Jeff, the man of my dreams (although, at that point, I hadn’t told him how I felt about him), was waiting for me at my spot near the fireplace when I got off the elevator and turned the corner into the dining room in the main building of Side By Side Assisted Living. Lesley, my private duty aide, parked me right next to him. He had a big impish grin on his face, but when he saw I’d been crying, his grin melted away and he looked concerned.
“What happened Becca?” He asked me.
“I’m not allowed to say,” I told him, “But I’m not allowed to have any men in my apartment anymore.”
“Who said that?” he asked me. “Your parents? They shelter you way too much, you know I-”
“It wasn’t my parents it was Eve (the owner of Side By Side),” I cut him off.
“Oh, I have Eve wrapped around my little pinkie finger,” his smile reappeared, “I’ll be the exception. Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out.”
Although I had just learned that my perception about safe guys was off, I had a feeling from deep down within me that Jeff was a safe guy, that he was different from any guy I had ever met or gotten to know. He was special, and I didn’t have to worry about him doing anything to me at all like John (the man who molested me) did. I just knew.
“Also,” Jeff added, “She never said anything about not coming over to my apartment.”
“But your apartment has stairs,” I told him.
“I can carry you up the stairs,” he told me. He pulled up his sleeves and flexed his muscles. He was built, impressive for such a small guy ( he couldn’t be taller than 5’7 and he couldn’t have weighed much more than about 160 or 170). I grinned.
“In high school, they used to call me Muscles Harford. On my first day of high school a senior came up to me and tried to haze me, I picked him up with one hand and then used the other hand to flip him upside down and shake him so everything fell out of his pockets and then set him down and said, ‘how about that for my first day of school?’ My vice-principal suspended me but my parents weren’t even upset, a senior had tried to haze me, all I did was defend myself. So they just let me enjoy my day off. They did have some issues with other kids I beat up later in the year. At least they never found out about the time I accidentally popped my buddy Josh’s lung and he had to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance after we were fooling around and wrestling together. We both just claimed we didn’t know how it happened.” Jeff smiled as he told me this story from his high school years. This was one of his favorite stories from high school to tell me. As I got to know him better I would learn that he had a few stock favorites.
I just laughed.
“All right,” I smiled, “we’ll go to your apartment, but only if you can make sure that I don’t get into any more trouble with Eve, she doesn’t like me very much.”
“Like I said, wrapped around my little pinkie finger,” he put up his pinkie finger and waggled it around in the air.
After I got most of my schoolwork done, Jeff took me and my wheelchair and wheeled me over to his house. He had a ramp into his house at least. Jeff carried me up the stairs to his apartment and sat me down on top of his queen-size bed that Eve had given him. I wasn’t worried or uncomfortable being on his bed because he sat on a nearby chair with a good amount of space between us, and I was sitting on top of his quilt with even my jacket still on. Jeff was very respectful of my personal space, except of course when he had to carry me up and down the stairs, but even then he was careful of where and how he held me. He was a total gentleman to me.
We watched movies and chatted and played cards and then he carried me back down the steps and put me back in the wheelchair and wheeled me back to the main building. No one was the wiser and we had a great time.
For a couple of days, I managed to hold things together by spending my time with Jeff and not thinking about what had happened in the early morning hours of Sunday, but then on Tuesday, we had to have that meeting with me and John and my mom and Eve and Chrissy.
“She invited me in, she was leading me on, it’s what I thought she wanted,” John kept saying. “She’s such a striptease.”
“I was saying ‘no’ and screaming ‘stop’,” I told him, “and you just kept tightening your grip on my leg, I have the bruises to prove it.”
“Well you wanted me to massage your feet with lotion,” he said.
“No, you continued to push to do that and I was afraid you weren’t going to want to be my friend anymore if I didn’t let you do it so I did, but then when I asked you to stop you didn’t,” I said.
“Well, I’m sorry if I upset you, I didn’t mean to,” John said, and then leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms in front of his chest looking smug.
“Do you have anything to say?” Eve asked me.
I couldn’t believe she was trying to get me to apologize to the man who had just molested me several days ago. The nightmares and flashbacks hadn’t stopped since.
“I’m sorry if I led you in the wrong direction,” I finally mumbled.
“I couldn’t hear that, speak up,” Eve told me.
I sighed, paused a long pregnant moment to avoid crying, and then repeated myself a little louder barely believing that I was actually apologizing for being violated.
“Can you two be civil with each other from now on and be adults and just get along for the sake of everyone else?” Chrissy asked us.
