A Sad Soul Can Kill You (3 page)

Lorenzo left the lakefront and drove until he saw the petite gray and white house nestled between a boarded-up tavern and a dilapidated storefront. Empty plastic bottles, paper, and other debris littered the curbside, and he parked his car under the one streetlight still working. He carefully checked out his surroundings before getting out of the car, and then he walked swiftly up to the wooden door.

He knocked once on the unfinished surface, then three more times in rapid succession. The stench of sweat and smoke greeted Lorenzo as a tall, muscular man opened the door just enough for Lorenzo to squeeze through. The man turned his clean shaven head toward the basement of the crack house, and Lorenzo walked down the rickety stairs that creaked each time he placed his full weight of 380 pounds on them.

As it always did, the battle between his flesh and mind waged on. With each unsteady step he took, the morality of his mind fought to be heard over the lustful persistence of his flesh. Lorenzo licked his lips. He needed this, and that was all there was to it. He hurried down the steps, eager to become immersed in the darkness that kept his soul in captivity.

As he entered the dimly lit basement, the intermingling odor of feces and urine quickly clung to his polyester jacket like a leech. He turned the corner and entered another semidarkened room where men and women, young and old, had all found a space where they could disappear right in front of his eyes. Lorenzo intended to disappear as well . . . just as soon as he got what he came for.

Although he had entered a crack house, the rock hard substance was not what he had come for. Opiates, in the form of painkillers, were his drug of choice. He continued down the grim hallway until he reached the last room on the left where the drug dealer sat behind a tattered and stained folding table.

This drug dealer was a jack-of-all-trades with a menacing demeanor when it came to assisting others in the destruction of their lives; little by little, one hit from the pipe—or in Lorenzo's case, one pill at a time. But Lorenzo couldn't see any of that. He couldn't see beyond his misery or how much he wanted the pain to stop. All he knew was that the handful of pills he was about to purchase would make all of his unpleasant feelings go away.

“What you want?” the dealer asked Lorenzo without looking up. He was surrounded by three other menacing figures who did all the looking for him.

“The usual,” Lorenzo said as he quickly placed four twenty-dollar bills on the table. The tug-of-war within him continued as did his pain. He wanted to leave, just run up the steps and out the door, but his misery would not allow him to do so . . . not until he had gotten the pills.

The dealer snatched the money from the table, and then reached into a mop bucket underneath the chair he was sitting on. “Here you go,” he said as he slid a small plastic bag across the table.

Lorenzo grabbed the tiny bag with four round pills inside, and turned to leave without saying a word.

“See you next time,” the dealer said.

The condescending tone in his voice may as well have been an arrow piercing straight through the center of Lorenzo's soul. He stumbled past the lifeless shadows lurking in the murky environment. He made it to the steps and left the same way he had entered.

The nagging pull at his conscience, combined with the arrow still penetrating his soul, was too much. Lorenzo took two of the pills out of the bag and swallowed them before he'd even gotten to the car. Later, he would take the other two and everything would be all right. At the very least, the void in him would be gone, and that would be good enough.

He started the car, hoping the pills' numbing effects would kick in by the time he got home. As he drove, he thought about all the years he'd been trying to convince himself that everything was all right, that
he
was all right. His self-persuasion had never really worked, and the events of today had been an accumulation of just how wrong everything truly was. It had ended with his visit to his parents' house, but it had started that Wednesday morning with his wife, Tia.

He'd been lying in bed next to her, trying to think of something to say that would make amends for what had happened. He was trying to find a way to apologize again for the physical spasm of emotion he'd been able to conjure up, but that had ended seconds after it had begun. What could he say that he hadn't already said before?

He remembered studying the limbs on the birch tree outside of his window, noting how still they remained under the weight of the fresh February snowfall. And then finally the words had come. “You're my soul mate,” he'd spoken softly to his wife. There. He'd finally said something loving.

But Tia had remained stone-faced and silent.

