Staci Andrea

Lake Laps

By Staci Andrea

Prologue

They sat out there in the fading evening sun; her three-year-old body sprawled out lazily over his belly. The warm August lake water was gently lapping at the side of the boat, as the scent of sunblock hung thick in the air. Her life jacket was snugly riding up under her chin as she laid there giggling with one hand holding her blanket and the other fishing around in a half-eaten bag of cheesy poofs, searching for damp survivors. Her ocean blue eyes were squinting as they watched her sister and grandpa out on the jet ski.

He took it all in. Her curly blonde hair blowing in the soft warm air, the belly laugh she would let out as her sister rode by on the jet ski with Grandpa splashing them. The little face with a smile full of teeth who grinned at him.

“Hey Magoo,” he called out her nickname, watching her struggle with the sippy cup as the boat gently rocked side to side, water lapping at the sides of the boat.

“Huh, Dad?” she answered as she spun around to face him, blanket still under one arm and a damp cheesy poof bag in the other.

“Stay three Ms. Magoo. Just stay three,” he pleaded as she giggled and threw her baby soft face into his neck, dropping the cheesy poofs, but managing to keep the beloved blanket tucked under her armpit. These are the memories that you cling to when you realize that eighteen years went by when you blinked, and it just wasn’t enough. The memories that you lay with in the middle of the night when you are cold and alone and the ones that haunt you in your sleep like a long lost puppy with pleading eyes, begging you to be the savior. You question if you would do it all again if given the chance, knowing how it would all play out, and the answer comes swiftly and hard on your heart, you would choose those eighteen years every damn time, no matter how it would end…

Introduction

“Tell me she’s still alive!” I pleaded into the phone. I could feel my throat closing as the words fought to escape my lips. My heart was pummeling my chest with such a force that I could barely hear. I took a deep breath in to fill my lungs that no longer cared if they were to sustain my life or not. Panic began to slowly lick at my soul, but only briefly. My scattered thoughts went from questioning the enormity of what I had just done, to then soothing myself and reassuring my heart that if she made it out alive, what I had done would have been worth it.

She’s my daughter after all. I would give my life for hers and dance with the devil himself if that’s what it took, and dance we did.

It was at this moment that I began to lose my grip on reality. Not in any of the nightmarish months that had built up to this catastrophic night, not any of the times I sat hunched over in the shower, silently crying so no one would hear my heart breaking. Not when I took off after arguing with her, or with my husband, not sure where I would go or what I would do, but talking myself back into sanity as I drove tirelessly around the lake, pleading for answers from a God that I doubted existed anymore. I stayed sane while I hid all the guns in the house and suffered through sleepless nights, fearing that he would kill her, or himself or all of us. I didn’t crack when I had to write the note that to this day sits in my top desk drawer at the office to alert anyone that if I should die, this Joker was who they should be looking for. It was none of these events that led me to dance on the edge of reality, slowly letting the warm sensation of a false reality begin to engulf my soul. It was in this moment right here that I walked the line, hanging on to my every breath, waiting for my estranged husband to speak the words that I needed to hear to stay sane.

“Damn it, Max, are you listening?” I faintly heard him on the line, screaming with frustration into the phone. “Did you hear what I said?” I was busy letting my mind lapse from this hellish reality that had become our home, to see his face in my mind, the boy that I met at the age of sixteen, the man that I married at nineteen. We had our first daughter when I was twenty-two and second when I was twenty-five. We had owned six homes together through the years and amassed a treasure trove of picture-perfect snapshot memories. We had worked hard and built our road to greatness, forged on hard work and sacrifice. We were inching ever so slowly towards a retirement that would eventually allow us to spend all of our time with the grandchildren that we would be blessed with and to travel. It’s why we owned such a tiny house. It’s why we have made sacrifices time and time again. We bought the girls their first cars, helped pay for college, paid for their cell phones, insurance, and paid for a wedding. We had scrimped and saved our way to this point in our lives, setting our daughters up for a good future and allowing us to enjoy the second half of our lives. And it was wonderful. We were the fairy tale …. Until we weren’t.

