Brave

I have never been a brave person and made a habit of masking my cowardice with smart ass humor and forced witty banter to make sure I fooled each and every person into believing I was brave.

The moment I met him I felt a swirling deep in my belly, I was moved by his very presence, spurred to action and suddenly I felt brave. I saw him through a gaggle of people, teenagers like me, all hanging out, watching some boys skateboard, passing around Camel cigarettes and giant Big Gulps of pop from the nearby convenient store. I asked my friends what his name was, where he was from and nobody really knew for sure. He was the new guy. Finally a bemused boy named Mikey did know, he told me this new guy’s name and it was unique. I stared at him from across the group and without my brain telling my feet to move I glided towards him with an almost surreal and unexpected buoyancy.

“Hello! I’ve never seen you here before.” The reddening in my cheeks had created a throbbing in my ears and I remembered my Grandmother telling me never to ask a boy out, to always let him come to me.

“’Cause I’ve never been here before probably.” He looked at me confused for a moment and I had a real chance to etch his face into my memory. A goofy, easy grin, chipped front tooth, large pronounced nose, thick black eyebrows, pale skin with a sheen of health from the sun. And most importantly green, green eyes with thick glossy eyelashes. Looking down and not knowing what else to say to the gawking amazed me, he skated off and left me standing there embarrassed and out of sorts. I could hear my girlfriends laughing behind me. I turned to meet Mikey’s huge smile, ready to tear me apart with merciless teasing.

After this and despite everything that was me, the young awkwardly uncomfortable me who never let anyone see my true nature, I started to relentlessly pursue this new guy. This boy with the deep set green eyes and the dark, dark curly hair that threatened to turn into dreadlocks even with constant washing. My friends thought I was insane.

Within a few days he was my boyfriend and picked me up in his dad’s old creamy colored Ford Fairmont, groped me underneath my oh so stylish overalls in my parents’ basement and told me he loved me over and over again with his smoky breath and careful, nervous words.

I went to Europe and he had his first bingeing experience. He had drank just like all our older friends did and smoked pot and all of the other things that I had just taken for granted were rites of passage for him. But after he came to the airport to say goodbye to me and hug and kiss me in front of my embarrassed parents he went straight to the city he grew up in and drank himself into a stupor, used drugs and God only knows what else. He certainly didn’t remember.

He parents put him in rehab and while I was touring the Continent they fielded my phone calls and wouldn’t let me speak to him, not telling me what had happened to him. When I returned he wasn’t at the airport, wasn’t reachable, was gone.

I got a postcard from him sent from San Diego two months later.

“Baby,

I am sorry. I have a disease and I will only ruin everything. I love you and maybe someday after I work on my addiction we can be together. If you can forgive me.”

Disease? Addiction? I was confused, worried and most of all pissed as hell. I spent the next two years trying to and finally succeeding in wiping him out of my brain…except for the pulling bit in my tiny girl tummy that remembered how very brave he made me feel.

No one made me feel like that again but when I was in college I met a man who was quite a bit older than me, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t do much of anything except spend money on me, dote on me.

I married him, finished my degree and had three daughters with him. I was nursing and/or pregnant for 7 years straight. I wasn’t happy really, but I joyed in the existence of my daughters and filled my unhappiness with loving them.

When my youngest daughter was finally weaned I began teaching classes at a college an hour away from my home but in the city that my new guy grew up in. I felt like I could run into him at any moment and even though I had no idea where or how he was I wished I could see him with every fiber of my being.

Just like Sylvia Plath had conjured her husband’s lover I made him come into existence as it were and like an apparition, a beautiful timeless ghoul there he was in front of me outside of a college classroom, guitar case over his shoulder, staring at me. His head cocked to one side and his mouth hung slack in a mirror image of what my face must have shown to him.

We stood there and just stared at each other for a long time. Finally he said the words that I regret he ever said, words that have no end and no beginning and which started my strange and sometimes dark journey forward with him from that day on.

“Baby, oh my god you’re like an angel.”

I went home with him minutes later and we made love all night long while I was a villain to my husband and my children and I didn’t care one tiny little bit. He held me in his arms like I was his only succor in this world and I held him like I was a new person, a brave person.

The next day I moved my children out of my beautiful house and although I had asked my husband for a divorce on and off for months before all of this it still was a horrible surprise. I put everyone through hell and back and hell again just to be with this man.

I promised to be with him for the rest of my days on this earth, with this one caveat: that he was utterly and completely devoted to his sobriety.

That lasted six months. When I was five months pregnant with our son he went out one night to get milk and never came home. He had run into an acquaintance at the store and went with him to get a beer and God knows what else. I was beside myself, unsure of what to do, scared and alone. My daughters were at their dad’s house and I sat in our home by myself all night long, calling his cell phone, crying and hoping he would walk in the door. I fell asleep on the settee beside the door in the front foyer and was awakened by him stumbling in at 5 AM, an apologetic man with him who I had never seen before or since.

