Till There Was You

I am the most hopeful person in the world, Louis says. I met Louis in October in Pittsburgh the weekend I asked my wife to marry me in a bar across the street from the theater where I did it. There was a Beatles concert, not the real guys, a tribute band, a very good tribute band, and we were five or six rows from the stage so not too close to notice the difference. They looked authentic to us. There were angels on the ceiling of that theater and lighting that seemed appropriate for a parlor in Heaven. The band stopped the concert to introduce us and to give me my chance to ask her the big question. The most important question a man could ever ask a woman. I wrote what I would say all out on my hand in blue ink. I had emailed the band before and since they were all about love, so it was. It felt predestined and all the signs I ever got in my life led me to her. I borrowed money for the trip and proposed with a ring I couldn’t possibly afford. I was all in and I didn’t hold back. It was perfect and she said yes. I can still see her smiling as the band played what became our song, and as I nervously slid the ring on the wrong finger until she laughed and gracefully offered me her other ring finger.

Louis was my childhood hero. He unexpectedly came to visit me after my wife left me a few months later when I was drunk and depressed in a bar down the street. We got married in a Wendy’s by my workplace at a courthouse after we found out she was pregnant. We needed to cover her on my insurance, but our ceremony and honeymoon was scheduled still for February. Groundhog’s Day. A date that never came, though like clockwork, the groundhog popped up out of his hole.  It, meaning the baby, happened the weekend we were engaged. I will only say that her ebb and flow ebbed too greatly for me to surmount as I had before throughout the relationship. No one cheated. No one did anything worthy a daytime talk show. She simply wasn’t in love enough and no one can love for two. Louis once played professional football for the Pittsburgh Steelers, but now he does nothing besides follow me around and give me good advice or insight into my life. I don’t know why he does it. He simply does. But I am grateful for him, for his friendship, however long it might last.

Tom, the jailhouse pastor, says my determined optimism is contagious and he notices an influx of positive energy in the jail when I am there as opposed to when I am not. I have been there several times. Like a businessman casually checking in and out of a Holiday Inn Express. He says it is kind of like the tide. When he said that, I thought of Ft. Lauderdale and smiled because Ft. Lauderdale always makes me smile. Just as thoughts of mushroom soup and talk of dolphin dicks always makes me smile. I don’t belong in jail, I know. I am not violent, or angry, or a threat to harm anyone. Certainly, not her. I don’t really belong anywhere without her though, so I suppose jail is as good a place for me as any. I am sort of like pollen, or those cottonwood spores that float upon wafts in the summer when it is really hot. I am the deliberate cause of someone’s Hay Fever.

I am not particularly good at anything and I certainly never made much money or saved any up. But my gift, if you would call it that, is my ability to be extremely hopeful when there is no apparent call to be. I am extremely hopeful and very much in love with my wife, despite her leaving me and no longer being in love with me, as she said. A man she didn’t want. A baby she didn’t want, as though we were disposable. Like her job was disposable and everyone she ever knew before me was disposable. I knew it was the emotions talking, but I suppose I faltered and gave in and believed the “downer her” rather than to wait for the “upper her” to return from its vacation in the back of her mind. It was as though she had two faces and day to day I never knew which one I would see. Despite her not wanting our baby and not giving me the chance to be there for her pregnancy, I love her. And I can’t help but to hope that she will come back, even if it is in a thousand years. The way the tide comes back and crests the shore in places that seem impossible for it to reach. Even here in jail, I stare out the window looking for her, waiting for that tide.

Her face is on the other side of the billboard on the highway that runs by the jail. Every time they lock me up, I see her from the back of the cruiser. She is fourth from the left. It is a billboard for the real estate agency she works for and despite being in cuffs and dreading losing my liberty and the uncertainty and cruelty of jail that awaits me like some mythical hungry beast I am thrown into to be slowly digested of my wits, all I can do is to look up and smile at her. Louis says I am nuts. But Louis isn’t really here, though he is sitting by me in back of the cruiser. 

I guess the officer caught me looking. I saw his angry eyes in the rearview and he said I was the only person he ever took to jail smiling, as he recalled anyway. He said I looked like John Dillinger but I ain’t robbed no banks. I asked him, “What’s not to smile about?” He said the fact that I was going to jail, but I said I was going for a good reason. To prove my love to my wife. I told him that my wife was on the billboard and he looked up. I said she was fourth from the left and he counted over until his eyes met hers.

“She’s a very beautiful woman,” he agreed.

“Indeed she is,” I smiled.

“So she’s the one locking you up?”

“Indeed she is,” I smiled.

