Hot & Cold: Toxic Love

by Jessica E. Kirby

  Hot & Cold

  Toxic Love

  Jessica Kirby

  © 2016 by Jessica E. Kirby all rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be interpreted as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations or persons, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

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  For Jr, Misty, Ashley, Tiffanie, Cindee, Laura, and all of my family and friends.

  I could not have done this without you.

  ONE

  The wispy rolls of smoke curled from my cracked lips, as a tear easily slid down my already drenched face. This quiet country air is soft enough to hear the crackling of my cigarette. Another coil of smoke slithered out of my soul. It seems as I sit here on the steps of my front porch, for however much longer, my knowingness about the world and how it works changes. How God can give and take, and leave a girl so alone in the world. The heat waves of summer are licking at my face. This dry, parched, wasteland of a home is all it is now. It used to be everything to me. They were everything to me. Now, everything is different.

  I look up from my feet and see acres of land that used to excite me. I used to dream of the days when I could go home and just run, letting my southern brown curly hair float in the Florida sunshine. My brown eyes would soak up the dusk sunbeams, moments before Mama would call me in for dinner. Nothing but a mile of grass and a small dirt road could make me any happier. See, that’s the thing about the south. It doesn’t matter what decade you’re in, all you need is a white house with a wraparound porch, and a long dirt road and you’re at home. Down here, it doesn’t matter how many gigabytes are in your computer, or how big your television is, if you have morals and family values, you have everything. And that ignorance is what sets us apart from the rest of the world.

  I flick away my cigarette and get balanced on my feet. As I do, I see a puff of dust following three black sedans and a police officer on the horizon. They’ve come for me, as they said they would. I’m outraged by the way these people have treated me so far. Just shy of eighteen, they want to take me away from my home and into a foster home until other arrangements can be made.

  It seems like a mile of bumpy dirt road wasn’t a match for them. They are here in what seems like a millisecond. The police officer is the first to step out of his patrol car, carrying a plastic tote and some other tools.

  With his all-too-familiar southern draw, he starts, “Hello Hayden,” with a halfhearted sympathetic face, “Let me explain first what will happen. I’m going to open the seal, and you will be escorted straight to your belongings, filling this up with everything you need, excluding clothes. Now-“

  “What? Wait? No. No.” I interrupted with a sort of calm wrath, “They said I didn’t have to back in there!” A quiver in my voice is heard by everyone, as I try my best to control my tears welling up like oceans waves behind my eyes. I feel that tightness in my throat.

  My mind flashes back to the first day of when everything started. I had gone to school that day, the third day of school in August, and woke up with a strange sensation flooding my stomach. It was nothing like I’d ever felt before. I had left my mother at the kitchen table, with a kiss goodbye. When I came home, she was still in the same spot. Her slumped-over body on the piles of papers suggested she had checked the mail that day. She was sleeping, still in her pajamas, and hair still tied in the same fashion from the morning. The white portable telephone was in her left hand, and she held a letter in her right hand. Her head lay softly on her left extended arm. Under her closed eyes was thick black welts and a pinkish tint to her eyelids, a kind of hint that she had been crying. I remember lightly pulling the letter from her hand and reading it, and with every word my vision became a tunnel. It was from the military. My father had been killed in active duty. I remember putting my hand to my open mouth and sobbing, slowly sitting down beside my sleeping mother, before my entire body broke down.

  “Listen, I know this is hard for you, but if you don’t want to leave here empty handed, I suggest you take whatever you can.” He said. This must be hard for him too. Officer Perry was like family to us.

  “You know what they’ll do? They’re going to sell everything! Aren’t they?” I couldn’t fight it anymore. I didn’t even cry at either of my parent’s funerals. My pain has gotten the best of me. I doubled over on myself and started to sob. I let the concrete pathway eat my knees up. I don’t care. I want everything back. As I did, Officer Perry rushed over and did his best to be strong and comfort me, but I could tell he was feeling a small portion of what I felt. I died a little inside when I came back today. I finally let it all out. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, “God, Dear God. Why me? Why me?”

  “Shh,” I heard as we were rocking. He finally took my head in his hands and said, “Remember Hayden, God giveth and God taketh away. You have to remember that. You’re a strong girl. I’ll help you get through this. You’re strong, like-“

  “Like my mother?” I cried, completing his sentence. I looked up from his shoulder, “My mother wasn’t strong enough. She’s not here for me now is she? IS SHE? You can sugar coat it all you want, but I know what kind of a weak person she was. She knew I needed her after poppa died, and not only wasn’t she there for me but, she decided that not being here at all would solve all of her problems.” This was the first time I said anything like this since that day.

  I knew she was distraught about my father’s passing. I knew she didn’t want to ever talk about it, especially to me. Her husband was her life. Everything she cared about was in him. After his empty casket was buried, the drinking began. Day in. Day out. Nothing but drinking. She barely ate. I heard her up every night moaning of distraught. The school began to worry about the bruises on my body. She had never laid a hand on me, but when she was drunk, she wasn’t my mother. I didn’t know who this person was.

