You ***ing Forced Me to Say Goodbye

“What do you mean my mother is coming?” Jana asked with horror in her voice. Austin sighed as he turned on his car. “Austin…”

“She left me a voicemail that she would be here within a week. She’s coming to get you, I guess.”

“No! You can’t let her do that! Please, Austin,” Jana cried with terror. “Please…don’t let her take me away.” He looked at her.

“Jana, if you want to stay with me I’ll make sure you stay with me. You are sixteen, Jana, you should be able to choose who you stay with.”

“I’ll be 17 in another month and a half,” she said. He nodded.

“So everything will be okay, Jana. I’ll make sure you stay with me. But you have to promise to work your hardest at staying clean and not running away when things get too bad,” he said. Jana nodded and looked down at her freshly done acrylic French tip fingernails. Heather was coming. Heather would find out all the painful truths Jana had to herself for nearly three years.

When they got back to the house Jana went into her room and changed her clothes. She sat in front of the vanity mirror Austin had bought her and again stared into her own eyes. They were greenish blue, her father’s eyes without doubt, and they were lined with tears. The girl looking back at her now was a child. A girl she recognized more than the woman in the dressing room mirror.

Her green blue eyes were wide, scared, and worried. What would Heather think when she laid eyes on this wasted away girl with frightened eyes? She was still thin, and the make-up she wore only covered part of the true lining of her face. Cheek bones that stood out too much, and thin cheeks to set them off. Her eyes were set deep in their sockets. She was healthier looking then she’d been months ago. But she was still far too thin.

She pulled her long dark brown hair, another trait of her father’s, into a pony tail and she looked at the frightened face in her mirror once again. “Who am I?” she asked herself and wiped away a tear that escaped her eye. “Every time I look in the mirror I see somebody else. It’s as if I don’t really exist.” She sighed before wiping away her make-up and taking a shaking breath. She looked again into the mirror and this time it was not the frightened child looking back at her. “I’m Jana James,” she said to herself. “No, I am Jana Winkler. And that bitch won’t ever take me away from here.”

“Heather, I told you from the beginning you won’t take Jana away from me now. I missed nearly 17 years with her, I won’t miss the rest. So I hope you are prepared for a fucking war,” Austin said to Heather’s voicemail box. He hung up his phone and lay back on his bed. This whole thing was going to blow up around him. What worried him most was Jana’s stability. She was three months clean, but her last binge had been after a fight with her mother. He was very worried that she’d disappear again, and this time she’d get killed.

He got up after a few minutes and went to the kitchen. He put on a pot of coffee and leaned against the counter top. “Why couldn’t she just fucking let it go?” he asked himself. “Why couldn’t she just let Jana stay, and keep herself in Oklahoma? Why?”

Jana couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t even relax. All she could do was worry and question her future. Once her mother saw her again, and saw Stephanie, it was sure to cause a tense scene. But she feared it would bring up pressure and past heartbreaks she wasn’t prepared for. What would Heather say when she discovered she was a grandmother? How could she react? Jana was certain it wouldn’t be well.

When there was a knock on her door she sat up and turned on her side table lamp. “Come in,” she called, knowing Stephanie was long since asleep in her bed. The door opened and Austin came in, still mostly dressed.

“I thought I’d see if you were awake. I brought you some coffee,” he said and handed her a mug full with the warm liquid. She took it from him.

“Thank you,” she said. She pulled her knees up to her chest and took a sip of the coffee. “I can’t relax enough to sleep. I can’t stop thinking of how much of a bitch she is going to be when she finds out about Stephanie. Or when she finds out I killed a man…” Jana cried. Austin sat on the edge of her bed.

“She doesn’t have to know everything,” he said and smiled. Jana didn’t return the gesture.

“She always finds out everything. My mother knew I was out at parties when I was thirteen and fourteen. I don’t know if she knew I was having sex, I guess that didn’t really matter. I knew about birth control and I’m already going to hell.”

“If premarital sex and drugs are sending you to hell we’ll be there together,” he laughed. Jana smiled.

“I just…I don’t know how to confront my mother, you know. I haven’t seen her in nearly three years. I have a baby…I don’t know who her father is… my mother will never accept that,” she said and started to cry. Austin sighed.

“Don’t cry, Jana. She’s your mother…if she loves you she will accept the things you’ve done and been through.”

“She never will! She’s done nothing but lie to me my entire life. But she always made sure to let me know how ashamed and hurt she’d be if I ever had a baby out of wedlock, or before I was somewhere in my twenties. I had my first baby at 14, and I don’t even know who her father is, let alone am I married to him. I couldn’t begin to count how many people I’ve been with…but there isn’t a single one that I loved. My mother will hate me. But I could live with that. I could handle it if she just hated me and let me be. It’s that she won’t leave me along. She’ll try everything in her power to take me away…and ship me away some place where they’ll ‘save’ me.”

