I Ain't Me No More Read online

  With my arms cramping and aching, I didn’t know if I’d be able to hold them up any longer. When I wasn’t pulling at Dub, I was trying to lift him to release some of the tension around his neck, but nothing seemed to work. I felt defeated and ready to give up. I was able to muster up enough strength to pull one last time, hard enough so that both Dub and I went crashing to the floor.

  It was a surreal moment as I just sat there, crying. Dub sat next to me, crying too. I’d never seen him cry before. I’d never seen a grown man cry, period. His shoulders heaved up and down, and he even made little wailing sounds as tears flowed from his eyes. The image beside me began to tug at my heartstrings. He might have been a monster, but I was a human being with feelings, which I could not define.

  Dub threw his arms around me and just embraced me as his chest rose and his shoulders slumped. I just sat there, still stunned. So many thoughts were coursing through my mind, but the main one was, This man is crazy. Some people might call it love, but I called it crazy!

  “I knew you really loved me,” he cried. “If you didn’t, you would have just left me hanging there. You would have let me die. I knew you loved me. I’m going to do better this time. This time we’ll . . .”

  His words trailed off, and all I could hear was my inner voice telling me, What have you done? You were almost free. Not only should you have let him die, but you should also have watched him die, making sure every last ounce of breath was expelled from his body. Why? Why didn’t you let him die?

  I had no answers to all the inquiries sailing through my head. I couldn’t explain why I was here, back in Satan’s embrace, when just five minutes ago, I could have been out that door, leaving Dub behind, perhaps to die alone.

  But something inside of me just wouldn’t stand there and watch that man die. No matter how much he had hurt me, I just couldn’t do it.

  As I sat there, being held by Dub, I knew I had just waived my only way out. Would I get a second chance at freedom, or would I remain a voluntary prisoner of Dub for the rest of my life?

  Stone Number Ten

  “Why didn’t I just let him die when I had the chance?” I asked my reflection in the mirror of Dub’s basement bathroom. It wasn’t but three short months after Dub’s suicide attempt, and he was at it again.

  “Hurry up!” he yelled from outside the bathroom door. “It don’t take you that long to pee.”

  It was official. Dub had completely lost his mind. It was late Wednesday morning, a morning I should have been at school. But Dub was holding me hostage in his bedroom. He wouldn’t let me go to school unless I had sex with him. His jealousy had been over the top ever since the situation with me giving the two guys from my classroom a ride to work. He’d sometimes request that I have sex with him prior to going to school. I guess he figured if I still was sneaking and giving dudes rides to work, at least I wouldn’t be having sex with them if he got to me first.

  Of course, I was no longer giving them a ride to work. Dub had made sure of that. He had come up to the school, asking for Markus by name. Even though I’d told him I had been giving two of my classmates a ride, he went after only Markus. I suppose because Markus was always the one who hopped in the front seat, something that didn’t go unnoticed by whoever Dub’s watchdog was. Dub’s friends sure did need a life if they didn’t have anything better to do than watch my daily routine and then report it back to Dub.

  Dub was like some crazy man the day he came up to my school. He stopped anyone who crossed his path and asked, “Are you Markus?” or “Do you know a Markus?” He told everybody he stopped to relay to Markus that once he found him, he was going to give him a beat down for trying to get at his girl, Helen.

  “Yo, your man is up here clownin’ over you,” said this guy I didn’t even know as he walked by me when I was exiting the school building.

  I was heading for my car so I could go to work. He looked me up and down, shook his head, and chuckled. I felt as if he was silently saying, “And you ain’t even hot.” Because that was the way he was looking at me.

  I felt so mortified. I had no idea how long Dub had been outside harassing all my schoolmates. But by now the word was out, and everybody seemed to know what was going on.

