The Lilac Thief Legacy

Chapter One: PEACE

We would walk on the white beach of Marco Island with stale bread wrapped in a recycled red-and-blue polka-dot bread bag. We tossed hardened crumbs while droves of seagulls descended into my mother’s hands peeling shrills of joy. ” Jennifer, get a picture of these maniacs!” My mother would laugh with complete abandonment. She would be encircled like a Hitchcock movie with seagulls eating right from her hands. I would always be afraid of the enormity of my mother’s momentum for joy. I spent most of my life on the sidelines of her social dazzle and sparkle. Her smile and warmth always ignited a room like the multitude of expressions from her big blue eyes that seemed to cast an open door into her heart.

People loved her and when she stopped reaching out and retreated, no one seemed to understand why. I found it painful that so many people were annoyed with her seclusion as if at eighty-two she owed the world to remain a star ever infinitely burning. She was burning out. She was afraid to hear about who she used to be. Sometimes when I speak of a wonderful moment in our lives and the vacant stare is returned which tells me that soon the words, “if you say so,” will be uttered from her lips. There is now an indifference where there once was a warm, vivacious, soul.

As I stood by her bedside watching her rest, I remembered that my mother and I took such pleasure in holding a stranger’s lilac bush hostage as she clipped away branches leaving them wet with scissor scars. Her laughter would peel through me and then she would whisper, “Move it, let’s get out of here. ”She would shove me along grabbing hold of my hands as she ran through the yards with me in hysterics. We were lilac thief cohorts filled with glee as the house was fragrant with the smell of free, stolen, flowers. What more spelled spring then the wafting lilacs meticulously placed by my mother in a vase to represent our find. Once, I had my own Lilac bushes, the thrill of the memories seemed to bring a smile to her melancholic, aging face. Yet, this isn’t a story about stealing lilacs. This is a story about stealing the breadth of beauty from a soul. It is that place in between innocence and violation where beauty is plucked thoughtlessly from the legs and sanctuary of a young girls’ hymen. This is my mother’s pain. Plucked the scent of promise right from her. This is a story about my pain in watching her age and never coming to terms with what “he” did according to “his” pleasure. I would avenge his abuses one way or another.

Because of the pains that my mother experienced, I suffered from night terrors. It seemed to always happen when I was wickedly tired. The dreams would rush fast and furious like a tsunami of images. Some were happy and poetic flights of romance. Strangers and strange settings. Tonight, was filled with night terrors. Dogs, dozens of them feral, ferocious and biting me. I felt no end to the small boxer like mouths with sharpened teeth like knives ripping at my flesh. I clung tightly to my snowy white toy poodle Adonis. I protected him with my arms wrapped tightly around his little Persian lamb body as the droves of dogs devoured me.

I screamed loud, horrified yells of “no” as a dark foreign man stood still and watched in disbelief, and yet, with a sneer of contempt as I found no end within my sleep. My resolution was only to awaken startled to my dog snoozing with one eye raised at my nocturnal and apparently nonsensical commotion. It was always helplessness, this fury of conflicts literally biting at my legs and consuming me. My dreams seemed to mirror my inner turmoil. My mother would awaken in the same turmoil when I would visit and sleep in her bed. “Mom, I’m here, wake up,” and I would hold her crow-like thin fingers and then her blue eyes would peer out at me in warm recognition. We believed we were safe with one another, but we never felt safe. Never.

Only moments in beautiful homes, wonderful trips, moments when we could steal away from the memories who held us hostage like the lilacs wafting in our hands. Sometimes what seems so lovely is filled with the undercurrent of the stench of a sewer. Such is a rapist’s hold post-trauma. He did ruin my mother’s life. The dreams I had so often were just another legacy of pain passed down. Dreams that haunted me just as much as my mother’s dreams had haunted her.

