The story now takes a turn becoming more of a challenge. 

I include a warning at the close of this post.

My seventy-one-year-old current self steps back allowing this story to be written.

The nineteen-year-old self has waited for a very long time to tell of her experience. 

 

I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a
higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is dark.

I am unable to see.

I drift.

I lay in a state of unconsciousness.

There is no memory of coming back. I have no memory of becoming aware of the room. I have no memory of getting up from the bed. I don’t remember stepping into the shower. I don’t remember dressing or speaking or being spoken to. I do not recall a meal.

I am wheeled out of the hospital and slowly, carefully, I settle myself into the back seat.

I give the driver the address.

I am driven back across town. Twenty miles. I am returned to the small house on the side street where I lived for eight years with the family. The small house on Lincoln Avenue three miles up the main road from the young widow’s bungalow.

Mom bought the house on Lincoln to save us from a world of danger. She knew shortly after marrying dad that he would stay forever in the ethnic inner-city neighborhood where he was born. He had only been away two years while serving in the Navy; South Pacific during WWII. She soon realized that she had made the wrong decision. Marrying him so quickly after his return, brother of her good friend in nursing school, she knew she was not where she had planned to be. She knew that she was not where she belonged. She talked to her mother. She asked her for help. Mom told me the story time and again over the years. Grandma said, “I’m sorry you’re unhappy. You made your bed. Now you have to lie in it.”

Life lesson: handle it.

Mom handled things.

Mom handled everything. She took control. She had lost control when at age six she had been sent away to a ‘fresh-air camp’ with other children who she said, “needed to be fattened up”. Her stories of that experience made it clear that she was taken away from her family and placed into a facility where she was at the mercy of others. Everything was regimented from bed-making; a quarter had to bounce in the center of the bed if it was made correctly,  to meals; you ate what was put on your plate no matter how long you stared at it. She was “picked up by the hair”, she was forced to follow rules. She was taken away from her three sisters and her mom and dad.  When she spoke of these times, I could tell she was incredibly sad.

Mom wanted desperately to keep all five of us safe. She would give her life to keep us out of harm’s way. She found a way to hide me.

She loves me. She loves the five of us more than her happiness.

In the taxi, I take out the envelope and look at the tiny ballpoint pen portrait. The infant is going to his new life. I wish him well. I remind him of my promise. I unfold the adoption papers and read the non-disclosure agreement which I have signed with Catholic Charities. I notice that the hospital bill is enclosed. I look at the invoice. Six hundred dollars. It cost six hundred dollars to have the baby delivered. The word PAID is stamped in red over $600.00 amount due.

It’s Monday afternoon. I gave birth on Saturday, the day Robert Kennedy was buried in Arlington, at night.

I feel like I am made of liquid. My breasts carry their heavy load, my empty belly ripples. I might make a sloshy sound when I move. I might break like a full water balloon forming an instant puddle when I stand. I might seep into the grass alarming the worms as they quickly make their way up to the surface. I might disappear without a trace.

The driver pulls into the short asphalt driveway and looks over his shoulder. He tells me what I owe. I have no money. He walks around to open the door. I act normal. I act as if everything is fine. I tell him that I will get the fare. I will be right back.

I turn to see Lori running toward me. Lori is a 16-year-old sunbeam. She is a bright beam, a towheaded delight. I feel the uplift, not hearing what she is yelling.

Then her actual words reach my ears.

“Donna!

Donna!

Guess who’s dead?!”

Stay upright.

Keep steady. Act normal.

She is excited.

This is an important announcement.

“Who?” I ask.

Such exuberance, such enthusiasm.

 Keep standing.

“Kenny!

Kenny!

They found him dead in his apartment!

He was there for three days! All alone!”

Dark cloud. Flash Flood.

Do not react.

Keep moving.

I carry my suitcase and continue up the driveway to the lean-to porch.

Act normal.

Act as if everything is fine.

I hear the familiar radio voice before I get through the back-porch screen door. Mom stares out the windows over her double bowl stainless steel sink. She has been able to watch and hear Lori as she runs to meet me. She does not move. Karl Haas, in the corner under the cabinets, hosting Adventures in Good Music classical music review. Mom’s ever-present backdrop: WCLV-FM.

I announce, “Hi! I’m Home!” giving my best impersonation of a return from my promotion; six months working in Chicago at the ad agency.

Slowly mom turns and smiles. Lori gets the money and dashes out to pay the driver. Hurrying back, she wants to tell me more details about the drama. I suggest that she let me unpack and get settled. I move through the kitchen doorway into the dining room thinking to head upstairs to my attic room. Mom says, “Wait a minute, come with me.” She walks out to the driveway. She nods toward the house next door, close enough that I can reach out over the thin strip of grass and touch the white aluminum siding.

