Never Too Late

by Amber Portwood

  She must have known almost right away that something was wrong.

  All of a sudden my brother and I heard this horrible screaming. It scared us so bad we jumped up out of bed and ran to find Mom and Dad. We could hear them in the other room with Candace, and my mom was yelling, “She’s not breathing!”

  When we got to the door of that room, we saw our parents living out their worst nightmare. Candace was in my father’s arms, and he was trying to give her mouth to mouth. The details of that scene are so clear in my mind, and so horrifying, it turns my stomach to think about it. I try not to. But I can remember exactly what she looked like in their arms. I can remember people from the building rushing into the room and someone bringing in a stretcher.

  Candace Ann Portwood had only been my little sister for two weeks.

  Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is what they call it when a healthy baby just passes away without any apparent reason. I don’t even think there are words to explain what SIDS does to a family. Bubby and I were so young—he was only seven or eight at the time—there was no way we could fully understand what happened. But the really awful thing was nobody understood. People still don’t know what causes SIDS or how to prevent it, and back then it was an even bigger mystery. Everybody wanted to blame someone, and pretty soon they decided to blame my dad. Maybe it was because he was the one who was with us just before my mom came home and found Candace lying there, not breathing. Or maybe his alcoholism made him an easy target, made people think he wasn’t a responsible father. Either way, it wasn’t right to lay that kind of blame on someone for the death of their own child, and in the end I think it made it basically impossible for our family to recover.

  I can’t even imagine how horrible it must have been for my parents, but they tried their best to help us kids through it. My mom tried to explain it to me. I remember her sitting on my bottom bunk while I walked around the room by the closet and the rocking horse. I asked her why my little sister had to die. What could she have said? I don’t even remember, but I hate to think about how hard that conversation must have been for her.

  I remember the funeral for Candace, the little coffin and the headband she wore.

  Years later, when I had Leah, my memories of that night came back stronger than ever and haunted me in the worst way. I used to sleep with my daughter’s crib right beside my bed, just so I could wake up and make sure she was still breathing. Sometimes she’d be sleeping so deep and breathing so lightly that I’d get scared and put my fingertips under her nose to check. If that still didn’t make me feel better, I’d have to pick her up just to hold her in my arms and make sure she was still alive. Leah’s way too old to be at risk now for what happened to Candace, but that feeling still makes me cold with fear inside.

  I was so young when we lost my sister, and I remember I was so stunned that I couldn’t even cry at the time. I didn’t even understand death. But the whole horrible thing has just stayed with me, and now that fear I felt with Leah makes me cry when I remember. It breaks my heart now that I’m old enough to understand what my parents went through. What could be worse than losing your child? As a mother I can’t wrap my mind around it, and I don’t want to. It doesn’t shock me as much now, looking back with that adult-level understanding, that my family fell apart the way it did. If my parents had struggled before, they didn’t stand a chance against something like that.

  After Candace died, my family started to deteriorate. That was the start of the bad times that turned into a blur in my memory. Still, I don’t have to remember everything perfectly to reach some kind of understanding of what happened. Most of all, it’s obvious that being blamed for Candace’s death was more than my father could bear. Can you imagine a heavier burden than that?

  It’s still so odd to me that people could be so cruel that they’d lay that on his head. I wish I could have been older then, and maybe I could have stopped it from happening like that. But pretty soon he was blaming himself, and his alcoholism went out of control. What do you expect? How could anyone cope with the guilt and shame of being blamed for the death of their own child, let alone someone who already struggled with addiction?

  Of course my mom had her problems, too. She drank. He drank. They were both devastated by what had happened and completely miserable with each other. It was a perfect recipe for an unhappy home. There were no happy years of marriage in the cards for them from that point. For the rest of their time together, they were fighting and screaming all the time.

  And I mean all the time. When I was growing up there wasn’t one single day in our house where my parents weren’t fighting and screaming and cussing at each other. I can remember my brother and me running out of our room at night and yelling at them to please stop, please stop, telling them we had school in the morning. But they never would. They fought every single night about anything and everything. I mean, stupid things!