I had built my house as if in a dream with a bedroom that contained all the trappings of a spa, perhaps, like a hotel suite with living room, sauna, and room to retreat and rest. Yet, I clung to nights of pure terror. I always returned to one thought of how I never knew that paradise would feel like such hell. My life was easy in some respects, along with the diffidence. I wasn’t quite sure how being a lawyer was easier than being a poet. A beautiful home does not always breathe peace.

Not all was lost to imaginary, satanic incarnations crippling me in my sleep. When awake, I found a refuge in my books. I felt a sorrow at times that she would never live long enough to read all the books in the world. Yet, my mother and like my wise aunt Dominica before her, she would read each day of her life, each book that she could find in libraries or old antiquated bookstores. A multitude of words pressed with images that rolled like old Kodak slides. The reading so romantic and luminous while the arid stench and steam of the New York subway jostled me awake into my next stop. Such is the life of an aging, melancholic, lawyer closeting a poet in her briefcase!

Chapter Two: COLD CASE

I sat at the counsel table staring out the window watching the cherry blossoms shiver in the chill of the raw spring air. I thought about a poem I once wrote about the cherry tree charades. The judge’s ruling for yet another motion in my cryptic years of lawyering boomed in a monotone white noise backdrop to the pirouettes of poetic thoughts. I played the words in my mind: “The cherry tree charades, milk white bark so bare, and words like I only know today what’s growing and is gone. ”I was nineteen when that poem emerged. I loved the deep union of emotions with branches, bark that seemed to tell a story. Like the cuts of wood, a hieroglyphics tale while lawyers spit arguments at one another. Lizards of legal analysis spewing venom in the corridors.

“Counselor, counselor, Ms. Sloan, do you have anything to add?” the judge bellowed.

As always, I would reply with grace and decorum, “No Your Honor.” Another morning of tension, turmoil, some form of conflict resolved by dumping the arguments into the judge’s lap for decision. I suppose I somewhat liked the idea of not being responsible. I liked the idea of blending in the dark as a lawyer, never quite making any true waves. Yet, my writing, my poetry screamed truth, dreams, life. My poetry, my writing was mine. The words were my vibrancy.

As I roamed through the old courthouse hall graced with marble pillars as large as a lion’s den at the coliseum, I saw Jimmy, a sheriff’s deputy and my dear friend. He came racing towards me with his twinkling blue Irish eyes and flaming red hair.

“Jen, I need to talk to you,” Jimmy exclaimed half out of breath.

“Can’t it wait?” I proceeded down the hallway in my usual frenetic pace.

“No, Jen!” Jimmy grabbed my arm so tight I could be bruised. “Listen, your Uncle Harry’s death is being opened up for investigation and family members will be interviewed, I wanted to warn you. ”

I stopped dead in the hallway and stared half in terror as if the snarling dogs were at my feet. I felt faint as if someone had stopped the air to my lungs.

“What the hell for, Jimmy, the old coot rapist died from a heart attack?” I almost yelled in a loud hysteria of terror as my panicked squeals echoed against the marble walls. I hated the way everything echoed in a courthouse, like a bag of dozens of marbles had dropped on the floor. Overwhelming sounds of falling glass that seemed infinite and menacing.

“Apparently, Jen, some new information has come through that your family had some real issues with him,” Jimmy said with a stern stare. “The old man had a nasty blow to the head and then had the heart attack. ” He said this quietly.

“Issues, he was no good and everyone knew the ‘issues,’ Jimmy, so what!

“Well, this is just shit wonderful!” I sneered.

“My mother at 65-years old is a person of interest?”

Now I was bordering on hysterics; I was enflamed. Demonic, dead Uncle Harry still haunts us.

“Just keep your eyes and ears open, Jen. I wanted to warn you. ”

“There’s nothing to observe, Jimmy, he’s dead period, who cares if he was murdered, serves him right!”I said as I ran like wildfire down the hall, fuming with anger.

Chapter Three: DR. JULIAN

I sat waiting for Dr. Julian in my favorite café on Seventh Avenue. I stared out of the elongated front window watching raindrops slowly descend down the pane like newly formed tears dripping down a sorrowful child’s salty cheek. As Julian crossed the street, I felt my mood lift a little.

