Authors: Vacirca Vaughn
Cedric
looked away, defeated that his last attempt failed. He realized that
there was no way to take back the truth he had tried to hide. He stood
and his face hardened with the same truth he had been hiding. “Yeah,
well, I’ve always been with you because I needed you. It’s what made it
bearable to get into this bed with you every night.”
Phoenix
pushed him. “Go now, before I knock your lights out! Go!” Her
shrill voice ricocheted around the room as she bent to retrieve the baseball
bat from the floor.
“I’m
going, Fe. I’m going.”
“I hope
God forgives you, Cedric, for using me all this time. You need to pray.”
Cedric
laughed. “Being a hypocrite makes you even less attractive than you
already are, Fe. When I met you, you said you were a Christian and was
always going to church. But that sure didn’t stop you from letting a
little attention from me change your mind really quick! You slept with me
on our second date and let me move in with you, didn’t you? I had my
reasons for all this, but I never pretended to be something I wasn’t to impress
you. Shoot, you give up God just to be with a good-
lookin
’
dude. And it was just that easy too. Maybe
you’re
the one
that should pray for forgiveness.” He picked up his three garbage bags of
belongings. “I’m going.”
And so
he did. Taking all of Phoenix’s youth, hopes, dreams, and plans with him,
Cedric walked out the door and out of her life.
***
By the end of
the “movie,” Phoenix was fully resolved with the idea of taking the rest of the
pills and drifting off into a place where she was no longer ugly, no longer
alone, and no longer worthless. But a strange thing happened as she
attempted to bring the bottle of pills back to her lips to swallow what
remained. They slipped out of her grasp and the pills scattered around
her. Her eyelids grew so heavy and her head began to swim. She was
forced to lie back on the floor, unable to move, unable to retrieve the pills
from the ground. She wanted to. She wanted all of the pain, the
loneliness, the fear to end. She struggled to lift her arm again to
reach, but her arms felt like they weighed several metric tons.
And the voices
and images in her head that had been leading her to do the one thing she could
never take back, faded away.
Phoenix fell
asleep drugged and drunk…
Satan became
enraged as he watched
Caliel
knock the bottle of
pills out of Phoenix’s hand, as
Uriel
lulled Phoenix
into deep sleep. It was impossible for her to take the pills
now. Satan was enraged and wanted to pummel the angels, but could
not get close because there was a wall of light surrounding them.
“I will get her
somehow!” Satan roared as he disappeared.
Once Satan and
his army were gone,
Uriel
and
Caliel
,
left as well, certain that she, for now was safe.
It was true
that her demons had a small victory for her drunkenness and her severe
depression. But the battle had been won by Lord.
Sure she’d have
a hangover straight from Hell when she woke up the next morning.
But Phoenix
would
wake up the next morning.
Thank God
someone had been praying for her.
Chapter 4
The LORD
is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
(Psalm
34:18)
Almost
twenty-four hours later, the shrill ring of the phone caused Phoenix’s head to
jerk up off the floor. Her left jaw was covered with the pasty veil of
dried drool. Lying next to her on the musty carpet was an empty bottle of
vodka and a pile of pills. Phoenix stared at the mess with a puzzled
frown until the phone rang again, causing her to groan. The pounding in
her head caused the noise to become as shrill as an ambulance siren. She
clutched her ears.
“Stop ringing!”
she hissed at the phone.
She sighed when
the call went to voicemail. She reached over and picked up the bottle,
prepared to take a few sips to clear the cobwebs in her head, but realized the
bottle was empty. Discouraged, she tossed the bottle towards the silver
trashcan that was already overflowing with bottles labeled with her preferred
brands—Smirnoff, Hennessey, Jack Daniel’s, and for those times she was low on
cash, Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Struggling to
stand, she gripped the side of her bed and pulled herself off the floor.
Swaying, she rubbed her temples. Her head felt like a ten-ton
helmet. She shut her eyes and rubbed the stiffness out of her neck.
