Beyond the Darkness

by Angie Fenimore

  As we pulled up to the house, I felt sick when I saw the ambulance with the flashing lights on top. Please let Dad be all right, I prayed. Darting inside, I could hear JoAnne crying and fighting with the paramedics. I stood at the top of the stairs as two large men took her out to the ambulance. My stomach was churning and I struggled to breathe as JoAnne sobbed apologies, but this time anger overrode my fear. At first her dramatic suicide attempts had left me consumed with fear and guilt, but now I secretly wished she would just do it and get it over with. I hated her for what she put us all through every time she swallowed a bottle of pills.

  By then my mother was also living in California, and we would visit her a couple of times a year. With JoAnne gone to the hospital, Toni and I moved in with her for a week. I arrived with my suitcase, my pillow, and a blanket in case my mother didn't have a real place for us to sleep. Then as I bounced around her new apartment—I'd never seen it before—I spotted my old red blanket spread across her bed. How I'd missed it! I dove into its warmth. I hollered out to my mother, "Can I trade blankets with you?"

  Mom stopped in the doorway. "What did you say?" she asked.

  "Don't you remember? This is my old blanket. I gave it to you when you left for Bear Creek," I said.

  "You did?" she asked.

  "Yeah!" I reminded her. "I said you could have it because I didn't need it anymore."

  "I don't remember, honey, but you can have it back," she said.

  Immediately I clutched it to me. I was relieved to find that it still had its comfort-giving magic, which I needed more than ever.

  Later, when Mom asked about things at home, I griped about JoAnne's control. "She won't let us go anywhere, and she's mad all the time," I said. When the subject of school grades came up, I confessed that for as many A's as I received, I got the same number of D's and F's.

  "Well, you really are a screwup, aren't you, Ang!" she observed with her usual careless bluntness.

  Her words stung, though I knew she didn't mean to hurt me. We saw too little of each other to allow for such reproaches. I got enough of those at home. Although I hadn't quite grasped the powerful link between the two, I knew that my inability to concentrate in school had begun when my mother left home. If I was a screwup, she had contributed, and I suspect that she sensed that truth. I think she also sensed my discomfort with her world. We were too much like strangers for her even to recognize how deep my problems ran. When the week was over, Toni and I were back with Daddy.

  There were a few more suicide attempts, and then JoAnne decided to leave my dad. They were divorced when I was seventeen. The stomach attacks that I always got when JoAnne was angry persisted even after she left. One day when I was at the movies with some friends, my stomach started to burn. I had grown accustomed to the pain of these attacks, but I could tell that this was going to be a bad one. After a few miserable minutes, I whispered to the other girls, "You guys, I have to go home. I'm sorry."

  "Are you okay?" asked the friend next to me. I went weak as the fire in my stomach climbed up my throat. Frightened, she insisted on escorting me home. All I could say was "Hurry," as I held back the tears.

  By the time I got there, I was in a cold sweat and my temperature was skyrocketing. Terrified, Dad took me to the hospital.

  When the nurse explained that she was going to pump my stomach, I panicked. Daddy calmed me down and watched nervously as the nurses shoved thick surgical tubing up my nose, back down my throat, and then into my stomach. The whole procedure took several hours, and he spoke encouraging words to me throughout it, assuring me that the torment was almost over. By then it was very late, and he had to go home.

  "No! Please don't leave me," I begged.

  "I have to go to work in a few hours, honey," he gently said.

  I was afraid to swallow or to move, and so I lay awake the rest of the night, praying silently. A day later, despite my high fever, my gallbladder was removed. "You had enough gallstones to build a house," the doctor joked.

  I was released a week later, but I didn't recover. I was vomiting constantly and running a fever of 104, so again I was admitted to the hospital. None of the tests revealed a clue as to what was wrong with me, and I grew more sick and frail with each passing day. Then the days stretched into weeks. Daddy had brought me my red blanket, which was a tremendous comfort. My mother called and sent flowers once, but she never came to see me.

