Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle

by Reinhardt, Susan

  Miranda tugged and clung to me, and I tried to reassure her half a dozen times I’d be back soon, that it was all right and that Mommy always came home. “It’s okay, precious,” I said, kissing her beautiful, full moon face. “You’ll have a great time with Mama Millings.” She held onto my leg and pressed her wet mouth and nose into the places doctors had pieced back together. I heard muffled cries, but was used to them and the pros had told me they would gradually stop. The separation anxiety at her age was common and made even more so by what she’d been through with her parents while too young to understand.

  “I’d rather be called Nana,” my mother said, a big turban covering her head as she drained her Maxwell House poison. “It sounds so much more refined.”

  “We tried that. They didn’t catch on. I’m sorry but it’s Mama Millings. Sure beats Mee-Maw, though if you’d rather us call—”

  “You don’t need to go sassing me,” she said. “What in the world are you so dressed up for? You look like a hooker with a large fanny.”

  “What is that thing on your head?” I asked. “You look like you’re headed to Iran to give a Sunday school lesson.”

  “The monkeys,” she whispered. “I put Purell in it and am still fumigating my hair and scalp, Miss Priss. Look here, you need to invest in an exercise regime and whittle down a few of those pounds now, Prudy, I mean Dee. Dee is a thinner name, anyway. I’m just being proactive because you’ll be entering the dating scene and it’s best to be as marketable as possible.”

  “Lighten up about my weight,” I said, knowing a size 12 wasn’t thin, but nowhere near gastric-bypass-qualifying obesity. “Truth be known, I thought there might be a need for such full-figured tarts down at the Econo Inn.”

  She set down her coffee cup. “Prudy, you’ve always walked sin’s tightrope. I won’t have any such business in my house. Now, why are you all hussified?”

  “Mama, for the hundredth time, I’m going to get a job. Got a lead and need to look nice.”

  She considered my face, peering around to check it out from all angles while Miranda blew her nose in my silk skirt and ran off in the playroom to search for her dolls and her granddaddy.

  “I see,” Mama said, smiling. “You sweet girl. You are going to Dillard’s for the makeup job. I knew it. You know when your Mama’s right. You even blended your base so well I can barely see the scars on your neck. Your blush is on the heavy-handed side, though, to be quite honest.”

  I smiled and told her I was sorry but she was wrong about the job.

  “I’m going down to WUSC radio and check out a possibility,” I said.

  “WUSC? The rock station?” She thought rock music made people lust for sex and guns and heroin and was the melody by which Satan stoked his fires, readying his den for new arrivals. “You mean that station where Chuck from Spartanburg High works?”

  “Right,” I said, trying to wipe off some blush.

  “What could you possibly be trained to do there? Isn’t he the boy that tried to get you to drink a slow gin fizz when you were 15?”

  “Mama,” I said, kissing her soft cheek and smelling something lethal leaking from her turban as if she’d also soaked her head in ammonia and vinegar, “he tried to get everyone drunk, not just me. Don’t worry, the station has a secretarial position open because I read it in the classifieds. Since I know Chuck, I have an in, so to speak.” The look of horror on her face kept me from going on, ruining her day with the shame of her college-educated, nearly murdered daughter becoming a clerk, though quite frankly I thought it was a sure-fire way to make money. “Mama, relax. I’ve got options and ideas. You’d really be quite surprised. Wish me luck.”

  “But you have a degree. A college degree! Look at your father. He went to college on the GI Bill and made a great name for himself in the textile industry. He did so well he retired early and only has to take on consulting work. He did so well, in fact, that I never had to work at all. That’s what finding a good husband can do for a woman. Since you don’t have that husband, you can just use your degree we paid thousands for you to get.”

  “It’s in psychology, Mother. And you need a master’s to make it worth a dime. My degree isn’t going to pay my rent right now, understand?”

  “Well, why’d you have to go and take up with that piece of road kill? I told you to send it to an animal rehabber. You don’t think that squirrel’s going to cost you a fortune?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Mother. If it brings smiles to my kids’ faces it’s worth every dime. The vet comped the bill, anyway.”

  “By the way,” she said, following us out to the car, “I noticed Jay walking funny, like his shoes were too small. I can’t abide by that, Prudy, Dee, or whoever you are. I’d just as soon get a job whipping up biscuits and burgers at Hardee’s than have my grandchild’s feet turn all deformed due to lack of proper shoe fit.”

  “I’ll find him some at the thrift store, Mother. Please, I’m trying. You need to lay off.”

  “Lay off? I’m just wanting you to get back into the routine of regular living is all. Look at me. I’m baking two pies and a green bean casserole for a couple of women in my church who right now at this very minute are in the hospital having parts removed and tossed into the garbage. I may not work a regular job, but I never stop moving. That’s the key, honey. You just can’t stop moving.”

  I waved as nicely as possible, slid into the car and backed away slowly, the way one does when facing a predator, making it half-way down the drive before she came running out screaming, “Wipe off that blush, it’s way too dark for day. Blend, Prudy, blend, blend, blend. I’ve taught you to blend since you were 16 and you never remember. Blending is everything,”

  “You already said I’d blended fine,” I shouted, turning onto Dogwood Avenue, passing four houses, all with flags and perfect lawns. This was “I Love America, Support the Troops” country, and if a Democrat lived among them, he or she surely hid that party affiliation the way a witch hides her little jars and potions.

