This is a short story loosely based on my mother's life. I say "loosely" because in the story, things turn out much differently than they did in real life. I am in no way the love of her life, and my sister does not contact us. My mother is not happy. I don't think this story is very graphic or anything, but there are some mature situations involved - a suicide, but the most graphic thing there is a drop of blood. So read on if you'd like, and if you do please let me know what you think! Opinions are very important to me right now, I am trying very hard to get into a very prestigious school with a great writing program, AND get a scholarship, so my work has got to blow someone out of the water. Thanks!
I remember it was snowing that day. I can still see the little white flakes, falling outside of my window. I can still feel the cold; I never understood where it came from. I’d lie in my room and watch from my bed, warm and comfortable, surrounded by the glassy-eyed dolls I called friends.
My room was conveniently placed on the far end of the hallway; far from my older sister, Erica’s room, and far enough from my parent’s room that the sounds of their raised voices didn’t carry. At its worst, the yelling was a low hum; like bees, trapped in a jar.
Both of my parents were beautiful people. They’d met in a coffee shop a long time ago; my father was training for the army at the time, and my mother loved a man in uniform. He bought her a drink and they talked all night – naturally, she fell for him.
The rest was history. They fell madly in love, got married, and had my sister and I.
With my dad being in the army, we moved around a lot. But that didn’t matter much to us – no matter where we lived, we were still a family.
Life was beautiful, to say the least. I can remember the many nights spent in front of the fire, us four Brannons laughing. I remember the jokes my father told, and being giddy on the sips of wine he snuck me when my mother turned her back.
Daddy loved to go out, just disappear for hours on end without reason, and come back with beautiful surprises: butterflies (who had died of natural causes) for our walls, motherless animals to raise and set free…flowers, dresses and exotic foods for mom. I remember one night in particular - he told us to get dressed, that he had something to show us. He was sweating, despite the fact it was cold out, and dirt was stuck to his T-shirt. He was smiling wide and incessantly, like a Cheshire cat. “Carl!” My mother began to complain, but she was smiling. He gave her a look that said “please?”
“Well, alright.” She gave in. “Go on, Erica, Kaitlyn. Get dressed.”
So we did. It was late, and dark out, but I was with my daddy; nothing could go wrong. He led us to the woods behind the house. After about ten minutes of walking, we reached a small clearing, and saw what he’d been up to.
There was a wonderful little cottage house he’d built for Kaitlyn and I to share. He was too excited to wait another day to show us.
He was the most wonderful father on earth.
But as the War progressed, I noticed a change in him. Slowly but surely, the man I knew, my father and hero, began to fall apart. He started drinking nightly, getting into screaming fights with my mother. He’d end up hitting her, and she’d retreat, crying. He’d feel terrible, so he’d drink some more.
When I was nine years old, he and I were walking down the street. I saw a man missing an arm; an amputee, with half of his face severely burned. I was afraid.
“What happened to him?” I gasped, squeezing my father’s arm.
He turned to me, then. “That’s what war does, baby.”
I remember his voice then, strange and flat. Like he was willing himself not to feel anything.
One year later, I sat on my bed watching the snow fall.
“Kaitlyn! We’re going to the store, do you want to come?” my mother’s voice drifted in from the other side of the hall. Erica came in.
“We’re out of shampoo”, she said. “Get dressed.”
Erica was thirteen, and gorgeous. Everybody used to say we looked so much alike, but I doubted it. Blonde hair, celery green eyes, peach plump lips and the perfect body – my sister, the American Beauty.
“Okay.”
I pulled on my new red sweater, some gloves, and a warm hat.
“Later, dad!” I called, walking by his room. I stopped when I saw him, sitting on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands.
“Daddy?”
He looked up then.
“Daddy, are you okay?”
“Yes, baby. Yes, I am.”
There was an awkward silence then, until my father looked back up at me. Looking back, I wish I could have seen right through his eyes and read his thoughts. Eyes more full of pain I have not seen since.
“I love you, Kaitlyn.”
“You too, dad, see you when we get back.”
The truth his, my father’s vulnerability scared me, and I wasn’t willing to acknowledge it.
Getting the shampoo took five minutes, but Erica wanted a studded pink hair band. My mother was explaining that it was just too expensive, but of course Erica got her way in the end. She always did.
We pulled back up to our house, and I told my mom I was going to stay out and play in the snow. Erica said she’d be back out, that we could make a snowman and to “hold on one sec” because she wanted to go show Daddy her new hair band.