  It was in that environment that I first experienced the power of addiction to damage even the strongest relationships. Remember how I said I loved my dad when I was little? How I was a total daddy’s girl? I was barely in grade school when that stopped being true. My father was absolutely horrible back then. The combination of all that pain with his drinking problem just turned him into a different, horrible person. When he and my mom were fighting he’d scream the most awful things at her, calling her names and acting vicious. Before long, he was doing it to me, too. The things I grew up listening to in that house were just terrible. Day after day, year after year, I had to learn to live with all that violent screaming, anger, and meanness. It was always happening around me, for no reason, with no point and no end.

  By the time I was in grade school, I hated my father. All my early memories of the rock ‘n’ roll records and the hair-braiding were replaced by what came after that: my father the mean drunk.

  We ended up moving out of those apartments and into a better place, but it came with a big problem: it was next to a bar. So my mom was always going over there and screaming at my dad, dragging him home, and screaming some more. But she had her problems with drinking, too. She wasn’t some sloppy, fall-over drunk or anything. In fact both my parents somehow kept working constantly through all of this. But when she was waitressing, she’d drink on the job. Then she’d come home, and as soon as they were together it was screaming and fighting again, at the bar next door, in the house; it didn’t matter. Screaming, screaming, screaming! Even when we tried to do fun stuff, like going to Disney-world, there was always that stupid, horrible drama. I don’t remember one single day without it.

  So, yeah. My childhood wasn’t the worst, but my home life sucked. It really did. There’s a lot I wish had been different. I wish we’d had a peaceful house, with parents who got along and weren’t drinking and screaming all the time. I wish I wasn’t begging them to get divorced when I was in kindergarten. And I wish we hadn’t lost my baby sister.

  But there’s one thing I can say about my family, even if it doesn’t make sense to anybody who wasn’t there with us: they always tried to get better. They did the best with what they could. Even my dad, I don’t hate him for those bad times. Knowing him now, and what a big heart he has and how much I’m like him, I don’t blame him for falling apart. If that happened to me—it’s hard to even think about it—but if Leah died and no one could tell me why, and they blamed me for it? I’d do a lot more than drink. I’d just give up. There’s no way I can imagine getting through that without any support. Looking back at it now, I don’t even know how he held it together as much as he did, and that goes for my mom, too. I can look back and wish it was different, and I’m not going to pretend my environment didn’t have anything to do with the way I turned out and the mistakes I ended up making. Some of that was stuff I learned that I shouldn’t have learned. But I’ll tell you what: this family is strong. I’m strong, my broth-er’s strong, and my mom and dad are strong people. They held it together for us the best they could.

  Now that I’m an adult who’s ma
de my own mistakes, I understand the damage a person’s demons can do to the things that matter in their life. I didn’t have perfect parents, but you’ll see that in the end we did make it back to being a family. I consider myself lucky to be part of a family that’s strong enough to survive what we’ve survived. We’re all living proof that it’s never too late to make things better.

  That said, it still sucked to live through all those shitty parts. There wasn’t anything normal about my childhood as far as I’m concerned. And it wasn’t just all the chaos and the fighting. We didn’t even have a phone when I was growing up! We had one for a little while, but it wasn’t working for long, and the worst thing was the actual phone just stayed on the wall in the kitchen forever, like it was mocking us. Eventually, we didn’t have TV, either. Some people would say that’s a good thing, I know, but for me it was just one less normal thing in my life and one more reason to feel really alone. I didn’t get to have that normal kid life where you watch TV and call up your friends to talk and get in trouble for staying up too late on the phone.