Fortunately, we caught a red light so I got to see her longer this time. Sometimes I stare at her eyes, the shape of her thin face, her bottom lip, or her nose. She doesn’t like her nose, but I do. When you love someone their imperfections become graces to you. The things that make them special and unique and different from all other people. I must have driven past that billboard a thousand times when I was free to do so. And sometimes at night I would park in the lot across the street and think about how good it once was between us. How it felt to sleep in bed with her. I’d think about the hot summer nights, dinners with mosquitoes on her back patio when all she really knew to make me was potatoes, brussel sprouts and salads because I am vegetarian and she had never cooked for a vegetarian before. Or the music she played, the songs she sung, the wine we went through. Or when we were in Ft. Lauderdale and I carved our names on the bar in the Elbow Room. Or for some reason, those distant freighters that sat out in the ocean waiting to port.

“Damn, son, you got something the hell wrong with you,” the officer scoffed. “Anyone locks me up, I’m not going to be smiling at them, I tell you that right now. No matter how pretty she is.” Louis nodded at the officer’s words. He had said the same sort of thing many times.

“There you go,” he said. He liked my wife, but he liked me more. But he didn’t know her like I know her. The officer’s eyes glared like fire in the rearview. My nose itched so I scratched it by rubbing it on the plexiglass barrier between us. You learn such things after being chauffeured a time or two to the hoosegow. How to scratch any part of your body not assessable to you by your cuffed hands. 

A Bee-Gees song played on the radio as the light turned green. I don’t know what its called but the singer, one of the Gibbs’ brothers, sang, “I got to get a message to you. Hold on. Hold on.” It struck a cord, as they say. God does that to me. He plays songs on the radio that I should listen to at particular times in my life. Or he gives me things to keep my hope alive when I feel lost without her. By the time we got to the jail, that gray mortar and block beast that waited to swallow my life and liberty, whoever was singing was going to be put to death and wanted to let his wife know he loves her. I wasn’t going to be put to death. My crimes weren’t that serious. I am guilty of loving someone who doesn’t love me. For holding on to something they all say is lost. Society was telling me I had to let go or they would keep putting me in jail. But I’d go to jail a million times for her, so they failed to prove their point to me.

“Well, here we go again,” Louis sighed as we pulled into the jail’s sallyport. The beast’s mouth opened slowly and the cruiser eased in. “Would you stop smiling?” he asked.

“I can’t,” I told him. “You know she is going to be at court to try to get me locked up longer. So I’ll get to see her again, Louis.”

“You ain’t right, kid. You just ain’t right. You’re sick in the head.”

I shook my head to disagree, still smiling. The officer opened the door of the cruiser and I hobbled out and they buzzed us through the heavy jail doors. Your freedom kind of falls off you somewhere between the last two doors. At one of the buzzes, or with one of the clicks. I walked into the intake department, the beehive of the jail, and angry-looking deputies glared at me like I was there to steal their honey. They hated their jobs and they hated me for giving them more work to do so they made me sit there and Dr. Phil talked on a TV above my head about overcoming childhood trauma of some sort. They would hate Louis, too, if they knew he was there. If they could see him. They hate everyone though, so there is no point in feeling special about it. Louis says he thinks I especially piss them off by smiling. He says I should frown sometime, but I can’t because I think of her and then I smile. He tries to remind me of what she did to me. He blames her for me losing my job. For losing my car. For breaking my heart the way that band in that dive bar once prophesied she would. When she turned and looked at me and told me she would never. “She lied,” Louis said. “She did break it. Didn’t she?”

“It’s not her fault. You don’t understand.”

“Violated the CPO again?” a deputy growled rifling through a stack of paperwork. I nodded. Guilty as charged, though in court I plead not guilty so there would be a trial. He waved me to the counter to sign paperwork. I knew everywhere to sign without him telling me.

“Well, what did you do this time?”

“I sent her flowers.”

He laughed.

“It was our anniversary,” I added. “What was I supposed to do?” I went back and sat down and thought of all the nights I spent my last few bucks on flowers and chocolate for her. How hard it was to peal the damn sale price tag off the side of the wrapping so she didn’t see I got the bargain bouquet rather than the full price job. Yesterday’s flowers rather than today’s. Last week’s when money was really tight. Whatever I could do or buy to make her smile. Maybe someday it would all mean something to her that it didn’t quite then or that it doesn’t seem to now. 

Louis cringed. The deputy turned and laughed as he told his bee brethren, “But it was their anniversary.” One of them said something crude about what he got his wife for their anniversary which involved an improperly placed finger. I guess they didn’t understand. None of them understood. Like bees don’t understand birds who don’t understand rabbits.

