LaShanna Adams
Dr. Mitchell
Engl 3200
17 November 2008
The Day That Changed Everything and Nothing
I wish I could tell you before this story ever begins that it’s going to be all flowers, happiness, and all of that great fairytale nonsense that everyone seems to want from a story. Actually, on second thought, I’m glad I can’t say that it will absolutely beyond a doubt make you smile; I think those kind of endings are completely contrived and in no way portray what really happens in life. The reality is the good guy doesn’t always win, the princess doesn’t always kiss the right frog, and little girls aren’t always the apple of daddy’s eye. I guess that’s where this story begins, or maybe where it ends. Honestly, I’m not even sure where things begin and end anymore.
I guess let me start by introducing myself (seems like you should know a little about me if you’re going to read about my warped existence). My name is Mercy and I’m eighteen-years-old. I’m not going to give you any details about how I look, for all I know some old perv could be reading this right now and I refuse to let you make me your mental eye candy for the night. So just leave it at my name is Mercy, I’m eighteen, and I guess you could say I’m a little jaded by this world already. Alright, I guess I could let you in on a few more details about myself if you’re really going to get the full picture here. Let’s see… I’m the oldest of four, my mom is a single parent, and my dad isn’t really much of a parent at all. Really, that’s all you need to know as far a background goes.
Okay, let’s get to the heart of things here. There’s no sense in skirting around the story you’re interested in. You want to know how the little girl in the picture holding onto her dad’s finger and smiling can be so different now. You want to know what happened. The short answer is life happened. Things just don’t always turn out the way we want them to. Things aren’t always within our control (that’s the real catch). But the short answer isn’t really much of a story now is it? So here goes, here’s the whole thing laid out for you. Maybe you’ll be able to make better sense of it that I can.
I guess things really begin some time ago when my dad decided love was something that he could just transfer from one woman to another without so much as a glance back. I think his actual words to my mom were something like “I don’t love you anymore. I found somebody new and I love her now.” Funny how love of human beings seems a lot like toys when it’s talked about in that way. I remember when I was little I would neglect Malibu Barbie if I got a new holiday edition Barbie for Christmas. But it seems like love between real people should be different from the love a little girl has toward new Barbie dolls. Call me crazy, I just thought things should be happier than that in real life. Women shouldn’t be the kind of object of desire that can be discarded like that Malibu Barbie was. But there it was, my mom, the Malibu Barbie (though she didn’t really look like a Barbie or anything), thrown to the side because my dad had managed to get a new style for Christmas, the slut version (I guess they never really made that Barbie huh? Maybe that’s an idea to send to Mattel). I mean she is a slut in so many ways but lets just start with the fact that he met her in the strip club where she danced. I don’t think she was even pretty enough to be one of the weekend girls, she was probably just one of the sluts they popped up on the stage in the Tuesday afternoon time slot when no one there is really expecting to see a naked goddess. But I guess the issue I never had to deal with when it came to getting new Barbie dolls was what to do with all of the miniature Barbie dolls clutching onto the hem of Malibu Barbie’s sarong. Then again, I guess my dad didn’t really concern himself with this either. I guess he figured my mom was resourceful enough to figure it out for herself.
And that’s really where he left things. Maybe when he decided to stop loving my mom he forgot that you can’t really discard kids the way you can a wife. Or maybe you can… after all, that’s basically what he did. Hmm… maybe the four of us were like the Garbage Pail Babies to him and he figured we would just stink everything up anyways. Sorry, I guess I really liked my childhood toys. Anyway, when I say he discarded us I mean he really had no interest in us at all. He suddenly forgot every birthday and every holiday. I used to think it was the slut controlling him but come on let’s be serious, she’s a slut how much of a brain does she really have to manipulate people with?
So in the midst of my mom raising us all by herself there was another huge issue; my brother, Gabe, was quite possibly the spawn of Satan himself. I mean it, he was absolutely terrifying. It was as though a cloud of destruction and chaos surrounded him. He was mean, strong, and angry most of the time. Don’t get me wrong, we had our moments; he would always tell me if something looked bad on me and he would always offer backup vocals on the most ridiculous songs. But then there were the other times and they seemed to overshadow everything else. I remember plenty of fights that would begin out of nowhere and end with Gabe throwing a right hook and hitting me square in the jaw. I don’t think it ever occurred to Gabe that boys aren’t supposed to hit girls or maybe it did and he just didn’t care. I guess that’s one of those things dads should be there to teach their sons.
