Mother's Day

by Dennis McDougal

  “William never came back to the house after that night,” said Robert.

  After his brother left home, Robert had their room to himself for a while. But then his mother’s back went out not too long after Sheila died. She ordered Robert to move out so she could sleep in his room. It was closer to the bathroom.

  “When my mom’s back went out, she slept and sat in the room that me and William used to share,” said Robert. “She’d sit there the whole day and watch the closet.”

  Robert did not put up a fight. He had not the least desire to look at the closet either. Ever.

  He moved to a storage area next to the living room, down the hall. It was a perfectly good place to sleep and well out of sight of his sister’s solitary death cell.

  “I was standing outside the hospital room, when he screamed out of a coma, ‘Theresa’” said Terry.

  After cheating death since the day he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the late 1950s, James Cross had fallen into a coma late in October 1985. Cross spent his final days in a bed at Mercy San Juan Hospital—the same hospital where Theresa had given birth to Howard Sanders more than twenty years earlier. With Terry as her only companion, Theresa was there at his bedside throughout the ordeal.

  Until he shouted out his youngest daughter’s name the day after Halloween, Cross had been oblivious to his visitors and the tubes and monitors measuring his heartbeat and temperature. The sepsis pneumonia from which he suffered had put him into the coma, and his nurses said he probably could neither see nor hear his daughter or granddaughter sitting nearby.

  But Theresa didn’t believe it. She waited patiently for a signal indicating that he knew she was there and that he was getting ready to breathe his last breath. When he shouted her name out loud, she knew he had given that signal.

  “And my mom says, ‘We’re gonna go home so that my dad can pass,’” said Terry. “Knowing how crazed my mom was about death and life, I knew what she meant. He wasn’t gonna let go until she was gone.

  “We left that hospital at seven A.M., took the bus home, and I went to sleep on the floor at the foot of my mother’s bunk bed soon as we got back home.

  “I saw my grandfather’s face in my sleep, and that’s all I saw. And he looked happy. At one o’clock that afternoon, I woke out of a sound sleep. Ruth, the lady that lived in a trailer across from the apartment, pounded on the door.

  “‘I’ve got a very important phone call for your mother,’ she said. ‘Her father died.’”

  James Cross’s death had occurred at 1:42 P.M. on November 2, 1985. He was eighty years old.

  On the way back to the hospital, Theresa told Terry about her grandfather—how he had always cared more for Rosemary than he did for his younger daughter, but how Theresa stood by him when Rosemary would not because she had gone off and married the awful Floyd Norris against her father’s wishes. She told Terry about her grandmother and how she and Jim Cross used to fight, but how they stayed together no matter what because that’s what men and women were supposed to do when they got married and had children. Good men didn’t leave, the way Terry’s father had. Good men stayed no matter what, like Jim Cross had done.

  She talked about the Parkinson’s disease and how he shook so badly that Swannie Gay had to sleep in a separate bed during the last few years of her life. When they were on good terms, Swannie called Jim “Black Dutch” and Jim called her his Shanty Irish, because those names represented the black sheep of the two cultures they each came from, according to Theresa.

  She told her daughter that staying together as a family was the most important thing on earth. Her father taught her that. That was why she could not bear to lose any of her children. She could not allow them to abandon her.

  “When we got there, the doctor had to pronounce him dead in front of family,” Terry said. “I had never seen my grandfather look so goddamn happy in all my life. That man looked like he was just breathing away. He looked happy, at peace. He was glowing, and he was dead.

  “And I looked at this doctor and said, ‘My grandpa’s not dead.’ And he whips up his hand that’s all purple because of the blood settling. And he goes, ‘Is this proof enough for you?’ And my mother went off. ‘You don’t do that to my daughter, you son of a bitch!’ In this hospital, right in front of the nurses, my mother went off.

  “I looked at my grandpa’s hand and my heart sank. I thought, ‘Damn, my grandpa was a good man, and he’s dead. My sisters were both good persons. They’re dead.’”

  She looked at her mother, then back at her grandfather, and she tried to make sense of the contradictions: family is all-important, yet children can be beaten until they die. Family. Staying together, and family. The sentiment was fine, but that was all that it was: sentiment.

  “That’s probably when I got my hard-core attitude,” said Terry. “Fuck it. Just screw everything. I’ve got shit for family. I’ve got shit for brains. And that’s when I started surviving.”

  Theresa spared no expense for her father’s funeral. Jim Cross was buried in a casket that was lowered into a cement vault for which Theresa continued to make monthly payments for nearly a year afterward. When the graveside service was over, Theresa held her head high and left for Howard’s house with Robert and Terry sitting next to her in the car and Bill following close behind in his own car. The short funeral procession ended at Howard’s house, where they all posed for pictures.

  Throughout the ordeal, Terry can’t remember observing her mother shedding a single tear.

  “Terry never really gave in,” said Robert. “She continually would do stuff to get punished. She went out of her way to make sure she got in trouble, and every time she did, it invariably wound up involving somebody else. But she was the only one of my sisters who went up against [my mother]. The other ones, you know, they tried, but eventually I guess they got tired of fighting.”