“What? What? No… no Gage, I... I…” there were just no words to answer with at this point. The small cell that I was being held in suddenly became smaller and although it was cold and uncomfortable, I still felt as though I had risen out of the situation and was watching this whole thing unfold as a spectator and not as a player in the game. This wasn’t us. This couldn’t be us.

Not my family from the small town in Iowa with two daughters, a dog, a cat and a house near the lake. Not my daughter, who up until about a year ago was part of a picture-perfect slide show of life. And damn sure not me, a woman who loves her family fiercely and who only a short time ago was consumed with graduation planning for the girls and a wedding to get off the ground in the fall for my oldest daughter. I looked down at this sad soul, broken and sobbing on her hands and knees in her cell, unable to recognize the empty shell that I had become.

I was utterly unrecognizable. I had aged ten years in twelve months. My hair had dulled and thinned, my muscles had grown weak, and my fingernails had cracked and peeled. My skin had paled, and I had lost any glow that had ever sparked my soul. My green eyes that once danced with ideas had dimmed in a wretched sadness, as my soul had been consumed with hate and my heart had been paralyzed in fear. My body was tired of hanging on and my mind had begun to let go. My joints ached, my skin hurt, and I just wanted off of the ride.

“I said she’s breathing on her own! She’s still out of it, but she’s a fighter! Max…. Maxine! Do you hear what I am telling you? God damn it, will you say something?!” I could hear the desperation in his voice, but that wasn’t what reached my soul. I knew that the events of the last few months had driven my husband and I too far apart to make it back to each other again. It wasn’t that we fell out of love, it was just that all the anger and pain had seeped in and splintered our relationship, festering away until there was a great divide. We had fought to hang on as long as we could, but I couldn’t save us all. Somewhere in my soul, I had already made peace with that. It’s amazing the things that you are willing to sacrifice to save your child.

My estranged husband had said to me once that she had broken him, that he didn’t know how to care anymore, and that terrified him. This tiny human that we had put our whole hearts and souls into had turned on us in a matter of months, ripping off the protective barrier and exposing who we all were underneath…. just broken souls trying to survive. What did bring me back from the

depths of insanity, from the dark space that was threatening to anchor me to my own hell, was the sliver of hope that she will make it. Her survival was worth giving up all of my dreams, all of my heart and all of my sanity for.

I gasped at the air that was thick and burned with a fury in my lungs with each gulp. Pain and fear, anxiety and depression and a million other ailments had weighed my heart down for so long that it was hard to want to breathe, to will myself, to keep going on. I choked on the oxygen and, as tears escaped my stinging eyes and slid down my burning cheeks, I blurted out the only thing that was left to ask…

“What about Him? Gage, tell me that fucker is dead.”

Chapter 1: What we didn’t warn her about...

It’s never the things in life that you spend your time warning your kids about that will lure them into the darkness. We spend years lecturing about strangers and no-no spots. Say no to drugs and no drinking and driving. Go pee in groups of three and leave no one behind. Leave the party with the people you went with and check the backseat of your car before you get in. Be leery of white vans with no windows. Carry your keys like a weapon and, for God’s sake, girls, don’t dress to get raped. In today's world, my girls had a healthy dose of fear instilled in them, along with the multiple lectures of “There is nothing worth dying for”, that basically was my way of saying suicide was no way out no matter what the “problem” may be…. Think teen pregnancy, drugs and just the disappointment lectures in general. My girls knew that I would pick them up in the middle of the night, no questions asked to get them home safe. Hell, I thought they always knew that I would crawl army style through an inferno to the ends of the earth for them. But maybe that’s where the line starts to blur, because maybe one of them never truly understood just how far her mother’s love would push her to go.