  My second family, my friends and church members, rallied to my side. Their cards and flowers streamed in, and my room was packed with company every minute of visiting hours. I had so many visitors that the hospital finally propped an easel in the lobby with my name and room number on it to spare the staff the onslaught of requests. Then, on my eighteenth birthday, I was wheeled out into the lobby. As I was pushed through the double doors, I was greeted with balloons and streamers and a rousing chorus of "Happy Birthday 1 ' from my friends. What a wonderful surprise! I had never imagined that so many people cared about me.

  But my condition kept worsening. At night I slept fitfully, and I frequently had incoherent dreams. I could barely walk and only with help. One day I pushed the button to call a nurse to take me to the rest room. Nobody came, and so I attempted the trek on my own, supporting my eighty-five-pound frame on the portable monitor that held my IV. It took me several minutes to get across the room, and then my IV monitor started beeping, the sign that it needed to be plugged into a socket. I squatted down to insert the plug and then found myself too weak to stand up. I couldn't even summon the strength to yell for help. All I could do was sit and cry until my roommate woke up and rescued me.

  I had test after test, with no clear diagnosis. The doctors knew that my life was in serious danger, and I had begun to despair. One night when my minister came to visit me, his face went pale when he saw my state. He told me that the congregation was holding a special fast and offering prayers for me. When he left, I felt comforted enough to be able to sleep peacefully for the first time in many nights.

  By the next morning, the incision from my surgery had ballooned out so that it looked like I had a little puppy in my abdomen, stuffed underneath the scar. When the nurse saw it, she rushed out to call my doctor, who dashed in wearing his three-piece suit, accompanied by a team of nurses armed with surgical instruments. The nurses held and reassured me as the doctor cut open my sutures again. I had developed an abscess that was polluting my body and killing me. When my incision was reopened, the poison could escape, and finally my recovery began.

  The doctors thought I was lucky that the abscess had emerged in time for them to check the infection's spread, but I believed that more than luck had intervened. The love of all my friends, who cheered me and pushed me to get well; and the faith in God of my fellow church members, who prayed and fasted for me—that is what saved my life.

  SIX

  There was one member of my church family who was coming to dominate my thoughts. His name was Richard, and from the moment I met him, I knew I'd found the kind of man I wanted to marry—strongwilled, decisive, and in control. Like me, Richard had had a difficult childhood. His parents were divorced when he was nine, and his mother had raised her children alone. The family was destitute. Richard remembers days when he only got one meal—the free "government" lunch at school—and being ridiculed by other students for being poor and for not having a father. And like me, he'd learned to cope with his family problems by turning to God. Being intelligent and determined, he'd gotten into college, and while that made me proud, I couldn't imagine life without him. So I hopped a Greyhound bus to visit him in the Rockies. It was our first real date. On my second visit he gave me an engagement ring that his best friend had made by hand. It was a little chipped, but I cherished it. We were so desperately, ecstatically in love that I abandoned California for a rented room across from his apartment so I could see him every day. We were married four months later.

  Richard had secured a job as a research assistant for the university. With real paychecks in ou
r future, we could use our meager savings as the down payment on a little Datsun that Richard's brother was selling. The weekend before Richard's job started, we took the car down to Southern California for an extended test drive and a visit to my family. We drove all night without stopping except for gas.

  We arrived tired but too excited to sleep, so we decided to rest up on the beach for a few hours. We laid out our towels in a nice spot, and Richard put the car key in a little pocket inside his swimming trunks. We spent the afternoon body surfing and sleeping in the sun, enjoying our first minivacation together as a couple. When the sun began to fade, we packed to head back to Daddy's house. Richard reached into his pocket for the car key. "Oh, no!" he shouted. "It's gone!"

  "You're kidding!" I said.

