As I Breathe (One Breath at a Time: Book 2) (3 page)

She narrowed her stare into my eyes. “You hear a voice of a man—men?” she asked, choking on her words, clearing her throat. She seemed even more concerned than she had minutes before when first discovering that I heard voices.

“Yep, lots of them,” I expressed loudly. “Great! This means I’m a man down inside.” I gasped, simultaneously rolling my eyes and frowning due to this new revelation.

As much as I should’ve been interested in my mother’s views on the voices that kept me company, I found myself distracted and wanted to move on from the conversation. I certainly didn’t want to think about being a man on the inside. I began jumping around. At the time, this topic was far too daunting for a small child.

My mother furrowed her perfectly manicured brows together and knelt down beside me.

She was extremely beautiful—a natural strawberry blonde with pale skin. Her features were comparable to that of a princess. To me, my mother was the fairest of them all, even more so than the princesses who existed on the pages of my childhood books. My mother’s lips curled upward at the corners of her mouth and looked almost like the tips of a rose petal when she spoke. Her big blue eyes tilted upward and sparkled. But that day they were narrow and squinted at the corners.

“You’re not a man on the inside,” she said, sharpening her stare. Her voice raised several octaves and took on a tone that was sterner than what I was accustomed to.

I tightened my lips, perplexed that she didn’t understand me. “Well, there are lots of them in me. And they’re funny. There’s men in me...there’s men in me,” I sang and marched around in a circle.

Frustration mingled with a little smirk on my mother’s face as if she was holding back laughter. “Brielle, stop this nonsense! There’s no one inside of you. It’s make-believe. You will understand when you are older.” The sharp intonation of her voice contradicted the fragility of her thin frame, which itself was misleading when it came to her emotional strength.

When I reached an age of understanding, I felt my mother would have made an exceptional motivational speaker because her voice was so powerful when she wanted it to be. But my mother had other plans. It was once her dream to be a prosecuting attorney. Personally, I had my doubts that she could’ve handled prosecuting someone as a career. It was so against her nature.

My mother was never rude nor did she speak indignantly to others. Prosecuting attorneys have to be brutal, and my mother didn’t have a mean bone in her body.

The way I have always seen it, her gift was accepting people for who they were and having great patience. And she didn’t push her beliefs on anyone. I’ve always admired this about her.

Don’t get me wrong. She wasn’t a pushover, and still isn’t. Either way, I could never imagine her witnessing an execution, even if it was of a monstrous murderer. Being responsible for such an event, and knowing a human being had died by sending a wicked bolt of electricity through cold-blooded veins to stop the beating of the blackest organ that passed for a heart would’ve eaten her soul away. No matter the crime, my mother wouldn’t have been capable of ending the life of another.

***

“I think it was 1995 when the state of New York tried to reinstate the death penalty; I was pretty young then,” I said to Doctor Tagorksi.

Dr. Tagorski interjected, “Wait, Brielle, did you say 1995?”

“Yes I did,” I replied in a jovial tone. The drug he had given me had me feeling like I was on cloud nine.

He didn’t breathe a word, appraising me subjectively. It was the worst kind of feeling. In the thick of the silence he jotted down a few notes, flashing at me every so often. Still his expression remained unreadable.

I waited for what felt as if it were longer than a minute without saying a thing. That sense of disquieted concern came rushing back.

“
Is there something wrong?” I asked, passing my eyes over my arms and hands, concerned that I was turning blue or having a bad reaction to the drugs, or something worse, that I couldn’t see from my perspective. A rush of heat swept through my body.

“
I don’t think so.” His expression was meditative.

“
I thought I’d said something wrong.”

“
No, just interesting, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from what I’ve learned of you this far.” Doctor Tagorski looked at me curiously.

“
I’m not sure how to respond to that one.” I sighed heavily. “I suppose someone telling you they used to hear voices would raise a brow or two.”

“
My brows are stable, Miss Eden.” And they were.

I wondered if he thought that I was a complete nut job—I had never so much as talked to anyone outside of my family about the voices, until then.

Just wait doc, it gets better!

“
Please continue,” he requested.

I intently eyed the doctor, still distracted my thoughts, as he pushed up from his chair and turned on a funky-looking portable tape recorder. He placed his chair closer to the bedside, and he rapidly took more notes as I continued to speak about my mother.

***

“
At the time I didn’t understand the proposal; however, I knew this really upset my mother. She rallied in the streets, protesting with others who were against capital punishment. In June of 2004, the Court of Appeals ruled the death penalty unconstitutional, but it still exists in a few other states. The whole concept seems a bit hard-core to me, but then again, if someone murdered someone in my family, or a friend, I might have voted for capital punishment. After all, it’s hard to really know your core beliefs until you’re in the face of adversity.” I rattled on to the doctor about my family upbringing, covering quite a bit.

“
The universe made some hard choices for my mother. When she discovered she was pregnant, she dropped out of law school, which really set the stage for her future.”

“
Your mother went to law school?” the doctor asked.

“
Yes, but she didn’t finish. My grandmother told me it nearly killed my mom when she lost the baby during the delivery. It was a little girl. To this day, I still think that she lost a part of her soul when her baby died, and my mother’s dream to be a lawyer died with her.

“
After losing her first child, it was nearly seven years later when she became pregnant with me.”

***

My childhood story had come full circle, back to the day when my mother discovered that I heard voices. With obvious effort my mother had calmed somewhat, but was still edgy. Even so, I pressed on. I wasn’t one to stop anything when told, and I desperately needed her to understand the voices were not mine.

