The Bad Lady (Novel) (12 page)

Diabetes? You can’t blame me for not believing that. I was too naïve to question her lie. Even if my mother had been truthful and had told me that she had been shooting heroin, it would not have made any difference, since I did not know what heroin was. In fact, as a pubescent boy I knew about as much about ‘Smack’ as I did about child sexual abuse. At the time, the only illegal drug I had ever heard of was pot, which some of the kids at school had occasionally mentioned, usually whispering about it behind cupped hands. I’m referring to the burnout kids, who, I suppose smoked the marijuana with their older siblings or something.

“Mom, can I go over Andrew’s house today?”

Visibly staggered by the inquiry, she glared at me as if I had just asked her if I could put on my backpack and scale Mount Everest. “Are you for real? No way.”

“Why can‘t I go over?” I frowned.

“You were over at Andrew’s house yesterday.”

“So.”

“So I don’t want you going over there again, at least not for a while.”

“What do you mean, not for a while?”

“Just what I said.”

I folded my arms and sulked. “That’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair . . . Now come here, Billy.”

“Why, where are we going?”

“To your room.”

I followed her in.

She stopped in front of the window. “Okay,” she says, “this is the knob that switches the air conditioner on and off. And this dial below, right here, this is the thermostat. Now I have it set at exactly sixty-five degrees. This is where I want the temperature to stay for now. You got that? So don’t play with the dial.”

“I won‘t.”

“Good.” She glanced at my bed. The blankets were in a heap, piled on top of the fluffy foam pillow. “I don’t believe this.” My mother had run her hand along the sheet.

“What?” I asked.

“Billy, you wet your bed.”

“I what?”

“You wet your bed.”

“I did?”

“Yes. For heaven‘s sakes!” She shook her head irritably. Then she seized my hand and forced me to touch the mattress. She was right. Not only could I feel the urine, I could see the unsightly yellow stain, which had taken on a semicircular shape. It looked as if someone had spilled either warm beer or warm ginger ale on the bed. The unusual thing, before this mishap I had not peed in my bed since about the age of five or six.

“I’m sorry.” I felt humiliated.

“That’s not just a little bit of pee either, that’s a huge puddle.”

“I said I was sorry.”

Still shaking her head, my mother tore the urine-stained sheet off the mattress. Then she held the wrinkled garment up to her nose and sniffed it. “Pee-yew!” she says, handing the sheet to me. “Here. Go put this putrid thing in the washing machine.”

Ashamed, I marched into the laundry room, with my head held low. After putting the foul-smelling sheet in the washing machine, my mom came in and dumped around a quarter of a cup of liquid Tide into the plastic cup that holds the detergent. Then, without wasting time, she turned the washing machine on.

“Billy, don‘t look so sullen,” she says, teasingly mussing my hair. “I’m not mad at you. I realize it was an accident.”

“It was an accident. I swear to God.”

“Please don’t swear to God. You know I don’t like it when you take the lord‘s name in vain.”

“I just meant-”

“I know what you meant.”

“So you’re not gonna punish me?” I asked, lowering my voice to a soft, humble decibel.

“Absolutely not.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Do you know what caused you to wet your bed?”

I nodded. “No.”

“It’s related to stress,” she explains, while surprisingly composed. “And actually, it’s to be expected, considering what that mean person Nancy Sutcliffe did to you. Whether you realize it or not, Billy, what Nancy Sutcliffe did to you in the Good Humor truck is causing you a lot of anxiety. A lot of inner turmoil. You might even be traumatized. And unfortunately, because of what she did to you, you’ll probably wet your bed again. As a matter of fact, you’ll probably wet your bed for the next few days. Maybe even for the next few weeks. Who knows? So what I was thinking of doing to combat the problem, is putting that old shower curtain that we have out in the garage, under the fitted sheet to protect your mattress.”

Well, I did not have any idea if all that was true, about the stress and the inner turmoil supposedly being the reason as to why I had wet my bed.

Then I thought back to my creepy nightmare about the clowns and decided that maybe my mom did have a reasonable point after all. Perhaps that particular nightmare about the clowns stealing my clothes had been so disturbing to my inner mind that, the same as when people are really frightened in their waking world, they sometimes pee in their pants involuntarily.

