Ellie could feel the power of Joey’s belief wash over her like warm spring rain. She smiled down at him impressed by his strength and courage.
“Merciful God, help me.” He gasped.
Joey’s faith was not the desperate last ditch belief of those sinners frantic for a miracle to save their rotting souls from hell, grasping for heaven like a drowning man clutching a life preserver. It had always been genuine and strong. His love for God was unfaltering and unconditional. Even after all he’d been through his eyes were glazed with rapture as he stared heavenward.
A wrinkled, balding, white-haired, liver spotted priest came in to give him communion. He looked like Lazarus reborn yet still decomposing. Joey hadn’t wanted to miss mass even while he was hospitalized. So he’d had them summon the old Jesuit to perform the communion for him. If Joey needed any more proof that miracles were possible then just the fact that such an impossibly ancient human was still alive and ambulatory would have been enough.
The dying young boy was far too weak to kneel so the old priest stood over his bed.
“The body of Christ.” He said as he genuflected with the cracker and then placed it on Joey’s outstretched tongue. Ellie squeezed her son tighter as he swallowed the communal wafer and continued to pray. The boy even had white spots and sores inside his mouth and on his tongue. He was dying despite all the high-priced drugs they had him on. Only she could save him now.
As she held him she could feel his fever slowly abating, his temperature dropping, his tremors quieting. She kissed him on his sweaty brow and he smiled up at her with those enraptured eyes. Then he climbed up out of the bed.
The nurses stared at him in awe as he shrugged off his bed-sheets and stepped down onto the cool tiled floor. Earlier that day he’d been too weak to lift his head from the pillow to take his medication.
“It’s a miracle!” they shouted almost in unison.
One of them turned and thanked the old priest. Kneeling to kiss his hand. The old Jesuit smiled pompously. Ellie’s jealousy flared. It was her love that had resurrected her son from near death, not that old fraud’s useless prayers. She slammed into the aging priest as she stormed out of the room, knocking him into the wall. He clutched his chest with one gnarled arthritic hand and his eyes went wide as his heartbeat stuttered and threatened to stall. The priest genuflected and uttered a silent prayer, taking deep breaths to slow his thundering pulse.
With a warm smile on her face, feeling the love of her children as it flowed over her in waves from all those in the room who’d borne witness to the miracle, El left little Joey’s room behind as she stalked off down the hall. The nurses split as they burst into action, half grabbing at the falling priest and the others rushing to perform tests on the little miracle boy, praising Ellie loudly whenever one of the tests came back with positive results. Even his white blood count was rising. The HIV appeared to be in recession. Still, there were more of Ellie’s children who were suffering, more of them who needed her help; her love.
In the next room Ellie’s daughter Nikky lay on a gurney with her legs spread, biting her bottom lip against the memory of pain as the nurse swabbed the walls of her vagina with a cotton ball, collecting semen samples for a DNA test. A police woman calmly took pictures of the bruises and bite marks on Nikky’s battered face, breasts, and buttocks, and picked flecks of blood and skin from beneath her fingernails with tweezers, sealing them in zip-lock bags. A stern middle-aged doctor came in, mumbled an insincere greeting and a few tepid words of encouragement, then patted the frightened young woman on the arm to raise the thick vein on the inside of her elbow. He then filled a syringe with Doxycyclin and administered an injection for the Chlamydia and Gonorrhea and a prescription for Valtrex to treat the herpes her attackers had infected her with.
Sighing as if the entire thing were as much an ordeal for him as it was for her, he told the nurse to take blood for an AIDS test and recommended to Nikky that she come back again in three months for another test. Nikky nodded her head solemnly with her bottom lip trembling as if about to fall.