Lorenzo had taken a deep breath. “You know that, don't you?” He'd forced himself to look down at her. The pasty white streak traveling down the right side of her dark brown cheek let him know she'd been crying.

“No, I don't,” she'd answered coldly. “How can I?”

He'd gotten out of the bed after that and had gone back into the living room where he'd begun sleeping at night, preferring the company of a television set to that of his wife. Sometimes, Tia would come to him in the middle of the night and try to get him to come to bed. Lorenzo would pretend not to feel her shaking him or he would mumble “okay” just to get her to stop, but daylight would find him right where she had left him.

It didn't bother him that months had gone by since he'd last made love to his wife. And he didn't care about the wall of resentment he was creating between them because of it. After awhile, Tia stopped getting out of bed to wake him. And Lorenzo didn't care about that either.

The pills had not kicked in yet, and the familiar sensation of emptiness returned to Lorenzo. He parked his car in front of his house and waited for the dull emotional pain that he knew would follow. This time he tried to convince himself that the pain was not really present. But it was, and it would not be dismissed simply by his denial of its presence. He got out of his car and slammed the door shut. His pain was real, and it had become quite unbearable.

The crescent circles forming at the top of Franny's pale blue gown grew bigger and wetter. She waited until she could no longer hear the fixed rhythm of Tia's synthetic heels hitting the hallway floor outside of her room. Then she released the full volume of her tears. She wasn't crying because of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. She was crying because of the predicament she was in.

It had been two weeks since she'd driven herself to Victory Memorial Hospital and shuffled up to the registration desk complaining of leg pain. After an assessment of her swollen legs was done by one of the emergency room doctors, she was told that she needed to be seen by a vascular specialist.

The doctor suggested she follow up with her primary care physician the next day for a referral. But the next day found her back in the emergency room—this time complaining of shortness of breath. The doctor who had treated her hours earlier asked her if she had contacted her primary care physician like he had advised her to do.

“I didn't have a chance to.” Franny's voice had quivered. “When I woke up this morning, I could hardly breathe!”

She remembered following the doctor's eyes as they traveled up to her gray disheveled hair, and then back down to her stained blue dress, and she wondered if he noticed that it was the same dress she'd worn the night before.

“We're going to admit you for a full cardiac workup and a consultation with a vascular surgeon,” he'd said before leaving the room.

Well, at least she'd had somewhere to stay temporarily. Now, they were talking about the possibility of releasing her in the next few days. Where would she go? She'd been sleeping in her car for weeks, but she couldn't keep doing that. It had gotten far too cold.

She turned to the news channel on the television set. A young man was reporting on the status of homeless shelters in the surrounding area.

Franny watched as he walked into a small building with his cameraman right behind him. The uninviting room was already half-filled with men and women who were lounging on plastic chairs reading newspapers. Some of the women rummaged through stacks of clothing laid out on a white vinyl table that had been pushed against the wall. Quite a few of the men had congregated in front of the steam radiator, eager to thaw away the cold that had set up residence in their bones.

Franny did not want to spend the night sleeping on a chair. She didn't want to spend the night in a shelter at all. She dried her eyes and took a few moments to regain her composure. Then she picked up the phone and called her estranged son, Homer.

She'd gotten pregnant with Homer when she was seventeen years old. The eighteen-year-old boy who'd gotten her pregnant had joined the army shortly after she'd told him the news. The year was 1963, and it had been gut-wrenching for Franny to find herself pregnant and unmarried.

Even now, fifty-one years later, she could still remember the terrible ache in her heart after Homer's father went missing in action. She never saw him again, and her heart was left feeling like there was a vice grip around it. Somehow, she knew she would never be the same after that.

Charlotte, Franny's mother, had made the decision to send her daughter away until after she'd had the baby. So Franny had stayed at a facility that offered pregnant girls the opportunity to continue their education while providing a reprieve for them during their pregnancy.

