Sacrifices of the Soul, Chapter 90
by SIPort

TC and Eve were shown to their table. Eve ordered a white wine immediately, while TC nursed his drink. The waiter came over.

” Do you want to order?”, TC asked.

” You can order for us.”

” For appetizers, how about an antipasto salad, your bruschetta, and two bowls of your best minestrone. “

“ Thank you, Sir.”

Eve just stared at her drink, and there was this awkward silence that persisted until their food was delivered. Eve started in on her soup, as did TC. Once it was finshed, TC loaded some of the antipasto onto his plate.

” Are we going to sit here in silence the entire meal, or talk to one another like we were married for 20 years?”

“ TC. You’ve been angry with me for so long. I’m just not in the mood to be berated and degraded. I have more important things on my mind.”

“ I know. Simone.”

“ Yes, our baby girl.”

” Eve, I promise I won’t attack you. I…..I just want answers.”

” Answers?”

” We divorced and there was so much left unsaid between us.”

” I thought everything was handled at the divorce hearing.”

” That was the divorce. That wasn’t us. From that moment at the church, my life spun out of control. Everything I thought I knew was a lie. How could I stay married to a liar?”

” TC..”

” I’m not attacking you. It’s a fact, Eve. You lied to me. Everyday from the moment we met. You lied to me. And, I guess, I just want to know WHY? Why did you lie to me?”

There was nothing accusatory in his tone. It was very factual, sliding into pleading. He just needed answers.

“ I’m sorry, TC.”

” Eve, the apology is fine. But, an explanation is what I want. Don’t you respect me enough to give me one?”

Eve nodded. “ I do, TC. I never meant to hurt you. But, when you start telling lies, there really is no stopping the train of lies. You have to tell ‘just one more’ to cover the last one, and before you know it, you don’t even remember the first one.  So, I guess, I’ll start with the first one. I chose the name Eve Johnson. I was born Clarissa Morton. “

” Clarissa…”

“ One day, I came home from school, and my mother was gone. She’d had a breakdown. They…they put her in the state psychiatric hospital. It was a horrible place. Dark, dank, smelly, horrible. They’d take me to visit her sometimes. She was dead. She could breathe on her own, but otherwise, she was dead. There was no life in her eyes. They were pure glass. She never recognized me again. I used to brush her hair when I visited her, and talked to her, but there was no response. Then, on one visit, I realized it.”

Eve finished her glass of wine, and stared at the plate. She picked at her food. Without looking up, she uttered.

” My mother was pregnant. She had been raped, and now she was pregnant. There was no one to talk to about this. The people who were supposed to be taking care of her? They could care less. They had let it happen. They had let her be abused like that.”

Eve stopped eating. She just looked away. At the floor. Out the window. Anywhere but at TC.

” Eve, where’s your mother? Your sibling?”

” DEAD, TC! They’re dead. They both died in childbirth.” The tears were streaming down Eve’s  face. TC gave her a handkerchief and she wiped her eyes.

” I’m sorry, Eve. I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“ It was a misdiagnosis. Something that pretty much happens to poor people because they’re poor. If she had been middle-class or rich, she would have gotten the treatment to save her life. It wouldn’t have even gotten to the point where it was life threatening. But, if you’re poor, and have no insurance, and go to inferior hospitals, with overworked and understaffed hospital staff, then things ‘slip through the cracks’. The ‘cracks’ are always with regards to the have-nots. There aren’t many ‘cracks’ with the haves.”

” Uh huh.”

“ They were buried in a Potters field, but of course, a shopping mall was more important, so there it went. It’s as if they never existed. They were truly invisible.”

Eve’s voiced cracked with pain as she said it, and TC wiped his eyes.

