“Are you all right? What happened?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I was delivering some parts, and someone walked out in front of me. I braked and swerved into the workbench, and then everything was kind of a blur.”
Terence’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. “Someone?” he asked, pitching his voice loud enough to be heard by everyone in the area. A dozen pairs of eyes looked in our direction.
My gut clenched under the scrutiny, and I could feel myself flush. I noticed a movement from the corner of my eye, and spotted the welder I had almost hit. He looked frightened out of his wits. I didn’t recognize him; he must have been new.
He spoke in a small voice. “It was me, sir.”
The foreman called him closer. “Jim, what happened?”
“Sorry, sir,” Jim said, looking back and forth between his foreman, the safety officer, and Mr. Matheson. “It was just one of those things; an accident. I was just going to grab a wrench and there was the truck. It happened really fast.”
“Why’d the solvent catch on fire?” the safety officer asked.
Jim seemed to shrink inside himself.
One of the security men made a throaty noise, bent over and picked up a cigarette butt. He brought it over.
The foreman’s voice was a low growl. “Jim, this is your brand, isn’t it?”
Jim turned white.
Terence Matheson stepped forward, glaring at both of us. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? We’re going to have to shut down this entire hangar until we can run a full investigation. You two morons just cost me tens of thousands of dollars, maybe even hundreds of thousands with the delay this will cause. It’s not like my insurance company is going to cover stupidity and negligence.”
He turned to Al. “I want you and your security team to escort these two off the premises. They’re both fired for negligence and incompetence.”
The safety officer said, “I can’t see how this man was at fault at all.” He jerked his thumb at me.
Terence didn’t look at the safety officer when he spoke. “I happened to review his employment file today. It appears he has a criminal record and is therefore unbondable. According to our company’s insurance policy, unbonded personnel are restricted from entering any bonded area.”
He looked squarely at the security officer. “I believe our hangars are bonded areas. He broke protocol. He should never have come inside the building. If anyone had been injured, our company would be liable.”
The security officer sighed. “Damn.”
“Like I said—” Terence leveled his glare back at me. “—incompetence. I’m sure my lawyers will be contacting both of you. Al, please get these two idiots out of my sight.”
Al, one of his lips curled up in a satisfied sneer, grabbed me by my arm. “Let’s go.” He motioned to one of the security men to escort Jim.
It felt like I was outside of myself. I couldn’t believe what was happening. Between the shock of the accident, my exhaustion from lack of sleep, and being convicted without a trial, I couldn’t process it all fast enough.
Al had bundled Jim and me inside the SUV, and we were halfway to the main gate before the gravity of everything finally sunk in.
I was still on parole.
Being fired, my PO had explained to me very carefully, was a direct violation of that parole.
The moment he found out, he would send me straight back to prison.
Chapter Five
I didn’t want to go back to prison, although that was where I had turned my life around.
After spending my late teens on the street and living under my own rules, I’d had a hard time adjusting to prison routine. I was nineteen when I went in, and I was angry at the world.
I blamed everyone but myself for where I was and what I had become. Daily, I got into fights—both verbal and physical—with inmates as well as the guards.
My cell mate had had enough of the guards’ attention on our cell, and our argument quickly turned physical. I ended up with a cracked rib and had to spend the third week of my incarceration in a hospital bed.
The prison counselor visited me there, and assured me that if I kept getting into trouble, I could forget about parole. He spoke to me at length—I was a captive audience—and by the end of our conversation, I had what I could only describe as an epiphany.
I had been going down a path that was leading to more and more pain, both emotional and physical, and if I didn’t do something about it, I might never find my way back.
The counselor talked about ‘choosing one’s own path’. It was only then that I realized that I was responsible for my own choices. If I did something wrong, and I owned up to it, then I owned it. If I owned my mistakes, then I had the power to change how I acted in the future.
It seemed like my life was filled with regrets, and if I were being honest, I could lay the blame for my misfortunes squarely on my own shoulders.
It was with that attitude that I slowly began to transform myself over the following year.
Instead of raging against the rules and routine, I embraced them. I learned to appreciate the sense of achievement in completing the tasks I was assigned, however mundane they were.
Although I was not a sociable person, and never would be, I made an effort to interact with the other prisoners and the prison staff, forcing myself to be polite and not take offense at the things anyone said, whether the offense was real or imagined.
I found myself visiting the prison library more often. I started to educate myself. One of the reasons the parole board awarded me early release is that I managed to get my GED.
I had started to believe there might be hope for my future.
When I got paroled six months ago, I quickly found out just how far behind the rest of the world I was.
In a way, prison protects the inmates from society as much as protecting society from the offenders. Life inside was scheduled and safe; life outside was chaotic and dangerous.
In the correctional system, there was always someone to turn to if you had a problem or grievance—not that many inmates would take advantage of the opportunity.