“Well, my dear friend, how are you?” Julian exclaimed as she gave me a warm motherly hug.

“So, so Julian,” I sighed.

“I suspect you are still sleepwalking or doing your night terror wanderings?” she asked with a knowing nod.

“Yes, it is even worse now at times, and apparently my mother is just as bad. I don’t know how to deal with this alone any longer, and when I have mentioned it to my mother that I am suffering from dreams just as she is, my mother actually dismisses it.”

“You have a sleep disorder, certainly, and you belong in a sleep study. I’m sure that any hint of such a course of therapy for your mother wouldn’t fare well with her. ”

“Her dreams, Dr. Julian, are always the same, it’s him, Harry coming after her, his awful, drooling face tormenting her for years even though he’s dead,” I said. “Sometimes I awaken out of bed in a room in the house, and I don’t even know how I arrived there. I know my mother is doing the same thing at night. We are running away in unison. ”

“Let me ask you this, are you at least recording your movements with the cameras that I suggested?”

“I am when I can, not always, but when I have, I do have it in my laptop saved,” I said.

“At some point my friend, this has to be dealt with if you want to move on in your life. ”

The conversations always ended in the same way that I needed to get further help.

Chapter Four: HARRY

How odd that Uncle Harry was always kind to me, and yet, he ruined my mother’s life. Harry was a woodworker in his spare time. An undertaker by trade. I believe he was involved in some black-market body part scheme. At least I pegged him for that type. I would sit on an old wooden stool with paint and cuts from years of his physical abuse even towards an inanimate object, while he worked on some creation. Oddly, I was never alone with him. Aunt Domenica was always smiling, half in terror with a shaky voice pretending to be interested in what her husband was doing. I didn’t realize she was being protective.

At times it was confusing. Family dinners of amazing Italian food, a jug of cheap red wine always next to Harry’s feet. I was always thrilled that the whole family, including my parents, were together eating. It always seemed out of nowhere that my mother and Harry would start an argument.

The last argument was the grand finale, Harry in his demonic voice said to my mother, “Why don’t you go get yourself a quart and get out of here. ”The storm would ensue and that was the last time they spoke. He deserved whatever manner that ended his life.

My brilliant, beautiful mother with more than enough brains and ability to read incessantly wanted to be the lawyer. As fate would have it, money and opportunity simply didn’t exist. However, my mother made sure I received an education. The sins that scorned and torched my mother like a California wildfire only blackened any trust in men.

Chapter Five: EMPTINESS

My lone wolf lifestyle wasn’t all my own fault. Aunt Domenica’s husband Harry was a familial rapist. He created from the 1950s a lineage and carnage of “me too” souls in our family. Aunt Domenica turned a quiet blind eye and poked her nose into a book rather than kill the demon. She would sing and hum as she cut lilacs in her yard and plant petunias. In retrospect, the humming was a mantra to ward off his evil bellowing. The fragrant flowers masked the stench of his vile abuse. He probably was the man in the dream the other night.

My mother was a brilliant, beautiful teenager who took the wrath of Harry’s menace. At his funeral, I stood next to my mother, and as we stared down at the dead man in the coffin, my mother seethed and said, “I should just spit on him, so long you bastard!”

To this day, I could swear as I walked away from my uncle’s coffin that I heard a spitting sound. Harry’s death had been a mystery. I thought it was a heart attack. Now, after seeing Jimmy at the courthouse, I wasn’t so sure. There was a buzz of new evidence having been uncovered. No one deserved to know how this haunting affected me and my mother who still screams expletives in the quiet of the night. How sad that “me too” includes the spouses, lovers, husbands, children of one demonic disgrace for a human being!How sad that “me too” took so long.

Chapter Six: JENNIFER'S DREAMS

When I left Dr. Julian, I retreated like a lost puppy to my home. I was on edge, worried about why Harry’s death was being raised now. I settled in for the night and decided as I always did to take the Scarlet O’Hara approach and leave it for tomorrow. My life really was a series of stress, dreams, some joy and then the same cycle. Harry’s investigation was playing, haunting me just as much as he did in life.

