by BB Easton
That was all he was, I guess. All any of us are. Just souls wearing masks.
But there was no one behind Knight’s mask anymore. I could feel it. He was gone.
He’s gone.
I’m safe.
He’s gone.
I’m safe.
It was the mantra I used to repeat whenever I felt that sliver of fear slide down my spine. Whenever I felt those icy-blue eyes watching me from the shadows. But I would never feel that fear again.
I was free.
And so was Knight.
As my heart rate returned to normal, I realized that I had one hand in my jacket pocket, clutching the corner of my sonogram, and the other in my purse, clutching my can of pepper spray.
I pulled it out and stared at the leather pouch, tattered and worn, my thumb grazing the embossed letters. Unhooking it from my key ring, I took a deep breath and tucked it into the front of Knight’s cut.
Patting the bulge beneath his leather vest, I whispered, “Bye, Knight,” as my eyes welled with tears.
There was so much more I wanted to say, but my throat was too swollen with emotion to speak. So, I gave Knight one last look, committing every freckle and frown line to memory, and said it with my heart.
As I stepped outside, wishing like hell that I could drink or smoke or take something to make the pain in my chest go away, I caught the unmistakable scent of a menthol cigarette on the breeze. I inhaled deeply and followed my nose to a frail blonde woman sitting on the curb, smoking a skinny, six-inch-long Virginia Slim.
Candi.
My first instinct was to turn and run in the opposite direction, but the mother in me ached for the mother in her. Candi might not have been a good mom, but no one deserves to bury their only child. No one.
Sitting on the curb next to her, I opened my mouth to speak, but the only thing that came out was a sorrowful, “Hey.”
Looking up, Candi’s face was wet and wrinkled and makeup-free. I’d never even seen her without false eyelashes on before. She looked so old. So spent. Deep lines rimmed her thinning lips from years of smoking. Her crystalline-blue eyes were dull and bloodshot. And every muscle in her face sagged, as if she hadn’t smiled in years.
“BB,” she squeaked, her chin pulling in on itself. “Oh, BB.” Throwing her skeletal arms around my slightly thicker body, she rested her forehead on my shoulder and sniffled. “I’m so happy you came.”
Her redneck Southern accent, the one that she used to try to hide for her trophy-wife persona, was now on full display as well.
“Me, too.” I patted her back with a stiff hand. “I’m so sorry.”
Lifting her head, Candi looked me in the eyes. “I don’t know nobody in there.”
I smiled weakly. “Me either.”
“I can’t believe he’s gone.” She shook her head. “I always thought you were gonna be the mother of my grandchildren.” Staring at a spot on the sidewalk, she added, “Now, I’ll never have grandchildren.”
I ran one hand over her bony back as I dragged my finger over the corner of the sonogram in my pocket. I didn’t tell her about the baby. I just sat there and bore witness to her pain as the ash from her unsmoked cigarette fell onto my boot.
“Here,” Candi said, suddenly stamping out her cigarette and reaching for something inside the neck of her black dress. “Ronnie woulda wanted you to have this.” When her long acrylic nails emerged, they were pinching Knight’s dog tags.
“Oh, Candi. No. You keep those.”
“There’s two of ’em,” she said, unclasping the silver ball chain around her neck and sliding one off. “One for me”—she lifted her miserable eyes to mine as she held out her hand—“an’ one for you.”
I accepted the small metal plate stamped with Knight’s identifying information hesitantly. I didn’t feel right, taking it when I was married to someone else. But Candi was right. Knight would have wanted me to have it.
He would have wanted me to have the husband and the baby, too.
I swallowed my sobs as I hugged Candi goodbye, knowing I would never see her again. Then, I stood up, brushed myself off, and walked to my car, the end of one life and the beginning of another bouncing side by side in my pocket.
December 2009
My son was born seven months later after twenty-six hours of labor, two ineffective epidurals, and two worthless rounds of intravenous narcotics.
It turns out that some redheads are genetically resistant to painkillers.
Lucky me.
Ken was amazing through the whole process. He responded to all the orders I barked immediately, held one of my legs while I pushed, and watched me expel a little bald person out of my sliced-open vag hole like it was no big deal. He even cut the gnarly purple cord that came out with it.
When Ken handed the baby to me, I’d expected it to have its eyes closed like a little puppy but not this one. He stared me dead in the eye—glared was more like it—as if he were blaming me personally for what had just happened to him. I gave him my swollen boob as a peace offering. He accepted but refused to take his eyes off of mine the entire time he nursed.
“I hope you’re amazing,” I whispered down to my beautiful, healthy, oddly alert, and suspicious newborn, “because I am never doing that again.”
Ken sat on the edge of the bed, and I watched him almost as intensely as our son watched me.
Would he cry? Would he be moved? Would he be freaked out? Would he be a good dad?
But all my worries were put to rest the moment the nurses came to take our son for his first bath.
