Chapter 29 — Birthday Wish

Early that year I found out that I was no longer welcome to even visit my father. “You just cause too much drama,” he told me when he came over to give me my money. Though one time, Betty invited me there, since my new doctor was just down the street from his condo, but when he came home, he asked me to leave, but not before screaming at Betty.

“What’s she doing here?” he shouted as soon as he walked in the door.

“I invited her, Ron!” she snapped back. “After all, she is your daughter!”

“You’re always going against my wishes!” He screamed waving his hands and throwing his body into each raspy syllable. “Are you the one who has to find her a place when she gets thrown out of another apartment? Do you ever take a day off from work to go to court and talk to the judge to get her more money? I’m the one who is there every week, giving her money and… and… and… cleaning her manchas!”

Then he paced around and started to huff while Betty and I both sat and stared at each other. He eventually cooled down and let me stay for dinner, but he warned that I was never to show up again without calling him first.

“But didn’t you tell me that you no longer wanted me calling you here?” I interrupted.

“You catch on quick!” he shot back.

It was then that I realized it was all about money and that my father didn’t gave a shit about me. I was only a burden—a burden not only to him, but a burden to everyone!

“Oh God, why didn’t you just let me die in the accident?” I asked him that night when I prayed. “Life would be so much better for everyone.”

I swallowed my meds, brushed my teeth, took off my clothes and waited for the portals of sleep to mercifully enter into my room. I remember I saw this dark shadow emerging from out of the closet. I don’t recall if it was a dream, I mean I never left my closet door open at night when I slept, it was something I learned as a child that if I cleaned up my room and shut my closet the “boogie man” would stay far away, so I guess that it was a dream—or was it? Do dreams have faces and names? Some do I guess, but since most of mine didn’t I felt that this probably wasn’t. Anyway, as the shadow grew closer, I could make out the hair, then its tall slender body moving slowly toward the foot of my bed. Any other time I would have probably screamed, but this time I wasn’t afraid since I recognized both the face and the voice.

“Pammy.”

“Mom?”

“It’s okay, baby. Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not,” I said as my teeth were beginning to chatter.

“I just wanted to tell you I love you and how much I miss you.”

“I miss you too, Mom.”

“And your daughter, Arielle, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Beautiful name—Lion of God.”

My mother always was very smart. Got straight A’s in high school – Pius X I think that was where she went—that was when she’d met my father and they started going out in her senior year. She always wanted to go to college, but then they got married that summer and later that fall my oldest sister Marie was born. As I looked up again, she was standing next to a man a few years older. He was big and tall with graying hair and a full white beard, yet his voice was so soft and so gentle as he stood in my bedroom next to my mother.

“I miss you, honey,” he said in a deep husky timbre. “Remember when you would always come over and visit?”

“David?”

“She remembers you, honey,” my mother assured him taking his hand.

“And do you remember Dillinger?” my mother asked me, referring to David’s hundred-pound pit bull that used to pull me and my friends on our skateboards then cuddle with me on the living room floor.

“Of course!” I answered excitedly. “Of course I do!”

“Well, he’s up here with us,” my mother insisted. “And you know what else, honey? All the pain in my body is gone! It’s like I’m in a brand-new body! A body in which there is no more pain… no more pain… no more pain… no more pain…” then her voice slowly faded away and they both disappeared from inside of my room.

“The bible warns us to test the spirits,” my old friend Ruth said when I called her. “And Pam, you need to start following God. From all that you’ve been telling me lately it sounds like you’ve drifted away.”

For the next few nights, my mother and David came back in my room. Then one night, they showed up with Marty—at least he introduced himself as Marty since he no longer looked like a sixteen-year-old kid but a full-grown man. Like my mother and David, he assured me that where they all were there would be no more pain.

“Nothing will ever hurt you again,” he asserted, unaware of what he once did to me.

That morning when I woke up, I sat beside my computer and started writing a poem. It began with those words I heard in my dream—no more sorrow, no more pain, no more loss and no more gain. Then the phone started ringing and I hit the “save” button and walked over to answer it.

