The Signs

Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are:

brink ~ stultify ~ brief ~ gobble ~ right

They were submitted by: https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/

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The nightstand on her husband's side of the bed held another bank card and driver's license from a woman she didn't know and didn't recognize. Third time, now. Third time was definitely not the charm here.

She'd been able to write off the other two as some sort of mistake. The first one she found was an accident. She was actually honestly looking for some tums or something that might help with a raging case of heartburn she had. She knew he kept some in the nightstand in case it woke him up at night. She'd forgotten all about the heartburn when she found the ID and card though.

She'd sort of defaulted to thinking it was a mistress who'd, she didn't know, left it with him? For some reason? Or something he found when he went out drinking after work and planned to return? It didn't really make sense to her no matter how she tried to frame it at the time but who would have thought...well what she thought now felt insane to be honest.

She hadn't found a way to bring it up to him yet without risking one of his little episodes when that woman's name was in the news a couple days later as having disappeared on am early morning run. She was pretty sure it was the same woman because the ID pic had kind of been emblazoned in her memory and it was very similar to the photo shown on the news. Same long dark hair, same piercing blue eyes... Neck tattoos and deep red lipstick. This woman was just his type. Not herself though. Oh no the woman he married was petite and blonde and quiet and wore clothes 2 sizes too big... When she accidentally found his porn stash on their computer that time it had all been women who looked like the one on the news.

Anyway that had been 2 years ago. She'd looked ever so often in his nightstand and then one day last year after she'd come back from visiting her parents upstate, there was another ID and card. And another news story. Another woman missing after a night out with friends in the downtown area near the art school campus.

And now 6 months later, here was another one. This time she hadn't been with her parents though. This time, she'd been in the hospital from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy that had nearly killed her. She'd spent nearly 2 weeks laid up in that bed alone and miserable and wishing she would have died.

He'd shown up once, flipped through his phone for the entire half hour he bothered to be there, then left again without so much as an "I love you."

It hadn't always been like this. She really didn't think it had. Meeting him had felt so serendipitous...a fairytale. She'd often wondered if she was dreaming the sweetest dreams imaginable in the beginning. He brought her flowers. He made her feel like she was the only woman on earth. They'd dated for a year before he asked her to marry him, and at the time, there wasn't a single red flag she could name. He was attentive and supportive. He didn't go cold on her back then. He'd been passionate and gentle and couldn't get enough of her it seemed.

Now though she wondered what he was doing on those weekends he took boys trips with old college chums and didn't speak to her for days not even to check in. Were there actually business trips he went on and came back with a cut under his eye or scratches on his arms? Things lined up now in a way they hadn't back then. Why would she suspect him of anything at all when he'd gone so far to make her feel loved and important?

But then the wedding happened and things...things were off. He'd taken a job transfer without talking to her about it and basically forced them to move almost overnight away from her family and friends and her teaching job. He'd wanted her to wait on finding a job to see if maybe they could try for a baby only, well, he wasn't doing much trying and hadn't for years now. Their 5 year anniversary was coming up and she could count on her hands how many times they'd been intimate in that time. But he'd wanted her almost every day before the marriage and the move. Some nights he didn't even come home. There she'd be with dinner ready and plated looking like a dumbass with no work from him. She'd learned not to even bother calling. He wouldn't answer, and he'd accuse her of being clingy and insecure about it when he finally did show up.

She hadn't been to a single work function or let his coworkers. He never bothered to come back home with her and controlled when and how long she would go. If she wanted to stay 3 days he would insist on 2 weeks and not a minute sooner, but there were also times he'd forbidden her to go.

It's like the dream prince she married turned into a controlling nightmare with the flip of a switch when he said "I do."

So of course she'd long suspected affairs. She was sure he was at least having one night stands. But these IDs and bank cards? She understood now this was something much, much darker and she couldn't ignore it any longer. What would people think of her? That she must have known? That she turned a blind eye to it all? The thought of it made her throw up what little breakfast she'd been able to eat. She still wasn't feeling 100% after the lonely hospital stay... And she definitely hadn't had any more support once she'd gotten home.