“I found him outside my apartment building and woke him up enough to get him to tell me where he lives. I have been in this spot before, I didn’t want to call the police.” This stranger was ashamed for me and for himself and for my blithering and clueless boyfriend who had crumpled into a heap feet away from the front door and was dead to the world.

Instead of kicking him out or demanding answers I nursed him out of his stupor which took him two days to recover from. The only demand I made upon him was that he get help and promise never to do this to me again. I had given up my life for him and was carrying our son. He had to see the right in this; he had to do what was best for us.

And he did…for another year.

A five month old baby boy was in our house now, along with my daughters four days a week. Our son was healthy, incredibly large and indubitably in charge of my every second. I adored him, his father, my daughters and I felt happier than I ever had in my life. I shut all of the bad noise of the past out and carried on towards our wonderful future. Until he came home with a case of beer.

My dad was a drinker and I had grown up with beer around the house so I wasn’t all that alarmed. This wasn’t bingeing at a bar with whores and frat boys, this was having a few brews before bed, half drunk sex, sleeping in with a slight headache, our baby boy between us slumbering. It wasn’t so bad. I didn’t see the wrong when there was so much right.

Then the cases of beer began to disappear faster and faster and while I was in bed I would hear the crunching of cans, crunch, crunch, crunch, annunciated only by the louder click of an opening beer can. And then (how naïve I had been) he started to go into work late, calling off of work, not showing up to work, his work cell ringing and ringing and my lovely beautiful man sleeping off 15 beers didn’t care one bit.

Anger followed, he was pissed off about everything, anything I did. Even our tiny son couldn’t do right by him at times. The world went in a dizzying circle like a sipping top around me and I couldn’t quite reach my finger out to make it stop because I knew if I did that top would come clattering down, echoing failure, bitterness and resent.

It ended with another binge and another black out. This time came at my cousin’s wedding when he wandered away from the festivities into the 300 acre grape field and never came back. My brothers had to search for him the next morning, found him slumbering against a tree.

Sobriety followed and this became the trend of our life cycle together. Nine months to one year of sublime happiness, one to two months of threatening horrible want to go get drunk right now behavior, one month of drinking, one horrible night of blacked out mystery.

Last year he left our home at 1:00 PM to skate with friends and never came home. I called, texted, called, had someone come watch our son so I could go out to the local bars looking for him, lost the nerve before I even walked into the first one. I went home and cried myself to sleep once again, blubbering, “How many times can my heart break?” over and over again.

This time I awoke in the early morning to the shower running. His clothes were strewn all over the house; he was sitting in the running shower blood dripping from his hands and forearms. I found his cell phone in the front yard blowing up with vibration, all texts from a stranger he screwed in the back of her car after spending the evening at a bar with her. The texts were graphic; she even made fun of me in them.

“Hope you’re not in too much trouble with your wife. J”

“You said this wasn’t going to be a one night stand!”

“I should have known this was going to happen when you passed out going down on me.”

“I made you cum three times, you said I was amazing.”

And much, much more.

We had made love that morning before he left to skate, before he left to binge, black out, have sex with a stranger and break my heart into a hundred billion pieces. I vomited in our front yard while reading these texts.

I vomited while calling my brother to collect my son from the house.

I vomited while confronting my partner in the bathroom.

I vomited while he cracked open a beer and told me he didn’t remember anything from the night before.

I put all of his personal things in two black bags and called his friend who lived an hour away to come pick him up or I was calling the police. I sat on the floor inside the front door with my back up against it and he sat on the front porch in a stupor, drinking and smoking. He began talking to me through the door; telling me I was whiny and tiresome, that he hated me, that he wished I was dead. I could barely understand him because his words were so slurred. When his friend came I refused to open the door and vomited again when I heard him say, “The bitch just kicked me out for no reason!” My lovely man whose mother had raised him and his brothers alone and who he adored, this man who I’d never heard call anyone a bitch before had just called me a bitch, oblivious of his actions.

I ran out the door and handed his friend the cell phone and told him to look through the texts so he could show my partner what he had done when he came out of his black out. His friend flipped through smiling, thinking this trivial until he started reading the texts and his face turned angry. “This is fucking unbelievable!” He looked in the car, looked back at me, face scrunched and pissed off.

“Don’t let him come back here, please.” I sighed and I don’t remember the rest of that day. I woke up in my bed in what I’m guessing was the morning, went into the bathroom, remembered what happened and sobbed until I was sick again. I got back into my bed and stayed there.

Two days later I attempted to come out of the quasi vegetable state I was in. My parents tried to get me to eat but the nausea was too overwhelming. His parents tried to get me to go to Al-Anon meetings with them but I was too weak to move. Despite the love and joy I had in my life without him I wanted to die, like the coward that I am.

And then another day passed and he called me.

“Oh Baby, I’m so sorry. I did not mean to do that to you. I love you, I want to come home.”

And I felt brave again.