The Other F Word Rebecca DeMauro
The Other F Word
a memoir
Rebecca DeMauro
For Virginia
…the Lord make his face shine upon thee,
and be gracious unto thee.
Numbers 6:25
Disclaimer: This memoir has taken nearly a decade to write. These are my memories. To protect the privacy of others, some names have been changed and some incidents condensed.
Prologue
January 2004
Most people think they could never kill a person. At one time, I thought the same thing. Right now though, I could. I could kill another human being, one particular human being, without batting an eye or losing a millisecond of sleep.
But I don’t have to. The state is about to do it for me.
The clock on the wall ticks so loudly it is almost deafening. Tick. Pause. Tick .Pause. Tick. Pause. The sound makes me want to scream. Instead I sit quietly, hands folded in my lap in a small office inside the Arkansas Department of Correction-Maximum Security Unit waiting for those ticks and pauses to bring me closer to the moment I feel will finally bring me peace. My demeanor does not betray the hate I harbor. But it is there, consuming me, crushing me with the heaviness I have felt ever since we received the call from the prosecuting attorney a few months back telling us that the execution had been set and looked as though it would go through.
No, it has been there longer than that.
It stretches back to that day in May of 1999 when they told me what this man had done. For five long years I have wanted him to suffer the same way he made others suffer. He has no human contact (no prison rapes for him, which disappoints me), no one there to make him pay for his crime the way I want him to pay for it. He has nothing to live for anyway but a lonely cell and perhaps the guard who slips him his food under the door every day, maybe whispering a “hello” or “how you doing?” But then again isn’t that punishment enough? To be locked away waiting to die for something that took you less than 15 minutes to carry out? Isn’t that cruel and unusual enough?
On the closed circuit television screen is the execution chamber or “The Death House” as they call it here at the Arkansas State penitentiary. It is a small room with white walls and a gurney that takes center stage. On that gurney are two arm boards that stretch out to each side with Velcro straps hanging in long strips. It looks like a crucifix they have laid down on an ambulance cot. Three more straps are draped across the gurney, one for the chest area, one for the mid-section and one for the legs. As I stare at the monitor, I wonder how I, a suburban wife and mother, find myself waiting to witness the death of another human being. My breath picks up. I have seen someone die before, three people actually, in a car wreck that happened in front of me. They were T-boned on the highway and killed instantly. I couldn’t sleep for days after that. It just made me sick. It was so sudden. So wrong.
Like this.
I snap my head around to see if anyone else heard that statement and realize suddenly it came from my own mind. My husband, Kris, gives me a puzzled look and queries, “What’s wrong?”
I shake my head quickly and look down at my hands. What am I thinking? This is nothing like that. Those were innocent people on that highway. This is not wrong. This man is a killer.
This is making me crazy.
Images snap through my head, like a slideshow going too fast. Will he say he’s sorry? Look toward me with remorse in his eyes? Cry out for mercy?
And what will happen when they inject him? Will he slowly go to sleep? Or will he twitch or convulse like a mouse I once saw in a trap? The mouse twitched for a full minute before he finally grew still. I felt sorry for him. How can I have pity and mercy on a rodent and not for another human being?
Am I the monster?
No! I am no monster. I didn’t condemn this man to death. The jury did. But I was relieved when they pronounced the death sentence on him. Justice had been served.
Right?
My heart races and sweat pops out on my upper lip. I feel the urgency to release this man from the trap and from my hatred. The feeling is so strong that I want to scream at the top of my lungs for them to stop. I wring my hands in my lap and pray.
As always, the thought of God makes me think about the F word. By the F Word, I mean forgiveness. But at this moment, the word “forgiveness” is more of an expletive to me than the other word could ever be. I have always thought I could never forgive this wrong that had been done to me, never move on until retribution was fully exacted on the one who dealt me the most life-crushing of blows. The only thing I’ve been interested in will come from the end of that needle filled with sodium thiopental, potassium chloride and pancuronium bromide. Nothing, I believe, can equal the thrill that will overtake me when I see evil take its last, shuddering breath.
Then the phone rings. And the warden, looks at us with pity and says,
“It was Governor Huckabee. We have a stay of execution.”
My heart stops. The F-word fades into the furthest chamber of my heart, driven back by the hatred that swells up like vomit. I can taste it. I can feel it in my eyes. Kris grabs my hand. I jerk it away. Where is this coming from? Only moments ago I was feeling pity for the man about to be strapped down in the next room. Now I want him to die again. What is wrong with me?
