Holding Her in Madness (29 page)

“Stop.” she pulls away long enough to slap the fuck out of my face. Then she hugs my neck again. Through gritted teeth, she finishes speaking. “Stop fucking drinking, Leo. You and your wife need help. Not tomorrow, not next week. Now. Get to a fucking meeting. Then get you and Lil into therapy.” She pulls away again and I stiffen preparing for another slap, but she smiles. “Leo, happiness isn’t easy. And the loss of a child is enough to tear any parent or any husband and wife apart. But not you and Lil.”

I just look at her. Shock, surprise, relief, anxiety, and dread are all waging a war inside me. But for the first time in eighteen months, hope is also one of the emotions.

“Not you and Lil, Leo. You two were written in the stars. A love like yours doesn’t happen in real life, so when it does…of course fate is going to break its own laws, and it’s up to you to make sure that love lasts, even through hell, Leo… You have to find a way to make it last.” Her eyes leave mine and focus on the bottles around me, “And you will never find the way in one of those bottles.”

I nod and use my hands to dry my face. “Thank you, ‘Lise. I don’t know—”

“I always know, Leo. I don’t want to. Believe me. But I know when you need me. I may not be your one true love”—her voice quivers and she hugs me tightly around her baby belly—”but you will always be mine. Bye, Leo.”

She turns and begins to walk away but stops and says without looking back at me, “Take care of Lil. You have to be happy with Lil, Leo… Otherwise, all of this will be for nothing. Please don’t take away everything I ever loved for nothing. Please.”

My mouth opens to speak only to snap shut a second later when ‘Lise’s car pulls away from the curb.

I’m fucking laughing right now. Really… I wish you could hear the maniacal cackle spilling from me. It is
quite
spectacular. And sometimes, in these moments of delusion, as I look around at the complete and utter Hell that I live in, guarding the inside of Hell’s gates to ensure Lil doesn’t cross its threshold again, I catch myself wondering if Lilith attached herself onto my soul after she was pushed from my wife.

As Lil said, when she in the clutches of madness and insanity… Let’s end this where we began.

All of that back there was my story. I’m not telling it because I seek absolution, pity, or even understanding from you.

I’ll fucking tell you like I told her. It ain’t gonna fix a fuckin’ thing, but I’ll say it…

I fucked up, okay? I fucked up and I know… I know I did. I let Lil down so many goddamn times.

Fuck!

I know I don’t fucking deserve her, but I’ll be goddamned if I leave her again, and I’ll be even more fucking damned if I let what I deserve or don’t deserve in life keep me away from her. Period.

I told her that everything I touch I fuck up. Why the hell do you think I ran from her little ass all those years ago? I was trying to shut her out before she got under my skin. But I couldn’t. She wouldn’t let me keep her at arm’s length. She wouldn’t allow me to ignore what was as bright as the fucking sun.

She was too strong. Even at sixteen she was too strong for me to fight. She forced me to face the fact that we were two pieces of a whole.

That we were two pieces of the same soul.

She was my firecracker, and I was her knight. She lit me up and turned my darkness into light.

But even a firecracker only lights up the night for a moment.

I would give anything to go back and keep shit from falling apart. I would tell her dad to fuck off, just grab her up, and fucking run.

Out of all the fucking moments, I always return to the turning page. The devastating fork in the course of my life when I was standing on the precipice. The moment in time where our lives went one way or another. The moment when I either lost the life I wanted with the woman I wanted instead of having a life with Lil and Lil alone…

I never should have let her out of my car that night when we were kids. I could have protected her from fucking everything. From all of it...

I could ask where I went wrong, beg for an answer to soothe this fucking terrible ache, this guilt that I’ve carried for decades. But I won’t ask, because I don’t deserve a break from my pain.

I know you think you knew Lil, and now that you’ve read her story and heard mine, it’s possible that you do. But my opinion remains that, until you hold a woman like Lil, until you stare into her drunken eyes, heavy from ecstasy while you’re balls deep inside of Heaven, inside this woman who is so fucking unlike anyone else on this goddamn earth… Until you hold her shuddering body as her tears soak your shirt while she cries out for something even she doesn’t understand, just so long as it takes away her pain… Until you’ve been where I’ve been with Lil, you don’t truly know her.

Not like I fucking do.

I do hope that by the time you finish OUR story, you are able to take away enough from both sides to realize a story is as never as simple or as clean-cut as it seems.

I felt the dread in the marrow of my bones that May night. It started that morning, another one of my countless mistakes; I ignored the hair-raising sense of dread that hit me that morning. I was supposed to be on my way to Atlanta for some stupid fucking merger meeting between my company’s marketing department and another new, upcoming marketing company.

I was hauling fucking ass from one terminal to another, trying like hell to catch my connecting flight from Houston to Atlanta, when it hit me like a motherfucking brick across the face. I stopped right where the fuck I was, assholes crashing into me from behind, cussing at me.

I took my ass to the nearest fucking ticket counter and asked for the next flight to get me back home. Shit, I’d been gone for almost three months straight. I hadn’t seen Lil in over six months—that she knew of. I still kept an eye on her. I just couldn’t fucking explain what the hell my eyes were seeing. She was so far gone that I couldn’t see a single thing in my wife that resembled the woman I had fallen in love with over twenty years ago. The woman I’d waited all my life for was truly and irrevocably fucking gone.

Do you know what it’s like as a fucking man to have to look at your wife and watch her all over these cheesy fuckers, drunk and high out of her goddamn mind, so fucking lost she’s beyond ever being found?

Oh, I knew what the fuck she was doing. I knew about the drugs and
ALL
the men. But I was such a fucking coward that I just walked away like I had all the other times. I told myself that at least she was happy; at least they made her smile. For more than a year after my boy died, I could only get her to look at me or speak to me when we were in the throes of passion.

