by Barb Rogers
Dry, dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, it's time for the dreaded daily ritual of hair and makeup. I hate the woman in the mirror, the one who works so hard at looking good on the outside, but who I know is ugly. Mom used to say I looked like something the cat dragged in. I fixed that by learning the skills of styling hair and applying creams and makeup, but no amount of makeup can conceal what lives within. Now, I truly feel like something the cat dragged in—a hopelessly struggling victim trapped in the jaws of a cruel world.
Ablutions completed quickly, I glance at the letter, gulp down another shot of brandy, pop a mint in my mouth, and I'm out the door. I pray to the car god that my old car starts. It's too hot to walk the two miles to the Red Fox Restaurant, although I've had to do it many times before. I don't have the energy today.
The big, gold-colored gas hog, which sits in my driveway more often than not—either because it won't run or I don't have gas money—starts on the third try. I let out a sigh. If I had a phone, life would be easier. But that's not going to happen. Jon ran up a huge phone bill before he left for treatment, and I still don't have it paid off. I yelled at him about it, said things I wish I could take back. I shift the car into reverse and quickly back out of the drive before my thoughts wander to that dark place.
I walk through the bar, waving at the bartender who is setting up for the day ahead, past the dining room, and into the kitchen where I spend my working hours as a cook. Wayne, the owner and my boss, is prepping for lunch along with the salad girl. They stop and stare at me, obviously uncomfortable. I've encountered that a lot lately. It only makes things worse. I force a smile. Wayne leads me to his office and says, “Do you need a couple more days?”
A couple more days isn't going to change anything. My son will still be dead. I will still be alone. “No, I need to get back to work.” The mortuary gave me a thirty-day grace period. After that, I will be giving them a percentage of my check each week until my debt is paid. “I can come back tomorrow, if that's okay.”
I start home, change my mind, pull into the liquor store drive-through, purchase a pint of gin, and head toward the country. I can't go home. The letter is there, waiting for me. Fear grips me when I think of opening it. What more can Bill tell me that I want to know? Jon is dead, hit by a truck and killed on Central Avenue in Phoenix. He'll never graduate from high school, go to college, get married, or have children. I will not have grandchildren … not ever. The tears come. I can't believe I have any left. I unscrew the lid of the pint bottle, take a healthy swig, and continue to drive over the hilly country roads until I find myself at the cemetery. It's the last thing I remember when I come to, face down, chilled from the damp grass, lying next to the mound of dirt under which my son's body lies.
I struggle to my feet, head throbbing, and brush the dirt and grass from my clothes. Picking up the empty bottle, I toss it into the trees surrounding the tiny cemetery and convince myself I must have been exhausted from not sleeping well—that I simply fell asleep. I won't accept any other explanation, least of all that I drunkenly passed out. I can't. However, doubts assail me when I locate my car off the gravel drive, parked dangerously close to a headstone. What time is it? I have to get home to let Angel out and feed her.
A darkness unique to the cloud-filled, summer storm season of Illinois descends as I approach the house. There are no lights on. I hate the dark. It has never been my friend. Angel rushes out the screen door as soon as I open it, barely making it off the sidewalk to relieve herself. Poor little thing. How long have I been gone? I flip light switches as I move through the house to the kitchen, pour myself a big glass of cold water, and drink it down. As I turn from the sink, I see the letter. My heart sinks. I do not want to know the details!
Angel fed, I gather her into my arms, go to Jon's room, lie down on his bed, and weep into Angel's soft fur until sleep comes. The sound of sobbing wakes me. He's there. I can see him. He's standing at the end of the bed. Blood is gushing from his mouth. I scream. He disappears. I rush to the bathroom, hang my head over the toilet, and everything in my stomach erupts. It can't be happening. Not again! It's the same nightmare I started having after my tiny infant daughter, Nikki, died. When it got so bad I was afraid to go to sleep, I sought help from a doctor. He told me to drink a little brandy before I went to sleep. It took more than a little, but it worked.