What was she even going to tell police? My husband had this woman's ID but I was too scared to keep it? It's happened 3 times at least but I was too scared to call? She slid the items in a Ziploc bag, walked out to her car, and knew she'd never ever be able to set one foot back in that house. She'd have to figure out the rest along the way.

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Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:

Baking In A Tornado https://www.bakinginatornado.com/

On the Border https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver https://thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog

What TF Sarah https://crazymamallama.blogspot.com

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/

The One That Broke Us

Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are:

stairway ~ generation ~ holy ~ flower ~ scent

It was submitted by: https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/

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The house was unassuming white clapboard. Boring. So bland it could be outperformed by flour. The yard really made up for it though. Every inch had been meticulously groomed with styled garden beds and sculptures. There were mini fountains and bird feeders and every color of flower imaginable. Birds flocked to this mini garden of Eden and shared space with chittering squirrels and buzzing bees. Almost like a fairytale, a Disney princess origin story.

But not even the sweetness of the competing sights or smells or the beauty and bounty of flora and fauna could make up for the scent of decomp that hung so heavily in the air you'd still taste it hours later or the horrors being uncovered at 248 Boxwood Lane.

For that matter, none of it detracted from the mystery unfolding in the backyard for the last week either.

It all started with a stench and a nosy neighbor. The guys who first showed up to do their due diligence and fill out a meaningless report thinking this would be another of Ms. Regina "Busybody" Goodwin's wild (and numerous) claims figured out pretty quickly that this was no boy cries wolf (or seething spiteful spinster calls the cops) type of deal. The smell was undeniably a dead body before they even reached the front door of the unfortunate soul who had been living next to Ms. Goodwin.

When the cops knocked on the door, the man inside opened up, held up his hands, and said "well I guess you finally got me" and refused to speak another word without an attorney present. They went to look in the backyard and apparently one of them hadn't stopped mumbling "holy shit" randomly under his breath ever since.

Yes, it was that bad.

When the cops placed the man, whose name we still don't actually know for sure though his mail came to Sanford Walsh, in the back of the car, the Holy Shit guy took a look out back while his partner kept an eye on Walsh. And what he found was a very flooded yard from a ruptured main and body parts in various stages of decomposition floating in the muddy pools or lying on the little islands of higher land and covering just about every bit of the place.

An almost skeleton arm does not belong in the lower stems of an azalea bush.

They called for backup being totally out of their league on how to handle a cemetery's worth of bodies in a person's yard. Detectives showed up and crime scene techs and the coroner... Then an m.e., the state cops and then the FBI and a behavioral scientist. And that was all before things got weird. Ok they were already weird but not in comparison to where they end up. Trust me.

This is where I come in. Anthropology isn't usually this weird, so when I got the call I thought it was a prank. I mean I've handled a few consults on cases of skeletal remains because I do biological anthropological examinations and studies, but my expertise is more in line with indigenous societies in north America before Europeans settled on the continent. And the m.e., a sharp old broad named Sandra, knew that about me. She said that was exactly why she called me, but that just didn't seem possible. A murder case that needed my expertise? Being investigated now? I got in the car and headed down anyway, but nothing about our conversation made sense.

I should have stayed home. I don't think any of us that worked this case will ever be the same again. Most days I feel like if I ever look at another bone, it will be too soon.

While the first detectives and techs worked on the scene, I was blissfully unaware that my life was about to be changed forever the moment I got tangled up with the Walsh case. Not his name. I still have no idea what his name is or was. But that's what we called him especially at the beginning. It wasn't until later that we found absolutely no information on this guy under that name. It was just just a placeholder. A costume perhaps. But the house and the land... The house had generation after generation of history. Funny thing, that.

He wouldn't talk to police after his initial "you finally got me." He became almost catatonic really. No answers to questions. No eye contact. No requests. He'd just sat there staring into whatever black void he resided in and hummed the tune of Daisy Bell over and over and over until he snapped to attention like he'd been jolted away by a cattle prod and demanded an attorney before returning back to his humming state. The officers keeping an eye on him said it was like a switch had been flipped on in his brain and switched right back off. Apparently it happened at his arraignment. It happened when he finally got assigned an attorney--the attorney he'd demanded to have.