Now I was on the outside, and I was on my own. There was no safety net for someone in my circumstances. I was a felon. I had fewer rights out here than I had had in prison. One slip, and what little freedom I had gained would be yanked away.
There was no one I could turn to. My parole officer was very explicit about that. Standard procedure on any transgression was an immediate revoking of my parole; and any issues would be addressed after that.
I didn’t want to go back to jail, but I knew the moment my PO found out about my firing, he would send a squad car to round me up.
* * *
After Al had escorted me to my car and watched as I left the premises, I drove aimlessly through the streets of Seattle. I had a lot on my mind. It was only when I turned the wrong way down a one-way street and nearly collided with a van that I snapped out of my daze.
I swerved to avoid the other vehicle, one tire riding up on the curb. Horn blaring, the other driver shouted at me from within the cab of his van, as if I could hear him.
I pulled over, stopped the car, and took a deep breath. I had to pull myself together.
A glance at the clock in the dash reminded me that I had told my mother I would stop by after work to check on her.
Putting the car back into gear, I carefully turned around and made my way to the hospital.
* * *
To my surprise, my mother was dressed and sitting in a chair in the waiting room.
The first thing she said when she saw me was, “I’ve been waiting for you for an hour.” Her tone wasn’t so much accusatory as it was forlorn; as if she thought I had forgotten her.
“Mom,” I said, “I thought they were going to keep you here another day.”
She gave me an inscrutable look. “Why would they do that?”
I tried to keep my voice low, but it came out harsher than I had intended. “Be
cause you had your stomach pumped!”
“I’m fine, Richy.” She folded her hands on her lap and fixed her eyes on a spot to the side of me. It was her way of letting me know that it was her final statement on the matter.
I sighed. “Did you at least talk to the doctor?”
“Of course,” she said, as if that were a given. Now that I was here, her demeanor cooled—everything was back under control. “He took my blood pressure and shined his little pen light in my eyes and said I was fine.” On the last word, she made a short and sharp nod to the side.
“All right. Let’s go,” I said. “Do you need to sign something?”
“I already did. I just want to go home.”
She didn’t exactly pull away when I reached out to grab her arm, but she walked quickly to the exit.
* * *
The car ride home was icy. She would only give me one-word answers to any of my questions about how she was feeling, and completely avoided speaking about her hospital stay. I couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed or angry.
I wanted to tell her about my day, the accident, and how I got fired. After all, she was bound to find out soon enough. Every time I gathered the courage to speak, however, I inevitably chickened out.
I convinced myself that my mother had already gone through enough in the past day; what harm could come of holding off telling her the news for a few more hours?
When I was young, I had been conscious that my mother was an alcoholic. More concerned with dealing with her on a moment-to-moment basis, however, I had never taken the time to wonder about the underlying reasons for her drinking.
It was only after I got out of jail that I had spent any time thinking about it. Of course, the best I could do was to make educated assumptions about what was going on with my mother.
She had come to visit me in jail once a week after my sentencing, and she had always looked at the top of her game. Every time I saw her up until my release, she had never shown any signs that she was anything but perfectly healthy and sober. I thought—hoped—she had changed in the years since I had run away.
For the first six months after my release, everything seemed to go well. I rarely saw her with a drink in her hand, and we got along better than we had before.
It was on a Friday a little over two months ago when she decided to go out with a few of the other receptionists from Worldwind. Having passed my driver’s test and gotten my license the day before, I was happy to taxi her back and forth. Less than an hour after I left her at Hangar Hank’s Bar and Grill, she called me from her cell phone to come get her.
When I got there, she was standing outside. One of the waitresses—I would later find out it was Stacy—had kept her company until I got there.
I could tell right away that my mother had been crying. At first, she wouldn’t talk about what had happened, but by the time we got home, I managed to get the story out of her. It started when one of the other receptionists made an unkind comment about my criminal past. I didn’t get all the details, but it sounded like it had escalated to insults and then shouting—enough so that my mother was asked to leave the bar.
That night, my mother had sunk the better half of a bottle of vodka in less than three hours. It was the first time I had rushed her to the hospital.
Over the next few months, her drinking got worse. I knew something had to be done to help her, but I didn’t know what.
Now, of course, if I went back to jail, there would be no hope for her.
As we rolled up to the house, my mother finally spoke to me.
“What did you tell them at work?” She held her breath. “About me?”
I parked the car at the curb in front of our house. “I told them you had the flu.”
She nodded and got out of the car.
“I’m tired, Richard,” she said as I walked a pace behind her up to the front door. “I hope you can fend for yourself for dinner. I think I’m going straight to bed.”
“Yeah, no problem, Mom.”
* * *
Upon entering the house, my mother went right upstairs to her room and closed the door behind her. It was creeping past six, and I could feel the stirrings of hunger in my stomach competing with my own desire to crash in bed for a few hours of much-needed sleep.
