Unintended Consequences

Unintended Consequences

    Death bed wishes strangle the living.  I was only nineteen when Dad made me promise to care for Mom to the end of her days.  I didn't know for sure that she killed him.  She had always been clever and convincing.

    I kept that promise for six years until I gratefully turned her over to Greg.  I tried to tell him about mother, but I don't think he truly believed me.  Before the wedding he only saw the happy, carefree woman who acted younger than her years.
 
  Mom had never quite accepted her aging.  She kept her hair in the same style she wore when she married Dad.  Even I’d outgrown the flip.  Her gray roots never were allowed to show.  She never had plastic surgery, but she used a lot of those wrinkle prevention creams sold in drug stores.  She also wore clothes meant for teenagers.  It was often embarrassing to be out with her.  She was sure she still looked nineteen and that all the high school boys checking her groceries were secretly in love with her.

    When she became engaged to Greg, Mom started planning a formal wedding with a white satin gown, a long train and thirteen bridesmaids.  It was the wedding she'd planned before she'd married Dad, but they had eloped.  Dad's parents had thought Mom was unstable and opposed their marriage.  I had heard for years about "the day every girl looks forward to her whole life."

    Mom and Greg were married in the small chapel of a church they never entered again, with me and the preacher's wife as witnesses.  She wore a formal gown, but at least it wasn't white.  I moved out when Greg took her off on a short honeymoon at the local Holiday Inn.  She wanted Paris.

    After the wedding, Greg was sure he could help her.  That he could do what Dad and I hadn't been able to do.  Although, I'll admit that Dad tried harder than I did.  A child accepts whatever behavior modeled as normal.  Whatever that is.  Mostly I tried to keep her from having to pay for her actions.  Dad had trained me well. 

    This morning’s call was like many others I’d received.  Greg sounded frantic.  “ Julie, Melinda is out of control!  Can't you do something?"

    Selfish of me, I know, but did hesitate for a moment.  Six months of living my own life, with an apartment, a job and some semblance of sanity will do that, but old habits die hard, so I came to the rescue.  Again.  I heard voices as I entered the house.  They were arguing again.  I don't know what it was about this time.  Before it made much sense she had grabbed a gun from the bedside table and shot him.  I’d warned him to get rid of it, but he said his dad had given it to him and he wanted it for protection.

    As she dropped the gun and staggered back, Melinda automatically fell into her normal method of dealing with life's little unexpected troubles, denial.

    "No, no, no, no, no.  I didn't do it.  It didn't happen.  Nothing happened."

    Greg's body on the floor challenged her contradictory statements.  Wishing wouldn't make this go away.  I couldn't help her this time. 

    She had always lived in a dream world.  She became the heroine in whatever romance she was reading at the moment.  She consumed close to a dozen a week.  With her imagination she probably could have written a romance.  Instead she tried to live one, becoming furious when others muffed the lines she had mentally written.

    "He shouldn't have done it."  Anger was her second response.  "It was his fault.  You'll say that won't you?  It won't bring Greg back if you don't."
   
    That was true.  Greg was beyond my words.

    "He provoked me.  He...he attacked me!"

    He'd done nothing of the sort.  At least while I was there. 

    "He tried to kill me and I grabbed the gun.  You'll say that, won't you?  It is what happened."

    She'd already convinced herself.  Her story would stand up to a lie detector, too.  I'd seen it before.  She already believed it.  She wouldn't be lying.

    This was just like the time she'd been caught shop lifting.  She'd blamed the clerk.  She'd said the girl had dropped the perfume in her bag out of spite.  For what?  She didn't say.  She had, she'd said, plenty of money to buy it if she wanted it.  That was true.

    She'd also said she was allergic to that fragrance.  Not true before that time, but always true after.  I don't know what it is about her.  Self-hypnosis, maybe?

    They had given her a lie detector test and she had passed with flying colors.  So did the clerk, but she lost her job anyway.

    She started crying.  "Oh, Greg, Greg.  Why did you try to kill me?  Oh, Greg, I loved you so."

    "We have to call the police."  I spoke firmly.  "And an ambulance."

    "Why?"  She seemed genuinely puzzled.

    "Greg may not be dead.  In any case, he was shot and the police should be called."

    "No."  She stamped her foot.

    I moved toward Greg, trying to avoid stepping in his blood.

    "Get away from him." She picked up the gun.  I ignored her and felt for a pulse in his neck.
   
    "He's alive.  Just barely, but he is alive.  We've got to call an ambulance."

    "No."

    "This way, it's not murder."

    "No."

    I got up from my knees and walked toward her.  "You're just upset, Mother.  It'll be all right.  I'll take care of it, but we've got to call the ambulance.  Put the gun down."

    She sighed and laid the gun on the table.

    I went into the kitchen and dialed 911.  The door opened behind me.  "Don't you see?  It didn't happen that way."

    A sharp pain in my shoulder coincided with the pop of her gun and the operator saying, “9-1-1.  What is the nature of your emergency?”