When the Darkness Falls

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  How long he might have been abusing my daughter, I have no idea. I only know this: on that last fateful day he assaulted her horribly, and when Ashley arrived back to the apartment she noticed Lisa screaming in extreme pain. George had been nervous but claimed to not know why she was crying. He’d left the apartment soon after Ashley arrived. Ashley noticed Lisa’s injuries when she changed her diaper a few minutes later. That was when she rushed her to the hospital but it was already too late. She’d been bleeding internally for hours. My baby never had a chance.

  Despite being arrested for second-degree murder and sexual assault on a child, George Rios was convicted and sentenced to twenty years to life in state prison. Last time I checked he was still alive, although he’d survived several attempts on his life in prison. He’d be in his seventies now. If Lisa had lived she’d be in her senior year of high school. My daughter never had the chance to live, yet my tax dollars go toward keeping sick pedophiles like George Rios alive for the rest of their miserable lives. He took her life in a selfish act of sickness and she paid the ultimate price. I was left with a memory.

  TO LOSE A child is something one never recovers from. That child remains with you. Always.

  In your heart. In your mind.

  In your soul.

  Lisa remained with me. A day didn’t pass, a minute didn’t go by, when she wasn’t in my mind and all I could do was break down and cry. Ashley, too, took it very hard, but I think in some ways I took it harder.

  She blamed herself. She told me that if she’d only waited for me to come home that night, if she had only sent me to the store she wouldn’t have left Lisa with George Rios and he wouldn’t have killed her. I immediately sought solace in black and red labeled bourbon and did my best to see her through her grief, but I did a lousy job at it. Maybe if I hadn’t been working so much Ashley wouldn’t have needed to feel she had to leave Lisa with George. That was what I told myself over and over.

  We were young, and because we couldn’t deal with what happened, we dealt with it the only way our shattered selves could. Our relationship crawled along for another six months before finally ending.

  And I still felt Lisa with me. I still thought about her. Still smelled her. And feeling her seemed to make the pain greater, not better.

  In the four or five years that followed I remember snatches of evenings where I’d suddenly come awake from a heroin-induced stupor and suddenly start crying, calling out for my daughter. And as my drug-addled mind whirled I’d feel Lisa with me, lying beside me wherever I was; on a soiled mattress in some abandoned building; in a lover’s bed; on an acquaintance’s sofa, in the back seat of whatever shitty car I was driving and living out of. I’d feel her there making those soft cooing baby sounds and I’d hear the moist sounds as she sucked her thumb or pacifier in her sleep, and I’d try to burrow myself against her and hold her. For years I told myself that it was the drugs making me hallucinate, but in the past three years since my last emergence into sobriety I’ve come to realize that what I felt was not drug-induced. Because every time I thought I heard or smelled her or sensed her presence, I sought comfort in trying to embrace what I knew wasn’t there. And in reaching out to embrace what I knew intellectually wasn’t there, I’d feel the soft fluttery caress of baby-soft skin, then the warmth of breath against my cheek. I’d lie there, heart racing, telling myself that it was the drugs messing with my mind, making me remember what it felt like to sleep next to Lisa, to feel the curve of her skull against my cheek, to feel her warm body snuggled against mine and to feel the grasp of her little fingers as they wound themselves around mine, seeking comfort in sleep.

  Sometimes I’d feel her presence at work. I was working in a warehouse whenever I had brief moments of lucidity. Of course, I was always under the influence of something—self-medicating was the only way I felt I could deal with the pain of my loss. And I’d be at work on the line, or operating a forklift, and I’d feel the presence of somebody else there. At first it creeped me out, but after awhile I got used to it. I told myself that what I was sensing wasn’t my daughter even when I tried to intellectualize it. It freaked me out because she would show up unexpectedly and I could hear her. Making those soft cooing sounds she made when she was happy, lowering the register in her tone whenever she would get sad. It seemed that lowered register was more prevalent than the happy one. I almost got the impression she was trying to reach me, and I reacted stronger to this impression late at night when I was tripping or stoned. That’s when I’d get all weepy and cry for Lisa and she’d be there beside me, taking my hand and talking to me in that broken baby-English. “Eth ah right da-eee. Eth ah right.”

