Space Between the Stars (12 page)

The next thing I knew, water was filling my nose. I sputtered and coughed, opening my eyes. Sly was holding me up in the shower, my clothes plastered to my body under the stream of water pouring over me. I looked at Sly. He was fully dressed, too. What were we doing in the shower? “She's awake!” Sly called out. He turned the water off.

Kitsaun stood at the door, gulping back tears. “Are you all right?” she asked, handing Sly a towel. He dried my face.

“What happened?” I asked.

Sly walked me out of the stall.

Kitsaun cried, “You were sitting there, and then you fell straight back. Your eyes were half-opened. I thought you were dead.”

“She's okay now,” Sly said, trying to calm Kitsaun. “Let me get her undressed and in bed. I'll be downstairs in a few minutes.”

Sly took off my clothes, rubbed the terry towel gently over
me, and laid me on the bed. I was still groggy. He covered me with blankets and the comforter. He kissed my forehead, brushed my hair back, and stepped into the walk-in closet to change his wet clothes. I wondered if I had passed out because I was trying to escape from my dead-end life. Kitsaun said I had looked dead, and I definitely felt as though I was traveling on an unstable road of harm. I drifted to sleep listening to Sly's deep voice through the floor as he sat in the living room talking with everyone else.

Late the next morning, Kitsaun and I sat outside on the stone terrace facing the line of mulberries and madrones bordering the property. “I don't know why you faded out last night, but it really scared me. You're so thin, Deb.”

Kitsaun had always been the closest person in my life. We had not talked as much lately—but there was no schism in our honesty and love. “I love Sly, but he's changed into a different person—not the man I met. I should leave and go back to San Francisco, but it's like I'm addicted to him.”

“He's doing more drugs,” Kitsaun said. “I can see that.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “And so am I—”

“Remember when you were little and Damon gave you a rope burn across your face?”

“Yes.” I laughed. “You beat him up during recess.”

“Well, I'm twenty-one now and I'm still your big sister. I can be down here in a couple of hours if you need me. If you want to come home, come. And please eat more than fried chicken.”

I drove her to Burbank Airport in the Thunderbird, coming back over Highland Boulevard in the summer sunshine. Marvin Gaye was on the radio, “Oh, mercy, mercy me. Things ain't what they used to be …” I sang along with his gentle, plaintive
voice. Mercy—yes, the world was full of suffering, and my life was far from what it had been. I was not cultivating a fertile life of promise or purpose. My body knew this. I realized that I had faded out due to the excruciating pain of physically knowing the truth but not making a change.

Sly began recording in the studio the first night we moved into Bel Air. Stevie helped me unpack. Lynn and Jerry moved into the pool house. I had made a vow to write poetry every afternoon, to try to get my mind motivated. Cal State L.A. was going to mail me their schedule of classes. I thought my life might be getting back on track—until I missed a menstrual period. I waited three weeks and then made an appointment at a women's clinic on La Cienega. The nurse confirmed what I feared: I was pregnant. She asked me to step onto a scale and measured my weight and height.

“You are underweight, young lady. At 5 feet 6 inches and 104 pounds, you're no more than skin and bones.”

I looked in the mirror. I was flat front and back. Even my butt was gone.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. I stepped off the scale and looked down at the floor. She repeated her question.

“I don't know.”

“Get dressed. I'll be back.”

She gave me pamphlets about birth control, pregnancy, and abortion. “If you need someone to talk to, call us. We have counselors.”

When I left the clinic, I drove down Fountain Avenue, where I had lived when I moved to L.A. Then I drove west, out Sunset Boulevard to the beach.
I cannot have a baby—I have taken
too many drugs. The baby will not be healthy or normal. I don't want a baby. I need to turn my own life around—start work or go back to school. I will have to get an abortion. It isn't legal, but I have heard of women finding doctors who perform them.

I drove back to Bel Air.

Sly was alone in the control room, his music turned up to ten. His hat was pushed back on his head; his shirt, unbuttoned to his waist, was hanging over black leather pants. “Where were you?”

“Driving.”

“Why didn't you tell me where you were going?” His dark eyes looked through me.

“I had an appointment.”

Sly pushed the knobs on the console down. The music softened.

“I'm pregnant.”

He dropped his forehead on the board. His hands were above him, still holding the knobs.

“I don't think I'm going to have it.”

He looked up at me and smiled, like the old Sly. “Phew. I mean, whatever you want, but phew. Look, my cousin's a nurse.” He stood up and put his arms around me. “I'll call her. Maybe she can help.”

It was a lonely walk to the bedroom. On the bed, I spread out the pamphlets and leafed through them, staring at the titles:
Pregnancy. Birth Control. Abortion.
I tried to remember when I had last refilled my birth control prescription. God—what irresponsibility. I really had only one choice. I was not healthy with all the drugs I had taken. I wanted to go back to school and not have a child.

Sly brought his cousin to the house a week later. “This is
Toni, he said. He pushed two Seconals in my hand and bolted up the stairs while Toni and I stood facing each other in the living room. She looked about thirty. Her square, mocha-colored face opened into a smile.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hello. Thanks for coming.”

