Second Chances (12 page)

“I begged and pleaded with Lydia to give me the guy’s name.
Please just give me his name.  Just his name. I swore I wouldn’t do
anything, I just wanted his name.”

“Would you have done anything?” Richard asked.

“Hell yeah, I would have,” Ben said.  “I still would if I
knew who the guy was.  I would kill him and leave him in a ditch somewhere. 

She wouldn’t do it, though.  She knew I would kill
him. She knew me a lot better than I knew myself, and she didn’t want to
add more pain to what she was already experiencing.

“The girl who came home from the hospital after the incident
wasn’t the same one that went to college.  When Lydia came back it was
like she was nine again.  Weeping for her Daddy and promising he would
come home to them.

“Her strength and confidence in herself were gone.  She
was sullen and withdrawn, barely able to talk to me about anything.  I was
still drinking, but much less. I even had a job, so I was able to take care of
her while she recovered.

“Except she didn’t recover. She just got worse.  More
withdrawn. More haunted.  She was terrified to leave the house. Literally
terrified.  Not a little scared like I am of spiders.  Petrified and
helpless. 

“It was horrible to watch.  I felt so impotent because
nothing I tried worked. I tried cheering her up, I tried yelling at her,
and I tried pleading with her. Didn’t help. I couldn’t bring her back out of
it.

“She tried to go back a few months later. I helped her
enroll, praying she would get better, but it didn’t last. She was there three
weeks before she came back home.  I asked her what happened.  She
said nothing. She said she was done and wouldn’t be going back.

“It was another week before she overdosed and died.”

Ben stopped talking, visibly crying now.  Richard doubted
Ben even knew he was still in the clinic; the kid was completely absorbed in his
story, reliving painful memories he kept buried.

Richard could relate. 

Ben rubbed at his eyes and made a choking sound.

“I found her in the bathroom. I didn’t even know she was
using, but she had needle marks all over her arms and between her toes.  It
wasn’t intentional. At least I don’t think so. 

“The funeral was small, only a handful of people, and I
remember all I could think about was that Dad never showed up. I don’t even
know if he knew she had died.  Her Dad never came to protect her.

“That’s when I
really
started drinking.  Like it
was my job. I drank like a fiend for about a year, as much as I could get my
hands on.  I left home after that because I couldn’t stand to look at my Mom
anymore.

“I couldn’t stand to see her face. Her lying, stinking face.
 I think she felt the same way, because she didn’t once ask where I was going. 
I just wandered out one day and never looked back. 

“Town to town, city to city, just traveling and moving and
doing just enough work to keep my nights hazy with drink. When I couldn’t find
a quick job to make some money, I stole a bottle.  Anytime I could get my
hands on something I would spend my night staring at the sky and drinking
myself into a stupor.  

“I rode the trains for a while, because it felt like
something you do when you don’t have a place called home, but it wasn’t for me.
I was a walker. I would just go from place to place. Hitchhike when I could but
that wasn’t very often. I just had to keep moving.

“I spent about a year doing that before I realized what was
happening to me. How bad I was getting.  I thought constantly about Lydia.
She was never far from my mind, and I drank to forget about her.  I also drank
because…a part of me—a large part—wanted to join her. 

“I would get drunk and when I couldn’t get drunk I would
start thinking about killing myself. Join Lydia. I would think about how I
would do it. I was miserable and hateful and pathetic.  I know that I would
never actually kill myself, because I’m too much of a coward, but part of me
thought I should.

“I went home because I was afraid I had really lost it all.
That I would give up and let my depression win.  I felt useless, horrible,
and lost, and I knew without a doubt that if something didn’t change I would
hit that place you can’t come back from. 

“If that happened, I might really have done it; you know,
kill myself. I heard somewhere that it’s genetic, like we are predisposed to
kill ourselves because of our genes.  I don’t know if that’s true or not, but
it could be.

“Anyway, Mom was gone when I got home. She’d left town
months earlier and hadn’t given a forwarding address. But an Uncle of mine on
my Mom’s side named Roger offered to take me in. 