“
Okay, but there are voices—they’re not me.” I furrowed my brows. “They talk like Daddy.” I lowered my voice to a deeper husky tone, impersonating my father’s sleepy morning banter, “Good morning, Brielle.”

“
Wow! That is really deep. See, it’s your own voice.” My mother chuckled endearingly.

I wrinkled my nose and shrugged. “I don’t want to be a man on the inside,” I grumbled.

My mother exhaled heavily. “Brielle, you’re not a man or a boy. Look, you’re a pretty little girl”—she took my hand and stood me in front of the mirror. In the reflection of the mirror—
me
—a scrawny twig with big cotton candy pale blonde hair, lips that were too big for my face and bluish-green eyes stared back at me. I was dressed in a body suit, pink tutu, and tights. I followed my mother’s eyes as she scanned the full area of my room. “Everything you own is pink. You’re definitely a little princess.” As she spoke, her tender hand inadvertently smoothed the wild-waves of my hair. She was always trying to calm down my fly-a-ways.

Looking back at the decor of my room, my mother was right about all that pink. I had pink sheets, pink curtains, pink walls, and even pink carpet—I had never realized a bottle of Pepto Bismol had thrown-up all over my bedroom. The side effects of all the pink made me want to puke, remembering it again.

“You love dolls and girly-girl things. A little boy would
not
want to play with dolls, ever.” My mother’s grimace turned into a squirrelly and contradictive grin. She flushed. “That was a catch-22,” she whispered under her breath, quickly placing her hand over her mouth, trying to hide the comment from me, but I heard it.

“
What does catch-22 mean?” I questioned with wide eyes and a tight-lined smile plastered on my face. Even at five years old, I knew my mother’s expressions were slightly cryptic.

“
Hum...here, let’s try this.” She ignored my question. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized why she avoided answering my question.
Some boys do play with dolls.
“Think of something and say it to yourself in your head, without saying your words out loud.”

“
Okay,” I replied, agreeing.
I love you Mommy,
I said inwardly.

“
Now tell me, what did you say on the inside?”

“
I said...I love you mommy.” I grinned, aching to hear her say the words back to me.

“
I love you too”—she squeezed me tightly—“See, it sounded like your own voice, right?” Her brows rose inquisitively.

“
Yep.” I jumped into her lap and hugged her back in a death grip.

“
Good. I’m glad we figured this out together.”

“
But, Mommy, the voices they—I mean it...they’re not like my inside voice,” I insisted. “I swear to God...cross my heart, hope to die, and stick a needle in my eye...it’s not my voice! It’s a man and another one and another one!” I stammered firmly.

“
Sweetie, please, this is your imagination. And if it’s not, then you need to make the voices go away.” Her stern words were followed by a weary look of despair, which again, she tried to hide from me. I smiled quizzically, staring up into her misty green eyes.

“
Tell me why, Mommy?” When our eyes locked so did our hearts, as always, and the despaired look on her face was chased away by a slight smile that slowly panned her face.

“
Brielle...” She paused and batted her lashes, breaking our connection. “Talk to them right now and tell them to go away. Now,” she demanded harshly.

“
But
why,
Mommy? They don’t hurt me. Why are you even doing this?” I asked, pursing out my bottom lip.

“
Now, Brielle. Tell them to go away,” she repeated.

I decided an ultimatum was in order. “I will if you buy me a puppy.”

“Brielle, this is
not
negotiable: no puppies.”

“
Fine then,” I snapped cantankerously and sluggishly crawled out of her lap. Standing straight as a board, I yelled as loud as I could, “Go away!” For effect, I jutted out my hip to one side in what I imagined was a very fierce pose. “Are you guys still there?” I asked. There was no answer. I waited. My mother’s eyes were glued to me in intent stare. I rolled my eyes around, upward, then side to side. “I guess they’re gone.” I shrugged, arms waving at the elbows, fingers curled in and palms facing up.

My mother pursed her lips and said, “Thank goodness,” as she lifted herself from the rug.

“You’re mean. You made them go away,” I shouted, throwing myself face down on my bed. “I like it when they sing to me.”

“
They sing to you, too? Oh, Brie.” Her words vibrated as she spoke and an intense concern filled her eyes.

“
Yep,” I simply said. “Now they won’t anymore,” I pouted.

“
What do they sing to you?” She crawled across my bed, and positioned herself on her side next to me, curious about my answer.

I anchored my body onto my elbows, looking up toward her.
Why did she care,
I thought. “I don’t know,” I pouted. “Do you really want to know, Mommy?”

“
Of course I do.”

“
Okay, I’ll tell you then, but you better not get mad at me again.”

“
I’ll do my best. Okay?”

“
Kay.” I nodded and smiled excitingly, allowing my cranky mood to dissolve. I cuddled up to my mother, making sure I had all her attention. Twisting my lips, I contemplated as children do while I caressed one of my mother’s pink cheeks softly with my small polished fingertips. Pink fingertips. How typical. “Do you remember Papa Grant, Mommy?”

“
Yes, of course I do, he was my granddaddy.”

“
I know he was.”

“
He was so good to us and moved in to our home to help Grandma raise me after my daddy died, but I’m surprised you still remember him.”

“
I do...kind of. I remember mostly that he was really old, with a bald head, right?” I asked, and she responded by nodding, yes.

My mother smiled tenderly and asked, “Did you know that I called him Papa Shark?”