I went to work in David’s office, which was connected on one side to a donut shop. For the first couple of days, I loved the sweet smell of donuts in the air. By day three, and from then on, it made me kind of sick. A constant sugar rush, though, seemed like a small price to pay for a good, steady job.
But there was another problem. My first week at work was also the week I had to take JP to the clinic. I was allowed to see him three days a week—two visits and one day of family counseling—but in order to see him I’d have to find a way to leave work early. And how could I ask my boss for time off from a job I’d only just started? But since I had no choice, I scrounged up my courage and asked David if I could work through lunch so I could leave at 4:00 p.m. and drive up to see my son. I was terrified he was going to fire me on the spot.
He didn’t. He agreed to let me leave early three days a week. It turned out there were circumstances in David’s life that allowed him to understand and sympathize with what I was going through. He said that sometimes it felt like his work at the office was the only thing holding his family together. That’s why he was so kind to me—he knew I needed a helping hand, same as he did. Once I learned what he was going through, it made me want to work even harder for him and for the business. It was just the two of us, but we became a really effective little team. During my time at David’s agency he won several awards, and I even won one myself for my work with children in the community.
But even better than the awards was the friendship we developed. We helped each other through a really tough time for both of us. David became one of my dearest friends, and though he moved away, I still speak with him every now and then. I wonder if he knows that when he hired me, he basically saved my life.
Thanks to David, I went to see JP every chance I could (we also got to talk on the phone ten minutes a night, not nearly enough time for either of us). In my visits, I could tell his condition was slowly improving. They’d given him different mood stabilizers, and it seemed to be working. He was still having problems with many of his frontal lobe functions—inhibitions, emotions, impulse control—but at least we were getting some tools to help us handle it.
In the middle of this whirlwind called my life, a person appeared who changed everything. He wasn’t someone I ever expected or even wanted to meet, and I fought as hard as I could to make him go away. But he wouldn’t, and he didn’t. And so my crazy little life took an amazing new turn.
BELIEVE ME, BY then I was all but finished with men. I just didn’t have time for games and drama, and after what had happened with Steven and JP, I was even more careful about who I brought into lives. Only many years later would I realize you aren’t the only one in control of who enters your life. Sometimes greater forces are at work putting people in your path.
It started when a friend invited me for a glass of wine at the Air Force base. I was way too tired to go, but my friend was persistent. “Come on, one glass,” she said. Sabyre was staying with my mom, and JP was still in the clinic. Reluctantly I went to meet my friend.
At the main gate, a guard stopped us and sent us into an office to get a pass. This guard, an older guy, started hitting on my friend and me in a really obnoxious way. You know, leering at us and making inappropriate comments. I had zero tolerance for bigmouthed men anymore, and I was just about to lay into him when another guard in the office suddenly spoke up.
“You going on a date or something?” he asked me.
I looked over at this other guard. He was sitting at a back desk eating Girl Scout cookies—Thin Mints, to be exact. He was a light-skinned black man about my age, and he had a beautiful smile and warm, friendly eyes. Right away I sensed there was nothing mean or threatening about him. He was the kind of guy who would have turned my head in years past, but I’d had more than enough of men clumsily hitting on me. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“That’s none of your business,” I snapped. “You don’t need to know that to give me a pass, do you?”
The guard looked wounded. “I’m sorry, miss, I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “I just think you look beautiful.”
I didn’t say anything else; I just took my pass and stormed out. A few hours later, in my friend’s room, I began to feel bad about how rude I’d been. It wasn’t like me to snap like that—well, not for no reason, anyway—and I wanted to apologize to the guard. I had my friend call the gate and tell him I was sorry. Instead, she invited him over. I was surprised an hour later when he showed up in full uniform.
I apologized for my rudeness, and we wound up sitting and talking for about four hours that night. If nothing else, this guy was a great listener. For some reason, I felt okay telling him about my kids and JP’s accident and all that—not every detail, of course, but a pretty good overview. And he sat there with those warm, friendly eyes and let me tell my tale of woe. He didn’t make a move on me or even try to kiss me, and at the end of the night he just gave me a peck on the cheek and said he hoped he’d see me again.
“You’re going to marry him,” my friend said as soon as he left.
“Oh, please,” I said. “I’m probably never going to see him again.”
Only much later would he tell me that he fell in love with me that night.
HIS NAME WAS Virgil, and he was a U.S. Army Security Forces officer stationed at the base. He was born in Texas, but when he was a child, the searing heat gave him skin rashes, so his parents moved him north to Oklahoma. His dad, Vernon, was a truck driver who steered giant rigs strapped with huge drums of dangerous chemicals, and Virgil knew him to be as tough a man as there was. One winter when the roads were iced over, his dad’s truck slid into a deep ditch and toppled over. Luckily, he didn’t seem too badly hurt, but he refused to go to the hospital to get an X-ray. He just went home all sore and bruised and spent the next few days picking tiny bits of the windshield out of his clothes. (He’s come a long way since then; today, Vernon owns his own construction business in Oklahoma City.)
