Late in the afternoon, a female officer from the Houston P.D. drops by the house. At first, she seems interested in my story. But in the course of the telling I mention that I’m getting a divorce. With these words the pen and notepad are discreetly tucked away. She’ll try to remember everything I say.
Staring at the notepad in her pocket, I point out that a big time methamphetamine chemist for whose arrest I was responsible is now out on bond. He has made repeated threats against my life. He has broken into my house and installed an eavesdropping device. The officer smiles. It’s all part of a nasty divorce, and the listening device is a baby monitor. Boiled down to law enforcement jargon, “It’s a civil matter, which means there isn’t much we can do.”
“Breaking and entering isn’t a civil matter,” I say. “He used your wife’s key, right? So there was no ‘breaking,’” she says, four fingers clawing in the air for quotes. Need she say more? No, she needn’t. “A detective will be getting in touch with you tomorrow,” she says on her way out. “Maybe a restraining order or even a protective order would be appropriate.”
But the next day, no one from the Houston P.D. calls, no one comes by. If my brains are dashed away in my sleep, I ask myself, will it be the same anemic police force investigating my demise?
Clyde, I learn in the meantime, has a real gift for terror. He lets me know he’s been lurking about in subtle yet unmistakable ways – a necktie hanging from the rearview mirror in my locked car, the end of the tie lopped off…a rifle target of a human silhouette taped to the front door of my house. Coming home from work one day, I find on the foyer floor a Polaroid of my wife at the height of her chemical madness. In the photo, she wears camo-fatigues and aims a high-powered rifle at one of the human targets on the ranch. The picture is dated, I note, as Lucille is not showing. She stands before the dam on the ranch in profile, looking resolute, enraged, and horribly skinny – Clyde’s first lieutenant in his lunatic militia. He wants me to know that my world has turned against me because I have turned against him, that he can do whatever he wants whenever he wants, that I am at the mercy of a madman and his mad girlfriend / recruit, who happens to be my wife. On each of these scores, I must admit, he is correct. He is also effective.
The effect on me is not merely psychological, but physical. Upon waking up one morning, I am suddenly taken by an overwhelming lethargy. It’s more than ordinary fatigue, as my vision is tunnel-like, and I feel a general numbness in my extremities. As I get out of bed and head for the shower, I sense that I’m not a part of my immediate surroundings; it’s as though reality itself is somehow surreal, the edges blurred, the colors washed away. Tactile sensation is eerily vague, my dissociation nearly complete.
I call work to tell them I won’t be in, and head straight for the doctor’s office, where a nurse takes my temperature and checks my blood pressure. The first blood pressure reading is “ridiculously high,” almost higher than she’s ever seen. So she takes another. Her eyelashes flutter as she pulls her stethoscope from her ears. “Mr. Braswell,” she says, “your blood pressure is…190 over 160…”
The doctor comes in, takes a reading himself, and immediately orders a drug regimen that includes a beta blocker, a calcium channel blocker, and an ACE inhibitor. After a few more tests, he discovers that I am in the throes of renal failure. Dialysis certainly lies in my future, and possibly a kidney transplant. It appears that the hospital will be my home away from home from this day forward.
“What’s going on with you, Sterling?” he says as he pushes himself on his wheeled stool away from my table. Unlike the Houston P.D., he seems to be deeply curious.
“It’s a long, sad story, doc,” I say.
“Let’s hear it.”
And so I begin, condensing the entirety down to a minute or so. When I finish, he appears stricken. My heart instantly attaches itself to this busy old man who recognizes a well-spent two minutes. Suddenly I feel as though I am about to break down, begin crying uncontrollably. The doctor’s expression seems to suggest that this might be a good thing.
I feel the tears rise up, crest, then subside. Don’t want to head down that path. Once I do, there will be no end to it.
“You need to get out of Houston,” he murmurs. “If your wife’s crazy friends don’t kill you, the stress of the situation will.”
“Unfortunately a living must be made – or, in my case, remade,” I say.
He shakes his head. “There is no living to be made if you’re not alive.”
“I have a gun.”
“Oh, my,” he groans. “I don’t see this ending happily.”
While lying awake in my hospital bed a few nights later, the phone rings just before midnight. Lucille’s mother informs me that I am the father of a baby boy. “Eight pounds, nine ounces,” she says. “Perfectly healthy, perfectly content. Lucille calls him ‘Carter’” Click.