  “Girl, Dub is up here, acting like a crazy, deranged lunatic,” Synthia said as she came up behind me. Synthia was the prettiest girl at the school and therefore the most popular. Since Rochelle and I weren’t that close anymore, Synthia was becoming like my new best bud. The same way I had never imagined dating someone with Dub’s looks, I had never imagined that the prettiest and most popular girl at school would ever want to be my friend.

  Synthia had exited the building right behind me, so clearly the word had been getting around inside the school but had somehow managed to miss me.

  I was completely caught off guard. “I don’t know what is going on,” I lied to Synthia.

  “I hear he’s askin’ everybody if they know Markus. Something about Markus trying to steal his girl or something. He’s probably gone now, though,” Synthia said. “The school called the police. I think they tried to come get you out of class, but you were already gone.”

  I halted my steps. “The cops are here?”

  “I think they are gone now.”

  Dub had gotten wind of the police and had gone on about his business. But even though he and the cops had left, their visit remained the talk of the school.

  “Markus don’t want her. She ain’t all that for no dude to be fighting over,” were some of the words spoken that got back to me.

  Now, as I stood before that bathroom mirror down in Dub’s basement, I agreed. “Look at me. Look how stupid and ugly I am,” I mumbled to myself. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Each time I called myself stupid, I punched myself upside the head. Maybe I did deserve to be hit for being so stupid. So ugly. So dumb. So lost. So confused.

  “Don’t make me come through this door!” Dub’s voice shook me out of my own moment of self-inflicted pain.

  I opened the door to find Dub waiting with his arms folded. He pushed me into his bedroom.

  “Dub, I need to go to school. I have a test today,” I lied, There was no test. I was tired, drained, and ready to go. He’d been trying to have sex with me all morning, and this time I just didn’t want to do it. I just didn’t want him touching me. My rejecting him enraged him. I was just relieved Baby D wasn’t around.

  By now I’d learned about a program called Title 20, which was government-funded child care. I only had to pay something like sixteen dollars a week to the childcare provider, and the government supplemented the rest. Believe it or not, I preferred to take my child to a biological stranger’s house than have him with his father all day. If Dub could snap off on me at any given moment, he could do the same with my son. I had to protect my son from his father at all costs. And if it meant I had to stay with Dub just to make sure I was always around whenever he was with our son, then so be it. Yep, you guessed it. This was another reason to add to my list of reasons why I stayed with Dub.

  After I dropped Baby D off and before I went to school, Dub made me drive to his house, and for the past two hours he’d been hitting me, trying to get me to confess to him that the real reason I didn’t want to have sex with him was that I was having sex with someone else. So the fact that I was not giving him sex wasn’t really his concern anymore. Getting me to admit my infidelity was.

  “You don’t have no test today,” Dub spat. “You just trying to go get to your little boyfriend. Who is it? That Markus dude? Do I need to come back up to that school and regulate?”

  “Dub, please. How many times do I have to—”

  “Shut up lying to me, you stupid witch!” he said, giving me a blow upside my head. “Do you think I’m as stupid as you? Huh? Huh?” Two more blows to my head. “Forget this. I’m done playing with you.”

  He rushed me and pinned me to the bed. “Whoever he is, let him get my sloppy seconds.” He tugged my pants off of me.

 
; I just lay there the entire time as he thrust in and out of me. Sex both before and after the baby had always been pretty much one-sided. I always did it more for Dub than for myself, right down to the first time. I was tired. Tired of Dub. Tired of fighting. Tired of fighting Dub.

  “Now I know you ain’t gon’ have sex with nobody,” he said upon finishing up with me.

  As I lay there, I thought, Why didn’t I just have sex with him in the first place and get it over with? Then none of this would be happening. I’d be at school, like every other able teenager. I just wanted to be a regular teenage girl. Just regular. But for how many other teenage girls was this type of thing regular?

  “Now can I go to school?” I asked Dub. The nonchalance in my tone pissed him off.

  “No!” he yelled, smacking me in my mouth. “You think I’m done with you? You still ain’t really gave me what I want.”