Virgil’s mother, Eddie, met his father in college, where she was earning a psychology degree; family lore has it she did a lot of his homework for him. They were in their early twenties when Virgil was born, and they took him to their Baptist church every Sunday. After a while, though, they stopped going to church, and young Virgil stopped going, too.
But when Virgil was fourteen, his basketball coach, a deeply religious man, started talking to him about salvation—how it was possible for him to be saved in the eyes of God. Something about the concept of salvation really stuck with Virgil, and that year he entered into a relationship with God. There was no elaborate ceremony or ritual—Virgil just went off on his own somewhere and spoke a few words to God. “Lord, I am a sinner, and I ask you to forgive me my sins,” he said. “I believe that you died on the cross for my sins, and I ask you now to enter my heart as my savior.”
As Virgil would later explain it to me, that was the start of a long and beautiful process. From that day on, Virgil has never looked back. He has never doubted, not even for a moment, that God is real and lives in his heart. “I can trust God,” he will say. “I know He will help and protect me.” In a nutshell, Virgil had the very certainty about God that I had always craved but never could feel. Where I went back and forth about God’s existence and His goodness, Virgil never wavered. The presence of God was a plain and simple fact of his life, like the air he breathed and the food he ate and the grass that grew beneath his feet.
I had never met anyone like him.
So naturally, his first impression of me was “Wow, what a rude person.”
Actually, Virgil didn’t think that at all. He didn’t let my rudeness bother him in the least. He wasn’t a pushover or anything like that—far from it. He was a former boxer, and he was plenty tough, like his dad. But he was also kind and soft-spoken, and he always seemed like the calmest, most secure man in any room. Even so, I had no interest in dating him—I had no interest in dating, period. There was just too much going on in
my life—and my track record with men was just too sorry—for me to get involved with anyone new. Virgil and I got together again for coffee a day or two after we met and went on to spend a lot of time talking on the phone, but I think I made it pretty clear I wasn’t available. The best he could hope for was to become my friend.
And that is exactly what happened. Virgil seemed so interested in my problems and my struggles, and he always told me how strong I was and how much he admired me. I felt I was getting a very real measure of support from him at a time when I desperately needed it. For three or four weeks we’d sit around and talk and eat and watch movies, and I started to realize I’d never felt this kind of closeness with any other man in my past. Whatever it was that I was feeling, it felt different. It wasn’t the head-over-heels passion and wild romantic yearning I was so used to experiencing. It was something deeper, more substantial—something that felt more real. After a month or so, I even decided to let Virgil meet my kids.
Sabyre met him first. She was only six years old at the time and had trouble pronouncing his last name—McVea—so she took to calling him Max. Well, Max and Sabyre became best pals. As gentle and generous as he was with me, he was even more wonderful with my daughter. Then one day I told Virgil I had to go visit JP in the clinic. He asked if he could come with me, but I didn’t think it was fair to bring him in to meet JP in the institution, so I said no. Virgil said, fine, he’d come to keep me company, then sit in the car and wait while I saw JP. I told him the visit could last three hours. He said he didn’t care.
So he drove with me and waited in the car for three hours while I saw JP.
Not long after that, I got a pass to take my son out of the clinic for a weekend. It was his birthday—he was turning nine—and I scheduled a whole day for us at the Omniplex, a gigantic science exhibition hall and zoo in Oklahoma City. Virgil called his parents, who lived in Oklahoma City, and told them his friend Crystal’s son was having his birthday. His mother—demonstrating exactly where Virgil got his kindness from—opened up her house, invited all these friends and cousins, and threw JP his own birthday party, with a special cake and everything. It was just about the happiest I’d seen him in years.
By then it was clear to me I had real feelings for Virgil. It began to dawn on me that Virgil could be an important part of my life. My partner, my champion, my hero—someone who’d be there for me in a way no one else ever had. Not a day went by without Virgil telling me how beautiful I looked or what a great mother I was, and on some days I even allowed myself to believe him.
But on most days, my feelings for Virgil were overwhelmed by a single, persistent thought: He is too good for you.
The self-hatred that had rooted in me since I was a young girl was, all those years later, part of me still. I wasn’t the kind of woman good men like Virgil fall for. I didn’t love myself, and I knew that God couldn’t love me. So how could I accept someone like Virgil loving me? It couldn’t be possible. It didn’t make sense.
That’s why I did everything in my power to chase Virgil away.
At some point I sat him down and listed every reason why he shouldn’t be with me. I told him about the horrors of my childhood. I told him about the abortion. I told him how I had dated married men. I told him I had two children and how that was something he didn’t want any part of. I gave him every reason under the sun to get up and walk away from me for good.
But Virgil didn’t get up, and he didn’t walk away. As I sat there crying and spilling my guts, he just leaned in and listened. When I was through, he spoke to me in that calm, reasoned way I was starting to get used to.