  She was like a ghost to me. She didn’t remind me of the once thriving beauty she used to be. In the short six months after my father’s death, she had turned into a sobbing nothing of a woman. I didn’t even matter to her. Nothing really seemed to matter to her. Her heart was shattered. She rejected counseling, paid for entirely by the government, to not only her but for me too. I was the last of her worries. But I wouldn’t have ever thought she would do the unthinkable.

  The year marked my father’s anniversary of his death. That day, I was sent off to school. She was unusually happy. It was the happiest she had been in a whole year. This made me feel good inside that she was finally back to her old self. I didn’t want to bring up the occasion because I feared it would spoil her progress, a progress that she had made in what seemed like, overnight. That morning I had the same feeling in my stomach. In retrospect, I assume that this feeling was sort of a premonition.

  Officer Perry guided me to my feet again. “Rob,” I informally addressed him, “I think I can do it. But-” I stopped for a second; glancing to the sealed crime scene door, “don’t let me look in the living room, okay?” He nodded in a melancholy way.

  “Wait here, face away from the house.” I let my eyes find his eyes in harmonizing fashion. I turned away from the house, facing the vehicles, and the well-dressed people are now standing outside their cars, waiting for me to run. “Okay Hayden, let’s go.” I turned around towards the house looking down. One step. Two steps. Three steps. I’m on the top of the porch. I look Rob in the eyes as he says, “Okay hun, and don’t look left or right. Just look straight down until we reach the staircase. After we reach the top, don’t look left. Go straight to your bedroom, and gather what you need to bring.” After an under
standing nod, I did as I was told to do.

  I passed through the threshold of the once peaceful home I once knew. The smell of the old wood floors, beaconing my heart to break again. I will never know happiness like these memories again. I fixed my eyes straight down on the flowered door rug, waiting for Officer Perry to be on my right side. I didn’t even want the scene to be in my peripheral vision. I knew that with every step, I would feel her. I feel the person she was before everything had happened. I knew that this would be the hardest thing I'd done in a very long time. I never knew hardship. Everything had been provided for me. I don't know what it was like to be on my own with no parental help.

  It felt like everything happened in slow motion. It seemed like it took forever until we reached the edge of the staircase. That's when I saw it. An injured footstep soaked in blood atop a heavily flowered staircase runner. A light wood banister drenched in the last moments of my mother’s life. My breathing deepened as I watched a story in blood unfold against my young eyes.

  That day was one of the best days I had in almost a year. At school, my friends seemed like angels, comforting me and catching me up on the last year of school that I hadn't really attended. But that ripe sweet apple of a day quickly turned into a rotting corpse of a core that had been eaten away by the sight of police cars and ambulances crowded around my home as I got there. I felt my stomach tighten as I rolled up to the front door. I sensed my heart stop as blood-soaked EMT’s exited the front door. I noted the coroner’s van as I hazily ran to the porch. I’m not quite sure I remember what happened next. I remember darting past the people who tried to contain me. They said afterward it felt like I had the strength of ten men, breaking through the barrier of men and women restraining me from getting to the crime scene. Honestly, I believe my mind blocked out what had happened next. I know this was my mind’s way of coping with the trauma, which I am much obliged. I know that the only way I can remember is if I looked directly at where she lay.

  My curiosity wouldn’t be the mechanism to turn my head just yet. It would take more than just my wondering of what happened exactly. I still haven’t read the report, or fully listened to the autopsy results. I knew what happened. I knew why she did it. There’s no reason to put it on paper. There’s no reason to stare at meaningless words of what they think might’ve happened. I wasn’t enough of a reason for her to stay alive. I haven’t read the letter yet, the one she wrote for me. At least she was thinking of me as she was bleeding to death. Oh, how thoughtful.

  It was like I was following a backward storyline as I slowly tread the starchy rug. It crunched and creaked with dried blood through every step. It’s almost unbearable. After what seemed like an endless nightmare, we reached the top of the staircase. Still staring at the darkened runner, I refused my eyes their craving of looking up. I’ve rewound to the beginning, to where it all had started. At the end of the staircase sets two ancient heavy wooden doors. I know they’re there. I know they are beckoning me to steal away from the ground. That’s my parent’s room. To the left is the small office my father would spend countless hours in, writing war stories of his grandfather’s experiences. To the right was the small hall bathroom, where I would spend ages preparing me for the day’s adventures. It wasn’t very modern, but it suited me. Just to the right of the bathroom hangs a small white wooden door, slightly ajar. The dark hallway was cut by the light pouring out from my window. I slowly turned myself with a deep breath. I was very careful of not averting my eyes left or right, I was fixated on the door. We've finally reached the doorway.

  Rob started by saying, “I’ll wait downstairs to make sure no one has come through.” I timidly nodded to agree. The brass doorknob, which was barely hanging there, squeaked as I pushed it the rest of the way. It was just as I left it; it was just how I left everything. Clothes and shoes lobbed across the old wooden floor. A bed barely visible. Rob sat the blue tote down by my feet and walked away. I shut the door and with a shaky hand started to pour things into that blue tote. How will I fit my whole life, my whole world, into this small thing? With no one looking, I am free to sob. I don’t have to feel guilty about missing my mother. I don’t have to answer to anyone right now. Subconsciously, that’s what I decided to do. I felt my uncontrollable knees buckle, along with the rest of my body, my back against the bedroom door. My forehead hit the ground with my hands cupped in my face. There, I wept. In this position, I wept for I don’t know how long. I got exactly nothing accomplished.

