Because of You

by Sam Mariano

  Because

  Of

  You

  Sam Mariano

  Because of You

  Copyright © 2013 Samantha Druggish.

  All rights reserved.

  __________________

  2ndEdition

  Dedication

  There are a lot of people that this book should be dedicated to, far too many to list right here.

  To all of the readers over the years who read this story, connected with Nikki, felt touched by the characters and their journey, this book is absolutely for you. Without you guys, I never would have published this, and that’s a fact. I appreciate you guys and your encouragement, support and feedback more than words can ever say!

  To Jeremy, the king of gift-giving, who first put this (unedited) story into book form and gave it to me as a Christmas present: love you and stuff.

  To Katie: Just by existing and sharing your sweet little smiles with me, you make my world a much better place. You didn’t even exist when I wrote this, but everything I have ever done and everything I’ll ever do is for you.

  Author’s Note:

  Thank you for buying my book!

  This is a newly revised edition of this book, but the story hasn’t changed. I added—and removed—and tweaked little things here and there, but only to better express this story as I always intended it from the day I wrote the first word, about 8 years ago. Over time, my writing style has changed, but I’m not going to completely rewrite the book, because I know that many readers over the years have really connected with this story, these characters, so I want the story to remain the same for those people and others like them.

  This book is fiction. I am not condoning relationships with jerks (Derek does start out as quite a jerk).

  I hope that you enjoy Nikki’s story!

  Prologue-

  For as long as I could remember I had only heard her described as a bitter, obsessive, crazy monster out to wreak havoc on everyone around her, to punish the world because she didn't get her way.

  While the world around me called her insane, I only called her my mother, and while they only saw her bitterness, I only saw her love and—once in a while—her intense pain.

  I remember my mother's smile, the way she would hold me as we sat outside and rest her chin on top of my head, looking out at the world in our backyard, telling me that it was our safe place, that it belonged only to her and to me, and no one else could ever take that from us. I remember when she used to sing along to the radio as we folded towels or mated socks together.

  For all that they say my mother was filled with hatred and bitterness, I remember mostly her love.

  But I do remember her pain, as well.

  I remember when I was four years old, the very first day that I ever laid eyes on him. My mother and I were walking through the grocery store, she was holding my hand, and she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks. Her grip tightened almost painfully on my hand; I started to whine about it and I looked up at her to complain, but as soon as I saw her face, how pale she was, the broken look that I will never, as long as I live, be able to forget, I forgot about my hand.

  I thought she might break, that's how fragile she looked in that moment. I saw the tears frozen in her eyes, refusing to spill over and ruin the horrible moment for her.

  Even at the age of four, I knew it had to be something terrible that was responsible for changing my beautiful, strong, happy mother into that sad woman with a broken expression that was holding my hand. I looked ahead of us to see what she saw that had upset her so visibly, and all I saw was what appeared to be a family.

  The woman, a much heavier woman than my mother, had brown hair piled in a messy bun on top of her head, and she was pushing the cart, smiling over at the man who was with her. The man was handsome, with long blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail, his blue eyes focused on my mother, his expression unreadable. There was a little boy with them, around my age with short blond hair, and he kept whining, "Mom, can we go now?"

  The little boy's mother seemed to notice that the man was looking at my mom; she lost her smile, glancing quickly at my mother, then to me. She said something to the man, resting her hand on his shoulder—a gesture that should have looked tender, but I somehow thought it looked mean.

  My mother jolted out of whatever trance she had been in, and she quickly said, "Come on," then we immediately left the store without whatever we had been there to get.

  I sat in the backseat on the way home, not saying anything as my mother put on her sunglasses on a cloudy day, pretending not to notice the tears she kept wiping from her face as she drove.

  When we got home she sent me to play with my toys and she sat down at the table with a notebook, something she did quite often, and started writing furiously, a tear sliding down her face now and then, only to get angrily dashed away.

  It wasn't until that night that I realized the sound I sometimes heard in the middle of the night that gave me bad dreams was the sound of my mother crying.

  I remember hearing it at night, my childish imagination concocting plenty of scary reasons for the sound, some that gave me nightmares, some that made me pull the covers up over my face and just try to go to sleep so morning would come and the monster would go away.

  But it was no monster, it was my mother.

  That night when I heard the noise, something made me decide to face my fear, to crawl out of bed and tiptoe out into the hall. When I stood just outside my mother's door, I could hear the noise coming from within. Being four, I didn't realize my mother was crying, I just thought the monster was in her room, and being afraid it might get her, I quietly opened the door to go save her. That was when I saw my mother on the bed, curled up on her side, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed.

  I think that scared me more than a monster would have.

  My mother never cried. She always told me that anybody who made us want to cry wasn't worth our tears. But there was my mother, crying her eyes out as she had done many nights before, as she would do many nights after.

