Sherwinn was a nightmare we lived with every day, and while our momma fought for her life, we fought for our lives, too.
Click, click, click.
What do I blame for my momma’s mistake in bringing Sherwinn into our lives? I blame her brain tumor. It was clearly growing before she even met Sherwinn, and I think it affected her judgment. I blame her entrenched loneliness after my dad died. I blame Sherwinn’s captivating, deceitful personality that swept my momma off her feet. I blame the mysterious grief she carried with her that I never understood, the tears that fell down her face when she played her violin and spoke in French, as if reaching for someone, a hand out in despair.
I could hate my momma for bringing Sherwinn into our lives. I could hate her for being blind to his demented personality and what was happening to us in her own home. But the truth is, he only lived with us for a few months. When she found out what they did, she killed all three of them.
Even so, could I hate my momma for bringing total emotional devastation to Annie and me?
I could.
But I didn’t. Why? Because I loved her so very, very much.
Marie Elise Laurent was the best momma on the planet.
19
We live in a freewheeling, free-dealing country. We are rabid about our rights.
I get it.
I am a born and bred American. I love America, and I love my rights.
But I take issue on our “rights” to pornography. People say others have the right to view whatever they want in the privacy of their own homes, on their computers, in their mailbox, and so on.
Okay. I hear that.
But aside from the fact that pornography corrodes minds, fills them with human depravity and filthy sexual images, intrudes on marriages and relationships, causes pornographic addictions to disgusting and demeaning images of women, and promotes violence, we have to think about the people whose photos are being shot.
Now, I am not overly concerned about the American porn star who is an adult and making millions every year. I don’t like what she’s doing, I don’t like her choice for her own mental health and safety, and I don’t like the result and how many millions of men and women will be panting and slobbering while watching her videos. I don’t like that she’s choosing to be a catalyst for millions of men to mentally and physically jack off. I don’t like that she’s doing something that addicts millions of men and boys, and some women, to porn, and how that twists their minds into morasses of tarry, moral-less messes.
Argue all you want, but you’re watching someone else naked, having sex, or doing something atrocious and your mind is getting all hyped up about it. It’s disgusting.
However. The porn star making millions in America who retires to the country to run a horse farm is not the norm. The norm is millions of young people, mostly very young girls, many, if not most, underage, being forced into this hellacious business. Think that naked woman in the video having something disgusting done to her appears young?
She is.
She’s probably some poor Eastern European fourteen-year-old girl who has been whipped off the streets and forced into this sickness.
Think the long-haired Asian woman who’s on top of that hairy white man has the body of a child?
That’s because she is a child. She was taken from her parents and told she was going to work as a maid in someone’s house in a city in China. She is not working as a maid. She is working as a sex slave.
Think that boy in that homosexual position looks like he’s about five? He is. He is five. He should be in kindergarten painting a picture of a spider with furry feet.
See that blond girl? She’s American. She’s from California. That man with her? That is her father and you are watching that girl getting raped while her father films it. Over and over.
I wonder if rancid people who view porn ever take the time to stare into the “actors’” eyes? Do they? Probably not. It’s not what they’re looking for, and they don’t want to know the harsh truth of what their vomitous addiction is doing to someone else.
They are repulsive people. Do not try to tell me they are not. They are repulsive.
Pornography is a scourge on this planet. It is a soul-stripping business that profits, mainly, off helpless, powerless, scared-to-death young people who are forced to do things that most of us wouldn’t even do in our bedroom. They are imprisoned and they literally can’t leave or they will be shot, attacked, or beaten till their faces are smeared into glue.
They are children. They are kids. They should be out kicking a ball, buying lip gloss, or swimming in the city pool. If they are no longer technically children, they are in their twenties, probably being forced into it, maybe under threat of losing their lives, and have drug and alcohol problems that make them unable to function, and think, like a normal person.
Folks, there is nothing redeeming about pornography. Nothing . If I could take it away forever, I would.
And it is my fervent hope that when the men—and it’s mostly men—who promote and watch this trash die, and hopefully it will be a bone-crushing, painful death, and they look God in the face and are asked to explain to God why they forced His innocent, sweet children into that squalid pit, that they finally realize the destruction they have wreaked.
I would not want to be them. I would not want to look God in the eye and tell Him I promoted porn. I can only hope that when these sickening monsters are tossed down to hell that Satan himself has a bonfire crackling and steel rods ready.
Welcome to hell, he’ll cackle, and they’ll catch on fire and burn. But they won’t die. They’ll live to burn again. Every day. For eternity.
To pay them back for the burning they did here on Earth.
I wish my rage would go away.
I also wish I could breathe like a normal member of the human species.
That night I made chicken burritos with mango salsa and avocado strips for Grandma, Granddad, Nola, and Annie.
Afterward I helped get Grandma to her bedroom. Annie and I left when Granddad tucked Grandma into bed, spending extra time smoothing lavender lotion into her hands. Right before we shut the door we heard her say, “Anton! You send me to the heavens!”