Anyway, her deciding to put the old shower curtain that we had in the garage under the fitted sheets to protect my mattress, bothered me big-time.

Why? Because at that moment, I did not know how I‘d go about doing it, but I had swore to myself that I would not urinate in my sleep again.

No way!

No how!

Although I might have been young, I knew that a ten-year old should not be peeing in his bed. Inner turmoil or no inner turmoil, it should not happen.

CHAPTER 17

After giving me that talk, my mom went into her room, where much like when she had been in the bathroom, she stayed in there for quite some time. I had no clue why.

Since I did not feel like listening to music, and had finished reading the funnies, I decided to sneak a peek at what was on TV, given that I had the living room to myself.

I lay on the large sand-colored, suede sofa. Picked up the remote control, and did some channel surfing. We only had basic cable so there wasn’t much of a selection.

Crap! There really wasn’t anything on except the Jerry Springer Show, and I didn’t dare watch that. My mom, as she had mentioned to Mr. Keller, did not like me to watch TV period, let along The Jerry Springer Show. I think she thought that too much television would decompose my brain or something.

To be safe, I clicked on a rerun of I Dream of Jeannie. Barbara Eden suddenly materialized from her magic genie bottle and as usual, Larry Hagman, up in arms about something, wanted Jeannie to go away. I laughed along with the studio audience. I tell you, it felt good to laugh.

Evidently, my mom had taken the cordless phone, from the kitchen, and had brought it into her room. I say that, because all of a sudden, I heard her talking to someone, and I could tell by her tone that she wasn‘t speaking to the bad lady.

Now I don’t want you to get the idea that I was a sneak, someone fixated on eavesdropping. However, with the ongoing drama regarding Nancy being so intense and unresolved, I couldn’t help myself; I had to know what was going on in my mom’s head.

This time, she made no secret that she had contacted Rudy at his job, at the garage. I didn’t even have to stand near her bedroom door to overhear the conversation. My mom spoke rather loud, as if she had forgotten I was home. Or maybe she just didn’t care that I could hear her.

“I know I was supposed to wait for you to call me,” I listened to her say to Rudy, almost whining. “What?”

Pause.

“What am I doing? Well, right now, I’m sitting on my bed, writing in my diary, crying my eyes out. That’s what I’m doing.”

Writing in her diary and crying her eyes out?

Why couldn’t my mom get a grip on her emotions? I was the one who had been sexually violated and I wasn’t sitting around crying.

I know. I know. You’re right. That wasn’t fair of me to say. What did I know?

Sad thing is Nancy really did have me believing that the way we had touched one another, so intimately, was what two people who cared about the other did. She just forget to mention the part about how a thirty-eight year old shouldn‘t be messing around with a kid.

“And do you know what happened now?” my mom says to Rudy. “Billy wet his bed. Yup. The sheets were soaked. I couldn’t believe it either. And it’s because of her. That whore -”

Silence.

“What? I’m trying to tell you, Rudy, is that he wet his damn bed because he’s under a lot of stress. Listen to me, a ten-year old doesn’t just pee in his bed for no reason . . . When Billy went to sleep last night the realization that he had been sexually and emotionally traumatized must have wreaked havoc on his subconscious, thus triggering him to urinate in his bed.”

Oh, perhaps I forgot to point out that my mom was exceptionally clever. She always seemed to have a book in her hand. She knew more about psychology, and all of that technical mumbo-jumbo, than anyone I ever came across. Rudy was fairly bright as well, yet in a more street smarts sort of way.

“Rudy, will you cut it out?” my mom continued to give her boyfriend an aggressive earful. “I know I’m not my normal self right now. Would you be? What the hell do you expect? Don’t give me a hard time. What? I know you’re busy. Well, excuse me. Remember, I have a situation on my hands. That’s right. Something that’s a lot more serious than tinkering with some fucking engine.”

Suddenly it got quiet again. I think my mom may have realized that she had gotten too explosively loud, and that she had better simmer down. Or maybe Rudy had said something to get her to relax.