Creepy, right? Well you don't know the fucking half of it.

I got to the house with very little information to go on. I was weirded out already. My expertise. I knew it was bad, that multiple bodies had been found, but I had no idea. By the time I was called in, folks had been digging for a few days. The hole in the yard had grown so big and so deep, a stairway had been fashioned for those working on site to get down to the bottom.

Sandra was down in that pit when I arrived and called for me to join her. Her hair was uncharacteristically messy and her eyes were wild. I got the feeling she was on the verge of losing it. It was written plainly across her usually stoic face.

She nearly pulled me down the last few steps hurrying me along until I finally yelled, "Sandra what the fuck is going on? You look like you haven't slept in days."

"I haven't. And probably won't for a long time yet."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

She took a deep breath and sighed. She looked rough. Bags, dark circles...her face puffy like she'd spent a few nights crying over a cheating partner. And then she told me.

The yard had been flooded and full of parts so after some folks were called in to turn off the main and pump out some of the water, the techs were finally able to get to work. Everything that could be seen was collected and then the yard was taped off in a grid. 12 people total took one square each and sifted the top layer--well, about a foot anyway--looking for more bones. They found some. The grid stayed behind and each square was then dug out to 3 feet and sifted. More. Again and again and again they dug into the earth finding body after body. Sandra looked at these bones each time and with each layer. She pointed out the stratification of the ground surrounding the excavation area and I could see it for myself. I could see dozens of artifacts laid out in one square of the grid and still more bones being dug out in others.

Sandra walked me over to the artifacts and looked at me with pleading eyes. She said, "I can't be sure until I get the results back from the lab dating these bodies, but they're old. I know they're old. And I need you to tell me we've stumbled on some kind of burial ground or mass grave that has nothing to do with anything else in this fucking hell scape of a yard."

She let me look through the artifacts. I already knew right then nothing I was looking at was modern. This was the genuine thing. So I took a square to dig for myself and got a look at the layout. It didn't seem like a mass grave. The bodies weren't one on top of one another. And nothing said burial mound. The artifacts included weren't really the type of grave offerings you'd expect to see in these types of burial sites. These were regular items. Things people might be wearing or things used in body modification or fastening cloth. The bodies were not spaced out enough for individual graves in the way I was used to seeint and not close enough for family sites or a mass grave. I looked at her photos and maps of body locations and everything was just too methodical. Bodies corresponded to each other in each layer.

There really wasn't any way anymore to tell exactly how any of these people had died, but the freshest bodies had their throats cut and a whole lot of other trauma... Given that information it didn't seem like a burial site in the traditional sense but how else could all these bodies get in this one space? I had more questions than answers but it certainly wasn't a mass grave or anything I recognized as a typical grave site for the societies I had studied.

I told Sandra. I told her all the things she hadn't wanted to hear and that I'd like to get a better look at the bones she already transported, but she shook her head and walked to the steps..."I'm done. I don't want to know any more. You'll have to get someone else."

It seemed like an overreaction to me. I could be wrong in my initial assessment. I needed more time to be sure and to look at more. I needed to see if this land had ever housed a crude cemetery. And, at most, a family tradition of murder wasn't exactly common, right? But it had happened. The Bloody Benders, the Kelly family, the bean clan... The Gonzalez Sisters in Mexico had left at least 90 bodies to be found and something like 20 of their family members had been in on it and charged along with them.

But then

There's always a "but" in these things right?

One of the techs on scene agreed to drive me to the morgue to get a look at those other bodies. She didn't seem like she wanted to talk. I'd asked if Sandra had just been overworked or if we needed to check on her, and the tech, Amy, pulled into a Denny's parking lot.

She took a deep breath and let out a shaky sigh.