I don’t have a pen to write to her this time. Or paper. I did last time I was locked up. Traded food for two days for a pen, ten sheets of paper, an envelope, and one stamp. I was released before the letter got to her house. I filled all ten pages with beautiful poems and love. She gave it to the police and they arrested me again. I told them that one of these days they would stop arresting me and they told me maybe one of these days I’d stop being so stupid.

I tried to tell her about the signs and the light. That the signs have come and led me directly to her. And that you don’t always see everyone’s light in this life. But when you do, it means they are the person you are meant to be with. People can’t intentionally show you their light and you can’t see it by looking harder for it. It just emanates from them when it is supposed to, when the right person is around. Louis says it is all bullshit.

“I’ve never seen anyone’s damn light,” Pops admitted. Pops is an old carpenter who was locked up for drugs of some kind. Some PV on an old drug charge, rather. He had a billy goat beard, slicked Grecian hair, and crazy eyes. He reminded me of a picture I’d seen of John Brown in an old elementary school social studies book. I never asked what kind of drugs he did, or what the PV was. It didn’t really matter. I listened to him tell me all about houses he built or remodeled at one time or another. I listened to him tell me about his wife, but I don’t know if she was dead or living and I was afraid to ask. I couldn’t help but to feel sad that in all his long life, he had never seen someone’s light, and he talked more passionately about remodeling houses than he did his wife. 

Ben had never seen it, either. But he was young, yet. Marked up with awful tattoos he got when he was drunk or in some jail or prison somewhere. He was a good-looking kid, though he had neglected himself. A few chipped and rotting teeth and a bad haircut. One side of his face was cratered like the moon. He was also locked up for drugs and inside he was dealing pills, though he said he wanted to get straight for his kids who would otherwise grow up without him. I figured that maybe drugs supplant the light they don’t see in other human-beings, or simply that some of us see it and others do not. Maybe my wife is one of those who doesn’t.

“Yet,” I smiled encouraging them both, waiting for dinner. “You haven’t seen anyone’s light yet, boys.” It felt like I was telling them about a sure deal goldmine over the hills or something. Despite the terrible conditions of jail, the deprivation of basic humanity, the filth and stench, everyone got along pretty well. I read my Bible and I thought of her. And sometimes I talked to Louis. Louis wasn’t always against us. He was just a pragmatist, he said, concerned solely for my well-being, such being his purpose. It was payback for me idolizing him as a kid playing backyard football and writing a story all about it, which I shared with him when we met.

I often dreamed of escaping as I looked out the barred window by my rack. It wasn’t possible, but I dreamed of it. I didn’t do much else but look out the window and wonder if the people in all of those cars that roll by ever look over and see our ghostly faces between the window bars and think of us. For some reason, I like to think that they do. That they care. Louis lays in my rack and says they don’t. He says people don’t ever care for what they don’t see. He doesn’t believe in signs, or the light.

In jail you keep your little slither of toothpaste, your tiny bar of soap, and your thimble toothbrush in your cup or bag because that is everything you have of value in this world, besides whatever money you have on the books and your orange plastic slippers, of course, and your hopes and dreams which get whittled away fast by the suffocation of basic freedom and the depression of being treated like you are worthless whether they directly say so or not. You don’t get cups of coffee in the morning. You don’t get a cigarette or a proper shower. You don’t get eggs any other way besides boiled. You get a plastic cup of sweet milk and stale rice krispies, and maybe a thin slice of greasy ham they call “sweat meat” because it sweats. I don’t eat meat so I gave it to whoever seemed to need it most. I am a vegetarian, and I cannot imagine being any other way. I suppose I have always cared for even the things that I don’t see. Perhaps, that is a flaw in me, or a general weakness. To love too much, too intensely. To burn too hot.

Four times I’ve been locked up for violating the protection order. I stand here at the same window and look out all day long. I sometimes wonder if she might pull into the parking lot and look up at the window. Maybe she will get out and wave at me, or flash her headlights three times for I love you. Maybe she’ll come for a visit and tell me she dropped everything and she wants me home. Maybe she would put her hand on the glass like in the movies. So I stand here and wait because I don’t want to miss her if she comes. And I smile because I expect her anytime just like I expected her to call me after we split up; when she called it all off and said she didn’t want to be with me anymore and didn’t want our baby. I kept my phone’s ringer on just in case. But when inevitably the days passed and she didn’t show or call, I wasn’t at all disheartened because I had seen her light and I knew it was just a matter of time before she did. And still, it is just a matter of time.

