Chapter 19 Light Through the Cracks
Light Through the Cracks
I’D BEEN TALKING TO MY MOM ONLINE FOR YEARS, BUT I hadn’t seen her physically since I was three months old and she left me on a stranger’s doorstep.
But given everything I was going through with Karma, I needed my mother.
I needed someone to just hug me. And Karma actually agreed that I needed to meet her—as long as he could come along.
Of course we were still together. Everything that guardian angel had come to tell me—that I was worth a damn, that I could protect myself and help myself and live—those realizations were years away.
Abuse creates a set of chains around us, and even if I was screaming on the inside, my body just wouldn’t move.
I couldn’t get free of him, not yet. And so he came along with me to Indiana, picking fights every step of the way, and drove me to her house.
I wore a cute little flowered skirt with a black top when we pulled up to a rundown shack in an alley, smack-dab in the middle of small-town Indiana.
When the door opened and I saw my mom, I got teary-eyed right away.
The little girl in me sobbed on the inside, but I mostly kept my composure on the outside.
She was just the tiniest little thing, with big, bright blue eyes and auburn hair.
I hugged her and just held on. We didn’t let go for a long while, and eventually we were both crying.
I’d waited thirty-six years to finally hug my mama.
It was everything I could have ever dreamed of.
Inside, her house was run-down beyond belief.
She didn’t have gas. She didn’t even have a stove.
I didn’t know it at the time, but there was no running water in the house either, so she’d shit in the bathtub or a bucket.
Vanessa was a total hermit who never left the house, her anxiety so severe that it kept her confined to this tiny hellhole.
I know how crippling anxiety can be—I’ve had it since the night I took that X pill laced with heroin.
But I’ve had to learn to fight against mine and not let it control me.
My mom just wasn’t that strong, and I could just see the anxiety consuming her.
It made her an addict. And the truth about Vanessa is that she didn’t aspire to be anything more than an addict. She dated biker dudes who treated her like shit. Her life was a dark mess. It infuriated me as I got to know her. Why didn’t she want better for herself?
I was so disgusted by her house that first day, and I knew even then that it would eventually kill her.
And it did—she developed COPD later in life.
In those early days when we reconnected, she had pneumonia all the time.
I left that day panicked and disgusted by how my mother was living, so I took my mom under my financial wing and started providing for her as best I could.
But I couldn’t save her, not with Karma hovering around, grimacing in disgust at my mom and at me too.
I wasn’t even in a position to save myself.
* * *
GRACE, MY BEAUTIFUL SOUTHERN BELLE love, was still by my side no matter what—even if she had pressed charges against me for harassment back in the day. After that night when Karma went too far, I moved out of our throuple mansion and into a house with my girl.
I even tried to get a restraining order to keep Karma away from me. I just didn’t trust that he wouldn’t try to kill me if he got close enough. I was finally afraid of him, and poking and instigating was no longer on my to-do list. I’d already fucked around and I sure as hell found out.
As with all toxic love affairs, it’s like you get addicted to the pain and can’t stay away for long. Of course, we saw each other. We would fuck and he would promise not to put hands on me. It was I love you and I can’t be without you.
But Karma was exactly who he was, and when he drank he affectionately called himself “the Werewolf.” Once liquor hit his system, everything he did was destructive.
One evening, we were getting shit-faced at the bar across the street from my house like we always did, and he left with an older lady.
He’d just outright disrespected me and left me at a bar to go home with some fucking sixty-year-old lady because she had drugs.
So I told him to go fuck himself. He fed me some lie and left, and I ordered another round.
Hours later, I went home and started getting ready for bed.
The sun was up, and I needed sleep. I’ll deal with him when I wake up.
I didn’t hear from him until six in the morning the next day. He started banging on my front door, and I wouldn’t let him in the house. He was begging, but I stuck to my guns. Grace wasn’t home, and I knew if he found out I was alone, there would be trouble.
Without hesitation, he threw a brick through my window, crawled through the broken glass, and grabbed a handful of my hair to start dragging me around the house.
