Okay guys, I’m trying something a little
different, here. I love to write fiction, but I have a horrid habit of starting
stories that do not finish. I figure I can use the very few readers of this
blog to motivate me to complete my work. I’ll post whatever I get done here.
Then I’ll be motivated to post the next piece because you will ALL WANT to read
the next section…. Right? ….. Well , it’s worth a shot.
THESE ARE VERY ROUGH DRAFTS. I haven’t edited
these pages out loud, and probably wouldn’t hand them into a creative writing
workshop. Also the writing may plain suck; I haven’t been graded on my fiction
in a long time! In any case, read it criticize or don’t. This A Story I’m work
on called "She and Adam." Again it is just the first seven pages. I have to keep writing
She didn’t know what she was doing. How do
you write about someone like him? How do you tell the world about the
injustices he suffered, and tell them how loved he was? How do you describe how
horrific and fantastic it was to be a part of his life? Her undergrad degree in
creative writing, that the dean of the University of Massachusetts had handed
her six and a half years earlier, hadn’t
prepared her for the emotional ride an author takes when writing words that
tear at their heart. She had never wanted to write about what happen. She never
wanted to think about it again, and she wouldn’t have either, but her dad had
asked her to try to tell Adam’s story, and her dad had never asked her for
anything. So she opened up a word document with her brother’s name in the
header, and did what her favorite professor always told her to do, she started at the beginning.
Adam Joseph Miller was born on July
12, 1987, exactly three months after I turned six. The sister between us,
Bailey, was three and much less happy than I was about the arrival of our new
sibling. She had always been very attached to mom, and often became
inconsolable after ten minutes of her unexplained absence. It had been ten
hours. I remember Aunt Diane attempting
to calm with sleep in her eyes, “Go to bed now, and next time you see your
mama, she’ll be holding the baby!” “You’ll be a big sister now, too!” I said,
trying to help, nothing worked. It’s
surprising to me now that Bailey is the most well adjusted person in our
family. When Adam’s life began to unravel, we all worried the most about her.
She had a ringside seat, and a habit of blaming herself for things she couldn’t
control.
After making sure Bailey was
asleep, My aunt, who always went out of
her way to make me feel like I was her favorite, told me I could sleep in her
bed, in case news of the baby’s birth came in the middle of night. It did. True to character, Adam entered the
world at 2:35 AM. Aunt Diane took us to
the hospital right after breakfast. I was so excited to meet him that I
demanded it. I ran straight to my dad because I knew Bailey would make a
bee-line for mom and I didn’t want to get caught the cross-fire. “The biggest
sister!” he half-whispered enthusiastically as he picked me up, “Mom had a
little boy; you have a brother.” He laid
me next to my mom who kissed me softly on the forehead three times, like
always, and I saw him. My brother! His arms
already had rings of fat around them, and his eyes were wide open. Bailey was
snuggled into mom’s other shoulder, she asked to hold him first. Apparently,
all the “I don’t want a new baby”, feelings from the night before had
disappeared. She sang “You are my Sunshine”,
to him and then it was my turn. I kissed
`and kissed and kissed his cheeks! Both
my sister and I were both as in love with him as we’d ever been with anybody or
anything. For a year, almost every
interaction I had with Bailey was fighting over him. We fought over who sat
closest to him at the dinner table, which one of us got to hold him while mom
vacuumed the house; we even wanted to help change his diapers. If you had told
me then that, eighteen years later, Bailey would be helplessly begging me to
take Adam off her hands; I would have thought you were insane. In fact, if you
had told me that story a year before in happened, I would have thought you were
insane.
Just writing about his birth took her three
hours. She kept pausing to wipe away tears.
She was dreading the moment when she would have to stop writing about
the little brother she loved and start writing about the stranger he’d become.
It seemed impossible. She shut her
laptop and walked the kitchen. She didn’t really need coffee; she was probably
too awake. Her husband and daughter were asleep though, and she needed a break,
something to do that required no thought—so she filled the coffee pot with
water and emptied it into the machine. She poured coffee granules into the
filter and pushed the red button. She didn’t however stop thinking. She was
suddenly livid. The brother she knew had left her a long time ago, and she
wondered if his ghost deserved this. Dad refused to admit it, but Adam had
shamed the family—wrecked their name. He had devastated lives, he had ended
one. He broke her heart, Bailey’s heart. Marcus wasn’t a good guy, but he was
some mother’s son. No mother deserves
the pain of burying their baby. No matter how much he hurt her sister, Marcus
didn’t deserve to die. She smacked the counter in anger, and then she sat
down. For the first time all night she was not
consumed with Adam, she was thinking about Maria. Her four year old daughter
had never met Adam and of course, she wouldn’t. This idea made quietly sob for
a while, but then, oddly, it motivated her.
Maria would undoubtedly read about what happened one day, and if she
only read the words of writers who didn’t know her uncle, it would be very easy
for her to believe that she was related to a monster. That couldn’t happen. She
tippy-toed down the hallway into her baby’s room and kissed her on the forehead
three times. “For you, little girl, for
you and for dad.” She accidently whispered. She was sad, frightened and she
felt sick, but she didn’t need a third reason to tell Adam’s story.