  There were still a few things I held onto back then. For one thing, my brother and I were best friends. We shared a room all the way up until we started turning into teenagers. We talked every night, and I used to sing to him until we fell asleep. We talked about everything and did everything together. Up until we started getting older and doing our own teenage things, our connection was flawless. And even after our relationship with our dad had fallen apart, Bubby and me totally inherited his love of music. In fact, it turned into one of the most important things in my life. Whatever I was going through, music was the closest thing I ever found to an escape.

  I had friends in school, too. I was a goofy kid. I was shy and timid when I didn’t know you, but once I did I loved to laugh and joke around. But it’s hard living a life where all you hear at home is fighting and violence, and it takes a toll on you. I started to feel so alone. I knew my parents’ relationship wasn’t normal, and my house wasn’t normal. I wouldn’t even tell my friends about it, but it seemed like nobody else at school was living that life. Nobody had crazy parents like that.

  But even that stuff doesn’t really explain how I felt inside. The fact was, in my case, there was even more going on under the surface that spelled trouble. I just always felt alone and out of place, no matter who was with me or how much fun it seemed like I was having. It was like that dark feeling wasn’t even connected to what was going on around me, and it just stayed where it was, out of reach but always hanging over me. Even back then I knew it was something that was my own personal problem, this issue I had of just always feeling wrong. People did notice there was something unusual about me, although they didn’t usually interpret it in a negative way. I got called an old soul all the time, probably partly because I had to grow up really fast dealing with all that family stuff at a young age. But I didn’t feel wise or like I had my shit together because of it. I just felt alone.

  I don’t remember exactly when someone first told me I had depression, but I was young. It’s not until after you grow up and learn about those things that you can look back and think, “Wow, that really wasn’t a normal way for a little kid to feel.” There was just this dark, empty, lonely feeling inside of me all the time as a kid. I felt like I was miles away from everybody else and always would be. And that’s mostly what I remember from the blur of my childhood. That deep, weird loneliness and sadness that you can’t really explain away with anything, not even family problems.

  I just felt wrong. And all I ever wanted was to not feel that way. Instead of a little kid’s thoughts, what I had was this constant, painful wish to just feel any other way than the way I felt. All I wanted was to feel different. I wanted to feel normal.

  But I was so young, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t change what was going on around me, and I couldn’t control that sadness inside of me, either. It was really bad. It was so bad, honestly, that when I was eleven I made the first of many extreme attempts to fix it.

  I tried to kill myself.

  I can’t even explain how I could be so young and decide the right thing to do was end my own life. I don’t even know if I wanted to die, exactly. I think I was just in such a haze and feeling so bad inside with that loneliness and confusion, it just seemed like the thing to do, because then I wouldn’t feel like that anymore. It’s a twisted thing for a kid to think, but with that kind of depression and at such a young age, I guess it was just the only solution I came up with.

  No one was home when I did it. I just took a cord into the bathroom and hung it on the fan in the ceiling, and I looped it around my neck. I didn’t get on a chair, take a deep breath and jump, or anything dramatic like that. I just leaned into it and picked up my feet. It’s so hazy that I only remember certain details, like feeling tons of pressure behind my ears and then waking up on the floor. I don’t know how long I was out. But the fan had only been held up in the ceiling with one screw in the middle, and the weight pulled the fan so it stripped the screw and fell on the floor. I didn’t try again—I just kind of chalked it up to a failure. And I couldn’t get the fan back up right because the screw was stripped, so after that it was always kind of messed up and made this weird sound when it was on. Nobody knew the reason but me, so it was this kind of a spooky reminder of something only I understood. For the rest of the years we lived in that house, I’d notice the messed up sound of that fan and have to remember what I’d done that day.

  It almost seems unreal looking back on that, and the way I tell the story even I can understand how weird it is. I’ve never been good at expressing the emotions I really feel behind things, and it’s obvious enough that I don’t know the right words to explain how horrific that time was and what I was feeling when I was in that dark place as a kid. I can’t explain it. But I am glad I survived, just like I’ve survived so many other things I’ve put myself through when I was feeling so messed up inside.