——
Maybe it's time to read the letter. At the kitchen table, I stare at it for long moments. With shaking fingers, I rip it open. When I realize I'm holding my breath in, I let the air out and watch the handwritten pages flutter as I unfold them. And then I read.
It's all there; all the details I don't want to know. Until I read that letter, I was able to remember Jon as he was when I left him at the treatment center. Now, the picture of his death is embedded in my mind. The memory of my prayer, that god-awful prayer I'd uttered when he ran away from the treatment facility, returns. I hadn't prayed since my babies were dying, since my mother shot herself. They had all died; the prayer hadn't worked. I should have known better. But, I did it. I said, “God, I can't take care of Jon anymore. Will you look after him?” A few days later, he was dead. I might as well have signed his death warrant.
Choking back the tears, I begin shredding the letter into strips and watching the pieces float to the floor. Everyone I ever cared for either hurt me, left me, or died, and this God that everyone was so sure was out there somewhere, helping people with their problems, didn't give a damn about me. My life had been shit from the beginning, and it always would be.
4
Memories
FLASHBACKS OR MEMORIES … I don't know anymore. What I do know is I can't walk back into that house again. I think of how mad I used to get when I came home from work to find Jon's dirty, stinky sweat socks in the living room floor. I'd scream at him. Now, I'd give anything to see them, smell that familiar odor, just to know he is there. I see him in every doorway, lying in the floor playing with Angel, on the couch picking at his guitar, shooting pool with his friends. But he's not there. No matter how hard I try, my memories always end with him dead in the middle of the road, hit by a car, his neck broken.
Immediately, memories of holding my other dead children in my arms—and then having to let them go, that emptiness—flood my mind. Nikki, my tiny infant daughter, born when I was just seventeen, was a fighter. She amazed the doctors when she lasted as long as she did, considering all her physical problems: a hole in her heart and lungs not fully developed.
My second son, Ronny, came along nearly two years later. He looked just like Jon except he had dark hair and skin like mine. Bigger than Nikki, more developed, the doctors thought he would make it. I was sure of it. Each day I went to the pediatric floor to check on him where he'd spent his short life in a clear box, hooked up to monitors. Then one day he suddenly stopped breathing. Nurses fluttered around. They closed the curtain. A doctor rushed through the door. I couldn't catch my breath. I collapsed in a heap, and the next thing I knew, I came to in a hospital bed. The doctor told me that Ronny was dead.
The only time I ever got to touch my babies was after they were dead. They looked like they were just sleeping, their little bodies still warm. I flash back to the days my infant daughter and son died, holding their lifeless bodies in my arms, praying it wasn't true, that they would open their eyes and it would all be a big mistake. I wanted to pull them to my breast and run away, but I stood there in stone silence, my tears running over their tiny faces, and let them be taken away from me and put in the ground. A few years later, when I lost a child before he was born, I simply shut down, knowing that for some reason I wasn't fit to be a mother.
——
My husband blamed me. I blamed myself. If I'd taken better care of myself, it wouldn't have happened. He didn't need to keep telling me. I knew it.
I knew I was a bad mother then, and I know it now. If I hadn't dragged Jon around with me like we were a couple of gypsies, if I hadn't put him through all the drama t
hat was my life, he wouldn't be in the ground like his brother and sister. I put him there as surely as if I'd snapped his neck myself, and I could no longer live in the house where we lived together, where my memories haunted every corner.
I have a place to go, a rented room in another woman's house. I like her. She owns a beauty shop where I worked as a nail girl, and we partied in the same crowd. The rent on my house is paid for a month, so I have time to see if this new living arrangement works out. Right now, I can't see past packing a few things, gathering up the dog, taking the cat to a friend's house, and getting the hell away from the constant reminders of my dead son.
Like Mary Jo, whose long blond hair is never out of place, who wears the appropriate clothes for every occasion, who looks good even when she's drunk, the house is perfect. Everything is like brand-new, everything matches, but it seems to lack any personal touches. My secondhand clothes and few personal items seem out of place, as do I. Maybe I'll get used to it. I have to try, because I have no place else to go. Except for Aunt Ruthie, who's married to Mom's brother and fighting the good fight against cancer, what family I have left has nothing to do with me.