“Pam?” said a familiar voice inside the receiver.

“Steve?”

“Yeah, it’s Steve. Please don’t hang up,” he pleaded.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry for being an ass. You deserved so much better than me.”

“So now you’re just finding that out?” I retorted turning his self-revelation against him. “And never mind me, do you remember what you said about Arielle?”

“Arielle?”

“My baby!” I reminded him.

“Oh yeah, I’m so sorry,” he began to lament. “I’m sure that she’s beautiful just like her mother.”

“Well thank you, Steve. And thank you for calling.”

“So, this is good-bye?”

“This is good-bye.”

I hung up the phone, logged back onto my computer, and opened the file I’d saved with my poem—no more anger, no more rage, no more act upon this stage. Then resaving the file, I logged back out and started to cry. That night I set out all of my pills on the table wondering just how much I would need. Before I sat down and started to count them, I added another verse to my poem—no more fear and no more dread, come tomorrow I’ll be dead.

“Goddamn it!” I shouted looking at all of the near-empty bottles next to my chair. “My father forgot to call them in the last time he was here! I fucking can’t even do suicide right!”

Then I thought of my dad. He was getting older, a few more years until he retired. What would he live on? Say what you will about my father, but he was always a good provider. Not to mention his birthday was coming and I really couldn’t leave him with nothing. Of course I’d have to look out for Arielle and leave something to all of my siblings. And let’s see, Trey was always there for me too, I’d need to leave something for him. The rest, I decided, the rest of it could go to my father. “Happy birthday daddy!” I said to myself as I went back over to my computer, opened a document, and started to type.

“Are you sure that this is the way that want it?” my lawyer asked me over the phone.

“That’s what I said, Sheldon. Everything that I read you.”

“Good. Then send me a fax and I’ll file it for you.”

“Thank you,” I told him. “And Sheldon, my father’s birthday is February 3, please make sure it gets done before then.”

That night I sat up in my bed unable to sleep. I tried playing some video games, but since I ran out of all of my pain meds the 3D graphics and digital blips only caused my head to pound that much harder as if I could feel the blood as it coursed through each vessel. I began jerking my head back and forth trying to make the pain go away as now and then the white-yellow beams from a set of stray headlights shot through my window and onto the wall. Turning my head back to the screen, I started to feel this ominous presence standing behind me, its shadow beginning to swallow me whole as a cold wave of darkness brushed up against me like a blanket soaked in dark murky water. Then I heard a faint and distant female voice, like one trying to comfort a child during a nightmare, only in this case she was the nightmare.

“Pam. Pam,” she called out my name as the screen saver flickered to life and the light from the computer screen faded to black leaving behind the sinister glow from bright red letters that flashed on the screen, “Pam is not here, will you please go away.”

“Mom, mom is that you?” My voice called out to her in the dark.

“No, silly,” she answered. “It’s your friend from Yorba Linda.

“Erika?” I questioned as another set of distant headlights outlined a tall slender shadow like a slide from a childhood nightmare shot through a circular movie projector. As the figure grew closer, dark matted ribbons of hair fell at her shoulder, and a black satin veil concealed her face.

“Erika’s a bitch!” she exclaimed as she turned around, tore off her veil, and stared through me with dark empty sockets glowing with fire. “But you my dear, were the one I desired!”

At first, I wanted to scream, but then as I began to feel her cool damp fingers stroking my shoulder, I almost felt a sense of relief as if she and she alone could make all of the pain go away.

“Honey, I know this sounds strange,” she continued in a softer more mellifluous tone, “but I was also like you.”

“Who are you?” I asked her. “You seem so…”

“Familiar?” She said as she finished my sentence. “Well the reason for that is because you are actually seeing yourself. Maybe not now, but in a few years after you take off some of that weight,” she said, then she started to laugh.