“You’ve earned a college degree,” he said. “You work full-time and raise two great kids on your own. You have compassion for people, and your humor and laughter draws them to you. You’re one of the strongest women I’ve ever known. You have so many more good qualities than anything bad you can ever say about yourself.”
And then he went in for the clincher.
“You survived all of that stuff,” he said of my past, “and you have become the person I love.”
A remarkable thing happened at that point—I stopped running.
But when I stopped running, everything I’d been running away from suddenly found me all at once.
And when that happened, the course of my life took its strangest turn yet.
VIRGIL AND I DATED FOR SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE we decided to get married. The proposal? Well, Virgil didn’t exactly propose to me, mainly because I didn’t give him the chance. Once we knew we were going to be together, I vowed to do it right this time—no more living with someone and hoping it might work out. So when Virgil’s stint in the Army was up and he got ready to become a civilian, I laid down the law.
“Either you need to get your own apartment or we need to get married,” I said.
“Well,” Virgil said with a wink, “I guess it’s cheaper to marry you.”
As much as I loved him, the idea of marrying Virgil scared me. My history with men was something I couldn’t put behind me, and it was like I was always waiting for something to go wrong—only now it wouldn’t just affect me. It would mess up my kids. When Virgil and I went to get our marriage license, I had a full-blown panic attack. I couldn’t even sign the license, my hand was shaking so badly. Then I found I couldn’t say the word “husband.” The first time I heard someone refer to Virgil as my husband, I had another panic attack. To this day, we still laugh about that.
I guess this was just my mind playing tricks on me. In my heart, I knew I wanted to be with Virgil forever. When I told the kids we were getting married, they were beyond excited—they were already nuts about Virgil and had been for a while. So were my friends, and my mother, and everyone who knew him.
During my early twenties my life was so chaotic I went to church only sporadically, but after I met Virgil I became a regular churchgoer again. I even taught Sunday school at Grace Methodist Church—the same church I’d grown up in. Virgil and I decided to get married there after Sunday school. We both agreed we wanted a low-key affair. It was the second marriage for both of us, and we didn’t feel we needed to have a big fairy tale wedding. We didn’t invite many people—just my mom and my Aunt Bridget and uncle Al, my brother Jayson, and, of course, my children, plus a couple from the church who would be our witnesses. Virgil’s parents, unfortunately, couldn’t make it down from Oklahoma City.
We wanted the ceremony to be warm and informal, and it was. Virgil wore a simple white shirt and a nice pair of slacks, and I wore an autumn-colored skirt and a burnt orange sweater. That morning I’d gone to the store and bought some peach roses and peach-colored ribbon, and that was my bouquet. Simple yet beautiful. Sabyre and JP—who was out of the clinic and doing better—got dressed up in their Sunday finest and pranced around that morning like it was Christmas.
Right after Sunday school I told the nine teenagers in my class I was getting married. They were all so excited they stuck around to watch. It was like having our own little cheering section. The service itself took less than five minutes. The pastor, George, who was more like family to us than just a pastor, took us through our traditional vows—Do you take this man? Do you take this woman?—and then, just like that, we were married. Virgil leaned in and gave me a sweet little kiss, and all the kids, including my own, began whooping it up. During church service we have what we call a “thankful box,” and if you want to share anything with the congregation, you just put a dollar in the box and start sharing. JP and Sabyre ran up and put a dollar in and yelled out their good news: “My mom and dad got married today!” they squealed.
And so I got my fairy tale wedding after all.
THE HONEYMOON WAS a weekend in a fancy hotel in Oklahoma City—with the kids. They were at least as excited as we were and probably more. As soon as we got there, Sabyre helpfully told the receptionist, “We’re on our honeymoon!” And once the hotel staffers knew, they sent a fruit and cheese plate and sparkling cider to our room. That weekend wa
s one of the happiest weekends I’ve ever had.
You see, my marriage to Virgil brought something to my life that I never, ever had before: stability.
For the first time, I felt like I had solid ground under my feet. I got over my prewedding jitters and even started using the word “husband” freely (okay, so it took me three weeks into the marriage to stop referring to Virgil as “my boyfriend”). We bought a house in my hometown, and not long after that I got a new job teaching third grade at a local elementary school. JP was doing better, and both he and Sabyre loved their new dad. If life is a great big puzzle with a million tiny pieces, a lot of my missing pieces were starting to fall into place.
And yet I didn’t react to my new stability like you might think I would.
Don’t get me wrong. It was wonderful to have someone who loved me and was always on my side, and Virgil did indeed become my champion. He took over my fight to get JP on his dad’s insurance and finally got it done. He helped me get JP in to see the specialists he needed. He made it so I didn’t have to hustle quite as much as I had to when I was single. All my adult life I’d run around like a maniac from one job to the next, cleaning houses, ironing clothes, serving beers, finishing college, raising two kids, you name it. I don’t remember ever slowing down. And all that working and running around made me lean and tough, if nothing else. I probably weighed less as an adult than I did as a student in high school.
Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again Page 11
