by E. N. Joy
Doreen stood in the motel doorway covering her ears with her hands. She began shaking her head as tears formed in her eyes. She was protecting her ears from the truth Mrs. Tucker’s voice was speaking inside her head. Why had she bothered? Why should she even bother doing anything about it now? After all is said and done, she’s going to end up being the one looking stupid. Passing women up in grocery stores that have been with her man. Having to endure those snide looks on their faces, reminding Doreen that they’d been with her husband and could be with him again if they wanted. If in her heart she knew she wasn’t going to leave Willie for his unfaithful actions and sins, then she might as well leave that motel room right now and save herself the drama.
Slowly Doreen began backing out of the motel room.
“You don’t care about me and your other sisters, do you?”
Doreen stopped in her tracks. It was as if she’d physically bumped into Sarina. And now, instead of Doreen visualizing her mother-in-law standing behind her, it was her little sister. She could hear the words from her sister inside her head scolding her.
“You just gon’ keep taking it and taking it and taking it, huh?” Sarina’s eyes spilled with tears. “Is this how you are going to pay back Mama and Daddy for all the years of them bringing you up to be a good Christian girl? Is this the example you want to set for me and the girls? How many generations of us Hamilton women are going to have to endure this same thing because you set a pattern? How many generations will be cursed?” Sarina looked over at Willie and the woman he was cheating with. “You just gon’ walk away and do nothing but pretend to be the perfect little wife and the perfect little Christian.” Sarina shook her head. “What you gon’ do, Reen?”
“Nothing. She ain’t gon’ do a dang on thing.” Now the vision of Mrs. Tucker was back. She took another sip of her drink and laughed.
“Baby, baby,” the woman underneath Willie moaned again, almost in a panic.
“I’m sorry. Was I being too rough?” Willie asked, slowing down his pace.
At that moment, in Doreen’s ears she could hear Willie and his mistress talking. In her head she could hear her mother-in-law and her sister. There were too many voices. She couldn’t take it. Too many voices.
“Baby,” the mistress said.
“Is that better? Does that feel good to you?” Willie murmured.
“She ain’t gon’ do nothing,” Mrs. Tucker said.
“Do something, Reen,” Sarina urged.
“Nooooooooo,” Doreen yelled out. “Nooooooooo!!!!”
“Doreen!” That was Willie, shocked as all get-out to look over his shoulder and see his wife screaming, crying, and covering her ears in the doorway. “My God, what are you doing here?” Doreen didn’t reply; then moments later, she heard Willie asking, “My God, what are you doing?” Still Doreen didn’t reply. She didn’t know how much time passed after that, but the next question Willie posed to her was, “My God, Doreen, what have you done?”
As far as Doreen knew, she’d been standing in the doorway the entire time. She hadn’t moved a muscle. But when she looked down at the sheet she held clinched in her fist, she knew that wasn’t the case. She looked up at Willie for answers as to how the sheet had gotten into her hands, but he just stood there looking horrified at his wife. Next, Doreen turned her attention to the place where she had more than likely gotten the sheet—at the bed.
Upon seeing blood—blood everywhere—she had no choice but to pose the same question to herself that Willie just had: “My God, what have I done?”
Chapter Twenty-one
Doreen felt like she was a very, very long way from home. It felt more like Germany or something, rather than West Virginia. It may not have been Germany, but it was still foreign, nonetheless. She had never stepped foot in jail a day in her life; not to visit anybody or nothing. And now, she would call this place home.
Although she was a grown woman now, she wanted her mommy. She wanted her daddy. But there was no way in hell or on earth she would summon them to come see her; not in a jail cell, that was for sure.
“You gon’ eat that or what?” a voice boomed into Doreen’s ear.
She looked down at the beige clump of mess that had been scooped up into the bowl that sat on her tray. She gagged, holding back puke. It wasn’t just the cold, old oatmeal that made her sick to her stomach. It was her nerves—the fear that was lurking inside her belly like a bully’s prey at three o’clock after school.
Doreen shook her head and scooted the bowl toward the woman who’d just inquired about her food.
“Thanks. But just so you know, the chow they give us here don’t get much better than this. So unless you plan on turning into skin and bones, you better get used to it.” The woman took Doreen’s bowl and dumped its contents into hers. She then scooted the bowl back toward Doreen and began eating. “So what you in for and how long?” the woman asked with a mouthful of mushy oatmeal.
Once again, Doreen wanted to gag. Now it was because the girl next to her, with half her teeth missing and the other half just as rotten as could be, was talking with a mouthful of food. The yucky concoction of oatmeal and saliva settled in the cracks of the woman’s mouth.
Doreen quickly turned away and put her hand over her mouth. She managed to keep from throwing up, but absolutely could not look back at the woman who had no table manners whatsoever. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?” The woman scooped food into her mouth, chewed, and talked all at the same time.
The churning of Doreen’s stomach could be heard. Although she couldn’t see the mess in the woman’s mouth, she could hear the stickiness of it as she spoke. She couldn’t talk for fear it wouldn’t just be words that came up.
“Well, I don’t know what. Is it you don’t know what you’re in here for, or you don’t know how long you’re in here for?”