  Honestly, that was just the first crazy thing I did to try and knock my head into a different place. Suicide attempt at eleven? That was just the beginning. Before long I’d be trying different strategies, and eventually I’d settle on the pills. I couldn’t have seen it coming at the time, but that need I had to kill the bad feelings inside of me and get my mind into a different state was what would lead me down the road to addiction. It would end up taking over my life and almost ruining every chance of happiness I ever had.

  All the stupid things like that I’ve done in my life, any one of them could have really destroyed me. But they haven’t. The suicide attempts and drug binges should have killed me, but they didn’t. There were many more times to come when I’d wake up and not know how I was still alive. But here I am, stronger than ever, and telling you my story. Maybe it’s just dumb luck, but I can’t help feeling like someone was watching over me. One thing’s for sure, though: after how far I went, I don’t take that for granted anymore.

  3

  Adventures in Anderson

  One thing that always seems to surprise people about me is how serious I am about music. And I don’t mean I like rock ‘n’ roll or pop or any one genre. I love good music. It doesn’t matter what it is. Country, old school, heavy metal . . . if it’s good, I’ll always want to hear it. I’ll even listen to polka if it’s damn good polka. I don’t care. I’m just serious about music, and I love hearing the best of it. That started back before I was even walking or talking, way back in the days when Bubby and I would take those records of our dad’s and play them on our little toy record player. We’d just be rocking out to all those classics, The Beatles and Janis Joplin and the soft rock from the seventies, soaking it up. I loved it all, and I still do.

  Even by the time I was in elementary school I was getting into all these different genres. When I was seven, I remember it was all R&B and rap: Boys II Men, Mary J. Blige, Tupac, Ice Cube. I was really into that stuff. The bubblegum pop on the radio at the time wasn’t doing it for me at all. I remember one year my mo
m tried to get me a Britney Spears CD, and I was absolutely pissed. I hated it! I have to admit, though, I did end up liking the Spice Girls, for some reason. But I think that happened to a lot of people, so, whatever. Sue me.

  I was still really into the R&B stuff when I was around thirteen. But it was right around then that Bubby introduced me to my favorite band that ended up staying with me for my whole life. Now, Bubby was a teenager at the time, and I practically worshipped him. Between the two of us, it had always been the kind of thing where whatever he did I had to do it, too. If he dyed his hair, I used the leftover color to dye mine. When he pierced his lip, I went and pierced my lip. We just had the strongest connection. We shared a room right up until we hit puberty, and even after that when we got our own rooms, we’d still stay up late together and talk about everything. So one night he came in with this CD by a band called The Used and put it on. I wasn’t into that screamo stuff at the time, so at first I was like, “What is this?” I hated it as a reflex. But he just left it on and fell asleep, and I was lying there on his bed just kind of half-listening when this song “On My Own” came on. If you don’t listen to The Used, you might be imagining something different from what this song was. It wasn’t the sort of hardcore, screaming shit they were associated with at the time. They’re actually a great rock ‘n’ roll group with a lot of different material, and this was a beautiful, introspective song about loneliness and the struggle of living with it. It really struck a chord with me.

  Even though I’d always loved music, for the most part it just made me want to dance and have fun. But this was the first time I had ever experienced a real emotional impact from a song. Of course, you have to remember what was going on at the time. By that time I’d already been living with depression for years, and it was so bad I had already tried to kill myself. So hearing something so beautiful that spoke to those feelings opened up a whole new world to me. From that point on, whenever I felt sad or depressed or alone I turned to music and looked for whatever relief I could find in that emotional connection. It was still the same deal years later in prison, where all you really have to pass the time anyway is your radio and your headphones. I’d be up all night, just like when I was a kid, lying in bed with my headphones on getting lost in that music. The funny thing was everybody in that prison knew how serious that habit was, to the point where even if they had to sanction me, they knew better than to take my headphones away. They knew if they did I would be a total fucking bitch. What can I say? Put me in the corner if you have to, but don’t touch the music.