She got off the phone quickly to go back to her slumber party with her friends. No sooner had I hung up the phone than it rang again.
“Happy New Year, Pops.” It was Michael. He was not one to let a moment pass too far away without remembering.
“Happy New Year to you, too, son.” I resisted the “be careful” speech because there is the right moment and there is the wrong moment and this was the wrong moment for that kind of thing.
I hung up the phone and I looked over at Matthew, who looked at me and said, “Hey, let’s make another pizza. I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry, Dad?”
Now, we had already made three large pizzas and there was no possible way I was hungry, but I looked at him and smiled and said, “Another pizza sounds great, buddy.”
A long dark hallway. I stood for a moment not understanding what I needed to do. I looked behind me—blackness.
Over the loudspeaker, a female voice said, “Move forward, please.”
I needed to move forward. I slowly began to step forward. Slowly I began to move. I could hear sounds. At first, they seemed almost inhuman, but as I began to work my way down this corridor, I understood they were coming from behind doorways, locked, hospital-type doorways. I could see some of their faces. Distorted faces. What I was hearing was the sounds of the insane. I continued moving forward, not understanding where I was headed, the orchestra of the insane moving me onward. I came to an open doorway. I stopped. I knew deep in my soul that I was supposed to walk into that room.
Over the loudspeaker was the sound of the female voice again, “Please step into the open doorway.”
I had a feeling whatever was in that room was something important, and I really had to find out what it was. I took a step toward the open door, my heart pounding. I took another step. Please, Jesus, give me the strength to endure what I need to endure. I took another step and another. I was standing at the doorway. I could see a chair. One of those tall chairs, almost Gothic in style, with a high back, the type of chair where you can’t tell if anyone is in it or not. I took a step into the room.
The female voice again. “Please step closer to the chair.”
I took another step closer to the chair. I stopped in my tracks when the chair slowly began to turn around on its own. I wanted to scream as it began to reveal itself to me. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move! What I saw was worse than anything imaginable, and it sat before me in that chair!
It was my ex-wife! Bound in a straitjacket! Drool coming out of her mouth! Her eyes as white as snow!
“Evil has many faces,” she said with an evil giggle. I looked at her in complete and absolute horror.
“Don’t you understand?” she giggled at me again. I ran from the room as she began to yell at me.
“DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”
I ran down the hall and just as I reached the blackness, the Man came out of it and grabbed me by the throat!
“Don’t you understand?” he said to me as he licked his pointed teeth. Then he began to laugh as I began to scream.
Matthew was shaking me. It was still New Year’s Eve. I had fallen asleep watching one of Matthew’s crash-’em-up movies. “Dad, Dad, wake up. Listen.” I sat up, still trying to clear the nightmare from my mind and trying to focus on what he was trying to tell me. “Dad, you have to listen,” he said. By the sound of his voice I could tell he was frightened.
That is when I heard it: someone running their hand down the outside of the house. Every once in a while, there would be a pause and then it would sound like they would take a fist and bang on the side of the house as hard as they could, causing the pictures to rattle on the walls. I looked at Matthew and put my finger to my lips to tell him to be quiet. I was not quite sure who was out there, but I knew I had to be ready for anything. The next thing we heard was someone walking up to the porch steps. I have to tell you, at this point my heart began to pound within my chest and I was ready to go to battle with whoever was messing with my house. The doorknob began to move on the door. Back and forth slowly, but the door was locked. I knew it was time to let them know someone was home.
“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but I have just called the police and you had better get moving!” I said in the loudest voice possible.
Now, I expected whoever it was to either head down the porch at this point or come through the door. I was ready for both possibilities. What happened next, I was not expecting. In an instant, whoever was on the porch jumped from the porch to the roof of the house. This was a distance of over 14 feet! They ran down the distance of the house one way and back up on the roof and then they were gone. What they did was impossible. Matthew and I sat there with our mouths open. We knew what we had just witnessed was not humanly possible. The other option was one we did not want to consider. Matthew quietly walked over to the blessed candle, which had been given to us by Father Paul, and set it in front of me.
“Light it,” he said, handing me a lighter. I lit the candle and we let it burn until morning.
The phone call announcing that my ex-wife had given birth to a baby girl came shortly after the New Year. At first, I wasn’t sure what reaction she expected out of me, or what reaction I should have to the whole thing. This was the woman who left us high and dry because she didn’t want to have children. This was the woman who had clearly stated she wanted to divorce her children. This was the woman who had nothing to do with her children, and for the past couple of years knew very little about them. What possible reaction could she be looking for from me? Was I simply to forget everything and put it aside? This was one big, huge clusterfuck, and once again I was the one who was going to have to pick up the pieces and put my kids together again from the damage she was about to cause. I knew the cannons were loaded and aimed directly at my daughter this time, because damn, this baby was a girl.