Louis and I walk around the jail and I looked down at my feet. There was a heart-shaped imperfection in the concrete and I bent down and traced the outline of it with my finger and smiled looking up, showing him. He shook his head. I stood up and took a deep breath, still smiling, and he shook his head again, but didn’t say anything. You know what it means. “God has given me heart-shaped signs since I’ve known her and this is yet another. I believe, Louis.”

“Someday you won’t,” he replied glumly.

“You obviously don’t know me very well, Louis.”

Sometimes in the sunlight I get carried back in time and I can see her clearly as I did in that 1920's house on Marks that I wanted to buy. The one that was sold out from under me to a cash offer. I didn’t have much money then and certainly I have less now, but I loved looking. She showed me that house and a dozen others and I never wanted to stop looking at houses with her, for fear then that it would end too soon because I didn’t yet know the meaning or the power of the light. And there had yet to be clear signs. The peacock signs that would follow. But I didn’t want to be the annoying perpetual buyer who never bought anything. The dreamer who just looks and drools like the guy who told her that he won the African lottery and was just waiting for his check from Nairobi.

I was in love with her from Marks on. We had only recently met, though I had seen her in passing when she bartended part-time at my favorite bar years before. When I was mistakenly with someone else because I didn’t know her then. But when I saw her light, it was as though I had known her all of my life and I wanted to keep her for the rest of it. Just as I look at the sunshine now, I wanted to stare endlessly at her light. I finally understood why moths and such insects risk the peril of bats to fly as close as they can to the suburban streetlights I remember as a kid. I sat on the curb and looked up and watched the bats pick them off one by one thinking moths were dumb, not realizing they don’t know fear. They never faltered. It was terribly romantic to me, however tragic.

Natasha, I’ll called her. It wasn’t her real name, but it was that weekend we spent in Ft. Lauderdale swimming in the ocean, making love several times a day with every meal, and drinking Peroni beer at pizza joints along the ocean. She was a Russian agent and I was her Cuban-American contact when we got drunk on the beach and watched those freighters out in the harbor. The waves crashed over the soles of our feet giving us relief from the stinging hot day sand. We sat beneath that cheap orange and green umbrella that was staked beside us.

“Easily the best weekend of my life,” I happily told Louis and the boys in jail. We played Euchre on playing cards made from yellow legal pad paper until we got an actual deck. I smiled the whole three days the first time. The whole week the second time. The whole thirty days the third time. And the whole two months the fourth time. Most of the boys were in for drugs or beating up their wives. Or not paying child support. Or some, probation violations. Not me. I was in for being in love too much.

“How do you smile all the time?” Pops asked as he dealt the fragile cards.

“Easy. Because I’m in love.” I sung the song the Beatles band played when we were engaged in that beautiful Pittsburgh theater. There were bells, on the hill, but I never heard them ringing, no, I never heard them at all, till there was you. And as I sang it, it was like I was there again, though I was in jail telling everyone what happened. And I stood up and I asked her to be my wife again and she smiled the prettiest smile I have ever seen anyone smile and said yes with tears in her doe-like eyes. But it faded away and the heavenly theater lights degenerated to florescent jail lights and she became the mop head I was holding. The boys smiled jagged smiles I never thought I would see them smile. Louis, however, was not amused.

“Louis, the whole world believes in love besides you. Look at them smile. They believe. Don’t you all believe?” I asked them.

They all agreed, one way or another.

“Well, that may be so,” he said. “But she isn’t coming back and you are not dealing in reality. You should move on. There are plenty of women who...”

“There is no other woman for me. If I moved on, it would be a farce and she would think less of me for it,” I shot back angrily.

“Maybe she has moved on,” Louis said. “Ever think of that? Pretty women like that don’t stay single long. Sure she has. And what makes you think she is keeping that baby? Come on, man. She said she doesn’t want you or it.”

I attacked him immediately. I punched him twice in the face and he returned blows. The boys watched us tussle and cleared the way for us to flop around. Louis hit my head against the concrete and I briefly lost consciousness. All I remember is the big eyes of everyone standing over me asking me if I was okay. Then I had to spend fourteen days in the hole for fighting Louis. It was on tape, they said. Damndest thing I ever saw, Schmidt laughed. All the guards were assholes, but for a few. And they all had German last names which made me believe that Germans are predestined to be evil bastards and helped explain the holocaust to me. Louis sat with me in isolation so I wasn’t so lonely. He had a black eye and a busted lip. He apologized and said he didn’t mean to upset me, but he didn’t want me to be more hurt in the long run. We talked about football to pass the fourteen days. I knew he didn’t want to hear about her anymore, but she is all I thought about and I think he knew it.

