god,
Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.
Just for today,
Just for this minute,
Just for now,
Right now.
Amen.
And again and again the words came out, almost inaudible, until the prayer became a run of 'god, god, god, god, god'. He didn't know how long he leaned there against the bedroom door. His mind raced, now that the prayer had made its way out there was room for his imagination to go to work. And it did.
Memories flew through him. The time Amy stumbled in just before dawn, just before Harmon had to leave for work. That was a bad one, he actually had to open the door himself and let her slump into his arms. A bad one, sure, but not the worst - oh, no. One night, asleep on the couch he awakened to high beams streaming through the living room windows. He waited and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, waited for Amy to stumble up the four steps to the front door, but there was nothing. He didn't hear the heavy footfalls on the creaky stairs, no wrenching over the side of the railing. Opening the front door, Harmon instinctively prepared to catch weight (about 98 pounds) and was surprised to find her, not propped against the porch or the door but laying in the yard just past the line of the gravel driveway. Fear fought its way through the fog of sleep that hadn't completely departed and he rushed to her. She lay there in an unnatural way, one arm bent around behind her back her left leg positioned as if she were jointed like a bird. He got her to the hospital that night and she dried out for about a month - if you don't count the pain meds, which she was very fond of.
These memories and a myriad of others skittered across his conscience. He was sure it had only been a few seconds but in that time his left hand had curled itself into a fist and now nestled itself between his upper and lower teeth, effectively gagging the nonsense his beloved serenity prayer had turned into. Perhaps that night in the yard where he found Amy with a broken arm, leg, nose, and a few teeth (and about as close to an overdose as any person weighing 98 pounds could get) was the worst, but it was far from 'out of the ordinary'. And now Harmon leaned against the cheap hollow door to their bedroom with wicked thoughts about what lay behind it. The imagination can be a harsh mistress at times and Harmon's fit the part in these awful seconds, twisting the horrible scene in the yard into something much much worse. The fight or flight started creeping through his muscles and they twitched, but undecidedely. Stay or go, help or leave her to her fate. But he knew he couldn't leave her, he loved her - more than loved her. They had made a life together, such as it was and he couldn't be so cold as to run away. After all, she was sick. Whatever waited behind the bedroom door, Amy was sick.
Harmon tried, delicately, to get Amy to come to a meeting with him or read some of the literature he brought home from the meetings he went to at the old church in down town Sowell Pike. Basements full of coffee, cigarettes and the sick trying to get well. Usually, he'd suggest this after a worried, sleepless night waiting for her to come slumping against the front door and then into his arms. The days after she spent dry - sometimes one or two days, sometimes a week - were glimmers of hope for Harmon. Maybe this time she'll crack open the old 'Big Book' his father had given him, maybe this time she'd spend a week dry and then maybe a week sober. But not yet, and he didn't press the issue. She'd come around when she was ready, it did no good to drag a reluctant horse to water only to find out that all your efforts were in vain because you could get the horse there, but you could never make him drink. Harmon knew that and he waited in his love for her. A love that started back when they were in sixth grade at Sowell Elementary.
Their love grew like a garden of roses, but as they say, "Every rose has it's thorn." Harmon was terrified of what thorns grew on the other side of that door. He lowered his left fist from his mouth - he could see a clear indention where his teeth had clamped down on his knuckles - and eased the knob and then the door open.
The bedroom was dark, full of shadows, his eyes couldn't see anything at first but soon they adjusted to the gloom and he saw her. His beloved Amy made a lump on the floor at the end of the bed. She wasn't moving. Harmon stood there, paralyzed, waiting to see the rise and fall that meant breath from the lump on the floor. Oddly enough, he was holding his breath. The way time stretched while his mind raced when he was leaning against the door, stretched even further. Every second felt like an eternity. She wasn't moving, she wasn't breathing. Now, thoughts of what the hospital staff would ask and how bad things were and the possibility that the sheet on the stretcher might just cover her entire danced a jig on his exhausted mind. And then, a slight rise from the lump, from Amy. She was breathing, barely, but she did take a breath, she did. Harmon blocked the possibility that his imagination - wicked, wicked thing - was playing tricks on him.
His paralysis broke and he rushed over to her. Going down on his knees and trying to get the blanket unravelled from her slight frame so he could see her face, he was a terrified wreck. She was making a soft mulling sound deep in her throat and that was all, no movement. She was dead weight in his frantic hands. He got her face out of the blanket - cocoon - and smoothed her hair back off her forehead.
"Amy, my god, what happened?" She gave nothing back, almost like she didn't hear him. "Amy!" he hollered and felt immediately bad, but she wasn't responding. He lifted her, blanket and all, onto the bed and still she just made those awful sounds in her throat. He went over to the closet and turned the light on there, leaving the door just cracked. Maybe he didn't want to shock her with the bright overhead light, maybe he was afraid of what that stark bright light would reveal. But the thin, soft light from the closet revealed enough.
Harmon felt his gorge rise and made his best effort to swallow back. He turned his head and a stream of bile and coffee splashed on the carpet at the end of the bed where Amy had cocooned herself sometime before he got home. Wiping his mouth he turned back to look at her and despite is revolting stomach he curled up next to her in bed and cradled her as best he could. Her chest still rose and fell slightly and Harmon held onto that. Tried to use each breath she took as a shield against the nightmare that was her face.
Where round orbs should be, below the eyebrow and above the cheek bones, the skin lay concave; dipping in instead of protruding out. Just before Amy would make one of her low throaty sounds, Harmon could see the muscles there around her temples trying in vain to blink, to see. What hurt Harmon the most was the way the skin - so thin and pale - pulled against the stitches crudely laced through her eyelashes. And then that anguished sound, a scream perhaps had she more strength.
The tears that had been welling in his eyes spilled over the rim of his lower lid and he laid his head down on her chest. He couldn't look at her like this anymore but with his ear on her chest he could know she was still breathing, that her heart was still beating. And he cried, and Amy cried with him, only, where his tears made clean tracts through the grease and dirt on his face, hers were red runnels of fluid leaking from her empty eye sockets. They laid there like the lovers they were, amidst the ruin and tragedy and hurt. He cradled her with his arms, with his love, with his soul.
At some point, fatigue took over and Harmon's body shut down. He slept there through the night with her (he would clean her up and call for an ambulance in the morning) until he heard a strained gurgling coming from her chest.
He was wide awake in the predawn gray the moment she made a sound - the way a parent can hear their baby in distress from across the house. "What? What, baby, what'd you say?" Harmon was frantic. She was making sounds like she wanted to tell him something. He needed that, he needed to know what happened, what he should do. "Who did this, baby? I'm right here, you can tell me." He wiped the tears and the film of snot off his face and she gurgled out another stressed syllable:
"Da..." she managed. "Da..." The muscles around her eyes twitched again, letting loose another small stream of tears that weren't really tears at all. And then another syllable to join the first, "Da... Da... rrel."
DARREL!!!! Harmon's mind reeled. The good old Serenity prayer forgotten now, Harmon couldn't accept any of this. None of it, no way, Darrel would pay for this. That scum, drug peddling (and now) sadistic waste. Harmon would find him.
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