When Homer was born, and Franny saw the curled up claw where his left foot should have been, the vice grip around her heart was replaced by a fracture, which caused her heart to crack and shatter. The deformity was more than she could handle. It was the last straw.

She left Homer with her now-deceased mother shortly after he was born and enrolled in an out-of-state university. In the beginning, she called weekly to check on Homer's well-being.

“How's my baby?” she'd ask her mother.

“He's doing fine,” Charlotte would reassure her.

“How's he doing with that foot?”

“He's making a lot of progress in therapy.”

“Is it still balled up?”

Each time Franny asked that question, she always hoped to hear her mother say that Homer's foot had somehow miraculously uncurled itself and had become a normal-looking foot. But that was never the case, and her heart sank each time she heard the answer.

“Yes,” Charlotte had said. “It'll probably stay that way, but Homer is going to be just fine.”

As time passed, her weekly calls became every other week, then once a month. Soon, months went by without her calling to check on her son. And for every month that passed without her calling was a month she managed to subdue the guilt inside of her just a little bit more.

She never told any of her college classmates or her roommate that she had a son. And by the end of her freshman year, the facade had become her reality. The guilt—having been hushed into silence—became temporarily nonexistent.

The financial aid Franny received from the government was not enough to cover all of her expenses, and Charlotte had refused to help her.

“I'm taking care of your son,” Charlotte had said. “That's my help, and that's all the help you're going to get from me.”

So Franny had gotten a job through the campus work-study program, and divided her time between studying and working to supplement the cost of her tuition. After graduating, she'd worked for a short time as a nanny, taking care of another woman's son and daughter.

The irony of what she was doing had not escaped her. There she was taking care of someone else's children while rejecting her own child.
Men do it all the time,
she'd told herself.
They make babies, and then leave babies
. Including her son's father. And it was this way of thinking that allowed her to continue living without having any physical contact with her child.

Eventually, she began working for the Department of Health and Human Services as an administrative assistant. The job paid well, and she was able to save a great deal of money, some of which she sent home to her mother every week. Still, she had not returned home to see her son.

On Homer's fifth birthday, Charlotte called Franny. “When are you coming home to see your son?” she asked.

“I've been so busy,” Franny had said. “I'm trying to make plans now, but it's so hard. How's he doing?”

“Well, he gets teased about his foot sometimes,” Charlotte said, “because of the limp, but other than that he's all right.”

Two more years passed without a visit from Franny, and on Homer's eighth birthday, Franny received a legal document from Charlotte requesting to become Homer's legal guardian.

“You don't spend no time with the boy,” Charlotte had said, “so you may as well sign them. If you don't, I'll just take you to court.”

It didn't take Franny long to accept her own justification that she was not giving her son away but was leaving him in a stable environment with his grandmother, a blood relative.

After making Charlotte Homer's legal guardian, Franny began to visit him.

Even though Homer knew Franny was his biological mother, he would always address her by her first name and refer to Charlotte as “Mom.”

It seemed to Franny that after each instance of Homer calling his grandmother “Mom,” he'd make a deliberate point of looking at Franny. The look of contempt in his eyes made her cringe, and then he'd limp past her to the opposite side of the room and just stare at her.

The visits had become increasingly uncomfortable for Franny, which caused her to keep them short and infrequent. As Homer got older, she would come to visit, and he would be nowhere to be found.

“Where's Homer?” Franny would ask Charlotte.

“I don't know where that boy went,” Charlotte would say. “I told him you were coming, and the next thing I knew he was gone.”

Eventually, it became easier for Franny to pretend she did not have a son, and that's exactly what she did until Homer came looking for her after he'd graduated from college. By that time Franny had moved back to Chicago, and Charlotte had let Homer know. When he'd asked for his mother's address, Charlotte had given it to him. But when he showed up on Franny's doorstep, she'd quickly realized it was not because he wanted a happy reunion. Homer had made it clear to her that he had not forgiven her for abandoning him. And their relationship had remained distant and strained ever since.