"Look, I'm not really supposed to say more, but I'm going to because it's not fair to keep it from people. Sandra has always been overworked if we're honest. She doesn't have the budget for enough help and to be quite honest she needs too much control to delegate well."

She paused and I felt like I had to say something. "That tracks. I can tell that about her."

"Right. Well. She's stressed on a normal case. She's even more stressed when she feels like she needs to find an answer to help get justice for someone taken too soon. But this...this case... It's fucking batshit, ok"

"I mean yeah all this is really unsettling but the worst we're looking at here is a murder family, right? Assuming the land has stayed in the same family, the absolute worse this could be is a few generations of this family line taking up each other's murderous tendencies, right? She's handled plenty of gnarly stuff before..."

Amy signed again. She looked haunted. "No. No we don't think that's it actually."

"What? What's the deal?"

"well. We processed the house too, you know. First day. There are more bodies in the basement, by the way, and we haven't even really started digging it out to figure out how many or how far it goes." She stared out of the windshield for a long time.

"I know I'm going to sound crazy but he slept in a coffin. We found it. His windows aren't blacked out or anything but he has like a room full of spf 50 and 100 sunscreen. Just sunscreen, right? And we also found family photos. Actually we found family paintings. We have to get all these things dated of course. It's going to be a long investigation... But..." She looked straight at me, eyes wide. "They're all the same guy, Jess. I know it sounds crazy but it's all the same guy. Every photo. Smiling kids, wife, same guy. Different kids, different wife, same guy. Photos so old they're falling apart almost, same guy. Same guy. It's not just a resemblance. And I've seen Walsh. I had to look for myself. I had to. Jess, it's him. It's all the same guy."

Well, that might explain all the creepiness but there was no way I was going to just take her word for it.

We left, both unable to talk anymore, and went by the morgue. The place was filled with bones and bodies. There wasn't anywhere to store them all. A refrigerated truck had to be brought in for the time being. But Sandra was there packing her things.

"I didn't mean to make you quit, Sandra. Let me take a closer look at things. I could be wrong. I have to be wrong."

"It's not you, Jess." She looked at me. Hard. "Amy told you."

I nodded.

"Jess, I don't want to know. I've lived my entire life thinking the world was complicated but mostly logical. There were reasons people do what they do even if I could never. There were explanations and disorders and even when things were absolutely terrifying and maddening we could catch the guy and all sigh in relief that we had stopped someone. But this? I saw the photos, the portraits. I went and sat with him, Jess. I asked him. I asked him about the photos, the bodies. I asked him what year he was born and he laughed. He just laughed. I can't do this. I can't live in a world knowing this exists so I'm getting out. good luck."

And that was that.

But how do I get out of this? Because I can't pretend I don't know what these women have told me and I damn sure can't quit without some kind of answer. It will gnaw away at me for the rest of my life.

What do I do now?

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Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:

Baking In A Tornado https://www.bakinginatornado.com/

On the Border https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver https://thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog.html/

Climaxed https://climaxedtheblog.blogspot.com

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/

What TF Sarah https://crazymamallama.blogspot.com/

Dinner Date

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 12 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My “Secret Subject” is:

Describe your perfect meal? Who cooks? Where is it? With whom do you eat?

It was submitted by: http://thelieberfamily.com

I took a little freedom with this prompt and wrote a little fiction. I did include my perfect meal (the eggplant, btw), but I don't think I would call any of these other circumstances perfect by any means. Anyway, I just wanted to stretch my fiction wings and see what I could do with this prompt. Thanks for reading. 

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I met him on Tindr.

As much as I want to say that should have been the first red flag, I guess a lot of people must have success with that app, right? I mean, too many people use it still for it to all be bad. Maybe the right phrase here is that I should have been less naïve about how wrongly this could go. I should have packed some mace or had a plan to let my friends know where I would be and what time I would be home. Am I victim-blaming myself? Ugh. A little, but that’s so ingrained in who we are as people, isn’t it? If we admit the victim is never at fault in things like this, then we also have to admit we have no control over whether we will ever be a victim, and who the hell wants that? Apparently not the majority of the world.

