Not My Time
Copyright 2011 Misty Reigenborn
Smashwords Edition
Starr opened the door to her refrigerator. She noticed offhandedly that it was empty again.
There was no food in the cupboards either. She shrugged to herself and sighed, reaching for a glass out of the cupboard for water. But all of the glasses were in the sink, already dirty. Her house was a mess, her life was a mess but Starr Brentwood found that she didn’t much care.
She retreated to the living room, sitting down in what used to be her fiancé’s easy chair.
She missed Reid. But he’d walked away when she’d needed him most. He had turned out to be no different than the fathers of her three older children.
Things had been going so well, too. If things had gone the way they were supposed to, they would have been married six months by now. But no, Starr thought as she lit the last cigarette in the pack, things had gone to shit like they always seemed to.
It had started a year and a half ago, when she was pregnant with Mary Jean. Reid was a recovering addict. But when she’d first met him three years ago, he had been clean for almost a decade. He was older than her by ten years but he’d always been so good to her. Starr wasn’t used to being treated well by the men in her life.
They’d met at the daycare center. She was picking up her three kids and he was picking up his son. She’d been waiting for the bus at the stop in front of the center, struggling with her five year old son Percy who was fighting with her over a toy car, her three year old daughter Brianna who was dancing around because she’d only decided she needed to go to the bathroom when they’d left the daycare center, and the baby Kaelen who was squirming in her arms. She had dropped her diaper bag on the ground, spilling everything from diapers to extra clothes, to the contents of her pocketbook on the ground. She had been trying to pick everything up, hold her struggling son and keep an eye on the older kids at the same time when she heard a male voice say “Let me help you.”
She was close to tears of frustration when he showed up, his handsome four year old son who looked like a miniature version of his father standing patiently next to him. Reid had helped her pick everything up. It was all back in the diaper bag when the bus pulled up. She was heading towards the doors when it pulled away immediately after dropping someone off.
Tears sprang to her eyes again when Brianna burst into tears. It was the combination of the bus pulling away without them and her daughter wetting her pants that sent her over the edge.
Reid had taken one look at her face and said “Miss, where do you need to go? If it’s short I can give you a ride. I don’t have extra car seats but I have plenty of room.” He’d gestured to a full size van parked at the curb.
“It’s only about ten blocks away but it’s so hard to walk with all three kids,” she’d told him.
“Come on.”
He’d loaded all of them into the van. They’d become fast friends that had turned into lovers. She’d become pregnant with his child. They’d planned on marriage and trying to gain custody of his son Reid Jr. He’d helped her get not only a bigger place, but a better job.
They were happy.
Until Reid had relapsed when she was seven months pregnant with Mary Jean. At first it was marijuana, which she figured was pretty close to harmless. Her sixty year old aunt in California even had a prescription for it. Then it had turned into coke. Reid would come home one out of every three nights. They’d started fighting all the time.
The kids were at her Mom’s house when he came in late one night. He was high. She could see it in his eyes. The man she loved turning into no different than the men she thought she’d loved before. She couldn’t put her kids through it again. But she’d loved Reid so much.
That was why she’d done it. She’d seen a real family, a good life within her grasp. He brought coke home. When he’d offered to share, she’d taken him up on it. She thought he’d pay attention to her that way. He had for a while. They’d had incredible sex that night and he’d been straight for a few days afterwards.
She’d only snorted coke with him twice after that. It was never much. She was so afraid it would hurt the baby or that they’d find it in her system and take the kids away. Reid told her that his ex had smoked meth right before giving birth to their son and had tested clean. She’d believed him. The baby was fine at her next doctor’s appointment.
Then she went into labor three weeks early. They found the cocaine in her system.
They took the baby from the hospital and the older kids from her Mother’s house. She’d never understood why they couldn’t leave her kids with their grandma but she couldn’t stop them.
Reid had been by her side for the first few court hearings. He told the judge they were getting married and he wanted to adopt her older kids. They went to all the classes and appointments the social workers told them to.
Starr’s drug tests were clean after the first one. Reid’s were after the second. She’d gotten a promotion. Her lawyer said the kids were going to be able to come home. Then they’d gotten a new DFS worker and everything had gone to Hell. They got less visits with the kids. Percy was put into a different foster home. They ignored her mother as a placement though she’d gone through all the training and inspections.
Six months later, her parental rights were terminated for all four of her kids and Reid was just dust in the wind. Six more months after that she was, living off of unemployment and whatever odd jobs she could pick up. She was living in a broken down, one bedroom apartment and paying outrageous rent on a storage unit. She couldn’t stand to part with the things that had belonged to her children.