Everything around me melts and I am standing at a crossroads, one I did not expect to encounter today. Where do I go from here? What am I supposed to do? I can try to make the magic again, try to push for execution, putting my health and my marriage at risk and pour my energies into fulfilling what has been my mission in life for almost five years. I can hide away, letting bitterness slowly suck me under like mud in a river bottom. Or I can face the F-word head on and try to make peace with it.
Of the three, the third choice sounds the easiest. They may say “to err is human, to forgive is divine,” but I can tell you that I’m very much human and not at all divine. I make the choice. I want to see the man who brutalized us die an agonizing death and to those who expected me to drop my grudge and let bygones be bygones, I have only one thing to say:
F you.
And this time it doesn’t stand for forgive.
Section One:
Hells Bells-Wedding Bells
~1~
When I was seven, I stood on a boat in Beaver Lake, Arkansas and stared down into the water. It was so clear I could see the rocks glistening on the bottom. They looked so close and the water called to me. I didn’t know how to swim yet, but I couldn’t resist the water’s siren song. It beckoned me. I jumped.
I swallowed the water as quickly as it swallowed me. I sputtered to clear my lungs but there was no air. The rocks that had seemed so close were nowhere to be found and I flailed my arms and legs, desperately seeking a place to put my feet or for something to hang onto. There was nothing.
Then a hand, my father’s hand, grabbed the back of my shirt like a mother dog grabs a pup. I emerged a dripping, coughing mass from the water. My hair hung over my eyes in a tangled mop but I could see my father’s face, a mixture of fear, anger and deep concern.
Now if my mother had pulled from the water, she probably would have flipped me right over and busted my ass, no questions asked, and I have to admit, I would have deserved it. But my dad just clutched my shoulders and shook me lightly, as I coughed lake water out of my lungs. Then he looked at me with an absolute expression of bewilderment, one with which I would grow very familiar over the years.
“What were you thinking?”
What could I say to him? How could I explain that the water beckoned me and I couldn’t help but answer? How could I explain something to him that I didn’t understand myself?
So I did the only other thing I could do. I started bawling.
Dad hugged me and soothed me then, though I’m sure he was still frustrated with me and wanted to wring my neck for scaring him so badly. It seemed I always kept my parents in a state of frustrated panic, as they never knew what I was going to do next. Hell, I never knew what I was going to do next. Jumping into the water wasn’t my first impulsive act and it sure wouldn’t be the last.
Like the time I made a rock hard snowball and thought it would be really funny to throw it at a passing car. The driver didn’t think it was very funny however when it cracked the glass on his windshield. He came charging out of his car, screaming, “You little shit!” but I hid in the bushes until he left.
Or like the time I shot a bottle rocket at my cousin, Bob, because he made me mad. I don’t remember what he did to me that time (he was always pulling something), but I remember saying, “You bastard!” and taking the bottle rocket I had just lit in my bare hand and pointing it right at his ass. It hit its mark and blew up, sending him bawling to Grandma. I got my behind swatted with a fly swatter for that one, but really considered it well worth it. It was just payback for the time he shoved me off a fence and I busted the back of my head open.
And then there was the time I almost set the house on fire. A neighbor girl and I were playing Barbie campout in my bedroom. She was Barbie of course, and I had to be Ken. I hated that. But being Ken, I was responsible for keeping the party warm so I decided to start a campfire. I figured a roll of toilet paper would make the perfect bonfire so I fished out some matches and lit ‘er up. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever set toilet paper on fire , but let me tell you, it burns fast and big. The roll shot into flames right in my hands. I stood up and ran to the bathroom, leaving ash and floating bits of toilet paper in a trail behind me. With the smoke detector blaring from the hallway, I threw the ball of fire into the toilet. A big cloud of stinking smoke hissed up from the bowl and I did the only thing I knew to do. I flushed. Of course, this stopped up the toilet, so my friend and I spent the next fifteen minutes plunging the toilet and fanning the doors so that the smell would leave the house before my parents got home from work. We did a good enough job that Mom only sniffed a bit when she arrived home and said “What’s that smell?” Of course, I shrugged in complete innocence, narrowly avoiding yet another ass beating on this one.
