If I Die Before I Wake (2 page)

The next “sometime” Mac spoke of occurred in February. For eight months I'd lived on hope, convincing myself that Jim had a good reason for not coming back. Some days were more difficult than others. I missed going to school, spending time with the few friends I'd made in Arizona, and acting like a kid. I passed my days as a babysitter, housekeeper, and laundress for Mrs. Scopaletti, who lived three blocks from our house with her husband and six children. The majority of my earnings went to Scottsdale Baptist Hospital to pay for the birth of my child. I was miserable. But when one day the phone rang and I heard Jim's deep, familiar voice, everything I'd gone through went right out of my mind. He had come. We would get married, have the baby, and be a family. The dream was alive.

——

I'd heard that what you don't know can't hurt you, but in my case that simply wasn't true. What I didn't know nearly killed me. I dressed in my best maternity outfit, stood next to Jim in front of a minister in my parent's living room, and exchanged
vows with him. We ate cake. Jim took my hand, and we walked outside. I imagined he had a surprise for me. He did, but not what I thought. He said, “I'm not staying. I married you so the baby would have a name. I'll take care of you and the baby financially, but we can't be together. I'm too old for you. It would never work.” He turned and walked away.

Stunned, I walked through the house to my bedroom, closed the door, and sat in the wooden rocker I would use for the baby. I couldn't cry. I couldn't think. I just sat there in numbed silence until my mother walked through the door. When I saw her, the tears came. “You're going to have to pull yourself together,” she said. “Think of the baby.”

My tears were replaced with anger. First, she and my step-dad tried to make me get rid of the baby. When I refused, my stepdad slapped me across the face. Later, after they threatened me with no help, financial or otherwise, they thought they could make me put the baby up for adoption. Determined, I went to work. Their last ploy was that they would take the baby. There was no way I would let them do to an innocent baby what they'd done to my brother and me.

“The baby?” I screamed. “You mean the baby you wanted me to kill? Or, the baby you wanted me to give away? No … no, the baby you think you're going to take from me? That baby?”

“You're hysterical. You need to calm down,” my mother said.

I glared at her, hoping she could see the hate in my eyes. “He left. He married me, and then he left.”

“Don't you get it, Barbara? Are you that stupid? He only married you to keep from going to jail for statutory rape.”

Rape? “He didn't rape me!”

“For Christ's sake, he's twice your age. Do you really think he wants to spend his time with a teenager? He's a grown man. The law says when a man his age has sex with a child, it's rape.”

“I'm not a child.”

Mom hesitated with her hand on the doorknob, turned, and said, “No, you're going to be a mother. You better start thinking like one.”

“Yeah, like you would know anything about that,” I mumbled. She shot me a look. “What?”

“It doesn't matter,” I said. No matter what I had to do, I wouldn't let my mother raise my baby.

——

Jon Luther Lewis, a miniature image of his father, made his entrance into the world on March 8. Overwhelmed with feelings I'd never experienced before, I cuddled the sweet-smelling, perfect, tiny bundle in my arms. “No one will ever take you away from me,” I whispered into the small, shell-like ear. “I'll take you away from here. They'll never hurt you.”

——

Fifteen years later and a week after the knock on the door, the harbinger of the news which is every mother's greatest fear, I stand at my son's grave. My dear son is in a box, under the ground. The choices I made killed him. I am alone.

DAYS PASS BY AS IF IN SLOW MOTION
. I'm not here. I'm somewhere on the outside of the world, watching through a haze. Is that what it's like to be dead? If I kill myself, will I be reunited with my son, or lie in the ground, forgotten? Who will be left to remember my child or to mourn my passing? I pour a shot of brandy into my coffee. How should I do it? It must be dramatic; something memorable. I could take poison, lie across Jon's grave, leave a poignant note.

Angel is barking. It's the postman. If I don't get to the mail, she'll tear it up. I don't know why, but when the mail comes through the slot in the door, Angel just attacks. As a result, many of my bills are sent back shredded and taped together. It's a race to the door. The dog wins, grabs a flyer, and shakes it furiously while I gather the few envelopes. I thumb through the bills on the way back to the kitchen. If I don't kill myself, I'm going to have to go back to work soon. There's a letter from my brother at the bottom of the pile.