What did I feel about the baby? I was scared for the child. I knew there were all kinds of possibilities ahead for that baby of hers, and I knew the guy she was living with had no clue what she was capable of. He had no idea of the monster who was hiding just beneath the surface of her fake, manipulating facade. Yes, I was frightened for the child. My ex-wife was mentally ill. I had tried to get her help. I had tried to do everything I could to get her counseling, but she only went to four sessions and then she abruptly stopped. The problem is that I should have had her committed when I could have, but I was in denial. How do you do that to the person you love?
Did I love her?
Yes, at one time I did love her. Nothing before or after has ever measured up to the love that I felt for her, but she destroyed it all, leaving me empty and alone. Now, where that love used to be housed, all I could feel was emptiness and the feeling of being betrayed, not only for myself, but for my children as well. There was a time when the doctor told us we could never have children. I thought our children were and are the most wonderful blessings in the world. How could she feel as if they weren’t? How could she now claim that she had never wanted them? There was a time when a child was all that we wanted. I guess for you to completely understand that driving desire, you have to be told you can’t have any. How can your feelings change on a dime the way hers had? What happened? And the elephant in the room, which was now hovering above all of us, was: why was it okay for her to be a mother to this new child and not the three she already had?
I had no idea the collision course she was on. I had no idea she would turn to drugs and alcohol the way she did. I had no idea she would turn to prostitution the way she did. I couldn’t see into the future. Things went from bad to worse. Where she was concerned, things went from worse to a complete disaster. All I could do was watch from the sidelines and wonder where the woman I had married went, and why she was gone. It was almost like a completely different person had stepped in and she had stepped out. There were no signs of her left. She even acted differently––mannerism changed and the w
hole nine yards. Friends of ours talked about how they could not trust her alone in their houses because things would come up missing, and how they didn’t even know her anymore. I sat back and watched the complete, total destruction of a person and there was nothing I could do. Of course I carried guilt. But sometimes, after someone does so much to you, that guilt turns into anger.
I was angry. I was angry for not having her committed. I was angry because I knew I had to keep her away from us because she would try to hurt us if it crossed her mind at any given point. I was angry she was eaten up with a mental illness. I was angry that the person I originally fell in love with no longer existed. But most of all, I was angry because now I had to tell my children that the woman who did not want to be their mother had just had another baby, whom she wanted to be a mother to. You cannot imagine all of the feelings associated with her and all of the things I had to now try to hide from my children. Prostitution, drug addiction, and alcoholism were just some of the things I had to add to the list of things I was now hiding from them. Now there was this baby––a betrayal of massive proportions I could not hide. What reaction did the woman want from me?
“I have some papers here at the hospital you need to sign, stating you are not the baby’s father, since we are really still legally married,” she said into the phone, with a sickeningly sweet voice I had heard many times before when she wanted to get something out of me. I thought it over for a moment and then I answered.
“Listen, I am not signing anything. You got yourself into this mess because you obviously could not keep your legs together. Now you can damn well figure how to get yourself out of this mess on your own. I am not signing any papers for you without a divorce and an attorney present.” And I slammed down the receiver, hanging up on her abruptly. I knew instantly I was forcing her to file for a divorce. It was time. The children were old enough. I also knew I had enough on her to ensure custody would not be a problem. I took a deep breath and got ready for the oncoming battle.
[contents]
Chapter 8
February 2006
The pounding at the door was so hard, I thought the door would come off of its hinges. There was a voice screaming from behind it, “Open this door, you stinking, motherfucking cunt!” I knew this scene. I had lived it before, the pounding on the door and the vileness of the voice from behind it. It seemed as if I was back to that Halloween day when Helen came to kill me.
Slowly standing up from the couch, I moved to the window and carefully pulled back the curtains. There stood Helen, who could sense me watching her from the window, her head snapping to look my way immediately. Her eyes were completely engulfed in blackness, beady as shark eyes. Instead of holding the gun behind her back where I couldn’t see it, she now held it in plain view, almost beckoning me with it. “Open the door, you chickenshit, fucking ass bastard!” She placed the barrel of the gun onto the center of her forehead playfully and started to giggle. It was clear to me at this point we were off the real-life script and were now headed into new territory. I quickly closed the curtains and backed away from the window.
“I’ll kill you on a Monday. They’ll bury you on a Thursday. They will forget you on a Friday.” I looked toward the front door and to my horror it began to breathe in and out, in a rhythmic succession of death deep breaths and rattling sounds. “Let me in! One moment and it will all be over. One moment and it will all be done.” Helen continued to giggle as she begged for entrance from the other side of the closed breathing door. My two cats began to hiss at the door. They had their backs arched, adding to the strange sounds filling the room. “One bullet right in the middle of your forehead is all it will fucking take. Open the door!” I tried backing away from the door farther. “Open the door, you fucking pussy!” I put my hand on the couch for leverage because it felt like the room was spinning. “OPEN THE GODDAMN DOOR!” I tried to scream “NO,” but the sound wouldn’t come from my throat. Then a guttural, evil laugh came from the other side of the door, low at first and then building in momentum. An evil laugh that turned into a throaty whisper, “Have you checked your children lately?”