I saw her light again there in that theater. In her eyes. I told the story to all the boys every time I got locked up. The new guys smiled when I recalled it, but the guys that had been in for a while tried their best to ignore it. Stories get old quick in jail. Talking about court dates gets annoying fast. Asking everyone if they think you will get out is a bad idea. No one wants to hear any of it. They want to do their time and talk to who they trust and want to talk to. They heard my story several times and they knew the ending. Or at least, where it stood at present.

Some were cynical and made fun of me, but it didn’t matter. I knew she was the one for me because I had seen her light. So it didn’t matter what my fellow inmates at the county jail told me or thought of me. It doesn’t matter what the judge says about the protection order or the prosecuting attorney’s threats of charging me with a felony and me spending years in prison for sending her flowers on her birthday or letters now and then. I knew she needed them. I thought about what I would say at trial, but I wouldn’t offer any other defense other than I am in love with her. I wouldn’t say anything about the ebb and the flow. About our personal history or her psychological state for it wasn’t anyone’s business besides our own. I wouldn’t talk about her mother or all the horses she threw away.

I had never harmed her or threatened to harm her. I just tried too hard to keep her when she said her love was gone. I didn’t believe her. It doesn’t matter why she got it against me. How terribly I failed to contest it and to explain what happened to me psychologically in the aftermath of losing her and my thinking I was losing our baby. How far and fast we fell from Ft. Lauderdale, or Pittsburgh, or nights on her sofa, or days at the pool, or the Fourth of July when her face was lit up by bursts of color and her son’s eyes were full of blurry sparks and tears as she smiled at me and covered his ears. The wheels on the bus go round and round, we sang on the way there. It doesn’t matter how much I loved him or her, either, Louis says. I told him he was wrong. That is the only thing that does matter.

I always felt lucky to be with her and I suppose I rode it as long as I could ride it and my luck finally ran out. That four leaf clover I bought at the antique store in the plastic key chain had lost its charm. The poems I wrote her, the long text messages telling her how much I love her every day, the attention I gave her wasn’t enough. And like those fireworks spent, leaving only cardboard shells no one bothers to clean up that you find the following Spring, my love did too, and remained in a slowly dissipating cloud in some black night air, heavy with the dying scent of burnt sulfur, or lapping a beach, or buried under the seasons. A missing heart-shaped sea rock, or a clump of green seaweed I jokingly wore as a Roman wig when I was the Caesar of the sea.

What had I done? That’s what they all asked me. I refused to stop telling her I love her. To stop writing her poems and sending her flowers and leaving gifts on her porch. She called off the wedding ceremony and the pregnancy, so I thought. The waves that came and went didn’t come anymore. Our ocean was still and there was no moon in the sky. Those waves that lapped the shore of Ft. Lauderdale stayed out there with those freighters waiting until it was time to port to avoid penalty. I admired them for their patience, though I didn’t understand it. She told me to stick with her because the waves come and they go, but she never told me there would be a time when they didn’t come at all. When it would just end. I told her I loved her on that beach for the first time and all was right in this world for three days. I wish we never had to go home, she said on the beach back to me sadly. I didn’t understand it then, but I guess I know what she meant now. But the ups and downs again passed and we made it to Pittsburgh. And in the theater as the Beatles played...well, I’ve said it a hundred times before, with the same smile. And I’ll say it a hundred times more. One day in court on the record before they tell me how many years I will spend and where for being in love.

Then there was music and wonderful roses. They tell me in sweet fragrant meadows of dawn and dew. I sang in my head with my eyes closed in the transport van from jail to court. The judge wasn’t happy to see me at all. He scowled at me, maybe because I was smiling at him. He shook his head as I hobbled into the courtroom in shackles. I jingled some beautiful love song. I think he wanted me to be upset or scared, but he could see that I wasn’t. This was the Lord’s work and doing. There was nothing to be upset about. I had 114 counts of violating a Civil Protection Order, which would be discussed in full detail during the trial. I had a public defender named Brian something who had bad hair, a cheap suit, looked fresh out of law school, and who read my file as we sat in court. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He smelled like bagels. I looked over at him and Louis whispered that I was screwed. Brian had crumbs on his blue polyester suit coat.

She came in accompanied by the victim’s advocate. She wore a blue shirt I had seen her in a few times and black tight pants and boots. She looked thin and tired and I felt sad for her. But the watermelon under her shirt was ours and he was really all we had left of us together. 

“I want to hold her,” I admitted in a whisper to Louis.

