A Woman Gone Mad (33 page)

Leo and I have a beautiful and romantic lunch together that Valentine’s Day in our spot on the lake. Life is so damn good… My life is perfect.

After our lunch Leo packs up our little mess, I add it as the fourth moment of my life that includes my husband that I will remember until the day I leave this world. Valentine’s Day may have started out perfectly for us today, but the lingering business trip of his keeps stealing my happiness every time I remember that I’ll spend the night alone in our bed.

Then my heart breaks from saying goodbye to him at the airport tonight.

That night I wake up without Leo in bed beside me with contractions crippling me over in pain at around ten thirty. This is bad. I know it immediately. This shit isn’t playing like Bella’s labor did. It hits fast and it hits hard. Before I can even get my ass in the shower, my water breaks and a loop of the umbilical cord comes out with it.

I know thick particulate meconium when I see it. You know what those three words mean? They mean that your baby is fucked, especially with a prolapsed cord. Even more so when you’re in so much pain that all you can do is rock in the fetal position, hoping the constant continuing contraction will ease up only for a second so you can scurry to the phone to call Stacy, Denise, or Teresa.

Then I realize they wouldn’t even be there. It is too late at night. I hang up and do the one thing I swore I’d never do—I call 911. I don’t call for myself or the pain that is gripping me like a steel vice and never truly letting up.

I call for my son. I call to save his life. Because I know in my soul that my baby boy needs help.

Do you have any idea what crosses a woman’s mind when she realizes that her baby is dying inside her? She goes fucking mad… Absolutely insane. And she will do
anything
in order to save her child from its demise, including taking herself out in the process.

I haven’t even laid eyes on my son when the paramedics rush in and restrain me…stopping me and the knife ready to cut my son, Leo’s son, out of me…

I know the cardinal rule, just like every other fucking labor unit RN across the globe. Seven minutes. I am at four minutes when they break both of my wrists to get the knife away from my lower abdomen. I am at thirty-three minutes by the time I am in an observation room and the labor unit nurse can’t find baby Leo’s heart tones on the monitor. I am at forty-two minutes on the OR table when Leo Ethan Phillips, Jr. is both born and pronounced dead…

At forty-three minutes, I mentally and emotionally check the fuck out. That is the last blow. I am fucking done.

L
eo and I bury our son beside his Uncle Allen on a day so cold and dreary that it helps calm the rage I feel inside. Leo and I have yet to speak to one another about what happened the night I delivered baby Leo. We both blame each other and ourselves at the same time. We also built walls of defense around ourselves. Not because we were fighting. Because it is in both of our natures.

We expected each other to lash out and cast blame, so we set up defense mechanisms for it, even though it never came. This self-preservation erected a wall between us. We shut down, rarely speaking unless it was over neutral and easy topics. We didn’t push each other and we never scratched past the surface.

This is our marriage for an entire year after baby Leo is buried. Leo’s business trips have increased but I’m so tired, so exhausted, that I don’t even care. I certainly don’t care enough to investigate it and find out if he’s having an affair.

We still make love, like stark-raving-mad manics. Afterward I can never tell who started it or how it started. We just fly at each, bite, growl, take, consume. It’s aggressive and it’s angry, but when the world is spinning and I’m falling over the edge with Leo, it’s the only time we become what we were before life fucked everything up… Again.

I miss my husband all the time. Even when he’s with me, he isn’t with me. He never plays with my hair, and he hasn’t held me or shown me love and affection since last February. I’m starving for his attention but refuse to let him know how much I need him. He for damn sure doesn’t need me.

I also start drinking heavily again. It helps me numb the pain of my broken soul. I retreat into myself and let the depression pull me into the darkness. I have window specialists brought in to put darkening shutters that slide down with a press of a button. Leo was pissed over it, but I don’t care. I want the sun to just fucking go away.

About a year and a half of this behavior, of me living in a hole, is all Leo can take. He’s at the end of his rope and doesn’t know what to do to help me. He forces me to start counseling. We have marriage counseling on Mondays and Thursdays. I have grief counseling every Tuesday, and I see a psychiatrist every other Wednesday.

After six months of counseling, I still haven’t spoken a single fucking word, not in one session of all these different counseling groups. Leo said all I had to do was go. He never said I had to talk.

They have me on so many different mood stabilizers and antidepressants along with Xanax that I practically sleep twenty-four-seven. I fucking hate it, but not enough to really care or try to change shit. I’m over it.

I’m so fucking over this shitty life.

By 2012, nothing is better. It’s actually a thousand times fucking worse. I’ve had two miscarriages. Leo only knows about one, and that’s because he was at home when it happened. He’s gone even more than he’s home, and our communication has stalled out from easy topics to no topics at all.

I catch him watching me all the time, and I don’t know if he’s trying to glare daggers into me for refusing to go to counseling anymore or if he’s trying to figure out where his wife went, where his Lil went. Quite frankly, I don’t even care enough to ask or give it any thought.