These were just a couple of incidents in a long string of misbehaviors, which included everything from throwing dirt clods at an empty building to break the windows to cussing and making lewd gestures behind the Baptist preacher’s house (to my mother’s complete horror).
Sometimes, my misbehaviors were unintentional. Especially when it came to pets. Once I gave a kitten an airplane ride, swinging it with full force upside down between my legs. I can honestly say that in my little four year old brain, I believed the cat was having fun. After all, I loved it when my Grandpa Petty would swing me around. My mother looked out the kitchen window and screamed, “Becki, no!” But it was too late. I dropped the cat at the sound of her voice, but it was already dead.
This was minor in comparison to the death of Harry Houdini, my parakeet. I had received him for my sixth birthday and I loved that bird. He was so smart and he would sit on my finger or shoulder and chirp away. He would nibble at my fingers or neck but he was nice and never bit. I often got in trouble however, because I would leave my door open and he would get out and fly all over the house, pooping everywhere.
Mom loved the bird too, but she always scolded, “Don’t let that bird out of your room!” So one day, when Harry tried to escape, I ran frantically around my room trying to catch him before he could reach the open doorway. This agitated him further and sent him shooting toward his escape, squawking the whole way. I leapt to the door and slammed it shut before he could get out—and he hit it full force. I’ll never forget seeing him fall to the floor in a poof of feathers; his screeching halted suddenly leaving a dead silence.
The silence didn’t last long. The rest of the memory involves my mother again wailing, “Becki, no!” and a mad dash to the vet’s office with a half dead bird, who gave out a twitch or two and an occasional gasp for air. The vet told us to take him home, he’d be fine the next day. “$50 please.”
Harry Houdini died within hours. We were $50 poorer—and we had no bird.
My worst luck was with gerbils. I wanted a gerbil for years, but my mother refused to allow it, pointing out that their cages tend to get stinky. Then one Christmas break, I was delighted when the teacher called for volunteers to take the four class gerbil’s home for the vacation period. I about broke my damn arm waving it. I was finally going to get my gerbils—for two weeks at least.
I didn’t ask for permission from my parents, but I lied to the teacher when she asked if it was okay with them. Of course I wasn’t going to ask. They would have said no! When school let out for Christmas break, I proudly collected the gerbils and proceeded with my plan to get them into the house. We lived close to the school, so I wrapped my coat around the cage to protect them from the cold weather, and hurried to my house. After making sure no cars were in the garage, I dashed into the house and up the stairs, where I deposited the cage in a window alcove and put towels over it to hide it from sight. I was so happy. I was going to take such good care of these gerbils.
They died the next morning.
I’m not sure why they died. Perhaps it was the cold Kansas wind. Or perhaps the towels I used to conceal them were too heavy and smothered them. I never figured out why, but I was devastated. I had to confess to my parents and eat crow with the teachers, who were mad at me for lying about permission from my parents. But I must have been extremely pathetic because by the end of the whole incident, my parents took pity on me and bought me my own two gerbils. Thinking they were both female, I named them Laverne and Shirley.
Imagine my surprise when Laverne got overly friendly with Shirley, who gave birth soon afterwards to four bouncing baby gerbils. I remember how pink and tiny they were. I waited excitedly for them to start growing fur.
It never happened. Our cat, Tommy, decided he needed a snack and apparently the little pink babies looked like a McDonald’s chicken nugget happy meal to him. We came home one day to a bloody murder scene. The gerbil cage was toppled and there were bloodstained cedar chips all over the floor. Tommy sat there in complete well fed innocence, licking the evidence from his paws. After my mother got her “Becki, no!” scream out of the way, we searched the house and found the lone survivor, Shirley, crouched behind the refrigerator. We kept her until her natural death, but she was never the same again.
I never had to worry much about whether I could keep a pet alive again after Laverne and Shirley because my parents got divorced not long after. Each had their own method of discipline. My mother, who believed “spare the rod, spoil the child” had no qualms about busting my behind and after all I did, I’m surprised I have any behind left. My laid-back father, on the other hand, just chalked it up to being a kid. I soon learned that a good fit of bawling would get me out of just about any fix with him.
But all the bawling in the world wouldn’t make a difference when the pee stick turned blue.
***
I was sixteen when I got pregnant with Andi, and I was just stupid enough to be proud of myself. Finally, I could start living my life on my own, and this time, I would get to be Barbie instead of Ken, with my own home and family, with no one to tell me when I could come and go, no one to tell me I couldn’t heed the call of the water and jump right in.