“ Years later, after I became a doctor, I hired a detective and found Simone’s mother. She had rebuilt her life. She recognized me immediately. Told me that she had wondered what had happened to me. She apologized to me for leaving. She had gone to school, become a social worker, and spent the better part of the next 20 years being a good foster parent to kids like me. R…right on her mantle, was an old picture of Simone and me. I told her that she had nothing to apologize for because she had been a positive influence, and I thanked her for those years. She ran a social center, and every year, I sent her an anonymous donation. “

“ Eve, you really…”

” TC, if I don’t tell you now, I never will.” Eve sighed. “ After Simone’s mother left, I was placed in a couple of foster homes. They were bad places; people who only wanted the check that came with a foster kid. I learned how to keep my mouth shut, the place they gave me clean; stayed out of their way. I was able to handle it, until one night, one of the foster mother’s boyfriends tried to molest me. I fought him, kicked him hard, and locked myself in the closet. I didn’t wait to be thrown out, I left before the next sunrise.  I lived on the streets for a few weeks – not the best experience. Taught me lessons I’d rather forget, but never can. Then, one day, I made it back to my old neighborhood and as luck would have it, I ran into the neighborhood eccentric. Everyone thought she was a little crazy, but I was homeless. When she offered me a meal, I accepted it. I guess I must have eaten that meal  like the starving girl I was. She told me she was sorry about my mother, and asked about Simone. I told her about Simone dying, and she was sincerely sorry.

She offered me her couch. I thanked her. One night moved into two. I’d help around the house. Clean and do laundry. She had this wonderful book and album collection. Every week, she’d give me a book to read, and an album to listen to. She didn’t force me to go to school, because if I went to school, then people would ask for records, and I didn’t want to back into foster care. It was through her that I realized I could sing. She used to sing, ‘ back in the day’, and record by record, I learned all of them.  It was my education, and I loved it. I think she enjoyed the companionship. Someone that would listen to all of her stories. Someone that would listen to and enjoy all the records. She wanted me to learn. She was always talking about education, and how it could save you. How it could make you free. I don’t think I really understood that back then; I was too wrapped up in my dream of being the next Dinah Washington or Ella Fitzgerald. I was going to sell those millions of albums, and she was going to be right there with me, enjoying it all, looking over me.

One day I came home from the store, and she was passed out on the couch, listening to her favorite Ella record. She was dead. She had an insurance policy for burial, and had left me her music collection. I sold it to her favorite record shop we always went to, and I took the bus to Boston. I was going to be a famous singer.

Of course, it didn’t turn out that way. I got to sing alright, but it wasn’t going anywhere. Then, one night, in the middle of my set, in walked Julian. Despite everything that had happened to me, can you believe that I was still hopelessly naïve about certain things? He offered me my first glass of champagne, and my life was never the same. “

Eve looked TC directly in the eye. “ You sure you want to hear this?”

” Yes.”

“ It was like a whirlwind. He was so sophisticated, witty. He was the first man who actually quoted all those books that that she had me read over the years. When Julian realized that I was actually a reader, I think it shocked him. A lounge singer who could quote Robert Frost and Yates. “ Eve laughed. “ And, the lifestyle. It was fast, glamorous. Things I had only read about in magazines, there I was, enjoying. Boy, did I enjoy it. Julian actually introduced me to REAL music people. I was going into a studio, and cutting tracks for an album. I was on my way. But, of course, Julian and I were both so unready for our relationship, and the depth of it.

I’m sure, in the beginning, I was just another conquest to Julian. And, for me, I don’t know what he was. He was as much a curiosity for me as I was for him. But, something real happened, and neither one of us was ready for it, which why we were primed for interference by Alistair. Julian was weak; a coward wrapped up in being the Crane Heir. I wanted to be a singer, and I would have done anything to fit into the life of what I ‘thought’ a singer should be. Young, guideless, wandering, desperate, dreamer. A recipe for disaster.

While I enjoyed ‘the good life’ with Julian, drinking, a little coke with him, after all, remember the times, when he was gone, and I was with the music crowd, I got introduced to harder stuff- heroin. Chasing the dragon. I fell apart. It consumed my life, and singing became the afterthought.”

” How’d you get clean?”

