Because of You

by Sam Mariano

  But her heart had wings that night.

  After all the pain, all the tears, all the difficulty, all the patience, the man she loved was finally going to be all hers.

  She was so happy that week that reading those entries in her journal makes my heart ache for her, even after all these years. Her heart was so full of hope, her dreams just a breath away from becoming reality, and she loved him so much. She went shopping for a new outfit that week, and decided to buy a matching bra and panties set, too, because even though she wouldn't admit it plainly, she was planning to finally make herself his in the only way that she wasn't already.

  She stopped journaling for three days, and on the fourth day she wrote hysterically, most of it not even making sense, just desperate started sentences that went unfinished. She finally told herself to get it together, and she wrote that she had just gotten off the phone with Mike, that he was packing his things. His mother had kicked him out, and he claimed he didn't have anywhere else to go. She asked him with dread where he was moving. He responded lowly, "Sarah."

  Her heart broke again.

  Even though he initially claimed they were not back together, that it was just a living arrangement, she knew that with him under Sarah's roof, she would never see him. Sarah would get him back before long, and she would be right back where she was before, but worse, because she couldn't even go to his house to see him after Sarah went to work.

  My mother did make one last, desperate stab to stop it; she asked him to move in with her. She said she would get a place, which she had been planning to do anyway, and they could live there together. He made up an excuse about not knowing if he had enough money for rent. She told him he didn't have to, that she could pay the rent on her check alone. My mother was willing to do anything that she had to do to be with Mike, go to any lengths. By that time, she had lost more than her heart to him; she had lost her entire soul to him.

  It was then that Mike finally told her that it wasn't about the rent or having a place to live. He admitted that Sarah wouldn't let him see his child if he wasn't with her, and he told my mother that she couldn't ask him to choose between her and his own kid. Crushed once more, she could only stare at him, before finally saying, near tears, "I would never ask you to do that. You have to know me well enough by now to know that."

  "I do," he replied, but went on to tell her that's exactly what it came down to. Sarah was making him choose between my mother or his child.

  My mother was outraged, and she told him that Sarah couldn't do that, that they could reason with her, they could figure something out— if all else failed, they could fight her in court.

  But Mike was certain that if he did that, the courts would rule in her favor and he would still never get to see his child. She wrote in her journal,"I wanted to push, I wanted to open his eyes and argue with him until he saw reason, and I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that wouldn't happen. But what if I'm wrong? What if I pushed and made him believe me, and he did lose his child? He would never forgive me, and I would never forgive myself."

  She cried in front of him that day as she realized that it was truly over, that it was really goodbye, and he looked at her sadly, tenderly, and told her as he wiped away her tears with his thumb, "This is exactly what I didn't want to happen."

  My mother was terribly depressed for a couple weeks after that; she claimed that she cried all the time, at the tiniest things, that she felt completely worn out, too tired even to get out of bed.

  It was a month after their goodbye when Alex came back. During my mother's six to eight week period with Mike, apparently Alex moved in with his girlfriend two hours away where she was going to college, a fact she only added as an afterthought before she signed off and went to bed.

  Alex was still with the girlfriend, but he called my mom the morning he got into town and told her he'd love to see her while he was there.

  Just two days before Alex called she made a remark that she needed something to distract her, to make her forget about Mike, even if only for a little while. Alex was nothing if not a good distraction.

  Alex decided to come up to her work that night and visit her, and when he got there she ran out and gave him a hug, like any old friend, although she noted,"He gave me that affectionate squeeze as he hugged me. Made me sad."

  Mike was working that night, and he knew Alex because they had grown up going to school together and living just down the road from one another. He also knew from talk at work that she had been involved with him before she met Mike.

  My mother wrote that she could see and feel the difference in Mike after Alex came to see her. She wrote that Mike made fun of her for ever dating Alex, and that he was mean to her for the rest of the night. Reading the following entries, he seemed to only get meaner as the entries progressed after that night.

  Personally, I think he was jealous, but he had absolutely no right to be, especially not after all she put up with from him.

  Anyway, I don't know what happened between my mom and Alex that night, because she seemed upset about it, ashamed, and even in her own private journal, she wouldn't state plainly what had happened. Apparently she was angry at the way Alex achieved whatever he had achieved. She wrote that he had manipulated her, played her in a way that he had never played her before. He pounced on her vulnerabilities, probing about Mike, asking questions that made her sad, feeding on that vulnerability, touching her, rubbing her shoulders, stroking her face. She tried to just ignore him, not rejecting him and making things awkward like they had been before, but not accepting, because she certainly wasn't going to sleep with him.

  I kept telling myself, she wrote,I am not that jaded.

  Whatever did happen between them that night, it helped her forget about Mike for approximately four days, and by the end of a week (Alex was gone again, since had had only been visiting) she was completely miserable again, with nothing to distract her and with Mike suddenly treating her by her own description, "like a whore."