So somewhere along the way, when I was about thirteen and Gabe was about eleven, my absent father decided it would be a brilliant move for Gabe to live with him for a while. And in what I can only assume was shear desperation for a way to fix Gabe my mom agreed to let him go. I remember the day we took him to the airport, I wondered then if the decision was really the right way to go. But Gabe had failed the sixth grade and wasn’t letting up on his mission to destroy us all and so it seemed like the only real answer.
My relationships with my dad and Gabe only seemed to get worse after that. I remember one night a few months after Gabe left getting a phone call in which he told me that he was going to have someone come outside my window and shoot me because he wanted me dead. I’m telling you, this was the spawn of Satan at age eleven. Of course, this was nothing that he could really make happen, he was at least a thousand miles away and didn’t really know anybody where we were. If he were closer I might have been a little scared, remember this is the spawn of Satan we’re dealing with.
So all of a sudden, things got quiet. We didn’t hear from my dad, we didn’t hear from Gabe. Their phone had been disconnected, and they didn’t respond to letters. It was very quiet but the silence wasn’t very welcome. In spite of the awful father he had been I missed my dad. In spite of the demon that he was, I missed Gabe. And I didn’t really trust the slut at all. She was… is (some things remain constant and reliable) absolutely nuts. She has nine personalities and only one of them actually likes my dad. One of the slut’s personalities is supposedly a seventeen-year-old nympho who likes my dad for only one purpose (I don’t know why I know this. I wish I didn’t). Believe me the slut really has multiple personalities; you can’t make that stuff up. Much to my dad’s benefit, the doctors keep the slut well medicated these days. During that year of silence I imagined all sorts of fates for my dad, I imagined that the slut had managed to kill him and was keeping my brother locked up somewhere. I imagined that I would never see them again and I would never really know what happened to them. I would lie in bed and plot my revenge against the slut; I knew she was somehow responsible for all of this.
Finally, after about a year of silence, my mom decided that we would make the drive from our home in Florida to Virginia where they supposedly were to find them during the summer that I was fourteen. The drive was long and left plenty of time to conjure up ideas about what we would find when we got there. My mom had obviously spent time conjuring up her own horror stories too because before we got to the last address we had for them she called the local police station to let them know where we were going and why we were going there as an added security.
As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way this place looked when we pulled up. I remember the weather was hot, it was early August and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, it was a bright, beautiful day. The brightness and beauty seemed ironic in light of what had brought us to this place. The apartment building that we pulled up to looked run down and relatively vacant. It sat on a huge sandy lot. You could see the shore but somehow it lacked that beauty and majesty you usually associate with the ocean, instead it seemed dull and lifeless. It was strange but you almost expected a tumbleweed to roll past you and toward the water.
Anyway, we pulled up to this place and just sat in the van trying to decide if we were even at the right place. That’s when I saw the most disturbing image of my entire life. It was like something out of some pathetic Lifetime movie or something. My mom noticed my brother walking down the hallway on the first floor. I guess she suddenly got overwhelmed with emotion and screamed Gabe’s name out the window. Now this is the terrifying part that still haunts my nightmares… Gabe turned his head and looked right at us as he continued to walk past us and up the stairs and disappeared into an apartment. I swear, the way he only turned his head as he kept his body straight and continued to walk looked like something straight out of a Chucky movie. It was disquieting to say the least. I think we all just stayed glued to our spots for a few minutes in complete disbelief of what had just happened.