Anyway, like I said, we met on Tindr, Adam and I. That’s probably not his real name now that I think about it, but either way, that’s all I know, so it’s what I’ll go with. He messaged me first, and I thought his pictures were great. He had a few of him and his dog that, of course, melted my heart. I was more excited about that dog than anything at first if you want to know the truth. Too many dates in my life have gone wrong, but I’ve never met a doggo that wasn’t love at first sight.

We matched or whatever, but I didn’t send a message at first. I didn’t want to seem too eager, and his profile didn’t give me enough to really construct something I could feel good about. Maybe that’s the beauty of Tindr, though. There’s not a whole lot of information to go on when you are looking at profiles. It’s not like some of these other sites where a person has already constructed this quirky outline of who they are that’s almost always a couple thousand words of bullshit that never turn out to be true in any shape or form. It might be who they wish they were, but it’s never who they really are. Not in my experience.

I can’t remember what exactly he said in his first message, but he was pretty chill, and that first day he did let me know that he wasn’t looking for an easy hook-up. He did want to be able to actually meet someone in person which so rarely happened on actual dating site, so his desire ranged somewhere between nameless one-night-stand and committed relationship. We talked for a few days, flirted shamelessly, and swapped numbers. I wanted to go out for drinks right after that (roughly a week or so after we first connected), but after asking twice and getting shot down (he was tired, he was busy, etc etc), I figured he either wasn’t really interested or wanted to ask himself, so I backed off a bit to see how it would go.

He didn’t take it well. When do they ever?

I woke up to a string of messages after I didn’t return his missed call the night before. He called me rude and asked me why I had wasted his time when he specifically told me he wanted someone who would actually meet him, blah blah blah. If at any time there was a red flag, that was truly it, so why was I so stupid? I fell right for it. I felt horribly that I had ignored him on purpose because I knew I was trying to manipulate the situation to my favor or at least manipulate it to preserve my own feelings while trying to sniff out the truth, and it had backfired on me so fucking spectacularly that I didn’t really stop to think in the moment that this reaction was so far out of proportion over just a missed phone call.

I messaged him a long apology by text. I lied. Obviously. But, I still apologized telling him I hadn’t felt well but that I should have just text and let him know that. I didn’t get an apology in return of course, but I was relieved at the time that he seemed to take my excuse as truth and calmed down enough to continue our conversations. We didn’t talk on the phone that night, and he was a little standoffish, but the next day it was like it never happened. He asked me, finally, if I wanted to have dinner with him. I accepted thinking we could meet at one of the little cafes downtown for something light that night, but no. No, he had other plans. He wanted to cook for me, he said. At his house. Way outside of town. Because of course. Of course he did. And of course I agreed like an idiot.

We had already discussed our favorite foods—mine being eggplant parmesan and his being steak (of course it was! Of course!). So he wanted to cook both. Apparently, I have just never had a steak cooked the right way regardless of the fact that I don’t really eat much meat especially beef and pork. You know, that kind of guy. I started getting a little more hesitant then, but I figured I would go through with it. I mean, maybe he was just really proud of his steak skills? That’s what I thought at the time anyway.

That’s not what I think now.

Have you ever seen that subreddit called Let’s Not Meet? Or read one of those craigslist horror stories? This is kinda like that. I got to his house a little early. I knocked, but no one answered. I could smell the grill, though, so I walked around back and found him carving up some kind of animal that was definitely not a cow and throwing pieces on the grill. He was wearing a poncho, had the entire back porch covered in a plastic tarp. He had a lot of tools out there…things I have never even seen before. I screamed. Loudly. He jumped and dropped whatever he was working on yelling at me, “what the fuck are you doing here so early?!”

I froze mid-scream in a panic and watched in horror as he grinned broadly and picked up the cleaver he had been using on the not-cow, “you have been a bad, bad girl. Come over here and get your punishment.”

