Death Sentence (14 page)

8

Velma had no place to go after Lillie’s funeral. Ronnie and Pam knew that she was in no condition to stay alone. Although Pam was only five weeks into her marriage, she allowed her mother to move in with her until another solution could be found. Her life quickly became a nightmare. Kirby was tolerant, pretending he didn’t mind, but she knew that nobody could long abide the life her mother was forcing on them.

Velma was in a stupor every day, and Pam could not figure how she maintained it. She had searched her room for drugs, rifled all her possessions, even scoured her body. She had thought, as Ronnie had, that if she could just limit the number of doctors her mother was seeing, monitor the prescriptions she received, dole out the medications as prescribed, that Velma would be all right. But her mother had developed the slyness common to addicts and she always managed to get more pills.

Because Pam and Kirby had to work, Velma was alone during the day, but she was without money, so far as Pam knew, without transportation. How did she keep getting drugs? And how did she keep them hidden, no matter how hard Pam searched?

Pam beseeched her mother, lectured her, yelled at her, but nothing changed.

Ronnie had enrolled again at Pembroke for the spring semester, but stress was causing him to have trouble keeping up with his classes. One day in January, Velma came to him crying and said she had to have money to pay off some checks she had written on a closed account before her mother died. What had happened to all of the money she had gotten from Al’s insurance? Ronnie knew that she had given him $700, but how could she have squandered all the rest so rapidly? She had no answer. It was just gone.

Ronnie felt obligated to help her. After all, she had given him money. Now she needed it back. He went to a bank in Lumberton where his uncle, Jesse, was now working, got a loan for $500 and gave it to his mother. Joanna was upset when she found out. They couldn’t afford to keep getting Velma out of hock, she complained.

“If it was your mama,” Ronnie said curtly, “you’d do the same thing.”

A month after Lillie’s death, Velma was in perhaps the worst shape that Pam had ever seen. She cared for nothing; she wouldn’t eat; she soiled herself in bed. After her mother went without food for three days, Pam dragged her to the kitchen, sat her at the table, tied her in the chair with towels so she wouldn’t topple over, and force-fed chicken soup to her.

“It always seemed to come back to Pam taking care of Mama,” she recalled. “From thirteen on, I felt like I was her mother.”

On February 3, Pam came home to find her mother unconscious from another overdose. She and Kirby took her to the emergency room. Velma was admitted, kept until she was sober and released again. What amazed Pam and Ronnie was that every time their mother was admitted for drug overdoses, she was always released with more prescriptions.

Soon after her mother’s release, Pam began feeling not so well herself. Some days she was so sick to her stomach that she couldn’t eat and didn’t have strength to go to work. She finally went to a doctor, who quickly diagnosed her condition: she was pregnant. Her morning sickness just lasted all day.

This should have been one of the happiest moments in her life, but her mother’s presence and hopeless condition gave little reason for celebration.

On the morning of Wednesday, February 12, a week after her release from the hospital, Velma appeared at Ronnie’s door wanting to spend the day. Ronnie and Joanna had planned to play golf that day and were on their way to a nearby course. Velma seemed to be all right. They told her that she was welcome to stay. They’d be back when they finished their round.

They returned to find Velma unconscious on the floor in front of the washing machine. She’d broken her left collarbone and it was protruding through the skin. Ronnie called an ambulance. Velma was admitted once again to the mental health unit at Southeastern Hospital. She told the doctor who treated her that she had tried to kill herself, that she couldn’t overcome her morbid thoughts. But she wouldn’t tell him about the thoughts.

While Velma was in the hospital, sheriff’s deputies came by Pam’s trailer looking for her. They had more bad checks. Ronnie was flabbergasted when he heard. He’d just given his mother money to pay off bad checks, and here were more. The deputies went to the hospital to talk to Velma, warning that she would face arrest if she didn’t make restitution.

Ronnie and Pam were more despondent than ever about their mother’s behavior. They had been going through hell with her for more than seven years now, and she showed no sign of stopping. How much more could they take? How much more could they do for her? Would it ever end?

They had tried to control her medicines, had pleaded with doctors not to give them to her, had hidden them, flushed them down the toilet. But one way or another, she always managed to get more.

As painful as it was for both to accept, they had been coming to the same conclusion. Perhaps the only way they could save their mother was to force her to face the consequences of her actions. And that time seemed at hand.

Velma remained in the mental health unit until March 8, when she was given a weekend pass. She returned on Monday, March 10, and was discharged. Two days later, sheriff’s deputies came to Pam’s trailer to tell Velma that unless she paid off the checks, they would have no choice but to arrest her.

Velma turned tearfully to Pam for help.

“You got into this,” Pam told her. “I tried to help you, and you wouldn’t listen. Now you’ll have to get out of it yourself.”

When the deputies came a day later and Velma still couldn’t pay, she was taken into custody and placed in the Robeson County jail. This time, as hard as it was for him to do, Ronnie did not run to bail her out.

On March 21, Velma appeared before a judge, alone in court, despondent and forlorn. She was convicted on seven bad check charges. The judge also revoked her suspended sentence for writing the forged prescription and ordered her sent to the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women in Raleigh for six months.

By the time Velma entered prison on March 27, she was agitated and irritable, suffering headaches, chills and muscle spasms. She was taken to the prison hospital, where she told the doctor about her “bad nerves” and how long she had been taking medication for the condition. The doctor recognized the symptoms of withdrawal and ordered a sustaining dosage of Valium, later changing to the highly sedating antidepressant Elavil. Velma would remain on one or the other throughout her stay in prison.

When Tyrone went to visit his sister, he brought the news that the autopsy report on their mother was finally back. An inflammation had been found in her heart, and her doctor thought that contributed to her lack of response to treatment and resulting death. It was too bad, Velma observed. If they’d known earlier, maybe something could have been done to save her.

