Northern Wildflower

by Catherine Lafferty

  My grandma’s prayers must have been answered because, for some reason, I was spared from going further down the road of drug addiction and self-destruction. Cocaine was never something that I developed a strong addiction to. I mostly did it because it was an escape route and it was normalized by the people that I chose to hang around. I’m quite positive that I overdosed on it once after a night of partying, though. When I got home in the early morning hours, I dragged myself into the shower on all fours, throwing up white foam after throwing my clothes in the garbage in the hopes that it would signify my desire of leaving that lifestyle behind me. I found myself in some slim situations in those days, and I am thankful that I am alive — a little jaded, but still breathing.

  I never did go as far as doing needles. I did come close once but changed my mind at the last minute. That was before I watched someone shoot up in front of me. I watched as he ripped the corner off a little white bag with his teeth and then cooked up the powder. He grabbed whatever he could find off the floor and wiped his needle prodded arm, trying to find a spot where his skin wasn’t already broken. He stuck the needle in, wiped the remaining blood off with an old dirty sock, then threw his head back and grunted. It must have been an immense feeling for it to have such control over a grown man, but after what I saw I had no desire to find out for myself.

  My grandma told me that she once got a knock at the door of her apartment late at night, and when she looked through the peep hole she seen a man dressed in a black suit. She had a bad feeling, so she opened the door just enough to talk to him through the chain and asked, “What do you want?” The man had a briefcase in his hand and was claiming to sell something. “Can I come in and show you?” he asked. She told him that she wasn’t interested in what he was selling and tried shutting the door, but he insisted. She looked at his expensive suit and wondered where he had come from. Then she looked at his nails and noticed that they were long, pointy and black. She quickly slammed and locked the door, but he was relentless. He kept on knocking louder and louder until she yelled at him, “Go away!” and the knocking finally stopped.

  ***

  I DON’T REMEMBER HOW WE met; we were just two people that happened to be in the same place at the same time. Brad became my everything, and I gave him everything that I had to offer. Soon after we met, we were instantly in love and inseparable. From the moment we first met, we spent seven whole days together in a tent in his backyard, busy falling in love.

  Brad had beautiful blue eyes, for which I am an instant sucker. He was a real troublemaker but also a homebody at the same time. He never went out to have a good time or socialize, because whenever he went out it turned into a fight or a full-out bar brawl, so he usually tended to just stay home, out of trouble.

  When we were together, we were unaware of the world around us. We used to hike up to the cliffs a few miles from the local beach. One night, we had the crazy idea to jump in the lake in our birthday suits just for fun, not thinking that anyone would ever catch us. To our surprise, a family found us swimming naked in the early evening and threw our clothes into the water at us. We had to tread water to get into our wet clothes while trying to keep our dignity.

  I was crazy about Brad, so crazy that I tattooed his initials on my hand in black Indian ink, right on the soft spot between my thumb and pointer finger. I ended up getting it covered over with a butterfly tattoo a few years later. The tattoo artist told me that he was used to seeing bad tattoos and did a pretty good job of covering it up for me, even though it was taboo to ink up a person’s hands in those days. My only other tattoo is of a rose on my right arm. My friend Bree and I were bored one night — boredom seemed to be the motive behind all my bad decisions with Bree — and we came up with the wise idea to tattoo each other. I asked Bree to freehand a tattoo with a large heart, angel wings and a halo on my upper arm. It was far less than even what an amateur could do, and I was stuck with the distasteful tattoo until a few years later. When a friend and I met a guy that said he did tattoos out of his house, we went with the intention of covering up my horrendous homemade tattoo. While we sat around in his dingy basement, we had a few drinks and he went to work putting some roses and vines over my angel heart. When my tattoo was finished, my arm was bruised and sore and I was ready to go home, but my friend wanted to stay and drink because her and the tattoo guy seemed to be hitting it off. So, I just went home and left her there, not thinking anything of it. The next morning, she was crying at my door. She had been raped.

  I was so mad at myself for leaving her there alone with him, telling myself over again that I should have never left her. I know now that it is entirely his fault, but victims often take part of the blame and I know my friend felt like it was somehow her fault, too. I have since gotten the tattoo covered up, but I will always feel for my friend and the hurt and the shame that she went through when I look at the roses and the thorns wrapped around my arm.

  That’s not the first or the last time that someone I know was raped and the attackers got away with it. One of my cousins was drugged in a bar in the mid-eighties. She was beaten, raped, shaved bald and left for dead, face down in an empty grave outside of town. She survived, but she will be traumatized for the rest of her life. My grandma always said, “Don’t ever leave your drink alone!” and, when I found out what happened to my cousin, it made sense that my grandma worried so much. It could happen to anyone. Even though I heeded her advice, it happened to me, too, by someone that I trusted. After a baseball tournament one summer, I was invited over to a friend of a friend’s place to have a few drinks. I was offered a beer, took a sip and the next thing I knew I could feel someone’s hands down my pants and the burn of the early morning sunlight on my face, shining in on me from the living room window. I tried to get up and grab my things to go, but I couldn’t move. I felt paralyzed. I couldn’t open my eyes, but I was somehow able to get away and run out of the apartment and fall asleep outside on the curb while waiting for a cab.

