Broken Man (7 page)

The final catalyst to Donna’s self-destruction occurred just after Amanda entered her Sophomore year in high school. A brutal recession crippled the US economy, the casinos of Atlantic City particularly hard hit. The layoffs were swift and merciless, and an aging cocktail waitress with a burgeoning drug addiction never stood a chance. The money long gone along with her job, Donna simply stopped coming home, leaving Amanda on her own to figure things out.

* * *

The ringing of the phone brought Amanda back to the real world.

“Hello.”

“Is this Amanda Lee,” a gravely voiced female attempted an identification.

“It is,” Amanda replied stoically and looked at her clock that read 9:13, surprised that the wheels of bureaucracy were turning so quickly.

“This is Atlantic City General calling to set up an ID,” the caller went through the scripted motions.

How cold, Amanda thought to herself, her mother no longer a person but rather a number on the bureaucratic chain, just another overdose to process through the system, a piece of paperwork passed from one department to the next.

“Okay, I can be there at 10:30,” Amanda replied just as coldly, almost as if making an appointment to do her hair, but without the requisite pleasantries.

“10:30 will be fine. Please report to the first floor reception area.”

As she hung up the phone, the finality of her Mother’s death suddenly hit Amanda, and she snapped out of her state of shock as she realized she had just made an appointment to view her Mother’s dead body.

How had her mother’s life come to this, Amanda thought to herself as she started to cry. A once promising young woman whose last ten years had been wasted, a drug addicted prostitute working the casinos of Atlantic City, just a step above the streets.

This town is to blame, Amanda rationalized to herself, a sewer of humanity that her mother was sucked into. She never had a chance to survive, not in the culture of depravation disguised as opportunity that Atlantic City was built upon. No, her mother was seen as nothing more than a soulless vessel built for the pleasure of the party-goer, her value degrading as her body aged and her beauty faded.

As she stripped off her robe to get in the shower, Amanda looked at her naked body in the mirror and realized she was no different than her mother in the eyes of these predators, just an amalgam of body parts to bid for and purchase, sufficient enough for now until a fresher one came along.

Wallowing in a shower of self pity and sadness, Amanda quickly recovered as she remembered who she was and recalled the final lesson and last request from her grandmother.

“Whatever you do, Amanda, promise me you will leave Atlantic City.”

Chapter Six

Amanda never imagined the death of her mother would be handled with such ease. A quickie autopsy confirming an overdose as the cause of death, the signing of a few papers, the transport of the body to a crematorium, and within the week, an urn filled with her Mother’s ashes sitting silently on the mantle in her apartment.

It hadn’t even been necessary to take the week off from work, which was granted without question after Amanda told her supervisors that her mother had passed. There was really nothing for Amanda to do. No estate to settle, no home to clean out, no affairs to get in order, no friends to console, no service to attend.

Just nothing. Nothing but the urn, the solitary reminder of the sad life her mother had lived.

Amanda had used the time off from work wisely, getting back into the flow of school and catching up on her dissertation, on which she had fallen behind over the last several months, busy with work and the regrettable distraction of her ex-boyfriend. With her mother gone and absolutely nothing left to keep her in Atlantic City, she had rededicated herself to her school work and circled the first weekend of May on her calendar. The day of her graduation, the day she would leave Atlantic City.

Unfortunately, it was now Saturday in early January, and Amanda wished she had not taken the entire week off. With no school or work to distract her until Sunday night, she was left alone with her thoughts, a cold, rainy winter day knocking on her window.

Maybe she should go to the ocean as her mother had requested long ago. Turn her loose into the sea, her ashes scattered in the place she loved most, left to travel the world and see all the places she never did.

No, her mother had never left New Jersey. Nor had she ever been loved by a man, never felt what it was like to mean everything to someone, to feel that connection in her soul. She had seemingly never even felt what is was like to love, a hard shell of a woman forever damaged by her past.

Sitting alone in her apartment, Amanda remembered the last conversation she had with her mother. Christmas Eve two years earlier, the day she disappeared forever. The drugs temporarily detoxed from her system, her mother had tried to explain what had happened to her, tried to justify the person she had become, the mother she hadn’t been.

Her mother had fallen in love at sixteen, a summer romance with a boy three years her senior, just returned from his freshman year in college. She fell in love the moment they met, and they spent the summer relaxing at the beach, going to parties, making love for the first time.

The pregnancy was unexpected. Knowing that it would make things easier for both of them, Donna considered terminating the pregnancy. But, she also knew that she was in love with him and decided to have the baby, a decision she shared with him as the summer came to an end.

His reaction had taken her by complete surprise. No, he didn’t love her, he had replied coldly, and no, they weren’t going to have a baby together. What was she thinking? Why hadn’t she been more careful?

Her heart broken, she agreed to have an abortion, the procedure surreptitiously arranged by his well-placed family. She shared with Amanda the extent of her heartbreak, the horror of the procedure, the depression after having given up her child, and her resolution to never let anyone get close to her again.

Amanda had listened with interest but without empathy as her mother told the story, forever regretting that she hadn’t been more understanding, more forgiving to her mother. She had just not been ready or willing to understand what her mother was trying to say, the excuses never ending, the pain too much to process at the time. Amanda remembered telling her mother that they would talk later as she left for work, not knowing that they would never have the chance to finish the conversation.