I decided to throw a frozen pizza in the microwave to keep me going. While I was waiting for it to cook, I had a nagging suspicion something was wrong.
My mother and I had never had a tight relationship, and despite the first few months after I came back home, it really hadn’t improved. In some ways, I felt like I was her penance for a long-ago sin, and had to be endured.
As far back as I could remember, though, my mother always called me ‘Richy’ unless she was furious with me, and that was when she used ‘Richard Andrew Riley’. The only other time she called me by my full first name were when she was being emotionally distant, when I had pushed her past her point.
In the car, she called me ‘Richard’.
Leaving the microwave to finish its chore unsupervised, I raced up the stairs, two at a time, and burst into my mother’s room without knocking.
She was sitting at her vanity. A tall bottle of vodka—still mostly full—was opened and firmly in her grip. Tipping it to her lips, she started to gulp it down as if intending to drink the entire bottle in one pull.
“Mom!” I yelled.
As if she were a defiant child, she tried to drink faster.
I got to her before she swallowed more than a few mouthfuls of alcohol, and knocked the bottle out of her hands. It hit the mirror on her vanity and shattered it into hundreds of tiny slivers. Vodka sprayed out of her mouth.
My mother jumped out of the chair and shouted at me, “Leave me alone!”
Sobbing, she turned to run to the small half bathroom, but I grabbed her arms and spun her back toward me.
“What are you doing, Mom?”
“Let me be,” she cried through her tears. “I don’t want any of this anymore. I can’t stand it.”
She sank to the floor and hugged her knees against her chest.
My heart felt like it was going to explode. Had she found out about my being fired? Did she, deep down, despise me?
“Mom. Mom,” I said in as soothing a voice as I could muster. “It’ll be all right.”
Shaking her head, her tears and sobs would not stop. I had no idea what to do, so I sat beside her and put my arm around her.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
Her sobs intensified, and I felt like a complete idiot. If only I knew what it was I had done to set her off, maybe I could do something about it. I couldn’t own my mistake if I didn’t know what it was.
“What did I do?” I asked her. “Tell me. I’m trying to be better.”
She shook her head, but didn’t look up at me. “I can’t do it anymore. It’s too hard.”
“Do what?”
“I can’t handle it anymore. I just can’t do it.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Mom, what are you talking about?”
“I can’t go back there.”
For a moment, I didn’t know what she meant. “The hospital?”
“No,” she said, and then, in a very tiny voice, added, “Worldwind.”
I held my breath. Did she know what had happened today?
She choked back a sob. “They think I can’t hear them talking, but I do. I can’t go back there.”
My thoughts couldn’t sort out what she was saying. Were the other receptionists giving her a hard time because of me?
“It’s all right, Mom. You don’t have to go back. We’ll figure something out.”
She gripped me tighter, as if I were her only hope, and I stayed where I was, not saying anything, until she finally cried herself asleep.
Gently, I picked her up and put her to bed, throwing a comforter over her.
My cheeks felt hot, and when I brushed the back of my hand against them, they were wet with my own tears.
For a minute, I stood there, watching as my mother fell into a deep sleep.
Then I spent the next half an hour ripping through the house and destroying every ounce of liquor I could find.
Chapter Six
A hammering sound woke me. Eyes wide, I sprang from the couch where I had fallen asleep. Disoriented, I looked around for a clock. It was closing on midnight.
Blood rushed to my head, and I felt dizzy. My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. I had left the frozen pizza in the microwave; it was probably hard as a brick by now.
My first thought was the sound had come from my mother. Was she awake? Had she fallen off the bed?
No. A second knock came from the front door. I had no idea who it was at this time of night. I picked my glasses up from the coffee table and slipped them on. I got up, walked over to the door, and looked through the small diamond-shaped window.
I was surprised to see it was Stacy.
Checking myself quickly in the hall mirror, I realized I was beyond repair, and dropped my shoulders. I swung the door open and stepped back to let her inside. She was still dressed in her uniform from the restaurant.
“Stace. What are you doing here?”
She stood on her tiptoes and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “I just got off shift. Thought I’d pop over for a visit. Did you go to see your mother?”
I must have made a distraught face because Stacy immediately grabbed my arm. “Is she all right?”
“She’s home,” I said. “But she’s not all right.”
I knew Stacy would want the full story, but standing in the hall wasn’t the place to talk about it.
“Come on in.” I motioned toward the couch. She kicked off her shoes and followed me over.
I sat down, put my elbows on my knees and ran my hands through my hair.
“She’s not…?” Stacy asked, obviously expecting the worst.
I shook my head. “No, but not for lack of trying.”
“What?”
“I took her home today.” I shook my head. “I’m sure against her doctor’s advice.” Taking a deep breath, I said, “She went up to her room and tried to drink an entire bottle of vodka.”
Angel's Breath: The Second Book of Fallen Angels Page 4