And our granddad, such a gentleman, said sweetly, “And you do the same for me, my love.”
“I like heaven!” she piped up. “Right between my legs!”
On Thursday night, as I lay in my bed surrounded by purple pillows, the closet obsessively neat so I could see straight through to the wall, I heard Grandma open the door to my room and run on tiptoe to my bed. She said, in French and English, with only three words in German, “I will save your daughter for you. I will raise her as my own. We will walk over the mountains. We will escape.” She kissed me on the forehead. “Good-bye, my sister.”
The last three words, she said in German, “Good-bye, my sister.”
I leaned my head back. Good-bye, my sister? I will save your daughter? We will walk over the mountains? What in hell was Grandma talking about? I was so tired of their secrets.
“Anton has the papers, and we are leaving. I don’t know how I can live without you, sister. My heart is breaking. I can’t live without you. How do I do this? How?” She burst into tears, her shoulders shaking.
“It’s okay, Grandma, it’s me. Madeline.” I sat up and wrapped my arms around her.
“I will take your violin for Anna. There is a scratch in the back. It happened when we ran from the black ghosts, away from the stars on the backs of ostriches. Only a skinny scratch, made by, perhaps, a tiny gopher wearing an apron. The notes are still good.”
The door opened and Granddad came in. “Hello, Madeline,” he said, his voice soft, understanding, the voice that had steadied me my whole life.
“Hi, Granddad,” I said.
She turned to him. “I can’t leave Madeline, I can’t leave Ismael. I can’t leave them. I won’t—”
“They are with God now, Emmanuelle.” My granddad’s voice split, pain ra
cking every word. He sat down next to her on my bed and linked an arm around her tiny shoulders.
“I want to check, I want to make sure. The doctor said he’s dying, but I want to check. . . .”
“He’s dead.” My granddad’s voice choked. “Come with me, come with me, Emmanuelle, back to bed.”
“They are dead, and we go, we live. It is not fair. Why us? Why do we live? For my sister, she is more deserving.”
“No,” he said. “It is not fair. I don’t want to go, but we must save ourselves. We must save Anna. Come. Let’s go and sit near the lavender plants.”
My grandma stilled. “The lavender is ready? It is purple and white and there are magic marbles in between the plants next to the tiny swans?”
“Yes, the lavender is ready and there are marbles already there. The swans flew in.”
“The miniature swans with yellow magic beaks? All right.” She wiped the tears off her face. “If you’re sure. I feel Ismael, still. I hear him, I see him, I know he’s here.” She tapped her heart. “How can he be gone?”
“He is gone.” My granddad bent his head and kissed my grandma on the forehead. “But you and I will see Madeline and Ismael and Anna again.”
“When?” She turned her tear streaked face to his, her hands on his chest. “I want to see them.”
“Soon, I feel, very soon, my love. We will see them again.”
“I want to see them! Let’s go to the lavender. But call me Dynah.”
What? Call me Dynah?
“I’ll do that,” Granddad croaked out.
“And I’ll call you by your real name, Abe.” She stroked his jaw. “Abe. My love, Abe.”
What? I’ll call you Abe?
He nodded. “I think it’s time.”
“Yes, it’s time.”
Grandma reached around and patted my granddad on the bottom, her mood changing lightning quick. She smiled coquettishly at him, then winked.
They had spoken in French, then switched to German halfway through their conversation.
I caught my granddad’s eye and this time, I saw it. I saw his exhaustion, his resignation, his understanding that this could not go on any longer.
He would tell me.
He would tell me soon.
He was done with his secret.
“I can’t believe it, but she bombed us with her persistence this morning.” Georgie stuck a silver butterfly clip in her hair. The wings bounced. She had sprayed the ends of her platinum hair red. She was wearing a red dress and red boots today.
“Who?” But I knew who.
“Marlene, that reporter.”
“You’re kidding.” Marlene was the type of person with tunnel ambition. Nothing mattered except that ambition, that story, her byline. Nothing. And if someone had to get trampled in her quest for her raging ambition, too bad.
“I told that female warlock that her spirit needed to be realigned so she didn’t hurt people, bother people, get in the way of the flow of their own life chart.”
I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t know what a life chart was. I would ask later.
“And I told her that she was not only harassing you, but she was harassing me, too, because I kept having to rouse myself to deal with someone who was breaking the rhythm of my body functions, which was causing gas.”
“Okeydoke. Gas. How did she respond?”
“She said in that quiet voice of hers, ‘Does Madeline know that if she participates in the article, she can control this somewhat ? She can give her input, address the issues, the past?’”
“And I said, ‘Madeline is the smartest woman I know. She knows all of that and she has chosen to disregard your efforts to intrude upon her life and now I am withdrawing my blessing.’ That’s what I told her.”
“You withdrew your blessing?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Good. And you hung up?”
“No, because she got in some questions lickety-split quick.” I listened intently as Georgie told me what Marlene had asked, all questions having to do with my and Annie’s nightmares, a hole like molten steel singeing my stomach.