She staggered
out of her bedroom into the living room. Seeing an unopened bottle of
Svedka
on the dining table, she smiled as she made her way
to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of orange juice.
“I
have
to
have my O.J. in the morning,” she whispered as she limped back to the living
room.
Slumping onto
her soft, leather couch, she groaned as her muscles adjusted to the
cushions. She twisted off the cap and poured a healthy amount of the
vodka into her glass. “I wonder if I should be mixing this stuff with the
Grey Goose I’ve been drinking.” She paused with her glass in midair,
shrugged, then took a gulp. “Oh well, I don’t think mixing two brands of
vodka will be a problem.”
As she sipped,
she thought about how comfortable it felt to be sitting on the cool leather of
her sofa in the early-August heat. It was sweltering in the apartment,
but Phoenix did not have energy to get back up to turn on the air
conditioner. Sighing she laid back. “I should sleep on this from
now on. My fat behind can’t handle another night on the floor.”
Tears rushed to
her eyes as she thought about her new sleeping quarters—a small corner on her
bedroom floor. She couldn’t think about sleeping on her bed after what
Cedric had done on it. Worse, she couldn’t sleep on that bed
alone.
Her mind
drifted back to the spilled
Ambien
pills she had
found, scattered near her place on the floor. She hadn’t taken them since
the previous year, when she’d started developing insomnia. She had only
taken them for a week before deciding to handle her sudden anxiety- induced
insomnia with relaxation exercises and the occasional glass of wine. To
see the pills scattered beside her left her baffled. More than that, she
was afraid to think about what she had planned to do with them in her drunken
haze. She had an unshakable feeling that God had somehow spared her from
something, something that had to do with her being drunk and depressed, and
taking out an old bottle of sleeping pills. As a psychologist, she knew
of so many cases of people that gotten depressed and intoxicated, and while
under the influence, performed some impulsive act that permanently injured them
or even led to their death.
“Did I try
to…oh God. Would I even—?” She gulped down a little more courage as her stomach
tightened.
She sat and
sipped and focused. She needed to remember the details of the previous
night but kept drawing a blank. She shuddered. “I don’t remember
anything. I have no idea. I don’t think I would have, but
God? If You’re listening, sorry about whatever I was going to do.
Thank You for keeping me from doing something I could never take back.”
She stared at
the glass of liquor in her hand, wondering if she should put it away.
Naw
, she wasn’t ready for that. Instead, she got up
and threw out all prescribed and over-the-counter medications in her medicine
cabinet.
Just in
case.
Taking another
gulp of her morning drink, she longed for that fuzzy feeling in her head that
would ease the fear eating away at her gut. “No, I am not ready to give
up my friend, Mr. Vodka yet. And I am going to start sleeping on the
couch, until I can save up enough to get a new bed.”
When she was
done with her drink, she slammed the glass on the coffee table and poured
herself some more vodka. “Yep. I’m going to get me a new bed, then
I can sleep on it again…”
Her heavy
eyelids began to droop as she relished the nap that was slowly overtaking
her. She appreciated her new mid-morning ritual. Vodka, nap, and
takeout. After all, she had not slept well in two weeks, ever since her
fiancé had left. She would sleep for a little while and then—
The phone began
to ring again. “Dag!” Phoenix cursed herself for buying a phone with so
many headsets. “I mean, we lived in a one bedroom apartment. Why
did he have to have so many phones?”
She snatched
the phone from the coffee table and considered letting it go to
voicemail. But then she remembered that it had been two weeks since she’d
last spoken to her family…to anyone, really. A small part of her realized
that it might have been an emergency.
Before she
changed her mind, she hit the TALK button. “Yes, hello?” she barked.
“Fe-
fe
?” Her mother high-pitched Haitian accent filled
the line. “Where have you been? I have been worried sick! I
called you so many times! I came by your place, called your friends, and
called your work. Your boss told me you took a sudden vacation.