She’d take so much back of what she’d done if she could, make better choices. She wasn’t a bad mother until she’d been pregnant with Mary Jean, or at least she hadn’t thought so.
The social workers had thought different though, picked over every little detail of her life.
Starr put out the cigarette and wondered if she had a pack hiding somewhere in another pair of pants or the bottom of her purse. She figured she should be hungry but she wasn’t. Not much of anything mattered anymore. A judge’s decision that she wasn’t fit to be a mother had taken all that mattered away.
She could move she thought. She could have more children. Change her name, dye her hair, do whatever she wanted. She was only twenty-seven, had practically her whole life ahead of her.
But without her heart it didn’t matter. Her children were her heart.
Starr got up from the chair and went to the bedroom. She dug in her purse and found two stray cigarettes that miraculously weren’t broken. There was also an almost full bottle of the antidepressants they had given her when she was still fighting for the kids.
She lit one of the cigarettes and took a deep drag, contemplating the bottle. She had an almost full bottle of schnapps in the freezer. Would the pills and the alcohol be enough to end her worthless life Starr wondered?
Still puffing on the cigarette, she walked into the bathroom. There was another bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet. The first “happy pill” that they’d given her that hadn’t worked. The second hadn’t really either but she’d pretended so they’d leave her alone. That bottle was half full. Maybe the combination would put her to sleep permanently she thought.
Starr put the cigarette butt in the toilet and took both bottles of pills with her to the kitchen, where she dug the cinnamon schnapps out of the freezer. She rinsed out a glass with hot water since she didn’t have any dish soap and took the pills and the alcohol to the living room.
She lit the last cigarette and poured the glass half full of schnapps. She looked at the red liquid. She’d never been much of a drinker, couldn’t stand to drink if you could taste the alcohol at all but the schnapps tasted more like cinnamon candy than alcohol.
She took a sip. It burned her throat a little. She put the cigarette in the ashtray and opened one of the pill bottles. Starr tossed ten antidepressants in her mouth. She had taken a gulp of alcohol to wash them down when the irony hit her of killing yourself with antidepressants. She almost choked.
She’d taken another five pills and drained the glass when it really hit her that she might never see her kids again. If she knew that’d she’d be able to watch over them, it might be okay.
But she didn’t know that.
Suddenly feeling nauseous, Starr went to the bathroom and threw up. When her stomach was empty, she still felt like crap but realized it would probably be a good idea to eat something, even if it only meant she had something in her stomach to throw up. That meant she had to leave the house.
Feeling shaky, Starr wiped her mouth and rinsed with mouthwash. She was surprised for a minute that there was any left but then it hit her she hadn’t been doing very well at brushing her teeth. She let out a shaky laugh and looked at herself in the mirror.
She’d never been beautiful, but now she looked like death warmed over. She made a face at herself, and realized how close she’d come to killing herself.
“What the fuck Starr,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. “You’re letting those fuckers win. You messed up, but you’re better than this.”
It was what her mother had told her over and over again before she’d stopped talking to her. Sighing, Starr shoved her feet into a pair of sandals and grabbed her purse. At least she could get cigarettes when she went out.
There was a strip mall four blocks away that had a fast food place, a grocery store and a mini mart. That would work just fine Starr thought.
Thirty minutes later, she had a bag with two burgers, cigarettes and a few things from the grocery store in hand. She was headed out of the parking lot towards home when she dropped her lighter. She bent down to pick it up. When she straightened up, suddenly a car was speeding her way. She tried to step out of the way but they were going too fast.
Starr Brentwood’s body hit the ground, broken and bloody, on the day she’d decided not to end her life. Her vision was blurred. The man that stood above her was fading in and out of her view. She took a last breath and wondered again if she would be able to watch over her children. It would be okay if she could she thought again.
Starr escaped from her body and looked down at her broken form. Of all the days to die.
She heard a familiar voice and turned. “Grandma?”
“Yes Starr. I didn’t expect to see you soon my dear.”
“Yeah.” Starr paused, no longer interested in watching the stranger sob over her broken body while the woman that had been the passenger spoke into a cell phone. Sirens were coming closer. “Grandma?”
“Yes?”
“Can I watch over my babies now?”
Starr’s grandmother shook her head a little. “Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t honey. It depends. But they won’t know you’re there.”
Starr sighed, though it made no sound. “Even in death nothing seems to go right.”
“Come with me darling. There may be someone we can talk to about that.”
Starr put her hand into her grandmother’s and they were gone.