  “You wanted sex, and now you got it. What?” I asked, raising my hands in question.

  “What? The truth is what. If you hadn’t just had sex with me, who was it you would have had sex with?”

  I could not freaking believe it. I felt as if there was no way I was going to get out of that room if I didn’t tell him exactly what he wanted to hear. Maybe if I lied and told him that there was something going on between Markus and me, he’d leave me alone and go take it out on Markus. I knew that was wrong, but I didn’t know how much longer I could take the abuse. Those selfish thoughts went pounding through my head, until there was a pounding on the front door.

  Dub looked at me as if I was expecting someone.

  “It’s your house,” I replied, answering his unasked question. “I don’t know who it is.”

  Dub got up from next to me and went to peek through the curtains. After sighing and muttering an expletive, he said, “It’s your moms.” He then looked at me as if I’d snuck out and called her or something.

  “The school must have called her,” I immediately thought out loud, once again answering Dub’s unasked question. “The school probably called her when I didn’t show up and no one called to report my absence.” That was a school procedure neither Dub nor I even thought about.

  She knocked again. I could tell Dub didn’t want to answer the door, but he knew my mom wasn’t going anywhere, especially after seeing my bright yellow Chevette parked right outside the house. She knew I was in there.

  “Get yourself together,” Dub ordered me nervously.

  I began to straighten out my clothing, while Dub slowly went to answer the door, asking me intermittently, “You got yourself together yet? You cool?”

  I was so afraid. I was afraid that I might have to lie to my mother about why I wasn’t in school. I was afraid to tell my mom that for over a year and half now, ever since Baby D was born, Dub had been battering me. I knew she’d be mad at me for being so stupid. For allowing him to do that to me.

  Never once had I taken into consideration that because my mom had been through the same thing herself during her first marriage, she just might understand. She just might be on my side.

  “Helen, I know you’re in there. I see your car,” my mom called after knocking a couple more times and getting no answer.

  At that point, Dub opened the door. I was now at the bottom of the steps, looking up, as my mom brushed right by Dub and came into the house uninvited.

  “Where’s Helen?” she asked. Just then she saw me at the bottom of the steps. “The school called me. Why aren’t you in school?” she spat.

  I couldn’t even get a word in edgewise as she continued going off on me.

  “You think you just gon’ lay up under this fool and not go to school?” My mom pointed at Dub. She couldn’t have cared less that she’d just called him a fool to his face—in his own house. “Why didn’t you go to school today? I don’t care if you do have a baby and think you grown. You ain’t quite eighteen just yet. You still live under my roof. Got the school calling me on my job. I got to leave work and come see about you.”

  There was a brief pause. I just stood there, not knowing if she really wanted an answer from me or if she was going to keep on fussing. That was how my mother was: fuss, fuss, fussing and cuss, cuss, cussing. This was why as soon as she could after turning eighteen, Lynn had packed up and moved out. She didn’t want to endure the wrath of Genie if she didn’t have to.

  “Well, you heard me. Why ain’t you in school?” My mother stood with her hands on her hips, looking back and forth from me to Dub. She resembled a warrior. She was on the warpath. She’d come to see about me. And at that very moment, I felt like any child felt about their parents—that they could protect them.

  My mother covered me with a quilt of protection and warmed me. It was something I had never felt before when it came to my mother. After all, when I was home, I had to deal with her madness. When I was at Dub’s, I had to deal with his madness. There had never really been a safe haven for me. But at that moment, in spite of how mean I might have thought my mother was, I still felt safeguarded by her.

  “Answer me, Helen,” my mom shouted. Her loud, piercing voice had the same stinging effect it’d had for years, the one that had put the fear of death in Lynn and me, but right now it didn’t faze me in the same way. Right now Genie was ordering me to tell her what was going on. And I felt like I could.