I ran. I ran faster than I think I have ever run in my life. I heard him jump over the railing of his porch, but thank fucking god, I have a keyless entry car these days because I was in the car with the doors locked and had it cranked before he caught up to me. I threw the car in reverse while he banged on the window with the butt of the cleaver. The window cracked just a little and splintered, but it never actually broke before I could pull off down the street. I called 911 as soon as I got to the end of his street and gave them the address and told them what I saw. The woman dispatcher seemed horrified, but maybe that’s just because I was so horrified. Maybe I read into it? Maybe I was so panicked she couldn’t help but pick up on some of my feelings about it. Either way, she said she would send someone to his house while I drove to the station to make a statement. I did what was asked of me. I gave my statement, showed the texts, and our Tindr messages. I answered all the questions I could and ended up knowing the two officers who were talking to me thought I was being absolutely hysterical and had completely misread the situation….until the officers who responded to the scene called back in.

The house wasn’t Adam’s or whoever he was. It was empty or appeared to be and didn’t have a current lease according to the owner who hadn’t rented it out or even had a question about it in over 6 months. There wasn’t anything at all in the house except a duffle bag with some more tools, another poncho, another tarp, and a handful of driver’s licenses from other women. He was nowhere to be found. No car, no trace, nothing except the bloody tarp in the back, the tools, and the meat which has yet to be identified.

The police have the picture I saved as his contact photo, but his Tindr profile was deleted. I’m guessing all the licenses will come back to missing women and maybe being early for once saved my life… I haven’t been sleeping well—I keep having nightmares that he comes looking for me which I guess might actually not be that far from the realm of possibilities. But at least I didn’t eat anyone. 

Silver linings, y’all.

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Here's the rest of the submissions this week!

Baking In A Tornado http://www.bakinginatornado.com/2017/03/ill-take-half-secret-subject-swap.html

Dinosaur Superhero Mommy http://dinoheromommy.com/

Spatulas on Parade http://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver http://www.thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/blog.html

The Lieber Family Blog http://thelieberfamily.com

The Bergham Chronicles http://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com

Never Ever Give Up Hope http://batteredhope.blogspot.com

Simply Shannon http://shannonbutler.org

Confessions of a part time working mom http://thethreegerbers.blogspot.com/2017/03/march-secret-subject-swap-pay-it-forward.html

Southern Belle Charm http://www.southernbellecharm.com

The Angrivated Mom http://www.angrivatedmom.wordpress.com/

The Couch

I've had fun with fiction lately, so here's one more....

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“Are you satisfied, now?” she screamed at me before the cops took her away, her hands cuffed behind her back as they forced her head down to get her into the backseat of their sleek black car, grimaces on their faces and a haunted expression in their eyes.

No, I thought. No, I’m not and this is not what I really wanted. But, what choice did I have?

Angela is my mom. Angela, the woman who had just been arrested and taken to wherever they were taking her… Yep, that’s her. My mother. The person who brought me in to this world and who is constantly threatening to take me out of it. Jokingly threatening. I think.

Angela hasn’t ever really had her act together. I mean, does anybody every really have it together? We all thought Martha Stewart was the model of female perfection or some shit and even she went to prison, so I try to reserve judgment… But, let’s just say that Angela has seen her fair share of trouble at least in my lifetime. Check fraud. Identity theft. Shoplifting. Possession of methamphetamines. Solicitation in some of her worst times. Assault. Battery. Car theft. Larceny. It’s a long list.

Most of the time when I was younger, I was in and out of foster homes while she was in prison or rehab or wherever she ended up to try to “fix” whatever it was that is broken with her, that made her do these things and choose that lifestyle over being a mom. I used to resent her for it--for showing up at my school randomly with her stringy bleach blond hair wearing tube tops and reeking like an ashtray that hadn’t been dumped or cleaned in a year, for never being there for me when I was sick with the flu, for always being focused on the next scheme instead of trying to get a real job and take care of me the way mothers are supposed to. There were some nights when I absolutely hated her especially those nights when I would cry and beg one of my longest foster fathers, Jim, not to hit me anymore and still go to bed hurting so bad I couldn’t even stand the covers touching me. There were other nights that she was the only person in the world that I wanted and the less she was there for me, the more empty I felt and the more I despised her…

The older I got the more I understood that there were times she really tried to do her best, but she was fucked up from the start. She wasn’t hardwired for a normal life and the drugs just made that worse. I don’t know if she really could have stayed inside her own head for too long without killing herself anyway. From the bits and pieces I’ve been able to put together over the years, her life makes my own look like a fairytale sitcom full of punny jokes and rainbows and silliness and ponies.