I remember in my first conceal and carry class, one of the first things that we were told was that if we shoot someone, anyone, in any situation, we would most definitely be arrested. At the conclusion of the first class, we were handed a card with the name of an attorney who specialized in this very type of litigation. At the time I took that class, my mindset was very different. I wanted to be more comfortable around our handguns. I wanted to know that when my husband was away on business, that I could protect and defend our family. There were basic rules. When defending your home, the intruder couldn’t just be in the garage, they should be in your home in order to shoot them. Preferably, they should be facing you because if you shoot them in the back, it means they were leaving your home and you would have been using deadly force that wasn’t warranted. Always be aware of what is behind your target before you shoot. And never, never shoot unless it is your last line of defense. The problem with that last one is how do you know what is considered your last line of defense? How many times previously do you need to defend yourself before it’s acceptable to forcibly remove the problem? I suppose I should have studied that designation a little bit more thoroughly...

As I write this for the lawyer, for the judge, for the jury and for my family, I just want it to be known that this was never about hate, although it was there. It was never about revenge. It was always about saving her from herself, ensuring her survival and the survival of our family. In order to do that, I also had to decide what was worth saving, who was expendable and what I was willing to trade.

Hang on, I need to grab the sheet from my cot. It’s not much, but I find that since I have tumbled into this lonely abyss, I’m cold a lot. Like, cold to my bones. I remember this feeling from when I was a kid. I think it was right around when I was fourteen or fifteen and going through some basic “depression” type of tendencies, as we all do when we are young and stupid. I can remember sitting out on the back deck of my parent’s house in our suburban middle-class neighborhood alone, looking into the woods and thinking of how lonely I felt. I didn’t really like school and had a couple of friends, but never really felt like I was “enough”. That loneliness that stung your bones, the shiver that runs up your back when there is no breeze. The darkness that shrouds you and makes you want to curl up in a ball. That familiar old friend of a feeling has come back to me now. But I am a long way from fifteen, and this time, the depression has made its home within my guts and rightly so.

I like to think that I was a pretty good kid. I was only a shit for about a year or so, hanging out with the wrong crowd and being mouthy. I was never into drugs and too terrified of disappointing my family to try drinking or partying too hard. I wasn’t even good at lying. I tried a cigarette at my best friend's house one night, puked after inhaling once and came home and told my mom about it. What I was pretty good at was becoming pretty invisible. We moved a lot as a kid. By the time I hit eighth grade, it was my fourteenth school. My parents weren’t gypsies or hippies or anything, they just worked hard at different jobs that led to different opportunities. I started out in Iowa, headed to Florida, where they both worked at the Space Center, then back to Iowa, on to Minnesota, and headed back to Iowa to raise my kids as an adult later on in life. All of that moving did two things for me in those formative years. First, it taught me how to blend in. One thing you never wanted to do as the new kid was stand out. I just learned how to pay attention, test the waters and survive. In high school, I was great at walking into a classroom and deciding which of the local gangs would be the best bet to sit by that day. Even as kids, survival is ingrained in us. This has served me well over the years, and a skill that I gripped when I was tossed into this hell of a jail cell.

The second thing that all the moving around had done for me growing up was to instill the value of family. We were a pretty small family, just my mom, dad, sister and myself. We had no brothers, so if anything needed to be moved, hauled, picked up, or cleaned out, we were one of the boys. When my dad worked a lot, or was on a different shift than my mom, I watched her become the man of the house, too. She was such a tiny person, but her strength was insane, which led us to dubbing her Mighty Mouse. We thought nothing of her hanging pictures by herself,chasing snakes out of the house and changing toilet seats, which somehow was always my job in my married life as well. We were just always close. Not touchy-feely close, but close. We weren’t the family that openly professed our love towards each other and hugged all the time, but we just knew it. There is a loyalty in some families that I truly believe is just ingrained through history and respect. This was us. And this is what I brought into my family.

If I was the one that brought the loyalty and closeness to our family, it was my husband’s upbringing that brought the touchy-feely side. Again, he was raised with only one sister. They didn’t move around, and he went to school with the same group of kids his whole life. Of course, he was popular, he played hockey and was cute as hell. His dad liked to learn and was in school for most of the time the kids were growing up. So, he also watched his mom have to be the strong woman that she needed to be, although he and his friends were fiercely protective of her. They were huggers, though. They freely expressed their adoration for each other, and it was a concept that was so foreign to me at first. I really didn’t know how to hug like that, like they meant it. I caught on quick though and easily became the mama later on in life that just adored her kids and slobbered all over them.