” Would you believe Julian?”, Eve replied with a slight smile. “ He came back from a long business trip, took one look at me, and knew that something was wrong. I played around him, and hid it for a couple of weeks, but finally, one night, he caught me, in the middle of a fix. He took the smack, flushed it down the toilet, tied me to the bed in my small apartment, and then searched for and found every bit of the stash I had. He stayed with me, the entire time I detoxed. He had me go cold turkey. It was ugly. The vomiting. The fever. The diarrhea. The shakes. The violence of a desperate addict willing to kill for a fix. He took it all from me. By the end of those few weeks, I was sober. And, never looked back.

I dove back into the music, and Julian. Then, I got pregnant.

I was happy, but that was the beginning of the end. Alistair began to put his foot down with Julian, and made him miserable. Soon, he was gone, I didn’t get a chance to tell him about the baby, and I was nursing a broken heart. But, I had my baby. I was hurting and happy to the extreme. As my son grew inside of me, I found something that I didn’t even know I was capable of anymore – hope. This little person would love me. This little being wouldn’t leave me. This little person would help me become a better person. I was strangely happy during this time.

He was born on Christmas Eve. You know I took that as a sign. What a wonderful gift. I held his tiny body in my arms. He was my miracle. He was my joy. I kissed him, and that was the last time I saw him.”

Eve began to cry openly again. When she began again, her voice was barely a whisper.

” That was it for me. I couldn’t take anymore. I snapped. I couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t feel anything. When Alistair came to see me in the hospital, telling me that Julian wanted to ‘pay me’ for my time with an education, I numbly agreed. I went to school, and once I got there, it was obvious to me what I had to study – medicine. So many of the losses in my life were related to poor medical care – I thought that is what had killed my son in that county facility for the poor. So, even though I had no formal science training, I was a numb robot, taking those pre-med classes. Since I didn’t have a life, all I did was eat, sleep, and study. Nothing else. I crammed 4 years of college into 3 years, and then did medical school. I was the top of the tools. None of the rest of those kids had anything on me. Nobody was going to top me. Nobody. “

Eve looked into TC’s eyes.

” By the time we met, it had been seven years. Seven years since I’d had meaningful emotional contact with another human being. I celebrated nothing. Holidays were meaningless, as were birthdays. I was IN the world, but not OF it anymore.

Then, I met you. And, for some reason, we made a connection. An honest human connection. Do you know what that is like? It’s like being a newborn babe, taking that first breath. I was alive again. After being dead.

When you’ve had that, you’ll do anything. ANYTHING. To keep that person in your life that gave you your emotional life back. I couldn’t lose you, TC. I couldn’t. I couldn’t go back to not feeling again. I needed you too much to risk telling you anything other than what would keep you in my life. Whatever you needed me to be is what I was going to be.

Here you were, offering me this place. A place where I could be loved. Treasured. Worshipped. Heady stuff for someone who had been thrown away nearly all her life. A home. A family. Of my very own.

I know I hurt, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If I had a patient come into my office with my story, I would have advised them to get serious therapy. I never got any. I see the error of that poor choice now. But, what’s done is done.

I don’t want you to think I didn’t love you. I don’t want you to think that I thought you were this joke that I played everyday. Nothing could be further from the truth. You gave me a life, TC. You gave me this wonderful life that I dreamt of since I was a little girl with nothing. I loved you. I loved our family. I loved our life together. I will always cherish it. And one day, I hope you can forgive me. I want you to find a special woman. Someone who won’t hurt you the way that I did, because you deserve so much. “

TC had tears in his eyes. He looked around the restaurant. He and Eve were the only patrons left.

“ I didn’t think we’d close down the joint.”

They both laughed. “ Let me pay the check, and let’s see if they can get us a cab.”

Eve and TC took the cab ride back to the hotel in silence. TC walked Eve to her door. TC took Eve’s hand. “ Thank you, Eve. I needed tonight. I needed to hear your story. I have somethings to work through, but tonight meant the world to me. You don’t have to worry anymore. I will never come between you and Simone, or you and Whitney. We won’t be at cross purposes ever again when it comes to our daughters. I promise.”

Eve kissed TC on the cheek. “ Thank you.”