“Okay, then. I love you, Rod.” He smiled and took both my hands where they rested in my lap. His eyes were filled with tears.
“Do you want to marry me?” I stiffened and my mouth sprang open. I swallowed hard.
“Are you asking me to marry you, or are you asking me whether I want to?”
“I’m asking you to go with me to Washington D.C. tomorrow, the next day, whenever you say, and marry me. I’m telling you I will move to New York, or New Mexico or New Hampshire or New Jersey. I’ll do anything, go anywhere, if you will marry me.”
“I don’t want to believe or hope in something that can’t really be—and have my dreams shattered.”
“I can make it happen, Baby. You have to trust me.” I looked at him, trying to believe him, but unable to reconcile my beliefs with his words. He stared at me. Beneath all of my strength and resolve, all of my courage and determination, all of my brave efforts to keep him alive—under that outer layer, I was a vulnerable, sensitive, needy white girl who wanted him ... more than anything.
“Do you trust me?” he whispered. He held the ice pack to my cheek, our noses almost touching. I breathed in his exhale, he sucked in mine.
“Yes.”
“Will you marry me?”
*
I sat in Rodney’s Mustang the next morning and felt like I was in a time capsule. The front of the car seemed to move forward, to a future, to happiness. The back of the car seemed stuck in the muck and the murk of Jim Crow and the Deep South.
We didn’t talk much. Every now and then Rodney would look at me and smile or wink, then look back out the front windshield. I also sneaked a few peeks at him, and tried to read his mind. His expression vacillated between a shit-eating grin that reeked of victory, happiness—and a concerned frown that said he was worried and missing his family already. Then I’d see the almost-smile and deep wrinkles form across his forehead simultaneously. We didn’t say what we were both thinking.
Would Rodney’s family suffer because of our actions? Would my daddy come after us? Would we live to regret our selfishness after the honeymoon period of our love passed on?
As we neared Baton Rouge and I saw airplanes taking off and landing, I gulped. Would Rodney really get on the plane with me? If he did, if he and I really were to sit next to each other thirty-thousand feet above the ground, would I tell him about our four-year-old daughter? How would I do it? Would we voice our concerns about our future or just delve into it?
I had to walk through the next few hours to see how it played out. Just as my doubts started to get the best of me, Rodney parked the car, turned off the ignition and shifted in his seat until he faced me.
“I love you, Susie.” He leaned his body to me and kissed me on the lips. “Tell me you love me. Just say the words. That’s all I need.”
“I love you, Rodney.”
More books by Madelyn Bennett Edwards
coming in 2018 and 2019
Looking for a Cliff
Synopsis:
When I look back on the 65 years of my life, one thread runs true throughout—an inner voice that said, “I will never be trapped.” That voice came from feeling trapped in my childhood and watching my mother feel trapped in her marriage. I swore to myself, at twelve years old, that when I turned eighteen, I’d get out of the trap and find my own way. Then I fell into a new trap—marriage to a man like my dad who controlled and manipulated me, abused and used me and, in the end, insulted my intelligence and my fortitude. That was his mistake.
I developed a plan and with two young children I got out of the marriage, out of the town, and out of the career I didn’t like. I was never trapped again—not in a job, not in a relationship, not in a particular city or career or educational level—that is, until I became trapped in prescription drug addiction in the form of an intrathecal Dilaudid pain pump. My fight to get out of the opioid trap, the ravages of alcohol, and a litany of other medications such as high blood pressure and sleeping pills, is part of my story.
My mother used to say that I went to The School of Hard Knocks and that’s what made me so strong. When my second husband died I became as weak as I was at twelve, and had to find my strength in God and in my belief that I could be better because of, and in spite of the tragedy. Then I lost my beloved brother eight months later and I questioned whether I’d ever be whole again. My fall into depression and emotional pain caused my physical pain to grow and I was given larger and larger doses of prescription Dilaudid. Fourteen years later, when I decided to try to get off the Dilaudid pump I learned that no other patient had done it, and there was no way to plug the catheter from which my spinal fluid would leak.
Nothing ever came easy for me and this journey was no different. I had to work hard at everything—school, marriage, career, friendships, life. While I was in the midst of withdrawals I entered graduate school and began to write my stories, my truths. While this timing seemed, at first, a dumb idea, it turned out to be fortuitous. I call it, “Writing to Heal,” and it worked. I wrote through my emotional pain, which made my physical pain slowly dissipate—nothing short of miraculous for someone with a degenerative spine disease.