  I made a right onto Fernwood Place and out of her perfect world, sun blinding from the east, the direction of the station, the direction of my future.

  ***

  When the church van struck, I did not feel pain. Didn’t know my tibia bone protruded in shards from open, jagged skin. Or that my hand was crushed where I’d used it to protect my head and chest, not wanting another screwdriver jabbed into my neck.

  The noise of the church van I remember most and can still hear, as if it were a plane revving its engines and building enough power for take-off. I felt myself airborne and then falling onto the concrete, crashing into BI-LO’s plate-glass window advertising hams and chuck roasts. I remember seeing Bryce’s beef-red face as he tried to finish the job of killing me with his set of Philip’s screwdrivers. Then I shut down.

  I am blocked. I don’t know another way to live right now. I know the facts from what people tell me, what I heard in the hospital, in court, yet it is almost as if they are talking about someone else. I wouldn’t have believed all the horrific things they said had I not seen the wounds and gouges, the marks of madness all over my body to show for it.

  They say when you hover at the hem of death, when tubes and machines, ventilator and prayer are the only things keeping you alive, you can’t hear the voices in the room. You can’t know they are writing you off as dead, you can’t feel the urgency in the hands holding yours, the tears falling on the bedsheets and your own wounded flesh.

  They are right. For the most part.

  But on a rare occasion or two, moments of clarity arrive and senses sharpen like new No. 2 pencils and you want to scream out but can’t because a breathing tube is stuck down your throat and you’re trapped in a subconscious state, frozen and immobile.

  You can hear them. The grief and pity are as real as the cold air in Intensive Care
rooms and the harsh lights and doubts that go round and round through your head.

  People in ICU, if my case is any indication, those listed as critical and given less than five percent chances, know the odds of dying are real. We lie tied and tubed, a chest tube removing air from a punctured lung, braces and brackets, sutures and clamps holding our splintered bones and clavicles, our torn ventricles and diced bodies. We may hear doctors fretting over whether death will come from pericardial tamponade—the pooling of blood around the heart—a sudden embolism, or if one of the injuries might brew up a fatal infection.

  “It’s a miracle to me,” one doctor said when my eyes opened and he sensed an audience, “a real miracle the weapon didn’t kill her when it hit her heart.”

  But it had, I wanted to say. It most definitely had in a metaphorical sense.

  That same doctor had held my bandaged hand for one of the nurses. “See this,” he said. “The weapon went nearly clear through, but this hand probably saved her life. She had it over her left breast. Still grazed a ventricle but could have been much, much worse. Had that screwdriver been a couple inches longer . . . had her hand been anywhere else on her body . . .”

  ***

  I remember the first time I woke up a few days after it had happened, seeing my Mama in a chair with her head flung across my bed, pressed into the railings, into prayer, into a hope she’d never abandon.

  I reached for her strawberry blonde bob and held tight. She looked up, saw my eyes, my good hand moving frantically, a game of Charades. Guessing the need, she handed over a piece of paper, rummaged and found a pen and wrapped my stiff, blood-stained fingers around it so I could write.

  It took awhile for my brain and hand to connect, but eventually they had.

  “My kids need a mama,” I wrote in fairly illegible print. I wanted to tell my mother not to let the doctors give up. But that wouldn’t be necessary. She’s always fought for life over death. Even when my grandmother posted the Do Not Resuscitate sign in her chart at the nursing home, my mother, acting as power-of-attorney, changed her mind when a heart attack hit the old woman midday and demanded doctors, “Give it all you got.” The poor woman, bruised and battered from the paddles and CPR, lived an extra year thanks to my mama and was able to enjoy another Thanksgiving, another Christmas turkey and the feel of grandchildren, even great-grandchildren in her lap, before she died peacefully in her sleep, timing it where no one could yell Code Blue and whip out a crash cart.

  I pushed the note toward my mother. Tears fell from her eyes and face, and she clasped her hands and said loudly, “Hear that, Lord? My baby isn’t ready to go yet.”

  Bryce sat in the county jail while my body slowly repaired itself, as did the torn ventricle, broken bones and slashed and pounded neck and chest. My leg was all that still hurt, a patchwork of rods and screws looking like a genetic misfiring. All told, it took nearly three months and many close calls, but I was finally out of the hospital, out of rehab and back into the Cape Cod because the church insisted I stay in the parsonage, though it had been stripped of most furnishings thanks to the Jeters’ buzzard mentality. The church members took charge with their love and warm food and ever-present babysitting services.

  It was moving and heart-wrenching how they stood by us, giving me much more faith in Christian ways than hearing some phony at the podium. These women were real. They came in perfumed and pearled to vacuum and scrub the tub and toilet, all while telling stories of their own pain and horror: a daughter who beat one of the women, sons who hadn’t written in years, breast cancers and other diseases and afflictions—of both body and mind. Seemed few people in this life ever had it easy.