“Why did Harry’s death have to come up again now, a good five years later?” I thought.

Harry,  this black void of nothingness. A dead old man who spent most of his life terrorizing women and carting dead bodies for rich funeral home directors. Not to mention the body parts. I remembered being in an elevator with my aunt, Harry and a dead body on a gurney. Harry taunted me at only age seven that he would pull the sheet down for me to see the dead body. He was such a sadistic bastard. I screamed, and with no way out, hid behind my aunt covering my eyes.

A kindness seemed to come over Harry, and he teased me that he wouldn’t show me the body. Out of nowhere, the alabaster and blue-veined hand like a Halloween hand fell out from the sheet. I couldn’t decide if I felt terror, excitement or wanted to laugh in hysterics. Harry began to laugh, and so did my aunt, and so I joined in the morbid joviality. Yet, everything with Harry emanated with being a bully and terrorist.

Harry had big teeth like a horse and he almost drooled at times. His black eyes shifted from kindness to cruelty with the stroke of his temper.  He was like a monster man in a Du Maurier novel. A towering and lanky undertaker in a cheap white shirt with yellow sweat stains and an ill-fitted dark suit. Yet, he was paternal and kind at the same time. The mixed feelings haunted me always. As I drifted to sleep, I thought that I must check my laptop in the morning

Adonis snoozed in the comfort of his luxury bed on the floor, and I drifted into a wave of sleep that felt safe and comforting. As I lulled myself into the deep oceanic state of nocturnal bliss, that man, the dark, creepy, contemptuous man appeared from a dark alley. Rain seemed to be surrounding him, torrential rain bounced off the brim of his Fedora as he leered from under his hat. He opened his hand half visible in the swirling mist of fog and showed me a small carving tool. The tool was carved with hieroglyphic letters and a bleeding heart and scarab drenched in black blood. As I reached to take the tool, he grabbed it away and disappeared.

Adonis’ rapacious snoring as he snorted for more and more air woke me in the early morning. I felt haunted. I felt watched as I awoke to the dim morning rays that creeped through half-open window blinds. The daylight felt daunting as the dream became like a repetitive chant in my head. I pulled myself together and greeted the morning with coffee and a walk into the crisp morning air. The police cars pulled into the driveway, lights ablaze. I saw Jimmy emerge, his face a ghastly white and my laptop in his hand. I snipped a lilac from a bush on my property, and I had one consuming thought: "Who killed Harry?”

Chapter 7: CARTELS, CORPSES AND CREEPS

I sat patiently waiting at the Prosectors office with Jimmy and my laptop on the conference table. John Anthony, the Assistant Prosecutor, arrived, and of course, my first thought was never trust a man with two first names, unless he owns a hair salon! Yet I knew this was no time for jokes.

My laptop contained recorded videos of me awake and going out the door on the night that Harry died and then returning with a video of me typing away. Perhaps, they found something in one of my sleepwalking adventures that seemed to indicate just as I suspected, Harry was selling body parts and caskets lined with drugs to various international cartels. Just as I suspected he simply was no good. It was clear that he was murdered and not by any family member.

The issue, as double first name Anthony explained, is what exactly did I know and what do I know now. I was relieved that my mother and I were off the hook for murder, but I was a sleepwalking nocturnal witness to something. No one will believe I don’t remember anything from the sleepwalking or even working at night. Jimmy wasn’t buying it, and neither was double name Mr. Anthony. I could be in trouble; however, Dr. Julian had my black-out sleepwalking so documented that reasonable doubt could be implanted in any juror’s mind, and I wasn’t one to play chicken with any emotional or legal system in my life. Unfortunately, my hatred for Harry also posed an arrogant indifference to even finding his killer or killers. It was a blessing, as far as I was concerned, and my mother certainly was happy to not look at the pervert’s face again.