The irony of the situation with my family hasn't escaped me. At age 26, after running off with another woman's husband and finding myself and Jon deserted in a hotel in another state with no money, no clothes, and no car, I did what I always did when I was in trouble. I ordered drinks up to the room and signed for them. The next thing I remember was waking up tied hand and foot to a bed in a mental hospital in Springfield, Illinois. Apparently, sometime during my drunken stupor, I had called my most recent ex-husband. He drove to Kentucky to get us, but unable to handle me any longer, turned me over to the medical community.
They'd locked me up with a bunch of crazy people! I wasn't nuts—I was just drunk. I decided not to cooperate, but was put through months of drug and shock therapy before they released me—with conditions. I had to agree to stay on my medications and go to therapy, for at least two years. With all the help the state of Illinois was willing to give me, I had an opportunity to turn my life around, a chance to be a better person and a better mother. Finally sober, which I hadn't been for any length of time since I turned 17, I threw myself into therapy with a local psychologist even as I flushed the medications that made me feel like a slobbering fool. My therapist suggested that I stay away from my family for the first year. When I told them that, they didn't take it well. One would think that when an out-of-control drunk gives up the booze and is trying to do better, her family might embrace her. Not mine. From that moment on, I had no family except for Aunt Ruthie, who'd never been a drinker.
——
It's Saturday morning. Mary Jo is at work. I have the house to myself. Still in my robe after a long soak in the tub, I dart to the window when I hear a car pull into the driveway and car doors slam. My heart stops for a moment. What the hell are they doing here? It's my mom's sister, Juanita, and her husband, an abusive beer-soaked truck driver who got me drunk when I was 19 and raped me … a secret shame that I will take to my grave. He'd convinced me that the rape was my fault, and if I ever told, it would destroy Juanita and their two boys. As I peek through the blinds, I see the back door of the car open. It's Aunt Ruthie. I consider hiding, not letting them in, but I can't do that to Aunt Ruthie. She is the one person throughout my childhood who treated me decently, who never called me names or hit me.
Pulling the lapels of the shabby robe close around my neck, I open the door. Uncle John swaggers past me, followed by Juanita. They reek of cigarettes and beer. Juanita pulls me to her. I stiffen. As soon as Ruthie steps through the door, I launch myself into her waiting arms. The little girl who so wanted to be loved, for someone to tell her everything would be okay, emerges from me, and the tears I normally swallow in front of others pour down my face. Suddenly, I realize the woman holding me is half the woman she used to be. I pull back, unable to reconcile Ruthie's weight loss and the thick salt-and-pepper hair reduced to thin straggling wisps of fine, nearly completely gray hair with the woman I had known. The chemotherapy has really taken a toll on her. She's dying, and she's consoling me. Making the excuse that I need to get dressed, I run to my bedroom.
Collapsed across the unmade bed, I push my face into the pillow. Strange sounds erupt from the deepest part of me. I can't do it. I can't lose another person I care about. I can't go out there and act like nothing is wrong. Why Aunt Ruthie? I don't know how she does it … smiles through her pain, all the while knowing she's dying. It's not like she's had a good life. Her husband, my mom's brother and a drunk who gambles and chases anything in a skirt, never treated her right. She raised their three kids in spite of him, working long hours at a shoe factory until she had a hump in her back from bending over a sewing machine. But still, she's loving, kind, and sober. I don't get it.
Ruthie steps through the door, perches on the side of the bed, and takes my hand in hers. I see tears glistening in her eyes. “Soon,” she says, “I'll go and take care of your Jon, but you'll have to stay here and look after my kids. Can you do that?” Unable to speak, I nod, but in the deepest part of me, I know it's a lie. I'm the last person anyone would want looking after their kids. “You are more than you think,” she continues. “God has a plan for you.”
After some stilted conversation and a few snide remarks cloaked behind false concern for me from John and Juanita, the need for a drink drives them out the door. I'm sure they have a cooler of beer waiting for them in the car. I focus on Ruthie's face through the backseat window of the big Buick as they back out the drive. Will this be the last time I see her?