I led the way to the bedroom. “Sly said you're a nurse.”

“Well, an aide.”

My legs felt wobbly. I poured a glass of water and swallowed the pills.

“If it helps, I've done this before,” she said. She opened a shopping bag and took out a sheet and a stack of dark towels. “Take off your underwear and lay on the towels on the bed,” she said. I did as she instructed. “When did you have your last period?”

I silently counted. “Seven weeks ago.”

She walked to the closet and lifted a hanger off the wooden rod. Twisting the neck counterclockwise, she glanced at me while she unbent the wire into a straight line.

“What are you going to use that for?” I asked.

She looked down at me, hesitating for an instant. “This is what I'm going to scrape you out with,” she said.

Nausea tightened my throat. My stomach turned over, and a sour taste coated my mouth. I closed my eyes when she told me to open my legs. They were trembling uncontrollably. She inserted something inside me and said, “We have to wait a few minutes for you to dilate.”

I heard the peacocks jump onto the roof and imagined their bluish-green tails swaying in the breeze, their heads turning side to side. “Okay,” she said.
The metal was cold as it climbed up my vagina. “Ow!” I screamed as it poked into the tender tissue below my stomach. Opening my eyes, I saw her on her knees, peering into my womanhood.

“I know this hurts,” she said, “but there's no other way right now. I'll be finished soon.”

I grabbed fistfuls of the bedspread. She scraped the pointy metal around my uterus. It took forever and hurt so badly that I wondered if she had punctured an organ. Tears poured out of my eyes.

“There,” she said, pulling the bloody weapon out. “You'll probably cramp up, but that's a good sign. Drink lots of liquids tonight.”

Sweat beaded on her forehead. She pulled the towels out from under me and handed me a sanitary napkin to put on. Then she walked into the bathroom and shut the door. I could hear the water running in the sink.

I wrapped my arms around my stomach and stared at the ceiling. I hadn't known how painful it would be to end my pregnancy. My stomach was already cramping in circles of spasm.

She came out of the bathroom and sat down next to me. “You should go get yourself some birth control pills, honey. Take care of yourself.”

I did not know what else to say, so I said, “Thank you.”

She walked out the door. I heard her talking to Sly for a minute, and then a car engine started up.

I walked into the bathroom, poured a glass of water, and gingerly sat down on the floor. So much had happened to me in the past few months: Sly hitting me; moving; an abortion. I felt
as though I were in a pitch-black tunnel without light at either end to guide me out.

The marble floor was cool. I put a towel under my head and lay down with my eyes closed.

“Debbie?” Sly's voice called softly through the door.

“Yes?”

“What are you doing?”

“Resting.”

“Let me in.”

I stood up slowly and wiped my legs with a wet washcloth, as I did that first time I had made love with the man on the other side of the wall. Breathing deeply, I opened the door.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I'm in a bit of pain,” I said, trying not to cry.

“I'll bring you a Placydil.” He handed me an envelope, “This came for you today.” He ran to the safe, got the pill, and put it in my hand. He helped me to the bed and, with his hands on my shoulders, sat me down. He ran to the bathroom for my glass of water. I leaned into his chest while I looked at the letter and swallowed the pill. I recognized Mom's slanted handwriting.

“I'll be downstairs,” Sly said. “You rest. I'll leave the door open. If you need me, just holler.”

I crawled under the covers and opened the envelope. Mom wrote that Grandmother King was visiting Aunt Daisy and that Kitsaun was going to Europe with her friend. A second page read:

When I think of you in Los Angeles, I worry. Every day I pray you'll come home. I wrote this poem for you:

I read it again and again. She knew what I had never said. I had given Sly everything I had, and it meant nothing to him. I turned onto my side, clutching Mom's letter, feeling her intuitive connection with me. I grabbed my pillow in my arms, hugging it for comfort—and prayed to God to give me the strength to leave.

felt stronger after a couple of days, but not strong enough to leave Sly and take care of myself. I was emotionally trapped in needing Sly's attention because I could pretend it was love, the movement I felt in my heart for him. I imagined I saw signs that he cared for me; and I resumed taking care of his health and the house, as well as imagining our love whole once again. I hid Mom's letter in the bottom of a drawer. Kitsaun cancelled her trip to Europe and came back down to L.A. to stay with me awhile, watching over me, and she hung out with Stevie at the Stone Flower Productions office.

Sly left on tour early one Saturday morning, after we had been up in the studio all night. Harvette, Sly's caretaker for the Bel Air house, asked me to go with him on an errand. His wife, Peachy, was very pregnant and stayed home sleeping. I was tired, but awake enough, and fidgety from the cocaine we had snorted.

Harvette always drove his Corvair as though he were in a
racecar. He made a wide left turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard, brakes screeching onto the four-lane street. I put my hand on the dashboard to brace myself. Then I heard sirens. Over my shoulder, I saw the LAPD behind our car, lights twirling, siren wailing. Harvette pulled over, and one officer appeared at his window, another at mine. The cop standing over me said, “What's your name, miss?” He had a red face, twitching fingers, and a drawn mouth beneath his crew cut. I panicked and gave a false name. The LAPD had a reputation for harassment, brutality, and racism.