Novel Treatments / Chapter 2

Next stop was the bank. I had estimated around six hundred dollars should be in the account for rent and I had every intention on cleaning it out. Most banks put a limit on how much you could withdraw in one day, but leave it to Johnnie to find the one bank in town that didn’t. I had slipped the card out of his wallet after he passed out, as well as the whopping thirty bucks in cash he had left.

“It’s my money and I’ll be damned if they keep it from me” he always said. He was always spending all our money at the casino downtown or at one of those clubs on the East Side. He never went to the classy one’s either, he liked them totally nude or nothing at all.

I punched in the PIN. Six, Nine, Six, Nine. His idea of a joke, though I can’t recall there ever being any six to my nine. The screen read a balance of four hundred dollars.

“Shit” I said under my breath. I looked back at Cassi, still sleeping, without a care in the world. This was going to have to work. Eight hundred and fifty dollars wasn’t much but there was no turning back now. I would make it work. I slid the crisp new twenty dollar bills into my wallet and pulled away heading down highway 70. I looked at the clock. Two in the morning. John wouldn’t even notice I was gone until after seven that night. Fridays I worked a double shift and always took the car. Johnnie hated having to come pick me up so it was the one time he would let me drive. He spent most nights at one of the bars on main street, hollering with his friends and doing God knows what. Normally I would drop Cassi off at the neighbors between shifts, but I had convinced them to cover for me as long as they could. They had seen the bruises and heard the fights at night, and though they never said anything, I was positive they were glad to see me go, if only to give them a good night’s sleep. Yep. By the time Johnnie saw I was gone, I would have a nice head start.

Start of what, I wasn’t sure of, but it was definitely the start of something. I wasn’t sure what the process was from here. I was headed to the Saint Peters police department. Though we lived ten miles down the highway in Saint Charles, I had talked myself into going to meet an old friend who lived just down the street from the station. It had been almost three years since we had talked, around the time the problems with Johnny had become regularly physical. Of all people, most would say, she should have been the one person to understand what I was going through and more importantly, why. I just could not get out from underneath my pride long enough to tell her. Johnny claimed she had stopped returning my calls all those years ago, but in one of his pissed yet honest moments, he gleefully reported to me that he had been erasing the caller ID. His face shone with pride and joy to share with me just how much control he had over me. He managed to take from me my one and only friend and he was just fucking tickled about it.

Emily was Cassi’s Godmother. We had been best friends throughout high school. We started by sharing a common interest in “saving” our friends from their oh so important drama and then veered in a strange direction, as we found ourselves a taste for alcohol and sex. She preferred aftershock and jack daniels, while I fuzzed the world out with tequila and beer (preferably consumed as I was held upside down over a fresh keg). We fought together and against each other, probably because neither of us saw in ourselves what we saw in each other and even more so due to our shared brashness.

Shortly after I had met Chris, Emily got herself involved with a nasty bit of a guy, Scott. He was quite the shit, but I had no idea just how much, though I had my suspicions, until the day she showed up at my door drenched in beer. See, she had decided to leave him and he decided to dump his drink on her head. Rational one he was, that Scott. I learned for certain, then, that he had beat her. She of course blamed herself and all of the usual symptoms of domestic abuse.

She of all people would have understood. Only, in my mind, because of those nights I had spent with her tears on my shoulder, I was more focused on the fact that I should have known better. I was ashamed to show her that I went and made her mistake and put my child in that position to boot. When Johnny claimed she stopped calling, I told myself she was better off.

That night I was going to knock on her door, unannounced and beg sanctuary. Every ounce of me feared making that request, but everything I knew of my long lost friend screamed that she would open her arms to me and her Godchild.

I pulled into the parking lot of the St. Peters Police Department and sat wondering what I was to do from here. Before Cassi’s real father had died in the car accident, he and I always dreamt about going east and starting new. But around my second trimester, Chris was side swiped by an eighteen wheeler and crashed into a guard rail. He hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. I always used to nag him about that, but he wouldn’t listen. He thought he was invincible. I was so angry at first. Why hadn’t he listened to me, if only he had listened maybe he would still be here, maybe I wouldn’t be alone, maybe…

Life is full of maybes though and shortly after Cassi was born Johnnie showed up in my life and seemed to be some sort of knight in shining armor. He found us a great house in a nice, though slightly run down neighborhood, to rent and would tell me of his dreams of opening his own service shop one day. He swore to me he would love Cassi like his own and give me everything I had ever dreamed of and more. What girl could turn that down. Especially a twenty year old high school drop out who was raising a baby on her own.

That had, of course, all been a fantasy. Not soon after Johnnie and I had moved in together, his true self came out. At first it was only once in awhile, and he would always beg for me to forgive him. Said he was sorry, he wouldn’t ever do it again, this time was the last time. Practically every line from every Lifetime channel movie would come out of his mouth, but he had a way of making me believe it would be the last time, and that he really didn’t mean it. Eventually, when he knew I was trapped, when he had stripped every possible chance of freedom from me, he stopped apologizing. Maybe if I kept my big mouth shut he wouldn’t get so angry, he’d say. Maybe I shouldn’t be such a smart mouthed bitch. I didn’t appreciate what he gave me and I had it coming. How cliché, right? It just isn’t the same from the inside, though.

Behind me was a tornado of fists and curses, dinners that were never warm enough. A house that was never clean enough, and though I suppose he was only giving me what he thought I deserved, I couldn’t risk Cassi life by staying. I’d be damned if she ever felt the pain I knew, the worthlessness, the depression and hopelessness. She had come too close already and I had decided then that if there was any hope at all, she was it. She was an innocent she didn’t get to pick her family and she had no way of escaping it on her own. All I could do was pray that she would someday understand why I made the choice I did.

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