After the shock wore off, we all got out of the van and went to the door that Gabe had disappeared through shortly before. I don’t think anything could have prepared us for what was past that door. There was my dad, a good sixty to a hundred pounds heavier than he was the last time I had seen him. His hair was receding badly but he had grown the back out and had it pulled into a pathetic ponytail. He was wearing sweats and a t-shirt that barely covered the fat beneath it. Now what you need to understand is that my dad is one of the vainest people you will ever meet in your life. When I was a kid, he wouldn’t even go check the mail without a shower and cologne. He may not have been dead like I had imagined but he was definitely not the man smiling and holding my hand in those surreal pictures from a time that seemed far gone and definitely lost now. The apartment was small and a complete mess. Gabe was firmly planted in a dilapidated chair, the arms were almost completely detached and it looked like someone had tried to flatten it like a pancake. Apparently, it was the only thing he was allowed to sit on because he was the one who broke it. Somehow, by shear luck we had managed to arrive shortly after the slut had left to go run some errands. I imagined at the time that this wasn’t actually the truth and that my dad had finally gotten sick of her insanity and gotten rid of her for good. I liked that version much better. I always used to do that back when I used to believe in hope; I would make up some version of the truth that was in a lot of ways worse than the actual truth but better for my own peace of mind. Just to give you a good example, when my dad brought the slut to meet us for the first time (I think I was ten or eleven) I imagined that she wasn’t actually his girlfriend but some woman that he had paid to pretend just so that he could upset my mom. Now I know now that this imagined reality was much more warped than the truth but I just didn’t want to believe that my dad had really moved on from us and so this story seemed to work better for me back then. I try to avoid doing this kind of thing now but I have to admit that the tendency still creeps in from time to time. I mean I still wish the slut would disappear off the face of the earth even though I know she’s all my dad has anymore. Anyhow, let me get back to the real story here, that day that changed things.
I heard all kinds of stories that day. I heard about all of the reasons that we hadn’t heard from them. The story we got was that the slut had convinced them that my mom had hired a hit man for a million dollars to kill my dad (meanwhile we didn’t even have twenty extra dollars since he wasn’t even paying child support) and that they were in hiding. There were other stories too about where we kids were and what we were doing but those weren’t as great as my mom’s hit man was so I won’t bore you with those now. I guess I really need to be concerned about my dad’s sanity in all of this. I mean, who really believes some psychotic slut who tells you that someone actually wants you dead to the tune of one million dollars? I gotta wonder though, was he a little crazy before the slut came around or is she the source of insanity? I guess I want it to be all her fault. I want her to be some extraterrestrial creature that is just sucking the life force out of my dad and I want to be the one to kill her. But the truth is my dad was probably crazy long before he chose a crazy slut to spend his time with. She probably holds little blame past the fact that she’s a crazy slut.
The visit was surreal in every sense of the word and I can only hope that you have managed to get a small idea of what it felt like to be there from what I’ve told you. It was crazy, I’m glad it only happened once.
After that, things were better for a while. Gabe moved home shortly after the visit and after a long period of adjustment, lots of holes in the walls of our home, and maturing he managed to calm down a bit. I wish I could say things changed with my dad after that but they didn’t really. He still only calls when he feels like it. I feel like sometimes I only tolerate him because I’m afraid he’s going to snap if I don’t humor him and give him the kid glove treatment.
I don’t know if I can really say that that day changed my life. I know it’s the day I will never forget. I know that it has slowly replaced the other days I used to remember like the day we spent at the park with my dad and mom together before the slut made her appearance. I know that it made me feel pity for my dad. For the first time I realized the best thing he could have done for my family was leave. We did much better without him.
Like I said though, this story isn’t going to give you happy endings. I don’t know if it will give you any ending at all. I mean after all, I’m only eighteen; things could change all over again. I know that this day helped make me the cynic that I am. I think it was easier when I thought my dad was missing, at least then I could pretend that he had wanted to keep in touch with us but just couldn’t. The realization that he was fine and had just decided to let us go was a much harsher reality. I still hold out hope that our relationship will be restored, maybe he’ll change or maybe I’ll change and decide to let him back in. I guess I want him around for silly things like giving me away at my wedding someday ( of course I guess he really gave me away a long time ago when he left the others and me clinging to the hem of Malibu Barbie’s sarong). I want him to be around but I also just want to be happy. I want to trust people. I don’t really know how much this will all change as I get older, adults are always telling me that I’ll change my mind a lot as I get older ( I don’t know how much I buy that). Right now I just know that the day that I realized my dad just didn’t care enough to fight to keep up with us is the day that I realized that fairytale endings are complete crap. That’s the day I realized that frogs are always just frogs, good guys don’t always win, and daddies don’t always care.