  By the time her grandfather died, Terry was fifteen. She had given up on school and worked part-time at Del Taco. Eventually, she got her mother to help her forge a birth certificate so that she could pass for eighteen and work full-time without a work permit. Usually, that degree of cooperation between mother and daughter was rare. If Theresa helped Terry, it was because she saw a benefit—like Terry’s weekly paycheck. Most of the time Theresa did nothing to help her daughter. She disgusted her daughter, and gradually, Terry let her mother know just how much.

  “She got to the point where she wouldn’t take a shower but every two weeks, sometimes longer than that,” said Terry. “She’d sit on the couch all day combing that fuckin’ hair. That’s all she’d do all day, was comb it. It could be greasy as a motherfucker, look like she just dumped her head in a fry vat, and she’d be combing it.”

  Terry stopped short of name-calling because she still lived at the Auburn apartment, under her mother’s roof, and because she knew better than anyone what cruelty her mother was capable of.

  “After my sisters died, she tried putting me in a closet and I went berserk, screaming ‘Nooooo!’” said Terry. “She said I was screwing somebody in the car outside Del Taco ’cause I was two minutes late coming home from work.”

  Terry successfully fought off that attempt, but her mother outweighed her and she knew that another confrontation was just a matter of time. Following the closet incident, Terry tried to steer clear of her mother altogether. When she saw Theresa lumbering toward her, she found an excuse—any excuse—to do an about-face and walk in the other direction.

  “I was just trying to do whatever I had to do to stay out of her way,” she said. “I had it set it my mind: there was no way I was gonna die. I don’t wanna die. I wanna live!”

  But she could not duck her mother twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes she would wake up and find her mother towering over her, the doorway blocked and no escape route in sight.

  “That’s when my beatings started,” said Terry. “She beat me and started handcuffing me. When you’re controlled that much and you’ve got this big o
l’ mama hopping on top of you, just manhandling you, it’s real hard to fight back to survive.

  “My beatings stopped while Howard moved back in. My mom wouldn’t dare beat me in front of Howard. When I was a kid, I was Howard’s little baby. After Connie and him had their first child-abuse thing, he moved back to my mom’s house temporarily.”

  And she was safe.

  Getting Howard back amounted to a major triumph for Theresa, even if the circumstances of his return were not the best. He had been arrested for beating Howard Jr. within an inch of his life.

  “He’d been beating me from the time we first got together,” said Connie. “He said, ‘You ever leave me, I will hunt you down and kill you.’ To this day, when I sleep at night I have a flashlight and a knife right next to me. Every time I hear a noise I get up.”

  Connie’s paranoia began shortly after the birth of Howard Jr. Connie and Howard rarely saw Howard’s family in those times, but Theresa still came around on occasion, honking her horn out front of their newly rented home a few blocks away from Connie’s mother’s house. “She never came up to the door,” said Connie. “She would have him come out to the car, and they would drive around the corner or something.”

  She had grown larger and spookier than even Connie remembered, and Howard was afraid of her, too, given his suspicions about what she had done to Suesan.

  “He said one time—it was right around Christmas—that he was really afraid she was gonna kill him,” said Connie. “He said that she wore these real tight leather driving gloves all the time, and she’d never take them off so she wouldn’t get her fingerprints on anything. And he said the way she was acting and everything, he didn’t trust her.”

  When Howard asked her about Sheila, Theresa told him that she had run off with an Indian named Chief. Howard accepted her story, but that didn’t make him any less jittery when she dropped by for a visit.

  Keeping Theresa out of his life didn’t make him any more pleasant to live with, according to Connie. His lack of exercise, combined with drinking and drug use, had turned much of his high-school muscle into flab by the time he was twenty-three. He was beginning to resemble his mother in terms of sheer girth. Howard worked as a dishwasher and, later on, as a cook at a nearby restaurant, but he never seemed to find or hold on to a job much better than that. He tried joining the military once and had actually passed the recruiting tests with flying colors. He was “a stallion when it came to math,” according to Terry. But his hopes of getting on a career path with Uncle Sam were ultimately dashed because he was overweight and far from the acceptable physical shape the Marine Corps or the Army demanded of their recruits.

  Connie was into recreational drugs herself, but still considered herself to be a good wife and mother. Howard, on the other hand, seemed to regard himself as a failure and underwent a complete personality change whenever he escaped into alcohol or marijuana. Instead of anesthetizing his pain, the drugs turned him from husband and father into a drunken monster.

  On March 25, 1986, Connie gave birth to a second son: Miles James Sanders. No sooner had she brought him home than the trouble started.

  Howard Jr. was just one year old and barely weaned, but Connie did her best to care for both babies. She got little help from her husband. On the evening of April 2, she gave Junior to his father to watch while she fed Miles in the bedroom. No sooner had she returned to her newborn than Junior began throwing a temper tantrum. Howard, who had been drinking, told his son to shut up. When he didn’t, Howard smacked him.

  “Howard never used an open hand on anybody except for Junior,” said Connie.

  Connie heard the slaps and rescued Junior, carrying him back into the safety of the bedroom, where he began to calm down. But Howard was angrier now. He came through the door, pumped up over the baby’s impudence. Junior began howling again the moment he saw his father.