The irony of the situation doesn't escape me. My last link to my son is the brother I've been estranged from for many years. Mom may have been an alcoholic and a pill popper, but she held the family, dysfunctional as it was, together. When she died, the tentative hold we had on each other died with her. It's like a gunshot exploded and sent us all in different directions.

One more shot of brandy, and I'll read my brother's letter. I know I shouldn't be drinking this early in the day, especially after what happened to me before, but it's the only thing that keeps me from running screaming into the street. I pick up the letter, stare at it, and lay it down. I can't read it now. I need to get cleaned up, go to the restaurant, and find out if I still have a job. The bills aren't going to pay themselves.

In the shower, my tears mingle with the hot water streaming over my body. I wish the pure clean water could wash away my sins; that I could step from the shower with my insides as clean as my outsides. I've started my life over so many times—but never without Jon. Together, we'd overcome so much, and no matter what, we always had each other. Now I have no one. I
turn the hot water off. Cold water hits me like a blast of icy air. I have to stop this. It's time to pull myself together.

Dry, dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, it's time for the dreaded daily ritual of hair and makeup. I hate the woman in the mirror, the one who works so hard at looking good on the outside, but who I know is ugly. Mom used to say I looked like something the cat dragged in. I fixed that by learning the skills of styling hair and applying creams and makeup, but no amount of makeup can conceal what lives within. Now, I truly feel like something the cat dragged in—a hopelessly struggling victim trapped in the jaws of a cruel world.

Ablutions completed quickly, I glance at the letter, gulp down another shot of brandy, pop a mint in my mouth, and I'm out the door. I pray to the car god that my old car starts. It's too hot to walk the two miles to the Red Fox Restaurant, although I've had to do it many times before. I don't have the energy today.

The big, gold-colored gas hog, which sits in my driveway more often than not—either because it won't run or I don't have gas money—starts on the third try. I let out a sigh. If I had a phone, life would be easier. But that's not going to happen. Jon ran up a huge phone bill before he left for treatment, and I still don't have it paid off. I yelled at him about it, said things I wish I could take back. I shift the car into reverse and quickly back out of the drive before my thoughts wander to that dark place.

I walk through the bar, waving at the bartender who is setting up for the day ahead, past the dining room, and into the kitchen where I spend my working hours as a cook. Wayne, the owner and my boss, is prepping for lunch along with the salad
girl. They stop and stare at me, obviously uncomfortable. I've encountered that a lot lately. It only makes things worse. I force a smile. Wayne leads me to his office and says, “Do you need a couple more days?”

A couple more days isn't going to change anything. My son will still be dead. I will still be alone. “No, I need to get back to work.” The mortuary gave me a thirty-day grace period. After that, I will be giving them a percentage of my check each week until my debt is paid. “I can come back tomorrow, if that's okay.”

I start home, change my mind, pull into the liquor store drive-through, purchase a pint of gin, and head toward the country. I can't go home. The letter is there, waiting for me. Fear grips me when I think of opening it. What more can Bill tell me that I want to know? Jon is dead, hit by a truck and killed on Central Avenue in Phoenix. He'll never graduate from high school, go to college, get married, or have children. I will not have grandchildren … not ever. The tears come. I can't believe I have any left. I unscrew the lid of the pint bottle, take a healthy swig, and continue to drive over the hilly country roads until I find myself at the cemetery. It's the last thing I remember when I come to, face down, chilled from the damp grass, lying next to the mound of dirt under which my son's body lies.

I struggle to my feet, head throbbing, and brush the dirt and grass from my clothes. Picking up the empty bottle, I toss it into the trees surrounding the tiny cemetery and convince myself I must have been exhausted from not sleeping well—that I simply fell asleep. I won't accept any other explanation, least of all that I drunkenly passed out. I can't. However, doubts assail
me when I locate my car off the gravel drive, parked dangerously close to a headstone. What time is it? I have to get home to let Angel out and feed her.

