If I Die Before I Wake (3 page)

I knew I was a bad mother then, and I know it now. If I hadn't dragged Jon around with me like we were a couple of gypsies, if I hadn't put him through all the drama that was my life, he wouldn't be in the ground like his brother and sister. I put him there as surely as if I'd snapped his neck myself, and I could no longer live in the house where we lived together, where my memories haunted every corner.

I have a place to go, a rented room in another woman's house. I like her. She owns a beauty shop where I worked as a nail girl, and we partied in the same crowd. The rent on my house is paid for a month, so I have time to see if this new living arrangement works out. Right now, I can't see past packing a few things, gathering up the dog, taking the cat to a friend's house, and getting the hell away from the constant reminders of my dead son.

Like Mary Jo, whose long blond hair is never out of place, who wears the appropriate clothes for every occasion, who looks good even when she's drunk, the house is perfect. Everything is like brand-new, everything matches, but it seems to lack any personal touches. My secondhand clothes and few personal items seem out of place, as do I. Maybe I'll get used to it. I have to try, because I have no place else to go. Except for Aunt Ruthie, who's married to Mom's brother and fighting the good fight against cancer, what family I have left has nothing to do with me.

The irony of the situation with my family hasn't escaped me. At age 26, after running off with another woman's husband and finding myself and Jon deserted in a hotel in another state with no money, no clothes, and no car, I did what I always did when I was in trouble. I ordered drinks up to the room and signed for them. The next thing I remember was waking up tied hand and foot to a bed in a mental hospital in Springfield, Illinois. Apparently, sometime during my drunken stupor, I had called my most recent ex-husband. He drove to Kentucky to get us, but unable to handle me any longer, turned me over to the medical community.

They'd locked me up with a bunch of crazy people! I wasn't nuts—I was just drunk. I decided not to cooperate, but was put through months of drug and shock therapy before they released me—with conditions. I had to agree to stay on my medications and go to therapy, for at least two years. With all the help the state of Illinois was willing to give me, I had an opportunity to turn my life around, a chance to be a better person and a better mother. Finally sober, which I hadn't been for any length of time since I turned 17, I threw myself into therapy with a local psychologist even as I flushed the medications that made me feel like a slobbering fool. My therapist suggested that I stay away from my family for the first year. When I told them that, they didn't take it well. One would think that when an out-of-control drunk gives up the booze and is trying to do better, her family might embrace her. Not mine. From that moment on, I had no family except for Aunt Ruthie, who'd never been a drinker.

——

It's Saturday morning. Mary Jo is at work. I have the house to myself. Still in my robe after a long soak in the tub, I dart to the window when I hear a car pull into the driveway and car doors slam. My heart stops for a moment. What the hell are they doing here? It's my mom's sister, Juanita, and her husband, an abusive beer-soaked truck driver who got me drunk when I was 19 and raped me … a secret shame that I will take to my grave. He'd convinced me that the rape was my fault, and if I ever told, it would destroy Juanita and their two boys. As I peek through the blinds, I see the back door of the car open. It's Aunt Ruthie. I consider hiding, not letting them in, but I can't do that to Aunt Ruthie. She is the one person throughout my childhood who treated me decently, who never called me names or hit me.

Pulling the lapels of the shabby robe close around my neck, I open the door. Uncle John swaggers past me, followed by Juanita. They reek of cigarettes and beer. Juanita pulls me to her. I stiffen. As soon as Ruthie steps through the door, I launch myself into her waiting arms. The little girl who so wanted to be loved, for someone to tell her everything would be okay, emerges from me, and the tears I normally swallow in front of others pour down my face. Suddenly, I realize the woman holding me is half the woman she used to be. I pull back, unable to reconcile Ruthie's weight loss and the thick salt-and-pepper hair reduced to thin straggling wisps of fine, nearly completely gray hair with the woman I had known. The chemotherapy has really taken a toll on her. She's
dying, and she's consoling me. Making the excuse that I need to get dressed, I run to my bedroom.