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s see here, born September 21, 1964 under a full harvest moon, long dark hair, really pretty, at least every man that I knew seemed to think so, even the ones who had raped me when I was a child.”

Then I swallowed hard and took a deep breath as tears began to well up in my eyes. “What is your name?” I whispered.

“My mom named me Lilith.”

“That’s pretty,” I said.

“But now everyone calls me “Lost Eyes” or “Empty Eyes” as if I’m some sort of freak!” She raged as her entire body started to tremble. “And then there was this young man, someone I believed who really did love me, who…”

“Who what?” I asked her.

“Who fucking cheated on me!” She cried out clenching her fists. “He promised someday that we would be married, even gave me his ring, and he ended up leaving for some skanky young blonde.”

Suddenly, I was getting the picture.

“So what did you do?”

“I killed her,” she said in a voice that was as cold as a stone. “Held both of my hands on her throat as I looked in her eyes and recited the words, “What is thy sentence then, but speechless death?”

“Richard II,” I said when she finished. “The murder scene in the castle of Pomfret.”

“Precisely! You into Shakespeare?”

“Did Midsummer Night’s the day of the accident.”

“And you were?”

“Tatania.”

“But of course,” she said, grazing the back of my neck with her fingers.

Taking a breath, I began to intone “She was a vixen when she went to school,” my expression now rising in the pain of remembrance. Then both of our voices cried out in unison. “And though she be but little, she is fierce.”

“Beautiful, honey! That was so beautiful!” Lost Eyes assured me. “The best actors are always the ones who are able to channel their pain.”

“You ever do any acting yourself?” I asked.

“When I was younger,” she said. “Before my father died.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. He wasn’t always a very nice man.”

“It sounds like you’ve had a pretty hard life.”

“Like I said, we could almost be twins,” she asserted. “Except, that I died in my accident.”

“There are times that I wish I’d died too,” I admitted.

“Then what’s holding you back? Is it your family?”

“My family doesn’t give a shit about me! Sure my death might ruin everyone’s day, but then they’ll start counting my money.”

“Is it your daughter?”

“How do you know that I have a daughter?”

“The spirits my dear, they tell me everything.”

“I see,” I answered then thought for a moment about what Ruth told me. “Arielle doesn’t even know I’m her mother.”

“Well what is it then, honey?”

“It’s God. I don’t think he’d want me taking my life.”

“But would a loving God ever want you to be in such pain?”

“Perhaps it’s his will.”

“Didn’t God say, ‘I am come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly?’” She stopped for a moment, clenching her teeth and asked me again. “Didn’t he say that?”

“Of course,” I answered.

“Then how abundant is your life right now? Just saying,” she said then she put a hand on each of my shoulders as the flames in her sockets diminished into a warm amber glow. “Look, my dear, at one time I went to church every day, knew the bible forward and backward, and after it was all said and done, there’s only one verse that you need to remember.”

“What’s that?” I asked her.

“It’s 1 John 4:16. Surely, you’ve heard of 1 John 4:16?”

“Refresh me?”

She walked up behind me, wrapping me up in her cool, damp embrace and started stroking my hair with her hands. “God is love, my darling, God is love! No matter what you have done, or what you may do, remember that God always loves you. And not only that, but God will also forgive you!”

She set down her veil as it fell once again over her face. Turning around and facing the window, she started singing a song that I’d heard long ago—the summer we had first moved to Yorba Linda. Her voice was deep and resounding, but soft and beautiful like that of an angel just fallen from heaven—you’re a butterfly, and butterflies are free to fly—recognizing the nefarious lullaby, I began to join her, our voices ringing out together as one—fly away, high away, bye bye—then just like that she was gone from my room.

The next morning, I got a call from the pharmacy, “Ms. Vasquez, your prescriptions are ready.” So I got dressed, walked across the street to pick them up, and set the bag on the dining-room table—sixty of each Tylenol Codeine and Vicodin, not to mention thirty 25 mg morphine tablets—that I decided would be more than enough. Then I remembered the bottle of tequila that I kept in the cupboard above the refrigerator that one of the guys I was dating had saved for when he came over. “Well fuck him” I said to myself as I climbed up to get it on one of the chairs.