“Hell! Don’t say that so they can hear you!”

I got lost like I was on Marks and stared over at her and the judge yelled at me for it. She wouldn’t look at me.

Brian piped in with a squeaky unfortunate voice that lacked any confidence. “So you did nothing violent or never threatened her in any way? Correct?”

“Why would I?” I replied. “I love her.”

“Don’t say that!” he shot back angrily.

“I have to. That’s my defense.”

“No, no, no, no, nooooo,” he complained. “Just no! That can’t be our defense.”

“Might I suggest insanity, Brian,” Louis offered quietly.

I shrugged Louis off then looked at Brian and calmly stated, “It is my defense.”

The judge thought I was trying to intimidate her by looking at her. He chastised me several more times. The prosecutor turned to her and said she could leave the courtroom until she was needed to testify against me, but she declined and said she wanted to stay and the victim’s advocate held her hand and a box of tissues with clouds on the box. I said I was sorry to the judge, but I really wasn’t. Maybe I was sorry if I made her feel bad, but I couldn’t see how I did in all of this. How could I not look at her? She was still my wife. The divorce paperwork had been filed and I had been served, but that court date loomed off in the distance like one of those strange freighters at sea. I would never sign it. Not in a million years.

The judge had it all wrong. Louis had it all wrong. The prosecutor, the victim’s advocate who kind of looked like a manatee with legs, the bitter-looking boring court stenographer with the fake tan, even my own dopey attorney, they all had it wrong. All I could think of sitting there was laying on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale with her. Or sitting in the Casablanca Café at the bar after dinner when she was the most beautiful and perfect human-being I have ever known. And I could feel the heat on my face and the sand in my toes. And as I looked up to the light, it looked like sunlight melted through the orange and green umbrella, the color of sherbert. Then I thought of her imperfections and how she teased me about mine. Her Indian nose and her stegosaurus spine. Her shapeless legs, hips, and flat chest. How she talked longingly about her pregnancy boobs that I would never know. That I didn’t care at all about. She was so perfect for me in every way. God, I love her.

My attorney advised me not to take the stand, but I insisted. He put his head in his hand and made the sound of a man about to vomit. I doubt that he cared that much about my case, but he likely cared about his reputation. Everyone besides me cares about their reputation. When people found out I was in jail four times they treated me differently. Like I was a leper or something but I was okay being a leper. I took the stand and the prosecutor salivated and asked me directly about each and every violation of the CPO. 114 in all. I explained them to her. I never went near her or to her house, nor did I call her. But there were letters, text messages, gifts delivered, flowers, anything I could think to do to let her know that I still loved her and that I was still holding on to us.

You would have thought I killed Anne Frank by the time she was done with me. She grilled me for over an hour and thirty minutes straight before Brian, who looked like a chewed up and spat out gumdrop, slowly ambled to the stand for redirect. He sighed emphatically to the Gods, lamenting his decision to ever be a public defender in his tired and hopeless eyes. He was slow and deliberate which I thought was his strategy, but which was rather his defeatist personality oozing from him. He smacked his lips and asked me one simple question. “Why did you do all of this?”

“Because I love her. God gave me the signs that led me to her. From Oscar Hammerstein to the painting above her fireplace. She’s inspired me. She was meant to be my wife and I am happy she still is. No matter how many times I go to jail. I’ve seen her light.”

“Her light?”

“Yes. It’s what you see in someone when you are in love. Their light.”

“Did she see your light?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. “I guess she didn’t.”

“You’ve been to jail four times and are charged with 114 violations of a civil protection order and you’re here in this courtroom today smiling. In jail you spent fourteen days in isolation for beating yourself up, then wrote a statement that you had a fight with a retired professional football player named Louis Lipps who was there with you. Have you ever been assessed by an appropriate mental health professional to determine if you suffer from a mental illness?”

“No. But I am not crazy. I am in love.”

“Do you believe that your wife will return to you?”

“Yes.”

“....That one of these times you will do something so grand that it will change her mind and she will want to be your wife again?”

“Yes,” I smiled. “But she is still my wife.”

“....That it is just a matter of time and effort before she petitions to drop the protection order so you two can work things out?”

“Yes! And we can raise our son.”

“The son she threatened to abort?” Brian paused and looked up at the judge. My wife covered her face and cried. Louis cringed but gave me a thumbs up in support.

“Your honor, I’d like to declare my intent to change my client’s plea from not guilty to not guilty by reason of mental illness or defect.”