Ken left with him and returned an hour later, pushing the hospital crib and talking a mile a minute. “They let me dry him off after his bath and change his diaper, and when you change his diaper, you have to remember to fold the front flap down because of his umbilical cord stump and—” Ken pulled out his phone and started showing me pictures he’d taken inside the nursery. “He’s so long. Look at him when he was all stretched out. Twenty-one inches. And his head size is in the ninety-fifth percentile—”
“Yeah. I could tell while I was pushing it out.” I smirked, but Ken ignored me and continued his energetic recap of everything I’d missed in the last hour.
God, he’s talking so much.
And smiling.
This is weird. Why is he acting so weird?
And he’s in half of these pictures. He actually had someone take pictures of him with the baby.
Oh my God, is Ken…excited?
Excited Ken was something I only got to see on the first day of football season every year and whenever he stumbled upon a Hugh Grant movie on TBS. But there he was, pacing around my hospital room, grinning and rambling about percentile ranks as I patiently waited for him to give me my baby back.
Ken wasn’t going to be a great parent. He already was one.
I, on the other hand, had to work at it.
When I came home from the hospital, I looked like I was still five months pregnant. I was horrified by my postpartum body. All I wanted to do was chain myself to my treadmill and survive on a diet of hot water with lemon until the weight came off, but I couldn’t. I’d chosen to breastfeed, which meant I had to eat. A lot. Then, I had to keep eating, even after the baby was weaned so that I would have enough energy to chase him around. Every meal—hell, every bite—was an excruciating battle between wanting to be a good mother and wanting to be thin.
But, I wanted to be a good mother more.
I started meditating to help myself stay focused on what was really important. I learned about gratitude. I learned that, instead of hating my body, I should be thankful for everything it had done for me. And during process of soul-searching, I also learned why I’d been so perfectionistic and self-harming in the first place; I had been born feeling incomplete.
I’d spent my whole life looking for something to fill that sense of emptiness—boys, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, achievements, the quest for perfection, piercings, fast cars—but none of it had worked because
the void wasn’t existential. It wasn’t emotional or imaginary. It was physical.
The emptiness was in my womb.
Ken never wanted to get married or have children, but he set his wants aside to take care of my needs. He opened his home to me when I was lost. He gave me a ring when I needed to feel secure. He showered me with support during though tough grad school years. And, no matter what color I dyed my hair or how sick I became, he always gave me his unconditional acceptance. Ken never once put any pressure on me to get healthy; he simply gave me the one thing I needed to do it myself.
My son.
Our happily ever after would have culminated there, but like his mother, Mini Ken had been born feeling incomplete as well. I could tell the moment I’d laid eyes on him that he was searching for answers. As he got older, he would roam the house, a determined scowl on his beautiful face, looking under beds and inside cabinets. Always searching. Never finding. I couldn’t figure out what my smart, serious little boy was missing until he turned two and finally found the words to tell us.
“Mommydaddy,” he said, his big blue eyes shifting from mine to Ken’s, “when is my sister coming? Will she be here tomorrow?”
Mini Ken began asking about his mythical sister every day. He would go into our guest room and say, “Dis is my sister’s room.” He told us she had blonde hair and blue eyes. He said he would share his toys with her and push her on the swing. He even had the perfect name picked out for her—Frosting Spider-Man.
My heart went out to him. I knew firsthand what it felt like to miss someone you’d never met. I’d felt that way until the day he was born. If my little boy wanted a sister, I wanted to give him one.
Ken, of course, did not.
But, in true Ken form, he set his wants aside for ours.
That, and the fact that I promised him a vasectomy if everything went well.
April 2013
“What are you doing?” Ken squinted at me, leaning in the doorway of our master bathroom. “It’s three in the morning.”
I lowered my mascara wand and turned to face him, knocking my eyeshadow into the sink with my massive belly. “I think my water broke. Well, it’s more of a trickle than a break, but I’m having some pretty serious—” I gripped the counter with both hands and hissed through my clenched teeth.
“Contractions?” Ken finished for me.
I nodded, my face twisted in pain.
“I’ll call my mom to come over.”
“No!” I took a deep breath, the viselike crushing pain at the base of my spine beginning to ease up. “Don’t wake her up. Remember last time? We went to the hospital at six in the morning, and the baby wasn’t born until eight at—” I winced and dropped the mascara, jamming my fingertips into my lower back for some counterpressure.
Ken raised a sleepy eyebrow at me. “Pack your shit. I’m calling my mom and the obstetrician.”
Mrs. Easton arrived thirty minutes later, still in her pajamas. As she and Ken chatted in the living room, I tried to walk from one side of it to the other. I’d smile and comment on whatever they were talking about, take two steps, and double over in pain. Breathe, curse, wince, writhe, then stand back up, smile, and do it all over again.
“Uh,” Mrs. Easton said, watching me in horror, “I think you need to get her to a hospital.”
Ken helped me climb into the passenger seat of his SUV and then drove past the closet hospital to the better hospital. The one I’d already toured and filled out admission forms for. The one my doctor was supposed to meet me at as soon as we called him. The one that had my eighteen-page birth plan on file.
The one I was beginning to think I’d never see the inside of because my baby was about to be born in Ken’s fucking Nissan Xterra.