I ended up on all fours while he kicked me in the face and stomach like a dog.
I didn’t scream—it was just second nature to keep quiet by then.
I knew if I screamed it would only make him hurt me more, and I didn’t want him to kick my teeth out.
I also knew this man so well by then that I knew I could tame that monster. As he kicked my stomach, chest, and face, I looked up at him and pleaded as quietly as I could.
“Karma, I love you. Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this,” I whispered. “I love you so much. Let’s calm down.”
He slowly moved away from me. His shark eyes came into focus as he realized just how badly he’d hurt me—again.
I still get the chills thinking about how he looked at me, like a little hurt boy.
He grabbed my phone, ran out of the house, threw it in the neighbors’ pool so I couldn’t call the cops, and left.
It didn’t matter how many times I involved the police—there was no help coming from the justice system for me. There were so many other times when Karma hurt me, I’ve lost count. Eventually, I knew I had to change my entire life.
But no matter how much grace I have shown him, Karma is still trying to make my life hell. The difference is that now he has no power over me.
* * *
ONE NIGHT IN 2015, KARMA and I met up with some friends at a Moonshine Bandit concert. The path for the rest of my life was set that night.
While we were at the bar, I heard a thick Southern accent.
“Y’all wanna get a drink?”
First of all: Y’all? Who the hell is that?
I looked over at this tall, chunky boy with the brightest smile and tattoos all over his face.
“Hi. My name’s Jelly,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand.
“Hey, I’m Bunnie,” I said. I was—dare I say—mesmerized? This man was not my type. But shaking his hand felt like every star in the sky collided. My soul recognized his. It was as if I’d been looking for him my entire life.
Jelly had opened for the Bandits, and to be honest, I didn’t even pay attention to his performance.
Nor did I really care for his music. I was there with Karma, and we were barely hanging on by a thread.
If you let Karma tell the story, he will say he “gave” me to Jelly—an outright lie.
He will also tell you he performed with J—another lie.
That night, we both met J for the first time.
Karma didn’t have a clue I was crushing on the Nashville boy.
It’s strange, but I shot tons of videos of J on my phone that night—tell me why I filmed a man I barely even knew.
He was sipping out of a plastic cup, and I just kept on filming him moving around and being, well, Jelly.
I wanted to study him—the way he moved and the way he talked.
I was never a sucker for a Southern drawl until that night.
I do remember thinking to myself, “This boy is going to be a star one day.” I even said it out loud to one of his friends one night when he played J’s song “Cocaine in California” for Karma and me in some parking garage. I always knew he had that it factor.
Who the fuck are you? I thought to myself. But just as soon as the stars in my eyes started shining, Karma made sure to make his presence known and I was back to being the obedient girlfriend.
Still, that sweet, Southern boy’s smile lingered in the back of my mind for weeks to come.
* * *
LIVING WITH GRACE WAS MY escape, even when I couldn’t get off the merry-go-round from hell with Karma. We’d lie out together or go swimming in our pool, and everything felt calm with her. We would laugh until we cried—no one could ever make me laugh the way Gracey did.
But Grace was a mystery. I could never understand how someone so reckless and without a care in the world could just float through life, until February 26, 2016—the day it all finally made sense.
A few months earlier, we had been out in the pool drinking and carrying on. Grace was a skin cancer survivor after having a piece of her back cut out years before. She’d been cancer-free for years. She swam over to me and pulled me close.
“Bunnie, look at this lump on my leg,” she said. “What is it?” I looked and felt her skin with my fingers. It was a decent-size hard nodule. It didn’t move when I touched it, but I couldn’t imagine it was anything serious.
“Damn, girl. We need to get that checked out,” I said, just to be safe.
“I’ll find you a doctor.” But in true Grace fashion, she didn’t wait for me to find her a real doctor.
Instead, she called up an old trick of ours who ran a pill mill.
He was a full-on medical doctor—but shady.
Grace always had these back-alley doctors on call.