I know when I cross the line and start snorting coke for energy that there is no going back. I know when I buy the first eight ball that it is only a matter time before either the pills, the liquor, or the coke kill me. And that’s if I don’t do it before any or all those things did.

It’s easy to keep all this shit from Leo because he’s never around. And he’s too scared I’ll leave him if he asks too many questions or pries too deeply into my secrets.

Later in the year, I start getting dressed up at nights when Leo isn’t home and hit the town. I do a couple rails of coke, chase it with my man Jack Daniel, put on one of my sexy club dresses with a pair of stilettos, and hit the town.

I dance and party until the sun comes up. Sometimes I make it home; sometimes I don’t. I feel alive when I go out. I love it! But as soon as the harsh reality comes in with the sun, I want to crawl back into my hole. So I swallow a bunch of pills with my bourbon, close all the shutters in the house, and crawl back into my hole. I wake up, rinse, and repeat.

My partying gets harder as time passes, and my sleeping can go on for days at a time before I can pull myself from bed and get some coke in my system to wake me up.

Leo tires of this very quickly. And within a year, he’s moved out and gone from my life once again, just like I knew deep down he always would.

T
his morning started off just like every other fucking shit morning. I can’t even remember where the hell I am.

I look around the swanky hotel suite and do a quick room and body assessment. Alone—check.

Do you want to know what’s really fucked up though? For some stupid reason, I usually wish I weren’t alone the morning after. I’m telling you that, by now, I know that it’s better when I’m NOT left unattended. When I’m alone, that’s when the bad shit happens.

When I’m alone, that’s when the voices start. No, dammit, not schizophrenic voices. They are all my voices. But when Lilith got bored a couple years ago, she brought in some friends. These bitches are driving me even crazier than I already am.

Most of them are harmless and just as tired as I am, and they’ve began begging me to quit. And ever since Lilly left, I don’t have anyone to pull me back from the edge. All I have is Lilith pushing me closer to it, and I know she’s almost pushed me over the edge, but I can’t even fucking make myself care.

I really miss Lilly. She was always there for me and she always let me know that everything was going to be okay. And even if it wasn’t going to be okay, sometimes it’s nice to hear the false reassurance. It helps ease the sting of disappointment.

I remember the moment Lilly died. I remember when she fell silent. I also remember when Lilith first spoke up. It wasn’t after Lilly died either like I thought. As I lie here watching my life pass before my eyes, I realize that Lilith was always there in the background.

Lilith threw out the kid gloves years ago. She also unleashed my insanity at the same time. That suspicion I had about the game she and I were in was also a correct assumption. And she just fucking called checkmate, Ladies and Gentleman.

I do still consider her the most rational one though, and when I do what she says, shit does get better. Not permanently by any means, but hell, at least she’s producing something resembling a fucking solution. I know that if I did have a morning-after visitor right now, my attention would be more easily diverted, making Lilith sit back and quietly wait before starting up again about the perfect answer, the perfect solution to everyone’s problems.

However, I am without a morning-after visitor. So today with Lilith’s checkmate, I am a sitting duck, and I know it. I just don’t care.

When I look into the mirror, what I see staring back at me is not at all helping the last shreds of my survival instincts, my instincts that are screaming at me to ask someone for help.

My hair has gotten so thin. The skin on my face is thinning too. My once bright blue eyes have dulled to a colorless gray and look sunken in with bags underneath. My cheekbones are still high, but now they look sharp and harsh on my gaunt and hollow face. I can’t even see any laugh lines anymore.

My bed is calling me, and as I head to turn off the lights, I notice a few lines from the night before. Shocking that they’ve gone unnoticed until now. Grabbing the straw next to them, I bend over and inhale. Annnnnnd there they go.

The voices start up again. Some are screaming, some are crying, some are bitching at the others, some bitching at me. Lilith remains quiet though. She doesn’t utter a word. I feel her eyes on me; I feel her smirking at me. And why shouldn’t she smirk? She already won and she fucking knows it.

I take my long, stringy blond hair and tie it up quickly in a French twist.
Might as well snort the other lines. Why let them go to waste?
Leaning over the mirror, I grab my handy straw and finish both thick, long white rails.

I pour myself a double in the only clean tumbler I can find and slam it back with a handful of Xanax and Klonopin.

When I look back up into the face of my most hated enemy, the piece-of-shit shell of a person I was supposed to become, what I see isn’t so bad. My last few efforts of optimism quickly die before the thoughts can really even form.

As my body to falls back into bed and I snuggle up under the big down comforter, I hear Lilith’s voice clearly whisper in a cooing tone,
“Today will be a good day, Lillian. You’ll see. We just keep those other bitches quiet. Yes, I know, love. We both know that you used to be sweet and innocent, but then shit happened. LIFE happened. Yes, baby girl. Today is a good day. It’s the day we rectify the shit that happened.”