  Howard told the boy to be quiet, that he had no reason to cry. Over Connie’s objections, he took the boy out into the living room, telling him to quit screaming. Howard hated the screaming. If someone cried, they had to have a reason to cry, and Junior did not have a reason, according to his father. Then, his temper boiling over into rage, Howard held the boy upside down by his heels and began striking him in the face, like a punching bag.

  “He hit him on his face, back and forth, until he had a concussion and eye-retina damage,” said Connie. “The court said it was the worst abuse they had seen in years.”

  As Connie shrieked, trying to plant herself between her husband and her son, Howard yelled that Junior was just being a brat. When Connie wrestled the boy away from his father and put him in his playpen, Howard began hitting her—a half-dozen rabbit punches to the face.

  Connie grabbed Junior from the playpen, retreated to the bedroom, and Howard followed. Once she got her husband to stop shrieking long enough to see the damage that he had inflicted on his own child, Howard quit advancing. He stared at his hands, then at the red and swollen head and shoulders of his son, and muttered that he could not understand why he had done it.

  Howard left.

  A half hour later a friend who was also a nurse stopped by to visit Connie and, when she saw what had happened, made Connie take the boys to a nearby police station. It was not the first time that Howard had beaten his wife and belted his baby, the friend told police.

  The police report said Connie suffered a black eye, but Junior was lucky to be alive. The entire facial area, from the child’s forehead down to his chin and back towards his ears, were reddened and purple, wrote the investigating officer.

  Howard would eventually wind up with a sentence of three years formal probation, ninety days in jail, and enrollment in a mandatory drug-abuse program after being formally charged with spousal and child abuse.

  But in the spring of 1986, after police had picked him up for questioning and placed his children in protective custody, Howard asked only that he be allowed to go home to live with his mother until his case came to court. And the request was granted.

  Bill never came by to visit after his grandfather’s funeral, and both Robert and Terry were under strict orders never to speak of Suesan or Sheila. So when Howard returned home for his brief sojourn, the subject of the two missing sisters simply never came up. It was as if neither of them had ever existed.

  Except for one small problem.

  “Basically, after the disposal, Mom tried to clean out the closet,” said Robert. “I guess she was afraid some of the blood had soaked through the floor because we had a wooden floor and we had cement pylons. It wasn’t a complete solid cement foundation underneath the apartment, and she was afraid that some of the blood had soaked through the wood and seeped under. So she decided that it needed to be burned in order to destroy that.”

  Theresa had always been meticulous about how she broke the law. From the shooting of Clifford Sanders to the shooting of Suesan to the careful removal of any identifying materials in the cardboard box that became Sheila’s casket, her crimes were always well hidden or easily explained away. Thus, the lingering odor and unsightly bloodstains on the floor of the linen closet continued to haunt her the way the telltale heart haunted the protagonist in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story. She could not help but believe that the stains would connect her to Sheila’s murder someday, especially if and when the family moved out of the Auburn Boulevard apartment and some other curious tenant moved in.

  “Mom had tried to put a new floor into the closet and later on decided that would not be good enough,” said Robert.

  By September of 1986, Theresa’s paranoia had gotten the best of her. She concocted a plan to wipe out the offending linen closet and, with it, all trace of any connection she might still have with the death of her eldest daughter. She began by moving family furniture, her wardrobe, and all the rest of her personal belongings to a cheap motel a few blocks away. She got Robert to do the same. The going was slow because Theresa had traded the LTD in for a Honda and the smaller car didn’t ha
ve the same trunk space as the Ford.

  The next part of her plan involved Terry. While Howard had been living with them confrontations between Theresa and her one remaining daughter had cooled, but Howard’s stay was short. The court saw to that. At the time Theresa put her “erase Sheila” plan into action, Howard’s residence was the Sacramento County Jail. With no referee to keep them apart, Theresa and Terry were constantly fighting once again, particularly over Terry’s interest in young men.

  “I remember the first time I stayed the night at a boy’s house, right before I left home,” said Terry. “I stayed the night with John Pief Jr., and we went fishing up in Auburn. Next day, my mom made a big ol’ scene and got me fired from Burger King.”

  When she discovered that Terry had spent the night with a male, Theresa went into her usual tirade against her daughter’s whoring ways. When Terry ignored her, Theresa played the role of the distressed mother and stormed down to the Burger King, where she informed the manager that her daughter was underage and could get the restaurant in trouble if they kept her on the payroll. Terry had just turned sixteen, but she had faked her way into the job at Burger King, using the birth certificate her mother had helped her forge.

  “So I got fired,” said Terry. “Yet she was the one who had done the forging in the first place! My mom had a history of doing that. Same thing happened at Del Taco. She gets pissed at me and goes down and gets me fired.”

  Terry wanted to leave home. She’d seen Bill and Howard do it, but she’d also seen what happened to her sisters when they insisted on going, and they were both older than Terry was when they made their ill-fated attempts.

  Now Theresa was offering her daughter a compromise: if Terry would set the apartment on fire after Theresa and Robert were completely moved out, she was free to go. No strings attached.