A darkness unique to the cloud-filled, summer storm season of Illinois descends as I approach the house. There are no lights on. I hate the dark. It has never been my friend. Angel rushes out the screen door as soon as I open it, barely making it off the sidewalk to relieve herself. Poor little thing. How long have I been gone? I flip light switches as I move through the house to the kitchen, pour myself a big glass of cold water, and drink it down. As I turn from the sink, I see the letter. My heart sinks. I do not want to know the details!

Angel fed, I gather her into my arms, go to Jon's room, lie down on his bed, and weep into Angel's soft fur until sleep comes. The sound of sobbing wakes me. He's there. I can see him. He's standing at the end of the bed. Blood is gushing from his mouth. I scream. He disappears. I rush to the bathroom, hang my head over the toilet, and everything in my stomach erupts. It can't be happening. Not again! It's the same nightmare I started having after my tiny infant daughter, Nikki, died. When it got so bad I was afraid to go to sleep, I sought help from a doctor. He told me to drink a little brandy before I went to sleep. It took more than a little, but it worked.

——

Maybe it's time to read the letter. At the kitchen table, I stare at it for long moments. With shaking fingers, I rip it open. When I
realize I'm holding my breath in, I let the air out and watch the handwritten pages flutter as I unfold them. And then I read.

It's all there; all the details I don't want to know. Until I read that letter, I was able to remember Jon as he was when I left him at the treatment center. Now, the picture of his death is embedded in my mind. The memory of my prayer, that god-awful prayer I'd uttered when he ran away from the treatment facility, returns. I hadn't prayed since my babies were dying, since my mother shot herself. They had all died; the prayer hadn't worked. I should have known better. But, I did it. I said, “God, I can't take care of Jon anymore. Will you look after him?” A few days later, he was dead. I might as well have signed his death warrant.

Choking back the tears, I begin shredding the letter into strips and watching the pieces float to the floor. Everyone I ever cared for either hurt me, left me, or died, and this God that everyone was so sure was out there somewhere, helping people with their problems, didn't give a damn about me. My life had been shit from the beginning, and it always would be.

FLASHBACKS OR MEMORIES
… I don't know anymore. What I do know is I can't walk back into that house again. I think of how mad I used to get when I came home from work to find Jon's dirty, stinky sweat socks in the living room floor. I'd scream at him. Now, I'd give anything to see them, smell that familiar odor, just to know he is there. I see him in every doorway, lying in the floor playing with Angel, on the couch picking at his guitar, shooting pool with his friends. But he's not there.
No matter how hard I try, my memories always end with him dead in the middle of the road, hit by a car, his neck broken.

Immediately, memories of holding my other dead children in my arms—and then having to let them go, that emptiness—flood my mind. Nikki, my tiny infant daughter, born when I was just seventeen, was a fighter. She amazed the doctors when she lasted as long as she did, considering all her physical problems: a hole in her heart and lungs not fully developed.

My second son, Ronny, came along nearly two years later. He looked just like Jon except he had dark hair and skin like mine. Bigger than Nikki, more developed, the doctors thought he would make it. I was sure of it. Each day I went to the pediatric floor to check on him where he'd spent his short life in a clear box, hooked up to monitors. Then one day he suddenly stopped breathing. Nurses fluttered around. They closed the curtain. A doctor rushed through the door. I couldn't catch my breath. I collapsed in a heap, and the next thing I knew, I came to in a hospital bed. The doctor told me that Ronny was dead.

The only time I ever got to touch my babies was after they were dead. They looked like they were just sleeping, their little bodies still warm. I flash back to the days my infant daughter and son died, holding their lifeless bodies in my arms, praying it wasn't true, that they would open their eyes and it would all be a big mistake. I wanted to pull them to my breast and run away, but I stood there in stone silence, my tears running over their tiny faces, and let them be taken away from me and put in the ground. A few years later, when I lost a child before he was born, I simply shut down, knowing that for some reason I wasn't fit to be a mother.

——

My husband blamed me. I blamed myself. If I'd taken better care of myself, it wouldn't have happened. He didn't need to keep telling me. I knew it.