Collapsed across the unmade bed, I push my face into the pillow. Strange sounds erupt from the deepest part of me. I can't do it. I can't lose another person I care about. I can't go out there and act like nothing is wrong. Why Aunt Ruthie? I don't know how she does it … smiles through her pain, all the while knowing she's dying. It's not like she's had a good life. Her husband, my mom's brother and a drunk who gambles and chases anything in a skirt, never treated her right. She raised their three kids in spite of him, working long hours at a shoe factory until she had a hump in her back from bending over a sewing machine. But still, she's loving, kind, and sober. I don't get it.

Ruthie steps through the door, perches on the side of the bed, and takes my hand in hers. I see tears glistening in her eyes. “Soon,” she says, “I'll go and take care of your Jon, but you'll have to stay here and look after my kids. Can you do that?” Unable to speak, I nod, but in the deepest part of me, I know it's a lie. I'm the last person anyone would want looking after their kids. “You are more than you think,” she continues. “God has a plan for you.”

After some stilted conversation and a few snide remarks cloaked behind false concern for me from John and Juanita, the need for a drink drives them out the door. I'm sure they have a cooler of beer waiting for them in the car. I focus on Ruthie's face through the backseat window of the big Buick as they back out the drive. Will this be the last time I see her?

A plan for me? God? More than I think I am? What did she mean? Given her circumstances, how can she believe in a God, some imaginary plan? I puzzle over this. The shrill ring of the telephone brings me out of my reverie. It's the local sheriff. He's getting a group of people together to speak at schools and churches about drug and alcohol addiction. I owe him one because he identified Jon after I had his body flown home. I didn't think I could live through seeing another one of my children dead. He wants me to speak from a parent's point of view. I agree, but before I hang up the receiver I know it's a mistake.

——

“Another day in paradise,” I say to the empty kitchen and pour myself a large glass of wine. It's going to be one hell of a day. I need to write a letter to the young man who killed my son with his truck. It wasn't his fault, and I want to tell him that there is no reason his life should be destroyed by what was clearly an accident. As I lay in bed awake last night, staring out the window at the stars and wondering where my son is, I considered what to say. I imagined how I would feel if I killed another person. I would wonder about him … who he was, what he was like … and then my answer came. Now, I pull pen and paper out of Mary Jo's desk.

When I'm dressed, the ready-to-mail envelope clutched in one hand, the phone rings again. I hesitate, then answer it. It's Tom, the last person in the world I want to talk to at this moment. I can't decide if he's a blessing or a curse in my life. I just
know that since the age of 20 I haven't been able to get him out of my mind. Our on-and-off relationship for over ten years has been euphoric at some times and disastrous at others. Jon always adored him, and no man I was with since had measured up in Jon's eyes. But Tom had hurt me, and I can't take any more hurt right now.

“I have to go. I'm on my way out,” I say, hang up, grab up Angel, and rush out the door. After a quick stop at the post office to mail the letter, I turn the old car onto the country road that leads to the cemetery.

I don't want to go home
.

It's not my home
.

I don't have a home
.

I've never felt like I had a home. Ruthie's words play through my mind. Tom's face, with his pale blue eyes that seem to see into my very soul, flashes in front of me. I step hard on the accelerator. I can't make the turn. The car skids off the road. Angel is thrown to the floor. Stopped, stunned, I gather the little terrier into my arms and weep. She licks at my tears and wiggles out of my arms. The door open, she jumps from the car and darts through a stand of trees. I follow her into a wide, grassy clearing.

——

A fallen tree supports my back as I sit on the thick spongy grass, still damp from the early morning dew, and watch Angel
explore, peeing here and there. Warm beams of sunlight combine with a cool breeze to relax me. Sliding down, my head resting on the log, I notice the leaves are beginning to change color. Normally, I love the fall in Illinois—the red, orange, and yellow painting the edges of the foliage. But today the fall leaves take me back to another day, another time many years before when I felt much like I do at this moment: like I wish I could simply close my eyes, drift away, and never return. I wonder why I didn't let go of that boat.