Her eyes glistened with emotion yet she continued to fight back the tears, snarling in rage and revulsion remembering the foul breath of her assailants steaming in her face, their oily sweat dripping down onto her forehead and into her eyes, coating her skin in a noxious film. She shuddered and suppressed a scream as she recalled the vile taste of their semen ejaculating down her throat and the stomach churning pain of their angry cocks tearing into her rectum and splitting wide her vagina before they mutilated her. Ellie rushed to Nikky’s side just before she lost her tenuous grip on sanity. Nikky smiled, happy to have her mother there to see her through the tragedy. The nurses were all impressed with the love and faith she showed in her mother even after being gang raped by strangers on a subway platform at four o’clock in the morning. They didn’t know how to tell her that the damage the rapists had done to her reproductive system with the 40oz of St. Ides they’d shattered inside of her vagina while sodomizing her had destroyed any chances she’d had of ever bearing a child.
The nurse picked more jagged shards of glass from Nikky’s labia as she winced and tears squeezed out from the corners of her closed eyelids and then swabbed it with iodine once they’d finished collecting semen samples. The young nurse cursed when the doctor exited the room leaving her to break the news to poor Nikky. El left too.
Ellie moved on to the room where her 30 year-old son Walter lay in an intensive care unit with broken bones and bruised organs. Two of his cervical vertebrae had been shattered and he was numb from the neck down. Tubes snaked out from his nose, spine, and both arms into respirators, morphine drips, and intravenous feeding tubes. He was a mess and it was not expected that he would live and if by some miracle he did make it through the night he would be forever a paraplegic.
El slipped into the room and held his hand but didn’t bother to speak to him. She knew that Walter didn’t love her. He blamed her for everything that went wrong in his life including the Cadillac that smashed him against the parked Chevy Suburban as he rode his bike down Market Street. He never even turned to look at her as she rubbed his unfeeling palm across her cheek.
His wife came in and sat beside him with tears running the maze of worry lines down her face.
“It’s okay dear. Everything will be okay. I’ve got the whole church praying for you. God will take care of you. You’ll see.”
El slipped out quietly to leave the two of them alone. But she could still hear them. She could hear everything.
“Yeah, God’s done a wonderful job so far. Fuck the church!” Walt croaked.
El stopped and walked back into the room. She screamed and punched the walls in a rage that made the lights in the entire hospital flicker.
“Fuck the church? Fuck you Walter! You blame everyone but yourself! Fuck you!” She grabbed Walter by the throat and began shaking him like a ragdoll in the hands of a hyperkinetic kid as she screamed her indignation into his awestruck face. Tossing him back down onto the hard hospital mattress, she reached around and severed the connection between Walter’s spine and his brain. She watched his eyes go wide as he looked deep into her angry countenance and recognition spread across his features.
“You . . . you.” He managed to croak before all feeling left his muscles. His wife screamed as Walter began to convulse and the electrocardiograph went wild. “Fuck the church!” would be the last words he’d ever speak. He would lie in that bed, a vegetable, more brain cells dying by the day, for the next two years. Everyday his wife would beg El to bring him back to her, praying with fanatical regularity, sometimes fifteen or twenty times a day and devoting her life to the Lord, until the medical bills sapped all of their savings and she was nearly at the point of prostituting herself to pay Walter’s increasing hospital debt. Finally she would beg El to end his suffering for good. Ellie would oblige and reach into his chest to halt his life. Walt’s wife would thank her for her mercy.
Ellie made her way to t
he cancer ward and stroked the bedsores, lesions, and subcutaneous growths plaguing her children’s bodies with her feathery soft fingertips and whispered gently in their ears.
“Mommy’s here. I will take care of you. Don’t be afraid.”
Some of them smiled others groaned and turned away. Some cried out in pain. Some of them she embraced. Some of them she walked right past as if they were strangers and not her own flesh and blood.
She felt terrible for her suffering children. She left her sick and dying babies and walked across the street to the Baptist Church. It always made her feel better to hear the choir sing, the pipe organ, the drums, and tambourines, beautiful sounds of praise and worship. Today the church was filled. There had been a ten-car pile up on the freeway and friends and family of the injured and deceased crowded the pews to pray for their loved ones. She watched as her children’s friends and neighbors knelt in prayer and smiled as she listened to them praise her for all the love and compassion she showed to her suffering progeny in their time of need.