Your other boss told me you quit! Why did you quit your second
job? How will we pay for the wedding? Me and your brother came to
your place and could hear music, but you wouldn’t open the door. I knew
you should have given me a copy of your keys. What if something happened
to you? Why are you off from work? Why are you not answering your
phone or door? Why—”
Phoenix grabbed
her head. “Mom! Look I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I am sorry. I
just needed some time to myself.”
“Time to
yourself? What in God’s name are you talking about? And why do you sound
like that? Are you sick? Where’s that man you live with? I
called his phone so many times and he never returned my calls! Did that
man do something to you?”
Phoenix almost
chucked at her mother calling Cedric ‘that man.’” She disliked Cedric ever
since their first meeting and refused to call him by name. Her mother, a
woman of her word, had said that she would never speak his name until he got a
job and married her, instead of being her live-in boyfriend who lived off of
her. She blamed Cedric for causing Phoenix to do the very thing she had
been raised never to do—live with man out of wedlock. In spite of her
displeasure with Cedric, she was thrilled her daughter would finally be
married, having believed Phoenix would never capture the attention of a man as
handsome as Cedric. She had hoped Cedric’s gorgeous mixture of
African-American, Indian-Trinidadian, Chinese, and Caucasian roots would be
passed down to her grandchildren. It was that hope that had fueled her
decision to borrow against her retirement fund to help pay for their wedding.
Taking a
breath, Phoenix blurted, “No,
Maman
, he’s not
here. I asked him to leave.”
Silence.
“Mom?” Phoenix
cringed. She was grateful that the vodka was making this
conversation bearable. “Mom?”
“But you’re supposed
to be getting married! I didn’t like it, but you might as well, after
living with him, and taking care of him, for the past couple of years.
Cedric has taken your youth, and your money, and now you will not give him your
hand in marriage? You kids are backwards, I swear it. Why would you
wait until now to break it off? Now, after I’ve spent so much money,
after members of your family have scheduled vacation time from work and bought
plane tickets to attend this wedding? Why now? I don’t understand
how—”
“Mom!” Phoenix
shouted. Struggling to get her voice in check, she gulped more
vodka. “Look, I am sorry I worried you, but I don’t want to talk about
Cedric. Just know that the wedding is off, alright? That’s all I
want to say right now. As far as talking about it goes? I don’t
want to, okay?”
Her mother
gasped. “Oh!
Listen to the way this girl speaks to her own
mother. Oh yeah, Fe-Fe? After what you’ve put me through, you
will
be talking about it, and I mean today. ‘
Tende
?
(You hear me?) I expect you here in one hour, you get it?” She slammed the
phone down.
“How many times
do I have to tell you, Ma, that the expression is ‘got it?’ not ‘you get
it?’” Phoenix held the phone, staring at it, daring herself to call her
mother back and to remind her that she was not a child and she was
not
coming
over.
But she didn’t.
She may have
been drunk but she wasn’t crazy.
Groaning, she
heaved herself off the couch, stumbled into the bathroom, and turned on the
shower.
And knelt by
the toilet to force some of the alcohol out of her system.
As she did, she
wondered if maybe just once, her mother would help her through her pain.
Chapter 5
Even if my
father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close. (Psalm 27:10)
Exactly forty-two
minutes later, Phoenix was getting out of a livery cab on West 179
th
Street
and Amsterdam Avenue, in front of her mother’s public housing building.
She could have driven the thirty blocks from her apartment, in her car
that she rarely used, but didn’t trust herself with all the alcohol she had
consumed, in spite of her efforts to regurgitate it.
She nodded at
the same old men she had grown up watching, as they spent their summer
Saturdays on old egg crates, playing card games, debating politics, drinking
their small half-pints of
Georgi
Vodka from brown
paper bags, with lit
Kools
dangling from the
lips. “Hey Mr.
Kembro
, Mr. Salas, and Mr.
Rodriguez.”