  For years I didn’t tell anybody. I was afraid they would think I was crazy. That what I was hearing, what I was sensing, was a result of my fragile state of mind and my tremendous sense of grief.

  It was Ashley who helped me get sober again. She had grieved for Lisa, and then gone on with her life. The next time I saw her she’d tracked me down to a run-down apartment complex in Hollywood where I was living with three other addicts. I woke up from a heroin binge to see her and some guy I had never seen before standing over where I was sleeping on a worn dirty mattress with drug paraphernalia strewn about. Ashley was beautiful; she had cut and styled her hair differently, and it shimmered in the waning sunlight. The guy she was with was wearing a white shirt and a tie, and at first I thought he was a cop. Ashley looked down on me with sadness in her eyes. “Get up, Gregg.”

  They helped me up, and they waited while I showered (which they made me do...back then I hated taking showers because I was poor, and when you’re poor and hooked on smack you can draw out the high by not bathing; being dirty clogged up the pores and held it in your system longer). I could tell they were hiding the disgust at my living conditions, at my physical condition, but I didn’t care. We sat down at the scarred kitchen table when I was finished and that’s when I learned that the man Ashley was with was her new husband, and the two of them had decided they wanted to find me to try to drag me out of the mire of self-pity and destruction I’d been traveling down. Ashley started crying. “I still miss her, Gregg. I think about her everyday, and I still mourn for her. But...I’ve gone on with my life. Lisa will always be in my heart, but—“

  I interrupted her. “Don’t,” I said.

  Ashley looked at David, her husband, who nodded. She turned back to me. “I’ve been having these dreams,” she said. “Dreams in which Lisa tells me that her Daddy is dying...and that she’s sad because she’ll never be able to see him again.”

  I didn’t know what to say. At the time, Lisa’s presence was always permeated by sadness. I was deep in a bad heroin addiction, and I was stealing to support it (in fact, my roommates and I had just pulled out the apartment’s stove and refrigerator that we sold to raise money for drugs; the bathroom sink and the pipes were next). I was also smoking three packs of cigarettes a day and smoking crack and I’d often lie awake for days scratching at the scabs along my arms and thighs and watch television mindlessly for hours at a time, trying to ignore the shuffling and cries of my daughter’s ghost as she wandered around the apartment, crying, crying.

  David leaned forward. Looking back, I see now he was a good guy, that he was genuinely concerned for me. Back then I thought he had other agendas. “I’m willing to pay for your treatment and rehabilitation,” he said. “We want to help you.”

  “Can you make her stop?” I said; it just blurted out of my mouth, with no forewarning. “Can you make her stop?”

  “Make who stop, Gregg?” Ashley asked.

  I told them. About how I heard Lisa’s voice, heard her cries and heard her suck her thumb in her sleep. I told them how she still came to me, that she snuggled beside me when I slept at night, that she followed me everywhere. And as I told them I could tell they were glancing at each other worriedly. “Doesn’t she come to you?” I asked Ashley.

  Ashley appeared stunned; I didn’t know if she was going to respond beca
use David quickly intervened. He took her hand and nodded. “Yes, she does Gregg. Lisa does come to Ashley. She comes to her all the time. Now please...let us help you.”

  Looking back, I realize two things: my grief was still so profound, and I was still feeling the remnants of the previous nights’ high. When David told me that Lisa appeared to Ashley, I broke down and wept.

  They got me into rehab, my first stint. I was at Crossroads Rehabilitation for three months. Lisa went with me, and I could sense that she felt happier. She no longer cried, no longer moped around. I told my therapist about her, told the people in group about her, and I thought they understood. I thought David and Ashley had been telling me the truth about Lisa appearing to them. I found out later it was a lie, that David had been humoring me. They really did think I was crazy.