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF
1955, the year I turned 8. It would be my last summer on the Kaskaskia River with Grampa Chaplin and his wife, Alma. And, as my mother had reminded me several times, I had no one to blame but myself. I was a stupid, ungrateful child. If I had a brain, I would take it out and play with it. A whipping at the end of a willow switch couldn't have hurt any more than knowing I'd messed up the one good thing left in my life.

To me, there was nothing better than life on the river. The old cabin sat on the banks of the Kaskaskia, next to the Thompson
Mill covered bridge, with fields of corn behind it. Electricity was unnecessary; the cabin had oil lamps and a wood cookstove. A well with the coldest, best-tasting water I'd ever had, and a two-holer outhouse took the place of inside plumbing. There were no windows, only wooden flaps that could be pushed out and propped up with sticks. Daily life consisted of hunting, fishing, swimming (which passed for taking a bath), picking berries, drawing water, and gathering firewood for the stove where Alma prepared fabulous meals of fried catfish, potatoes, corn, and corn bread in heavy cast iron skillets. My mouth would water at the aroma of Alma's homemade bread and berry pies cooling near the window.

As each mile passed on the hilly, twisting dirt roads that led to the river, I felt all the worries of town leave me. There was no greater feeling than discarding the hated secondhand dresses that never seemed to fit quite right, not having to attend a school where I would never fit in, not listening to the drunken fighting between whoever happened to be at the house, and not dealing with parents who seemed to be angry at me most of the time. The river was where I wanted to be, and I imagined that someday, when I got older, I would go there and live out my life.

But all good things must come to an end, and for my brother and me, that end would happen the day my mother and her new husband, who used to be our uncle, came to fetch us at the river. The weather had turned cool after a hard rain a few days earlier. While Grampa and Bill went hunting squirrels, Alma heated a bucket of water on the stove, poured it into an old
washtub set in front of the stove, and scrubbed me down good with lye soap and the wooden-handled scrub brush that when turned over could be used as a paddle. I'd tasted the hard side of it many times. Clean, dressed in bibbed overalls, a tee shirt, and the shoes I would be wearing for school that fall, Alma turned me loose with dire warnings about not getting dirty before Mom came to get us.

I walked along the riverbank, poking at things with a stick I'd found along the way, until I spotted the rowboat Grampa used to check the trout lines bobbing up and down in the swiftly running, swollen, muddy river. It called to me.

Cautiously, so as not to get dirty, I slipped down the bank, grabbed the rope attached to the boat that was tied to a tree, and pulled it in. I jumped on board. I loved to lie in the bottom of the boat, feel the rocking motion of the river, and daydream. However, daydreams didn't come that day. My mind drifted to what I'd be returning to in town. Mom had divorced my dad and married his brother, a mean man whom I couldn't please no matter how hard I tried, and Dad had remarried a large Jewish woman with a little girl who was everything I would never be. In her white, fluffy dresses with jet-black hair that was never out of place, she looked like one of those porcelain dolls I'd seen in catalogues. The first time I saw her sitting on my dad's lap, I wanted to hit her and rip off her pretty dress.
She
sure didn't look like something the cat dragged in.

Lying in the boat, my head propped up on one of Grampa's homemade life preservers, I stared at the tops of the trees swaying in the breeze. They were just starting to turn colors
around the edges. One let loose and drifted on air currents until it landed on top of the water to drift away. I wanted to be that leaf, to drift away to another place, never to return to my life in town again. Would it drift all the way to the ocean? I'd never seen the ocean, but I had seen pictures of it at school.

Without a second thought, I slipped over the side of the rowboat. The water was cold, the current swift. One waterlogged shoe was dragged off, followed closely by the other. My wet bibbed overalls weighed me down, tugging me away from the boat. I could barely hang on to the side. I heard Alma calling my name. All I had to do was let go, but it felt as if my hands were frozen to the wood.

Alma grabbed the rope and pulled the boat into shore. Then she jumped in (which really surprised me because she couldn't swim), grabbed my arm, and in one swift motion, hauled me into the boat. I don't know if it was fear, cold, or the sight of Alma's bowed legs encased in rolled-down support hose and her long underdrawers showing as she fell backward—but I started to laugh, and I couldn't stop.