The Child of My Heart

He was born when I was fifteen. I was fascinated, in love, transfixed. I was at the hospital when he was born, and I dressed him for the first time, in his first clothes, in baby blue. As far as I was concerned, he was mine, and I spent every moment with him that I could. I spelled my parents with him at night, earning brownie points from older parents who thought they were done with mid night feedings. I rocked him for hours; my mother had a glider rocker and footstool, and by 1984 our tiny mountain town had actually gotten cable. It was the MTV heyday, and so Joey rocked to Madonna, Michael Jackson and Flock of Seagulls.

By the time he was a year old, he could walk and rock by himself. He had gotten a rocking horse for his birthday, among a thousand other gifts. He was the youngest of course, the entire family older and able to lavish his with the abundance usually showered on a royal heir, or at least a first born. Not usually on the baby, the tenth of eleven grandchildren.

Mama set the rocking horse up in our downstairs den, where the stereo was. We had gotten a CD player that year, making the advanced transition from cassette, vinyl and 8-track all at once. There were only two CDs he would listen to, “Hooked on Classics”, and “Hell’s Bell’s” by AC/DC. Either one would have him rocking that horse so violently that the springs would scream and stretch, and the motion would actually move the entire toy across the plush shag in the den. Somebody would have to turn him around and re-start “Back in Black”, because he’d be down there yelling ‘help my horse!’ for hours otherwise.

I took him to Homecoming when he was two, and the attention he got them may have made him a performer for life. His eyes were brown, his hair blonde and silky, his skin perfect peaches and cream. He managed to climb to the top of the locker bank that ran along one hallway. How he got up there, I never could figure out, but his little white Buster Browns were a good six inches over the top of my head, so he must have been six feet up. He flew down the length of the lockers, my heart in my throat as he ran. He was only two – what if he jumped?

“He’s old enough to know not to jump” the teacher who gave a ½ credit class in psychology assured me. “You just need to make sure he won’t fall”.

“Joey!” I called. My voice came out in a squeak. I tried again.

“Joey, baby – come to me now!” He turned, his giggles just pealing off the walls, and came running back down the tops of the lockers. I started toward him, my arms coming up to catch him, sure he would trip and break his neck or his precious blonde skull.

“Joey!” Louder now, getting anxious. He was playing now, knowing he wouldn’t fall, getting brave. He changed directions, laughing when he figured out he was stringing me along, waiting to dart the other way when I stopped. “Joey – now – you have to come down!” I tried for firmness. It worked, and he turned toward me, running in my direction.

“Ok!” he called. And he launched himself out, a perfect dive off the tops of the lockers. I lunged, not an athlete, praying for speed, strength, agility, anything. I could actually see his little body – arms outstretched to mine – in perfect silhouette. He came down, head beginning to tilt to the floor, concrete covered with cheap industrial carpeting too thin to protect an eggshell baby skull.

And then he was in my arms. I had somehow crossed – what? six feet? Ten feet? To catch him, to stay on my feet, to hold him. I had never even once in my life managed to catch a baseball or make a basket or return the volleyball and I was holding him cradled to my chest.

“Oh why did you jump? I was coming – don’t you know you could have been really, really hurt?” Even in my anxious babbling, I didn’t want him to hear that he could have been killed. Don’t scare the baby.

Those brown eyes met mine, those rosebud lips turned in a little smile.
“No.” he said, firmly. “No. You caught me. You would always catch me.”  And he fell asleep against me, not waking for my sobs, my dash to the car, my placing him in the seat to take him home, where it was safe.

When he was four, I took him to college with me. I was precocious, entering my freshman year while just sixteen, so by his fourth birthday, the classes I attended in my small private school were often just with six or eight students. I was of course, a day student then. I knew all of my professors, and he went to enough philosophy classes to begin saying ‘age is irrelevant’ when asked how old he was. He would sit at a desk beside mine, a notebook in front of him. He used fat Crayolas instead of Uni-balls or highlighters, but he drew and drew and drew. He would sometimes repeat a phrase that appealed to him, if the lecture broke through his concentration. He sat one say singing ‘agape’ over and over, under his breath, savoring the word – unconditional love.

“Agape. Agaaaaape. Agap-ay. Aaaaagape.” He gave the word every flavor in the world and tasted each syllable to the fullest. Fat legs too short to do anything but swing back and forth, little fist clutched around a purple crayon, he colored huge swoops and whorls as he chanted, filling the page to the edges with the size of his thoughts. Purple to me will always be the color of love. God must see me in purple.

When he was ten years old, I married, and I moved away. From Tennessee to Washington state we went, and I spent my first summer crying a bride’s strange tears at my losses – my mama, my home, my first baby. Joey would call me, and it would break my heart, and it would break my heart when he didn’t. I would have to stop my three, to bathe my eyes and wear cucumber slices, so the good man I married wouldn’t know I was unhappy. My husband bought him a plane ticket, saying money somehow from our endangered budget, giving it to me with a smile and a flourish that told me he knew anyway, and it was all right. He wanted to fix it for me.