I was young and dumb. Really dumb.
My partner in fornication was a young man named John Brewer from Mena, Arkansas. I thought he was “hot,” with his feathered hair, Polo shirts, and Levis jeans. Remember, this was the eighties. He was cocky as all get out, but like most sixteen year olds I was willing to overlook everything I wanted because he represented my obtaining an even greater desire: independence.
As a fellow member of the Dumb Shit Society, John was overjoyed to have planted his seed in my fertile loins. I am only surprised it did not happen sooner than it did.
The story continues on with all the breathless abandon of a bad teenage problem novel. First, I told my mother and stepfather, stirring up a storm of screaming recriminations from Mom and heartrending tears from my tenderhearted stepfather, Lloyd Allen. Once the initial tornado passed, Mom and Lloyd Allen promptly shipped me to Kansas to live with my father and his evil wife, who personified the wicked stepmother in every way. The lovesick John followed me and convinced my dad to let him live in the basement, while he supposedly looked for a job that never materialized.
Stepmother forced herself to be nice for a solid two weeks—a record for her—but she was soon overcome by the bitch within. She reverted back to the behavior that had forced me to move out of my dad’s house and into my mom’s only a couple of years before and I just couldn’t take it again. Looking back, I can see now that she was possibly a bit jealous. She had been trying for her entire marriage to get pregnant, even nagging my dad early on into getting a reverse vasectomy. Now here came his bull-headed, sixteen year old daughter with a baby that had sprouted as easily in her belly as thistles in the cow pasture. She had to have hated me. She did hate me and she showed it, griping at every little move I made until my newfound independence seemed to evaporate. I was stifled, smothered, trapped.
It was time to run again.
I called my mother, who had had time to cool off and consider the impending birth of a grandchild, and she told me that if we came back she would sign papers allowing us to get married. My prince was about to sweep me off my feet into his parent’s house in the Ozarks. Not exactly the total independence I had hoped for, but I knew if John and I worked hard enough we could get our own home, maybe a little trailer on a few wooded acres.
Such were the dreams of a sixteen year old girl.
The next day as soon as Dad and Stepmother left for work, John backed his old Ford pickup into the garage and we started pitching all our worldly belongings into the back end (where they fit perfectly). All the while we kept ever watchful and guilty eyes peeled to the road in case Dad or Stepmother were to make an unexpected return appearance. They didn’t and we were soon gunning it back to Arkansas.
The next weekend, on October 11, 1986, I married John Brewer in true hillbilly shotgun fashion. I didn’t have the time or money to get a dress, so I wore my prom dress. Luckily it was white, though God knows it shouldn’t have been. But I didn’t care. I was marrying the man of my dreams.
Or so I thought. Because the man of my dreams disappeared the minute we said, “I do.”
And I do mean the minute.
I really don’t know what happened to the John Brewer I knew before the wedding. That John was kind, compassionate, and full of dreams and hopes for our future. But this John transformed as if he were Gollum from Lord of the Rings, changing the moment the ring went on his finger. On our wedding night, he was aloof and restless, as if he felt chained to me. I don’t remember if we had sex, but I do remember lying in the dark waiting for him to talk to me, to cuddle me, to do any of the things you’re supposed to on your wedding night. When he fell asleep, and I lay there alone, I thought, “What the hell?” I was absolutely bewildered, and for the first time, I began to think I might have made a mistake. And not just a mistake. A big mistake.
But I damn sure wasn’t going to admit it. Not yet anyway.
Stubbornness has been both my strength and my weakness. My stubborn head got me pregnant and married to a man who soon found comfort in other women, booze and drugs. But my stubborn head also forced me to continue attending high school when everyone said I shouldn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t. I kept going, forcing my ever-growing belly into those tiny desks, pressing on toward my diploma, only taking two weeks off to have my little girl.
***
My baby was due on my seventeenth birthday, but Andria Nichole Brewer was born three days early on April 10, 1987 at 6:06 p.m. The early arrival was truly characteristic of Andi, who would always try to stay one step ahead of her mother.
I would have more children later, but Andi’s birth would be the most difficult. As I pushed her from my nearly seventeen year old body, I felt as though I would die. But I quickly forgot the pain when they laid my 6 pound, four ounce daughter in my arms. For the first time, I felt like I’d done something right and I knew the birth of this child would impact my life in a huge way. I just had no idea at the time how huge that impact would be.