“You are going to stay right here, Jana,” Austin said then. “And your mother will wither let you go or accept the mistakes you’ve made. She’s no saint.”

“Don’t I know it?” Jana sighed. She finished her coffee. “I need a cigarette.”

“You are a little young for that,” he said with laughter in his words. She smiled.

“I wasn’t much of a smoker anyways. Cigarettes are harder to get when you’re already choosing between cocaine and your kid,” she said. He nodded absently.

“Why didn’t you find me sooner, Jana?” he asked. She was quiet for a minute.

“I didn’t want you to see that you’d been right to leave me behind. I honestly at the time thought you and my mother had been married. I didn’t want you to see that I was a disaster. I didn’t know who you were…if you were important or something. I didn’t want you to have to be ashamed of me.”

“It kills me that she lied to you like that. To everybody.”

“She had to. She couldn’t begin to tell me the truth…because then she’d look bad. As it was she’d gotten pregnant at 17. But as much as she promised to forever be ashamed of me she couldn’t very well tell me she wasn’t married when I was born. Or that it had been her that had taken away my chance at having a father.”

“But…”

“But I hate her for all of her fucking lies. She has nobody but herself to blame for my leaving, and nobody but herself to blame for my never going back.”

As the end of the week came near Jana could feel the anxiety of her mother’s arrival start to wear her down. Her mind was tired, and she was tired of fighting her urge to run away. To run back to Scotty and his run down apartments that he gave out for rough painful sex. To let her mother come to find nothing but the man she’s lied to and thrown away.

But she knew she owed it to Austin to keep fighting. To keep trying to be good, and so she fought her painful desire to run away. She sat alone in her bed for a while the morning before her mother was supposed to be coming. She had a cell phone lying next to her on the bed and she took a deep breath. Austin had provided her with the cell phone after she’d been raped so could call anybody she needed to in case of any emergency.

Now she was set to call Heather herself. She was set to call her and tell her everything on her mind. So finally after a long time of finding the courage and strength, she picked up the phone and dialed Heather’s home phone number. It rang twice before her silky sweet voice filled the line.

“Hello, Heather James speaking,” she said. Jana’s heart seemed to stop cold in her chest.

“Mom,” she said in a strangled voice.

“Jana? Is that you, Jana? Oh my goodness…I haven’t…”

“Don’t,” Jana snapped, finally finding her voice. “Don’t start with all of your good, worried, untouchable mother bullshit, because I’ve got a world of things to say to you, and damn it you are going to shut up and listen.”

“Jana, I am still your mother! Just because you’ve gone and found your lowlife father doesn’t give you the right to outright disrespect…”

“Why did you lie to me?! For 14 years you lied to me! Why?! Tell me why mother! Tell me why!”

“Lie to you? When did I lie to you?” Heather asked. Jana was irritated by her supposed oblivion.

“My entire life! When didn’t you lie to me?! You never married Austin. You never even told him I existed! Why did you lie to me?!”

“Jana James, I never lied to you. How dare you accuse me of something like that?”

“How dare I? How dare you?! How fucking stupid do you think I am, mother? I have been here for almost three years, away from you, learning what the world is really like. I’ve been with Austin for a few months now and I’m smart enough to know that everything you told me was a fucking lie.”

“Who gave you that vocabulary, Jana? When you were home with me you never spoke to me that way.”

“Only because I was afraid you’d hit me in the mouth with a wooden spoon! But all of your little abuses were nothing compared to the life I’ve lived.”

“Abuses?! I never abused you, Jana! I punished you accordingly! And yet you still turned into a disgusting little slut with nothing hurt disrespect towards your mother.”

“Mother, you used to hit me in the mouth with spoons! And starve me,” Jana said. “When I was there I never realized how fucked up some of the stuff you did was. But I’ve been away from you long enough now to know better.”

“Jana you will respect me,” Heather said bitterly.

“No, you will respect me! You will respect me and my decision to stay with Austin.”

“I will be in Los Angeles tomorrow, Jana. And you will be coming home with me and you will never see Austin again.”

“I called to give you a chance at civil goodbye and the possibility of a relationship. But if you think you have to go and come out here, if you think you have to start a god damned fight, then come and fight. But be ready to lose, because I would rather die than live with you in your hell for the rest of my life.”

“I don’t know when you got such a bad attitude, Jana. You used to be a good girl.”