  Before I could veto them, tears erupted from my eyes. This wailing sound was discharged from my throat. It was a wail and a cry that only a person who had been through something like this could translate.

  “What did he do to you?” she said without me having to say a word. My mom understood. Although it had been years since she and Rakeem had divorced and he’d laid his hands on her, I knew she remembered what it was like. I knew she knew it was wrong. I knew she could translate and understand my cry.

  “He wouldn’t let me go to school,” I whispered, managing to get the words out.

  Dub was stupefied. He couldn’t believe I’d just blown the whistle on him. I was astounded myself. Perhaps God had answered my prayers a long time ago. Perhaps He’d equipped me all along with just what I needed to free myself from the hell I was living in. I just hadn’t used it. A person could have the gun and all the ammunition they needed, but if they didn’t know how to fire the gun, what good was it? I didn’t know how to ignite the fire in me, the power of the Holy Spirit . . . because I didn’t know it was there. So many of us walk around today clueless of the power God granted us. I was waiting on God to help me, clueless to the fact that He’d already given me everything I needed. He was waiting on me to help myself!

  “Get your stuff and let’s go, Helen,” my mom said before turning to Dub and pointing in his face. “And you stay away from my daughter, or I’ll kill you.”

  For the first time, I saw Dub shrink down to the size of an ant. As bad as I wanted to hang around and get a kick out of seeing him lick his pitiful wounds, I knew I’d better get to gettin’ before things got ugly. My mom might have been abused herself back in the day, but she wasn’t no punk. All those years of getting beat up had given her a courage that enabled her to stand up and challenge any man or woman.

  I brushed past Dub at the door, leaving him standing there as I headed to my car and my mom headed to hers. I cried the entire drive home, but this time they were tears of relief. I was free. I was really free this time. My mom was involved now, so there was no turning back . . . was there?

  I looked up to the heavens and grimaced, recalling how I had been so sure that I had a way out before—the last time I was going to leave Dub. Only, God got in the midst of things and ruined it for me. God had allowed His spirit to rise up inside of me and beat out my flesh, which would have loved nothing more than to see Dub take his last breath while hanging from that sheet. I’d been so angry at God for that interference, but never again would I let God get in my way. Never again.

  Stone Number Eleven

  After pulling off in our cars from Dub’s house, my mother and I drove home because most of my c
lasses were already over with. Ten minutes hadn’t passed after we walked in the door when Dub came running down the street and began banging on our door.

  “Helen! Let me in. Please let me talk to you. Don’t leave me! Don’t do this!” Dub hollered as he banged on the door. He was practically out of breath. I figured that was because he’d run all the way to our house. He had to have run, considering that his house was a good half hour walk from mine and he’d made it there in ten minutes.

  “Call the police!” my mom told me as she scurried into her bedroom.

  I picked up the cordless phone to dial 911. I could only half pay attention to the operator because of all the jingling noises coming from my mom’s bedroom. This was not the time to be counting money, but that was exactly what it sounded like she was doing as I heard change clinking together. I stood outside her door, which was barely cracked open, on the phone.

  “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” the operator asked.

  “Someone’s trying to break into the house.”

  Dub was knocking, turning the knob, and throwing his body against the door, all the while yelling my name. “Helen!”

  “Can you repeat that, ma’am?” the operator asked me.

  “Someone is trying to break into the house,” I told her.

  “Not someone. Tell her it’s your boyfriend.”

  It was the way my mother said it that reminded me why I hadn’t told anyone what Dub was doing to me. She had said it so accusingly. She might as well have said, “It’s your boyfriend, so this is your fault. None of this would be going down if you hadn’t picked this nutcase.”

  It was then that I wished I could recant my earlier statement and tell her instead that I’d been playing hooky from school to lay up under my boyfriend. She would have believed it. That had been her initial notion, anyway. Honesty had invited trouble to our doorstep. Why did I tell?

  “My boyfriend is trying to break into our house.” I stood corrected.