A Knock at Midnight(16)
I was gone. I ran upstairs to a neighbor’s apartment, taking the concrete steps two at time, banged on a door, two doors, begging to be let in. Nobody opened for me. I could hear Red raging and knew they wouldn’t be able to hold him much longer. As I stood pounding at the third neighbor’s door, I could hear the police sirens getting louder and louder, until finally their flashing lights animated the complex. It took several officers to take Red down.
Something happened within me after Red’s attack that night. For many young women, being in an abusive relationship, even surviving one, forms emotional and psychological scars that can be crippling for a long time after the initial abuse is over. I can understand that and completely empathize with it. But for me, the opposite happened. Going through that relationship and emerging on the other side laid the groundwork for who I am now—and the ground it left me on is in no way shaky. I became very secure in myself, confident in who I was and my worth. Red couldn’t take that from me, no matter how many patio doors he slammed through. Nobody could. I emerged from the confusion and despair of that experience with a strong sense of power and purpose. I knew who I was and what I would not tolerate. I was nineteen when Red last attacked me. In the next few years, I became stronger and more confident than I ever thought I would be.
Soon, I would need all of that strength. For my family, the hardest times were just around the corner.
* * *
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IN THE SUMMER of 2004, just before my senior year in college, I moved from Arlington to Dallas. I didn’t have a job, wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I knew I wanted a fresh start. I channeled my faith and my father’s teachings to visualize what I wanted, to live my life with intention, to set those intentions and go toward them without doubt or reservation. Daddy taught me to write it down, everything I wanted, and then to picture it as if it had already happened. “You got to imagine it down to the smallest detail,” he would say. “What are you wearing? What color are your shoes? Is the sun out or the stars? You have to bring it into being, BK! Put the universe in motion and it will align for your heart’s desires.” In Dallas, the power of intention worked. Within a week of moving, I secured a job at Comerica Bank in downtown Dallas, in their Heavy Equipment Lending Group. I worked every day, from eight o’clock to four thirty, leaving work to drive the thirty minutes to Arlington and attend a full load of classes.
We found Jazz an efficiency apartment nearby with low rent. I was making sixteen dollars an hour at Comerica and had a little financial aid from school to cover my own rent, so I was able to pay hers for about six months that year, just until she could get on her feet. Jazz found an assembly line job and started going to school, too. We lived humbly, ate our meals together, hit the dollar menu at Wendy’s a lot. We did what we had to, and it worked out.
But when Jazz moved to Dallas to be near me, my mother’s addiction hit rock bottom. Without Jazz, without me, my mom was left in Commerce to face her demons on her own. She lost. For the first time in our lives, she wasn’t able to hold down any type of job. She would come to Arlington and stay with me for a few months at a time. She’d get a good nursing gig and things would seem fine for a few weeks. Then she’d get her paycheck, and the nightmare would begin again.
In May 2005, I graduated from UTA. No one but Sissy and my family knew what I’d gone through in my personal life in those four years. My mother made it to my undergraduate graduation, gaunt and deep in the throes of addiction. Still, she was there. No matter how badly the disease ravaged her body and mind, Mama always came through for the big stuff. We knew we were loved, unconditionally.
When I graduated with my master’s a year later, I should have been on top of the world. I’d completed my master’s in a single year and had a high-paying job waiting for me at the nation’s top accounting firm. But when I proudly walked that stage to receive my degree, there was a gaping hole in my chest where joy should have been. Because for the first time in my life, my mother didn’t attend my graduation. She couldn’t. While I walked the stage in my cap and gown, my mother was on a hard cot in a concrete cell, stripped of her nursing license, her freedom—even her name.
Chapter 5
PULLING CHAIN
Tears flowed down my cheeks so heavy and strong I could feel them soaking through my shirt. It was a sweltering Texas July and I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of Woodman State Jail. Just two weeks earlier, in June 2006, a judge in Red River County had sentenced my mom to eight years in the Texas Department of Corrections. I was twenty-two years old.
The week before, when my mom called me collect from the Red River County jail, I didn’t have the heart to tell her I couldn’t afford for her to call me every day because I was helping Jazz pay her rent. We didn’t have much to say anyway. My mom cried on the other end of the line, and I tried not to cry on mine. We were still processing the prison sentence she had received.
“I think I’m going to pull chain this week,” she said nervously. Her voice seemed so distant through the phone. “Pulling chain” is jailhouse slang for being transferred from a local jail to a state-run prison.
“Wow, Mama. That’s fast.” My stomach turned in knots.
“It’s good though, you know?” she said. “I mean, I can’t come home until I leave.”