One of the first things I noticed about Andi was her small nose, a tiny nub settled on the tip of her face. I wondered what it would look like when she was older, but I guessed it would look like John’s. I hoped so, because I liked his nose better than mine. I inspected her tiny body, doing what all new parents do, counting fingers and toes, marveling at the softness of her skin. I was in awe that something so precious and wonderful could be entrusted to me.
By this time, my fairy tale marriage to John had hit the rocks with full force. When I was eight months pregnant, he had cheated on me with a girl who shall remain nameless and I suspect she wasn’t his first dalliance. But as he stood by my hospital bed, so obviously smitten with that baby girl, I felt myself warming to him again. Maybe he’d just succumbed to the pressure of being a teenage husband. Maybe he just needed to finish sowing his proverbial wild oats. Maybe Andi’s appearance would settle him down.
When you’re sixteen, life is full of maybes.
***
Andi quickly became the pride and joy of our family. Her quick wit and loving nature put her at the top of the list with everyone. My parents thought she hung the moon and everyone helped with her while I went to school and John worked at the local pallet factory. Being a teenage mother was not exactly what I thought it would be but we managed. Although I appreciated the home provided for me, living with John’s parents was not exactly my cup of tea. I felt restless. Controlled. Trapped…again. I wanted my own place with my own little family. So, when John’s brother began to pressure him about going to work for the Texas Department of Corrections as a prison guard I chirped right in.
Moving to Texas meant I had to change schools or quit, and so despite my former determination to get my diploma, I chose the latter. For the first semester of my senior year, I lived in a roach infested apartment complex in the industrial part of Houston, where I was greeted with a foul stench every time I stepped out the door. Not exactly the picket fence I had envisioned, but I felt certain that things would eventually be okay. I even entertained the idea of enrolling in the high school down the road to finish my degree, but I had a baby and no one to watch her. In fact, to make extra money, I was babysitting for other parents in our complex. When I thought of that high school, I felt a deep sense of regret that I was not inside, finishing my studies. I knew I could get a GED, but I wanted more than that…I wanted to walk with my class and receive my diploma. The voices of disapproving family members flitted in and out of my consciousness: You’ll never amount to anything now… You need to get an abortion…You’re grounded for the next eighteen years if you have that baby…
But those thoughts were often broken, when Andi buried her chubby little hand in my hair, laid her cheek on my chest, and stuck her thumb in her mouth as she gazed adoringly up at me. I might have been missing high school, but never for one minute would I have wanted to miss this little angel snuggled on my breast.
Things were resolved for me when we made a trip home for Christmas. John’s father had spoken to the principal at Hatfield High School and found I only needed four credits to graduate. Charles and Ann offered to let me stay there for the next semester, with Charles even offering to babysit for me in the mornings while I was gone. So when John went back to Houston, I stayed and went to school. Charles was true to his word, providing a father figure for not only the baby but myself. He took me to school each morning and picked me up at noon, and I always knew that Andi was in his loving and capable hands.
How John came from such a man, I will never know. While I was caring for his child in Arkansas and trying to better myself for both our futures, he was spending his time in Houston smoking pot outside the prison with the other prison guards during work and cheating on me—again--after hours. I didn’t have time to think about this though, so when I went to visit him on spring break, we did what was natural for a husband and a wife: we had sex. And although it only occurred one time, my body did what was natural.
It got pregnant.
***
I didn’t know I was pregnant with Melanie until after I received my diploma back in Hatfield a couple of months later. Before I could even pack my bags to return to Houston with John, I began to suspect my condition and bought a home pregnancy test. Pee stick blue.
Again.
I stared into the bathroom mirror as if I was staring at the biggest idiot on the planet. The thought of having a new little baby to love didn’t bother me. It was what it represented. You dumbass. Now you’re doubly tied to John. In my disillusionment with my Prince Charming, I had been contemplating other avenues for my life. College. Becoming a paramedic. I had an old notebook in which I had written over and over “Paramedic R. Brewer” the way some girls practice writing their new last name with their dream marriage partner. With one baby, I could have managed it, I thought. But with two? It was as if I had ripped those notebook pages out and let them fly away on the wind.
The same wind carried me back to Texas, where John and I moved further south to the small town of Angleton, Texas, where he promptly began an affair with a girl that lived across the courtyard of our apartment complex. Even with his disloyalty to me however, I never doubted that John would love our new baby just as he did Andi—until five months into the pregnancy.