That evening I ordered pizza—pineapple and Canadian bacon—the same kind that Trey would deliver for me when I called him at Dominos. God how I wish Trey was here now! Or maybe I don’t because he’d just end up trying to stop me again. When I was a girl, I always liked pizza. When my mom made something for dinner like liver and onions, or something else that I thought was gross, I’d go into my father’s dresser, open up the drawer where he kept his money, pull out a twenty, and call out for pizza. At first, he got really pissed and threatened to ground me, but then he would just end up shrugging it off. I guess that he didn’t much care for liver and onions since he always would steal a few of my slices. Now if any of my siblings would do that, they’d end up beaten and sent to their room. But not me, I was the baby! And as the baby, I could do whatever I wanted.

I also had an affection for bears—well more like an obsession for bears! Every Christmas and for my birthday I’d ask my father to get me a bear. At first, he’d explain that bears were meant to live “out in the wild” where they could be bears. Then when we moved to Yorba Linda and had that backyard, he told me that they would eat Heidi and Skippy and also my cat.

Then he told me a story—I’m still not sure of its real or not—of this hunter who met a bear in the woods and as he pointed a gun to his chest, the bear told him “stop and let’s talk for a while, what is it that you want?” “Well, I want a fur coat,” the hunter said.

Then the bear answered, “And I want a full belly.”

Then they both walked into the woods together and minutes later, the hunter had his fur coat and the bear his full belly.

He would tell me that story whenever I’d ask him to get me a bear. So one year, I think that it was the day I turned four, he had my Nino dress up like a bear! The thought of hearing my uncle Tony trying to growl and not knowing whether to scare me or hug me still makes me laugh. Then when he finally took off the suit, he couldn’t stop itching!

I was happy back then. But that was before all of the drinking, the rapes and the beatings. I was the one who was pretty and smart, the favorite of all of my teachers, the girl that all the boys wanted to date and who all of the girls had wanted to be. I got what I wanted, and usually I wanted it all. By high school I’d traded my Hessian leather for rockabilly socks, the “new ro” pumps when the trend changed again later that year. My tight dark curls had grown down to my back and I looked just like that lady in Heart—the one who sang—the prettier of the two sisters. I was also an actor in training and studied to be a professional dancer. I was Phoebe Cates in every freshmen boy’s swimming pool, and “carrot porn” in the high school lunchroom. And if anything, my upbringing taught me that I could use sex to get what I wanted.

Then came the fucking car accident! Goddamn it, why didn’t I just listen to my father and stay home that night? Why did I put us on Carbon Canyon Road when my parents told me to stay far away from that place? And why was Edward Lepak even able to drive? If I only knew where he was buried, I’d go over there now and piss on his grave! And God, why didn’t you stop it? Or could you? Or did you even bother to care? Maybe you wanted to get my attention since with the way I was living I probably would have been dead already. Perhaps Paul was right, him and Mike Hanning—why don’t you give up your life of sin, Pam? Why don’t you start going to church, Pam? Why don’t you stop snapping your gum, Pam? Why don’t you stop having sex on the bleachers, Pam? Okay, you were right, guys! And look where it got me? Anyway, I guess that I’ll never know. What I did know was that when I first saw myself after the accident, I no longer even wanted to live—my head shaved, my left hand not working, my eyes a pair of darting black slits unable to focus for more than a second. I remember driving my head straight into a wall – Kill the monster! Kill the freak! Kill the bitch who should have died that night instead of Marty! Then I’d fall back crying onto the floor, my head now throbbing in torrents of pain.

And the pain—Oh, God, the pain! Every day my head and my back, the light in my eyes, the daily withdrawal from all of my meds, before each night when I’d lift my bottle up like a chalice, remove the cap and receive what has become my body and blood—three Vicodin, two Tylenol Codeine, and a tablet of Morphine. Then to keep me awake, I lived on caffeine. Was that the life I was expected to live?

