This time it was her. I had been called in twice before to see if the poor waif in the morgue was my errant wife and each time the young woman was someone else's tragedy. They were each almost the same as my Sara: blond hair, blue eyes, short at 5' 2", petite build, but larger boobs, pretty. It is surprising how similar they look when they are like this, after a lengthy time on the streets and the ravages of drugs. One was almost identical but upon a second look and the fact she didn't have the butterfly birthmark under her right arm as my Sara, I had to shake my head 'no'; but... this time it was her.
I had been prepared for this moment, or thought I was. I thought I would cry, I thought I would mourn, but all I felt at this moment was a profound sadness. The loss of what could have been before mental illness and heroin took their toll. Who knew which came first but each ravaged this woman's tortured life, beyond my ability to help or even understand.
We had met in college and she was a beautiful vivacious woman who, I learned after our marriage, had a tortured past in the foster care system. People didn't talk as much of such things in those days but she was raped and sodomized in more than one of the homes she was assigned from the age of four. In others she received enough nurturing to actually grow up fairly normal and so when I met her, I fell hopelessly in love and we married as soon as I graduated from college.
We had Gracie 10 months later and 2 years after that we had Gordon Jr. Both beautiful, tiny replicas of their parents, lovely and precious. Sara suffered Postpartum Depression after Gordon was born and that seemed to degenerate into what I later learned was schizophrenia, The two were actually not connected but I didn't know that at the time. The drugs available for schizophrenia helped but they left her in a daze much of the time. Unknown to me, she sought solace in pills and before too long was shooting heroin.
One day, I came home from work at the University to babies messy and crying and a rapidly scrawled note in an erratic hand: "I can't do this," on the kitchen counter, no signature, no explanation, nothing. I discovered that she had not been taking her medications for a couple of weeks. I blamed myself for being too busy to notice her agony.
I had a few friends on the police force who saw her from time to time on the streets. They kept me more or less informed about where she was and what she was doing but they were always vague and looked nervous about telling me anything at all. I sensed it was much worse than what they conveyed. Now, a little more than a year after she left us she was here, at the morgue, a thin and worn wraith that was once my lovely wife.
She was still beautiful, or rather her basic beauty still showed. She was rough looking, too many months on the streets, too many needles in her arm. I didn't have to imagine too much to figure how she paid for her drug habit. She must have tried to keep her looks so she could preserve her only source income.
So after I identified her as Sara Grayson, my missing wife, I signed the necessary papers and arranged for a small ceremony. I knew almost no one would be there, she had no known family but me and the kids. I never knew her to have a friend, or even co-workers at her several jobs before our marriage. After we became a family and bought a house she wanted to stay at home and raise the babies, something she was determined to do, probably out of her own deprivations as a child.
"No child of mine will be raised by a babysitter!" She proclaimed emphatically! So she had no one at the memorial service except me, and the kids and my sister Jess.
After the funeral, I went home and Jess took the children to stay with her a week or so. I didn't let them see their Mom. I couldn't let them see the specter that she had become. They were 'too young to remember' people said, but I feared maybe not, I had vague glimpses of memories that I was told happened when I was asyoung as two, so you never know. I didn't know how I would handle the story of their Mom when they began to ask in a few years, it was too much to think on right then. Jessica had been watching the kids for me but she had her own life to live and a new job starting the next week. So at that moment I didn't know how I was going to raise two kids under 3 years of age and work at the same time. I sat at the kitchen table with my head in my hands too tired to think, too sad to cry, too spent to do anything but worry.
My sister Jessica and I were very close growing up. Our birth dates are in the same year., not particularly rare but pretty unusual just the same. Jessica was a mere 11 months older than I. She was born in January on the 15th day of 1960 and I was born exactly 11 months later on the 15th of December.
In those days there were only three ways to prevent pregnancy. One was using a condom, or 'rubber' in the parlance of the day, but they had a bad habit of breaking as one did when Jessica was conceived a mere two weeks after Dad and Mom married. The second was the rhythm method which almost every set of parents of the day had tried...yes the joke is true. I was conceived under that method. There was also a vasectomy which at the time neither Mom or Dad had previously considered because of their youth and later on Dad still refused it out of hand.