Now, Amanda finally understood what her mother had been trying to tell her, exactly what she had been trying to say. She had been trying to say she was sorry. Sorry for the live she had lived, sorry for the person she had become, sorry for the mother she hadn’t been.

The last two years had been an excruciatingly inevitable ending to her life, a life without love, a life without forgiveness. Maybe it was time to set her free, Amanda thought to herself, to return her to the ocean that she loved so much.

But, Amanda wasn’t ready for that, at least not yet. As she looked at the urn on the mantle, she spoke to her mother for the first time since that fateful night two years earlier.

“Mom, I am so sorry I didn’t listen to what you were trying to tell me,” she whispered through her tears. “And, I am so sorry for everything that happened to you. But, I need you now. I need you to watch over me during these last few months in Atlantic City. I need you to be the mother you wished you could have been, to remind me not to make the same mistakes that you did, to help me become the woman I know I can be. Just help guide me through these last few months, Mom, and I promise you, I will set you free forever.”

* * *

The long trip on his way up north proved an apt partner to the journey taking place in Jack’s mind.

It had been a bold move to resign and leave town, but one he had to make. Jack had finally realized he wasn’t doing anyone any good by continuing to go through the motions both in his life and at his job, and the owner of the resort had understood when Jack decided not to renew his contract at their annual New Year’s Day breakfast. While he hadn’t accepted his resignation, they had both agreed that it would be best for him to take a few months off to clear his head.

Jack appreciated the time to travel and didn’t rush the process, actually taking a more circuitous route than normal, stopping by his alma mater in North Carolina and staying with his old college roommate for a few days. The unplanned sabbatical provided time to think, time to consider where he had been, where he was going, and how he had gotten there.

In many ways, his adult life had simply been a logical reaction to his less than ideal childhood. His family and his home life had been an unqualified disaster, and Jack had spent his adulthood creating a orderly sanctuary from the cluttered environment and psychological pandemonium he had endured. He had essentially isolated himself in his work and his personal life, avoiding any feelings of love, emotional entanglement, or sense of connection.

He had been able to shield himself from all of that until he fell in love with Brittany, the consummate picture of organized dysfunction, a hurricane of a woman he couldn’t resist. She and the girls had truly transformed his environment from one of order and isolation to one filled with chaos and love, and now Jack felt sadness thinking about the sense of organization and sterility he misguidedly had sought.

As his drive north neared completion, Jack’s mind drifted back to the beginning of the journey, a twenty-five year old young man headed in the opposite direction seventeen years earlier. He had thought he knew all there was to know. Who he was, exactly what he wanted to do, the kind of man he wanted to be. And, he had taken all the right steps with those thoughts in mind.

For fifteen years, Jack had essentially just worked. Worked to fulfill the goals and dreams he had set out to accomplish. Worked to provide for his future and to forget about his past. Worked to become the man he thought he wanted to be.

And then he fell in love with Brittany.

Brittany had changed his way of thinking, and as Jack approached Atlantic City, he was thankful for having experienced her love and realized he would never be the same again. No, he could never return to being the emotionless void of a man he had been before she opened his heart, that wouldn’t be fair to her memory. But at the same time, Jack understood that he would never love again, that there would be no repairing his heart or replacing her in his life.

Everything had changed exactly two years earlier, the day of his 40th birthday when she had surprised him with her visit at the resort. Jack recalled the feeling of suddenly knowing for sure that what he was feeling wasn’t some kind of temporary infatuation, a surface attraction he had felt before and had even mistaken for love. No, the feeling had been entirely different, an overwhelming assault on his senses, an emotional flood of thoughts and feelings that he had never experienced in his forty years.

He could have gone his entire life and never known what he was missing, like a lot of men whose greatest passion is whether or not their team wins on Sunday. Having never experienced love, Jack could have just continued with his pleasantly uneventful life, unaware of anything different, anything better. It would have been a lot less painful, his life much easier.

Fortunately, he had been blessed to fall in love with her, to have her return his love, to be able to spend nearly a year with this amazing woman and her children. It was a year he would never forget, his life’s direction so clear, the memories surprisingly simple yet indelible. Waking up with her in the morning, taking the girls to the beach, long conversations over dinner and making love into the night, always as if it was their last chance to to express the way they felt about each other, somehow aware that the dream might end.

And, then it did end. Suddenly and painfully, his mind not yet able to put it behind him. Even after a year, it still seemed like a bad dream, a horrible experience that soon he would wake up from.

Now, as he approached the end of his week-long trip, Jack realized that he wasn’t going to wake up and find that everything was fine. And, he was finally able to put his finger on exactly what was bothering him, why he couldn’t move on.

He realized that his journey was over, cut short prematurely a year earlier on that horrible night. Sure, there was plenty of time left, years and years left to live. But, he was a man without direction, without purpose. He had nothing left to move towards, nothing left to accomplish, nothing left to love, nothing left to live for.

As he pulled into the tunnel beneath the hotel, Jack understood the significance of the moment. It was a new year, a fresh start, a hopeful beginning. But, as much as he understood that he had to move forward with his life, he also realized what he could never forget.

A full year removed from the tragedy, he was still a broken man.

Chapter Seven

“Good evening, Amanda.”

I know that voice, Amanda realized as she looked up from counting the chips on her table and her brain connected the sound in her head to the face of the man in seat seven. Try to say something, she thought to herself as she gazed into the eyes of the man in her dreams, the man she thought she would never see again, the man she had finally erased from her thoughts during the past week, her mind preoccupied with the death of her mother.