“Both,” Doreen managed to say.
“Oh, I see. You ain’t a transfer or nothing. You came in with the new girls in the middle of the night. You ain’t been arraigned yet. They’ll tell you the charges then. They should be rounding y’all up soon to transport y’all to the courthouse. The judge will set bail, and then maybe you can get out of here.” The woman then asked with a mouthful of food, “You married?”
“Isn’t it obvious that I’m married?” is what Doreen wanted to reply. Can’t she see as clear as day the wedding ring on my fing . . . Doreen’s thoughts trailed off and her heart almost stopped when she saw that each of her fingers were bare. She began to panic. “Oh my God, my ring. My ring is missing. Someone stole my wedding ring.”
“Slow your row,” the woman told her. “Ain’t nobody stole nothing. They made you check all your stuff in when you checked in. You’ll get it back just as soon as you check out. That is, if your stuff don’t mysteriously ‘get lost.’ My girl Josie swears up and down she seen one of the guards wearing her diamond studs.” The woman nodded her head up and down as if what she’d just said was Bible.
Back then there was no Tyler Perry or Madea movies, but if there had been, this woman would have been a perfect match for Mr. Brown. She looked like him both in the face and physically. She even talked like him. Everything she said she spoke with such seriousness, as if the last days were here.
“Anyway,” the woman continued, “you better pray you ain’t been getting on your old man’s nerves. That way, he won’t hesitate to come bail you out of this place.” She looked around, and then at Doreen. “But if you been nagging and worrying him something awful, he’ll look at your being here like a gift from God.”
Finally, Doreen spoke. “How could a man see his wife being in jail as a blessing from God?”
“It’s like a minivacation of him getting to be away from her. He ain’t got to hear her mouth talking about ‘Where you going’ and ‘Where you been.’ You’ll be the one locked up, while he’ll be out there feeling mo’ free than he ever has in his entire life.” The woman dipped her head up and down to drive her re
asoning home.
Burying her head in her hands, Doreen tried to think back. Had she been worrying and nagging Willie? Had she? She strained her brain to recall just the past twenty-four hours, let alone the last days or so. Her mind was blank. It was like her memory slate had been wiped clean. It felt as if she were outside herself and would return when she got good and ready.
“If you been good to yo’ man, though, do everything for him, then he’ll rob a bank to get you out of this place.” She laughed. “’Cause he know if he don’t, he might to die. A man used to having a woman around to do everything for him ain’t no good when she’s not around. He can barely pull up his own britches. He like to starve to death ’cause he can’t even boil water to make a hot dog.” She let out one more hearty laugh, and then it faded. “That’s what happened to my pops, you know. When my moms died of a stroke, he went to his own grave not too much after her. He was so used to having her there for him, doing for him, that he didn’t know how to live without her. He couldn’t live without her, so he didn’t. He died off shortly after. He had no will to live.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Doreen told her.
“Oh, no need to be sorry. Well, you can be sorry ’bout my mama dying. She was an angel. But the old man, he was Satan himself. Us kids was glad to see him go. He made coming up in our house a living nightmare. Always fussing and hitting on Mama and us kids. He the one who gave Mama her stroke in the first place. I know he did. All that hell he raised—her poor, kind heart couldn’t take it no more.” The woman looked down as her bottom lip began to tremble.
“You . . . you all right?” Doreen asked her.
The woman let the spoon fall from her hand into the bowl of oatmeal. “Yeah, it’s just that I feel kind of bad. I feel bad about something I prayed for after Mama had the stroke.” The woman took a break, contemplating whether she’d share the details with Doreen. Then she decided to do just that. “After Mama had her stroke and was lying there on that hospital bed, I closed my eyes and prayed to God.” The woman mocked the scene in the hospital room that day by closing her eyes and folding her hands. “Dear God, I love my mama. But don’t let her live, not here on earth. God, take her with you. She’s the perfect angel. I don’t know how heaven has survived without her thus far. But I know one thing; if you don’t take her and leave her here with my father, she ain’t gon’ survive long anyway. So please, God, just take her.” Once the woman realized a tear had escaped her eye, she quickly wiped it away, picked up her spoon, and continued piling heaps of cold oatmeal into her mouth.
“So you prayed for your own mama to die?” Doreen was a little shocked.
“I just wanted her to be happy,” the woman reasoned. “She deserved to be happy, you know? If you had a choice to see your mother die and go on to eternal life or stay here on earth and suffer, which would you choose? A selfish person is gonna choose the second one. A selfless person will choose the first one. Yeah, I loved my mama and wanted her here to be able to love and caress me. But that was so selfish. I couldn’t make it about me. For once in my life I had to make it about somebody else. I had to make it about her.” The woman looked upward as if looking straight into the gates of heaven. “I know she’s up there happier now than she ever would have been here on earth with my daddy.”
The woman smiled a huge smile. This time, Doreen didn’t even get disgusted by her mouth. She was too moved by the story she’d just told.