My ambivalence about all that has transpired dampens – but does not wholly diminish – my reflexive sense of joy. It occurs to me that a paternity test should be done, but then I realize that I want the child, whether or not he’s mine. In the meantime, I’m discharged from the hospital. My strength isn’t entirely back, and I feel frail in a most general sense, as if my kidneys are held together by strands of glass. Three days later, there’s a knock at the door. I thrust myself to my feet and hobble down the stairs in my bathrobe. Lucille’s mother stands in the doorway with the baby tightly wrapped in a blanket like a burrito.
“Looks like I gotta raise one of my grandchildren all by myself now,” she yaps as she hands over little Carter, “and I’m too old to be-a raisin’ another!”
“Can’t say I blame you,” I remark.
“Better get some diapers and formula,” she says before strutting off for the Lexus that was once mine, then her daughter’s, and now, apparently, hers.
I look down at the tiny sleeping eyes, feel the ghostly weight in my arms. There’s no doubt the boy is mine.
“Welcome to Planet Earth, Carter,” I whisper as I pet his faint, pale hair. “My name is Sterling, and my life is a mess.”
Perhaps it is mere ego, or the reality that I’ve been given something after so much has been stripped away. Maybe it’s that overriding instinct of general good cheer indigenous to every new parent that overwhelms even the bleakest circumstance. Whatever it is, it washes over the place in my brain that was once a simple void with a weird, foreign happiness. If only I were well, I tell myself. But well or not, Carter is utterly helpless. I make a few phone calls, and soon friends appear, as though arriving for a long-planned baby shower.
The incoherent childhood, so I’ve been told, is the germ of the unhappy adult. Looking down on my son, this is what I fear most. His mother is inextricably bound up in both of our lives, and she is all about chaos. But I am discovering that some problems solve themselves, or are at least replaced by new problems.
From early on, Lucille makes it clear that childrearing is not a natural inclination of hers. In those initial postnatal months, she comes by only once. Late one morning, there’s a sharp knock on the door, and there she stands, grim and furious, here, she says, “to visit her child” if that’s all right with me.
All traces of her former tranquility have been vanquished, replaced by jittery rage. She doesn’t seem high, yet her eyes are glazed, as though the lenses themselves seek to shield her heart from the sight she’s about to behold. She has become another person, an angry victim, furious at what’s been done to her, but vague as to just what that is. Her weight enhances her fierce, brittle posture. A mere month after having given birth, she probably weighs a hundred pounds.
I lead Lucille into the nursery where Carter is sleeping, and we look down on him together from either side of the basinet. She extends her bony little finger to Carter’s tiny hand, and Carter instinctively takes it in his sleep. Tears tumble over Lucille’s cheeks and are instantly absorbed into the bedding. “Your mommy loves you, Carter,” she mouths. “Don’t ever forget about me…”
She then withdraws her finger, and walks out of the room and out of the house. I follow her outside and call to her as she staggers down the street toward her car.
“Where can I find you?” I yell after her.
She turns about, her face streaked with tears and a tangle of black hair, her voice clogged with pure inarticulate emotion. In the absence of her ability to speak, she reaches for the door handle to her car and gets in. On the passenger seat is a handgun, on the floor a propane tank. Seeing that I’ve noticed, she tries to scream but can’t. She scowls. Her teeth are clenched, her eyes ablaze. A witchlike middle finger is thrust against the marred window. With that, she’s off.
I watch the silver car round the corner. A sheen of white mud gleams in the lateral morning light, lending it the look of a well-traveled rocket ship on its long distance journey into deep space. So Lucille is gone, a solitary traveler on a strange journey to a warring planet of plastic people. Final escape… or so it would seem at the time, anyway.
In reality, this scene, or one very much like it, will be repeated numerous times in the months to come, always infused with Lucille’s own brand of melodrama: the veiled hint of running away for good this time, or even of ending her life.
Two weeks after this first incident, a court awards temporary custody of our son to me by default, as Lucille fails to show up for the scheduled hearings.
My priorities are in order, but there is of course the problem of finances. When the accounting is done, the numbers are staggering. More than a million dollars have been siphoned from various checking and savings accounts, or charged to this or that credit card. Lucille, I discover, has been quietly spiriting away wealth wherever she could find it since having met Clyde. The ranch cannot be sold in its poisoned state, and has several liens against it to boot. The house is put on the market, and my son and I move into a small apartment in downtown Houston in a neighborhood populated by lots of friends. The space is spare, ugly, and nearly devoid of furniture. I hire a nanny, as I now face the prospect of raising a child without a spouse. But I soon come to realize that I’ve never been more convinced of my own happiness. I’m sick, stone broke, and happy. Lucille is in her spaceship, and I’m bouncing a baby boy on my knee in an empty living room. Granted, a loaded pistol is holstered in the front pocket of my pajamas. The universe can be an infinitely dark and lonely place, yet it can also render what you never thought you needed.