  ***

  ACID WAS THE MAIN DRUG on the streets when I was a teenager. In those days, between hanging out on the streets and sitting at the top of the steps of the old abandoned building across from the arcade, there was nothing much else to do but to get into trouble and experiment.

  The first time I took acid I was with Brad and some other friends. We all thought it would be a great idea to canoe to a small island in the middle of a lake and have a fire. By the time we got to the island, the sun was setting and the island was swarming with thousands of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes were so bad we could literally hear them sizzling in the fire every time we threw a log in.

  Acid heightened every one of my senses to the point that I felt like I had expert hearing, sight, taste and touch, and I didn’t know how to deal with it all at once. We didn’t stay on the island for long, but it was long enough for me to want to get off. At the very least, I was not having a good time. We ended up going back to Brad’s house where we watched movies until the drug wore off.

  The next time I did acid, I hesitated to take it at all because of the way it made me feel the first time. But there’s something to be said about peer pressure. My friends were pushing me to do it, so I gave in. I ripped the little cartoon square in half, put one half of it on my tongue to dissolve and threw the other half away. I think that since I was doubtful to take it at all, the drug began to act against me — that, or the hit I took was bad. Either way, I was stuck in a living nightmare for the next few hours.

  The acid hit me hard and fast. I looked at myself in the mirror in the arcade bathroom and my face looked deformed and blurry. When I leaned in closer to take a better look at myself, my face starting moulding into someone else’s, someone I couldn’t recognize. I ran out of the bathroom trying to tell myself I was okay, but that was only the beginning. The drug hadn’t even fully kicked in yet.

  My friends wanted to go to the park. To get there, we had to walk past a long propane tank beh
ind a gas station in the middle of town, and I could have sworn I heard an echoing voice coming from the tank, but I couldn’t make out the words. The snapdragon flowers that we walked past started bending themselves toward me, whispering something that I couldn’t understand. I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t real. I turned to my friends to see if they were seeing the same thing I was seeing, but they were laughing and having a great time. When we got to the park my friends all started running around and playing tag; I, on the other hand, was so disoriented that I could barely keep my balance. The ground beneath me was moving like waves, and I felt like I was under water.

  I wasn’t too far of a walking distance from Brad’s house, so I started slowly walking the little path behind the park that led to his house, trying not to lose my balance on the imaginary waves. I didn’t even say goodbye to my friends; they were too busy having fun without me to notice that I was ditching. When I got to Brad’s house, he was not in the mood for my usual games. He was growing tired of my wild behaviour, but I was desperate for his comfort and support. I needed to feel safe so that I could get my mind straight and out of the awful daze that I voluntarily signed myself up for, but he told me to go home.

  I called my grandma and papa to come and pick me up. When I told my grandma that I was on acid she didn’t understand what I was talking about and I repeated myself into the phone, yelling, “Acid, ACID! I’m on acid!” My grandma still didn’t comprehend what acid was, but she and my papa finally agreed to pick me up and told me to meet them at the corner store down the street from Brad’s house.

  To this day, I don’t know how I rendered the ability to walk to the corner store by myself in the dark. When I arrived at the set of lights to cross the street I couldn’t tell if the lights were red or green, so I just started walking into the middle of Main Street with car horns honking at me and people yelling. I made it across and jumped into the back seat of my papa’s town car, which sat idling on the corner. There was a song about angels playing on the radio and all I could think was, boy, do I ever need one of those angels watching over me right about now.

  My grandparents had no idea what was wrong, but neither of them asked me any questions because I must have looked completely incomprehensive. My papa drove like a maniac to get me to the hospital as fast as humanly possible. He always drove like a maniac, but this was more so than usual. They had no idea I was on drugs. All they knew was that I wasn’t acting right and needed help.

  When I arrived at the hospital, a large, scary-looking nurse with a huge gap in her teeth hooked me up to a heart monitor, gave me something that I’m guessing was valium and said, “Get some rest, you’re going to be all right.” I finally fell asleep, then went home the next morning, relieved that it was all over and I was back to my normal self.

  Chapter 7

  WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I FOUND out I was pregnant. No one in my family had talked to me about safe sex and contraception, so I didn’t consider how easy it was to get pregnant and Brad didn’t seem to be worried about it either.

  When I first took the test and it turned out positive, I put the entire situation in the back of my mind and tried to forget about it. I knew not to drink, though, and my friends started wondering why I was staying home on the weekends. Most other nights I would have been hanging out on the rocks on the outskirts of town, drinking overproof straight out of the bottle with no chase.

  For the first three months of my pregnancy, I walked around town pretending like everything was normal. I had a bit of morning sickness, but that was nothing; I was used to being hungover and it was slightly the same feeling. The reality didn’t set in until the day came when I couldn’t do up my jeans anymore.

  Meanwhile, Brad and I started drifting apart. I found out that he had been cheating on me. I was heartbroken, but I still had to take care of myself and the baby that was rapidly making its presence known.