Total abstinence was the only foolproof method, but Dad was of the old school, he had his rights as a husband and a man: Mom was his wife and had no say and that was that! That is until she found herself pregnant with me within weeks of delivering Jessica. After that she insisted he either have a vasectomy or her legs would be permanently closed. This became the greatest issue between them. Dad refused and she held to her pledge. Dad did the only thing he could, he had affairs. Mom knew and figured that as long as he brought home the paycheck and did his duties as a father she was willing to loan out the sexual duties to any floozie who would keep him busy. As far as I know they never resolved the issue until the day they died.
Some years later when Jess and I were away at college there was a power outage back home that left the house in sub-freezing temperatures, Dad tried to heat the house with a kerosine heater and he and Mom both succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning. So by age 19 we were orphans.
Jess and I were sharing an apartment at University when we got the news. We were devastated, of course, We hardly knew our Dad, he had always been distant, but Mom was our anchor. She kept us going in the right direction, made sure we did our homework and that we kept to our responsibilities. She made sure our clothes were clean and were reasonably fashionable. She kept us grounded. We both were at a loss when she was gone.
The day we were informed of Mom's and Dad's death was awful. The planning of the funerals was worse, the funeral and wake the worst, until everyone went home and then it was just Jess and I in the house. That was what did us in. We both collapsed into each other's arms and cried for what seemed hours. We cried until we ran out of tears.
We continued our college, but it was an effort to keep going. We found ourselves clinging to one another too much, jealous of any intrusion into our much abbreviated family. Jess was the first to make the break declaring she loved me but she had to get out in the world. She was right of course, soon we each were dating and exploring other relationships. We had to, out of necessity, loosen our emotional hold on each other and build our own lives, probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.
It was about this time that I met Sara James and Jess met Steve Williams, her husband. We continued to be close but not like before.
Steve and Jess were very much in love, both anxious to become parents. After two years and no babies were forthcoming they began to seek answers. It turned out that Jess had a congenital condition in which her Fallopian tubes were deformed and unable to function. Jess would never bear children. Steve was disappointed, but promised they would adopt instead.
Jess was depressed, she so wanted to bear a child of her own and resisted the idea of adoption but eventually she agreed. In the meantime, unfortunately, Steve found a younger woman who got pregnant every time she dropped her knickers and Steve divorced Jess with little thought to the matter. Jess was depressed even more and almost dropped out of my life completely.
I was having my own difficulties about that time. Sara was beginning to hear voices and doing bazaar things, I even feared for the safety of the children a little, though there never was an incident that alarmed me too much. Still, she became more depressed after Gordon Jr, was born and disappeared a few days over the next several months. She always came home again, asking forgiveness and promised to get on her medications and stay there, only to disappear again. Finally as I mentioned before, she just left and the next time I saw her was 7 days ago at the morgue.
Now I sat at the table in my modest home. I was already used to Sara's absence from this place but the knowledge that there was no hope at all of her return seemed to make the place emptier than before. I tried to make excuses for her, but the pain of her betrayals and deceptions were too great at the moment. I wandered through the house trying to remember her here but mostly failed. I came to the big mirror behind the couch and did remember her buying it and helping me hang it. I think we were really happy that day. But now I was startled at the man looking back at me in that big mirror and hardly recognized him. He stood 5' 11', like myself, average build, light brown hair that I noticed was tinged with grey at the temples. I wondered when that happened? The man in the mirror looked sad, profoundly sad. His features drooped to a near constant frown...I needed to change that for the sake of my kids. I tell myself that but it is hard when your heart isn't into it. I continued my impromptu tour about the house looking at all the other decorations and furnishings that she had placed when we moved in here that now seemed to mock the happiness that so alluded her. I decided to redecorate as soon as I had caught my breath but I wouldn't throw them away, instead I would box them up and put them in the attic, for now anyway. Maybe someday, I would understand better and be able to look at them and remember the good I saw in her albeit so briefly.
As I mused on these things, the doorbell rang. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 7 pm, a little late for anyone but a family member so I answered the door to see what Jess needed, She probably needed some diapers for Gordy so I grabbed a few as I headed to the front door.
When I opened the door, I almost had a heart attack! Standing there was Sara, or so was my first thought. I regained my composure enough to look again, the woman standing there looked amazingly like Sara, but as Sara would look if she was in her thirties instead of 23.