You know how they say that if we all put our problems into a big pile we’d gladly take back our own after seeing everyone else’s? That’s exactly how I feel about Angela. After understanding more about what she went through as a kid, I could see why she couldn’t be there for me. Knowing that the only reason she got pregnant with me at all was because she was raped by one of her junkie friends made me understand even more why she never really felt that motherly instinct towards me. How could she? I don’t even know that I could have done the same thing in her shoes….having the baby, staying clean for the pregnancy, making that effort…so somewhere down in that tangled mess that was her soul, she wanted me and she fought like hell to bring me into this world, as she would say. She had to’ve. There’s no other explanation for my existence. There’s no reason why she wouldn’t have pulled one of her quick schemes to at least get enough cash to have an abortion. That would have been the easiest solution, right? So on some level, she and I were bonded from the beginning…I just couldn’t see it back then.

I didn’t really come to that realization until the last couple of years. I’m 24 now, so I spent a lot of time, too many years, angry about it all. Confused, hurt, pissed, full of hate, depressed, unable to cope, barely functioning. And, I knew that if I ever wanted to get past it all, I needed to figure some things out or I was going to be just like her. That’s when I started asking around about her, talking to my grandma (who wasn’t really much of a mom herself) and then to the social worker Angela had as a kid when she was in and out of foster homes herself. I finally understood. After all that time, I finally got it. I got why she was so fucked up, and it made me sad for her. For the first time in my life, I stopped feeling sorry for myself and felt it for her instead.

So, I reached out. In a moment of pure emotional vulnerability, I reached out. Like a fucking idiot. And she took advantage.

At first when I found her again after not talking to her for a couple of years, we’d do lunch every now and then. She didn’t seem high. She’d be clean and dressed at least semi-decently. She would definitely still qualify for People of Walmart, but it wasn’t as bad as when I was a kid, so I overlooked it. I didn’t want to talk much about the past, but she did….she would always ask me if I remembered times with her like the day we went to the park in a thunderstorm and all the rain washed out the cheap dye she had in her hair until it pretty much covered her face. I wouldn’t come to her for hours and ran screaming from her until another woman at the park called the cops thinking my mom was trying to kidnap me. I guess she was trying to point out that they weren’t always bad memories, but even the good ones were pretty fucking horrifying. I did remember that day. Well. I really thought a giant monster was after me and had already eaten her face…but all she could do was laugh. And even all these years later she was still pretty clueless about what qualified as a good memory. Sure, she was still laughing about it now, but even the thought of it still made me squirm in my seat and made her laugh even harder.

Still, I felt like I was getting to know her for the first time, and I felt bad for her, but at the same time, I thought I saw a glimpse of who she could be, and I wanted to help her. So, the lunches became more frequent, then it was dinner, then I was taking her grocery shopping, then she was coming to my apartment and sleeping on the couch here and there and then a few times a week then more often than not. She was a walking fucking disaster, but she was still my mom, and I felt like if someone finally just accepted her for who she was and showed her unconditional love, it would fix her. It would finally just fix her. What I didn’t realize is that Angela couldn’t be fixed. Angela wasn’t really broken…she was no longer human, not in the sense that I am or that the lady in the downstairs corner apartment that volunteers at the homeless shelter is… There was no humanity left which meant there was nothing left in Angela to repair.