  "No, I'm not kidding!" he hollered. "How can I get back for my job on Monday?"

  All our money—forty dollars—was locked inside the car.

  "Calm down," I said. "We'll find it." I started sifting sand through my fingers.

  We scoured the beach until Richard plopped down in the sand, in frustration. "This is completely pointless," he fumed.

  It's a measure of how central religion was to our lives at that point that I suggested, "Richard, let's pray."

  "Oh, yeah," he said. "And the key will miraculously appear."

  "Come on, let's just try it."

  Kneeling on the deserted beach, we quietly asked God to help us get home in time for Richard's new job. But no, the key didn't miraculously appear.

  There was a rental shack up the beach, where a scraggly-looking teenager let us use the phone to call my dad and every friend I could think of. Nobody was home. Finally, I called a locksmith who wouldn't come unless we paid him $76 in cash. By now the sun was setting, and the boy who ran the rental shack was getting eager to close up. Explaining our dilemma, we begged him to stay open a little longer till we could figure something out. He thought for a minute or two and then said, "Listen, I have some money. I was going to use it to get high tonight, but you guys are in real trouble. So just take it, and send me a check when you get back to school."

  We were so touched that he would trust us that much. "See," I whispered to Richard. "I guess we did get a miracle." We gratefully accepted the offer, and of course kept our promise to pay the kid back.

  Not long after the "miracle" on the beach, Richard and I were married. I was so excited to be moving on into my own life. I had dreamed of the day when I would have my own family, my own home, and my own children to love; and especially a husband who would love me in return. In the beginning Richard's love completely filled me up, crowding out all my anxieties and fears. The other things that had sustained me— my friends, my church family, the comforts of religion— seemed like pale and ineffectual substitutes for the security of marriage. Richard, I thought, was all I needed.

  That's not to say that I knew how to be a wife. We were both just kids and had no idea how to handle the pressures of fusing two lives into one. That was clear from the night we moved into our first apartment. While we were unpacking, Richard came across a sheaf of my unpaid bills. "What are these?" he demanded.

  "Well," I said, "that's my old phone bill, and that's—"

  "How could you just run up a bill and not pay it!" Richard interrupted.

  "I was planning on paying them. I just forgot," I replied, a little sheepishly.

  "Fine, fine. I'll pay them," he said, half disgusted.

  And so a pattern was established in our lives. I made mistakes and Richard fixed them, but not without a lecture.

  We'd been married for only a few weeks when Richard's aunt Francine approached him about sending her ten-year-old son to live with us. She was having marital problems, and Richard had always been close to Jimmy. We were discussing the prospect, but then one afternoon while Richard was at school, I got a phone call. It was a woman with a thick southern drawl, and I figured she must be my mother-in-law. Everyone in Richard's family had such heavy southern accents that I could never understand them.

  "Er ya'll riddy furra veezater?" said the voice.

  "I'm sorry, can you say that again?" I asked, a little embarrassed.

  She repeated the question, "Er ya'll riddy furra veezater?"

  I just couldn't ask her again to repeat the question so I said, "Uh, okay." Two weeks later, Jimmy arrived on our doorstep.

  I suppose I can be forgiven for resenting him. Here I was, a new bride, just starting to build a life with my husband of less than two months, when my privacy was completely destroyed. Jimmy and I clashed bitterly. But worse than the loss of privacy was the tension that permeated our new home as Jimmy continually tested me. I felt that he deliberately did things wrong to make me angry, and I was jealous of his bond with Richard. Stuck between two warring parties, Richard grew withdrawn, sometimes staying at the library to avoid my rants about Jimmy —what a mess he'd made of the house or about how he'd embarrassed me by telling a snoopy, imperious neighbor that Richard was going to "fix me" for telling him what to do. Richard's withdrawal, of course, made both Jimmy and me more anxious, and our clashes grew more frequent and more bitter. I hated feeling abandoned by Richard; I hated the constant turmoil; and worst of all, I hated the recognition that I was sounding like JoAnne.