“He wanted to give me a place to stay until I could get on
my feet and decide what I wanted to do with my life.  He lived out in the
country with his wife and dog. He hated my mother, partly because she wasn’t a
Christian like him but mostly because she married my father.  

“I think he took me in because, to him, it was the Christian
thing to do and because he felt terrible about what happened to his niece.  He liked
to tell me about Lydia, that she deserved better, like I didn’t know that. 

“His only condition for bringing me in was that I never take
another sip of alcohol. He told me he would have to throw me out if I ever
drank again, even a sip, because then he would know he couldn’t trust me.  That
was his only condition.

“And I was done,” Ben added.  “Totally and completely ready
to get off the stuff and get my life together.  It was time for me to grow up;
to stop living in the past, you know?  I was more committed to that than
anything else in my life.”

“So he let you stay?”

Ben nodded.  “He let me stay.”

“Did you quit?” Richard asked.  “Drinking, I mean.”

“I did,” Ben said.  “Like I said, I was committed and I
really wanted to quit, so I did. At least for a while. It was hard at first to
break the addiction. My hand would shake and I would sweat a lot, and it was
hard to think straight.

“But after a while I got to the point where I could push the
cravings back down. And when the headaches weren’t as bad I started to enjoy
other things in life besides alcohol.

“After a few months I was feeling healthier, and after ten
months I wasn’t even really interested in drinking anymore.  I could
control it, and I was starting to get better.  Roger and his family were
good to me.

“He even helped me find a job, kept me fed, and treated me
like I was a decent human being worth being cared for. They even set me up with
a cell phone. One of those flip phones that are impossible to text on.”

“I used to have one of those,” Richard said.  “Didn’t bother
me at the time, but now I couldn’t imagine using one.”

“Yeah,” Ben said, chuckling.  “Hard to be a beggar and a
chooser. I never complained about it.

“Anyway,” Ben continued, “that’s when I met Desiree. She was
a local girl that worked at the post office, cute as a button with doe
eyes.  A few years younger than me, just out of high school. She was
amazing, the sweetest person I’d ever met, and she loved me. She really loved
me and cared about me, something I’d never really experienced before.  I
mean, who could possibly love me?  

“I was on cloud nine, happier than I’ve ever been and madly
in love.  And I was stupid and young so I thought things were just
fine.  I thought that everything would work out and they were finally
looking up. I thought that there was nothing in the world that could bring me
down.

“But I was wrong,” Ben said.

Then Ben laughed. It was an intense laugh, sardonic and
self-deprecating.  “God was I wrong. After I was there about five months a
phone call came.  Roger and his wife weren’t home so I answered it. 
It was my Dad.  He was calling Roger to find out where Lydia’s grave was
located. He wanted to go leave flowers and pay his respects.  

“It was so crazy, out of the blue, to hear my Dad’s voice
again.  A part of me still reviled him, but another part of me, a lonelier
part, woke up.  It was like a blast from the past, hearing him talk to me
again, and he seemed genuinely thrilled to be talking to me.  I was his
son, and he told me he loved and missed me.

“I told him where Lydia was buried, explained to him what
had happened, and then I told him how badly she missed him before she
died.  How much she loved him and how she had always been waiting for him
to come home.

“I blamed him. I yelled at him on the phone and said he was
responsible for her death. 

“He started crying. He told me I was right, that it was all
his fault, and that he’d screwed up. He talked about how weak he was. How big a
mistake he’d made when he up and left like he did. How he didn’t know how to
apologize, so he never came back. 

“I ate it up, desperate as I was to have someone to look up
to, and when he apologized I forgave him.  I actually gave in and forgave
him, like the moron I was.

“We decided to go visit the grave together. He would come
pick me up and we could pay our respects.  I thought this would be the
best day of my life. The turning point when things started to pick up. I would
be reunited with my father and we could make a new beginning. A fresh start.

“We went to her grave and spent something like five hours
there just talking. I told him about her and how she’d been going to college. How
smart she was. I told him how I would have killed the guy who did it to her,
and he said I was just like him. He would have done the same thing. 

“He told me how he’d been living upstate since he left and
how Mom told him he had to go away because he always hit me.  She told him
he was nothing and no good for her kids and that he had to leave or she would
call the police.