“Goodbye, mother,” she said and hung up the phone. She pulled her knees up to her chin and ran her fingers into her hair. She took a breath with her head between her knees. Tears filled her eyes and she could feel her heart start to beat rapidly. She finally calmed enough to pick up the phone and dial another number.

“Hello.”

“Jami…” she cried into the phone with a burst of tears. “Oh my god.”

“Jana what’s wrong, honey?” Jami asked with immediate concern. Jana continued to cry for a long moment. Her head was spinning with emotions and worry and fear and anger.

“My mother is coming to take me away, Jami! She’s going to try and take me away! I can’t go back! I can’t go back and be her little bitch anymore! If she doesn’t ship me to some Catholic boarding school, she’ll try and save me with her fucking wooden spoons and locked doors! Her locked doors with no food…with Bibles and crucifixes! Oh my God, Jami, I can’t go back there!” Jana cried violently into the phone.

“You will be okay, honey. Austin isn’t going to let that happen. He’s going to fight it out, I promise.”

“You don’t understand! My mother is fucking insane! When I was with her she hit me in the mouth with wooden spoons if I said things she didn’t like. Then she’d tell me she was sorry, and she loved me, but she had to do it. And always how at least she didn’t run out on me like my father. She locked me in the guest bedroom once, because the guest bedroom window is too small to get out. She left me in there for a week with nothing to eat and only enough water to keep me alive, claiming I’d disrespected her and God would only save me if I prayed.”

“Jesus, Jana,” Jami said, her stomach turning. “That’s sick.”

“It…it was weird,” she said. “I never understood…that those were abuses. Because most of the time she was okay. She loved me…we usually got along well enough. I mean, she always talked to me like I was stupid. But I was a wild kid, I don’t deny that. But I can’t think anything warrants locking a 13 year old girl in a bedroom with no food for a week.”

“No, nothing does. That’s fucked up and wrong and disgusting, Jana.”

“And I just can’t imagine the things she’s going to do to me when she finds out about my daughter…and my stripping and hooking and abortion. Or the rape or that I killed a man with his own gun. Oh my god, she’s going to have me locked up in a fucking convent where they beat people!” Jana cried.

“What do you mean killed a man?” Jami asked with confusion. Jana sniffed back tears. She hadn’t told Jami about the attack, she’d after all only known her for a week.

“A few months ago…after I found Austin, he had me call my mother. I really didn’t want to, but he made me. So I did and she verbally attacked me. She called me a disrespectful little slut and all this other shit. So I ran away. I left Stephanie here, because I didn’t want Austin to have to deal with me…I’m such a fuck up and it’s not fair to him. I got my apartment back, I went back to the streets second night I was out, high as hell and drunk to top it, this guy pulled up and forced me into his car at gun point. He took me to a hotel and tied me to the clothing rack thing and raped me. More than once. He raped me with his gun barrel,” she was starting to choke on her sobs and tears streamed down her face. “Austin’s friend Mike followed us to the hotel and then he came to the room and he and the guy fought long enough for me to get myself untied….and then I shot the guy six times with his own gun. Then the cops and Austin got there.”

“Jana…” Jami breathed and sniffed.

“Before you hate me, I promise I would never have done it if I didn’t have to. But he was coming after me with a knife and I had the gun in my hand and I had to….I had to.”

“Hate you? Why do you always think I’m going to hate you, Jana? The things you’ve been through are horrible things…and I can’t hate you for it, Jana. I can only love you and idolize how amazing of a young woman you are.”

“But how do I tell my mother, Jami?”

“You don’t have to. But if you ever need to, you just stand tall and tell her to her face, and if she doesn’t like it she can fuck herself. You are living proof that you can live through anything and come out still standing.”

“I know you don’t know me well, but would it be okay if I said I love you? You’ve meant so much to me this week…and you’ve been the only woman I’ve ever trusted wholly.”

“I love you, too, Jana,” Jami said. “Do you need me to come over?”

“No…I think I’m going to spend some time with Austin today. I never had a dad for close to 17 years…”

“I understand, baby. If you need me call me,” Jami said. “Talk to you later.”

“Bye bye,” Jana said. She hung up and sighed before getting out of bed and leaving the room. She was dressed in mini shorts and a silky tank top, her pajama set from Victoria’s Secret. Her hair was a mess, but she didn’t care.

She went into Stephanie’s room and smiled as she saw her daughter playing with a doll and teddy bear Austin had bought her. “Good morning, little girl,” she said. Stephanie looked up and a blinked.

“Mama,” she said.

“Come on,” she said and lifted her daughter. “Let’s surprise Austin with breakfast,” she said. She carried her daughter out of her room and stopped at Austin’s bedroom door. She cracked it open and peeked in at the bed. He was sprawled over the bed with his blanket tangled around him and his hair in his face, passed out cold. She laughed to herself and closed the door.