  Another month passed and my mom and Alex stayed in touch, not enthusiastically, but there was a phone call here and there. Then, one night, she received a phone call and he declared, "I think I'm kind of in love with you. Is that bad?"

  "Well... you have a girlfriend," she responded.

  To her annoyance, he told her he didn't see what that had to do with how he felt about her, but she didn’t argue about it.

  One of the days Mike was being mean to her, she told him that he was a liar. He demanded to know how he was a liar, and she told him he had lied to her when he told her he had ever cared about her. I don't know what he said, but whatever it was she acknowledged that it bothered him when she suggested things like that, and she said after that remark she caught him flirting with her, maybe unintentionally, and she thought it was probably to reassure that he had cared about her, but she still wondered if he knew how cruel that was.

  My mother wrote about much of their flirting, so I can understand easily how he would send her mixed signals. Even after he let her go, he would continue to flirt suggestively with her. She guessed at the time that he just didn't realize that it still bothered her, but I suspect that he was completely aware of what he was doing, and it was a boost to his ego—at my mother's expense.

  Whatever else there wasn't, there was passion and desire between them, and I know that only made my mother's devotion deeper.

  But passion and desire aren't always good, I've learned. Together they can bring bitterness and destruction, jealousy and betrayal, longing and obsession.

  In the journal, I could see her love changing, not dying, but holding onto her with its death grip as it poisoned her heart. She began to acknowledge that she never should have trusted Mike, and she tried with all her heart to make herself stop loving him. It didn't work, but it was a valiant effort.

  The night that decided everyone's future was a party at the house of someone from work. My mom got drunk that night for the first time in her life, and Mike was there. Once she was goo
d and drunk, apparently, by her recollection, she went off in search of Mike, and while I don't know entirely what happened, I do know that apparently she chased after him and he ran away from her which confused and annoyed her. When she finally caught up to him she asked him, "Mike, why do you hate me?" She said he didn't respond at first, merely asked her in a mean, nasty tone, why she had to follow him around.

  "Because I wanted to ask you why you hate me," she responded sensibly.

  "Because you follow me around," he responded harshly.

  My mom wrote that she could only stand there, not sure if the alcohol dulled the pain she had expected to feel or if it was just really anticlimactic, but she stood there thinking, "That's it?"

  After that night, my mom was full of hurt and anger. If necessary, she reminded herself hourly that she hated him, that he only had to tell her he hated her once, and that he would never have to worry about her following him around again. Her love seeped over into regret, and she wrote about how she wished she would have never gone over to his house, never given him her number, never given him a second glance. She said that if she would have known how it would all end, she would've gone so far as to quit her job before he started working there if she had to, anything to just stop herself from ever meeting him.

  As their baby boy's due date grew closer, my mother became more and more bitter.

  Alex came back to visit again and my angry, cynical mother consented to go out with him again. Her mother told her she was stupid for going, that she was just asking for trouble, but my momwrote,"But I don't care. I'm going. They could be having their baby within the next week or two, and I need something to make me forget about that, even if only for a night. Alex is good at making me forget."

  She journaled when she got back that night, and I gathered this time that she had slept with him, and apparently that wasn't even what pissed her off— it was that he had the nerve to tell her he loved her.

  Apparently, unable to stop herself, she snapped that he didn't love her and he didn't need to lie to her, because that was just going to piss her off. Apparently he fed her a whole load of shit to try to charm her, so before she let him get what he wanted she said, "Let's get one thing straight, Alex. You don't love me and I don't love you, and that is the only reason this is about to happen."

  I didn't understand that comment when she wrote it, and I doubt he did either, but my mother explained in the next entry what she meant.

  She had loved Mike and he had shattered her heart. She decided she would rather sleep with Alex for the first time knowing that it meant nothing than to sleep with someone else thinking that it meant something, only to find out later that it didn't. She swore she would never let love blind her again, that from there on out she was going to live with her eyes wide open.

  One day later, she put in her two week notice at Burger King, deciding that she needed to get away from Mike.

  It was two days after she went out with Alex that Mike, having heard that she was leaving, decided to make peace with her out of nowhere. He said something about how she had been so mean to him lately and she had thrown back some remark that yeah, she was going to be mean to someone who told her he hated her. Baffled, he claimed he never said that. She told him he most certainly did. Mike said she had gotten on his nerves that night, but he didn't hate her, and he wouldn't say he did.

  This seemed to depress her since she had already slept with Alex. She wrote in that tiny handwriting again that she felt like crying, that she felt cheated, that Mike could so easily make her doubt herself and her righteous indignation.

  For two weeks she was miserable. As the end of her two week notice drew closer, I expected to see her leaving Burger King. Instead, I flipped a page and read, "I think I'm late."

  As I read on, I realized that what I was reading was when she first found out she was pregnant with me.

  For the first time since Mike had started screwing her over, I could see that she was getting excited. In the first entry she was freaked out. She was 19 years old, she had just quit her job, and now she might be pregnant with her ex's kid? And Alex, of all people. She seemed particularly annoyed that she would always have to think of him as the father of her child initially, but she reasoned it out and she decided it would be convenient that way.