I hope you’ll join me as I look for a cliff to jump from, and find, instead, a new life of hope, redemption and joy in sober living and a God who never left me alone.
Go to www.madelynedwardsauthor.com to read an excerpt of Looking for a Cliff, and another book to be released in 2018, Murder in Marksville.
Murder in Marksville
Synopsis:
I returned to my hometown, Marksville, Louisiana, in the spring of 2017 to search for the stories entangled in a tragedy that had the nation reeling. In the process I came to question the very nature of the place where I was raised and where my family still lives, and I finally faced the reasons I had to leave thirty years ago.
I remembered Marksville as idyllic and safe as I drove the 850-miles from Asheville, NC for the trial of one of the two police officers who killed a little boy while attempting to kill the dad. Alone in my car I was at peace, the sun rising behind me, the moon setting above my windshield, as I thought about seeing my aging mother and visiting with my sister and two brothers. My younger brother is the district judge presiding over the murder trial for the two cops. He tried to explain this tragedy to me, long distance, after it happened, but I couldn’t come to grips with it. Why Marksville? Why my people. What happened to create an atmosphere where this senseless, unthinkable murder could happen?
While in Marksville, attending the first trial and talking to people, I began to question my own being and who I am as a product of Avoyelles Parish, South Louisiana, which was a source of pride for me these many years. My journey of discovery, not only about the political feud, the love triangle, the abusive cops, the meth ring and the indignity of my people over this shooting, caused me to see my people and my hometown through new lenses and come to terms with the way things really are, and may always have been.
Murder in Marksville is not about the trials of two cops who abused their power. It’s not the history of Jeremy Mardis and his dad, Christopher Few. It’s not about the mayor and the city judge and the feud between them that created an illegal and immoral breeding ground where a child could be murdered. This book is not even about the drugs and gambling and squalor that have made Marksville unrecognizable to me. Yes, I write about all of that, but what this book is really about is the way this murder and these events changed who I am as a person and what I believed to be true about my hometown.
While every news media in the country covered this tragedy from the killing on November 3, 2015 to the trials of the officers, I am uniquely qualified to tell this story, and I tell it from a personal level as no one else can. To read an excerpt from Murder in Marksville, go to www.madelynedwardsauthor.com
Acknowledgements
Gene. My IR. My partner. My husband. My biggest cheerleader. This would never have happened without you.
Lulie, Paul, David
and Gretchen—my children, and to Dane, Marie, Taylor, Jacob, Sarah, Clare, Matthew and Adeline, my grandchildren—you make me want to be all that I can be.
Christopher, Anna, Lee, Sean, Kristine—my chosen children, and to Cooper, Max, Griffin and Gray, my inherited grandsons—you bless me with your love and acceptance.
Lenoir-Rhyne University Center for Graduate Studies—the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative; Dean, Mike Dempsey; program director, Laura-Hope Gill; professors, Jessica Jacobs and Dale Neal—you opened a door I didn’t know was closed and beckoned me forward into this brave world as an author.
For my writing groups and partners: Taryn Huchinson, Francine Hendrickson, Kacy Burke, John Hickman, Dan Waters, Tanya Davis, Marie Horton, Heather Wood-Buzzard and all the students with whom I had the privilege of being in class with from 2015-2017, you made me a better writer.
My friends who read countless drafts of Catfish and other pieces: Chalayne Sayes, Evin Wilman, Becca Wilman, Brenda Oliver Vessels, Lisa Stacevich, Carol Kinder.
Brenda Oliver Vessels for her photographs of me for the back cover and on my web site.
Lori Hill for designing my website.
JT Hill and Jessica Jacobs for editorial advice
Mark Reid for the cover design and Lorna Reid for interior design, and for walking me through self-publishing like a child through a scary movie.
My siblings, Johnny, Billy and Sally who are what’s left of our family of eight and who provide me with a place to go, “home,” to; and to Benny and Bobby, our brothers, who are preparing our permanent home in heaven.
Angela Bauldree, who David made my sister.
My mother whose dream to be a writer and poet was usurped by motherhood, which she poured her whole life into; and to my dad who taught me that discipline and hard work pay off. Maybe you rest together in eternity.
To God, who has been so good to me. Thank you for giving me what I need, not what I deserve.
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