“He apologized for hitting me.  I told him it was alright
because he was back.  That was a long time ago and now he was back and we could
start over. We were back together and we could figure it all out moving
forward.  

“We both ended up crying. He gave me a hug and told me
things would get better. Then it was time to go. I told him I had to get back
and that Roger would be looking for me.  He told me we should go to a bar and have
a quick drink before he took me back. He would buy. 

“I said no, that I shouldn’t, that I had a little bit of a
problem, but he wouldn’t hear it.  He said it would dishonor Lydia to not
have at least one drink for her. Just one little drink. What could it possibly
hurt?”

“You went,” Richard said.

Ben nodded.  “I went. I remember that moment. That feeling I
had.  I was able to justify it to myself, because it was for Lydia, right?  I
was only having a drink because I wanted to honor Lydia, and that couldn’t be
bad, right?

“And that’s how stupid I was.  I actually believed
things would work out. I actually thought I was in control. We went to the bar.
We had a drink, then another. It wasn’t ‘til the fourth or fifth that he
started talking trash. He said some shit I don’t even remember about Lydia, and
how she’d probably been asking for it, and I punched him in the mouth. 

“We got into a fight and beat the shit out of each other. He
told me I was a…a ‘stupid little shit and that he left me because I wasn’t worth
being around’ and I threw him into the dishwasher.  I’m almost certain he
ended up in the hospital…or dead. I didn’t stick around to find out which. I
just left. I was drunk off my rocker, no car, in the middle of the night.

“At some point in the fight I broke my phone. I was piss
drunk as I staggered down the road until I found a pay phone I could use at a
gas station. I called Roger. It was the middle of the night, I was confused and
more than a little hurt, and when he answered I just started crying.

“I told him I was sorry, and that I knew I’d messed up. I
told him I had thought I was in control, and I’d just made one mistake. One
little mistake and as soon as I got home I’d clean up my act and never do it
again. That I was done and I’d finally learned my lesson.

“And you know what he said?” Ben asked, coughing.  “He
said: ‘No.’ He told me he saw the missed call from my father on his machine,
figured I was out drinking with him, and told me to screw off. He told me I
wasn’t welcome back and if he saw me again he would call the cops. 

“I begged and pleaded and screamed and yelled at him on the
phone but he wouldn’t listen. He just told me to stay away.

“So I called Desiree. She didn’t answer, and I was drunk and
pissed off so I left her a message.  Worst mistake of my life, because I
said a lot of things I didn’t mean in that voicemail. I was pissed off and
alone and I just wanted to vent to somebody.  

“I ended up sleeping behind the gas station tucked near the
trash cans, and when I woke up the next day I felt miserable and scared. I
remembered what I had done the night before and it finally hit me just how bad
I’d screwed up. 

“I called Roger again the next morning and tried to
apologize. He wouldn’t even let me talk. He told me he’d said his piece, that I
was just like my Dad, and that I was useless. Then he hung up on me.

“When I tried Desiree she didn’t answer.  Her sister
did, and all she told me was that Desiree didn’t deserve to be treated that way
and she didn’t want to see me ever again.  ‘Never come back,’ she
said.  ‘I liked you, Ben, and I thought you were good for her. But I was
wrong, so don’t show your face around here ever again.’

“And that was it.  I had forty bucks in my pocket, a
broken cell phone, and a hangover that pulsed through my forehead.   I
didn’t have anywhere to go or anyone to care about me, so I was back to square
one.

“I did the only thing that made sense.  Ten in the
morning, I went inside the gas station and bought all the alcohol I could
afford.  The attendant, the same one who saw me stagger in drunk the night
before, never said a word.

“I got drunk that day, and the next. And then the one after
that, too.  It was good, a relief; like a weight had been lifted off my
shoulders. 

“I would stare at the phone at night, sleeping in one place
or another around our little town, and wish things were different.  I
couldn’t believe I’d screwed up so badly and was back to drinking. 

“But another part of me felt good; like this was what I was
supposed to be doing.  Part of me felt that I deserved to be drunk, that
I 
deserved
 to be a wretch living alone on the streets.  This
was all I was worth, and that self-pity welcomed me home with open arms.”