  Since she didn't love my father, she wouldn't have to worry about her feelings turning bitter. They could always be friends, and she would just raise me on her own with him making periodic visits.

  Mike and Sarah had their kid in August, and she did write it down, but I noticed that she didn't seem to care quite as much because she had me to focus on. She decided to clean out her life and in doing so, she did have to remove Mike from it, so even though it scared her, she followed through with quitting her job. Before long, she had a new job as a waitress, and things were looking up.

  From there she started planning our life together. She didn't factor men in at all, because she decided they were bad and she wanted nothing more to do with them. When she told Alex she was pregnant, he was pretty mad, but she yelled at him, telling him she hadn't asked him for anything, she was just letting him know. That seemed to ease his mind.

  I believe I gave my mother something to live for. From the moment I was born, I became the center of her universe. Honestly, even though other people say they knew she was unhappy, I know I certainly didn't. She never appeared sad or bitter to me, in fact, I never really knew her pain until I found her journals. I got a glimpse that day at the grocery store, but usually she was loving and happy, everything a mother could be. I thought she was perfect.

  I was only six years old when it happened.

  I remember one minute I was sitting in my room playing with my dolls, then I heard a cry from the other room. My grandmother started screaming so incoherently that she scared me and I started to cry. She just screamed, calling for my grandpa and hyperventilating. I had no idea what was going on, but she finally started gasping, "My daughter! It's Jamie!" I knew my mother's name was Jamie, but I didn't know why a phone call from my mother would upset her so much.

  But my mother wasn't on the phone.

  According to the stories, my mother was driving down the road on her way home from work, and she noticed Sarah's car pulling out of the road that she and Mike lived on. Of course nobody can know exactly what happened, but what we do know is that my mom was driving down a road that had a posted speed limit of 45, a road she took every single day, so she was surely aware of the speed limit, and when she hit Sarah's car head on in the left lane, police say she had to have been doing at least 80 to 85 miles per hour.

  My mother and Sarah were both killed in the accident—although it isn't referred to as an accident, of course, it's referred to as a murder. A murder-suicide, to be more precise.

  When my mother died, I was given to my grandmother rather than my father since he really didn't want me anyway. He still came to town to visit his friends sometimes, and usually for his Christmas visit he would stop to see me and give me a coloring book or a cheap doll.

  Unfortunately for him and for me, my grandmother died of a massive heart attack and my grandfather couldn’t take care of me on his own, so when I was 14 years old, Alex had no choice but to take me in.

  I went from living in a modest two bedroom house with my mom, to a four bedroom family house with my grandparents, to a two bedroom trailer that always smelled of beer and cigarettes.

  Alex never married, going from girlfriend to girlfriend, never without one, always cheating on the one he had.

  I knew from pictures that he had been very handsome in his younger days, because my mom pasted photos in the backs of her journals and I used to love the one photo she had actually displayed of me, her and Alex when I was three-years-old at an ice cream stand when he came home to visit. In the picture he had me in his lap and an arm around my mom, a smile on everybody's face.

  The family we could have had, if they hadn’t both been so screwed up.

  Growing up, I
realized that I had trouble making friends. I wasn't sure why at first because I didn't think I was a mean person, but for some reason people seemed to dislike me before they even met me. It wasn't until second grade when I overheard my name as I walked past the principal's office on the first day of school that I realized what the problem was.

  "You cannot put Derek Noble in the same class as Nicole Harmon. Her mother killed his mother, Edward. You cannot expect those two children to sit in the same classroom. You have to change it," a teacher was saying.

  Suddenly it made a little more sense why no one wanted to sit with me at lunch, or swing with me at recess.

  I was the murderer's daughter, and nobody wanted to be associated with that.

  Grades one through five were very lonely for me. All I ever did was homework, and when I was done with that, I would find what sanctuary I could in my room with a book, getting lost in someone else's life.

  It wasn't until I turned 14 and moved in with Alex that I seemed to get another identity. Yes, I was still the mysterious Murderer's Daughter, but now that the kids were older they weren't afraid of me or my dead mother.

  The kids in the trailer park weren't afraid of me, but I still didn’t make friends easily, and it was only boys that ever wanted to hang out with me. When the first one I had ever let in my room decided to try to shove his tongue down my throat, I immediately threw him out, locked my door, and went back to my books.

  Of course, being an ass, the kid told all his little buddies that much more happened than what actually did, and they believed him. After that even if I would have wanted to, it wouldn't have been safe to hang out with the boys, because I had somehow developed a bad reputation in their corner of the world. I didn't care about their corner of the world, but still, an undeserved bad reputation was no picnic.

  I fell off of everyone's radar until high school, somewhat intentionally, I have to admit.

  By the time I reemerged as a freshman, nobody remembered what the stupid boys at the trailer park said, and anyone who had even looked at me funny after that got an icy glare that could have frozen the sun, so hopefully it would have had no merit even if they did.