Like the neighborhood where the young widow lives, the houses here are small and close together. Most are two-story bungalows like the widows.

Mom bought the house with three floors to fit seven of us. Seeing the house now it seems smaller than ever sitting on its foundation of twenty feet by twenty feet.

Linda and I have always shared the tiny sloped-ceiling attic space; dad put up a dividing wall of peg-board down the center, giving each of us a room of our own. It’s necessary to walk through mom and dad’s bedroom to reach the stairs. When I moved to the apartment Debi moved up and took my attic space. Lori and Robert each have a small room of their own across the narrow hall from mom and dad.

Mom tells me that the neighbors, “You remember A & J, the older couple, so nice. They’ve invited you to come and stay with them. You have a room in their upstairs.”  

Act normal.

I am not invited back.

My bed is made. Next door.

Mom wants to continue making dinner. She suggests that I head over to see Mr. and Mrs. She says, “Go on over so they can get you settled in your new room. I’ll call you for dinner. It’s Monday, we’re having meatloaf.” From the unbelieving way I look at her, she decides to walk ahead of me up the two concrete front steps. She sticks her nose into the small front hallway. An extreme stench pushes past her and hits me hard. Do not throw up. Mom calls out, “Here she is!” She quickly turns back toward her kitchen.

Mr. and Mrs. are waiting. Grinning they simultaneously pull their hands back from the large ceramic ashtray and rise from the small breakfast table in the alcove off the kitchen. A stogie forms a cloud around Mr. J’s face. He bites down hard on the dark shiny tightly rolled leaves which makes his mouth appear to smile in a sinister way. He is a big man, balding, burley, stubble-chinned. He wears a sleeveless white t-shirt, green work pants, and slippers with white socks. Puff. Puff. He sneer/stares at me.

Mrs. A appears genuinely happy to see me. She is tall and thin, shoulder-length brown hair streaked with grey pulled back into a ponytail. I have long been curious about her; so soft-spoken, exotic and scarred. Scars on her face and the back of both hands, circular. Burns. She is barefoot wearing black pedal-pushers and a cotton peasant blouse with embroidery circling the neck, braided ties, short puffy sleeves. I can see scars on her legs and on each arm. She is holding a Pall Mall between her nicotine-stained fingers, softly, in her constant whisper, she says, “Oh Donna, you will have the whole upstairs to yourself.”

She walks across the carpet to the door leading to the second floor. At the top of the landing, there is a window looking down on the driveway where the black Cadillac is parked. I glance at the next house over, its window like a mirror staring back. I enter the bright white space, a twin bed covered in a new flowered bedspread is underneath the window that stares across the driveway to where my family lives.

Mrs. A shows me the dresser, the closet, the easel that she set up for me near the front dormer window. She places the cigarette between her teeth and demonstrates the wing nut that can be turned to adjust the angle of the wooden easel. She shows me a large drawing board that Mr. J found in the garage. A large sketch pad. Pencils.

She bows and says, “I’ll leave you to get settled, I know that Dotty will be calling you for dinner soon.”

I lie down and stare across the short distance where my family lives. From here I am looking directly at the window on the landing leading into my old bedroom.

At my first family dinner in six months dad asks over his plate of meatloaf, “What are you doing here?”

I am not able to piece together the days that follow. I have no idea how I spend the unfolding weeks. I am disappeared.

In the weeks since I have been back ‘from Chicago,’ there has been much silence. No one has been interested in where I have been. No one has asked a question. There have been no comments. Naturally, my four siblings have a lot going on.

Lori corners me to finish telling me that Kenny was found dead from a drug and alcohol overdose. There had been a party in his apartment. I had no idea that he had moved away from the violence of his parent’s home. After the party, everyone gone, he suffers coronary arrest.

All alone.

It breaks my heart.

All alone.

No one there to notice that something is very wrong for him. No one to ask, ‘Is there something I can do?’ No way for him to call for help.

Days later a friend stops by. He knocks and knocks and knocks and when there is no answer he gets the superintendent to unlock the door. K could not answer his door. The police, and later the coroner determine, that he had laid dead for three days.

Alone.

On a Sunday afternoon, some weeks later, I walk into the kitchen. Mom is making Sunday dinner, roasted chicken and plank cut potatoes.  I ask her if I can please, please borrow her car for a few hours. I want to visit my friends, Patti and Sandy.

Silence.

She does not acknowledge me.

She keeps her back to me.

 

 

WARNING… 

Dear Reader, I appreciate your eyes, your hearts, and your comments both here and those received via email. I am now issuing a warning. I am not attempting to be dramatic. I am asking you to take good care and tend to yourself.

The story becomes…

Please consider whether you choose to open the next post. Up ahead lies deep trauma. I will post a reminder at the beginning of the next installment.

We continue moving toward three gifts.