The woman turned and looked at Doreen. “You know, I ain’t never, never told a living soul about that prayer.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know why I told you.” The woman was about to shovel another bite of oatmeal in her mouth before she stopped and looked at Doreen. “Yeah, I do. I know why I’m telling you all this stuff. Because you remind me just like her. You remind me just like my mama—your spirit and all, that is.” The woman gave Doreen such a warm smile, that for a moment, Doreen didn’t even care that she was in jail. She didn’t even care about how she’d gotten there. She just wanted to comfort this woman.
Doreen placed her hand atop the woman’s hand. The woman looked down at her hand, and then smiled up at Doreen. Just then, a couple of beasty-looking broads walked up behind the woman. One bent down and whispered in the woman’s ear. The woman immediately looked at Doreen with horror in her eyes. She slipped her hand from up under Doreen’s, picked up her bowl of oatmeal, and dumped the exact portion she’d taken from Doreen back in her bowl. Next, the woman stood up and went to walk away.
“Wait a minute,” Doreen called to the woman. “Where are you going? You don’t have to go.” Doreen felt bad that the woman had picked up and was leaving. For a minute there, the woman had made her forget all about herself. For a minute there, she felt like she was tending to one of her own sisters’ worries.
Folks at her mother and father’s church always told Doreen that she had these natural motherly tendencies, even at such a young age. Obviously, this woman had seen the same thing in her, but now, just like that, the woman was treating Doreen like she had cooties or something. “At least tell me your name,” Doreen practically pleaded.
The woman adamantly shook her head. “Uh-uh. Don’t no baby killer need to know my name.” The woman hurried off behind the other two women.
Doreen turned her attention back to her tray horrified. “Baby killer?” she mumbled. “Had that woman just called me a baby killer? But why? Why on earth would she say something so—” And it was at that very moment that everything came back to Doreen like a gushing tidal wave. She remembered. She remembered everything that had happened in that motel room, especially why she now found herself in jail.
Chapter Twenty-two
Breakfast was over, and now Doreen was back in a jail cell. Originally, she’d been in a cell with multiple other women, but now she was alone. After that woman had called her a baby killer, whispers and chattering made their way around the room like a high school cafeteria with a whole bunch of babbling girls. Doreen could only wish she could turn back the hands of time and find herself in a high school lunchroom instead of jail. She wanted to be anywhere but there as voices started getting louder and sounding like a swarm of bees. An uneasy feeling had come over Doreen. It was if the bees were going to strike and attack her at any moment.
She had simply sat at the cafeteria table, closed her eyes, and prayed for God’s protection.
“Prayer works on the outside world, but it ain’t gon’ help you none in here,” Doreen heard a voice say as someone passed behind her. She felt a thump as the owner of the voice brushed by her. She was too afraid to even look up from her breakfast tray to see who had, without many words at all, threatened her. No, no threatening words had been outright spoken as to any harm being done to Doreen, but she’d felt the threatening presence back in the cafeteria. She now still felt it in her jail cell. Evil was around her. Evil spirits lurked in that entire place. Doreen could feel it, but what scared her most was the evil that dwelled in her.
It had to have been nothing but pure evil that caused Doreen to do what she’d done to land herself in that place. The vision of the actions of exactly what she’d done eventually being triggered by two little words: baby killer.
“Why didn’t I just leave?” she asked herself as she sat on the floor of the cell. She could have sat on the bed, but there really wasn’t a big difference between the floor and that two-inch piece of mattress.
She closed her eyes and tried not to think about what had happened several hours ago at that motel room. She couldn’t help it, though. The entire incident consumed her mind.
“Doreen!” That was Willie, shocked as all get-out to look over his shoulder and see his wife screaming, crying, and covering her ears in the doorway of room 111. She’d been watching him make love to another woman in the bed of a cheap motel. Willie had no idea how long his wife had been standing there watching. Doreen hadn’t the slightest clue as to how long she’d been standing there either. “My God, what are you doing here?”
W
hat had gotten to Doreen was Willie’s tone. He’d asked her that question like she was his teenage daughter on punishment and had shown up at the school dance in spite of being forbidden to do so. What got her even more heated was when he said, “Go on home, Doreen. You’ve got no business here.”
He hadn’t even sounded sorry or regretful for the position she’d just caught him in. He continued to turn the knife already in her heart even more when he said, “Get to gettin’, woman, and I’ll talk to you when I get home.” He said all of these things without even attempting to remove himself from on top of the Jezebel beneath him.
There was no “Please, baby, please—it’s not what it looks like.” There was no “I’m sorry—it will never happen again.” There was no empathy whatsoever, and this cut to Doreen’s bones as tears began to fill her eyes, blurring her vision. Although she couldn’t see as clearly anymore, the silhouettes of her husband and his lover in that bed were still there. That vision taunted Doreen that very moment to no ends, but what happened next would haunt her forever.
“Sister Doreen, it’s, it’s . . .” The woman was stuttering and seemed scared for her life. “It’s not what it all seems. I swear to God.” The woman managed to push a still stunned Willie off of her. He was now positioned in bed next to the woman. Doreen wiped her eyes, and for the first time was able to clearly see the woman’s face. Because the woman had clinched the sheet between each fist and pulled it up to her neck in shame, Doreen couldn’t see her nakedness, but she sure could see her face, and a familiar face it was.