We both nodded, but my internal rage was almost at its boiling point. Why should I get treated like I had done something wrong when I was the one who had gotten molested, I was the one who was only 24 and had never lived on her own or dated or learned rules about social life because I had grown up going in and out of hospitals and that was it, yet here I was being treated like a criminal because I got molested because I’m too friendly and naïve. Something felt very very wrong.
My mom asked me if I wanted to visit after the meeting, but I was so drained that I decided I wanted to visit back at my apartment and then take a nap. My mom carried me up the stairs to the house and I wished I could just stay snuggled safely against her forever. I wished I was her baby again so that she could just take care of me and hold me all of the time and never let anything happen to me. Unfortunately, though, I was 24 and my mom had to put me down in my wheelchair when we got to the top of the steps.
We played a few half-hearted games of Boggle and then cards, and then I climbed into bed with my build-a-bears and tried to take a nap.
When I woke up my mom had gone home and I was alone. It was around 5 PM, and my thoughts were darker than ever.
What was the point of this life anyway? It had started crappy when at age 5 I started being physically and sexually abused by my best friend’s father. I was at her house constantly because she went to the same school as me, she was on my gymnastics team, and our families went to the same synagogue. Her father would hold me at either gunpoint or knifepoint and attempt to rape or sodomize me, but because I was always so tiny he was never able to complete the act, but he would constantly molest and touch me inappropriately and then slice my inner thighs with a butcher knife to the point where they probably should have gotten stitches but didn’t, then he would tell me that that was just a taste of what he would do to my family if I ever so much as even thought about telling them what he did to me.
I only told my parents about the sexual abuse when I got transferred from the hospital in New Jersey to the Children’s Hospital in New York because they noticed all of the cuts on the insides of my thighs and all the swelling and redness in my vaginal area, they questioned me very gently and I felt like my family and I were far enough away from the abuser, to tell the truth to the hospital. So I explained how for the last 5 years I had been abused.
The abuse was only the beginning of the tragedy of my life, then there was the whole issue with the gastroparesis and no one believing me, and then all the other symptoms that started up, then the brain tumor, then my autoimmune SFN getting worse, than the nursing home that almost killed me, and then getting molested and getting blamed for it. What was even the point of continuing to fight? My disease was only going to continue to get worse. I was going to get weaker and weaker. Eventually, I wouldn’t be able to walk at all, then I wouldn’t be able to stand, slowly I will need more and more oxygen, eventually, I will need a ventilator, who knows what else my naivety is going to screw up for me. I’ll never be able to hold down a real job, I’ll never be able to have kids, I’ll never be able to support myself. What was the point in my life? Did I really want to continue living this life?
I found myself looking around the room. This was my world. This was what my life came down to. I glanced at a bottle of liquid Phenergan. It would be so easy to just grab a syringe and pour the whole bottle of Phenergan down my J tube. They wouldn’t be able to reverse it if I did that because it would have already gone straight into the middle of my small intestines. The idea was tempting. I would have eternal rest. It would be like taking a long beautiful nap that you never have to wake up from.
I inched my wheelchair toward the bottle of Phenergan. I picked it up in one hand. It was heavy. It had just been refilled. If I poured the whole thing down my tube it should do the trick.
Slowly I unscrewed the top. I could hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears. Was this what I really wanted? This final solution? I could hear John’s leering voice in my head.
“She invited me in, she was leading me on”.
I could feel his large rough hands holding onto my foot and tightening so that I couldn’t get free.
Suddenly I was having trouble breathing.
The cap was jammed on the Phenergan bottle, I tried again to unscrew it. The cap was stuck on there tight.
“Speak up, I can’t hear you…. Crying is not going to get you anywhere with me,” Now I could hear Eve’s voice in my head.
I finally got the cap off the bottle of Phenergan. I sat the bottle down on my nightstand and picked up a 60 ml catheter tip syringe.
“Can you two be civil with each other from now on and just be adults?” Now I could hear Chrissy’s voice.
I picked up my J tube and slid the end of the catheter tip syringe into the end of my J tube.
I was just about to start pouring the Phenergan into my body when my phone buzzed, I looked down at it. It was a messenger attachment from Jeff.
Suddenly I was starting to have second thoughts about the whole suicide thing, but I was so completely overwhelmed. I opened the messenger message. There was a picture of a little gray and orange kitten hanging on a tree and the meme said “hang in there”. I couldn’t help it, I smiled a little bit.
Jeff and I had both been through hell and back, we were both too tough to just give up throw in the towel, and stop fighting. I knew I had to choose a different course of action.
Taking in a deep breath, I pulled the syringe out of the end of my J tube, closed up the J tube, screwed the cover back onto the Phenergan and put it back on the shelf, and collapsed onto my bed with my Build-a-Bears to formulate a plan of action.