  They saw me all laid up and battered and didn’t mind letting their secrets fly. They were so sweet, allowing us to live there rent-free, or practically. I paid the church a small donation when the disability and accident insurance kicked in but it wasn’t what you’d call a real “rent.”

  A few times, we even visited the church on Sundays. We wore what we wanted, not the neatly pressed and starched clothing when the stage belonged to the Rev. Bryce Jeter, but jeans and Dockers for Jay, Mermaid and fairy costumes for Miranda and the big, ugly purses she enjoys carrying around. I wore long skirts, even in the hot months of late August and September because I didn’t want to draw attention to the purple scars and shattered leg. I swallowed Percocets like M&Ms, downing those pills so I could walk without wincing, so I could take my children to Disney World and the mall, to Ocean Drive Beach, South Carolina, Six Flags Over Georgia and all over the Southeast where for a certain price a woman and her children could distract themselves enough to believe they were happy. We fell asleep in motel beds beneath fake-wood-framed prints and found ourselves tired enough to sleep without dreaming, without remembering.

  That’s how we lived in the early months after my recovery. Going from site to site. Sprinting from the memories always threatening to outrun us, running out of money instead.

  When the trial came up, I managed to get through that ordeal, the mezzanine of hell, by taking two or three times more pills than the doctors recommended. I thought it was the only way I could face Bryce’s defense lawyers, his parents, even Bryce himself and worst of all, taking the stand.

  The state gave Bryce 25 years without parole, and Jay cried his eyes red and swollen many, many nights. Unless we were on the road and I was rambling about Star Wars or roller coasters, planning beach excursions and then cramming those days with crabbing and fishing, museum touring and a schedule that would all but kill a regular family, he sobbed and shook as if electricity coursed through his veins.

  It was easy with Miranda; she was still a toddler and forgot her daddy a week or so after he was gone. I thank God for that tender mercy.

  Everything in our lives motored on shock and autopilot during that first year post rampage. All the distractions were a blessing; the paperwork alone for hospital bills and police and court mess would have consumed the energy of three.

  “I don’t know how you’re doing it, Prudy,” Mama said. “Please let me or your daddy come up and help. You kick us out after two days every time we come.”

  “We’re managing, Mama,” I’d say. “I really appreciate everything, but I have to learn to make it on my own now, and I can’t if I have you for a crutch.”

  And then it happened: May arrived. The first anniversary date, which passed uneventfully, or was about to, until the cards from Bryce began arriving in the mail. Most had been benign American Greetings or Hallmarks sent from his prison in Charlotte, North Carolina, and had all been handwritten and addressed to Jay. I handed the mail to him after I’d first screened and approved it. I even paid for a book of stamps so Jay could send his daddy mail in return. One therapist told me I was a fool to allow such a thing ever, under any circumstances. Another told me to follow my heart.

  In all, that first year, Bryce sent seven cards to Jay with brief notes about how much he missed him and how he wished everything could be different. And Jay matched him card for card.

  It was strange but Bryce never addressed Miranda and never wrote or mentioned me. And then the letters quit coming. Relief washed me like a hot shower.

  ***

  This latest letter, a huge and awful surprise, lay on the passenger-side seat as I drove to the radio station and was the first prison mail I’d received in a year. It was addressed to me directly, and as I picked it up, waving it around a couple of times, I figured whatever was in it had some heaviness attached—if not by weight, then emotion. At least it was typed and not written in Bryce’s meticulous penmanship. I don’t know what I’d do if I got a letter from him personally.

  ***

  The radio station was six miles out of town in an ugly section of Spartanburg where nothing but mobile homes and factories, a few convenience stores and lots of gas stations lined the state highway. It was loc
ated in the middle of a piece of raw, red dirt, towers rising behind it, the tan brick and cream shutters giving the station the appearance of someone’s house in the middle of nothing.

  The call letters were out front, on a sign and across the entrance. I was nervous but had my spiel and pitch ready to go. Two hours of rehearsing and the moment was now. I pressed my lips, making sure the lipstick was still there, tucked in my blouse, adjusted the double-pearl choker to hide the bulk of scars and opened the door. Bells jingled, and I was greeted by an older woman who looked like she could have been related to Joan Jett. She was still trying for that Journey, Foghat groupie look.

  “Could I help you?”

  “Yes . . . well, I’m actually . . . I don’t have an appointment but went to high school with Chuck and if he’s here, that’d be great. I’d like to apply for the receptionist-secretary position.”

  “We call them personal assistants. The terms ‘secretary’ and ‘receptionist’ have a condescending ring to them.”

  For a while after her remarks, she said nothing, just stared for what felt like forever. “Is he expecting you?”

  “No. He’s not, but like I said, we—”

  She punched the phone and said, “Chuck, could you come up front your next break, someone’s here from your past, darling.”

  She hung up and told me to have a seat. I could feel her eyes on me, probably wondering about the slight limp and the urgency of my request to see Chuck, though I’d tried to be cool.

  Chuck arrived ten minutes later looking exactly like he did in high school—tall, slump-shouldered, long-haired and a cross between a hippie and a computer geek.