A plan for me? God? More than I think I am? What did she mean? Given her circumstances, how can she believe in a God, some imaginary plan? I puzzle over this. The shrill ring of the telephone brings me out of my reverie. It's the local sheriff. He's getting a group of people together to speak at schools and churches about drug and alcohol addiction. I owe him one because he identified Jon after I had his body flown home. I didn't think I could live through seeing another one of my children dead. He wants me to speak from a parent's point of view. I agree, but before I hang up the receiver I know it's a mistake.
——
“Another day in paradise,” I say to the empty kitchen and pour myself a large glass of wine. It's going to be one hell of a day. I need to write a letter to the young man who killed my son with his truck. It wasn't his fault, and I want to tell him that there is no reason his life should be destroyed by what was clearly an accident. As I lay in bed awake last night, staring out the window at the stars and wondering where my son is, I considered what to say. I imagined how I would feel if I killed another person. I would wonder about him … who he was, what he was like … and then my answer came. Now, I pull pen and paper out of Mary Jo's desk.
When I'm dressed, the ready-to-mail envelope clutched in one hand, the phone rings again. I hesitate, then answer it. It's Tom, the last person in the world I want to talk to at this moment. I can't decide if he's a blessing or a curse in my life. I just know that since the age of 20 I haven't been able to get him out of my mind. Our on-and-off relationship for over ten years has been euphoric at some times and disastrous at others. Jon always adored him, and no man I was with since had measured up in Jon's eyes. But Tom had hurt me, and I can't take any more hurt right now.
“I have to go. I'm on my way out,” I say, hang up, grab up Angel, and rush out the door. After a quick stop at the post office to mail the letter, I turn the old car onto the country road that leads to the cemetery.
I don't want to go home.
It's not my home.
I don't have a home.
I've never felt like I had a home. Ruthie's words play through my mind. Tom's face, with his pale blue eyes that seem to see into my very soul, flashes in front of me. I step hard on the accelerator. I can't make the turn. The car skids off the road. Angel is thrown to the floor. Stopped, stunned, I gather the little terrier into my arms and weep. She licks
at my tears and wiggles out of my arms. The door open, she jumps from the car and darts through a stand of trees. I follow her into a wide, grassy clearing.
——
A fallen tree supports my back as I sit on the thick spongy grass, still damp from the early morning dew, and watch Angel explore, peeing here and there. Warm beams of sunlight combine with a cool breeze to relax me. Sliding down, my head resting on the log, I notice the leaves are beginning to change color. Normally, I love the fall in Illinois—the red, orange, and yellow painting the edges of the foliage. But today the fall leaves take me back to another day, another time many years before when I felt much like I do at this moment: like I wish I could simply close my eyes, drift away, and never return. I wonder why I didn't let go of that boat.
5
Holding On
IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1955, the year I turned 8. It would be my last summer on the Kaskaskia River with Grampa Chaplin and his wife, Alma. And, as my mother had reminded me several times, I had no one to blame but myself. I was a stupid, ungrateful child. If I had a brain, I would take it out and play with it. A whipping at the end of a willow switch couldn't have hurt any more than knowing I'd messed up the one good thing left in my life.
To me, there was nothing better than life on the river. The old cabin sat on the banks of the Kaskaskia, next to the Thompson Mill covered bridge, with fields of corn behind it. Electricity was unnecessary; the cabin had oil lamps and a wood cookstove. A well with the coldest, best-tasting water I'd ever had, and a two-holer outhouse took the place of inside plumbing. There were no windows, only wooden flaps that could be pushed out and propped up with sticks. Daily life consisted of hunting, fishing, swimming (which passed for taking a bath), picking berries, drawing water, and gathering firewood for the stove where Alma prepared fabulous meals of fried catfish, potatoes, corn, and corn bread in heavy cast iron skillets. My mouth would water at the aroma of Alma's homemade bread and berry pies cooling near the window.