I swear, I really hated it when my mom cursed, especially when she used the ’F’ word. I wished she had more class than that. Then again, I suppose she was like everyone else, when she got angry, her language sometimes turned vulgar. Became as foul as a truck driver, or those mechanics that Rudy worked with down at the garage, who always shot off their mouths, throwing a curse word in just about every sentence they spoke.

“No. I won’t bother you again,” my mom went on. “Yeah I did. Of course. A little while ago in the bathroom. Uh huh. But I only injected a small amount. Not my usual dose. One problem though, Billy walked in on me.”

She stopped talking again, to listen to Rudy’s response. The short intermission lasted for more or less thirty seconds. Although, as I said, my mom had been speaking relatively loud, I decided to mosey closer to her room. My curiosity to eavesdrop had intensified. I now knew when she had brought up the bathroom and how I had walked in on her that, she was referring to how she had injected her so-called medication.

“When Billy barged in on me,” she resumed, “he caught me sitting on the toilet, with the syringe in my arm. I just got out of the shower . . . No, no. I lied and told him I was a diabetic and that I was injecting insulin. I had to, Rudy. C’mon, what else was I supposed to do, tell him that I was shooting up dope?”

There was another break in proceedings.

“Because, when he barged in on me, I was as high as a kite. Experiencing the initial rush. For God’s sake, Rudy, don’t say that. He opened the door right as I started to pull the needle out. It‘s not like I had time to think of something else to say. That I was a diabetic, to me, seemed plausible.”

Just then, I suspected that Rudy had likely warned my mom to keep her voice down, because, all of a sudden, she closed her bedroom door. Not lightly either. Rather, she slammed it. That was okay though, I had heard enough.

Again, at the time, I did not understand what all that gibberish about the syringe, insulin, diabetes, meant.

I will add one thing; however, in the years to come I would find out that Rudy also had a heroin habit. So perhaps that explained part of my mom and his attraction to one another. They were two of a kind, two junkies.

Question is, did Rudy introduce my mother to heroin, or was it the other way around, she introduced him? Who knows? I like to think in all probability they had both been junkies before they had met. Why pass blame without evidence to back it up?

CHAPTER 18

That day we had an early lunch, at roughly ten minutes before noon.

“Did you get the plastic utensils?” my mom asked, thankfully not lecturing me about Nancy Sutcliffe. I needed a break from all that.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Napkins?”

“Uh huh. I brought out a whole stack.”

“What about salt and pepper?”

“I have that too.”

“Then I guess we’re all set,” she says, sounding relatively happy. “What would you like to drink, Coke, or Mountain Dew?”

“Mountain Dew.” I needed an ice-cold soft drink bad. I was dying of thirst. The temperature there in Hampton, Ohio had already climbed to eighty-nine degrees. Sweat made my forehead slick and my light-brown bangs damp. I kept thinking about that large built-in swimming pool I wished I had. If we had one on this day, I would have already dived in, and would have probably stayed in the refreshing chlorinated water all day.

“Do you want a Styrofoam cup? Or would you rather drink the soda out of the can?”

“I’ll just drink it out of the can.”

“Okay,” she tells me. “You might as well. That‘s what I‘m gonna do.”

My mom had prepared thick, hearty roast beef sandwiches with provolone cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise, on sesame hard rolls. On the paper plates, she also served a tiny dish of coleslaw and a dill pickle. The sandwiches were great, as tasty as anything you could get at a fine neighborhood deli.

“Mom can I ask you something?” We sat in the backyard, at the red picnic table. Our yard was small, with mown green grass, a couple of shade tress, and a chain link fence that surrounded the square patch of property. Overhead, a scattered gathering of cumulous clouds, the shape of cotton swabs, had materialized in the turquoise sky. Although seldom did the clouds seem to drift over the hot sun. Near the fence, an orange butterfly fluttered aimlessly. At the house behind us, my teenage neighbor Trish Alexander lay on the deck, soaking up the rays. She had music on, presently a dance song by En Vogue echoed tolerably through the air.

“Of course. What do you want to ask?”

“It’s a pretty strange question.”

“That’s all right. Ask away.”