  I never got out of bed again. I knew what the sound was, and sometimes I would just lie there in my bed, staring up at the darkness, hearing her tears and wondering what had made my mommy so sad, wondering how I could fix it.

  The writing my mother always did in her notebooks was journaling, and she saved every notebook, packing them away in boxes for me to find many years later. Since I didn’t get to know my mother for very long, I read them so many times I probably knew the stories her journal told as well as she did.

  It was a good thing I enjoyed reading, since my own childhood was a bit lonely. It’s hard to blend in when you have a family history like mine.

  As far as my existence is concerned, I only exist because of another child close to my age, the little boy from the grocery store, as it turns out.

  The train wreck that was my mother’s love life began to veer off course when she got her first job working at the local Burger King.

  She met a young man –two years older than her— named Alex Webber. Alex was something of a celebrity in the tri-county area, known for doing everything (and everyone). All of the locals knew him, or at least knew of him—everybody except my mother.

  My grandmother told me that before she turned into the "train wreck" that she became, my mother was a quiet, introverted individual, and she favored reading books over talking to anyone in her peer group.

  Apparently it was Alex Webber who changed all that. He took an interest in my mother, and although she was cautious and not at all sure that she liked him at all, even as a person, she ended up allowing his attentions. My grandmother says that they dated, and each time my mother went out with Alex she came home in a rage over something he had done, sayi
ng how she hated him and never wanted to lay eyes on him again, but come the next day she would always simply be over it.

  I suppose you could say that my mother and Alex started dating, although I learned from her journals that he had a girlfriend –that he denied having—the whole time. According to him, he did finally break up with the girlfriend to be with my mother, but the night he told her was the night they stopped seeing each other, because my mother went to a concert with him and he tried to get a little too cozy with her, which she didn’t appreciate.

  Two days later she found out from a mutual friend that he had a new girlfriend, and she stopped hearing from him. Apparently she moped around for exactly two days, then it was as if he never existed.

  Everyone thought, judging by her first failed relationship, that my mother handled matters of the heart remarkably well.

  Two months later she met Mike Noble.

  In the beginning she was as sensible as she always was, and while she did like him, she had hardly lost her head over him—or her heart.

  My mother had what she called her "six to eight week period," and it was apparently the crucial part of any relationship, the part where she would start to feel herself falling. For the first six or seven weeks my mother was completely herself, and Mike seemed to be the first guy that would actually be good for my mom.

  Although he did have "the bad boy vibe" as my mother called it, and an ex-girlfriend that still gave him rides to and from work, Mike seemed great. He and my mom started to spend time together after work. Apparently he smoked pot, but my mother didn't, so she would just hang out with him while he did it. Even though, looking back, I can't see anything special about this man (although I'm probably biased, since I knew how the story was going to end before I knew how it began) at the very end of my mother's six to eight week period, she apparently decided he was very special.

  She fell in love, and she fell hard.

  It's true that hindsight is twenty-twenty; looking back now I can see that my mother should have been more careful, that she shouldn't have let herself fall for him so hard, she should have paid more attention to the red flags.

  The red flags started popping up just before Christmas. My mother had taken Mike his presents and everything had been normal, he had been playful, flirty, had promised to take her out later that week so she could pick out a present for herself.

  Over the course of that week, she called him several times but he never answered and never returned any messages she left for him.

  At first, in her journaling, she was merely worried. She finally got to talk to him the night before Christmas Eve, because his brother answered and gave him the phone before Mike could tell him to say he wasn't home. They only talked for a minute, and in that minute she knew there was something very wrong. She asked him if he wanted to go somewhere with her, and he had blown her off as he had been blowing her off at work that week. He said he couldn't, that he was with "a bunch of people."

  My mother was in love, but she wasn't completely stupid, and she knew in her heart he wasn't telling her the truth. So, armed with her instinct, she got in the car and drove by his house, and sure enough his ex-girlfriend's car was sitting in the driveway.

  From there, her writing turned slightly frantic. I could always tell her moods by how the passages were written. When she was writing and she was upset, her writing was messy, sometimes written so furiously that she missed the bottom line of the paper altogether. She tried to reason that Sarah –the ex-girlfriend— was probably only there to give him his Christmas present because she wasn’t letting go gracefully. In fact, she was holding on for dear life, and since she had been with him for four years before they broke up she felt it was her right.

  The amount of emotional torture that man put my mother through would be enough to make me hate him even if nothing else had ever happened.

  Reading her journals, I've seen that he caused her more pain than anything, more tears than she would have ever permitted herself to cry if she wouldn't have been blinded by him. Even though she tried to ignore it, Sarah had never completely gone away, although prior to the Christmas catastrophe, the way my mother wrote it (I'll never know if it was true or just wishful thinking) Mike did seem to finally be making efforts to push Sarah out of the picture and move my mother into it.