So, there I was asking the same question being posed to me, who killed Harry?Except, I finished the question with and quite frankly, who cares. I would have to cooperate, undergo some weird hypnosis, or other psychobabble nonsense to see if I do know anything. I still don’t know what I was typing, and neither did Jimmy, since I was typing at the keyboard asleep and essentially not typing real words or phrases. I typed hieroglyphics, knives, bad men. Not much for anyone to go on. It seemed like I was typing my dreams, which maybe now were not just night terrors but perhaps a witnessing to something bigger than I could even understand.

Harry is not just a horrific haunting in life, but now he is haunting me from the grave. He was so sneaky and deceptive with his abuses that I am certain he left no trail, and whatever he was up to wasn’t documented since Harry was antiquated with electronics as most people in his generation are. Further, it’s not like hearses were looked upon as suspicious modes for criminal travel. Harry rode the whole metropolitan area in his shiny Cadillac hearse with blacked-out windows and the beautiful script of Knag’s funeral home that no one would suspect a thing with his drop offs and pick-ups. Harry was probably so arrogant that he thought he could skim payments to his criminal cohorts, and they didn’t take lightly to being ripped off. Finally, his theft of my mother’s youth and beauty resulted in an arrogant theft that had him killed. He simply believed he couldn’t get caught, and so perhaps his sins of stupidity did become his own demise.

Chapter 8: SAYING GOODBYE

Years passed and Harry’s death and murder became a cold case even while the investigation went nowhere. I was of no help despite every type of psychic inquiry into my unconscious brain merely kicking up garden-variety trauma night terrors. There simply wasn’t enough to go on. My only closure now was to say goodbye to my mother at some short solitary storage of my mother’s remains amid covid. There I was alone, staring at the majestic name of my mother and stepfather on the top tier of the mausoleum. She joked that she was going into the penthouse, her favorite place atop the world looking down, watching, and laughing from some spiritual cliff at me.

As my immediate family left, he approached me from the shadows of the chapel. The man in my dreams, Egyptian looking, handsome, soft Omar Shariff eyes not lecherous as in my sleep, but here he was Mr. Hieroglyphics in the flesh. At first, I was stunned, scared, and amazed that a dream was now walking slowly towards me in real life. “Hello J. J. ,” he said. My family and friends and people I allowed called me J. J. This immediate sense of familiarity took me aback. I asked him, “How do you know my name?”He said, “You don’t remember me,” and as I looked at his beautiful, weathered face, I whispered, “Mike, my gosh I haven’t seen you since I was six years old, and you gave me a burgundy construction helmet with Donald Duck and Sylvester on it. ”He smiled a warm smile and hugged me just as he had hugged and carried me in his arms when I was six. Mike Cammi was one of my mother’s extramarital affairs. This was her brokenness: to cheat and have men fall in love with her broken self. I loved Mike like he was my father.

He indicated that he had to say goodbye to her.  He also wanted to see me and how I was. I told him everyone had passed away.  My mother, the baby, was the last to pass away.  We sat for some time with the immensity of her life in the gold print. I confessed to Mike that I always liked him so much and have a warm feeling whenever I think of him, except that he was in a series of night terrors that I am just now understanding as I looked into his soft eyes. He talked about how special my mother was and how Harry was such an evil force when he was alive. And then it was revealed as Mike took my frail hand into his strong safe hands.  Mike said, “I set him up J. J. I had to. I knew what he was into and I set him up one night. I made sure word got out that Harry was a thief, and I made sure it got out to the right people.”  The cartel did kill Harry.  Mike didn’t know who or what group, but they did kill Harry.

“I did it for your mother, J.J.,” he said with tears in his eyes. “I was deeply in love with her, and I watched her suffer emotionally—the drinking, sorrow, the absolute broken beauty of her. ” I held this mammoth, beautiful man in my arms and cried with him.  All I could say was “thank you and I love you. ” I watched Mike lay a beautiful floral arrangement at the base of the mausoleum, and he looked at me with the most loving eyes and said, “Your mother always loved lilacs.”