Three minutes later, a scream came from the house. My heart stopped. I could hear everything: Erica screaming and crying, my mother’s voice, panicked: “Get the phone, Erica. ERICA! GET ME THE PHONE!”, somebody running, and the squeaky floorboards.
I didn’t know what to do. I knew something was very wrong, but I was too scared to go inside. I was mentally willing Erica to stop screaming, for my dad to come out and laugh and say: “gotcha”.
But that wouldn’t happen. In my heart, I knew it wouldn’t.
I ran into the house and up the stairs. Erica was outside my parent’s room, on her knees, head to the floor, sobbing. My mother was kneeling over something, crying and shaking, with the phone to her ear. I tried to get a look inside the room; I saw my father’s foot, poking out from behind the bed. “DADDY!”
I bolted.
Outside, Erica was still screaming and pulling her hair. My mother had one frantic arm around each of us, and was shoving us onto her breasts, whispering incoherent nothings.
“Daddy…” was all I could manage. At this, Erica started to scream louder. She vomited and collapsed in the snow. My mother was on her knees, holding my sister’s hair back, and afterwards rocking and whispering to her.
I sat down on the front step and cried, confused and shaking. I wet myself. We did this until I heard sirens. A man in a uniform pulled my mother aside and talked to her privately, while three other men in blue wheeled some sort of bed into the house. I watched them. One man made eye contact with me, for one second, before pulling away and bowing his head.
Minutes later, the figure of my father’s body was wheeled out under a black cloth. A drop of blood fell out from under it, and burned a little red hole in the snow.
Later, my mother told me he’d had an accident while polishing his rifle. For her sake I pretended to believe her.
The funeral was a disaster. Erica locked herself up in the bathroom and refused to come out, and my mother, seeing now that this was real became strange and distant. This new distance would soon after morph into aggressive, impatient behavior.
Nobody knew what to say to me, so when school started again, I didn’t have any friends. As for Erica, she didn’t want any. I noticed once when she was changing clothes that she had new little swollen cuts on her wrists. She always wore longs sleeves now, the same black sweater, and had lost a good deal of weight. She was no longer the carefree, stuck up but lovable big sister I knew. I kind of missed her.
My mother retreated into her world, and to be honest went a little bit crazy. She had to process that her husband was dead and that she was left with us. For months she was emotionally absent and often would disappear physically for a few days, as well. I learned to hold it together for the two of them.
About a year and a half after my father’s death, my mother announced that we were moving to Texas. She gave us a week’s notice. Since there wasn’t much left for us at home anyway, neither of us objected.
The move was surprisingly good for both my sister and I socially. We both made friends, and Erica got asked out by a boy we later figured to be the most popular in school. That got me pretty excited, though Erica wasn’t interested. It gave her something to do, though, which she needed more of these days.
At twelve, I grew awkwardly tall. My hair finally grew out, and magically it seemed, my chest grew. The years from twelve to fifteen are a blur of friends, parties, and drinking. I lost myself in those years, it seemed. Up to fifteen, I had been relatively innocent. I’d never done anything truly WRONG. But that year, I met Stephen. We met in math class. I hadn’t done my homework, and the teacher was lecturing me. After class, Stephen came to my desk and rolled his eyes, told me what a drag this teacher was. I agreed.
He asked if I wanted to hang out sometime. I said “Yeah, sure”, and soon we were inseparable. He had a license, as he was a year older, and we drove for hours on end. We went to movies out of town, just because we could; we liked westerns especially. He was a photographer, so he would take pictures of me learning to drive, lying in the grass, sitting on the big windowsill at his grandmother’s house looking out the window.
The most telling of these is one he asked a stranger to take. In it, we’re in front of a bridge, with the wind blowing at us. He has his arms around me, and I am laughing. I still smile when I look at this picture.
I lost my virginity to Stephen, and a month later, missed my period. When I told him, he just stared at me. He was going to be a doctor, and “just wasn’t ready” to be a father. His parents offered to pay child support, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep the baby. Not in our house, with Erica and my mom.
I never heard from Stephen again.
I told my mother, and she decided that I needed to get an abortion. They weren’t legal back then, so we had to drive up to Mexico. It was a long drive, and neither of us talked much during it. When we did get there, she decided things looked too dangerous; too shady. It didn’t look sterile. We agreed that I would have the baby, but put it up for adoption.