  Jimmy lived with us for a year and a half. By the time he moved back in with his mother, I had a whole new view of JoAnne's behavior. She'd made my life miserable for six long years, but now I could see how much she'd sacrificed for me and what she'd been trying to teach me. I was grateful for the tremendous gift she had given me, my reintroduction to God. Still, it scared me to find such a deep reservoir of anger within myself, and I was desperately afraid that my reactions proved that I shared her illness.

  My fears abated somewhat with the birth of my son Alex. In caring for him, I found the patience and love that had eluded me in dealing with Jimmy. Maybe I wasn't the perfect wife or stepmother, but when I held my son for the first time, I dedicated myself to being everything he could possibly need. And I was, for a while.

  Jimmy's departure didn't magically heal the breaches that had developed in our marriage. Money remained a problem, especially when tuition had to be paid. I'd contributed to our support by waitressing and baby-sitting as well as sewing—I was an accomplished seamstress and even established a small clientele. When Alex was born, I got a job as a telephone solicitor, working at home, so I could take care of him. I became adept at feeding him and even changing his diapers while talking on the phone.

  Alex had been born during final exam week of Richard's last semester in college. Even so, Richard graduated with honors in psychology. During his last push before graduation and while he hunted for a job, I took charge of our finances. When things got really tight, I would charge groceries at a nearby gas station/convenience store or float checks to get by.

  One day Richard caught on to my money-stretching tricks. Alex had a persistent rash from his cloth diapers, which I'd been washing by hand because I didn't have the money for the laundromat, and so I bought some disposable ones with a rubber check. I planned to cover the check in a day or two when I got paid, though I knew Richard would hate my messing with his credit rating.

  Unfortunately, Richard picked up the mail that brought the notice of the bounced check. It made him furious.

  "Not only did you bounce a check, but we'll have to pay a ten-dollar fee!" he shouted. "How could you do something so irresponsible?"

  "Irresponsible! I'm the one with a job," I protested.

  "Yeah, right," he said. "If we could live on the kind of jobs you get, I could have ten job offers to choose from by this afternoon. But I have an aversion to wearing paper hats."

  "Hey, at least I bring home a paycheck."

  Shaking the bank notice in my face, Richard smacked me in the forehead with it.

  "But you can't live within our income," he countered. "I'm not your dad. It's not my job to always bail you out."

  "Well, if I hadn't wasted the last three years p
utting you through school, cleaning your stupid house, and taking care of the baby—"

  Richard interrupted, "Putting me through school? Until six months ago I was working two jobs and going to school full-time. And who stopped you from going to school? It's not my fault that you got D's and F's in high school. You seem to be fulfilling your intellectual potential right now, Miss Telephone Sales Expert, and if you don't go to jail for writing hot checks, the sky is pretty much the limit for you, babe."

  Bursting into tears, I stormed out of the room. How dare Richard imply that I was stupid and a failure? Still sobbing, I pulled a suitcase from the bedroom closet, threw it on the bed, and started shoveling in my clothes.

  Richard followed me. "What are you doing?" he asked.

  "Well, I sure wouldn't want to be a burden to you," I told him, my teeth clenched in rage.

  "Oh, so now you're leaving. This is just like you, you and your mother. You always leave someone else holding the bag," Richard said.

  I was over the edge now, consumed with fury. "At least my mother didn't marry a jerk like I did!" I screamed back. "For your information, that check was for diapers; Alex needed diapers. If you spent more time changing diapers and less time watching TV, you might know that." I grabbed his bootleg videotape of Star Wars. "This video probably cost more than that bag of diapers. And I suppose you had to have it." Still crying, I broke open the protective guard and yanked at the tape inside until it snapped. "Here! This is what I think of you and your videotape and your college degree!" I hurled the tape into the fireplace, where a small fire was still smoldering.