I hate it, but over the years
Adam and Bailey grew closer to one another than either one of them was to
me. This was partly because of
personality. They were both warmer than
I am. I was driven; I didn’t have time to be warm. They confided in each other
because they knew I’d scoff and tell them to get over it. I constantly
encouraged them to push on, the way I had. When I was eleven, Bailey was badly
bullied by another girl. She kicked Bailey and called her hideous while a
couple of other kids watched. I remember that word, because after school,
Bailey asked me, “Do you think I’m hideous?” I said, “Mom and dad hate when people
fish for compliments. Tomorrow nobody will call you anything.” Adam
told her she was beautiful. He told her that Melanie was jealous of her pretty red
hair. I was telling the truth, Mom and Dad had always preached that being
self-deprecating was self-serving. He
told the more important truth. Bailey was beautiful. At five and eight, Adam
and Bailey already knew something it took me a marriage and a pregnancy to
learn. Most of the time people fish for compliments because they need them, and
sometimes they deserve them. I’ll never understand why some people are just
born with huge amounts of compassion, and why some of us have to work so hard
at it. I’m not a cold person. I guess, I
wasn’t born with the gift of knowing what to say, so I try not to say anything.
She
highlighted and deleted the sentence, “I write my emotions down, and throw them
away.” Whoever was publishing this
wouldn’t care about the way her mind worked; she didn’t kill anybody.
My brother and sister became even
closer when Mom was diagnosed with stage -three Breast Cancer. I at the tale-end of my freshmen year of college,
and decided after spending four days at home with my sick mother, that I needed
to take summer classes. I couldn’t face what might happen to our family, so
Adam and Bailey faced it together. It was only in the wake of Marcus’s murder
that my dad told me how much how hard my siblings had it. I inherited my
refusal to handle heartache from my dad. He shut down. He restored cars for hours after working the overtime he’d
requested, and then he came inside, sat on the couch, watched re-runs of ‘60’s
sitcoms, and drank a little beer. Adam
drove Mom to her chemo treatments and Bailey held her hair back while she vomited
the medicine that was supposed to be healing her. Our
Mom fought bravely for two years, and then one night my dad called me and told
me to drive home. When I got there Bailey was feeding her ice-chips and Adam
was doing his best to make her laugh.
They saw her through cancer and at
the end, when we all knew mom couldn’t hang on anymore, it was Adam who held
her hand, and gave her our permission to leave us. Bailey hugged him and kissed
her; she thanked our mother. I leaned down let my mom kiss my forehead three
times and made an inadequate excuse to leave the room. Mom died at one twenty-three in the morning
on August 30, 2002. Adam was barely fifteen. He was never okay again. I thought
for a long time, that our entire family would never be okay again. Contrary to
what most people tell you though, a family can be okay without being whole.
Where did she go next? Bailey meeting
Marcus? To the day she realized her brother was capable of evil? Did she want
Maria to hear that story? Too many questions swirled around her; she couldn’t
write anymore tonight. She climbed into
bed and pulled Nick’s arm over her. Normally, she liked to sleep with plenty of
space between her and her husband, but tonight she needed to feel him. His
presence had calmed her down and warmed her up since they met at twenty. She felt so fortunate when he pulled her in a
little tighter. He knew she needed him.
At three o’clock that morning she fell asleep not wondering why mental illness
happened to people as wonderful as Adam.
Instead she was wondering why some women meet men like Nick so young,
and others , ones as wonderful as her little sister, have to meet men like
Marcus.
When she woke up the next morning she had a
text message from Chrissie asking her what day would be best to meet for lunch.
Chrissie was where she’d go next.
One of my best friends from college
lost her mother in a car accident when she was thirteen. She was in the back
seat of a mini-van when a semi-truck’s force threw her mom through the
windshield, killing her almost instantly. Firemen had to pull Chrissie from the
wreckage. She has two jagged, long, white scars on her tan, shapely legs that
serve permanent reminders of the day her mom passed away. Her father offered to
pay for a treatment that would make them less noticeable, but Chrissie told him
to save his money. She said one night, after three daiquiris that the scars
were the last things she and her mom got together, and that she was afraid that
if they faded, her memory might fade a bit along with them. Of course, after
three drinks, it didn’t come out quite like that.
Chrissie graduated as valedictorian
of UMass nursing school and went on to become a nurse practitioner. She moved
to Manhattan and is engaged to a man who could be an underwear model but chooses
to work as a civil engineer instead. She is by far my most successful friend,
and one of my happiest, too.
Chrissie’s life was much more
traumatic my little brother’s. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I knew it got to
her. The day she graduated, I found her crying in the fetal position in the
backseat of her car. The seemingly endless string of boys she took home until
she met her fiancé had to be filling of some kind of void but Chrissie moved
on. After all that, she persevered.
Adam had time to prepare for mom’s
death. We all had the luxury for which Chrissie spent years longing, a chance
to say goodbye. For years, I was so
angry Adam—and sometimes I still am. It didn’t make sense that our mother’s
losing her battle with cancer could be the beginning of his end while Chrissie
did so well. She had better reason to be mad at the world.
Now, I understand something that
makes me angry with myself. When Adam lost mom, he lost the only person who recognized
that he felt differently than most… the only person who saw that he was ill. He
hid it from the rest of flawlessly and he wanted to be discovered.
She took out her phone told Chrissie Tuesday
worked, and added an uncharacteristic “I’m so excited to see you!! XXOO” to her
text. She was always glad to get
together with Chrissie, but today she felt like Chrissie just might need to
know it. Maybe, she thought, there is a tiny
piece of every kid who had to grow up to fast—happy or not, that wants to be
discovered.
My family went to several doctors
in the wake of what my father will probably always refer to as “that day”; we
wanted to understand Adam. The problem was, Adam didn’t fit into any boxes. He
was “overly cautious” but not quite paranoid. He had signs of mania, but they would
not call him manic. He lied a lot but
they weren’t sure if it was pathological or deliberate. He had psychotic
episodes—“moments when he lost with touch with reality” but seemed “generally
aware of his surroundings of his actions.” According to the shrinks, Adam had a
personality disorder, NDS: Not Otherwise
Diagnosed. How the hell were we supposed to handle to understand that? It’s
not shocking that Adam couldn’t understand himself.