“Wait!” I challenged. “Love is not a mental illness, or a defect,” I cried. “It is not always perfect but it cannot be denied. I don’t want to go to a mental hospital and to negate what I feel or to diminish it as being a mental impairment. No! That isn’t what this is. This is love! I saw her light! I have one last gift for my wife before I am found guilty and sentenced to however many years in prison your honor feels adequate.”

The judge reminded me such would be my hundred and fifteenth violation of the protection order. I nodded then I motioned for Pops to stand up. Pops from jail, the crazy-eyed John Brown, who was released a few days before me and who agreed to buy my wife one last gift for me before I went to prison. When he agreed he said, “I suppose I’m just an old softy.” I had tried to give her back the jewelry I bought her, even her wedding ring, but she returned them to my mother. Pops gave her a shoe box and she accepted it. She wiped her face dry with a tissue and opened the box. A bailiff stood by as though there might be a dismembered hand inside it, or a dead pet. He was disappointed by its contents.

I sat on the witness stand and watched her and smiled. When she removed the tissue paper there was an Indian girl doll staring back at her. She had seen that doll at the antique store once when we went and she told me that her mother used to buy her Indian dolls from a reservation in Michigan where her family vacationed. But her mom threw them all out. Along with her toy horses. She stood there in that store and stared at that doll for a while and said it was practically the only nice thing her mother ever did for her and I felt so damn sad for her that the one person who should have loved her more than anyone in the world didn’t. I thought of Dr. Phil’s booming voice that time in jail. Nothing in the world affected her more than that and the ebb and flow of her emotions due to the undiagnosed and untreated malady that afflicts her, owes its vile origin to that fetid relationship.

She sat there and stared down at the doll and court went on. I glanced back at her when the judge was distracted and she just kept looking at that doll. One of the things she always told me was that I never listened to her. But she was wrong. Maybe she knew it now. Or maybe she was thinking about being a kid again. I heard and remembered everything. Brian rested our case with hopes the judge would accept our change of plea and then I could be assessed while I waited in jail for it all to play out. I’d have to say he was a little more savvy than I gave him credit for in the beginning. He tried to sell me on the state mental hospital like he was selling me a Boca Raton timeshare. Louis wasn’t hot on the idea, though he had suggested it. They all talked and I just leaned forward and listened.

No matter where I went I would be without her, I knew then. And all the hopefulness that soaked my soul and my eternal well of optimism suddenly dried up. Everything was ripped away by the finality of it all and the realization that I was sitting in a courtroom in shackles in the middle of people who hated me without cause, with years of prison looming over me for a non-violent offense. I couldn’t smile anymore because I knew it was about over and there was a good chance I would do two years somewhere and not see her again.

The judge adjourned for the day and Louis and I went back to jail waiting for trial to continue tomorrow. I smiled for the sake to smile, but I didn’t feel it. I suddenly felt a terrible void in me. I knew God had given me all the signs that led me to her. I knew I had seen her light. But I lied in my rack rather than looking out the window and I stared up at the gray metal of the bunk above me and the picture I drew of her beautiful face as I remembered it once upon a time on the beach. The wallpaper picture on my phone for so long. Damn, how I wish I could go back. Louis says not to worry about it. He thought the same of football but it passed. All things pass, he said. Even the worst heartbreak. He said it will all be over in the morning and suggested that I pray. I said I felt bad asking God for something when some people drink from mud puddles. Louis knows me best. Maybe God sent him to me. And he knew I would be looking out the window if I had any hope.

I gave my breakfast to someone who looked hungry. Two hard boiled eggs, stale rice krispies, and sweet milk. I sat and read the Bible, waiting for them to come for me, those Germans in their jackboots, and when they did, they shackled me and I went to court. On the drive I thought of that house on Marks and she was standing there in the sunlight smiling back at me. She liked the house as much as I did and I thought that maybe had I bought it instead of the one I bought, things would have worked out differently. Then I thought of myself when I was a kid. Sitting on that curb in front of my house at night. Looking up at that street light that seemed to be a thousand feet tall. Watching those moths orbit the light. Wondering what they were thinking. And seeing the occasional streak of a bat dart through and the moths disappear one by one until I could see only a few. I realized that I am a moth who had avoided the bat for most of his life, but who can avoid him no more.

She came into the courtroom and was wearing what she wore in the Casablanca Café last year in Ft. Lauderdale when she was perfect. That gave me hope. Her hair was the same. Her eyes lit like the light of two candles burning through a whisky bottle. I smiled at her but she didn’t look at me, nor did she offer any sort of expression at all. Brian patted me on the back and said he had another witness to call. The case wasn’t over just yet. Louis sat beside me in an all black suit. I looked over and he smiled at me. It was as though he wanted to say something but didn’t know how to say it. Then I guess he found the words which was about what I did yesterday in court.