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to turn out. Fuck no, this wasn’t the way! When I first moved to Yorba Linda, my friend Kelly and I would play this game where we’d pull a number from out of a bag and talk about where we would be at that age. We were both five at the time so how could we have known any better? Sixteen, I’d be starting my senior year, get elected Homecoming Queen and working on getting accepted to college. Eighteen, I’d be a professional dancer and just completing my freshman year. Twenty-five, I’d be finished with acting school and already starring in movies. Twenty-eight, I’d be married and have a couple of children, a boy and a girl, we have a big house with huge backyard and a dog and a cat, and maybe a horse, and did I mention a spiral staircase? Yeah, the house would have a huge spiral staircase leading up to all of our rooms. Thirty, fuck it, I’m already dead! In fact, I was always a dead girl!

I learned the night that my mother had beat me and pulled out all of my stiches that I was named for her niece, the youngest of Loretta’s three children who had died in the fire. Kristine – Pamela Kristine! So my entire life I was always the dead girl! And you know what they say, “from dust thou art, and to dust thou shall return.”

It wasn’t like I was leaving everybody alone. Marie has Roger and Sarah and Robyn, Ron has Shelly and Ryan and Nick, Dad has Betty and her son Aaron, and Veronica has Andrew, Ashley, and Amanda—oh, and I forgot to mention, Veronica also has Arielle, my daughter. Then there’s my friends, most of who are married or moved or just don’t call anymore. You think that they would miss me? Are you fucking kidding? If anything, all I was is a bother.

I took the bottle, and I filled a glass I pulled from out of the cupboard up with the tequila, then I sat there and stared trying to make out what it said—We’ll always be friends, we know too much— it said right on the front with a ladybug blowing a kiss. Erika! It must have been the same one that she sent me one year for my birthday after she was already living in Vegas. Well, my friend if you only knew. If you read about this, I hope that you won’t be disappointed in me. Same goes for Randy and Cindy and Diane and Lisa and Dexter and Jason and Neil and Jeff, and Christina and Michael and Trey—who I believed really liked me but could never convince himself to admit it—and especially you, Mr. Moore. Please know that you were always my favorite teacher! And Rick, I know that you’ll make a great husband and father and I hope that you’ll be the next Jonas Salk. Daniella, you were always so sweet and so dear. Keep up the good fight, my friend! And Ruth who was like a spiritual mother, and all of my friends who I met in church, I hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive me. And to all of my friends at the station, well at least those who are left, it looks like I’ll be mixing with harps from now on! I hope that you can still hear my show each night in your dreams. And good-bye once again to Katie, and Marty, the old man who lived on my street, and to Mom and to David. Please leave the light on for me till I see you up there! And to my cousin Susie, even though we didn’t see eye to eye you still always had my back—at least until that drug addict Michelle started living with us—anyway, I do love you, cuz! And lastly, to my father, you’ll be taken good care of. I understand how hard it must have been for you to care for me all this time, coming over and doing my laundry and paying my bills and going to court and always finding me new apartments when I kept on getting kicked out of the ones I was in. I’m not sure if I ever said “thank you” but daddy, I’m saying it now. And despite how all this turned out I know that you always did your best and how much you loved me. And though you seldom ever put those three words “I love you” together, at least in that particular order, I always knew that you did. “I’m not a mushy guy” you would say, and I don’t disagree, but when it came right down to it, you always had a really big heart. When the day comes and you find me, please don’t ever blame yourself for what happened. Just know that I love you and that I’m always your “baby.” And to anyone else that I may have forgotten like Bill and Tony and Nana and Grandpa and Betty and Aaron. When you think about me, please think good thoughts!

Walking into my bedroom there was just one more thing that I needed to do, one final verse to complete my epitaph, the one that I had been writing for weeks, if not for over the course of a lifetime, “with no more tears left to cry, the time has come for me to die.”