“Man sleeping?” Stephanie asked.

“Austin,” Jana corrected. “Not ‘man’.”

“Man sleeping?”

“Austin is sleeping,” Jana said. Stephanie nodded as Jana carried her down the stairs and to the kitchen. She opened some of the cupboards and was surprised to find pancake mix. She looked around the kitchen and she found a waffle iron. “What do you think, Stephanie? Waffles or pancakes?”

“Waffles!” Stephanie said from where she was seated on the counter top. Jana laughed and nodded.

“And how about some bacon?”

“Yummy!”

Jana laughed again. She’s found that in her sobriety she’d found another appreciation for her daughter. She’d learned to enjoy the child’s company when her mind was clear. She opened the refrigerator and found a packet of bacon and found a frying pan. “This is going to be a wonderful surprise.”

She mixed the pancake mix into batter and started frying the bacon while her daughter watched with enthusiasm. She looked at Stephanie and smiled. “Can you smell the bacon?” she asked.

“Yummy!” Stephanie said and took in a deep breath. Jana laughed.

“Yes, yummy!” she agreed and put on a pot of coffee. She flipped the bacon and poured the first of the batter into the waffle iron. She started to hum to herself and slowly the fight with her mother left her mind. She was glad to be thinking of other things.

Her first batch of waffles and bacon were finished and plated as Austin came into the kitchen, his hair in several directions and his eyes still sleepy. “I smelled food,” he said in a hoarse voice. She smiled.

“Surprise,” she said and set the plate on the bar in front of him. He sat on the bar stool and looked down at the plate.

“Waffles…” he said. She placed a fork next to his plate along with butter and syrup. “Very domestic.”

“I thought I’d do something for you,” she said. He nodded.

“Any coffee?”

“Of course,” she said and set a cup in front of him. He smiled at her affectionately.

“If we weren’t related I’d marry you,” he said. She laughed out loud.

“You are crazy,” she said. “Besides, you’re not my type.”

“I’m just too much for you to handle.”

“That…and you’re my dad…and you’re old.”

“Fuck that,” he said and took in a bite of the food she’d put in front of him.

“Why do you have a waffle iron?”

“Fuck if I know. I think it was a wedding present.”

“I see,” she said and set a plate down for her daughter. “Well good thing I can make waffles.”

“I never guessed you’d be able to cook,” he said. She frowned.

“Why shouldn’t I be able to cook?” she asked defensively.

“I didn’t saw you shouldn’t be able to. Just that I didn’t know you could.”

“My mother insisted a woman should always know how to cook. She taught me everything…whether I wanted to learn or not.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Depends on what it is,” she said and ate a piece of bacon.

“Was Heather a good mom when you were out there? Or was she as much of a bitch as she is now over the phone?”

Jana bit down on her lip. She wasn’t sure she could go back into the story she’s told Jami not long before. But in a way she felt like she should. It was something she knew he deserved to know if he was going to fight this thing out with Heather. She took another bite of bacon and sighed before launching into the story a second time. When she finished he stared blankly at her.

“She’s fucking crazy,” he said after a long silence. She nodded.

“Yea she is. I mean, like I said, most of the time it was whatever. Like she’d be cool, just hanging out and whatever. She knew I snuck out all the time and she never let on that she cared much. It was weird.”

“It sounds horrible.”

“Nah, I’ve been through worse,” Jana said with a shrug, hoping she looked convincing. He nodded and took a sip of coffee.

“Don’t worry about it though, Jana. You aren’t going anywhere anytime soon,” he said. She nodded.

“I know,” she said. She took a sip of her own coffee and smiled. “I’m staying right here, come hell or high water. This is where I belong.”

She spent the remainder of her day lounging around the house with her father. She watched as he absently played with an acoustic guitar and drank a few glasses of red wine.

“Is it hard?” she asked.

“What?”

“The guitar?”

“Not once you know how,” he said and took a sip of his wine. She bit her lip as a slight urge for a glass of wine of her own crept over her. It passed quickly, leaving a dull ache on her tongue. “I can show you.”

“That could be fun,” she said. He handed the guitar to her then and showed her how to hold it and where to put her fingers. For a second she could feel her heart pounding in her chest. This seemed so easy, so normal. Like something that should happen between a father and daughter. Like she finally had some kind of normality.

When the doorbell rang the following morning Jana could feel her normality crashing around her. She opened the door with a heavy sense of dread. As she looked at the woman looking back at her her heart first skipped several beats before jumping into over drive, pounding so quickly it hurt.

“Jana! Hello!”

“Hello…mother.”