Chapter Twenty-Two / 1968 PART TWO

 

Now that we knew, medically speaking, what was wrong with John, one would have thought that our lives would be a little bit easier. I suppose, in some respects, there was an element of truth to that, since the only piece of advice Dr. Sata had to offer was to try to make John’s life as stress-free as possible and not to put him in positions of having to make decisions that he just could not make. Maybe because the information was still too new, too fresh for us to fully implement Sata’s suggestions (and because Charles and I were still children…extremely mature children (given all we had been through with surviving John)…but children, nonetheless), the second half of 1968 would prove to be one of the worst and scariest times of our lives.

 

Wednesday nights was when the St. Michaels and All Angeles choir had their weekly choir practice. As nearly was always the case these days, Steve Helgeson had come down to the Bel-Air right after school had gotten out. Steve and I had entertained each other for about forty-five minutes until Charles, in a flurry, had rushed in. There was not much time for him and Steve to eat and then get out the door and on the bus to get to their choir practice.

 

“Okay, here’s dinner,” Nora said, coming from the kitchen with two plates and a pan of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. (Always easy for Nora when we were in some kind of a rush.)

 

Charles and Steve emerged from our bedroom (where I had been banned from, being the annoying little brother).

 

Nora had barely gotten a plate dished out for both of them before what was on the plates was all gone.

 

“We gotta go, mom,” Charles said.

 

They both headed for the door. Steve, however, was a big and still growing boy. One plate was not enough. He ran back in and grabbed the whole pan and a spoon out of Nora’s hands, taking them with him as he ran out the door.

 

“Be sure to bring my pan back,” she hollered after Steve who, with Charles, was already long gone. In the kitchen, Nora had a second pan for John (whom she still always included in our dinner meals), herself and me.

 

“Chris, run across and tell your father that dinner is ready.”

 

I was too engrossed in whatever television show I had been watching. She had to repeat her request. With reluctance, I got up and headed across the Bel-Air to get John.

 

“Dad,” I said, opening the unlocked but closed door to apartment eight.

What actually was disturbing was having not gotten any response from my father when I had called out “dad” upon entering. The whole apartment was dark. It was now dark outside, as it was around six-thirty in the fall. Having made a second attempt to call for John, I was now in a panic. This could be one of two things, either he was sound asleep in the bedroom and had not heard me or he was not there. If he was not there was why I had become panicked.

 

Swiftly, I ran through the entire apartment, throwing on lights as I went.

 

“Mom! Mom!”

 

I ran back into apartment one, shouting for Nora the moment I had hit the door.

 

“What is it?” Nora asked, running from the kitchen, her apron still tied about her small waist.

 

“It’s dad. He’s not there.”

 

Nora quickly took off her apron.

 

“Run down and get Jimmy,” she said to me. Upset with a mix of both fear and panic, I did not move.

 

“Listen to me, Chris. Everything will be fine. However, just in case, I need Jimmy here. To help. Now, run down and get him. Please.”

 

I started to back away.

 

“Run, Chris,” she said.

 

I turned and, as instructed, ran out of the apartment and down to Jimmy and Jackie’s apartment. Jimmy had never moved out of apartment number three, two doors down, where he and Mike had moved into all those years earlier. That I might have run into John had not, initially, even entered my eleven-year-old thought process. Only once I was at Jimmy’s, pounding frantically on the wooden door, did I keep looking back down the fifty feet of hallway to the large glass front door of the Bel-Air. There was no one there, a good and bad sign.

 

“Chris?” red-haired Jackie, then about twenty-one years old, said, answering the door.

 

There was no time to waste with even talking to Jackie. I ran right in past her to the small living room where Jimmy and Mike were seated at the table playing cards. The ashtray was full of smoked cigarette butts and a couple of half-consumed beer bottles were on the table. On the radio, they were listening to some Johnny Cash tune.

 

“Jimmy…”

 

“Settle down, Chris,” Jimmy said, as I was now at the point of hyperventilating.

“What’s going on?”

 

“Dad…” was about all I could utter. Nevertheless, it was enough. Now from several years of experience with protecting us from John’s violence, Jimmy just knew that the combination of the state that I was in and just uttering the word

“dad” was all that both Jimmy and Mike needed to know.

 

“Where’s Nora?” was all Jimmy had time to say as he and Mike both leapt to their feet.

 

“Help, Jimmy! Help!”

 

From some place out in the Bel-Air’s large hallways, Nora was screaming at the top of her lungs.

 

Unlike the big, long hallways inside apartments one and eight, the inside hallway of apartment three was only about two-feet wide and four or five feet long. With Jackie still at the open door of the dark hallway, it was now a bottleneck. I had gotten to the door first, with Jimmy and Mike right behind me. We had all arrived just in time to see Nora, on a dead run, sprint past us. About three feet behind her was John, wielding over his head the twelve inch long carving knife from Nora’s good holiday carving set, with its faded ivory (now yellow) handles with a lion’s face and claws etched into it.

 

Between the suddenness of witnessing this and knowing that it would mean Nora’s death if John caught up with her – and there was no room for anybody to move – nobody did move. We could not. It was Nora making her second pass that prompted everybody into action.

 

“For God’s sake, Jackie, get Chris out of there,” Nora had yelled, seeing little me standing in the door, wanting to do something.

 

Mike was moved into action by Nora’s words.

 

“Put me down,” I hollered, as Mike picked me up from behind, over both Jimmy and Jackie’s heads. “I am not a little kid!”

 

Everybody it seemed was sensitive to how I felt about being short, except for the one person, Nora, who should have been the most sensitive.

 

“No,” Mike said, kindly yet quickly, “You are not a little kid. But right now, Chris, your mother is in trouble, we need to help her and we can’t get out the door.”

 

“Put me down,” I repeated.

 

He did, right behind him.

 

Nora was running out of breath, all those years of smoking. As Jimmy and Mike charged out of apartment three, Nora was half-running and half-stumbling towards the front door of the Bel-Air, John right behind her.

 

“You go the other way, Mike,” Jimmy said to his brother, indicating that Mike should run around the stairs in the middle of the hallway to cut John off should they make another pass through the hall. Jimmy headed directly for the front, behind John, as Jackie and I both watched this horrible scene unfold from the doorway of the apartment.

 

Jimmy and Mike were about to run out of time, as was Nora.

 

“John! No, John!” Nora said, as she reached for the doorknob of the front glass door.