  Apparently the doctors at the rehabilitation center saw it that way, too. After I was discharged, I continued to see a psychiatrist. He was very interested in hearing about Lisa, and I told him everything. By this time I was working a new job—and going to school to be a computer technician (you get a lot of contacts in rehab). I was also living in a new apartment by the beach. I’d get up every morning and go jogging and then I’d go to work. I stayed busy. And when I’d get home and unwind, Lisa was there. I could hear her playing in my living room.

  In the four years I remained sober, I tried to tell myself that I was either having flashbacks or that maybe I really was disturbed in some way. I talked about this to my psychiatrist and that’s when he went full bore. He praised me for recognizing my illness, which he diagnosed as schizophrenia. “Extreme cases of grief after losing a loved one can trigger schizophrenia,” he explained. “It can range from the patient actually believing that the deceased is still with them, “It strikes primarily those who have lost somebody they were very close to; in your case, your daughter. We always encourage people to keep a journal of some kind, or to write letters to those they’ve lost to keep that connection. Many times when the level of grief is so profound, the patient loses that sense of reality in which the person they’ve lost becomes real to them. This can lead to a mild form of schizophrenia.”

  When I first heard Dr. Robinson explain this to me, I thought he was full of shit. What did he know? I still had Lisa’s pillow, the blanket she slept in. I still had some of her toys, her pictures (thankfully, Ashley kept them and had given me some after I got sober the first time). I no longer slept with her blanket or her pillow, but Lisa still bedded down with me just like she did when she was a baby. Every night she still snuggled against me for warmth. I still heard and felt her. And it was her presence that brought a sense of comfort to me. There’s no other way I can explain it.

  Naturally, I didn’t believe I was schizophrenic. They say schizophrenics talk to themselves. I never talked to myself. Yeah, if you were to look into my apartment some evenings it would look like I was talking to myself. But I was really talking to Lisa.

  I did well in therapy, even if I didn’t want to admit to Dr. Robinson that I thought his schizophrenia diagnosis was wrong. Let him think I was on the road to recovery. I took the medication he gave me (a very mild dose of Lithium), I tried to live my life, I attended AA and NA meetings. And through it all my daughter was with me.

  There were women, too. There were women in my life even when I was using. When I was deep in the throes of my addiction I coupled with dozens. I went through one-night stands the way most people go through underwear (thankfully I managed to become HIV and Hepatitis III free). And from what I remember I performed just fine. It wasn’t until I became sober, nine months into my recovery, that I started seeing women again and realized I couldn’t perform without thinking of the possibility of becoming a father again.

  The thought terrified me. It brought back the pain and the anguish I felt when Lisa had first been taken from me. I didn’t want to risk getting somebody pregnant, so I always insisted on contraception. The few times it wasn’t available I’d pull out shy of climax like they did in the porn movies. The few women who professed they loved me pleaded that they didn’t want me to waste my seed on their bellies and backs, and when I tried to give myself to them I just...couldn’t. Couldn’t achieve orgasm, couldn’t finish the act. I couldn’t explain to them why I couldn’t, didn’t want them to hear that I was afraid of being a father, so they eventually left me. The only one who didn’t was my second wife, Catherine.

  I met Catherine at the place I worked, which was an electronics plant. To make a long story short, one thing led to another and we got engaged, and then married. Our wedding night was a disaster. Know why? We never officially consummated the marriage. Guess who couldn’t reach the finish line?

  Unlike the other women, I told Catherine my fears and she encouraged me to seek counseling. I’d told Catherine about my past, about my loss, and one of the reasons I fell in love with her was because she had been so loving, so supportive. She saw me through therapy, too. For a while we were in group together. Our therapist didn’t want to discuss my schizophrenia; he was more concerned with our sex life, which is what we were paying him for. We worked through several exercises designed to reintroduce the pleasures of sex to me once again, starting with sensual massage. He encouraged condom use for the first few sessions as well. That all went fine until...well...the actual deed sans contraceptives. Suffice to say, we tried for a year and when Catherine finally broke down and announced her intentions to have a child with me even if we had to go through artificial insemination, I lost it. I was adamant about not having another child, so adamant that we had a huge fight and I left the house.