I was a pussy. That’s what I was. I just wanted her to be happy, and she was only ever happy when I wasn’t home. Every time she looked at me, all she really saw was what could have been had our son lived. With me or my presence came memories of what should have been. And if there is one thing Lil and I have, it is a fucking world full of what-should-have-beens. There isn’t a fucking thing in this world worse than what should have been.

When I got home and couldn’t find her at any of her normal hangouts, I called every goddamn five-star hotel within a hundred-mile radius and still couldn’t find her.

That’s when I got scared. I hadn’t been there when she’d needed me. I knew she’d finally done it. She’d taken her life and killed the love of mine… She’d killed my firecracker.

I’d fucked up and all but handed her whatever drug or weapon she’d needed to get the job done. When she’d finally, really needed me, I’d been off being a pussy because I didn’t know how to take care of my own wife. I didn’t know how to bring her from the darkness and depth of misery she fed off.

Instead of manning the fuck up and grabbing Lil’s demons by their throats, killing them one by one, snuffing out every single one of those bitches fucking with her head, I’d stood aside, waiting for her to come back to me, waiting for her to need me enough to come back.

Fucking thank
FUCK
my cell rang! I knew it was her. Even though she didn’t say a word, I knew it was my firecracker. I knew I wasn’t too late. I knew it was her calling me for help, calling because she finally needed me.

I will thank God every night of my life for that call… ‘Cause I had a motherfucking number.

In only twenty minutes, that abundant victory immediately gutted me, leaving in its wake nothing but bleak desolation.

Shit, y’all were there. You know what the fuck I saw when I walked in the bathroom of her hotel suite. Her beautiful head was lolled back, lying in a bathtub of bloody water, her skin so pale and white it was transparent. Fuck, I’ll
never
forget that shit. It’s imprinted in my brain, etched across my skull. It’s seared into the backs of my eyelids.

She had a blood clot smeared from behind her ear, stringing like a fuckin’ spider web to her shoulder.

As I pulled her out and screamed, “Fucking call 911!” I cradled her against me, brushing her hair away from her pale face, asking her, “Baby, baby? Fuck, what did you do? Why, Lil? You know I can’t fucking live without you! Why did you do this?”

After I bound her wrists in towels to slow her bleeding, I carried her to the bedroom and fell to floor with her cradled to me, rocking her back and forth as I ran my fingers through her hair, humming ‘Black Balloon’ into the cold, pale skin of her shoulder.

Thoughts were invading my self-preservation.
This is all my fault.
I know it fucking is. I shouldn’t have left her at home that Valentine’s Day night. I should have tried harder to reach her.

I knew I looked like a pussy crying into Lil’s hair and rocking her wet, blood-soaked body on the floor of the suite when the paramedics came in, but I didn’t give a fuck. She stopped breathing and I frantically tried to find her pulse. “Please, baby. Fucking please don’t leave me.”

“Sir, I need you to lay her on this stretcher,” one of the paramedics said, standing next to a gurney draped in a white sheet.

“Can I go with her? Can’t I just hold her?” Panic was crawling its way up my throat, mixing with bile.

“Sir, the faster we get her in the ambulance, the faster we can get her stable, and she needs that now. Right now.”

I didn’t realize I had Lil wrapped up with my gun in my hand.

“Yeah, sorry, man.” I sat the gun aside and carried my wife’s light and lifeless body to the stretcher, laying her down as sobs and tears escaped me right there in front of God and every other motherfucker in that room.

When I backed away, they swarmed around her, one pushing on her chest and another fitting a mask on her face, breathing for her. That’s when it hit me.
I’ve lost her.
She’d fucking needed me and I’d let her down, just like I’d known I would. Just like her dad had said I would. He’d been right. I’m not a good enough man for her. I never was.

No matter how much I fucking tried.

It just wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.

After the docs got her physically well enough to be moved to the psychiatric unit, she was admitted to The Center.

I knew then that my fate, my happiness, my fucking
LIFE
depended on being strong enough for her. Everything in our goddamned life depended on me stepping up and doing anything and everything I could to save my firecracker, be there for her, and make fucking sure she knew I was there and that I wasn’t leaving.

And I did.

I made fucking sure I was enough. I killed all those fuckin’ bitches in her head. I went through Hell for my fuckin’ firecracker and brought her back to life.

And now, even if I have to stay here in Hell for the rest of my life in order to keep her out, that’s what the fuck I’ll do. As a man, sometimes you just have to do what the fuck you have to do.

When you’ve been where I’ve been, seen the shit I’ve seen, and been shredded as many times as I have, there is no other option. Even if it means your life is hell. Even if it means from this point on, you are the one who carries all the weight and burden.

You fuckin’ do it because you love a woman, the only woman in this whole damn world. You do it because she’s your soul mate. And without her,
YOU
would rather be fucking dead.

Now, as Lil and I both said… Let’s end this where we began. That was my story. I didn’t fucking tell my story because I was seeking absolution, pity, or even understanding from you.

No… I told it because, even though it was difficult to tell and probably just as painful to hear, it still needed to be told.
BOTH
sides needed to be told.

I could give a fuck what you say about me. As a matter of fact, I fucking beg of you to judge me.

Persecute me.

Blame me.

Hell, fucking hang me.

Take me if an execution is needed because the two fools in love fell over and over again, unable to withstand the blows we took both together and alone.

Then take my fucking head.

But don’t you fucking ever,
EVER
, touch a goddamn hair on Lil’s head.

If I’m this much of a fucking bastard as mortal, I would hate—no, love—to see my immortal wrath obliterate you for fucking with
MY
firecracker.