Joey came for three weeks. We packed up the Forerunner, tent and sleeping bags, camp stove and card games. We headed to Canada. I forgot my driver’s license, and got into the country on my American Express card. We camped, because we had to, and it was fun because Joey thought it was. I have a picture of him, badly exposed with my cheap camera. He crouches, next to the campfire. His legs are long and skinny with recent growth, his face in profile, still with baby fat on his cheeks, delighted. He’s holding a water chestnut from our camp stir-fry out to a chipmunk, who reaches delicate paws to take it. The fire behind makes a halo, red, yellow around him.

We splurged on tickets to aquariums and State Fairs in Vancouver. At the fair, he got in line for this horrible thing, a ride that made me feel ill just to see it. I am in the ‘non-rider’ gene pool, Joey in the ‘all rides are on!’ gene pool in our family. To my great relief, the man next to us had a kid Joey’s age, who wanted to ride, giving me an excuse not to get on. We worked a deal, putting the boys on together. I stood in front of the giant wheel, feeling as though it would come off its axis and roll toward me, crushing us both. I hate rides. I could watch though, as he came over the top of the wheel, and it seemed as though he were about to be launched into space. As I stood watching and waving and smiling and trying to keep my heart out of my throat every time he appeared, I found myself lifting my arms to him;  as though I could catch him again. He was shrieking with terror and delight, his laughter known to me even through the carnival sounds, through the hundred other screams.
When it was over, my arms ached from tensing, from trying to catch was couldn’t be held.

When he was twelve he discovered music. I had given him a guitar when he was six, and he learned to play after a fashion, but it wasn’t until adolescence swept him with all its angst that he learned to play in earnest. He became quite good actually, playing with the church group in Birmingham. He sang too, and his voice shocked me. Rich, deep, he sounded good. He used his music at first to try to keep the demons showing up in his thoughts from taking over. Music stayed with him for the next eight years, but it did not serve its purpose after that.

My husband took me home to the South when Joey was fourteen. He was thirteen years old when my first son was born. He loved my children as I had loved him, he was the perfect uncle. By then however, I couldn’t leave my children alone with him. The niggling, nagging little demons that had shown up when he was about ten, had grown as he had through adolescence, talked him into several methods of self medicating. Joey continued at the church, continued trying to find his way, continue to work on himself with vicodin, with oxycontin, valium, eventually heroin, cocaine, meth. It wasn’t until he was nineteen that his severe bi-polar disorder was diagnosed, and by then the medication couldn’t compete with the relief provided by the illegal narcotics.

When he was manic, he would create grand plans. He could rewrite the Windows software, win a Grammy, fix the family finances, single handedly. And he could argue, he was a born debater.
By the time he could drive, I didn’t even want my children around him, even with my direct supervision. He had long clean phases, and then he was the baby I had always loved with all my heart. The first born child of heart, if not my body. My first son was named after him; my daughter was his god-child. His moments of normalcy were beautiful – shining moments when his laugh would echo frequently in any room. He would walk in my door, with a grocery bag from Winn-Dixie, and would pull out three things; a pound of sausage, a pound of butter, and a quart of buttermilk. “Biscuits and gravy time” he would sing, and over the years it became our song – he created five stanzas in tribute to my biscuits and gravy, and I made them every time he asked, just to hear that song.

But the mania would come, or the depression would come, and within days he couldn’t fight it alone. The treatment centers and rehab places would eventually come, and he would fight, trying not to fly so high, trying to quell the demons.

When he was nineteen, and I had four babies, he told me how lost he was. He was gorgeous, six feet tall and slender. My oldest son, his namesake, Richard Joseph, had just been diagnosed with cancer. My youngest was six weeks old. He wanted to talk. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, heart broken over my oldest, missing my other babies who couldn’t come to the hospital.

The mania in some ways was the worst. He would become invincible. Not the ‘nothing can harm me’ invincibility of most teenagers, but a true Superman mentality.

“I can fly” he said.
“No, baby, you can’t fly” and it broke my heart to say it.
“Then catch me!” he replied, kissing me and making me laugh, although I wanted to cry.

He was killed by a toxic mixture of vicodin, cocaine, oxycontin, and valium. October 16, 2004. A recent rehab had worked for a while. But not enough, not nearly enough. A friend told me that perhaps Joey was my oldest’s advocate – that not even God could out-argue him. And perhaps that is true. My oldest boy is now ten years old, one inch away from five feet, all arms and legs and skinny adolescence. He’ll argue as well, anywhere and anytime. There is no trace of the pathetic, bald, swollen child that Joey last saw, that made him rail at God himself for daring to allow the child of Joey’s heart to suffer.
My own heart leaps when I see my son, I rejoice daily in his life. And sometimes, in the dark of night, I wonder if I had to pay the price of Joey’s life to save Ricky’s, if I had to trade the baby of heart so that the one of my body would live.

We dressed him for his funeral. Even in our mountain South, that’s not common anymore, for the family to take care of their dead. But my other brother, Richard and I could not stand to have anyone else done it. He was our little brother, in many ways Richard’s baby as well. We dressed him for the last time as I had dressed him for the first, in blue.

I had finally failed to catch him.



Received second place in the Drama in the Short Story Contest, February 2008.

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