John and I drove the long miles to our doctor in Houston, where I had an ultrasound, which told me we could expect a little girl. I was so excited at this news. I knew what to do with a little girl. I had practice. Then I looked over at John’s face. He was frowning. My high spirits fell at his disappointment and all the way back to the car, I kept asking, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” He stomped several feet in front of me as I struggled to keep up and then finally halted and whirled around to face me. The hatred and disgust on his face almost physically shoved me backward.
“I can’t believe we drove all the way to Houston just to find out you’re just giving me another fucking girl,” he spat accusingly.
I later found out that the male is actually responsible for the sex of the child, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if I had known that at the time. I felt as if he had backhanded me. Then something amazing happened inside of me. At the second I recovered from my shock, I bonded completely with my baby. It was as if my spiritual arms reached down inside my womb and cradled the little girl there. I was prepared from that moment to give her all the love I had given Andi and to make up for the love she would not receive from her father.
And I named her Melanie, for the character Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, because Melanie was the sweetest character that literature had ever created. I knew my Melanie surely would be as sweet, and as soon as she passed through her newborn colic, she certainly lived up to her name.
Andi, however, was not as excited about Melanie’s arrival, which was surprising to me. Even at twenty months, Andi already loved baby dolls and would carry one around saying cute little things like, “You a baby, you suck bobbles (bottles).” I felt sure she would welcome Melanie with open arms. The most trouble I expected was to have to keep her from wanting to carry Melanie around.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The moment I walked in the door with Melanie in my arms, Andi let out a shrill, blood curdling scream. John and I just looked at each other startled, as Andi pointed her chubby little finger at the bundle I was holding and screeched, “You take that baby back!” I stared at her round tear streaked face as she threw herself into a dramatic fit, flinging herself back onto the floor, stiffening her legs, and bawling at the top of her lungs. John rushed over and scooped her up into his arms.
“Why you doing that, Andi? Why are you acting that way?” he said soothingly.
People often ask me why I stayed so long with John. At moments like this, when he was tenderly cuddling our daughter and comforting her, I saw something sweet and good in him that always made me want to give him another chance. I thought perhaps if I loved him enough, he would change.
Melanie’s entrance into my life completed my joy as a mother, but my joy as a wife was completely gone by her birth. Around the time she was born, I discovered John was snorting cocaine. I later found out he had it hidden in the air vents in the bathroom of our apartment. I suspected he was still having affairs. When he decided we should go back home and live in Arkansas, I desperately clutched at the notion. At least there I would have family, people who cared about me. Here with him, I was utterly alone.
I thought things would be better at home. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He moved me into a heap of a trailer house that had belonged for years to his deceased grandmother, who had grown so tired of the place herself she had moved into a new trailer shortly before she died. As I stood and watched a big truck pull the dive that would be my new home up the dirt road to our land, my spirits sank to new depths, and then went even lower as I moved in. The place reeked of the musty odors always associated with the elderly. A thin layer of sticky grime coated everything and no amount of scrubbing would ever completely remove it. The carpet was crusted with God-only-knew-what and the wallpaper was yellowed and peeling like ancient book pages.
I was silent through most of this, taking it like a trooper. Then John looked at me, as serious as a heart attack, and said, with the deep Arkansas twang my Kansas bred ears had come to loathe, “I got an idea. I know where we can get an old school bus. We can pull it up to the back of the trailer and make it a laundry room.”
I broke my silence, albeit in a whisper. “Are you serious? Please tell me you’re not being serious.”
The look on his face told me, yes, he was serious. Visions of my father’s family from Kansas coming to visit flitted through my head. I could just see my upper middle class relatives bumping up this dirt road and seeing a shacky trailer with a bright yellow school bus parked at the back door. Hey why not add a junked up car or two, a couple of pink flamingos, and a coon dog pen while we were at it? I laid my foot down hard. “No. That ain’t gonna happen.”