Neither Pam nor Ronnie visited their mother. Pam was constantly sick with her pregnancy and having trouble maintaining her job. Ronnie was too busy. The top managers of Putt-Putt had taken note of him and offered an opportunity. The company had portable courses that could be set up on a vacant lot to test a market. They wanted to put one in Lumberton, and they asked Ronnie to set it up and run it for them. The situation was perfect, allowing Ronnie to combine work and pleasure. And he could practice all he needed, at no charge, for the weekend tournaments. He dropped his classes at Pembroke and went to work for Putt-Putt.

Velma hated prison, hated the noise, the crowding, the lack of privacy. She did her best to keep to herself and avoid trouble. Later, she would say that a war was going on within her while she was there. At times she thought that she had betrayed her children. At other times she felt betrayed by them. Her emotions swung from guilt to anger and back again. But one thing she was not fighting was her desire for drugs. She knew that she had prescriptions with refills left on them back in Lumberton. The fantasy of walking into a drugstore and being handed those refills pulled her through each day.

Velma was released at the end of June after serving three months. She moved back in with Pam and Kirby, but only, she cheerfully promised, until she could get back on her feet. Conditions of her parole required her to meet periodically with a probation officer and a social worker. On June 30, five days after her release, she met with Frederick Saravia, her social worker at the mental health center. She was upbeat. She planned to find a job, keep busy and stay out of the hospital, she told him. She realized, she said, that her abuse of medicines had caused her to waste some of the best years of her life, but all of that was behind her. From now on, things would be different.

Six days later, Velma was back at the hospital from an overdose. The next day a glum Ronnie and Pam met with Saravia and Velma’s probation officer, Louise Sanderson. They’d had three months free of dealing with their mother’s problems, and now the old misery had returned. Both were disheartened. Their mother was emotionally breaking up their lives, they said, and both admitted that they saw little chance that she would change. Clearly, Saravia and Sanderson told them, their mother could not function on her own; she needed a structured, supervised setting. Ronnie and Pam should consider a drug treatment program for her. Otherwise, Velma likely would be returning to prison to complete her sentence.

With help from Sanderson, Pam began looking for a program.

Meanwhile, Kirby was getting calls about bad checks. He discovered that Velma had written checks on an account he had closed long before, forging his name. That was how she had gotten the drugs. Kirby was furious. He wanted to let the checks go to the district attorney and force Velma to face the charges. But forgery was a felony, a far worse offense than writing bad checks. If Velma was charged, not only would her parole be revoked, but she also could receive a long sentence, as much as ten years.

Pam was distraught. She had not yet been married nine months. She was more than seven months pregnant. She’d had to give up her job because of her pregnancy. Her husband was angry and her marriage threatened because of her mother, who was at her trailer drugged out of her mind. Pam came to Ronnie in tears.

Ronnie found his mother in bed, barely able to understand what he was telling her. “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen if that probation officer comes and finds you in this condition?” he said angrily. “You’re going back to prison.”

How could she do what she was doing to Pam? Didn’t she know that she could cause Pam to lose her husband, maybe even lose the child she was carrying? Kirby and Pam had taken her in, given her a place to stay, fed her, and what does she do? Forges checks, overdoses, staggers around causing everybody misery. Didn’t she understand that if Kirby pressed charges there would be nothing that he or Pam or anybody else could do? She would be back in prison—for a long time.

Velma cried uncontrollably and begged Ronnie to talk to Kirby. She couldn’t go back to prison, she said. She’d rather die. She’d do better. They had to believe her. She would. Wait and see.

Velma knew her children wanted to believe her, and once again they did. Pam paid off the checks. A few weeks later, the probation officer found a halfway house in Charlotte that agreed to take Velma. It wasn’t a treatment program, but it would be a structured environment, and her drug intake would be closely monitored. Pam was happy at the news, but when she brought it up to her mother, Velma’s reaction was anything but positive.

She cried; she begged that she not be forced to leave. A halfway house would be like prison, she said, and she couldn’t stand to go back to something like that, couldn’t stand to be away from them again so soon. She wanted to be there when her first grandchild was born, not off in some institution. Wasn’t she doing better? Hadn’t she been trying to manage her medicines? She would get a job, she promised, get a place of her own, start going back to church, do whatever they wanted. Just give her one more chance, she pleaded, let her prove herself.

Both Pam and Ronnie felt sorry for her, and as they had done so many times before, they gave in. On September 3, Frederick Saravia wrote his final report on Velma, noting that she usually did a superficial follow-up after hospitalizations, then failed to continue needed treatment. She required live-in treatment, he wrote, but wouldn’t accept it. “Patient doesn’t appear amenable to outpatient treatment,” he noted. Velma clearly didn’t want to help herself, and there was nothing more that he could do. He was closing her case.

As it turned out, Velma did do better. Perhaps the change was due to the birth of her first grandchild the following month. Velma was at the hospital when Beverly Lynn* arrived. When she first held the baby, she later recalled, she was reminded of the time when she first took Ronnie into her arms. Tears came as she spoke to her first grandchild in the same baby talk she had used with her own children.

By this time Velma knew that another grandchild was on the way. Joanna, too, was pregnant, due to deliver in April.

The prospect of having a child had caused Ronnie to reassess his life. The Putt-Putt course that he had been managing had not brought in sufficient revenue to convince the company that one would thrive in Lumberton, and Ronnie could see that his chances of ever earning big money on the professional miniature golf circuit were scant, although he by no means intended to give up the dream. If he was going to adequately provide for his family, he realized, he had better prepare himself. That fall he enrolled at Robeson Technical Institute to study business and took a job on campus as a security guard.