  I felt my face fill with blood, and my eyes hurt from bellowing so much. I was pushing something out of my body, it seemed. Maybe it was bad memories. My throat clenched along with my teeth and hands. That was all my might. That was all I had to hold back from me screaming.

  I hoisted my top half up, there I was. I scooted across my room, and I was leaning up on my small bed, with my legs pushed to one side of me. My long brown curly hair stuck to my damp face. I tried to catch my breath, I tried to breathe regularly. The pit of my stomach ached.

  I stared at her corpse for hours in that funeral home to try and conjure a feeling. Her face was flawless. Her cold skin glittered, even as it lay dead. She was buried in her favorite blue and white flowered dress. To cover the deep wounds on her arms, only half of the coffin was open. While everyone sobbed and hugged me in sympathy, my eyes were as dry as wheat, as was my mouth. I didn’t honestly know what to do. I didn’t know if I knew her at all. It was like she was already dead to me. She died the day my father died. It was strange; the only people there were people from the church, my school, and her friends. That was the day I figured I had no family besides my parents. I had no uncles, aunts, cousins, or grand anything’s that were still alive. I was to spend about a year moving from foster home to foster home. No one is going to want an empty shell of a girl, dragged on wounded after hurt.

  I looked up from my where my eyes lay comfortably. After about five minutes of solid sobbing, a startling banging came from the door. As he opened the bedroom door, with an annoying creek, he is holding something in his hand. A bottle of water.

  He hands it to me, and I take it shakily. "Are you okay?" He asks.

  "Yeah, I just had a little moment," I say.

  "It'll happen just like that too, you'll never know when it comes or goes," he said with a shrug of a smile. I'm not quite sure what he's trying to do. Is he trying to act sorry he isn't able to take me in? Or does he just not know how to react in this situation? He's always been like an uncle to me. We've always considered him family.

  He looks at the half empty tote. "Is this it?"

  "No, I'm not done," I say.

  "I'll give you a few more minutes," he says as he turns on the balls of his feet.

  I get up on heavy legs and continue to pour things in the bucket. Pictures, makeup, personal products, a small blanket. I sat on an empty spot on my bed. Well, it's someone else's bed now; I guess.

  He must've sensed I was finished. As soon as I grabbed the bed post, he knocked again and invited himself in. He saw the now full bucket and bent down to grab it.

  TWO

  -THREE WEEKS LATER-

  The four-hour car ride to the state line, just outside Tallahassee, gave me some time to psych myself out. A lot of 'what-if's'. My caseworker found a foster home that accepted children at 'such an advanced age.' Am I damaged goods or something? It was a group home right on the Florida-Alabama line, in the panhandle. Why so far away?

  You would think an SUV with two people in it would be roomy and inviting. Truth is, with every mile, it just keeps getting smaller. The leather seats are sticking to my exposed thighs. I should not have worn shorts.

  After we get off of the highway, in the middle of nowhere, the never ending dirt road finally curved around into an extremely small town. Looks like something from the mid-west. The dirt road turns into an old concrete, pathetic street. We come to a stop at the end of the street, where a blinking orange light continuously warns. A pebble-ridden entrance, that loops around to a never
closing gate crunches under the hefty truck. A red brick mansion of a building, covered in vines greets us as we halt to a stop. Dust and debris surround us, as my caseworker starts getting out of the car. A four-story building is lined with white brick. The extended arch entrance is surrounded by the same white brick, set with two large black wooden doors.

  I shrug my book bag on as I slam the car door. The curly blonde headed lady gives me a dirty look for slamming the door. I wanted to make it obvious I wasn't a very happy camper about this situation. I mean, who would be?

  She placed her hand on my back and guided me to the three steps that lead to the entrance, probably to discourage me from running. Before we get to the top, the doors open. I half expected some old, crude lady with bags under her eyes. Instead, a young girl about my age greets us. She's very tall and skinny, with long ashy brown thin hair.

  Her pink cap sleeve shirt and Capri shorts suggest that there's no particular dress code. She ushers us into the front hallway, which is enormous. The massive centered staircase leads to another level. The Victorian-era red and white rug that sits atop glassy floors looks nothing short of astounding. Cast iron archways on both sides of us open into spacious sitting areas.

  "Ms. Gar will be out until Monday," the girl finally said in a thick country accent, as we circled around her in the foyer, "But, I'm Janie," She stuck her hand out to greet us. We took turns saying hello, as Janie maintained a huge inviting smile.

  I wasn't saying anything, so the blonde lady introduced me, "This is Hayden Greene, and here is her paperwork." Janie took the paperwork and tucked it under her arm.

  "Would you like some water, or a snack or anything Miss-?" Janie started.

  "Mrs. Jackson, and yes, please. It was a very long drive."