If I thought my marriage to John had reached its lowest valley by this point I was wrong. He couldn’t afford drugs anymore, so those were a luxury. Beer and women came cheap in Arkansas and he partook of those abundantly. He didn’t like the shack any better than I did apparently, for all the time he spent there. Many nights, I lay in bed with my two sleeping babies, waiting on him to come home, the most horrendous pit in my stomach as I wondered where he was and what he was doing—and who he was doing it with. John would finally come home just long enough to get about three hours of sleep before he left for work. The only heat in our trailer was provided by a wood stove, but John never thought to light a fire in it before he left in the morning. Often my father-in-law would come over and build a fire for me and the girls. He provided a spark of stability in my world with this simple act. How had I come to such an insecure existence, when all I had wanted was a secure family environment?
A few times, I tried to stave off John’s destruction of our family by following him to catch him in the act of infidelity. The proof did not come from this however but from something else, something I would never have imagined. One day, my mother and stepfather sat me down and revealed to me a horrible possibility: they believed my husband was having an affair with my stepsister. Nothing was ever proven, but the actions of the accused parties spoke volumes. My stepsister promptly packed her bags and moved out of state to live with her mother. John did what he always did. He denied it.
But something inside me felt it was true, and my feelings toward him went from disappointment and angst to utter hatred. Always before, I had wanted to believe in him, wanted to see something inside him that was good. Something kept me waiting, watching, hoping that the spark of good I believed I saw would flame up and start to burn away everything bad. Now the flames were truly burning, but inside of me. When my parents told me about their suspicions, I literally did see red. I hated him. I hated her.
I wanted to kill them both. And since she was gone, I settled for him.
Rage pulsed through my body as I barreled my car down the long dirt road toward the trailer. All I could think about was that John had a handgun under the seat of his pickup truck and it was loaded. At the trailer, I hopped out of my car, jerked the pickup door open, grabbed the .45 from under the seat and headed for the house. Inside, I could hear the shower running. The sound drew me down the hall.
I have since attained some proficiency in firearms, but at the time, I had never held a handgun in my life. My hands shook as I clutched the weapon. The bathroom door was open as I rounded the corner, and I could see John through the clear shower curtain. He sensed my presence and turned his head as I said, “You son of a bitch, you slept with my sister?” John yanked back the curtain and as he stared at me, I realized he was shaking even more than I was. His body quivered like shiny clear Jell-O.
In a split second, he jumped out of the tub and wrestled me to the ground. After he’d subdued me, he took the gun, unloaded it and then thrust it back into my hands with his hands clutching mine hard. “You fucking bitch, you could have killed me.” He forced my finger to pull the trigger over and over. Click, click, click. “You see how easy these things go off?”
It was easy…so easy. How easy it would have been to kill him in that fit of rage, to throw away my life with my girls, who were the only thing in the world I had left to my name.
“Get off me,” I screamed, hysterical tears running down my face. “Let me go!”
He did let me go and I do not remember what I did next. I do recall however thinking later that day, “This isn’t normal. This is not a healthy relationship.”
At this point, I decided it was time for me to find a way out.
A way out presented itself through my mother and stepfather. They had just recently moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma and I asked them if I could move in with them and go to paramedic school. They said yes, and I started packing.
With John’s lack of interest in our marriage and family—and with my near murderous rant—I didn’t think he would raise too much of an objection to my leaving. But once again I was wrong. I had underestimated his love for Andi. He had never bonded with Melanie, first because she was a girl instead of a boy and also because he always had the irrational belief that Melanie was the product of an affair. Since I had never been unfaithful, this was impossible, but John liked to believe this anyway, especially since I conceived during our one brief encounter while we were living apart that first spring. John’s partiality revealed itself fully the day before I was to move to Tulsa. The girls and I had stopped by to tell his parents goodbye. Andi and Mel were playing cars in the dirt in the front yard when John unexpectedly pulled up in his pickup, snatched Andi and drove off, leaving a bewildered Melanie sitting alone on the ground. We quickly recovered Andi from her sobbing father, but this proved the bond that existed between the two—the same bond that would prove to be tragic later in Andi’s life.
As much as I thought I hated John, my bond with him was not so easily broken either. As I made the move to Tulsa, he quickly moved in his new shack up honey—a girl I suspected he had been sleeping with down at the pallet plant. When I went back for the rest of my things a few weeks later, John met me at the door. He was alone. The place, which had been no palace to begin with, had reached a new low. John and Shack-up Honey had moved the bed into the living room and were apparently residing completely in there, where they could benefit from the warmth of the wood stove. I knew from experience that the back bedroom was a glorified refrigerator and I imagined Shack-up Honey had protested. Good enough for his wife and daughters, I thought, but not good enough for her.