I started noticing some strange things around the house especially when I’d try to clean up Angela’s clutter. Digging through the couch cushions was a nightmare. Seriously. Food scraps, unidentifiable wads of gooey fuzzballs, her bras—still sweaty sometimes, dirt, cigarette butts even though she didn’t smoke in my apartment…all manner of grossness. But, then I’d find someone else’s driver’s license. Mens’ licenses. Pocket watches. There would be a random shirt that I knew wouldn’t fit her thrown in the mix. But, she hadn’t had any men at my place. I never allowed her there when I wasn’t to the point that I got up early before work just to drop her off wherever she needed to be. I mean, she was still Angela, right?

I asked her about it. Of course, I did. And she said she didn’t know what I was talking about. She denied ever having seen them. Of course, she did. So I dropped it. I think, at the time, part of me didn’t want to know what it was about because I wanted to believe that I was having a positive effect on her, and I didn’t want to see that she was back to the same routines. So, instead of facing it and really questioning her about it, I just let it go and pushed it to the back of my brain.

And now I have to wonder if I could have stopped it sooner if I’d pressed her harder…I have to wonder if I could have saved lives. If I could have prevented a child from losing his father, a wife from losing her husband…

Right about that time, there were several stories on the news about missing men in the area. A preacher, a salesman, a truck driver… More would go missing before it was all over. Bodies turned up at rest stops and along the Interstate. I didn’t put two and two together at the time. I should have, but I ignored it all to be honest. Angela was bringing me gifts every now and then and she just seemed happier. Better. Almost like a real mom. She even took ME out to dinner once or twice over the next few weeks.

And then today I found a driver’s license for a name I recognized. Henry Dern. The news had done a quick mention of him being missing just this morning. It’s Saturday. I’m off and thought I’d catch up on my cleaning. I watched the news this morning while I had my coffee then put on a record, The Kills actually…ironically, and went to work. The couch reeked like her. I had pretty much resigned myself to getting a new one eventually when she got to a point where she didn’t need a place to stay anymore. IF she ever got to that point. I cleaned out the cushions while she was in the shower, and there it was. The man whose face I had just seen on the news. Middle aged. Gray hair at the temples but otherwise ruddy brown hair. Pock-marked skin but clean shaven. Brown eyes with deep crow’s feet at the corners. It was him. Henry Dern. And my mother had his driver’s license.

When she came out, towel wrapped in her hair, I jammed the license in my back pocket and put the couch back together. I was done cleaning for the day.

Why did my mother have a missing man’s driver’s license? What about the other licenses and the stuff and the money? It didn’t take long to put the pieces together. I had saved all those licenses, all the stuff. I don’t know why I did, but I guess something told me I should, so I went to the bathroom closet and pulled the Ziploc bag full of these things from behind the Tylenol and Benadryl and started looking up the names on Google. Every single one of them had been reported missing. Some of the bodies that had been found had been identified as these men. There were at least 7 licenses here counting Henry. 7 men.

I called the police still sitting on my bed staring at the laptop screen. I told them everything I knew, the names of the men on the licenses, where I’d found them, who my mother was, what I had, where we were. They transferred me to the detective working the case, and I had to repeat it all over again. And then again before he finally said he was on the way. When I hung up the phone, I immediately ran to the bathroom and threw up.

My mouth still tastes like bitter bile.

Angela came to check on me, and I said I was fine, but I’m not fine. I ran out of the bathroom holding the license that had still been in my back pocket, tears in my eyes, and I screamed at her, “what the fuck did you do, Angela?! What the fuck did you do?”

She took off then, and I chased her, but neither of us got far before running into the detectives working the case.

I’m sitting on the sidewalk outside after watching them take my mother away waiting on the crime scene people to “process” my apartment. My space. Because I was letting a serial killer sleep on my couch apparently.

Am I satisfied? I bark out a laugh thinking about what she asked as they took her way. Satisfied? HA. My mom was just arrested for very likely killing at least 7 men. I called the police on my own mother and not for the first time. I watched her being arrested. Again. The only satisfaction I am ever going to get out of this is being able to burn that fucking couch.

Thanks once again for reading my Sunday Confessions contribution. Head over to More Than Cheese and Beer to read the rest of the submissions and check out the Facebook page for anonymous confessions as well.