  During my first clinic visit, the doctor asked, “Have you thought about what you are going to do?” I didn’t have a plan for what I was going to do once the baby was born and I hadn’t thought about it until the doctor brought it up. I was only thinking about getting through my pregnancy, not thinking far enough ahead to prepare for taking care of a real baby.

  At that point in my life, I couldn’t even take care of myself let alone a baby. And Brad was proving, more and more, that he wasn’t ready to be a dad. My living situation wasn’t ideal. I was living with my grandma in a housing duplex behind the local bowling alley. It was hard enough for her to afford rent and groceries, let alone support another child.

  The doctor guided me through my options. Basically, I could keep the baby and become a single teenage mother, have an abortion or give the child up for adoption. My first reaction was to keep the baby, but my bleak outlook for a brighter future for both the child and myself made me strongly reconsider. I knew that, whatever was to happen, I wanted my child to have the best chance possible from the start. The last option made the most sense to me. I told the doctor that I would consider adoption. My doctor told me that requests for private adoptions were sent through the clinic and that, if I was interested, I could read up on the some of the families who wanted to adopt.

  I left the clinic that day trying to avoid it all, but I had such a heavy weight on my shoulders. My decision would change my life and the life of my unborn baby. I just wanted to wake up and realize that it was just a dream, but my growing belly was a constant reminder that I needed to decide soon.

  I was about five months along when I finally made up my mind. I felt that my decision would be best for everyone involved. I went to the doctor and asked, “So, what is this whole private adoption thing about?” I wanted to read up on the families who were looking to adopt. The doctor gave me a profile of two families, both about fifty pages long. The documents looked like a proposal that you would write for a business contract, but instead it was a proposal for a baby.

  The first family I read about already had close to ten adopted children. They lived on a farm in a remote southern town. They seemed like nice people, but I couldn’t imagine having the child being thrown into the mix right from the get go and baling hay every day at the crack of dawn. The second family was a middle-aged couple that lived in a small northern town, even further north than Yellowknife. The husband owned a successful company and the wife was a head nurse at the community health clinic. They had hoped for a child for years but were unfortunately not able to have a baby on their own.

  I brought the paper home with me and I must have read it a hundred times. I pondered the idea without telling any of my friends or family. I finally got up the nerve to call the couple a few days later, and it was the bravest conversation that I have ever had. I didn’t know what to say at first. How do you come out and say, “Hello, you don’t know me, but I am considering you as a candidate for the job of mother and father to my baby”? It’s not a typical, everyday conversation.

  They turned out be overjoyed and, in no time, they were on a flight to Yellowknife to meet me. We had an expensive lobster dinner together and they offered to pay the bill — my pregnancy cravings were not cheap. Over dinner they asked me about my lifestyle. Understandably, they wanted to know if I was eating healthy, if I smoked, if I was drinking during my pregnancy. I was honest and confessed, “I’m really trying to live a healthier lifestyle. It’s been easy for me to stop drinking, but I still have the occasional cigarette.”

  I liked these people. They seemed down to earth. They were the type of parents that I would have wanted. I didn’t tell them at first, but I had already made up my mind. I was going to give my baby to these kind people, in hopes that the baby would be raised in a loving, stable home, something that I didn’t think that I could provide. When I told my family and Brad’s family about my decision, they were saddened but mostly supportive — and, either way, my mind was already made up.

  During the next few months, my belly grew. I didn’t
watch what I was eating, and I was a balloon. I ended up almost doubling my weight. By the end of my pregnancy, I had gained ninety pounds. No one told me that you can’t eat whatever you want when you are “eating for two” and that you are only supposed to gain twenty to thirty pounds. My flawless skin became adorned with stretch marks. I now have them everywhere, even behind my knees, but they are a part of my story and I’ve come to accept them.

  I stayed with Brad through the first trimester of my pregnancy and he tried to be there for me when he could, but he was doing his own thing while I was at home living a quiet lifestyle that consisted of painting miniature collectible ceramic ornaments, reading countless comics and eating everything in sight to keep myself occupied.

  When my due date rolled around, there was no sign of the baby coming any time soon. After about two weeks of being overdue, my doctor decided it would be best to induce me. The nurses broke my water with a long, scary-looking tool that looked like a knitting needle, but it didn’t jumpstart my contractions. The baby needed to come out; she was so overdue that she was starting to use her bowels. Once my water broke there was still no progress, which meant no baby. She did not want to come out. The nurses set me up to an intravenous that gave me false contractions, and it was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life.

  I was hooked up to what I called the “contraction machine from hell” for what felt like never-ending agony, while my cervix made little progress. I inhaled two tanks of laughing gas in a matter of a few hours — which does not make you laugh, despite the name. I was in and out of the shower, and the adoptive mom massaged my back with a tennis ball while I kicked and screamed in pain. I begged for the doctors to give me a Cesarean. Finally, after two days of excruciating pain, the doctors agreed it would be best for me to undergo an emergency Cesarean section. Later, I found out that I probably would have died in childbirth if I hadn’t gotten the Cesarean because the baby’s head was stuck in the birth canal.