El was a good mother. This sentiment was almost unanimous. Almost, except for one lone protester who marched back and forth in front of the church accusing her of causing the suffering of her own children just to get attention for herself. Just so that she could comfort and heal them and absorb the accolades of those who witnessed her devotion for being such a loving and attentive parent. El hated the man because everything he said was true.
“Münchausen by Proxy! It’s a syndrome, a mental disorder, where mothers cause injury and illness to their children in order to get the sympathy and attention of others, to look like heroes when they sacrifice their time and energy to nurse them back to health. That’s what’s going on here! Münchausen by Proxy! She wants to be needed and the only way to do that is to make us suffer. So that we’ll cry out for her to save us and she can come running like the dutiful mother. But she’s causing all the pain and suffering! Both directly and by turning her back and allowing it all to happen when she could have stopped it, by setting up the situations under which these tragedies occur! She could have protected us from all of this pain but then what would we need her for?”
This was one that she should have strangled with the umbilical cord by her way of thinking. Ungrateful little brat! Hadn’t she suckled him at her tit and given him life? Hadn’t she done everything a good mother could ever be expected to do? Yet still he rebelled against her, accusing her of hurting her own kids. She wanted to push him out in front of a bus and watch his head crack like an over-ripe melon. Then he would call out for her. They all called her when they were in trouble. The first hint of pain or failure and they all cried for their mommy. But as much as she wanted to make the man suffer she was afraid people would get suspicious and might start believing the things he was saying. She didn’t want to martyr him.
The angry young man marched back and forth waving a big medical dictionary as if it were the bible.
“I’m not crazy! Just look at it. Read what the medical journals say. ‘Münchausen by Proxy Syndrome is a dangerous kind of maltreatment in which caretakers deliberately exaggerate and/or fabricate and/or induce physical and/or psychological-behavioral-mental health problems in others. The primary purpose of this behavior is to gain some form of internal gratification, such as attention, for the perpetrator. MBP perpetrators use their victims as objects in trying to satisfy internal needs through the attention they receive from having a child with “problems.” These needs are much more important to them than the needs of their victims.’ Now who does that sound like? You tell me! Who is responsible for all this suffering and why?!”
El hissed with fury, wanting again to strike the man down where he stood. Instead she just walked right past him and hissed in his face.
“Burn in hell!”
The man’s skin crawled as her words snaked over his flesh like a chill draft from the grave. He shivered and rubbed his hands over his arms.
“God! What the hell was that?”
El left the hospital to visit the rest of her children. So many of them were sick. So many of them needed her love and comfort. She could hear them calling out for her. She was the only hope they had. They needed her and those who didn’t need her yet soon would, she would make sure of that.
She had given birth to countless generations of man. She nursed entire species at her bosom. Her milk was the very nectar of life. Worlds, solar systems, galaxies, the entire universe flowed from her loins. She was the progenitor of all existence, the mother of all living things, and all Ellie had ever asked for was the love and appreciation of her children. That was all that she demanded.
El raised her arms out into the sky and they spanned the universe from one end to the other. All over the world cars crashed, women screamed in the brutal embrace of rapists, murderers, and abusers, children wasted away of famine, disease, abuse, and neglect, plagues spread, disaster struck, and wars erupted. As far as she could reach misery spread, stars exploded and planets shifted on their axis, comets crashed and solar systems collapsed into black holes. It was all good though. Mama would make it all better.
Finally the sun acquiesced and relinquished the sky to night and El went back to the hospital to visit her children. First she went to see her daughter who lay alone in a single hospital room with a candystriper sitting beside her bed reading a fashion magazine and dreaming about losing those extra 30 pounds she’d been trying to lose for years. She flipped through the pages and imagined one day fitting into one of those designer outfits that it would take her years of saving to afford as Nikky writhed on the bed sobbing uncontrollably and tugging at her restraints.