They had an emergency parking area for those kinds of situations, but Ken didn’t park there. He grabbed a spot in visitor parking, fucking sixty feet away from the door, and began unloading all the stuff he’d packed—my bag, his bag, the diaper bag, two regular pillows, my nursing pillow, my breast pump, a giant exercise ball, an extra copy of my birth plan in a clear plastic cover, cookies for the nurses…
“Ken!” I shouted, having only made it three feet away from the car before a massive contraction had me clinging to a concrete pillar for support. Pointing to the sliding glass doors ahead, I screamed, “Get a fucking wheelchair!”
Ken dashed off and returned seconds later with a wheelchair, an orderly, and a rolling cart for all our shit. I couldn’t stand, but I didn’t think I could sit either. So, I stood on the foot holders and gripped the armrests and rode into the hospital with my ass two feet off the seat.
When we got inside, the motherfuckers at the front desk made me sit/stand there while Ken filled out even…more…paperwork.
“I already…aaaaaaaaaaah…did that!” I screamed. Screamed. In the middle of the quiet hospital lobby, I screamed and writhed and then…the grunting started. Oh God. It was deep and guttural and sounded like I was taking the world’s biggest shit. I was so embarrassed, but I couldn’t stop the sounds coming out of my mouth. “My paperwork is on…uuuuuuuhhnnggg…file! I need an…uuuuuuuhhnnggg…epidural!”
I knew an epidural probably wouldn’t work, but I was willing to try anything at that point.
“Ma’am, your doctor isn’t here yet, but we have a midwife on staff who can deliver your—”
“Not a midwife. I need an anestheeeeeeeeeeeeeeesiologist!”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but there’s no time. Your baby is coming right now.”
My what is what?
And, with that, they wheeled me into a room, had me change into a giant paper gown—which was next to impossible with a head in my vagina—and then wheeled me into a delivery room where I was attacked by nurses.
I didn’t see any of it. I couldn’t have opened my eyes if I wanted to. The pain was so intense and unrelenting that all I could do was twist my face up, dig my fingertips into my thighs, and scream.
Oh, and grunt.
Luckily, the midwife was a fucking baby-birthing ninja angel, and twenty excruciating minutes later, she handed me an absolutely perfect baby girl with big blue eyes and long black eyelashes. This baby didn’t glare at me the way her brother had. This one didn’t have a care in the world. She blinked up at me a few times, then, satisfied with what she saw, little Frosting Spider-Man curled into my breast and nursed herself to sleep.
I smiled up at Ken, who looked pretty satisfied himself.
“Up high,” he said, raising one hand in the air, a huge grin on his otherwise exhausted face.
I eyed my husband wearily, then gently slapped his hand, careful not to disturb the baby.
“No doctor. No epidural.” He beamed. “This is gonna be the cheapest delivery ever!”
Ken and BB’s story continues in her bestselling, award-winning memoir, 44 Chapters About 4 Men.
Read on for an excerpt…
Chapter 6: Enter the Evil Professor
August 29, 2013
Dear Journal,
There’s a small chance that I might get disappeared soon, so I need you to know what happened in case the feds come snooping around.
I could write out the whole juicy story here, but I pretty much already did that in an email to my BFF, Sara, so I’m just going to copy and paste it in for the sake of time. And also, to prove that what I’m about to do was all her idea.
FROM: BB EASTON
TO: SARA SNOW
DATE: THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 9:36 P.M.
SUBJECT: SHIT. JUST. GOT. REAL.
So…Ken read my fucking journal.
I’m getting divorced.
I’m getting poisoned or divorced.
Just thought you should know.
FROM: SARA SNOW
TO: BB EASTON
DATE: THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 9:41 P.M.
SUBJECT: RE: SHIT. JUST. GOT. REAL.
No way. That doesn’t sound like Ken. How do you know?
Sara Snow, PhD
Associ
ate Professor, Department of Psychology, (name of university deleted)
FROM: BB EASTON
TO: SARA SNOW
DATE: THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 9:47 P.M.
SUBJECT: RE: SHIT. JUST. GOT. REAL.
Dude, I know because, when I was coming downstairs a few nights ago after putting the kids to bed, I heard him slam my fucking laptop shut. That’s how I know. By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs and rounded the corner into the living room, he was shoving my computer across the coffee table, looking guilty as shit.
He read my fucking journal, Sara. You have no idea what’s in there. It’s so, so graphic. After reading that shit, he could probably pick Knight’s giant cock out of a lineup.
I haven’t slept in, like, three days because I know, the second I close my eyes, Ken is going to go, “Shh, shh, shh,” and smother me with a pillow.
Tell me what to do. Please!
FROM: SARA SNOW
TO: BB EASTON
DATE: THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 10:01 P.M.
SUBJECT: RE: SHIT. JUST. GOT. REAL.
For starters, you should check your browser history. If whatever he read in your journal was that bad, then he probably used your computer to secure a safe house while he was at it. I’m going to save this email just in case you come up missing.
P.S. Why the hell didn’t you password-protect your journal?
Sara Snow, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, (name of university deleted)
FROM: BB EASTON
TO: SARA SNOW
DATE: THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 10:13 P.M.
SUBJECT: RE: SHIT. JUST. GOT. REAL.