“Really? You paid that old man to go get that Indian doll. Meant that much?”

“I was wondering when you were going to say something about it,” I replied. “Yes it did. Did you see her face? That was one of the few good memories she has of her mom.”

He shook his head. “You are an incredible person. Regardless of what they say about you. Or what they think. And no matter where you go, you will always have Ft. Lauderdale and Pittsburgh. It’s here,” he pointed to my head. “And here,” he then pointed to my heart. “Don’t forget it.”

I smiled at him and nodded. Judgment day. The judge began the proceeding and the lawyers spoke their jargon but I drifted away in a daydream staring out the window at the bright sun. Brian surprised me and called my wife for redirect and the prosecutor was startled and looked at him and back at my wife who got up to go to the stand. I watched her walk slowly and could see her stomach. Our boy was in her stomach, in a purple haze, and that made me smile. Hendrix, we were going to name him. Not anymore. I realized I wouldn’t have the opportunity to be at his birth, or in his life at all, and someone else would be known as his father. I can’t describe that feeling to you. Whoever you are. I only hope that you can understand that I am not a monster.

Brian asked her why she filed the CPO and about our relationship. Unlike what she had said the first time she testified, she spoke soft and solemnly. Her voice cracked and there were tears. She gave the true account of our relationship and admitted she didn’t at all feel threatened by me. She apologized to the court and she finished by saying she wished to drop the CPO and all charges that I violated it. The judge rubbed his head and then put it in his palm. She gracefully stepped down from the stand, offered me a slight smile, and left the courtroom. I was the happy again.

After a brief recess in which the lawyers met in chambers, they returned and the judge said he was prepared to accept a plea deal should I accept which would give me time served and which would drop the CPO. I smiled and agreed, but Brian tugged at the sleeve of my jail jumpsuit when he saw me smiling and said we had to talk. When the judge adjourned and the bailiffs came to take me back to jail to be processed for release, Brian told them to wait and he turned to me and told me that my wife had called him the night before to agree to drop the CPO out of mercy for me if I agreed to leave her alone and not send her anything more. No letters, cards, flowers, chocolate. Nothing. If I did, she would refile the CPO and follow though with pressing charges on any violations. I leaned back in the chair and exhaled. Louis put his hand on my shoulder because he knew I felt like everyone aboard the Titanic all at once.

“There’s more,” he added hesitantly. “I don’t know how to say this, but, well, she’s moved on. She said she has a boyfriend and he lives with her now.”

And so I met the bat. I, the little careless moth who lived his life for the light and loved too much. My stomach was the first to betray me, then my heart which spread my pain to every inch of my body. I simply didn’t believe it at first. Not with the signs I had received. Not after seeing her light. But it soon sunk in and there I sat at the bottom of the sea.

A week after, I was released and drove by her house with my bags packed and in the backseat like sleeping children. There was another car parked behind hers at 1:00am so I knew it was true. I guess I had to see it for myself. She hadn’t, nor would she ever, see my light. I drove on to the airport and Louis sat in the passenger seat. He tried to talk to me but I wouldn’t talk and by the time I got to the airport, he wasn’t there anymore. There was only an empty seat. I bought a ticket and boarded the plane by 4am. The first flight to Ft. Lauderdale. One way, of course.

I had no plan what I would do. Write some. Find work somewhere, maybe. Probably not. Go to the Casablanca Café and think. A last supper. Drink excessively until I didn’t feel anything. I sat at the Elbow Room, the open-air bar that faced the ocean and found our names carved on the bar. A cool breeze blew in and smelled like the deep ocean. I got drunk that night and passed up on offers for companionship from a few pretty tourists and a few not-so pretty tourists. The last who was among the prettier ones said I looked like I needed a friend and that I looked “a little like John Dillinger in that movie.” She bought me a drink I didn’t need and when the band stopped playing I could hear the ocean lapping the warm night shore. I told her about my wife and about the light and she said I was a hopeless romantic like her and she told me where she was staying and said I should come by and have a drink at the hotel bar. When she didn’t make progress she smiled and left and I walked out and sat on the beach for a few hours where my wife and I had laid last year. Then I saw the freighters out in the black ocean and I decided to swim out to see how they could be so patient and what they were waiting for. And somewhere between here and there I was back in that theater in Pittsburgh and the moon on the black tide was a brilliant diamond ring on her finger.

There was love all around but I never heard it singing. No, I never heard it at all till there was you. Till there was you.