“Did you hang up after that, Georgie?”
“I did, but first I told her to screw herself with a pencil.”
“Ah. Lovely. What did she say?”
“She said she would prefer not to do that.”
“And you said?”
“‘Good-bye. You have no blessings and now your day will be cursed.’”
Later that evening, my mind spinning, I stared west out the windows.
What should we expect out of life? What is reasonable?
What is right? What is selfish? What is outlandish? When we have a dream for our lives and it crashes and incinerates, is it worth the disappointment?
Should we embrace tragedy as we do gifts?
How?
How would that look for me? How would I embrace what happened to Annie and me?
What good came out of it? Not much that I can see, although I wish something would.
And, if there was good out of it—that I can relate to people’s tragedies better because I’ve lived it, that I understand their tears and grief, their fears and terrors, that I have risen above that abuse and built a life—are those skills good enough to obliterate the bad? The long-term damage it did to us? The death of my momma?
No.
I would rather not have gone through what Annie and I and our family did.
I would be a different person, that is true. I would not be riddled with jagged nerves and breath that gets wrapped around my organs and bones and stuck before it can fill my lungs. But I had moved forward, in many ways.
When we move forward through the muck, isn’t that, right there, a huge accomplishment?
I watched the sun set, the sky growing pink, yellow, orange, then blue, darker blue.
Today was leaving, tomorrow would come.
I wondered if I had the courage, the guts, to make my tomorrow different from today, or if I would simply plow through it as I have forever done.
Should I plow through?
When would I be done plowing? Would it ever end?
When do I start living without the plow?
20
On a Monday, after a snowy weekend, Annie passed out at school. The teacher flipped, and then moved quickly into hysteria, because when she shook Annie, Annie didn’t move. Other teachers raced in, followed by the principal and the paramedics.
I was out at recess. That day, instead of clinging to the wall in shame, I was playing wall ball under the covered area. My friend, Joyce Brown, sprinted over to me, her pigtails flying, and said, “Madeline, run! It’s Annie! She’s going away in the ambulance !”
My feet flew as I ran with Joyce and two other friends. When I reached her, I saw Annie on a stretcher with an oxygen mask and started screaming. I grabbed the stretcher and wouldn’t let go.
“Madeline,” the principal, Mrs. Jett, insisted, her hair falling out of her bun, “stay here with me, honey, stay here.”
“No,” I screamed. “No!” I jumped on the stretcher and held her tight, pushing hands away, until they gave up and put both of us into the ambulance. “Annie! Annie!”
The siren wailed into the morning, down the street in town, even reaching Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor where Momma received a call that one of her beloved girls had passed out and the other beloved girl was emotionally disintegrating.
Momma dropped the dye she was using to color Mrs. Ellerton’s hair and, with her black apron on, she and Carman flew out of the beauty parlor and into the disastrous, harsh truth of Momma’s life and the demon-plagued lives of her children.
About an hour after arriving at the hospital, I pretended I was asleep in the bed next to Annie’s so I could hear everything the doctors were telling my momma, Carman, Trudy Jo, and Shell Dee. Sheriff Ellery was there, along with two of his deputies and nurses. Annie was still woozy, not all together.
Momma sunk into a chair after hugging a
nd kissing Annie and me, too dizzy with shock to stand anymore.
I could tell by the doctor’s tone, a man who had been fishing with my dad many times, that he was gravely troubled, but he was taking things slow, one thing at a time. “Annie and Madeline are way too thin,” Dr. Hayes said. “Have you seen them without clothes on recently?”
“No, no, I haven’t—” Our momma wrung her hands. “I thought they were . . . I thought they weren’t eating as much because of my illness, because they were upset. They cry, they hug me all the time. But I’ve tried to get them to eat, I’ve tried, dear Lord, I have tried.”
She had tried. She made us breakfast every morning. Pancakes cut into the shapes of dogs and cats. Oatmeal with brown sugar. Scrambled eggs she arranged into a smile. We couldn’t eat. Hard to eat when the man who stuck a pencil in your bottom, chalk in your mouth, and a ruler in your hand for a naked “Back To School” porno shoot was sitting across the table smirking at you.
“Do they eat lunch?”
Yes, some. Whatever we could choke down, plus a lollipop for the walk home. “For energy,” Momma had told us, squeezing our cheeks.
“They’re at school. I can’t watch them eat there, but I do pack them a good lunch.”
Her lunches were delicious. The envy of all. Whenever I opened my lunch sack, I tasted my momma’s love.
“I don’t understand . . . I don’t understand . . .” Our momma’s makeup was smeared down her face, her hair a mess. Carman tried to smooth it. Shell Dee handed her another tissue.
“Marie Elise,” Dr. Hayes said, “after giving Annie an IV for fluids, we did a full exam.”
I did not miss the harsh tone of the doctor’s voice.
“Yes, what’s wrong? What is it?”
From my bed, I saw my momma’s face crumple.
“First I need to ask, where did the bruises and burns come from?”