  On Christmas Eve he worked but she didn't, so she took a stocking filled with his favorite candies up to him, and when she came home she was terribly upset because she wrote that she could feel the difference in the way he hugged her and he wouldn't look her directly in the eye.

  It was two days after Christmas that a mutual friend of theirs let on that she thought my mom should just find someone new to love. Since the friend seemed to know something she didn’t, my mom pushed and pried until her friend finally blurted, "Sarah's pregnant!"

  There is a little bit of writing from that night, but it's mostly smeared with tears and written so frantically that it’s more or less illegible. But I don't have to be able to read it to feel the pain she felt. She wrote so hard and so desperately that there were holes where the pen pushed through the paper.

  The next day she decided she had to go to Mike, let him tell her himself and ask him the question she feared the most: Were they back together?

  I know from the entries she wrote prior to visiting Mike that my mother had every intention of backing off if they were back together, that although it would hurt her, she would do it. But something happened when she went to see him that night.

  When she got home there were pages filled with rambling passages about how he had "broken her heart and stolen it at the same time," and she claimed that it was in those moments with him that she realized she couldn't walk away. She had even come right out and asked him, after he verified that he "guessed" they were back together, as if there was nothing he could do about it. She had asked him if he loved Sarah or if he was only with her now because of the baby. He assured her he was only with her because of the baby.

  My mother saw hope here, thinking if he was only with her because of some feeling of duty, time would pass, the sense of shock would pass, and someday he would be hers again. She asked him that night if he wanted her to give up on him, and he had looked up at her and told her no, he didn't. So she held his hand, feeling empowered, and she promised not to let go, not to give up. Apparently they shared many tender moments that night, and she said she could feel how much he cared about her in the way he held her close, the way he curved his face into her neck and pressed his lips against her skin.

  The months that followed would be pure hell for my mother, her only small moments of relief being a stolen kiss in the break room or a brief touching of hands as they passed each other.

  Since Mike was technically back with Sarah, no one was allowed to know they still had feelings for each other, and I believe this is another one of the things that taints my mother's memory. Once he had her heart, it was hard for her to cover it up, while apparently he was much better at it. (I suspect that he was playing my mother to a certain degree, although she would have never been able to see that.) Other people could still see her adoration in the way she looked at him, while he would only show her affection or attention of any kind when they were alone.

  Sarah would continue to pick him up and bring him to work, and my mother said that it hurt just to see her car. Even though she disdained Sarah for using pregnancy to hold on to a man who no longer wanted her, she couldn't help envying that at least Sarah could kiss him in front of people if she wanted to, and she wouldn't have to sneak a moment in the break room and risk getting caught.

  The secrecy and the torment took a toll on my mother, and it was a mere month later when she journaled in very small handwriting –there are hardly any of her entries with this writing, but it means she's worse than upset, she's emotionally devastated—that she knew she couldn't take it anymore. She had tried to give him time, tried to let him realize on his own that he didn't have to be with Sarah, that he could s
till be there for his child, but she had to know that was what he wanted. She needed him to see it soon, because she didn't know how much more her heart could take.

  In one of her entries she pleaded,"Can't he see that he's killing me? With every mention of her name with his, every word I hear about them at work, every time I see her drop him off ...it's killing me."

  She wrote him a letter, pouring her heart and soul out to him, and she gave it to him before she left work one day.

  Since she didn't work with him, she didn't get an immediate response, and finally he came in one Saturday night with his best friend, just to visit her like he used to before he and Sarah got back together. She tried to wait for him to say something to her, but he didn't.

  Finally, she pulled him off to the side and asked him about it. "So, you read my letter?" she asked him.

  "Letter?" he laughed a little. "Hon, it was a novel."

  Her heart soared that he had called her "hon" again, but she tried not to look too eager. "Well, what did you think?"

  She didn't write exactly what his response was, but I believe it was something along the lines of, "I don't know," because she was in disbelief. How could he not know, she wondered? She had poured her heart and soul into that letter, told him she was at the very end of her rope, that she didn't want to let go, but it was killing her to hold on the way she was, and he couldn't even give her a proper response?

  In the midst of her lecture, however, he cut her off, saying, "I don't know, hon. Me and Sarah broke up today, she moved out... I don't know the specifics yet."

  My mother wrote that he looked so happy to be sharing that news, and she was so elated that she nearly burst into tears.

  Despite her self-control, he must have seen it in her face, because he adopted a playful look and shook his head, saying, "And what's this? I don't even get my damn hug?"

  Of course she hugged him with all of her heart and didn't let go until she knew she could contain herself.