A scream engulfed the house, and in an instant it dragged me from my nightmare and sent me on a dead run from my bed through the house. It was Lydia! She was not in her room! I fell to my knees, trying to get down the hall as I heard her scream again! I heard something running across the roof above me and I knew I had to get to her! I made it into the living room and I saw her sitting up on the couch, screaming! “What’s wrong? I’m here. I’m here,” I said, trying to calm her down.
“I was sleeping and I woke up. There was this black shadow of a man standing over top of me, looking at me,” she said, shaking, with tears in her eyes. I immediately went on a rampage, checking all of the doors and windows. Everything was still locked down and nothing had been disturbed. The logical part of me would say that we both had a nightmare at the same moment, but logical explanations with my family went out the door a long time ago. We did not have the luxury of logical. The last time I questioned the logistics of a situation, I got bitch-slapped in the face for it.
A parent knows when there is something wrong with their child. I don’t care how old that child might be. A parent knows when something is wrong. I could sense, when Lydia began to evolve, that things were not kosher. We had already been through the adolescent rebellion stage. This was different. She was behaving differently. She was showing all of the signs of depression. She wasn’t sleeping. She wasn’t eating. It was a literal emotional roller coaster around our house. There were times I could just simply look at her, and she would start crying. I would ask her, and sometimes beg her, to tell me what was wrong and she wouldn’t. I was standing on the sidelines, watching the life being sucked out of my child, and I had no idea why. Her brothers had no idea what was going on either. It seemed with each passing day, things were getting worse and worse. I thought at one point it might be a boy problem, which got a laugh and a door shut in my face when I tried to talk to her about it.
Then one evening, we were sitting at the dinner table with my parents. My mother was sitting next to Lydia. I had not noticed that Lydia had been wearing these green, cherry-patterned sweatbands on her wrists. Nothing ever passed my mother’s watchful eyes. My mother asked Lydia why she was wearing them. Lydia wouldn’t answer her. My mother asked her again and again Lydia wouldn’t reply. So my mother simply reached over and removed one, and to my shock there were cuts all over Lydia’s wrists. She had been cutting herself. My heart broke instantly, because I knew right away what it was all about. I think instinctively I knew where this was headed. I had fooled myself for a long time that I had been able to piece this girl back together after her mother had deserted us, and now it was coming back to haunt us. I had only been able to prolong the damage, and now it was time to face the music.
The next morning, I was sitting on the couch, looking through the yellow pages to try and find a counselor, when Lydia came out of her bedroom. “You are not going to school today,” I said to her, not really knowing what else to say.
“Oh, yes, I am,” she snapped back at me immediately.
“We are going to find you someone to talk to about everything,” I said calmly. At this point Lydia went off the deep end, screaming and yelling that she was going to school and I couldn’t stop her. She went for the door, but I made it there before she could, and I literally blocked the door with my body. She was fighting me and hitting me. Crying and screaming, she was completely out of control. I took the hits and then I just held on to her. I felt as if I was completely losing her. I held on to her as long as I could, and then she got away and went back into her room. I then called the emergency room to ask them if they knew where I could get help for her. They told me to bring her in there for evaluation, and they would help me. Well, Lydia was listening to this conversation and started screaming she wasn’t going. The nurse asked me to give her the phone. The nurse told her to ei
ther come with me, or they were going to send someone to get her. At this point, Lydia got her purse and we were on our way.
They tested her for everything. Finally, a counselor came in to speak to her, and I was asked to step out of the room for what seemed like an eternity. When I was asked back into the room, Lydia looked a whole lot better. That is when the counselor began to explain to me what was going on.
Lydia had been having flashbacks from her childhood of the physical abuse her mother had put her and her brothers through. That is when Lydia started telling me what my ex-wife did to my children. Lydia remembers being hit in the face so hard that her mother’s hand had blood on it when it came away from her face. She remembers her mother lifting Matthew above her head and throwing him down a flight of stairs, of her locking Michael and Matthew in the basement all day and not letting them upstairs to use the bathroom, so they would have to use the drain in the floor. Lydia remembers sitting in school, terrified about what was happening to her brothers at home at the hands of their abusive mother. The stories went on and on, each one more horrible than the last. I sat there and listened as my world came crashing down around me once again. The shock was almost unbearable, as was the helplessness of not being able to fix this for my child and the guilt that I did not know it had been going on. Why did I not see this was happening? How did I overlook the abusive behavior the mother of my children was exhibiting?
I knew my ex-wife did not bond with our children like a mother should. Lydia told me, after her mother left, that there were two versions of my ex-wife. She had two types of personalities, a Jekyll and a Hyde, so to speak. Lydia described her mother as “restrained and patient” around family and completely and utterly macabre and spiteful when she was alone with the children. She was “Little Suzy Homemaker” when I was home and “Mommie Dearest” when I was at work. When we asked Lydia why she did not tell, she told us because she did not know it was supposed to be any other way. That knocked me right between the eyes. They lived with it because they did not know anything else. They thought her behavior was that of a true mother. Thank God she did not severely hurt or kill one of them.
Blessed Are the Wicked Page 7