The phone rang three times before Homer answered.

“Hello?”

The deep sound of his voice intimidated Franny. Her heartbeat quickened. “Hello, Homer,” she said, trying to control the tremor in her voice.

He paused before he spoke. “Yes?”

“I've been in the hospital,” she told the dull voice on the other end of the line. “But I might be released in a few days.”

Homer made a sound that was similar to that of pressurized air being released. Then he spoke. “Where will you go?”

Franny was quiet.

“Hello?”

“I'm here,” she answered. “I was wondering if you could pick me up when they release me.”

“And take you where?”

Franny could hear the agitation in his voice. She took a deep breath. “I was wondering if I could stay with you for a couple of months. I've already applied for senior housing so it shouldn't be longer than that.”

“I don't know,” he said. “My place is not that big. I mean it's me and Sandra, and you . . . Where have you been sleeping? Why can't you go home?”

She looked around the barren hospital room. The pale gray walls and neutral décor were incomparable to the material comforts she'd had in her three-bedroom, two-bath Cape Cod home; a home that she'd lived in for the past twelve years. But ever since she retired, it had been a struggle to maintain her same standard of living.

The truth was that she had financially miscalculated everything. And the Social Security check she received along with her pension just wasn't enough to pay the mortgage, utilities, and other miscellaneous bills.

If there had been anyone else she could have called on, she would have. Anyone . . . other than her son who she knew still held a grudge against her. But there was no one. Franny had never married, and while she'd made acquaintances through the years, she had never maintained any lasting friendships. Now, being homeless had only caused her to shun the few acquaintances she had.

She looked around the drab room again. Yes, Lord. She would love nothing more than to go back to her home. But what she wanted to do, and what she
could
do were two different things. The house had already gone into foreclosure, and she had been evicted. She remembered the day she'd come home and found the yellow notice of eviction taped to her front door.

The bright neon color had stood out like a traffic light at midnight, and she remembered the sinking feeling she'd felt in her heart. Franny had known from the color of the paper what the notice meant before she'd ever made it up the walkway. It had been clearly visible not only to her but to her neighbors as well, and she'd quickly snatched it off the door.

She'd had no one close she could call on to help her pack and move so little by little, she had packed her life's belongings into various-size boxes and bins and had professional movers take them along with her furniture to a storage unit she'd rented.

She remembered the panic that had settled within her and would not leave. Thank God she'd had the foresight to see the eviction coming and had already applied for senior housing. But the timing was still off, and she was faced with the reality of having no place to live.

The first week, she rented a motel room, but that quickly became an unaffordable option. She then made the decision to sleep in her car rather than ask anyone for help, and so she'd checked out of the motel room and parked her car on the parking lot behind the motel.

Her first night of being homeless was filled with anguish, discomfort, and fear. And she'd prayed all night for the Lord to be with her and protect her. She'd stayed awake the entire night, letting the car run at intervals as the temperature outside dropped.

By daybreak, her fear had subsided, along with her tears. But something had gone terribly wrong. How had she ended up in a situation like this? She had worked all her life, and this is what it had amounted to?

Franny had felt trapped and alone. Still, she clung to her belief that God was going to work it all out. She told herself that any day the manager of the senior housing complex would be calling her to tell her that an apartment was available. She just had to hold on.

The second and third nights weren't any easier, but she told herself it could be worse. At least she had access to running water and a bathroom at the 24-hour restaurant across the street. But then her leg had begun to swell and ache, and she'd driven herself to the hospital.

It had been so nice and warm in the examining room, and when the doctor had completed his examination and released her, she didn't want to leave. She'd reluctantly returned to her cold car. It had taken everything in her to keep from crying as she'd slid behind the steering wheel and looked at the icy crystals covering the windshield. The following morning, she'd begun to have difficulty breathing, and had returned to the hospital.