My mother kept me in school until I started to show. When it became too obvious, she called up an old friend she remembered had stayed in a home for unwed mothers. Her friend pulled a few strings, and after a month of waiting, I was admitted.
The first few days were hard. I missed my mom and sister, and most of the women in there were much older than me, and bitter. They had reason to be, but I was so young; I just wanted a friend.
I found one. Well, she found me. After two weeks of rarely leaving my room except for meals, I ventured into the dayroom. Most people were sitting in two’s or three’s, and I was too shy to join any of them. I went to the window and spaced out.
“Room for one more?”
I turned around to see a young woman smiling down at me.
“Yeah, sure.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kaitlyn…what’s yours?”
“Casey. You’re kinda young, aren’t you?”
“Sixteen. How old are you?”
“Twenty three.”
Casey already had one kid - a boy, David, almost three. Her stomach was unusually large, as she was having twins. She was the sweetest, prettiest thing. She had brown hair and amber eyes that were always smiling. She liked to crack jokes, and was so excited for the babies. She wanted girls.
I had never seen her cry.
Two months later, though, things changed. Casey started having sharp pains in her stomach a few days before her due date. She insisted things were going to be okay, though, she’d had pain the first time too. I kissed her on the cheek, and we said goodnight.
I woke up late the next morning, surprised nobody had woken me up. I went into the dayroom. It was dead quiet.
I went and sat next to a woman named Barbara and asked her what was going on. She looked over at me and shook her head. “Your friend.”
“Casey?”
She nodded. “She went into labor last night.” She paused. “The cord wrapped around one of the baby’s necks. It died.”
“Oh my god. What happened to the other one?”
“They tried to do a cesarean. Something went wrong…neither made it.”
She paused again, letting me take this in.
“Where is she?”
She was in her room. She hadn’t let anybody in, and the nurses advised me to wait awhile. I knew better than that, though. Casey needed someone, whether or not she wanted them.
I knocked and opened the door. She was curled up on her bed, with her head to her knees and her arms wrapped around them. She didn’t look up.
I closed the door, and walked over to her.
“Hey, sweetie…”
Her hair was covering her face. I brushed it off. Her eyes were swollen and pained.
“They were girls, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“Vanessa and Siran; those are their names. Butterfly and lovely, that’s what they mean.”
“That’s beautiful, Case.”
She pulled herself up and sunk into me, crying. She told me later she thought she’d never stop.
Casey left a week later, after the nurses were sure she was going to be alright. She was grieving, but I knew she’d be okay. She came and visited once a week, until summer, when she moved. I gave her my home number and she promised to call.
Carmen was born on February 16th, 1964. My beautiful baby girl. Giving her up was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do, but I knew it was for the best. A baby does not deserve to be born into such a chaotic environment. I loved her. I knew that nobody could ever say I didn’t love her, because I chose her happiness over mine.
Words cannot describe how hard it was to pull myself together after everything that had happened. I went into counseling, and through a lot of hard work, came to terms with my life. I knew in my heart that one day things would be okay, if I could just hold on.
That was forty years ago. I am now married and have a nine year old daughter, Amy. She and my husband are the loves of my life, and I have never been happier.
When I was nineteen, I went back to school and got my degree in literature. I teach seventh grade English now, and love all of my students. There is the occasional troubled child, but I know how to deal with those ones; I guess it really does take one to know one.
Casey is now a proud mother of two – David, and Vanessa, and a grandmother of one. She lives in New York City and works as a lawyer.
I lost touch with Erica when she moved out shortly after I had Carmen. I’ve tried to contact her, but she doesn’t want to be found. Last I heard she had also had a daughter, Martha.
My mother died seven years after my father, of a blood disease. She was never truly happy after his death, and it came as a relief. Her last request was to be cremated and have her ashes spread in a garden of roses.
Carmen contacted me for the first time two years ago. She now visits regularly on holidays or whenever she happens to be in the area. She is a beautiful young woman; she has my eyes, and she’s a great big sister to Amy.
I’ll never forget my father, or the hardships. But I have learned to accept what comes my way, and that while nobody would want or deserve the life I had, it molded who I am today.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
yeah, really, lame much?). But the truth is, if it's not truly GOOD, then I have no shot of getting what I want - and I am very determined to. Thing is, even my BEST writing right now (which I don't think is in existance yet) might not be good enough for what I am trying to attain (being a 25,000 to 50,000 dollar scholarship for my senior year of high school to be at Interlochen Arts Academy).
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