile.”
“On Langham Street with Joey.”
“The other day.”
“My parents are dead.”
That last reply always drew a sort of gasp, usually no response, and definitely no more questions. At least there was a bright side.
Jane and Jim scrambled to make room for Sissy and me in their house. They decided to finish their basement and make one big bedroom and a separate bathroom for us. It was completed after a few weeks of daylight-to-dark construction, but before it was, I stayed in Joey’s bedroom upstairs while he slept on the couch.
I started to adjust and started accepting my new life. I made some friends at school and even saw how things might be better since I wasn’t living with the tenuousness that Daddy always injected into everyday life. I didn’t have to worry so much anymore since that part of my life was over. But it wasn’t over, really. During those first weeks, I’d come home from school every afternoon, find a place to put my books and things, go into the hallway bathroom, lie down on the brown-carpeted floor, and let out the terrible, heavy sobs I’d kept in all day as silently as I could. I tried not to make a sound while my face contorted away from the much-practiced pleasant façade of a self-possessed teenage girl to the anguished little child who was so very lost. I’d wrap my arms around myself and rock back and forth. I wanted my mama to come back. I ached all over, inside and out. And I didn’t tell anyone.
Jane would ask me how I was doing. I would say I was fine. It wasn’t lost on me that her sister was gone, and that looking at me must’ve been a constant reminder that she’d never get to see her again. I wondered if she had her own bathroom routine. Everyone was in survival mode. They couldn’t do anything but try to make sure I continued to draw breath and got where I was supposed to go. We were all dragging the baggage of what had happened behind us every second.
Grief made me sort of stupid. When I made a D in Algebra—a subject I’d struggled with even before Mama and Daddy died—after my first six weeks at Monroe Academy, my uncle Jim told me that my performance was unacceptable, that no one was allowed to make a D in his house, and that I needed to get myself in order. I knew I did, but I didn’t know how.
Grief affects the memory, conceptualization, the ability to concentrate. It causes extreme anxiety, something I didn’t know then was called post-traumatic stress disorder. I’m quite familiar with it now. I had lost both of my parents in one day, changed living situations and schools, and I was expected to make an A in something that looked like a different language to me? I couldn’t even see straight. I sat in classrooms and stared at the door. I wasn’t worried about 5x + 7 = 32 and figuring out that x was 5. I was worried about what was going to happen next. When was the other shoe going to drop? When was the rug going to get snatched? The shoe had dropped and the rug was long gone, but I guess I always thought it could get worse. It hurt my feelings that Jim didn’t seem to understand it—that I wasn’t given any time to recover. I know he was trying to right my course, doing the only thing he knew how to do, which was to keep everyone in line. Since I was then living under his roof, that meant me too.
On the Saturday morning after I started tenth grade, Jane and Jim called me into their bedroom to tell me that Mammy had died. That made three gone in ten days. My mind went to Dandy. He had lost his son to suicide. He had lost his daughter-in-law to his son’s hands. And he had lost his wife.
Can a broken heart kill a person? Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, they call it. A condition that causes the heart to become weaker, the left ventricle changing shape. She’d gone in the hospital with an existing heart problem. Was what happened the real reason she never came out?
I don’t know how Dandy held on. As shattered as everyone was, my grandparents conducted themselves with an incredible amount of grace. I don’t think it was more than just a week or so after Mammy died that Dandy drove over to Jackson to see Nanny and PawPaw. They invited h
im in for a cup of coffee and a piece of pie just as they always did. Under the terms of the tacit agreement they had not to talk about what had happened, they made peace. What else could they have done? What else was there to do? Nothing. There was nothing to do but try to forgive it all. That’s the sort of people they were. But I wondered about their quiet moments, the moments when they didn’t have to put on brave faces.
Nanny and PawPaw had known for years that Daddy was dangerous. They’d both always told Mama that she had a place to go if things got too rough, if she couldn’t handle it anymore or thought Sissy and I weren’t safe. Mama did leave, but Daddy always talked her into going back. I don’t know if she ever told them that he used to say he’d kill all of us, them included, when she threatened to leave him. I don’t know how she found any joy in her life knowing that was hanging over her head every day, knowing she was held hostage, but she did sometimes.
Nanny told me that a few days after Mama died she found PawPaw in their bathroom, hitting the wall with his fist, crying and saying over and over in his soft-spoken way, “Why didn’t I do something?” I have wondered that same thing through the years. Why didn’t anyone stop Daddy? But how? What could anyone have done?
I saw the tears creep out of the corners of Dandy’s eyes whenever he’d see Sissy and me. I don’t think he quit crying until 2004, when he died at ninety years old.
My mind is a trap. It keeps me on the hamster wheel of thought, running frantically toward some sort of peace but never holding on to it for long if I do get lucky enough to find some. How do I make peace with all of this unpeacefulness? I’ve spent so long trying to figure it out, once I started letting myself ask the questions, that I’ve developed a sort of internal script—a way of talking to myself—talking myself into and out of this idea or that possibility. At the end of the day, I wish I’d known my parents better so that I had more clues about it all. Five thousand one hundred sixty-five days. I’ve known my best friend for over twice that length of time.
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