  And through it all Lisa was there. I could feel her impending sadness. Her tone of voice and demeanor changed. She began to cry more. She became more clinging. She would lie between Catherine and I and reach for me, crying that she wanted her daddy, and when I tried to hug her and talk to her, I’d wake Catherine up. “Who are you talking to?” she asked one time. When I realized I was talking to myself (for even then I didn’t want to believe that who I was talking to was really myself), I’d stop. This happened three times, and the morning after the last one Catherine gave me an ultimatum. Either I go back to therapy and address my issues or she would leave me.

  My issues were I didn’t want another child. I wasn’t ready emotionally; I was still running away from my past life, still assigning blame. Catherine left.

  I started to chase the dragon again.

  I’ve had a chance to look at my medical records and talk to my new doctor, a guy named Dr. Simmons. Looking back at that period, officially I was still deep in the throes of drug addiction and schizophrenia.

  I know better now. I may have been an addict, but I’ve never had schizophrenia, even though I exhibited the symptoms.

  I was haunted by the ghost of my daughter.

  IT'S FOUR A.M. and I’m still awake. I still haven’t heard the sounds I had come to associate with haunting, either.

  I’m almost finished. The more I write, the more the minutes pass. And the more the minutes pass, the more I am convinced it’s stopped.

  If you read back over what I’ve written, you’ll either come to the conclusion that the enormity of grief over the loss of my first daughter was so great that it led to the shattering of my mental state, that I developed schizophrenia and, therefore, imagined that I was being haunted by her ghost. My drug and alcohol problems only compounded the problem.

  Or, if you believe in ghosts, you’ve come to the conclusion that I really was being haunted.

  For years I didn’t know what to believe. There were periods of time where I’d go weeks, sometimes months, where I wouldn’t feel Lisa’s presence. Then she’d suddenly be there. I’d feel her presence in the apartment; I’d hear her crying, or laughing, or playing. For the most part I was the only witness to these spectral hauntings. Catherine surely never believed that I was being haunted by Lisa. It was her disbelief that led to our divorce.

  Following our divorce, I descended back into the worl
d of drug abuse. I sensed an immediate response in Lisa, who became more clinging, more morose. Once again I lost my job and apartment and soon took to shacking up with street people.

  This last binge didn’t last long. And it all had to do with the confirmation that I really wasn’t crazy.

  Strangely enough, it was a woman who helped me confirm I wasn’t insane. I was living with a skinny pothead named Tina Short in Huntington Beach. One evening we were reclining in bed when she asked right out of the blue, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  I turned to her. The first thing I said was, “Yeah, why?”

  “Because I think this apartment is haunted,” Tina said. She’d only moved in three months before, and I’d only been living with her for a week or so before she made this announcement.

  “Why’s that?”

  I remember what she said verbatim. And when she told me it sent chills down my spine.

  “A few days ago I came home,” she began. “You were crashed out in bed. I came in and started undressing and I...I heard a sound, like somebody moving in the bed. Like the bed springs creaking. I turned around and you were in the same position, but...” Her voice grew lower, almost a whisper. “Okay, I know this is freaky but I could have sworn there was somebody else in bed with you. I could feel...just feel the presence of somebody else there. And you were so sound asleep on your side but...it seemed you were...” She gestured. “...embracing somebody. You had your arm cradled out, as if you were holding somebody in sleep. I...I took a peek and there was nobody there, which I knew there wasn’t. But...” She looked at me and I knew she was telling me the truth and that what she’d seen spooked her. “Your arm was just around air, but something was there. I saw the indentations on the sheets, as if somebody was lying beside you.”