Nikky was under suicide watch. Her mind had yet to fully recover from the assault and the knowledge that she would never be a mother now. She had attacked the nurse when she’d been told that her fallopian tubes had been lacerated beyond repair. The orderlies had to pry her hands from around the woman’s throat. For the next hour she had alternated between praying and trying to rip open the arteries in her wrist with her own teeth, until finally they had strapped her arms to the bed with leather wrist restraints. El stepped quietly into her room. She knelt and kissed Nikky on her forehead, which seemed to calm her for a moment. Then she laid her hands on Nikky’s hot sweaty skin and spread the Hepatitis C throughout her body. It was the one STD they had neglected to test her for.
“I know you must be testing me Lord. I know that this is all a part of your plan. I will try to be strong.”
Ellie smiled down at her, stroked her hair and spread the Hepatitis down into her kidneys. She then reached between Nikky’s thighs and gifted her child with her first major Herpes outbreak. The little red sores erupted all over Nikky’s mouth, anus, and vagina looking raw and inflamed like bee stings that had been scratched once too often. Nikky wept aloud and began trying to gnaw at her wrist again when she lifted her bed sheet to see the suppurating wounds blistering around her still bruised and lacerated vagina. Her wrists were still strapped to the bed however and she was not strong enough to break the restraints. She continued to weep as she lay there staring at the ceiling and planning her suicide.
Ellie left as quietly as she had come, pausing briefly to clog more of the candystriper’s arteries with cholesterol. The overweight teenager would have a heart attack by the time she celebrated her twenty-ninth birthday. By then she would also be more than seventy pounds overweight.
In the cancer ward El took cancer from one child to give to another. She laid hands on one elderly lady and stopped the spread of cancer through her reproductive track shrinking the malignant grapefruit sized tumor in her uterus to the size of an orange. She then laid hands on the testicles of the man across the room from her and doubled the size of the growth in his balls before sliding her arm into his rectum and quadrupling the size of the tumor in his prostate.
She approached her son Billy who had been hospitalized for over a month dying of childhood Leukemia. Ellie had visited him often. Some days she took away his fever and
returned his strength. Other days she sat on his chest and sapped his vitality so that he could not get out of bed unassisted. Today she knelt and sucked the last of his life force out of him as he thrashed and convulsed then finally lay still forever.
“She tortures us so that we will love her more when she spares our lives or heals our wounds or takes some other father’s child instead of ours! She doesn’t love any of us! She’s only using us! My boy is up there in that hospital dying of AIDS and she does nothing!”
The hysterical man was still across the street, marching back and forth in front of the church as parishioners scuttled by him on their way to mass. Some paused to spit in his face, others threatened to call the cops or to kick his ass themselves, but others stopped to listen. Ellie was still not sure what she was going to do about him when she entered Joey’s room. Another relapse? Making little Joey better for a while after the priest had come to visit him had earned her the praise of half the nursing staff. Even some of the doctors who had long grown cynical to miracles had attended church that night. But it still had not done a thing to warm his father’s hardened heart to her love. He’d been through this too may times to get hopeful over these minor recoveries. Perhaps it was time to end Joey’s suffering and give his father some peace. He would come back to her soon, once he got over his child’s death. They always did. Perhaps she would bless him with another child.
“Don’t! Please. Don’t take my child.”
The hysterical man from the church steps was standing in the hospital room with her.
“You should have thought of that earlier Adam. If you’d never eaten from my tree you’d never even know what was happening. You’d be as ignorant and blissful as the rest of my children.”
“The rest of your sheep you mean!”
“Save your indignation. You’ve got the rest of eternity to hate me. I’ll never let you into heaven Adam. So why not go where you belong.”
The Book of a Thousand Sins Page 10